P. Frank | Trotskyist Writers | ETOL Home Page
What were the essential characteristics of the movement of May 1968? Its first characteristic, which struck everyone, was its extensiveness. Ten million strikers – France has never known such a movement. It is probable no big industrial country has experienced one like it or similar to it in proportion to population.
This movement – and this is another of its characteristics – did not include only workers. The industrial proletariat and the agricultural proletariat in the strict sense of the word, as well as most categories of white-collar workers, were encompassed by it. Besides the teachers and students who originated the movement, the participation of the high-school students, and parallel to this, of a large number of young workers, of very young people from 14 to 18 years of age, is an absolutely new phenomenon in history. Very young people have participated in revolutionary periods before, but this was always limited and never included the great bulk of adolescents. This is a phenomenon which would merit a serious sociological study. It is moreover an enormously promising development. All who closely followed the participation of these young people were struck, let me say for my part, amazed, by the seriousness and high political consciousness they exhibited above and beyond the enthusiasm of their age. This bears a promise for the movement in the coming years of an abundance of activists and cadres who will already have considerable experience at an age when recruitment to youth organizations generally used to begin.
The movement drew in a whole series of categories belonging sociologically to the petty bourgeoisie. At the side of the strikers were the greater part of the intellectuals and of the artists. Likewise, an important part of the new middle classes (technicians, etc.) joined in with the strikers. If I am not mistaken, this was the first time that the CGC took a favorable stand toward the workers demands; it even formally gave permission for its members to go to the May 13 demonstration if they wished. The liberal professions (doctors, architects, etc.) were also drawn into this movement, some of their members demonstrating against the high priests of their orders. Even the lawyers were stirred up against the archaic rules which govern them; even the judges were not left unaffected by the situation, and all the more so inasmuch as the government took a very cavalier attitude toward them during the student struggles.
Sectors as blasé as the journalists, as neutral as the public gardeners, as little politically concerned as the professional football players, and so on, were set in motion by this movement.
Among the peasants many demonstrators declared themselves outright for solidarity with the workers’ and students’ movements. I will only mention the ranks of the army. All reports agree that they followed the events with the greatest interest and that it would not have been possible to range them against the striking workers.
Even the police forces felt it necessary to address themselves through the proper hierarchical channels, to let the authorities know that it would be a test of conscience for them if they were sent against workers fighting for their demands. When cops start talking about conscience ...
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Another characteristic of the movement was that it bypassed bourgeois legality. May saw many street demonstrations, very strong demonstrations, for which no one had asked authorization – no more than the strikers had considered it necessary to give legal notice five days before going out on strike.
These demonstrations were not all of the same character. There were still some which proceeded calmly, quietly, and spiritlessly at the wish of their organizers and with the tacit approval of the authorities. And there were others which attained a high political level and did not shrink from confrontation with the repressive forces, giving free rein to the most varied methods of struggle.
The various demonstrations which took place in Paris expressed in the streets the various opposing political currents of the movement. These were the most remarkable illustration of the different orientations seeking to lead the movement toward different political objectives. Because, for all practical purposes, power was “in the street,” politics was carried on in the streets. This constituted a uniquely potent school of politics.
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One essential characteristic of a revolutionary period was present which cannot be overstressed. In such periods, different mass actions of greater or lesser duration and varying scope cripple the authority of the state, of the bosses, of those institutions whose basis lies in capitalist society. In Marxist terms, manifold mass actions lead to the creation of more or less prolonged dual power, that is to the creation of organs or forms, often only embryonic, which are outside the framework of capitalist society or the prevailing system, and which, as they progress could become the leading bodies of a new society. In the decomposition of capitalist society and its state, the elements of a socialist society began to form from the ground up. The balance of forces compelled the capitalist government, temporarily of course, to tolerate or accept these socialist elements. Instances of “dual power” were often produced independently of the consciousness of those who initiated them.
Here are examples: The universities and many educational institutions obviously broke most clearly with the government. They were suffering under a statute instituted by Napoleon I, and they were also the establishments in which self-government could be established with the least difficulties. It is also in this sphere that no solution has been achieved, that relations with the government have not been reestablished, and where a multiplicity of conflicts can be expected. Attempts at reorganizing the existing structures were also made by professors and high-school students; and they did not fail to run into resistance from the administration. What was attempted in the medical schools naturally carried over into hospitals linked to medical education.
I cannot go into detail here on many instances where authorities in the plants were challenged. Were there not many cases of plant managers locked in their offices or forbidden access to the plants? During the strike, the strike committees – even when they were only the old trade-union executive boards under another name – were led to confiscate plant property to assure continuation of the strike (Saclay ...). In certain cases, the strike committees spread out beyond their respective plants, entered into negotiations with suppliers and laid the initial groundwork for a resumption of work without the bosses. The problems of guaranteed employment and hiring were put on the agenda (CSF) in Brest.
In services, the employees often exercised the decisive supervisory power. Postal clerks made the decisions about the texts of telegrams to determine whether or not they were urgent.
