💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › anarchist-communist-federation-may-1968.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 06:38:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: May 1968 Author: Anarchist Communist Federation Date: 1998 Language: en Topics: May 1968, anarchist movement, communist party, france, Mexico, Organise! Source: Retrieved on May 14, 2013 from https://web.archive.org/web/20130514060055/http://www.afed.org.uk/org/issue49/may.html Notes: Published in Organise! Issue 49 — Summer-Autumn 1998.
1968 was marked by numerous events- the huge demonstrations throughout
Europe and America against the American intervention in Vietnam, unrest
in Czechoslovakia, riots in the black ghettos of the USA and student
occupations in Britain. What surged to the fore in that fateful year was
the events of May-June 1968 in France.
Today, in a period which seems the opposite of 1968, it seems hard to
realise that a vast movement of struggle, with youth at its forefront,
shook the world. But 1968 was prepared for on a number of fronts-
counter-cultural as well as political. Beatniks, hippies, drop-outs of
all sorts refused the restraints of bourgeois life, and emphasised
mutual aid, community life, and sexual liberty. This large
counter-cultural movement flourished above all in the United States, but
also in Northern Europe. By 1968, however, this movement was beginning
to run out of steam. Its most politicised form, the Dutch Provos,
inspired by a number of anarchists, had attempted to break through
apathy on both cultural and political fronts, with some success. But it
dissolved itself in May 1967.
In the USA the Students for a Democratic Society, coming after the civil
rights and disarmament movements, mobilised against the war in Vietnam,
both inside and outside the country. Similar movements emerged in Japan
with the Zengakuren student movement, in West Germany with Rudi Dutschke
at its head, in France, Italy and Great Britain. There were student
movements in countries ruled by the old dictatorships, like Franco’s
Spain, and in the Third World, like Mexico with very large student
demonstrations, leading up to the massacre by the military in Mexico
City in September 1968.
However, it is too easy to point to a world movement that had inevitable
consequences in the events in France. Before May 1968, tiny minorities
were engaged in agitation, and these tiny minorities were ignored by
practically every political observer in France. One inquiry published in
a book before the events, described young people as completely
depoliticised and eager to integrate as quickly as possible into work
and “adult life”, which was never questioned. (The White Book of Youth
by Francois Missoffe) This is not that far off the appearance of young
people in France and indeed in Britain today!
It was at Nanterre University where the March 22^(nd) Movement formed
with libertarian students like Danny Cohn-Bendit and Jean-Pierre
Duteuil, as well as the tiny Enrages group of situationists with Rene
Reisel. These groups led off the occupation of the admin block after the
arrest of militants of the Vietnam Committees. This agitation came
together with that led in the university living quarters against sexual
repression and the segregation of young women and young men. It also
points to the influence of Anarchism and dissident Marxism through the
politics of groups like Socialisme ou Barbarie, the neo-anarchism of the
group around the magazine Noir et Rouge and the radical ideas of the
Situationists. This was directly admitted in the book jointly written by
Gabriel Cohn-Bendit and his brother Daniel- Obsolete Communism-the Left
Wing Alternative. Also of importance were the ideas coming out of the
sociology department at Nantere with Henri Lefebvre- Marxist sociologist
and philosopher, close at one time to the Situationists, with his
critique of everyday life and “the bureaucratic society of directed
consumerism”. This concept was simplified by various spokespeople of the
movement as the “consumer society”. Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard, Rene
Lorau in the sociology department all had their influence on the student
movement there.
But the originality of May-June 1968 was down, not to the student
revolt, but to the generalisation of struggle, and the entrance onto the
scene of the workers, from 15^(th) May. Indeed before that, young
workers, in particular blousons noirs, those belonging to street gangs,
were joining the students on the barricades. The participation of the
workers gave the events an importance far beyond the ferment in Germany
and the United States, where workers regarded radical students with
little sympathy.
If the libertarian and situationist students lit the first spark of
revolt, it was at Nantes, the day after the great demo at Paris and the
occupation of the Sorbonne on the 13^(th) May, where the revolt spread
to the workers. The Sud-Aviation Bougenais factory was occupied by the
workers, among whom were a number of Trotskyists and
anarcho-syndicalists. This movement spread through the region, and
across all of France. From the 15^(th) May, a strike began at
Renault-Cleon at Rouen. The industrial workers, followed by those in the
public sector, set off a chain of events that spared few sectors of
society. So action committees were set up among film-makers, architects,
in the high schools and teaching faculties, the banks and offices, each
offering a savage analysis of the institutions and where the Sorbonne
was the most eloquent example of discussion and debate between different
sectors of society.
