The Meaning of May 1968
"Suddenly we had a real, live, general Strike!"
THIRTY years ago, a wave of struggles erupted in France which shook the European ruling
classes and opened up new possibilities for the left. How do marxists view their
importance? What are the lessons of the May-June events of 1968? Should they 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, then a
prominent leader of the student movement at Nanterre university and now a leading member
of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, French section of the Fourth International.
Could you speak a little on the background to the events of 1968? Everybody saw at once
that the students were fighting hack against attacks on their rights; but what were the
issues that mobilised the working class?
Much of the debate and reinterpretation of these events in France, 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 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 which gave room for a new far
left; this is 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 dynamics 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.
Sometimes the commentaries tend to identify the birth of social movements such as the
women’s movement with 1968. In reality in France this came as a result, if you like,
of the ‘68 events, but two or even three years later. The distinctive demands of the
women’s movement did not appear in 1968.
I think it was a transitional general strike, which remained under the control of the
reformist leaderships, and which, 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 to 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
but, since the results were rejected in some Renault plants, they remained only as a basis
for decentralised agreements. There was no global agreement as 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 for De Gaulle to be removed before talks began.
Despite the limitations of the strike and dynamics of the movement, there 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 to this outcome?
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 them, 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 strike.
Though it did not want to challenge the 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 was an 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. The SP was ready to have
a ‘left government with personalities’; even Mitterrand was ready to propose a
new government based not on parties but on personalities, without 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 demonstration – a very big one – and we were the
only current from the left to participate, and we were very small. We came with our slogan
‘popular government, yes: but no Mitterrand and Mendes-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-France.
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 individuals.
Could you say something about the origins of the JCR?
We were expelled from the CP’s youth organisation in 1965 for two reasons. One was
the kind of support we gave to Vietnam; we fought for support and 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 the Jeunesses 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 movement.
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?
In France there is a tendency to exaggerate the extent of the radicalisation and
politicisation of the youth and 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-cut confrontation, everything clear, 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 reforms; anti-imperialist, and anti-bureaucratic. The only limitation
on becoming involved – there were no tests, no programme like a party or anything
– was opposition to US intervention in Vietnam: that was the only real criterion that
was used. 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. We co-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.
How do you assess the other movements of that time, for instance the 22 March movement
of students?
The 22 March movement began first at Nanterre university, and changed composition as it
spread. It was a confused political movement. 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 Pierre Lambert’s Organisation Communiste Internationaliste,
OCI) who were very concerned with student unionism.
They 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 1968.
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.
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 four months, and 20 people were jailed until September
or October, but it was not a big problem for us.
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 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 not revolutionary
but was prerevolutionary. Yes, there was a deep movement of the working class that was
shaking the bourgeoisie: but there was no "subjective factor", no revolutionary
leadership rooted strongly in the working class. The 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 revolution now,
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 maoist currents.
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 it
some present political meaning.