meaning and outcome of 1968?
Let's start with France. Judged by objective possibilities the general strike signalled a pre-revolutionary situation. Both the major classes in society, the working class and the ruling class, mobilised against each other, posing the question of power — which class rules? The working class struggle went beyond the framework of normal strike struggles, and began, embryonically to challenge the structure and power of capitalism. In other words, the movement went as far as it could without a direct attempt to set up organisations of working class power
only embryonically emerged) and stage an insurrection against the
But given the relationship of forces in the workers movement — the domination of the PCF deeply tied to the 'bourgeois order', to capitalism, — this was impossible. The missing factor was a mass revolutionary force which could take the movement forward, in a collective way, to establish workers power.
The defeat of the May-June general strike was the product of a whole preceding period of capitalist development, in which it had been impossible to even begin to seriously challenge the prestige and leadership of the PCF.
Revolutionary consciousness, in such a period of economic growth, tended to decline, compared with the 1920s and 1930s. To be sure, the reformist practice of the PCF, and the CGT union federation which it controlled; their betrayal of the struggle against the Algerian war — and their supine acceptance of De Gualle's virtual coup d'etat in 1959 — tended to reinforce this decline in revolutionary consciousness. But objective factors, as well as the betrayals of the leadership, played a role.
While tens of thousands of French workers were able to outflank their SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 7 May/June 1988
leaders in action, to occupy their factories, to build action committees in the localities, and even in some factories re-start production under workers control, this never became generalised into a nationally-led attempt to build organisations of workers self-rule and take
When marxists talk of the May-June strike being a casualty of the 'crisis of leadership' they refer not just to the lack of a large revolutionary organisation. They stress the need for a sizeable layer of thousands of workers who through their own experiences and struggles have developed an anti-capitalist conscious-
Such a layer of workers did not exist in France, nor could it be developed overnight.
The idea of the working class at one
swoop, through a general strike, establishing its own power — without a preceding phase of profound anticapitalist political development — is an
On a more general level, 1968 marked a change in the political period, especially in western Europe, an end to
'the decisive battles between
the classes lie ahead of us' the period of relative social peace which followed the post-war settlement between the bourgeoisie and the working class leaders. This change in political period was intimately linked with the onset of the long period of economic recession, following the post-war capitalist boom.
The new period ushered in by 1968, the period in which we still are, was one of a prolonged economic crisis and a prolonged struggle between the classes to assert their domination. This is a decades-long fight, marked by economic ups and downs and its political ebbs and flows.
But in the end, we are still in the unresolved, long term struggle against the attempt of the imperialist bourgeoisies to create a new regime of capitalist accumulation, and a new political order, on the ruins of the post-war welfare state - and the strivings of the advanced guard workers movement to develop a leadership capable of imposing its own, socialist solution.
From the struggles in 1968 flowed the downfall of the dictatorships in Greece, Spain and Portugal; a gigantic rise of workers struggle in Italy and Britain; the
pre-revolutionary crisis in Portugal in 1974-75; and a widespread revolt of the peoples of the third world and in the
In capitalist Europe, the aftermath of 1968 gave rise to widespread illusions about the possibility of a fairly rapid development of revolutionary conditions: But after the onset of the 1974-75
the class struggle ebbed the workers movement reeled from austerity attacks.
The change in the situation, while not resulting in a return to pre-'68 conditions of relative social peace, exposed the weakness of the far left cruelly. Typically the far left was notable for its ultraleftism and underestimation of the mass organisations of the working class -unions and mass political parties.
Many revolutionary socialists imagined that these organisations could be more or less rapidly outflanked, and that debates and would 'go round' the old and 'discredited' workers organisations. This turned out not to be the case. For example, in France after 1968 the communist party, and even its student organisation, grew, as new layers of workers brought into politics turned first to their existing mass organisations, and not small left wing
In 1988, twenty years after the ice broke, the crisis of the capitalist world order — or for that matter the crisis of the stalinist states — is far from resolved. The decisive battles between the classes in the advanced capitalist countries, lie ahead of us.
In this sense, all those who, twenty years after 1968 are 'disillusioned' with the outcome, who have lost hope in socialism and the revolution, or think that all the hopes of 1968 were foolish, wasted dreams are wrong.
The generation of '68 almost everywhere underestimated the difficulty of the struggle, its duration and its scope.
The objective of refashioning the workers movement to meet revolutionary tasks cannot be done in a few months or even years; building a revolutionary movement implanted in the working class, and capable of giving real leadership is the most difficult thing in the world. It is also the most important.
