Thirty years ago this month, a wave of struggles in France shook the European ruling classes and opened up new possibilities for the left.
In 1968 DANIEL BENSAID was a prominent leader of the student movement at Nanterre University in Paris. Today he is a leading member of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, the French section of the Fourth International. We asked him how he interprets May 1968 today.
Question: What is the background to the events of 1968? The students were responding to attacks on their rights, but what were the issues that mobilised the working class?
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 with the general strike. Today's commentators often forget that we had a real general strike, of between 8 and 10 million workers, which lasted three weeks.
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 remained small.
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 were factory occupations, but very few elected strike committees or mass meetings. The union officials maintained control throughout the strike.
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.
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 government.
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.
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, 20 years later, it would have been an immediate revolution; but it was possible to open up a political crisis in the context of the 1960s.
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. The strength of the movement, in spite of its limitations, promised much more than was achieved.
Question: Did the Communist Party (CP) line contribute to this limitation?
Absolutely. If we re-read the literature of the big parties of 1968, mainly the CP, we see how they were obsessed with the idea of [ultra-left] 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 kept winning more and more elections.
CP leaders thought 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 them 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.
Question: 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 May 22 and 29 — 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 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 May 24 that they could not find a way out, and called for a referendum. Everybody, even reformists, 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 Francois Mitterrand was ready to propose a new government based not on parties but on personalities, without exclusions and with negotiations.
The CP, afraid of being marginalised and out-manoeuvred, 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 our responsibilities" so De Gaulle would withdraw the referendum, then dissolve the assembly and hold elections.
At that time, Mitterrand was in a small bourgeois radical group: only later did he join the SP.
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.
Question: Do you think now that a more concrete governmental slogan would have been better — something like "CP 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 [General Labour Confederation] demonstration on May 13 or thereabouts. They felt threatened from the right and the left, because the previous day we had organised a rally which attracted the new social democratic left and the new far left. The CP was frightened by this mixture.
They organised their own demonstration — a very big one. We were the only current from the left to participate. 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 and a solution, and at the same time showed a mistrust of the manoeuvres of Mitterrand and Mendes-France.
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 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.
Question: 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 that we fought for support and active solidarity with Vietnam's 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 formed the Jeunesses Communistes Révolutionnaires (JCR) in April 1966 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: the only thing we could do was 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 5000 members; nor were there such massive demonstrations before 1968. The radicalisation started with the US bombing of Hanoi in 1966-67, but the demonstrations 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.
Vietnam centralised in an issue imperialism versus people of colour, a clear-cut confrontation, everything clear, politics, morals, ethics, everything aligning people on the same side, no problem. But at Nanterre the movement also took on anti-bureaucratic struggles, some involving students in Warsaw, and other Polish issues.
The Nanterre movement was open to everybody. It had three main axes: it was against bourgeois education reforms, it was anti-imperialist and it was anti-bureaucratic. The only requirement for becoming involved was opposition to US intervention in Vietnam. Then it was all very clear, a unified view of the world was a real characteristic of those movements.
Question: How do you assess the other movements of that time, like the March 22nd student movement?
The March 22nd movement began first at Nanterre University, and changed composition as it spread. It was a confused political movement. At the beginning there were mainly two currents: us and the anarchists. The CP youth always opposed it, and there were some Lambertists (members of Pierre Lambert's Organisation Communiste Internationaliste) who were very concerned with student unionism.
They considered the March 22nd movement an"anti-union movement to destroy the student union". We didn't. So the really dynamic forces in the March 22nd 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 main current were the Maoists, who were growing as a result of the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966-67.
Question: Did the JCR grow fast in 1968?
Yes, we had enormous prestige because we were identified from the beginning with the radical wing of the movement, with the March 22nd. For example, we were the only national political current which fully participated on the "night of the barricades" on May 10.
The growth of the JCR, and later of the Ligue, came from the combination of two things: our participation in the movement when the Maoists were a bit discredited, and the campaign of our comrade Alain Krivine in the 1969 presidential elections.
Most far-left groups, showing their left infantilism, had no idea of how to utilise those elections. It was not obvious, and it was particularly difficult to do it, but it was a good idea, and it was this which, within a year, gave us a big space to expand.
Question: After the strike, the JCR was made illegal.
Both then and again in 1973! But it was advantageous in some ways because if you don't have the crazy line of the Maoists, and if you have some real links with the workers' movement, illegality is a formality and gives a certain prestige. We had to reorganise for four months, and 20 people were jailed until September or October, but it was not a big problem for us.
Question: Do you think that the potential of 1968 led some people to artificially high expectations?
This is not an academic question. Should we say it was a mountain or just a small hill? The truth may be between the two. But what it represents depends on what we do now: if nothing more happens, then it was just a big peak followed by a general decline. Now is the moment we must start from.
Some say it was the last big strike of the 19th century working class. But perhaps it was the first big strike of the 21st century. It depends on what we do now.
Sometimes we insist on stressing the political potential [of 1968], but a colder assessment shows that the consciousness of the working class had been formed by the years of prosperity and expansion, the welfare state, democratic rights.
1968 was not a revolutionary crisis like those of the 1920s or 1930s. We felt that the situation was not revolutionary but was pre-revolutionary. Yes, there was a deep movement of the working class that was shaking the bourgeoisie: but there was no revolutionary leadership rooted strongly in the working class. The strength of the bureaucracy has something to do with the level of consciousness of broader layers of the working class.
It is true that there were also many more illusions in Maoist currents, partly because of the view that the working class was finished. The Maoist currents expected revolution now, immediately. They went rapidly into decline. Their very illusions, coupled with the frustrations of what happened in Europe and then in China, do not justify but explain why so many right-wing intellectuals have come from Maoist currents.
Social democrats tend to interpret 1968 in cultural and sociological terms: some say 1968 was a success because of what the SP was able to do in government — realising democratic aspirations, legalised abortion and so on. Of course this is absurd: in many countries all this and more has been achieved without 1968. It doesn't explain anything about the peculiarities of such a movement, why a general strike involving millions of people took place, and so on.
There is a general move to depoliticise the interpretation of 1968. We have to defend the real political content and the dynamics of that upsurge. And not just to celebrate, but to give it some present political meaning.
[Abridged from Socialist Outlook, May 1998.]