P. Frank | Trotskyist Writers | ETOL Home Page
For an understanding of the historic meaning of May 1968, the major features of the crisis of French capitalism must be outlined. The great crisis of French capitalism began after the first world war. During part of the 19th century, France was still the second-ranking economic power in the world. After 1918, despite the advantages it drew from the Versailles Treaty, it was no longer anything more than a second-rate country, which moreover had suffered crippling losses. French capitalism had to adjust to its new position at the expense of the workers, by lowering wages or creating unemployment, or else the workers had to eliminate French capitalism. This crisis took spectacular forms starting in the 1930s. There was a succession of great convulsions in which the political regime changed a number of times: February 6, 1934, a right-wing coup, for the first time succeeding in damaging the parliamentary system and the Third Republic; June 1936, a thrust from the left, the first factory occupations; 1939-40, an abrupt shift to the right, the overthrow of the Third Republic and the establishment of the Vichy regime; 1945-47, a new thrust to the left following the war and the establishment of the Fourth Republic; and in 1958, the coup in Algiers, de Gaulle’s coming to power and the establishment of the Fifth Republic. May 1968 fits into this succession as the beginning of a new drive to the left moving toward the overthrow of the Gaul-list regime and opening up the perspective of a socialist republic. While each of these convulsions had its immediate cause in con-junctural phenomena of greater or lesser political importance, each of them developed in such a way as to pose all the social problems. I will not go into all the details which would be brought out by a thorough history of France since 1918, but a fundamental fact must be noted. In none of these thrusts to the right has French capitalism, owing to a lack of sufficient inner forces, been able to carry its offensive to the point of imposing a fascist solution, a solution which would involve crushing the working class, completely eliminating its organizations, and a merciless decimation of the cadres of these organizations. It was incapable of doing so even at the time which was most favorable to it, the occupation of France by Hitlerite German troops. It has been able only to institute solutions of a bonapartist type.
The most stable of these has been the Gaullist regime. This regime succeeded for some time in deceiving a part of the masses about its real nature because it ended the Algerian war, because it pursued a demagogic international policy, and because it received support from the governments of many recently decolonized countries, and also some workers states, for example the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union saw the Gaullist regime as a disruptive element in the Atlantic alliance and a possible ally for “peaceful coexistence.”
In contrast, in each of the left thrusts, the workers first of all and the working masses in general have never lacked militancy and combativity. In every case, they stopped short of overthrowing capitalism only because the leadership of the mass organizations failed to give the order. “You must know how to end a strike,” Thorez declared in 1936 [Maurice Thorez, longtime head of the Communist Party of France]. This same Thorez succeeded in getting the resistance (FTP) to disarm voluntarily by invoking the need for “one state, one army, and one police force.” The state, the army, and the police force were then under the command of de Gaulle. In May 1968, Seguy [Georges Seguy, head of the CP-led General Federation of Labor (CGT)] could not continue his speech to the point of saying “you must know how to end a strike”; he had to change his line right in the middle of his speech.
But once again – as we will see in another chapter – this movement, which had gone further than ever, which was on the point of bringing the Gaullist government down by its own momentum, did not accomplish this, did not arrive at an anti-capitalist conclusion, because of the policy of the working-class leaderships, essentially the CGT and the PCF, because the other leaderships did not have a decisive weight in the working class (the FGDS, the CFDT, and the PSU).
While it can be argued in retrospect how far the movement could have gone in 1936, and while only a minority thought that the “boat had been missed” in 1945-47, a great many understood the betrayal in 1968. These diverse mass thrusts have this simple common denominator: The leaderships have repeatedly betrayed, when all that would have been necessary to overthrow capitalism was for them to have wanted to do it. These leaderships will certainly never change. But there have been important differences in the objective and subjective conditions of these great working-class mobilizations in France.
