POWER
AND PROTEST IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY:
SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS AND POLITICS
Links:
The Youth/Counter-culture Movement
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS OF THE
'SIXTIES
May '68 in France.
1. Overview and background
to the crisis
Higher Education (HE) in France
Algerian war and polarization
10 million workers on strike at the peak
General de Gaulle
Parties and groups on the left associated with the May Days
2. The Roots of the Crisis
Higher education: expansion of HE – ‘open door’ policy; middle class
students in buildings next to working class areas; the state and HE –
bureaucracy remote; student grievances, extended to content of the courses
Bureaucracy in France, professions – public support for student
opposition; unions: CGT (communist-led but conservative), CFDT (catholic influence,
but more radical)
3. A summary of the events of
1968
Nanterre: staff-student committee for more autonomy not getting anywhere
à militants (enragȇs);
influence of political groupuscules;
Daniel Cohn-Bendit; demonstration confronted with
armed police (CRS); escalation à closure of
university; links being forged with workers; Sorbonne occupied by students.
4. The end of the “events”
May – June strikes; Cohn-Bendit banished; riots continue; de Gaulle to Germany, then
returned announcing general election, which he won with increased support.
De Gaulle able to succeed
because students, workers, politicians all divided; promised more ‘participation’;
negotiated with workers separately; fear of ‘communists’.
5. Links between the May Days
and political movements/organisations
Influence of 1789 revolution and 1791 Paris Commune; split in ‘left’
over Soviet Union; Trotskyism, Maoism, council communism; Marcuse and ‘repressive
tolerance’; groups outside the class struggle; Algeria and Vietnam; French
intellectuals (Sartre, de Beauvoir, Althusser, Alain
Touraine, Michel Foucault, Lacan); against passive
respect of authority.
6. Postmortem to the Days of
‘68
Re-appraisal of Marxism: economic conflict not central, but ‘order-givers
vs. order-takers’; and: workers’ self-management should have been the main aim;
or: a failure; or: needed a (disciplined) revolutionary party; or: ‘shifted the focus of opposition from
economic exploitation to social and cultural alienation’ (which à feminism and
environmentalism).
Some
slogans from Paris 1968:
All power to the
imagination.
Society is a carnivorous
flower.
I am a Graucho-tendency
Marxist.
Be realistic, demand the
impossible!
They are buying your happiness
– steal it back.
The alarm clock rings – first
humiliation of the day.
You will all finish up dying
from comfort.
Forests came before men – the
desert comes afterwards.
References:
Cockburn, A & Blackburn, R, (Ed.) (1969): Student Power, Penguin.
Feenberg A, and Freedman, J (2001):
When Poetry Ruled the Streets, Albany (NY).
Seale P, McConville M (1968): French
Revolution 1968, Penguin