P. Frank | Trotskyist Writers | ETOL Home Page
It is impossible as I write this to give a complete picture of the international repercussions of the May events. Every day new signs are noted. Above and beyond the direct echoes, deeper consequences can be expected which will show up less immediately.
The French student revolt was not the earliest. Similar movements have developed in several countries in Europe and North America, born in the struggle against the Vietnam war, and advancing demands of a social nature. I am not forgetting the student movements in the so-called underdeveloped countries; great revolutionary thrusts have been developing there for a long time and the students have been associated with them. But the working masses of the West European countries in their great majority have been politically inert and the student movements have seemed to be going against the current in the general situation in these countries.
There is no doubt that the victorious Tet offensive gave considerable impetus to all the vanguard movements and to broad masses and encouraged all the enemies of capitalism and imperialism. Once Paris threw itself into the battle, the floodgates were thrown open everywhere. Paris regained the old honor of its revolutionary traditions. The student uprisings, followed by the gigantic working-class explosion, gave the signal for the start or the reinforcement of movements more or less everywhere. In Spain, first of all, the fall of Franco is on the order of the day; in Italy the students are throwing themselves furiously into repeated assaults; in West Germany – this American fortress in Europe – in England, Belgium, Sweden, etc. Everywhere the clarion call of revolution rang out and was heard. Everywhere the students defied the bourgeois order; everywhere they turned to the workers; everywhere the red flag was raised. University buildings tended to become free territories outside the bourgeois state’s authority. In several countries and in Paris the high-school students intervened in political and social life. The essential difference in France was that nowhere else has a working-class mobilization arisen to any degree comparable to that of May. The workers’ reactions are slower in appearing, but it cannot be doubted that they will react. Several politicians, generally Social Democrats, have been the first to realize this. It could well happen here, Willy Brandt plaintively reflected; and he was not the only one saying such things.
In the underdeveloped countries, the consequences have not been long in making themselves felt. In Dakar, in Santiago de Chile, in Buenos Aires, in Rio de Janeiro, and in many other cities, the revolution has raised its head. Paris has given the best possible support to Vietnam as well as to socialist Cuba. We will soon see the consequences of May 1968 in North Africa, the Near East, in all of Asia, etc. ... All the students from the colonial countries living in France and the other European countries during these events and who took part in them will transmit an added stimulus to the colonial revolution as well as a more complete Marxist education.
Once Paris and France had moved, it could be all the less doubted that the revolutionary movement would find a response in East Europe. In Czechoslovakia, the action of the students and the intellectuals had just made a decisive contribution to bringing about the fall of Novotny. Only a few days were required before the students in Belgrade formulated a body of demands which no Marxist could find anything to object to. They also threw up barricades and occupied the universities.
Reading the press often gives a deceptive impression of what is going on in a country. Is it not clear that the French press – both the bourgeois press and the press of the PCF – contributed to the self-intoxication both of the Gaullist government and the PCF leadership in regard to the situation in the country before May 1968? But what is to be said about the Soviet press in regard to the French events? L’Humanité, which always tail-ended the events, saw its lies printed in Pravda or Izvestia still a few days more behind the facts. We are living in the age of the transistor; and no censorship, no barrier, can limit the dissemination of the truth.
The Chinese government has sown an unexampled confusion in regard to the “cultural revolution” in the last year, and its crude accusations against the USSR have helped the Kremlin bureaucracy. This said, however, unlike Moscow, which did not hide its dismay at the idea that de Gaulle might vanish from the scene, the Chinese government organized immense demonstrations of solidarity with the May movement. The mobilization of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators – whatever the motives of the organizers – has an objective importance which no one can underestimate.
It will be forgotten by no one that in the Soviet Union, on the other hand, the government hid from the masses what was going on in France. This was not only owing to their indisputable desire to conciliate de Gaulle. During these last years, the Soviet government has been pushing a very determined campaign against the intellectuals and the university youth in that country. Everyone recalls the Daniel-Sinyavsky trial, Brodsky, Ginzburg, the Litvinov-Bogoraz protests, etc. ... the movements of writers, artists, and scholars to gain freedom of expression in their fields (art, literary creation, etc.) are, in many countries as in the Soviet Union, merely the precursors of antibureaucratic workers movements aimed at reestablishing soviet democracy. The hour – I am convinced – will not be long in striking when the students and the intellectuals of Leningrad, Moscow, Kharkov, and the other big Soviet cities will move massively into struggle against the bureaucratic government. They will struggle for soviet democracy and will clear the way for the intervention of the Soviet workers.
