Twenty years after Mai 68
Socialist Outlook magazine1980sPhil HearseScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
DANY COHN-BENDIT on channel four; four books so far; all the colour supplements — 1968 is becoming an industry. But what did it really mean? Was it just the youthful excess of a generation who grew up in a pampered unreal time, before the harsh economic realities of the late twentieth century caught up with them?
If you examine the momentous events of that year in detail, they went far beyond 'student rebellion' and youthful ultra-leftism. World-historic events shook several parts of the world, involving very 'grown-up' forces and vital battles in the international class struggle. 1968 and the period which led up to, and followed it, has decisively shaped the world in which we live.
The key events of the year are well known. The May-June general strike in France, the Tet offensive in Vietnam, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August.
Less well known, but symbolic of an important process under way was the 25 February Vietnam demonstration in West Berlin, showcase of western capitalism. Young revolutionaries gathered from all over Europe to support the Vietnamese revolution, at the invitation of the German Socialist Students Federation (SDS). 20,000 people marched behind portraits of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The event marked the first time that the red flag had been carried in that part of Berlin since Hitler came to power in 1933.
Inspired by the Vietnamese revolution, militant socialist ideas were finding a new audience in the west.
The Berlin demonstration followed hard on the heels of the Tet offensive in Vietnam. Bourgeois papers, like the British Guardian claimed that the Tet offensive was a crushing defeat for the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF). But the US administration was not fooled. Never again did the US ruling class think of victory in Vietnam, only how to try to avoid crushing defeat.
1968 witnessed a new rise of the world revolution. A whole series of struggles in the colonial and semi-colonial world (the 'third world') accompanied the Vietnamese struggle. In particular, 1968 was the year of the spectacular emergence of the Palestinian fighters' organisations, the fedayeen.
In eastern Europe, the working people of Czechoslovakia attempted to exploit the opening provided by the emergence of a reforming wing of the bureaucracy around Dubcek, but were overthrown in August by the Soviet invasion.
But without doubt the most significant of the events of '68 was the May-June general strike in France. Sparked by the student rebellion, the French working class moved into action against the De Gaulle government, to the consternation of the trade union leaders, and the leaders of the biggest working class party — the French Communist Party (PCF).
The thunderbolt of May rocked bourgeois 'common sense' to its foundations. Here were millions of workers, occupying their factories and defying capitalist 'normality'. All those who said the workers were 'integrated' into capitalist society and only interested in more consumer goods were flabbergasted. Despite the fact that the May-June movement was sold out and led to defeat by the PCF, political life was totally shaken up. A new period had opened.
In Britain 1968 was important in two related ways. The Vietnam and student movement provided a new audience for the far left and led to its rapid growth. At the same time it was a 'break year' as far as the level of strike struggles was concerned, which doubled over 1967. It was the beginning of a working class upsurge which was to continue through the Heath government to 1974.
In a general sense, how can we sum up the meaning and outcome of 1968?
Let's start with France. Judged by objective possibilities the general strike signalled a pre-revolutionary situation. Both the major classes in society, the working class and the ruling class, mobilised against each other, posing the question of power — which class rules? The working class struggle went beyond the framework of normal strike struggles, and began, embryonically to challenge the structure and power of capitalism. In other words, the movement went as far as it could without a direct attempt to set up organisations of working class power (which only embryonically emerged) and stage an insurrection against the state.
But given the relationship of forces in the workers movement — the domination of the PCF deeply tied to the 'bourgeois order', to capitalism, — this was impossible. The missing factor was a mass revolutionary force which could take the movement forward, in a collective way, to establish workers power.
The defeat of the May-June general strike was the product of a whole preceding period of capitalist development, in which it had been impossible to even begin to seriously challenge the prestige and leadership of the PCF.
Revolutionary consciousness, in such a period of economic growth, tended to decline, compared with the 1920s and 1930s. To be sure, the reformist practice of the PCF, and the CGT union federation which it controlled; their betrayal of the struggle against the Algerian war — and their supine acceptance of De Gualle's virtual coup d'etat in 1959 — tended to reinforce this decline in revolutionary consciousness. But objective factors, as well as the betrayals of the leadership, played a role.
While tens of thousands of French workers were able to outflank their leaders in action, to occupy their factories, to build action committees in the localities, and even in some factories re-start production under workers control, this never became generalised into a nationally-led attempt to build organisations of workers self-rule and take power.
When marxists talk of the May-June strike being a casualty of the 'crisis of leadership' they refer not just to the lack of a large revolutionary organisation. They stress the need for a sizeable layer of thousands of workers who through their own experiences and struggles have developed an anti-capitalist consciousness. Such a layer of workers did not exist in France, nor could it be developed overnight.
The idea of the working class at one fell swoop, through a general strike, establishing its own power — without a preceding phase of profound anti-capitalist political development — is an anarcho-syndicalist myth.
On a more general level, 1968 marked a change in the political period, especially in western Europe, an end to the period of relative social peace which followed the post-war settlement between the bourgeoisie and the working class leaders. This change in political period was intimately linked with the onset of the long period of economic recession, following the post-war capitalist boom.
The new period ushered in by 1968, the period in which we still are, was one of a prolonged economic crisis and a prolonged struggle between the classes to assert their domination. This is a decades-long fight, marked by economic ups and downs and its political ebbs and flows.
But in the end, we are still in the unresolved, long term struggle against the attempt of the imperialist bourgeoisies to create a new regime of capitalist accumulation, and a new political order, on the ruins of the post-war welfare state — and the strivings of the advanced guard workers movement to develop a leadership capable of imposing its own, socialist solution.
From the struggles in 1968 flowed the downfall of the dictatorships in Greece, Spain and Portugal; a gigantic rise of workers struggle in Italy and Britain; the pre-revolutionary crisis in Portugal in 1974-75; and a widespread revolt of the peoples of the third world and in the stalinist states.
In capitalist Europe, the aftermath of 1968 gave rise to widespread illusions about the possibility of a fairly rapid development of revolutionary conditions. But after the onset of the 1974-75 recession, the class struggle ebbed markedly as the workers movement reeled from austerity attacks.
The change in the situation, while not resulting in a return to pre-'68 conditions of relative social peace, exposed the weakness of the far left cruelly. Typically the far left was notable for its ultra-leftism and underestimation of the mass organisations of the working class — unions and mass political parties.
Many revolutionary socialists imagined that these organisations could be more or less rapidly outflanked, and that debates and political differentiation would 'go round' the old and 'discredited' workers organisations. This turned out not to be the case. For example, in France after 1968 the communist party, and even its student organisation, grew, as new layers of workers brought into politics turned first to their existing mass organisations, and not small left wing alternatives.
In 1988, twenty years after the ice broke, the crisis of the capitalist world order — or for that matter the crisis of the stalinist states — is far from resolved. The decisive battles between the classes in the advanced capitalist countries, lie ahead of us.
In this sense, all those who, twenty years after 1968 are 'disillusioned' with the outcome, who have lost hope in socialism and the revolution, or think that all the hopes of 1968 were foolish, wasted dreams are wrong.
The generation of '68 almost everywhere underestimated the difficulty of the struggle, its duration and its scope.
The objective of refashioning the workers movement to meet revolutionary tasks cannot be done in a few months or even years; building a revolutionary movement implanted in the working class, and capable of giving real leadership is the most difficult thing in the world. It is also the most important.
The revolutionary generation of 1968 had a vision of a world ruled by priorities of human need and solidarity, not the priorities of profit. That vision is as valid and necessary as ever. As they said in 1968: 'This is only a beginning; the struggle continues !'
PHIL HEARSE