The revolutionary generation of 1968 had a vision of a world ruled by priorities of human need and solidarity, not the priorities of profit. That vision is as valid and necessary as ever. As they said in 1968: "This is only a beginning; the struggle continues!' • PHIL HEARSE 11
Twenty years after the explosive events of May-June 1968 in France, how do marxists view their importance? Are they simply to be looked back upon as grand moments of past history, or seen as reminders of unfinished political business that still confronts us today? JOHN LISTER interviewed DANIEL BENSAID, a prominent leader of the student movement at Nanterre university and now a leading member of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, French section of the Fourth International.
IL: Could you speak a little on the background to the events of 1968? Everybody sare at once that the students were fighting back against attacks on their rights; but what were the issues that mobilised the working class? DB: Much of the debate and reinterpre-
Cof these events in especially among those who have broken with revolutionary politics, tends to insist on the cultural, ideological aspects of 1968. But what gave the 1968 events real weight, at least in France, was the combination of the student mobilisation — which also happened in countries like Japan and the United States — with the general strike. It seems to me too much forgotten now; but it was a real general strike of between eight and ten million workers which lasted three weeks.
What did it mean? Maybe we tended to overestimate the political content of the strike. Obviously it opened up the possibility of a political crisis. But at the
The meaning same time we have to say what the limits of that general strike were. Some democratic demands were raised against the strong state of [French president] De Gaulle, a rigid archaic state with very concentrated power; and there were a series of economic, material demands to raise the standard of living; but the fact is that even given the big wave of the movement, the enormous general strike, the politicisation remained small.
There was no big crisis in the reformist parties. For example, the communist party (CP), in spite of its line, obtained good results in the 1969 elections, and it was relatively well able to channel most of the radicalisation. There was no big crisis in the unions either: they grew a lot, especially in the middle-sized and smaller factories. There were no big breaks like we had in France in 1945-47 after the war. There was a break, but of a very limited layer of youth and workers
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 7 May/June 1988
g of May '68 which gave room for a new far left; this is of the reformist leaderships, and which, significant because it still exists, but it was a very small break. The possibilities for action changed, but not the relationship of forces. That, I think, is to do with the limits, the dyna- mics of the general strike itself. There was also a difference with Italy in terms of self-organisation. There were factory occupations, yes, but very few elected strike committees or mass meetings. The union officials maintained control and organisation throughout the strike. identify the birth of social movements such as the women's movement with 1968. In reality in France this came as a ments. There was no global agreement result, if you like, of the '68 events, but two or even three years later. The dis- tinctive demands of the women's move- ment did not appear in 1968. I think it was a transitional general strike, which remained under the control SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 7 May/lune 1988
in the framework of the functioning welfare state of the time, served to win more space and social gains, winning back some things that had been lost under the De Gaulle government.
There had been some social security measures designed increase the weight of the state and the employers against the trade unions, but this was one point which was not won in the so-called agreement. In fact there was no real agreement. There were negotiations Sometimes the commentaries tend to but, since the results were rejected in some Renault plants, they remained only as a basis for decentralised agreeas there had been in 1936. The main points conceded were on wages, and on trade union rights, but there was no agreement on social security. The 1968 stoppage was never actually called as
a general strike, was it? No, that's the other point. It was a general strike, but a de facto general strike. Nobody had raised the slogan of a general strike. This is very important, and not a small point. The argument from the union bureaucracies, especially the (communist party-led) CGT, was that 'we don't need to call for a general strike because it already exists': so to call for it would be 'artificial', 'useless' and so on.
But it could have changed the meaning of the strike, because if they had called for a general strike, they would have been obliged to decide on what general platform they would call it, and the decision to call it off would have had to be a general decision too, with consultations. Secondly, if it had been declared a general strike it would have raised another question on the political preconditions to negotiate: whether they would negotiate with that government, or ask 13
for De Gaulle to be removed before talks
Despite the limitations of the strike and dynamics of the movement, were possibilities to open up a political crisis. We don't say now, twenty years later, it would have been an immediate revolution; but it was possible to open up a political crisis in the context of the 1960s. Obviously many things have changed, and nobody knows exactly what might have been possible, but 1968 changed the situation in France and in Europe in the early 1970s. We are not discussing. whether there could have been a revolution, but the fact that the strength of the movement, in spite of its limitations, promised much more than was achieved. Obviously the communist party line was central Absolutely. If we re-read today the literature of the big parties of 1968, mainly the communist party, we see how they were obsessed with the idea of provocation and plots. They were trying to find an answer to the changes in French society, in which, for the first time, the working class was in the majority. So they had developed the idea of a new coalition of social forces, expressed at the electoral level by the 'union of the left' (yet the gaullists kept winning more and more elections). At the same time they thought the socialist party (SP) had been pushed to the side by its capitulations on the Algerian War. In a real sense the SP was very reduced in influence in 1968, so the CP thought there could be an opening for ther, like the Italian CP, to become the major party of the left and to grow step by step through elections. All this was being disturbed by the 1968 events.
