55

In spite of renewed conflict in the world of work, including the industrial sector, social scientists in France and elsewhere seem to have permanently abandoned the study of worker mobilization, seen as “out of step” with new social movements or “defeated” by economic crisis. Since the turn of the century, however, the case of Argentina has offered an opportunity for studying new forms of protest: the social and political crisis that affected the country in 2001 provoked an unprecedented series of factory occupations and “recuperations” by workers. This study of the symbolic fight for a textile factory aims less to rehabilitate the political centrality of social “class” as a category than to understand the social mechanisms at work in the activism of what had long seemed a population immune to mobilization. For while the large-scale mobilizations of 2001 appear to have encouraged this occupation and, to a certain extent, the participation of politically inexperienced workers, the factory’s “recuperation” above all reflected a specific mode of professional socialization, what I describe here as an “ethos of zeal.”