Working at Boimondau: A Community Experience

Abstract

In the 1940s and 1950s, France witnessed the emergence of labor communities whose ambition was to escape capitalism and abolish wage labor. This article focuses on Boimondau, the best-known community at the time. In terms of work, the central activity in the life of the community, two main tensions lastingly structured the collective and caused it to evolve to the point of eroding the original project. The first concerns the relationship between the goal of attractive and cheerful work and an active practice of Taylorian-inspired work rationalization. The second involves an opposition between the promise of freedom and democracy through work, and the administration of social justice through recognition of the value of everyone’s work.