They were also concerned to control the mass movement. They tried to negotiate a broadening of union rights which would strengthen the CP by achieving certain gains and by strengthening its control at the level of union bureaucracy because it legalised a lot of rights in the factories: delegates, hours, pay, a lot of things which the unions had wanted. In the end this was the main result of the Though it did not want to government, the CP did change its line during the strike, didn't it, raising the demand of a 'popular government'? Yes, but that was a very short period at the end of the last week of May. It was between 22 May and 29 May — one week of open political crisis because the agreements were rejected and there was no possibility of stopping the strike just
through that kind of agreement.
The specificities of the gaullist regime left no channels to reach a consensus or negotiate: it was very centralised, and the strength of the regime was its weakness when it was challenged. So there
Tan opening of a political crisis, because De Gaulle announced on 24 May that they could not find a way out, and called for a referendum. Everybody, even reformists like Mendes-France and Mitterrand, rejected the referendum. That could mean an open political crisis. There were two answers. ready to have a 'left government with personalities'; even Mitterrand was ready to propose a new government based not on parties but on personalities, thout exclusions and with negotiations — which we termed inclusive bonapartism. The CP was afraid of being marginalised and out-manoeuvred, so it raised the question very abstractly of a popular government, not giving this any clear content. But this was only used to occupy the space for four days. Mitterrand said afterwards in his balance sheet of 1968 that this was all a manoeuvre, to say 'we are ready to take our responsibilities' so De Gaulle would withdraw the referendum, then dissolve the assembly and hold elections.
At that time, our position was quite tricky. To raise a governmental slogan in the radical movement was very unpopular because of widespread hostility to the SP and even the CP. However, we had a general answer which was 'yes to a popular government: but no to Mitterrand and Mendes-France!' At that time, Mitterrand was a bourgeois personality, he was not personally a member of the SP. He was in a small bourgeois radical group: only later did he join the SP.
All this lasted just a few days when De Gaulle disappeared to see the army in Germany and then came back. There was a kind of panic at that time, but it was a very short time. Do you think now, looking back, that a more concrete governmental slogan would have been better — something like 'CP take the power"? The CP alone could not have taken power. The kind of answer we raised was not very concrete but was not so bad, and was proven in the struggle. There was a big CP-CGT demonstration on 13 May or thereabouts. They felt threatened from the right, and threatened on the left because the day before we had organised a rally which was a mixture between the new social democratic left and the new far left and the CP was frightened by this mixture.
They organised their own demonstra-
tion — a very big one — and we were the only current from the left to participate, and we were very small. We came with
'popular government, yes: France!', and it was taken up by people from the CP because it expressed the political issue and a solution and at the same time showed a mistrust of the manoeuvres of Mitterrand and Mendes-
The other difficulty with the general strike not having been called was that to call for it would also have raised the question of who should negotiate: who should be the leadership of the general strike — the normal union bodies, or the left? In this context we have to be conscious of the fact that we as a current had only maybe 400 members, and in the factories we had very little - a few Could you say something about the origins of We were expelled from the CP youth organisation in 1965 for two reasons. One was the kind of support we gave to Vietnam; we fought for support active solidarity with the National Liberation Front (NLF), against the slogan of 'peace' which was the official CP line. The other was that we opposed the CP decision to back Mitterrand as the sole candidate in the first round of the 1965 presidential election.
We were expelled in 1965 and formed
Communistes Révolutionnaires (JCR) in April 1966 with 3-400 members, 90 per cent of whom were students. Our main activity was Vietnam solidarity and opposition to university reforms, which started at that time. We participated in the student movement. When the general strike started, it was obvious we had no real weight to compete: the only thing we could do was to try to organise and centralise in some way the more radical, dynamic part of the movement, through the action committees which appeared. This was not real self-organisation, since the action committees were more like gatherings of radical people. We tried to centralise these gatherings to gain a little strength to push proposals into the You referred to the student agitation on Vietnam, and it is obvious that international events had a big impact on the French events of 1968. Weren't there also important developments in Germany with the student movement? It is interesting to compare the situation today. In France there is a tendency to exaggerate the extent of the radicalisation and politicisation of the youth and
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 7 May/June 1988
student movement before 1968. The real growth came only in 1968, and afterwards. Before, the communist students were the milieu of the maturing of the radicalisation, and they never reached five thousand members; nor were there such massive demonstrations before 1968. The radicalisation started with the US bombing of Hanoi in 1966-67, but the demos were not so big.