I cannot leave the workers states without saluting the Polish students – other forerunners of these battles – and more particularly, without saluting their leaders, comrades Modzelewsky and Kuron, who have again been imprisoned for their remarkable achievement of drawing up the first antibureaucratic socialist program in the present resurgence.
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The rekindling of the European workers struggle is the May 1968 mobilization’s most important contribution to the world revolution. At the end of the second world war, revolutionary movements in West Europe were quickly stifled because of the class collaboration of the Stalinists who lived up to the “Big Three” wartime division of Europe into “spheres of influence.” These agreements guaranteed the maintenance of capitalism in West Europe. The victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949, at the end of the revolutionary period in Europe, kicked off the advance of the colonial revolution.
At the same time, the revolutionary socialist movement in West Europe suffered a considerable setback. Social Democratic or Stalinist reformism prevailed. Apathy and stagnation characterized the European workers movement to such an extent that some thinkers drew extremely pessimistic conclusions about the potentialities of the European proletariat and the proletariat in general. It cannot be doubted that the May mobilization of the French working class has broken the ground and set the workers throughout all of West Europe on the move. And this is true not only in the area of economic demands (properly speaking these struggles had never ceased but had remained within a narrowly reformist framework) – these struggles have been revived on a revolutionary level. The struggle for socialism is resurgent on the continent of its birth and where great revolutionary Marxist traditions exist, as May 1968 showed in France. As May 1968 showed also, these battles were renewed starting off from the heritage of the past, despite the fact that the Social Democratic or Stalinist leaderships have encased this heritage in a thick reformist shell for 20 to 30 years.
At its origin, the movement for socialism was limited for more than a half century, for understandable objective reasons, to the economically developed countries of Europe. The victory of October 1917, although situated on the periphery of Europe, was the first great success in this struggle. It gave the starting signal for revolutionary struggles in the colonized countries. For a whole series of reasons which have been set forth in extenso by the Trotskyist movement, Stalinism, which had triumphed in the Soviet Union and in the Communist parties, caused numerous defeats (Germany 1933, Spain 1937, for example) and the miring down of socialist revolution in Europe. In May 1968, the European workers movement first got moving again. Although the pernicious influence which the old leaderships will continue to exercise for some time yet cannot be underestimated (we have just seen this in France), it is now unquestionable that everywhere in Europe, the youth – the young workers, students and high-school students – are no longer in thrall to these old leaderships and are seeking to provide a socialist solution for these struggles. This fact gives assurance that we can hold the greatest hopes for the European socialist revolution.
Moscow was long the center of the socialist revolution, long after the Kremlin policy had lost all revolutionary character. For some years now, Moscow has no longer held any authority or prestige in the eyes of numerous young revolutionary movements. China and Cuba together have had revolutionary aspirations. Now, the advance of the socialist revolution will continue on all fronts at once (the workers revolution in the advanced capitalist states; the colonial revolution; the anti-bureaucratic political revolution in the workers states). The dangers involved in polarization around a state leadership which has given priority to the specific national interests of certain privileged layers will disappear in the face of a more even advance of the world socialist revolution.
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A few of the initial consequences of this less lopsided advance of the world socialist revolution were quickly discernible. The theoretical problems are no less important for the revolution and socialism. In past years, aside from the old, worn-out revisionist theories picked up by the Stalinists (“peaceful and parliamentary roads” to socialism, “peaceful coexistence”), many other theories have been advanced. Here are the most well known of these:
The reformist conceptions warmed over from Bernsteinism received a stinging refutation. The PCF leadership avoided drawing the conclusions of the fact that de Gaulle, who had been brought to power in 1958 by General Massu, went to visit him again 10 years later in order to maintain himself in power. Barricades did not turn out to be as old-fashioned as many claimed. It was proven yet again that reforms and demands are won, not after long years of narrow-minded reformism, but as a by-product of revolutionary struggle.