However, except at Nantes, where students were admitted to meetings of
the strike committee, co-ordination between students and workers was
difficult. The union bureaucrats, many in the Communist Party, exploited
the differences between the “adventurism “ of the students and the
“realism” of the workers. Many workers perceived students as spoilt
children of the bourgeoisie who could reject what they themselves had
never had the privilege to experience. But equally there was little sign
of revolutionary tendencies among workers to go beyond the limits set by
the union bureaucrats. The thousand workplaces occupied and open as
forums for free discussions were not seen as ways of moving forward.
Soon, the occupations were abandoned by the majority of workers who left
only the Communist Party and the union central it controlled, the CGT,
running things. As for realism, the bureaucrats fixed a deal of vague
promises on retirement payments and conditions and family payouts, and a
pay rise that was swiftly wiped out by a galloping rate of inflation.
This was in the context of a movement of factory occupations three times
that of those in June 1936 which had secured much greater gains in terms
of holiday allowances and other concessions.
May 1968: Demonstrations in the street with tens and hundreds of
thousands of participants, millions of workers on strike, pickets in
front of occupied factories even in very small towns, the nights of
barricades and the attack on the Stock Exchange, the red and the black
flags everywhere, the old revolutionary songs which re-emerged, the
universities and high schools occupied, the Odeon as a key centre, the
old organisations as well as the new like the 22^(nd) March.
And the anarchists in all this? They were there of course, leading
lights often enough, but the apparent resurgence of the anarchist
movement was very ephemeral. Or so it seemed...
The militants were present in all the struggles but their number was in
total very small, and they had different ways of operating.
The Federation Anarchiste of May 68 members were in the demonstrations
but it often limited itself to holding conferences and bookstalls at the
Sorbonne. On the night of the barricades of 10–11 May, it held its
annual gala (benefit concert) at the Mutualite close by, despite the
insistence of its activist tendency, inspired by platformism, the
Organisation Revolutionnaire Anarchiste, to cancel.
In fact, the majority of the FA made only sporadic appearances, on
different struggle fronts, whilst the ORA was in the street with other
libertarian communists, those of the Jeunesse Anarchiste Communiste,
ex-members of the old Federation Communiste Libertaire, militants of the
Union des Groupes Anarchistes Communistes, and the 22^(nd) March
Movement, a unitary body at Nanterre University which had absorbed
various pre-existing libertarian groups like Noir et Rouge.
Anarchists were present in the occupations of the universities, not only
at Nanterre and the Sorbonne, but also at Lille, Rennes, Nantes,
Toulouse, Marseilles, Tours, Poitiers, Strasbourg. Not to call for a
redefining of teaching or exams, but to call for the coming together of
student and workers struggles in a revolutionary perspective. The JAC,
notably, condemned all reformist illusions and played a major role in
the creation of the CALS (High School Action Committees) In the
workplaces, in the strike movements, there were often libertarian
communists or anarcho-syndicalists who had an important role. This was
the case, not only in western France, at Nantes, Saint-Nazaire, Lorient
and Brest, but also at Tours where railworkers and metalworkers of
Schmidt and SKF and textile workers of Indreco were in the forefront; at
Auxerre with the CNT, at the Renault plant at Billancourt, at Cleon,
Courbevoie, and at Paris among the proof-readers in the printing
industry.
The Comites d’action revolutionnaire also sprang up in many places. The
CARs gathered together Trotskyists, Maoists, dissidents of the Communist
Party, with the principal activists being libertarian communists. This
was particularly true at Tours which was in contact with the leading
anarchist communist at Nanterre, Jean-Pierre Duteuil, the situationists
of Paris and Nantes, with Jussieu University (in the centre of Paris and
with a proportionately higher working class intake than elsewhere). It
had contacts among the peasants and soldiers. But it was above all among
the railworkers that it played a very important role, with a real grip
on the lines and stations and with the beginnings of self-organisation
of the service.
““Everybody could recognise among those digging up cobble stones and the
builders of barriers, baptised barricades, the scum of Bordeaux: pimps,
thieves and wanted criminals, commandos of ex-paratroopers, fascists of
every sort” (Gironde Federation of the Communist Party, May 1968)
“ We were told ‘but these are revolutionary militants’. In truth, they
had nothing to do with the revolutionary movement. This isn’t the first
time that unscrupulous agitators have concealed their infamies under the
noble flag of the revolution. The fascists have also always pretended to
be revolutionaries”. (Georges Marchais, Communist Party leader).