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Title: Documents from France Author: Various Authors Date: September, 1968 Language: en Topics: France, 1968, May 1968, revolt, students, Black and Red, Paris Source: Black & Red Number 1, September, 1968, page 56 Notes: Scanned from original.
[Leaflet by students of the March 22 Movement explains why students
fought the police]
Fights in the Latin Quarter.
Press + university + cops + owners = repression.
Why are the students “enraged”?
The papers write about “madmen,” about “golden” youth who want to get
rid of their idleness by throwing themselves into violence and
vandalism.
What’s the purpose of those articles?
Only one: to cut the students off from the workers, to caricature their
struggle, to isolate in order to muzzle them better.
Three thousand students fought the police for five hours last Friday--is
this the “handful of trouble-makers” referred to by the Minister of
Education, Peyrefitte?
NO.
We’re fighting because we refuse to become:
- professors at the service of a system of selection which keeps out
working class students,
- sociologists who manufacture slogans for the government’s electoral
campaigns,
- psychologists charged with making “teams” of workers “operational” in
terms of “the best interests of the owners,”
- scientists whose research work will be used exclusively in the
interest of the profit economy.
We refuse this future as “watchdogs.”
We refuse the courses which teach us to become that.
We refuse the tests and the titles which compensate those who have
accepted to enter into the system.
We refuse to be recruited by these “mafias.”
We refuse to improve the bourgeois university.
We want to transform it radically so that it will educate intellectuals
who will fight alongside the workers, and not against them.
We want the interests of the working class defended inside the
university. Those who want to separate us from the workers go against
the interests of the working class and of those who want to fight with
the workers.
Wherever you are, wherever we are, let us all mobilize against bourgeois
repression.
-- March 22 Mouvement
[Leaflet by the Workers-Students Action Committees of the Censier Annex
of the University of Paris. It was distributed to the workers of a
chemical plant in Paris]
Workers:
After a week of continued struggle, the students of Paris have taken
possession of the Sorbonne--and we’ve decided to become the Masters.
Until now, a bourgeois education was imposed on us, and we weren’t able
to challenge its content. This education prepared us to be future
managers and the instruments of your exploitation.
Until now we had to solve our problems by traditional methods like
petitions, elections of better leaders, and partial demonstrations. The
inefficacy of these methods was proved to us by the experience of the
past few days; only mass action led by the rank and file was able to
make the established powers back down.
We haven’t simply demanded more space, more credits, more professors. We
asked ourselves: Why the space? Why the credits? Why the professors? We
challenged the very purpose of education.
There are profound similarities between your problems and ours.
Who decides the speed of the assembly line? Who decides the uses of the
production? Everywhere it’s the same rule: we are told to execute the
orders of the hierarchy.
We want to be informed of your struggle. Your struggle is ours.
-- Workers-Students Action Committees
[Leaflet by the Workers-Students Action Committee Citroen (The “Citroen
Committee”) of Censier. It was distributed to workers from Spain,
Portugal, Yugoslavia and North Africa who are employed at the Citroen
automobile plants in and around Paris.]
Hundreds of thousands of foreign workers are imported like any other
commodity useful to the capitalists, and the government even organizes
clandestine immigration from Portugal, thus showing itself as a slave
driver.
These workers are ferociously exploited by the capitalists. They live in
terrible conditions in the slums which surround Paris. Since they are
underqualified, they are underpaid. Since they only speak their own
language, they remain isolated from the rest of the working population
and are not understood. Thus isolated, they accept the most inhuman work
in the worst workshops.
ALL THIS BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO CHOICE:
They left their countries because they were starving, because their
countries are also under the yoke of capital. Victims in their own
countries, they are victims here too.
All that has to end.
Because they are not ENEMIES OF THE FRENCH PROLETARIAT: ON THE CONTRARY,
THEY ARE THE SUREST ALLIES. If they are not moving yet, it is because
they are aware of the precariousness of their situation. Since they have
no rights, the smallest act can lead to their expulsion, which means a
return to hunger (and jail).
Through their labor, the foreign workers participate in the creation of
the wealth of French society. They must have the same rights as all
others.
Thus it is up to revolutionary workers and students to see to it that
foreign workers ENJOY THE TOTALITY OF THEIR POLITICAL AND UNION RIGHTS.
This is the concrete beginning of internationalism.
The foreign workers, who make up an integral part of the working class
in France, together with their French comrades, will massively join the
radical struggle to destroy capitalism and to create a CLASSLESS SOCIETY
such as has NEVER been seen.
-- Workers-Students Action Committee--Citroen
[Leaflet by the March 22 Movement, distributed to students and workers
at a large demonstration.]
Against the Gases:
1. Preventive measures:
-- in the absence of a gas mask:
-- Underwater glasses or hermetic motorcycle or ski glasses. Hold half a
lemon in mouth (for breathing). Linen around nose and mouth.
-- Do not remain in a gas trap. Put water on the linen around the mouth,
open the mouth to water. (Do not put water over the eyes or on the body
because this may release poisonous elements.)
-- Do not breathe the gas of the offensive grenades (they’re the ones
that make a lot of noise when they explode).
-- On the skin: a layer of dye or greasy cream.
-- For the eyes: Hydro-cortisone eye-wash.
2. If someone is hit:
Doctors are not all familiar with the necessary measures:
a) 1. Lead the patient to a warm and well ventilated room; he should not
exert himself.
2. Move him as little as possible.
3. Drops of sulfuric ether in his nose.
4. Bleeding: 500 mg. of blood, minimum.
b) Give the patient oxygen and let him rest.
c) Do not let him eat or drink for four hours after the exposure.
Serious cases risk dry pulmonary lesions (bronchitis, red spittle), or
in the case of saturation, death from pulmonary lesions.
Chlorine grenades (in transparent, plastic cylinders) attack external
and internal mucous membranes.
Do not wear nylon (which burns) or paper padding.