The theories that neo-capitalism had definitively assured the stability of capitalism burst like soap bubbles. Neo-capitalism, even in France, where there was a “strong state” the like of which existed nowhere else, was rotted within much more than anyone had suspected.
As for the new theories which did not renounce revolutionary socialism, they were all the products of the historical detours of the socialist revolution which I mentioned above. Each one of them based itself on one particular aspect of the situation: the fact that the students and intellectuals in the capitalist countries supported the colonial revolution, while the traditional workers movement proved derelict in this regard; powerful peasant uprisings in the colonial countries; the success of the guerrilla struggle in winning power in Cuba; the apathy of the workers movement in the European countries and its stifling bureaucratization. These experiences were over-generalized. The common denominator of all these theories was their claim that the proletariat in the central imperialist countries was incapable and impotent. May 1968 dealt a mortal blow to all these generalizations, without, however, putting in question the validity of certain special methods such as guerrilla warfare in specific cases. It is demonstrably risky, even if you think you are proceeding in a revolutionary manner, to make revisions of fundamental features of Marxist theory, such as the role of the proletariat, based on experiences involving only a few years and in circumstances as exceptional as the period of stagnation in the European workers movement.
The May 1968 movement endowed the revolutionary Marxism which the Fourth International has ceaselessly defended against the most inclement conditions with a new luster. It verified a whole series of lessons which for ‘several decades had been relegated to the theoretical realm. The real-life experience of these lessons constituted the best school of Marxism we have had in a half century. The place of the general strike in the class struggle as a stage on the road to the winning of power; the creation of real mass committees in a revolutionary period; the emergence of dual power; the fact that the question of taking of power can be resolved in a very few crucial days and that such days come into existence in a revolutionary upheaval; the decisive role of the leadership in these days; the relationship between the masses and the vanguard – all these questions came out of the books and became part of the flesh and blood of thousands upon thousands of militants who had never experienced anything like this in the past.
The mobilization of May 1968 also brought a series of enrichments which I can only mention here in this pamphlet. We witnessed in Paris a sort of overture to the great drama of the socialist revolution in the central imperialist countries. The themes of the great struggles to come were sounded. The relationship between the student and youth movements and those of the great working masses were illustrated in a striking manner. Methods of fighting in big cities were outlined. It is impossible, without smiling, to think of all the theories built on the idea that the masses were brutalized by the mass media. These theories were also one-sided, as we saw when all France lived through the barricade battles and the revolts in Paris for nights at a time. It was not brutalization but revolt that the communication media fostered.
The relationship among the various European movements, in particular among the various student movements, has underlined the need for a liaison and even coordinated activity on the international scale. As it develops, the European workers movement will be compelled to organize itself on a more international basis. The Common Market represented a defensive effort by the European capitalists in the attempt to hang on after two world wars. This miserable attempt to organize the productive forces within the capitalist system will be shattered by the exploding revolutionary struggles of the European working class, which will put the creation of a Socialist United States of Europe on its agenda.
And in regard to Europe and the Common Market, it is not unworthy of note that these champions of “European integration,” the German, Italian, Belgian, Dutch, etc. reformist socialist party and trade-union leaderships did nothing – not a single appeal, not a single meeting, not a single solidarity demonstration – in support of the 10 million striking French workers. Moreover, among these striking workers were members of Force Ouvrière, the trade-union federation linked to them in this Common Market. For them, “European integration” means a share in the graft; it does not mean international solidarity of the European workers.
The necessity for a common international strategy for the struggles of the socialist revolution will make itself felt more and more imperiously. Thus, the question of the revolutionary international, which has been obscured and submerged for years by bureaucratic leaderships with special nationally limited interests, will arise with new vigor. Born in Europe more than a century ago, the mass revolutionary international will resurge more powerful than ever.
The French socialist revolution has begun; the European revolution has resumed its march forward. Fifty years after October 1917 worldwide victory looms on the horizon.
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Last updated: 10.12.2005