The following article was the basis of a presentation at a public meeting in Paris earlier this month.
————————————————
“It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us” (Walter Benjamin) “all is possible”, “the power of imagination”.
For the generation after the war, May 68 constituted the first “strong” signal of an immense hope.
All the structures of capitalist society seemed to be turned upside down, all social layers seemed prey to a bubbling over never before seen, all countries seemed affected by the change, and political consciousness seemed to link–up again with the roots of Marxism:
* The working class, in the first general strike since 1936 in France, in the hot autumn in Italy in 1970, contradicted the idea of the “disappearance” or “integration” of the proletariat; millions of strikers protested that a different world is possible, without advancing wage claims or claims based on a particular type employment; the worker’s in struggle confronted the trade unions, and self-organized their movements. The worker’s assemblies where everyone could speak served as a crucible for the decisions, including the dynamic of extension towards other factories; the rejection of the trade unions integrated into the State is visceral;
* The student movement, in France, in Italy, in Germany, in Belgium, in the United States, in Mexico disputed, on the political level, imperialism related to the struggles of “national liberation” (Vietnam War), racial discrimination (segregation of blacks in the United States), sexuality (development of feminism), and questioned the general orientation towards a standardized society and the penetration of the University for the needs of big business;
* The policy of the French Communist Party, the policy followed by the USSR (crushing the movement of revolt of Hungary, 1956) were firmly denounced, and a partial craze for the models of autarkic “socialism” ( Chinese, Albanian, Yugoslav, Algerian) developed;
* The rediscovery of the fundamental writings of Marxism, which had remained unknown or little published hitherto: “History and Class Consciousness” by Georg Lukács, the “Grundrisse”, and the “unpublished chapter of “Capital” by Marx; the interaction between students and thinkers and philosophical Marxists (Marcuse, Ernst Bloch) who had understood the historical potential of the events.
* There reigned an atmosphere of euphoria, “everything is possible”; the couple, the bourgeois family, parental authority, rigid education, were questioned; the generalization of contraception modified the attitude towards sexuality. The development of technologies initiated the appearance of the “consumer society”; one didn’t want to exchange the certainty of dying from hunger for that of dying of boredom!
Did May 68 announce the revolution? If not, why?
In ‘ 68, twenty years after the end of the Second World War, after reconstruction, capitalism was again confronted with economic crisis. According to a mechanistic Marxist vision, that crisis should have irremediably brought about a slackening in the growth of the productive forces, a rapid increase in unemployment, a generalized impoverishment of the proletariat, and thus an upswing of struggles. May ‘ 68, accordingly, was only one precursor of a teleological movement, which could only grow, towards revolution. Reality proved much more complex. May ‘ 68, which expressed “everything is possible”, was foreclosed again during the following years an iron grip which appears today even more difficult to shake.
Some will endeavor to sort the “good” from the “bad”, to separate the “purely worker’s” movement from the “student movement”, the “revolutionary struggle” from the “reformist struggle”. We will not do anything like that. The movements of May ‘ 68 were a global response of revolt in a still not yet revolutionary period. It is necessary for us to grasp the “not yet revolutionary” character of the period of ‘ 68 and the years ‘ 70, and to see how this period still expressed illusions of being able to escape from the increasing grip of capitalist technology, and on the imminent character of revolution. It is also necessary to grasp how capitalism transformed its economic, ideological, political, and ecological mode of domination since then, to understand how the conditions of a period and of revolutionary consciousness are maturing, and to give to a meaning, neither triumphalist, nor defeatist, to that gigantic warning signal which was ` 68.
The technological changes, including the digital revolution, allowed capitalism, within a context of crisis, to profoundly modify production, the employment of the working class, its living conditions, and the ideology related to these material conditions.
In ‘ 68, we still lived in a limited world, for all, where everything was scarce, expensive: cars, television, travel, higher education. Since then we have passed, in the industrialized countries, to a generalized, but apparent, abundance. The increase in productivity had as a consequence a reduction in production costs, therefore the production of cheaper goods allowing the reproduction of the labor power at cheaper price.
‘ 68 mark also the end of the Fordist period, based on the great proletarian concentrations (blue collar workers) in factories like FIAT Mirafiori or Renault Billancourt. If the working class could still count in the ‘ 60′s on its traditional bastions in the iron and steel industry, the mines, the assembly lines (automobile), since then, these concentrations have been largely dismantled in the central countries, whereas they developed on a scale even larger in the Asian countries. The proletariat, composed of those who have only the sale of their labor power to survive, finds itself in very different situations (short time, temporary employment, etc.). The reorganizations, the dislocations of companies, have destroyed the physical, geographical fabric of the Western proletariat, which must find other criteria to identify itself and to come together.