I was at Nanterre university, and we called what we considered a big gathering of people one Sunday — it was 500 people out of 10,000 students at the university. It was a significant minority of very active people — no more than that. What is interesting is to compare that with the situation now: then there was a kind of happy, spontaneous internationalism, a strong identification not only with Vietnam. Vietnam obviously was centralised, summarised as an issue, imperialism versus black people, a clear-
confrontation, politics, morals, ethics, everything lining people on the same side, no problem. But at Nanterre the movement also took on anti-bureaucratic struggles; there were some involving students in Warsaw, and other Polish issues.
The Nanterre movement was open to everybody. It had three main axes: it was against bourgeois education re-
anti-imperialist, bureaucratic. The only limitation on becoming involved - there were no
Ono programme like a party or anything — was opposition to US intervention in Vietnam, that was the only real criterion that was used. That's very different from today and was very clear and simple if you compare with now, when we find problems like Afghanistan on the one hand, Kampuchea on the other. Then it was all very clear, a unified view of the world was a real characteristic of those movements.
The German events had a big impact for various reasons. First, we had established some direct links with the SDS movement of Rudi Dutschke, at the beginning of 1967, with common conferences, meetings and so on. organised with the SDS a big Berlin demonstration in February 1968 before the attempted killing of Rudi Dutschke. Quite a big German delegation had also been here, so there were fairly strong direct links. When Rudi Dutschke was shot we were in a national conference of the JCR, and we started at once mobilising street demonstrations which radicalised very quickly. Gould you say something about the other movements of that time, for instance the 22 March movement of students? SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 7. May/June 1988
The 22 March movement began first at Nanterre university, and changed composition as it spread. It was a confused
At the beginning there were mainly two currents: us and the anarchists. The CP youth always opposed it, and there were some Lambertists (members of the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste, who were very concerned with student
considered the 22 March movement was an 'anti-union' movement to destroy the student union. We didn't consider it was opposed to student unions. So the really dynamic forces in the 22 March movement were the anarchists and the JCR.
Among the youth, the CP was very marginalised at that time, so there was us and the Lambertists — very sectarian - and the main current was the maoists who were growing as a result of the cultural revolution in China in 1966-67. At the beginning of the 1968 events they were stronger than we were, but we won out in comparison to them through Did the JCR grow fast in 1968? Yes, we had enormous prestige because we were identified from the beginning with the radical wing of the movement, with the 22 March. For example on the night of 10 May, the 'night of the barricades', sticks in everyone's imagination because of the pictures of it, we were the only national political current fully participating. The growth of the JCR and later of the Ligue came from the combination of two things: our participation in the movement when the maoists were a bit discredited, and the campaign of our comrade Alain Krivine in the 1969 presidential elections, when most of the groups, showing their left infantilism, had no idea of utilising those elections. It • was not obvious, and it was particularly difficult to do it, but it was a good idea, and it was this which within a year gave us a big space to expand. The Lambert organisation — then the OCI, but today's Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) — opposed involvement in the 'night of ihe barricades' didn't they? They were against it, and so were the maoists. It is a tricky question, because now, being more mature politically, I don't know if seen from the point of view of the global relationship of forces, building barricades in the centre of Paris to defeat the government without the workers, the unions, without the movement, offered any chance of winning. So was it irresponsible?
At that time the leadership of the JCR
was young, Krivine was only 25, many were 20-21, and maybe for that reason we didn't hesitate so much; it was more a question of feeling the sense of a big mass movement — because it was a mass movement - thousands and thousands of people. So we thought let's go ahead, and we shall see. Political decisions in such situations depend on feelings. That decision clearly strengthened your links with the student movement. The Lambertists argued that their orientation was rather towards the factories and the working class. No, I don't believe that was the real difference. I think the difference was on their characterisation of the political situation. They had more workers at that time than we did, that is true, but not so many, and only in certain specific areas, such as the public services, which in such a situation are not so explosively
They had workers — for example in Nantes, where they started the strike — that is true, but that was an exception.
But they had a strange view of the situation: their main worry was the danger of the gaullist regime evolving towards fascism, a kind of corporatist
Wto incorporate unions through wages policies and so on. They reacted in accordance with that, fearing that to provoke a confrontation could lead to a populist-fascist state, risk the smashing of the workers' movement and big repression; that was their main reason for opposing the 'night of the barricades', for example.
