1968 in France
* France Thirty years ago, a wave of struggles in France shook the European ruling classes and opened up new possibilities for the left. John Lister asked former student leader Daniel Bensaid how he now interprets May 1968. • What is the background to May 1968? The students responded to attacks on their rights; but what were the issues mobilising the working class? Bensaid: Much of the debate and reinterpretation of these events in France, especially among those who have broken with revolutionary politics, tends to insist on the cultural, ideological aspects of 1968. But what gave the 1968 events real weight, at least in France, was the combination of the student mobilisation - which also happened in countries like Japan and the United States - with the general strike. Today's commentators often forget that we had a real general strike, of between eight and ten million workers, which lasted
What did it mean? Maybe we tended to overestimate the political content of the strike. It opened up the possibility of a political crisis. Some democratic demands were raised against the rigid archaic state of [French president] De Gaulle, with very concentrated power; and there were a series of economic, material demands to raise the standard of living. But, even given the big wave of the movement, the enormous general strike, the politicisation
There was no big crisis in the reformist parties. Despite its hostility to the street protests, the Communist Party obtained good results in the 1969 elections, and it was able to channel most of the radicalisation. There was no big crisis in the unions either: in fact, they grew rapidly, especially in the middle-sized and smaller factories. There were no big ruptures in the labour movement, like we saw in 1945-47, after the war. A very limited layer of youth and workers split from the majority currents, creating the space for a new far left. This is significant because it still exists, but it was a very small rupture.
The possibilities for action changed, but not the relationship of forces. That is to do with the limits, the dynamics of the general strike itself. There was much less self-organisation of strikers than in Italy, for example. There were factory occupations, but very few elected strike committees or mass meetings. The union officials maintained control throughout the strike. 28 International Viewpoint #301
Some of today's commentators tend to identify the birth of social movements like the women's movement with 1968. In reality in France this came two or three years later, as a result of the '68 events. The distinctive demands of the women's movement did not appear in 1968.
It was a transitional general strike, which remained under the control of the reformist leaderships, and which, in the framework of the functioning welfare state of the time, served to win more space and social gains, winning back some things that had been lost under the De Gaulle
In fact, there was no final agreement between strikers and the state. There were negotiations but, since the results were rejected in some Renault plants, they remained only as a basis for decentralised agreements. There was no global agreement as there had been in 1936. The main points conceded were on wages, and on trade union rights, but there was no agreement on social security.
Despite the limitations of the strike and dynamics of the movement, there were possibilities to open up a political crisis. We don't say now, twenty years later, it would have been an immediate revolution; but it was possible to open up a political crisis in the context of the
Obviously many things have changed, and nobody knows exactly what might have been possible, but 1968 changed the situation in France and for Europe in the early 1970s. I am not saying there could have been a revolution, but the strength of the movement, in spite of its limitations, promised much more than was achieved. • The Communist Party line contributed
Absolutely. If we re-read today the literature of the big parties of 1968, mainly the Communist Party, we see how they were obsessed with the idea of [ultraleft] provocation and plots.
They were trying to find an answer to the changes in French society, in which, for the first time, the working class was in the majority. And they had developed the idea of a new coalition of social forces, expressed at the electoral level by the 'union of the left. Meanwhile, De Gaulle's conservatives (gaullists') kept winning the elections. Communist Party (CP) leaders thought that the Socialist Party (SP) had been pushed to the side by its capitulation on the Algerian War of Independence.
Indeed, in a real sense the SP was very reduced in influence in 1968, so the CP thought there could be an opening for rouge journal a action communiste le systeme cabitaliste est en crise
LES TRAVAILLEURS
NE PALERONT PAS!
26 novembre 1968 parait fous them, like the Italian CP, to become the major party of the left and to grow step by step through elections. All this was being disturbed by the 1968 events.
They were determined to control the mass movement. They successfully negotiated a broadening of union rights which strengthened the CP at the level of union bureaucracy. In the end this was the main result of the strike. • Although it did not want to challenge the government, the CP did change its line during the strike, raising the demand of a 'popular government'
Yes, but that was a very short period between 22 May and 29 May. A week of open political crisis, because the agreements were rejected and there was no possibility of stopping the strike just through that kind of agreement.
The specificity of the Gaullist regime left no channels to reach a consensus or negotiate: it was very centralised, and the strength of the regime was its weakness when it was challenged. So there was an opening of a political crisis because De Gaulle announced on 24 May that they could not find a way out, and called for a referendum. Everybody, even reformists like Mendes-France and Mitterrand, rejected the referendum. That could mean an open political crisis. There were two answers. The SP was ready to have a left government with personalities; even Mitterrand was ready to propose a new government based not on parties but on personalities, without exclusions and with negotiations. We called it 'inclusive bonapartism'.