In 1936 and 1945-47, the leaderships enjoyed very great prestige and authority among the masses (the Socialist Party and the PCF in 1936, and mainly the PCF in 1945-47). But in May 1968, even before the mobilization began, the Mollet and Mitterrand leaderships in the FGDS and the Waldeck Rochet leadership in the PCF, while still enjoying extensive control over their members and their constituencies, were beginning to encounter critical feelings, doubts, and even a malaise. Before this movement was unleashed it was hard to discern much more than that, and it was impossible to know the real situation that was first manifested in the course of the mobilization itself.
In 1936, the movement in France did indeed carry over into several countries. In Spain also the mass movement attained revolutionary breadth in the face of the Franco coup. But the international context was then dominated by the rise of Nazism in Europe and moreover by the rise of Stalinism in the USSR (the Moscow trials, etc.). In 1945-47, Hitlerism was defeated by the alliance of the imperialist democracies and the Soviet Union. However, the Soviet Union under Stalin’s leadership pledged itself not to challenge the capitalist order. And in the Soviet Union, the government was again preparing to begin its bloody purges (the “Doctors’ Plot,” Zhdanovism, etc.).
In 1968, the international situation was marked first of all by the victorious Tet offensive, as well as by numerous uprisings in the colonial countries. It was marked also by the resistance of the Afro-Americans in the United States, by a “de-Stalinization” which, however shallow, had eliminated the most oppressive aspects of Stalinism in the movement which swept away Novotny in Czechoslovakia. And finally, it was marked by growing student movements everywhere in the imperialist countries.
In all the great mobilizations of the French workers, one element has played the role of detonator. In 1936, it was the electoral victory of the Popular Front, that is, an event of an essentially parliamentary character. In 1945-47, it was the liberation brought about by the joint military victory of the imperialist democracies and the Soviet Union over Nazism. This victory was thus stamped with an equivocal character, an ambiguity from the class standpoint – an equivocality and ambiguity which was one of the characteristics of the Resistance. This resulted in an inner weakness in the movement of the period which made it possible for it to be liquidated relatively quickly.
The detonator in May 1968 was the student struggle. Nothing could be more misleading than to characterize this struggle as “petty-bourgeois” simply because the great majority of students are the children of the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie. The ideology inspiring the students of opposition to the neo-capitalist consumer society, the methods they used in their struggle, the place they occupy and will occupy in society (which will make the majority of them white-collar employees of the state or the capitalists) gave this struggle an eminently socialist, revolutionary, and internationalist character. Thus, while the detonator in the preceding mass movements was either “to the right” of the movement, or eclectic from the class point of view, this time it was to the left of the movement, with a very high political level in a revolutionary Marxist sense.
There were revolutionary minorities in the 1936 and 1945-47 movements which were in the vanguard of the movement as a whole and opposed the mass reformist leaderships. But these minorities were, all told, extremely few in numbers. They were really “group-lets.” For example, in the big parade that took place at the end of May 1936 at the Mur des Federes on the eve of the factory occupations, the group rallied around the Trotskyists – the only minority really existing at the time – was on the order of a thousand persons, who were ejected after a few brawls. In 1945-47, the revolutionary minorities were stronger, but in the climate created by the military victory, left oppositionists were unpopular. A few slanders were enough to keep the revolutionaries from gaining a broad hearing among the masses.
However, the May 1968 experience showed – at the Champ de Mars, at the Gare de Lyon, at the demonstration in Charlety stadium, at the demonstration in Montparnasse, at the Gare d’Austerlitz – that while the notorious “wildmen,” “grouplets,” “provocateurs,” etc., depending on whether you choose the government’s terminology, l’Humanité’s [official organ of the PCF], or some others’, were of course still a minority, they were by no means an insignificant minority. This minority was capable of bringing together tens of thousands of people in demonstrations, who effectively stood up against the repressive forces of bourgeois order.
To sum up, May 1968 occurred under political conditions far superior to those governing the previous mobilizations of the French workers. The new mass upsurge began at a much higher level with initial conditions much more favorable than in the past to a socialist outcome. It would certainly be wrong to draw only optimistic conclusions from this. The fight, although not a simple or easy one, comes in circumstances which objectively and subjectively offer much better perspectives than in the past.
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Last updated: 10.12.2005