POWER AND PROTEST IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY:

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND POLITICS

 

(7) Beats, Hippies, and the Movements of the “Sixties”.

 

 

                                                                                                                             Links to related pages: Notes on the Youth and Counter-culture Movement

 

                                                                                                                                                                   'Solidarity' account of May '68 in Paris

 

                                                                                                                             Link to:                         Imagining Other index page.                                                                                                                                                         

                            

Review by Ian Pirie of:

 

When Poetry Ruled the Streets. The French May Events of 1968 by Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2001.Pp. 192.  Bibliography. Index. ISBN 0 7914 4965 3 and 0 7914 4966 1 (paperback).

 

This review first appeared in Democratisation (a Frank Cass Journal) – summer 2002. I have since made minor changes and added a few footnotes.

 

What is the significance of the French “May Events”?  This book reminds us of the extent of the upheaval: at its height some 10 million French workers in all branches of industry were on strike. Initially this was in solidarity with demonstrating students who had been brutally attacked by the CRS (riot police), and initially, trade union leaders were happy to go along with a strike, especially if it was only for a 24-hour stoppage. However, the nature of the demands - from both workers and students - soon escalated, and radical ideas of workers’ self-management (hitherto associated with the relatively small anarchist, situationist and council communist movements) took root.  All over France, universities and factories were occupied by students and workers, many of whom were on “active strike”, putting self-management into practice. For a time, and in Paris in particular, poetry - and posters - seemed to rule the streets.  The text of this book is accompanied by reproductions of posters, and there is a page of slogans, calling typically for a Revolution which would see “all power to the imagination”.

 

As Douglas Kellner notes in his Foreword, much has been written on the “Events”, and many differing accounts and interpretations have been given. For any observer, it is difficult (perhaps impossible!) to avoid one’s own political perspective distorting the interpretation. This book is written by two participants, and has two parts: the first tells us “what happened in May” and is primarily a chronological narrative; and the second comprises “documents of the May Movement”, arranged thematically in groups, each prefaced by an “essay” by Andrew Freenberg. One of the most valuable features of this book, as Kellner states, is to give “access to many key original documents… [which] reveal the self-understanding of the actual participants.”  The account of the events does largely succeed in conveying the motives of the different actors, giving a sympathetic picture of the students’ and workers’ aims, and describing the twists and turns of the events, whilst avoiding getting too caught up in the internecine quarrels that were part of it all.

 

Having said this, I was left with a feeling of disappointment in the book, which I think comes from two main directions.  Most important is what I read as the authors’ ambivalence about what they themselves recognise as at the heart of the Events – the demand for “self-management”.  In Part III (The Last Act) they write of “The intangible notion of democratisation” and the “vague idea of self-management” (p. 47), which the CGT and Communist Party were (not unsurprisingly!) having difficulty with[1]. Yet the final document in the collection describes how, in Nantes, striking workers, their wives, local residents, farmers and students co-operated in running the town, supplying food at wholesale prices, looking after children while teachers were on strike and factories occupied, controlling traffic, and ensuring that electricity was supplied to essential services even if it was cut off to factories.  In the face of all this, the local authorities were powerless. Nothing “vague” here!

 

Secondly, there seem to me to be serious shortcomings in their theoretical analysis (which probably explain the authors’ ambivalence towards self-management). They compare the Events to the “last great wave of European revolutions that followed World War I” (p. 150), where workers’ councils were central – a focus on the industrial conflict; but they also say that this was a “return to the [anarchist and libertarian Marxist] idea of social revolution”; finally, the book’s title reflects the social and cultural dimension of the Events.  However, there is no development of a theoretical perspective which might link these dimensions, explain what is meant by social revolution, and show how the different actors were drawn together in a common struggle. Perhaps the authors want to resist this integration, since, on p. 68, they describe the legacy of the Events as transforming “resistance to technocratic authority and consumer society…into a basis for a new kind of mass politics that continues to live in a variety of forms to this day.”[2] Is there any connection between “technocratic authority” and a “consumer society”? What is the new kind of politics, and is it split into a variety of forms, or is there one (“social”) movement which aims at changing one dominant kind of society? These questions remain un-addressed.

 

The situationists themselves argued that technocracy, bureaucracy, consumerism, the alienation of workers, the industrialisation of higher education, the impoverishment of our cultural life - all sprang from the same roots, the “society of the spectacle”.  Other participants such as Alain Touraine, and Cornelius Castoriadis developed new theoretical approaches to society from the experience. Touraine, in Le Communisme Utopique (Paris: Seuil 1968), writes of a “programmed society”; while Castoriadis (referred to in the Foreword, p.xviii, quite erroneously as a postmodern writer), moved on from advocating self-management, to describe the alienated and fragmented society in which we live as “heteronomous”, - to which the only alternative is an “autonomous” society. (Castoriadis, C.: Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, Oxford, OUP 1991).  Feenberg and Freedman (p. 148) merely use the rather tired formula: “the technocratic project of monopoly capitalism” in passing and without further analysis.

 

In sum, “When Poetry…” is a good introductory overview of the Events, but for a better insight into the historical precursors of the “active strike” in France, and more awareness of the richness and variety of radical political views involved I would suggest:

 

Richard Gombin in Anarchism Today, (ed. Apter and Joll, Macmillan 1971).

 

Castoriadis (op cit, and see my introduction to Castoriadis: Recommencing Revolution)

 

Maurice Brinton (“Paris 1968”, London: Solidarity 1968, and Dark Star Press/Rebel Press 1986).

 

With these writers - especially Brinton - you get a better sense of how thrilling the Events were; and an account of the imaginative, creative capacity of ordinary people when they have power over their own lives. You also, incidentally, get more examples of how far the Communist Party was prepared to go, in lies, misrepresentation and manipulation, to prevent the social revolution, and to retain control over events.[3] Feenberg and Freedman let the Communists (and Trotskyists) off pretty lightly, and perhaps the weaknesses of their analysis lie in their having too much sympathy for the more standard Marxist interpretations of the Events.