Actualities and Potentialities from Barthe's Mythologies (New Translation by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers) I

The strike signifies that man is total, that all his functions are connected with one another, that the roles of man in the street, taxpayer, and soldier are much too fragile to oppose the contagion of facts, and that in society all are concerned by all.  By protesting that a strike is a disturbance to those it does not concern, the bourgeoisie testifies to a cohesion of social functions which it is the very goal of the strike to manifest: the paradox is that the petit bourgeois invokes the naturalness of his isolation at the very moment when the strike overwhelms him with the obviousness of his subordination.