May 68
1 May 2008
Demanding the Impossible
For those of us who like to reminisce about our student days on the barricades - forgetting they were mostly spent in meetings run by incompetent ideologues - May '68 still has resonance 40 years on
Even for armchair anarchists who are way too young to have been there.The events of May ‘68 centred on the Sorbonne, the second university occupied by students after Nanterres (a newer, more clinical style campus). Artists and poets supported the occupation and this (somehow) resulted in public opinion shifting in favour of the students. The country was gearing up for an international conference on Vietnam, but it was also struggling with a deeper undercurrent of frustration with conservative rule which the government of Charles de Gaulle did not see coming.
Police tactics used at the time were hotly discussed and easily condemned. The Guardian's article of May 7 says the police "clubbed the demonstrators when they caught them and sometimes bystanders with a sickening ferocity" and the protests were "unlike anything seen in western Europe since the end of the war". Immigration border checks were also used against organisers. The banning of Daniel Cohn-Bendit from French soil inspired one of the first anarchist border camps, a common feature of European protest today.
It took two weeks for the student rebellion to balloon into a general strike. Though initially sanctioned by unions, strikes were largely spontaneous in nature; union negotiations arrived at agreements but workers still did not return to work. The Sorbonne became a "people's university" (which sounds revolutionary, but probably meant having too many meetings).
De Gaulle announced a dissolution of parliament and a full election rather than a referendum and went into hiding in Germany. By then, censorship of media coverage on the State channel had resulted in a TV strike and de Gualle had to make his announcements on the radio.
Notoriously, the Communist Party of France (PCF) accepted the referendum offer and encouraged everyone to go home. After two months of police violence, communist betrayal and students running riot, there was an enormous backlash against the inconvenience of it all, and de Gaulle was returned to power with a greater majority than the precarious one he'd held since 1967. The spectre of revolution had secured his leadership, but also fatally wounded it. He remained in power until the following April.
The movement's strengths were its diversity and spontaneity, which is why it's so often quoted by anarchists when they're trying to tell people what to do. But those strengths are also what makes soixante-huit hard to pin down as a piece of history, to slot neatly into our narrative of post-war European development as tending inexorably toward democracy.
"Reducing the revolt to something with identifiable causes dilutes its ‘insaisissable' [elusive] nature that made it so difficult to control and such a focus of interest and controversy." writes commentator Chris Reynolds.
May ‘68 is remembered as the moment when France changed from a conservative to a liberated country, but the current conservative Government suggests the liberation was always half-cocked. Hilariously, President Nicolas Sarkozy criticised the "moral and intellectual permissiveness" of the period in his 2007 election campaign. France may be wed to an idea of itself as a liberated State but the French keep returning to that demanding mistress authoritarianism.
Although the history of May ‘68 records a failure, it is held up by Marxists and anarchists alike as a vision of what is possible. The left loves its own failures, especially when the Communists and the anarchists can argue over who was to blame. As to why it was possible, and whether it would be possible again, it is impossible to say. The events happened in specific social and historical contexts.
It is easy to simplify the revolt as a result of demographics - lots of young people with heaps of free time, an unjust war (Iraq anyone?). But it is also clear from the current era of summit protests that political actions have moved off campus. Voluntary student unionism may have crippled the student activists in this country, but that hasn't prevented anyone from building barricades elsewhere.
A quick look at the APEC and G20 protests will illustrate that technologies of surveillance have altered the policing of protest movements. Police at G20 had the media-savvy trick of making no arrests on the day then rounding up protesters across the country for months afterwards on painstakingly collated evidence. I'm not sure how much all this is costing the taxpayer but it's costing the protesters a packet - it seems like there's a new benefit gig every week - and now the Victorian Police will be compensatedfor their losses.
The methods of ‘68 have certainly been influential - if we remember nothing else, we remember the slogans. Many of the aesthetic techniques of the Situationists which infected the revolutionary attempt have since been seized upon by artists and media makers - the popularity of culture jamming, including shows like The Chaser, owes its existence to the Situationist International and intellectuals such as Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem.
As Naomi Klein has pointed out in No Logo, corporations are also appropriating the aesthetics and tactics of street artists and jammers. But for a generation which grew up after punk these double ironies are a fact of culture.