In ‘ 68, the wind of change seemed to blow from the periphery of capitalism, from the countries in struggle for their independence, against colonial domination or imperialism. The “revolutionary forces” of Vietnam, of China, of Cuba seemed, from their youth and their enthusiasm, to be able to shake the cover of the old world which had buried any inclination of revolt under the reconstruction after the war. Some Maoists Western intellectuals propagated their passion for the “cultural revolution” as living alternative to socialism of tanks and of the Soviet Un
In ’68, the wind of change seemed to blow from the periphery of capitalism, from the countries in struggle for their independence, against colonial domination or imperialism. The “revolutionary forces” of Vietnam, of China, of Cuba seemed, from their youthfulness and their enthusiasm, to be able to shake the iron grip of the old world, which had buried any inclination to revolt under the reconstruction of the post-war period. Certain intellectual Western Maoists propagated their passion for the “Cultural revolution” as an alternative to the socialism of tanks and steel of the Soviet Union. Those who dared to openly criticize this capitalist, brutal, totalitarian, terror campaign, which counted its victims in the tens of millions, such as Charles Reeves (“The Paper Tiger”, Editions Spartacus, 1971), or Simon Leys (“Chronic of the Cultural revolution”, written from 1967 to 1969) were a tiny minority. Twenty years after, in 1989, in front of all the cameras of the world, the massacres of the Tianmen Square (testified to the true nature of “Chinese communism”: that of a “government which declares war against its own people and launches an army of murderers against a disarmed and peaceful crowd in its capital” (S. Leys, Préface of 1989 with the “Tests on China”, Editions Books, p. 3). The invasion of Cambodia by its Vietnamese rival, in 1978, put an end to the atrocities of the “Khmer Rouge” of Pol Pot and left the country drained of blood, prey to devastation equivalent to that of some of the temples of Angkor Wat. Today, the confrontations in Tibet show the persistence of the Chinese regime: its use of the most brutal violence to preserve the totality of its political power.
’68 also saw the emergence of ecology, and the political “Green” parties. Rudi Dutschke and Daniel Cohn Bendit are emblematic figures of this concern for the state of the world. Forty years later, the hope to save the planet from ecological catastrophe has considerably diminished. Ecology, as a political ideology, has been recuperated for purely commercial goals, by becoming the source of new markets for “green” products. Ecology is even used in the inter-impérialist struggle. The motivation for the production of bio-fuels is not so much the rescue of the planet, but the liberation of the United States and Europe from the influence of imported fossil fuels. The indifference related to the effects of this production on the emergence of new imbalances in the production of the food and the increase in the suffering of an ever-larger part of the world’s population, can only shock us. “When one launches, in the United States, thanks to 6 billion dollars in subsidies, a policy of bio-fuels which drains 138 million tons of corn out of the food market, one provides the bases for a crime against humanity to serve its own thirst for fuel (…) and when the European Union decides to raise the share of bio-fuels to 10% in 2020, it shifts the burden onto small African farming communities…” (Jean Ziegler, advisor to the UN on food, April 14, 2008).
Mai’ 68 saw a challenge to the representative institutions of bourgeois ideology, the Church, marriage, standardized education, the democratic lack of participation in the universities. The student revolts against the Vietnam War constituted an attempt to reverse the depoliticization of public life in advanced capitalist society. Post-68 society is no longer governed by an ideology “coherent in itself”, perhaps because this was replaced more and more by a “falsification of activity” (Gunther Anders): rationalized work goes beyond our imagination, we do not see or we do not know what we do. Our political thought is skillfully controlled thanks to a systematic and organized work of propaganda, just as any other sector of production. The control of opinion, the foundation of any government, the most despotic along with the most free, “is infinitely more important in “free” societies, where one cannot maintain obedience by the whip” (Noam Chomsky, Dominate the world or save planet, ED. 10/18, p, 15).
Lesson of May 68: the loss of the illusions
Over the past 40 years, the following lessons can be drawn from this rich historical period, which constituted May 68:
* The question of the material and intellectual agents of the upheaval. Although student combativeness was in the foreground in ‘ 68, the students remained impotent to change the world. What “was lacking”, and which “is still lacking” today, is the emergence of the proletariat as a revolutionary collective worker;
* The absence of any “substitute” in the struggle against advanced capitalism. Contrary to the theories of “displacement of the conflicts in advanced capitalist society”, on the bond between a student movement in the metropoles and “liberation” struggles in the Third World, the proletariat, as revolutionary collective worker, must confront capitalism, and the law of the value, in the most developed countries.
* The “the liberation from taboos” as regards sexuality, equality between women and men, the access to education, did not mean a “liberation of human potential”, but went hand in hand with the perpetuation of a repressive society while making it possible for capitalism to extend the law of the value to then still unoccupied domains of social life: the commodification of the emotional and relational aspects of life.
* The inadequacy of the equation between industrialization, unlimited technological development, and communism. As the theorists of the Frankfurt School gleaned, the unlimited technological development which has characterized the production of value during the twentieth century went hand in hand with the subjugation of humankind: “the encasement of man within a fixed and ossified universe by commodities of comfort and well-being, increasingly accessible to the members of advanced industrial society and especially constantly increasing, occurred at the expense of another human dimension: possibility (…) According to the principle of a negative dialectic, the techniques of industrialization, supposed to liberate men from alienated work and struggle against scarcity, condemn them even more to the antiquated anathema consisting of earning their living, of struggling to survive. Today still, the most elementary needs (food, housing, clothing) are not satisfied except in exchange for the submission of labor to the production of value, to the point of rendering superfluous the greatest part of humanity, no longer necessary to fulfill that exploitation ” (F Ollier, Foreword: “Marcuse or the Combative Dialectic,” Critical Horizon, 2007, p. 18-19)
A different world is possible
Forty years after May ‘ 68, the idea of “possibility” is still, indeed increasingly, on the agenda. The proletariat, far from having disappeared, has expanded. The past four decades were also characterized by a massive loss of illusions in the future of the Third World countries, in the possibility of liberation for the human condition under capitalism, in the unlimited development of technology and consumer goods. How the collective worker will be able to oppose the law of the value, to pass from the “subject of work” to the “subject of freedom”, to save itself and escape from the death of the world, remains still indecipherable. But that path becomes increasingly necessary. The “possibility” announced by May ‘ 68 remains to be created.
