14.05.2008
Workers enter the fray
Student protests in May 1968 ignited a much bigger explosion. An unprecedented proletarian general strike. Jack Conrad charts the deepening crisis of Gaullist France
Capitalist optimism in the 1950s and 60s had a real material basis. After all, in the United States and western Europe, the economy boomed as never before. Gross national product majestically rose year on year. The much delayed American century had arrived as last.
TVs, washing machines, fridges, cars and foreign holidays - once considered the exclusive preserve of the upper and middle classes - fast became everyday commodities. Wants morph into profitable necessities. First in America, then to the privileged circle of its imperial allies. And what a contrast this chrome-plated prosperity made, when compared to the grey, impoverished triumphalism ruling in the Soviet Union.
In the west there was something like full employment, new welfare services and many other concessions besides. “Most of our people have never had it so good,” boasted British prime minister Harold Macmillan (1894-1986). He was right. Workers, in no small part due to their day-to-day guerrilla struggles, were steadily becoming better off. And stronger too. Control within the workplace grew to the point where management routinely complained about no longer being able to manage.
However, there was no mass socialist consciousness. No vision of another, higher, society. People took wage-slavery for granted, as they did the hierarchical division of labour, commodity production, the strong state, nationalism, etc.
France was different. Not by much though. Wages were successfully kept down relative to capital accumulation. Nonetheless, they were still going upwards. A French version of the embourgeoisified worker thesis inevitably followed. Trade union membership seemed to confirm the notion. From a peak of seven million in 1945, by the late 60s numbers were down to little more than three million. Reassuringly weak. And that despite the fact that relatively and absolutely the class of wage workers had significantly expanded meanwhile.
De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic was celebrated internationally as a particularly welcome example of stability. The 1960s saw a few big strikes. But the spirit of 1848, 1871 and 1936 - which made France the revolutionary centre of Europe - that had been “liquidated”. A claim made with supreme confidence. Class conflict was likewise exorcised. Ongoing but antiquated, unnecessary or simply self-defeating. Both workers and management were, though, supposedly leaving behind such childish nonsense.
True, the Parti Communiste Français still had 250,000 members, would normally score 20%-plus in general elections and considered the Soviet Union a shining beacon of socialism which ought to be followed. But, like the Socialist Party, the PCF was now loyal to the existing state. Programmatically committed to a popular front government, it dreamt of a reformist road to national socialism through the Elysée and through the existing constitution.
Through their joyous, wild and courageous actions over May 3-11 1968 the students had taught an invaluable lesson. So-called affluent society does not result in universal contentedness, universal political consensus and universal bovine apathy.
Occupations, mass demonstrations, the night of the barricades - all showed beyond dispute that France’s students, a sizable minority anyway, were far from contented, consenting, let alone dozily passive. Famously, the student vanguard prided themselves on demanding the impossible.
The impossible was not won on May 11. But the students got something not far from it. Prime minister Georges Pompidou, having returned from visiting the shah of Iran, went on the airwaves and all but capitulated. The three main demands of the students were conceded one by one: ie, reopen Nanterre and the Sorbonne, withdraw the police from the campuses, release all those who had been arrested.
De Gaulle’s France was visibly shaken. Ideologically the entire establishment was in disarray and lacked a coherent political strategy. Suddenly state power stood before society much diminished. As far as ministers, core bureaucrats and police chiefs were concerned, the student revolt came out of nowhere. There was raging anger, shocked bewilderment and impotence. It simply should not have happened.1 Affluence, or the promise of affluence, should bring selfish individualism, not a floodtide of collective protest.
Oppression, threats and media lies that it was all the work of outside agitators had palpably failed. They had made matters worse, backfired and handed the students a considerable body of public sympathy. Even more worrying, the PCF and the trade unions had committed themselves to a one-day general strike on May 13 (called ignoring the statutory five days’ notice).
Now was the time, before the ruling class regained the initiative, to decisively act. Unfortunately the PCF leadership and the Confédération Générale du Travail trade union generals wanted to put on a tame show. Allow those below to let off steam and then safely return things to normal as quickly as possible. That was the purpose of their one-day general strike. Nothing more.
But events were now moving at their own momentum. The flame of revolt was intensifying, spreading, leaping. Pompidou’s speech offered too little, too late. Student confidence was soaring. They wanted more, much more, and were constantly looking for provocative ways to up the temperature.
Eg, in the early morning of May 12 students burst into Strasbourg university and hoisted the red flag. Inspired by the street fighting in Paris, they proclaimed the university’s autonomy from the ministry of education.
Showing how even small numbers can have big effects under such circumstances, later the same day, 40 militants belonging to the Movement d’Action Universitaire took over the Censier annex of the Faculty of Letters. Founded in March 1968, the MAU consisted mainly of graduate students and research workers. Many were veterans of student protest actions against the war in Algeria. So they probably had a reasonably good idea of what they were about.
