Danielle Bleitrach

Danielle Bleitrach is a French sociologist.

Biography

Danielle Bleitrach was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of France PCF, then the National Committee of the party from 1981 to 1996, when she resigned on the basis of her belief that the conditions for participating in the government had not been met. In 2003, she left the PCF, but nonetheless she considers herself a communist.

She was also Assistant Editor-in-Chief of the communist party daily publication directed at intellectuals, Révolution.^[1] In this role, her articles were numerous and are characterized by a polemical mind but also by ground-level observations and the presentation of theoretical positions. This was an attempt to link sociologie and journalistic intervention. She always asserts that activism, the practise of popularization as interventionist action, is an integral part of the sciences called human or social. This is one way of confronting the fact that analysis does not concern itself with objects existing under deterministic laws, but with subjects that carry out conscious actions, all without refusing to take into account the structures within which the actions occur.

Danielle Bleitrach now works on the geographic areas of Cuba and Latin America (see below). This terrain is at once a breaking away from her previous sociogical analyses and yet within a continuation of a reflection on globalization, development, work and urbanization. Danielle Bleitrach has also written essays such as Music hall des âmes nobles (in English: "Music Hall of the Noble Spirits", about intellectuals) and novels : Un bouquet d'ortie (in English : "A Bouquet of Nettles"), and L'infortune de Gaspard (in English : "Gaspard's Misfortune") among others.

Bleitrach is a prolific author of opinion pieces for left-wing media, focusing on Marxist perspectives. Most recently, she has authored many articles discussing Latin American politics and military intervention by Western governments in the Middle East.^[2][3][4]

Academic publications

In the university sphere, Danielle Bleitrach was part of what is called the French school of urban sociology of inspiration. She chaired a conference at the Aix-Marseille University and University of Provence. In her academic capacity, she has written numerous articles and contributions to symposia.

Bleitrach has published fifteen works, in particular three works on the sociology of the working class and urbanization :

• L'usine et la vie, with Alain Chenu, Maspero éditeur, 1979. An enquiry concerning more than 5,000 workers in the Fos-sur-Mer zone and numerous businesses (steel industry, petrochemical industry, metallurgy, etc.) to understand how lifestyles contribute to the creation of different types of workers.

• Classe ouvrière et social démocratie, l'exemple de Lille et Marseille, with Jean Lojkine, Ernst Oary, Alain Chenu, Christian Delacroix and Alain Maheu, éditions sociales, 1981. A comparative study of two modes of municipal worker management. In the two cases, it analyzes the modes of worker hegemony, and how the organization and its ideology have succeeded in developing original forms of solidarity.

• L'exclusion ou la défaite ouvrière, with Mustapha El Miri, L'harmattan, 1996. A study of the trajectory of 500 minimum wage workers in Marseille, it calls into question the methodology of exclusion. For the authors, exclusion manifests itself in the defeat of workers during the 1980s and corresponds with globalization, which multiplied inequalities not only in the Third World but within advanced industrial countries by putting downward pressure on salaries, in particular those of unskilled workers. Driven from their countries of origin, a migrant labour force from rural areas often encountered this situation and the class was defeated; moreover, this defeat is characterized by less collectivity : unemployment, precariousness, and the growth of informal urbanization.

Publications on Cuba and Latin America

• Cuba est une île, cowritten with Viktor Dedaj, and with contributions by J.F. Bonaldi (éditions Le Temps des cerises, 2004, translated into Spanish in 2005 by publisher Viejo topo).

• Les États-Unis de Mal Empire, ces leçons de résistance qui nous viennent du sud, with Viktor Dedaj and Maxime Vivas (éditions Aden, 2005, translated into Spanish in 2007).

• Cuba, Fidel et le Che - ou l’aventure du socialisme, in collaboration with J.F. Bonaldi (éditions Le Temps des cerises, February 2008).

References

External links

• Sociology
• Urbanization
• Globalization
• Sociology of politics
• Social stratification
• Social class
• Urban sociology
• Industrial sociology