Our attitude was very different. It was
attitude of improvisation rather than a planned approach, but we felt that there had been a rise in workers' struggles and strikes. There had been a real, but not a big increase in strikes, each time bringing confrontations with the police. There was a feeling that not all that much divided the student radicalisation from the general mood of the country. We analysed the attacks by the gaullists on social security and so on; and in the earlier strikes we had fought for student solidarity, collecting money Ours was not a lunatic line, given the general mood in the country — though obviously we did not foresee we could provoke a general strike! And after the strike was over, the JCR was made illegal. We were made illegal, yes, and again in 1973, but it was advantageous in some ways because if you don't have the crazy line of the maoists and if you have some real links with the workers' movement, illegality is a formality and gives a certain prestige. We had to reorganise for 15
four months, and 20 people were jailed until September or October, but it was not a big problem for us. How do you explain the rise in votes for the CP after their role in the 1968 events? The CP came out of 1968 as the main workers' party, before the SP started to win back some ground. They were the main reformist party and won some support after 1968 — but not so much. I think it would be good to study the statistics some more. After they signed the "common programme' in 1972, there was a growth of real reformist currents, of which the CP was one. But as a reformist party it was less efficient than social democracy, and suffered from its links to the Soviet Union, which are strong in France. Many of the people who are breaking with the CP now are from this generation of 1968. You mentioned the question of women's liberation in the context of 1968: what was the level of women's involvement in the events? Obviously they played a role: there were women students and women workers — but their role was as workers or students, without raising specific feminist or women's demands. If you read the platforms and statements, they hardly appear anywhere. The same was true of participation in leading bodies of strikes. It is interesting to compare for example the weight women had in the 1986 student movement with the photographs and documents of 1968, with only marginal involvement. That is a big change. It's now 20 years on: do you think things could have been done better? Do you think that the potential of 1968 led some people to artificially high expectations? Obviously it was a high point, with potentialities which were not used, but we should remember with what strengths we entered 1968. We were formed in 1966, defending the very idea that the working class still existed, when all kinds of people were arguing that everyone was bourgeois now. Suddenly within two years we had a real, live general strike. It is very good for you!
There were obviously other potentialities even for a small organisation if we had only had more experience and more maturity.
The real question you are raising is firstly one of an estimation of 1968. This is not an academic question. Should we say was it a mountain or just a small hill? The truth may be between the two. But what it represents depends on what we do now: if nothing more happens, then it 16 was just a big peak followed by a general
decline. Now is the moment we must start from.
Some say it was the last big strike of the nineteenth century working class. But perhaps it was the first big strike of the twenty-first century. We don't know, and it depends on what we do now.
A more balanced view of 1968 is not that it was a revolutionary strike though sometimes we insist on stressing the political potentialities. A colder assessment shows that the consciousness of the working class had been formed by the years of prosperity and expansion, the welfare state, democratic rights. 1968 was not a revolutionary crisis like those of the 1920s or 1930s: that is true, and sometimes in polemics with the CP we insist too much on the revolutionary character of the situation.
Perhaps we have been more objective in our polemics with the Lambertists, though at first we did not know how to express why we felt that the situation was revolutionary. Yes, there was a deep movement of the working class that was shaking the bourgeoisie: but there was no subjective factor, no leadership rooted strongly in the working strength of the bureaucracy has something to do with the level of consciousness of broader layers of the working class. We can now see that better.
It is true that there were also many more illusions in maoist currents, partly because of the view that the working class was finished. They expected revol-
immediately. They went rapidly into decline. Their very illusions coupled with the frustrations of what happened in Europe and then in China do not justify but explain why so many right wing intellectuals have come from
Social democrats tend to interpret 1968 in cultural and sociological terms: some say 1968 was a success because of what the SP was able to do in government - realising democratic aspirations, legalised abortion, and so on. Of course this is absurd: in many countries all this and more has been achieved without 1968. It doesn't explain anything about the peculiarities of such a movement, why a general strike involving millions of people took place, and so on.
There is a general move to depoliticise the interpretation of 1968. We have to defend the real political content and the dynamics of 1968, not just to celebrate but to give some present political meaning to it •
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 7 May/lune 1988
The morning after the night of the barricades 17 SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 7 May/june 1988
Czechoslovakia, spring 1968; alongside those struggling throughout the world, from Vietnam to Paris, workers and intellectuals from the Soviet bloc emerge onto the political stage. The idea that stalinist "totalitarianism' had stifled for ever the possibility of political 18 ferment and mass struggle in
When Prague was "one big