The CP was afraid of being marginalised and out-manoeuvred, so it raised the abstract question of a popular government, without any clear content. But this was only used to occupy the space for four days. Mitterrand said afterwards in his balance sheet of 1968 that this was all a manoeuvre, to say 'we are ready to take
EST DANS LARUE our responsibilities' so De Gaulle would withdraw the referendum, then dissolve the assembly and hold elections.
At that time, Mitterrand was a bourgeois personality, he was not personally a member of the SP. He was in a small bourgeois radical group: only later did he join the SP, rise to the top, and win two presidential elections.
All this lasted just a few days when De Gaulle disappeared to see the army in Germany and then came back. There was a kind of panic at that time, but it was a very short period. • Do you think now, looking back, that a more concrete governmental slogan would have been better - something like 'Communist Party take power!'?
The CP alone could not have taken power. The kind of answer we raised was not very concrete but was not so bad, and was proven in the struggle. There was a big CP-CGT demonstration on 13 May or with 3-400 members, 90% of whom were students. Our main activity was Vietnam solidarity and opposition to university reforms, which started at that time.
When the general strike started, it was obvious we had no real weight to compete: the only thing we could do was to try to organise and centralise in some way the more radical, dynamic part of the movement, through the action committees which appeared. This was not real self-organisation, since the action committees were more like gatherings of radical people. We tried to centralise these gatherings to gain a little strength to push proposals into the movement.
In France today, there is a tendency to exaggerate the extent of the radicalisation and politicisation of the youth and student movement before 1968. The real growth came only in 1968, and afterwards. Before, the communist students were the milieu of the maturing of the radicalisation, and they never reached 5,000 members; nor were there such massive demonstrations before 1968. The radicalisation started with the us bombing of Hanoi in 1966-67, but the demos were not so big.
I was at Nanterre university, and we called what we considered a big gathering of people one Sunday - 500 people out of 10,000 students at the university. It was a significant minority of very active people - no more than that. What is interesting is to compare that with the situation now: then there was a kind of happy, spontaneous internationalism, a strong identification not only with Vietnam. Vietnam obviously was centralised, summarised as an issue, imperialism versus black people, a clear-cut confrontation, everything clear, politics, morals, ethics, everything lining people on the same side, no problem.
But at Nanterre the movement also took on anti-bureaucratic struggles; involving students in Warsaw, and other thereabouts. They felt LA BEAUTE threatened from the right and the left, because the previous day we had organised a rally which attracwas frightened by this
They organised their own demonstration - a very big one. We were the only current from the lett to participate, and we were very small. We came with our slogan popular government, yes: but no Mitterrand and Mendes-France!', and it was taken up by people from the CP because it expressed the political issue anci a sviuuuu and at the same time showed a mistrust of the manoeuvres of Mitterrand
The other difficulty with the general strike not having been called, but only existing 'de facto' was that to call for it would also have raised the question of who should negotiate: who should be the leadership of the general strike - the normal union bodies, or the left? In this context we have to be conscious of the fact that we as a current had only maybe 400 members, and in the factories we had very little - a few individuals. • Could you say something about the origins of the JCR?
We were expelled from the CP's youth organisation in 1965 for two reasons. One was the kind of support we gave to Vietnam; we fought for support and active solidarity with the National Liberation Front (NLF), against the official CP slogan of 'peace.' The other was that we opposed the CP decision to back Mitterrand as the sole candidate in the first round of the 1965 presidential election.
We were expelled in 1965 and formed the Jeunesses Communistes Révolutionmaires (JCR) in April 1966
Polish issues.
The Nanterre movement was open to everybody. It had three main axes: it was against bourgeois education reforms; anti-imperialist, and anti-bureaucratic. The only limitation on becoming involved i went nu tests, no programme like a party or anything - was opposition to US intervention in Vietnam: that was the only real criterion that was used. Then it was all very clear, a unified view of the world was a real characteristic of those movements.
• How do you assess the other movements of that time, like the "22 March" students?
The 22 March movement began first at
Nanterre university, and changed composition political movement. At the beginning there were mainly two currents: us and the anarchists. The
CP youth always opposed it, and tere were some Lambertists (members of
Pierre Lambert's Organisation Communiste Internationaliste, OCI) who were very concerned with student unionism.
They considered the 22 March movement to be an anti-union movement to destroy the student union.' We didn't. So the really dynamic forces in the movement were the anarchists and the JCR
Among the youth, the CP was very marginalised at that time, so there was us and the ultra-sectarian Lambertists. The ront were the Maoists who were
.. of the cultural revolu-
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