The MAU targeted the annex because, whereas the Sorbonne itself was surrounded by thousands of police, it was unguarded. The doors were forced open. The MAU was determined to begin a general political discussion. Everyone was invited. Anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyites - each revolutionary school contended. For the whole day and into the night debate raged. Unrestricted. Impassioned. Exhausting. A model that was to be copied many, many times over.
Student lead
Support for the general strike on May 13 - the 10th anniversary of the Algiers coup that brought de Gaulle to power - was overwhelming. Yet, though the CGT had given the order to rally, the student leaders had the glory on that day.
When the 800,000-strong demonstration set off from the Gare de l’Est, it had in its front rank Alain Geismar, Jacques Sauvageot and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. For once Georges Seguy, François Mitterand, Pierre Mendes-France and Waldeck Rochet - the leaders of the respectable left - were lost back in the crowd.2
The groupuscules had stepped out of the university ghetto and put themselves at the head of the prodigious worker-student demonstration. It snaked its way through Paris and into a passion. It pulsated with revolutionary energy. Moving with ease, almost instinct. Bristling with red banners, breathing fire and exuding muscular confidence, it obliged the police to keep their distance.
No routine march. Slogans thrilled, communicated, captivated. Closing speeches were not the signal to quietly head off home and back to the dull routine. They commanded attention. Something real, something important, something vital was being said. There were pleas and pious demands on the government. Empty talk and platform rhetoric. But there were also plans and preparation. The universities must be occupied! Student strikes will continue! Form action committees!
And the day was not yet over. After the trade union tops had marched off their members, the student leaders did the same. Only to the call: “Everyone to the Sorbonne.” Pompidou had been true to his word. Imprisoned students had been freed. Police pulled back from the Latin Quarter. The doors of the Sorbonne were no longer under guard. Students poured in, occupied the building and established their ‘free university’.
General strike
After a brilliant flowering of debate and self-organisation involving literally tens of thousands, the students’ ‘soviet’ at Sorbonne quickly degenerated. Endless discussion there was, but most of it was pointless and self-indulgent. Freedom reigned, but so did hedonism and crazy happenings. Utopian dreams of autonomy and doing one’s own thing became licence for lumpen thugs, dossers and police spies. What could have been an invaluable auxiliary for the forces of revolution became an anarchist playground.
Georges Lapassade, the philosopher and sociologist, reported to Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) that in its last week of occupation the Sorbonne’s “cellars were teeming with rats, lice were everywhere, at night the buildings filled with hippies, whores, tramps and drug pushers. The amphitheatres stank of hashish and pot. Mercenaries known as Katangais had been allowed in, ostensibly to repulse potential attacks from Occident, but were a law unto themselves.”3
Yet at that very moment when the student movement was passing its zenith, the centre of gravity suddenly shifted to the workers. May 14 1968, the day after the one-day protest general strike and the Sorbonne occupation, there were the beginnings of mass strikes and workplace occupations.
Paris always occupied the first place in May 1968. But there were other centres too. Indeed there were as many centres as there were centres of big industry.
Sud Aviation workers in Nantes had been engaged in a long-running dispute with management. Every Tuesday morning they would stage a token 15-minute strike. This Tuesday, May 14, was to be different. A new daring had been acquired. They locked up the management in their offices, formed an action committee and occupied the plant. There was hardly any need to think about it. The Sorbonne had become a model.
Next it was Renault. Workers at Rouen, Flins and Boulogne-Billancourt struck. Then all 60,000 Renault workers moved together. The company’s six main plants were occupied. Managers were locked up and had to endure a workers’ escort to the lavatory. Shipyards and hospitals followed. So did Citroen and the ports of Le Havre and Marseille. All were closed. On May 16 some 50 workplaces were under occupation and 200,000 on strike.
Under such conditions where the workers were joining the student revolt with one of their own, the established workers’ parties - crucially the PCF, the largest and by far the most serious - did everything to catch up in order to lead. But what sort of a lead?
In politics words are weapons. They can be explosives or tranquillisers, stimulants or poisons. The rival factions that made up the Socialist Party - effectively a loose electoral bloc - wanted to tranquillise. Sympathy was expressed for the students, at least in so far as they were calling for educational reforms and democratisation.
However, given its revolutionary origins, continued pretensions and deep implantation in the militant working class, it was the PCF that felt under acute threat from the left. Trotskyite, Maoist and anarchist organisations were not just growing. These irresponsible elements had taken the lead. That was unforgivable. The PCF was determined not to lose its hegemony over the working class nor risk anything that might upset its parliamentary road to national socialism.
