International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 115

International Journal on Criminology
to be less in a position of “exile” (Bacqué and Sintomer 2001, 218) than in a process
of weakening affiliation, itself understood as a “social pact guaranteed by the state”
(Bacqué and Sintomer 2001, 218).
They thus observe that the former Communist suburb’s affiliation “to the
wage society transitioned to an affiliation to the working-class town” (Bacqué and
Sintomer 2001, 220). They add that this affiliation:
not only relates here to the statistically significant proportion of
working-class people in the population, but involves the existence of
a collective identity founded on specific relations with work, modes
of sociability, and an organizational network, crafted by a municipal
politics in relative symbiosis with the population, and strengthened by
strong local affiliations. ( ... ) The strength of the PCF [French Communist
Party] from the interwar period onward consisted in turning
the social stigma attached to manual labor and living in the suburbs
into a positive identity ( ... ). In both its positive achievements and its
stalemates, municipal communism constituted a material structure
that in large part underpinned the organization of residents’ lives in
a counter-society, and was a source of symbolic identification that
enabled them to face everyday deprivations, gave meaning to the
contradictions of the present, and was thought to promise a different
future (Bacqué and Sintomer 2001, 220–1).
What we can take away from this is essentially that “the existence of a collective
identity” results in the first instance from standing together, i.e. as a feeling
of affiliation that is confirmed, established, and set down by and in a feeling of belonging,
in this case to a “counter-society” inspired by a “spirit of division” (Bacqué
and Sintomer 2001, 221).
As such, when the authors speak of affiliation to the working class via affiliation
to the working-class town, it is crucial that within this “dual affiliation”
(Bacqué and Sintomer 2001, 236), status affiliation on the one hand must be distinguished
epistemologically from political affiliation on the other. Moreover, the
latter must have primacy over the former since status affiliation is adopted through
support for what the working-class town represents in terms of a counter-society
and a spirit of division.
The authors emphasize this political reality, though only in part, when they
observe that:
in this context, affiliation had a political dimension. Certainly, politics
must not be reduced to the official political system, nor political
affiliation to affiliation to this system. While a representative-based
form is required for a social demand to truly carry weight in the political
sphere, and while this form has its own logic, it is often merely
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