Perhaps the hardest thing of all about continuing the anarchist project is the art of navigating its tired language. Take crimethinc, at its best a movement which breaks revolutionary ground for a new generation of youth, at its worst a set of dirgeful instruction manuals for emos. It is part of the pleasure of youth to be alienated from the mainstream, but it is also true that times have changed. Information and choice are everywhere, and you can get a bottle of chardonnay for seven bucks. But are we any more free or merely saturated in images of freedom?
The Guardian has a virtual tour of the period here.
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I have just received a call from a man who was there - he pointed out the role that US military resistance played in May 68. Was the first I had heard of soldiers participating in the rebellion.
Thought I would add this note as the man in question said he had difficulty with the comments facility here.
This aritcle is really pointelss, it trivialises and badly summarises the events, fails to mention a great deal of other information and participants, and leaves out the activities and events occuring in other parts of the world around the same time.
I don’t really see any use for this piece, except as a confusing attempt to be cynically cool. The author seems to have part contempt and part amusement of the era, events and anyone interested in it.
And what’s with the last paragraph? A weak attempt to connect with the Y Generation? I always thought the ‘anarchist project’ connected me more with my community, not that it made me alientate myself from it (I have nihilism for that).
Maybe the issue is so evasive it cannot be properly discussed in an article, but certainly not by this writer (sorry but its my opinion).
I don’t know, as a youth in the 1980’s I was raised up in my political leanings by listening to stories about 1968, so I find the article useful even just to remind folk of the breadth of the full context we exist in as a voting public. If you want to complain about pointlessness, try opposing Helen Razor’s work, which is so pointless usually that it is impossible to oppose, while good points are normally easier to define and so easier to disagree with.
Y-generation folk don’t even want to identify with our own opposition to being labelled, which is sort of what that last paragraph is getting at.
I liked the article because it was reminding me about how much better organised the left wing and social justice movement are in Britain, than here in Australia.
For example, at every political rally in the UK, there are a group of volunteers selected who are identifyable as not participating in the protest, but just observers; and their job is to write down the number of every uniform policeman present, and take photos and make footage, so that if anybody is arrested, the legal defense has anough material to work with.
Its a leaf out of the book of those whose land has been invaded for much longer than ours, which our own union movement, left wing radicals, and land rights activists need to have had before now.
Word Sword Sworn
At Hath
That Hat
Inshallah no poetry farce
By Solomon’s Seal will my past
No word not true can last
Unfortunately, i agree with Surdo… what’s the point? It doesn’t really offer anything to engage with, any hope. I’m currently writing a small piece bout May 68 for Mutiny zine and was sent a link to this and i’m a bit dissapointed. I’ll try not to repeat cos Surdo pretty much said what i was thinking.
But to try and add a separate point - actually a question - what’s the freakin point of the two paragraphs trying to connect May 68 with current situation here? Yeah, it makes sense when writing an analyses of a historical event to connect it with the present but these really seem forced and not saying to much.
As a person ‘rounded up across the country’ after the G20 i particularly think this was a pointless connection to draw. I’m confused with what you’re saying - because in the end it’s costing us (‘the protesters’), because it’s costing the taxpayers (wow, classicly, cliched mainstream journalism there), and because the police are receiving a payout it was a failure? No. Have you talked to any of us bout it? This is dangerous writing with one of us sitting in jail and the rest of us facing that consequence when we go to trial.
There’s many probs that can be pointed out with the G20 protests but this is lazy writing, seemingly straight from the Murdoch press. I know none of this was the main point of your article, but i did struggle with the point at all and this bit on the G20 just added to that. And to be somewhat facetious (though no more facetious than you mentioing G20 in the same article as May 68), and extend what you seem to be saying about the G20, should anytime a street protest becomes spontaneously militant, should we just walk away thinking about taxpayers? We don’t all have that luxury.
cheers,
SD.
(this was hard to write and i hope it’s not too mean, but i think it’s a real important time to be careul bout how we write about the struggles of other people and not undermine solidarity and i do hold lefty writers who have the privilege of having a widely-read forum to put their stuff on to tougher standards.)