Hence its words were designed to poison. It talked down the political side of the strikes and occupations and rubbished the student leaders. Cohn-Bendit was a particular target for slander. There was no revolutionary situation. All the workers want is higher pay and better conditions. As to governments, they should be replaced through the existing system of law. Not an irresponsible and potentially catastrophic use of unconstitutional methods.
The PCF wanted to lead the wave of strikes and occupations in order to divert the workers back into safe waters. With such considerations guiding its every move, the PCF did its utmost to keep workers and students separated. Eg, PCF-CGT officials issued urgent instructions to its cadres on the ground that no students were to be allowed inside the workplaces under their control.
So when on May 18 students expectantly marched to the giant Renault plant in the Paris suburb of BoulogneBillancourt, CGT stewards made sure they were not let in. Gates were kept firmly locked, barred and bolted. The ‘official communists’ wanted workers eyes firmly fixed on economic crumbs. The anarchist ravings coming from the Sorbonne were to be ignored or treated with contempt.
But the workers kept moving. Kept striking. Kept occupying. The workers’ revolt grew as if according to some master plan. On May 19 two million were on strike, by May 22 10 million, or roughly two-thirds of the French workforce.
Footballers and nuclear power workers, even weather forecasters struck. The Odeon national theatre was occupied. Air and rail traffic stopped. Postal deliveries dried up. There was no public transport in Paris, Nice, Marseilles and a string of provincial towns. Banks began to run out of cash and had to ration customers.
But, though this was the biggest general strike in history, at no point did a general strike order go out from the headquarters of the CGT or one of the smaller trade union confederations. There was no master plan.
Splits
France had been brought to a standstill through a spontaneous movement. Despite that, because of that, Pompidou issued dark warnings about the communist danger, manipulation from Moscow and red dictatorship. De Gaulle saw the sinister hand of the PCF behind events too. Or so he said. But the PCF had no plan. Except to reassert control, to defuse and to betray.
Nevertheless, government authority had sunk into panicked incoherence. What to do? Oppression had not worked. Nor had concessions. What had been student unrest was now a massive general strike. Inevitably that triggered a constitutional crisis. Splits in the political class became more numerous and more pronounced.
De Gaulle appeared before the country in 1958 as a giant. Now the general and great statesman looked as if he were a political corpse. He disappeared from public view and bided his time with brooding thoughts of counterrevolution. Meanwhile OAS remnants undertook an inventory of their arsenals.
Pompidou favoured giving more ground before agreeing to the use of other means. His ministers compiled lists of what government building would be allowed to fall to the students and workers and which should be stoutly defended. It was surely not a sense of humour which led to the decision to keep hold of the Comédie Française.
On the reformist left unconstitutional thoughts began to stir. The old contender, Pierre Mendes-France, awaited Kerensky-like the call of providence. The new contender, François Mitterand, tentatively suggested a provisional governments, perhaps with Mendes-France as caretaker prime minister, perhaps himself as president. The PCF protested - it did not want to be left out in the cold.
Clearly the student revolt was nothing compared to the forces now ranged against the Fifth Republic. Forces made all the more dangerous, given the unofficial beginnings of the workers’ revolt, the potential for worker-student unity and the emergence of dual power. Actually this already seemed to be taking elementary form.
Alongside and closely associated with both the student revolt and the spontaneous general strike there were local action committees. A luxuriant growth. They sprung up with incredible speed: in schools, universities, government offices, occupied factories and residential areas. Hundreds of them appeared across the mortified face of de Gaulle’s monarchical republic.
Could these action committees have been linked up? Could they have played a role analogous with the soviets in Russia and gone on to provide the organs of power for a new France?
For many a young revolutionary this should have been year one of the new proletarian order. I know - after all I was one of them. The May 1968 events in France were rightly seen by my generation of leftwing activists not as a thing in itself. They were part and parcel of a much wider revolt that was sweeping the world. Civil rights and black power in America, trade union militancy, alternative music and fashions, women’s liberation, student radicalism, the cultural revolution in China, Che Guevara in Bolivia and above all Vietnam. But France was France. Its history was in so many ways our history: 1789, 1848, 1871, 1936, 1945. And like Britain it was a ‘first world’ country. Where it led we could follow. So was the feeling, the expectation, the hope.
Though I was still trapped at school, news of what was going on in France opened my mind, made my heart race and emboldened me in everything I have done since. What had begun in 1917 was surely going to be completed soon. Or so I thought 40 years ago l
Notes
1. Frankly the Gaullists were not alone. Jean-Paul Sartre testifies that “like everyone else in France we were caught unawares by the events of May 68” (S de Beauvoir Adieux Harmondsworth 1984, p371).
2. Other big demonstrations took place: Marseilles -50,000, Toulouse - 40,000, Bordeaux - 50,000 and Lyons - 60,000.
3. Quoted in D Caute Sixty-eight London 1988, pp224-25.