Some localities found themselves under the control of the trade unions for all practical purposes (in Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, local authorities in actuality served only as messengers between the unions and the government). In Caen, passage in and out of the city was under the control of the strikers for a whole day. In a great number of cases groups of citizens took steps with little concern for legality or bourgeois property; land and buildings were occupied and used to meet needs which had been neglected or ignored before by both the appointed and elected officials.
The printing industry merits comment. The leadership of the printing unions, by an agreement between the reformist and Stalinist leaders, permitted daily newspapers to appear and consequently the bourgeois press continued being published. True, in certain circumstances the workers demanded changes in headlines (Figaro) or even refused to bring out a paper (La Nation) when the content was directly prejudicial to the strike. In these cases, the workers amended the decision of their union organization in the right way.
But this decision held another not altogether innocent aspect. The strike was to be applied to all of the weekly press and all periodicals. The result was that the wealthy publications which wanted to could be printed abroad, while with rare exceptions, all the vanguard papers, whose financial means are limited, were unable to appear. In other words, while the bourgeois press and the reformist and Stalinist press could express itself freely, revolutionary militants were up against enormous difficulties getting their views into print.
Obviously, this was a stratagem of the reformists and Stalinists in which they conspired like thieves. Only the proofreaders’ union, which was particularly sensitive to the problem, adopted the proposition in a resolution: “it [the proofreaders’ union] declares itself for the freedom to publish by the strikers themselves all publications supporting the workers and students movement, whether daily or periodical.”
One sphere where the question of relations with the government took an acute form was radio and television. On one hand, the government, which was so zealous about the “right to work,” deprived the over-the-border radio and television stations (the only stations broadcasting which are not under government control) of the radio-telephones they had rented, to prevent them from broadcasting accounts of the revolutionary demonstrations and the savage repressions of the CRS and the Gardes Mobiles. On the other hand, under the pressure of events and general indignation, the radio and TV workers (ORTF) found the majority of its personnel, including journalists who were not known in the past for independence, refusing to carry on a systematic dissemination of official lying.
And finally the day came, at a heightened moment of the crisis, when Geismar [head of SNESup during the crisis], Sauvageot [head of the UNEF], and Cohn-Bendit could be heard and seen on television. And this single broadcast showed the damage that merely honest radio and television could do to the government. While the government seemed to abandon any idea of reestablishing its “order” in the universities for a while, it was at no time disposed to making any essential concessions in the political management of ORTF. A battle is being waged there which concerns all the working people. Will this office, whose financial support comes from them, remain the monopoly of the Gaullist mafia (which formed an anonymous committee calling for the dismissal of certain journalists by name)? Or will it remain open, even if not completely, to a confrontation of ideas and points of view? In the present circumstances, when even the most politically bland large formations are excluded, revolutionary organizations and militants cannot hope to be heard.
The most developed form of “dual power” is in the Sorbonne itself. Bourgeois laws stop at the perimeter of this building, which used to be a school of scholastic theology. The police do not enter. Immunity is assured there for those who break bourgeois laws. Cohn-Bendit, who was banned from France, lived there in safety. Socialist democracy is undergoing an unlimited development. The Sorbonne is self-governing. I am told that for some time the police have been checking papers of those entering and leaving. They are doing this at a time when police and customs forces on the borders of France have almost literally evaporated. At the Sorbonne, they no longer pay any attention to the government’s decisions in educational matters, and not only in educational matters. Demonstrations are decided on there that really amount to attempted sorties into different countries, and not always peaceful ones. The word “foreigner” has no meaning, except insofar as men are given the means for preparing a struggle for socialism directed at their respective countries. The Sorbonne is, so to speak, the first free territory of the Socialist Republic of France.
Since the movement did not attain the end it could have, that is, the conquest of power, it is now reduced to strikes which are holding more or less to a united front. But it is obvious that before the next revolutionary wave, these islands of “dual power” will be subjected to attacks by the bourgeois government aimed at eliminating them. This is a problem I will examine further on in connection with the preparation for future revolutionary struggles.
Finally, the movement gave birth to manifold spontaneous forms of organization, with and without connections to previously existing organizations. No one could fail to be impressed by the number of leaflets from every quarter, alike from old organizations, more or less ephemeral new organizations, and individuals themselves. All of this testified to the impetus which socialist revolution gave to the liberation of man, from its first steps, even before its triumph.
Some have thought to display their wit by denigrating the Sorbonne occupation as a carnival. This is not very far removed from de Gaulle’s thinking that it was a “chienlit” [a crude military expression meaning roughly “a shitty mess”]. In fact, neglecting a few things which weren’t too serious, the Sorbonne revealed the creative power of revolution, its liberation of the creative initiative of masses and individuals alike. Life at the Sorbonne is not characterized by the “excesses” but all the creative ferment, the unquestionable liberation of the human spirit, what it would take a body of thinkers years to conceive – if then.
I will return to some of these questions in approaching the subject of the tasks of the revolutionary vanguard as it emerged in this movement. One task is to defend these gains. Only the living movement itself can sift out what it has created and eliminate what it does not find worthwhile. We must not fall into the trap which will certainly be there, of putting the spotlight on certain “excesses,” shocking to petty-bourgeois opinion, in order to discredit the conquests of the revolutionary movement of May 1968, thus enabling bourgeois repression to liquidate them.
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Last updated: 10.12.2005