P. Frank | Trotskyist Writers | ETOL Home Page
Following the movement day by day, one can distinguish stages which succeeded each other with a thoroughly remarkable internal logic.
The first stage began on May 3 with the entry of the police into the Sorbonne courtyard and the immediate resistance of the students on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. It reached its peak on May 10, when the high-school strike was followed by the demonstration which started out from the Place Denfert-Rochereau and returned on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, to end in the night of the barricades on the Rue Gay-Lussac and the neighboring streets.
This opened the way for the second stage, which began with the 24-hour general strike and the demonstrations of May 13. Under the impetus of this gigantic demonstration, the workers began to strike about 48 hours later, beginning a general strike with factory occupations. The movement reached a very high point (about 10 million strikers, to say nothing of numerous and many-sided demonstrations of all orders) toward the end of the week of May 20 to 25. During this week the dreary CGT demonstrations were politically juxtaposed to the demonstration at the Gare de Lyon, which culminated in a new night of the barricades and revolts in many parts of Paris. At this point, the government, the bosses, and the trade-union leaders hurriedly plunged into marathon negotiations lasting about 30 hours.
On Monday May 27 the trade-union leaders were barely given time to present the provisions of the Grenelle agreements to the workers in the principal factories (Renault, Citroën, etc.). These agreements were indignantly rejected by a unanimous hand vote. Then the movement entered into a third, politically decisive stage in which the question of power was posed. The government was impotent. There were demonstrations in the street in favor of different formulas for a government to succeed the de Gaulle regime. At Charlety stadium, the ranks were for “power to the workers.” However, the silhouette of Mendes-France stood out on the speakers’ platform, offering himself both to the bourgeoisie and the working masses as a ‘left de Gaulle” to replace the right-wing de Gaulle. On May 29, from the Bastille to the Gare Saint-Lazare, the workers of Paris and its red suburbs responded to the appeals of the CGT and the PCF for a “people’s government of democratic union” “with Communist participation.”
But these were only whims of the leaders since no slogan was given for any action aimed at overthrowing the Gaullist government. Strengthened by this indecision, this inertia, and by the electoral and parliamentary cretinism which deeply marks all the left leaders, de Gaulle decided to turn and fight. He stirred up every poltroonish, craven, and conservative element in the country. He denounced a purported danger from the PCF, which was completely nonplussed. He threatened to resort to military means. And, in place of a referendum which nobody even wanted to consider, he offered the left a goody – legislative elections in the coming weeks, following the dissolution of a National Assembly which had made itself an object of ridicule by the servility of the Fifth Republic mini-majority and the impotence of the minority to gather the few votes necessary to get a motion of censure adopted.
With de Gaulle’s May 30 speech a new stage opened up. The mass leaderships accepted the elections, creating an extreme fragmentation of the movement. The all-out general strike which objectively posed the question of power gave way to powerful strikes for essentially economic objectives, which were negotiated separately with the bosses or the leaderships of the overseeing ministries. This, as I write, is the phase we are in now. As a revolutionary thrust, a revolutionary crisis making possible the overthrow of the Gaullist regime and even the capitalist system, May 1968 is now ended.
The strike movement will not dissipate itself overnight. These strikes will continue for a more or less prolonged period in many sectors. Analyzing these strikes in detail is outside the scope of this pamphlet. It is enough here to say that they must be waged vigorously with the maximum cohesion on the strike front so as to obtain the best results in winning the economic demands.
In this new stage, revolutionaries are concerned not only with improving the workers’ living conditions, which is always the case for them. The new period of the crisis of the capitalist system will not end with the present strikes. The socialist revolution will pass through new waves and new revolutionary crises. In order for these to start in the best conditions, it is not unimportant that the workers come out of the present strikes free from any feeling of failure, or of frustration, and that they end the strikes as they began them, in a very militant way.
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Last updated: 10.12.2005