What Jean Fourastié was subsequently to dub the trente glorieuses – the ‘long wave’ of economic growth following the Second World War – accelerated the rural exodus, raised living standards, generalized leisure and created a ‘new working class’

[...] the concept of exploitation was fundamental. Exploitation is the extraction of surplus-value – that is, the portion of labour performed by wage-labourers for which they are not remunerated by capitalists. It is an economic concept, even if its consequences extend far beyond this sphere as traditionally conceived. This notion, like the representation of the social world that goes with it, tends to assign centrality to economic oppression – that suffered by the industrial working class – and to regard other forms of oppression, like male domination or colonialism, as secondary. This is what Marxists once called the problematic of ‘secondary fronts’, the ‘main’ front being the opposition between capital and labour. Contrary to a current but erroneous retrospective view, ‘qualitative’ themes – this is an important point – were never absent from Marxism and the labour movement. But in it exploitation nevertheless played the role of organizing concept.

The doctrine of power developed by Foucault is therefore relational, not substantive. Most structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers defend approaches of this type. The concept of ‘rhizome’ developed by Deleuze and Guattari, like the idea of ‘societies of control’, is an example of it.

The semiology developed by Barthes conceived the social world as a whole as a system of signs, as illustrated by the studies collected in Mythologies

Derrida dismissed the Saussurean hypothesis that language is a stable ‘system of differences’, therewith marking one of the ways in which the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism was made.

These texts derived from Situationist circles, issuing from the crossing of a libertarian Marxism and the tradition of the French avant-gardes, Dadaist, Surrealist and Lettrist in particular.