The French revolt of May-June 1968 began in December 1967 with a strike in eight Paris high schools to support a demonstration against government cuts in social security. This was followed by another high school walkout in January 1968, to protest against the expulsion of a high school activist.
The expelled student was a member of the Jeunesses Communistes Revolutionnaires, a revolutionary socialist youth organisation linked to the Trotskyist Fourth International.
The JCR, which had been formed at a conference of 120 university and high school activists in April 1966, was the central political force in the radicalisation among French students.
This radicalisation was fuelled by growing discontent with the French education system.
In the years after World War II, there had been a big increase in the number of university students in France: from 123,000 in 1946 to 514,000 in 1968. In their 1968 book French Revolution 1968, London Observer newspaper journalists Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville described the consequences of this as follows:
"The sheer pressure of numbers blotted out everything else ... Under the weight, the universities, and particularly the swollen Sorbonne, changed their character from small elitist clubs into inefficient, squalid factories of education, where everything was sacrificed to the simple problem of getting everyone in ..."
While these conditions were the basis for widespread discontent, it was opposition to the imperialist war against the Vietnamese revolution that was turning this discontent into a broad radicalisation against bourgeois society as a whole.
Seale and McConville gave a vivid description of the role of the anti- Vietnam War movement in the development of student political activism. They wrote:
"One of the most astonishing sights of the May Revolution was the thousands of schoolchildren marching to the slogan: `Power is in the streets, not in parliament!' This is a phenomenon to make any Western government tremble: it is nothing less than the rejection by the elite of the rising generation of the political institutions and values of their parents ...
"From December 1966 a string of Comites Vietnam lyceens (CVLs) - school Vietnam committees - were set up across France. They were for the most part small groups ... [which] had fallen out with the French Communist Party's schools organisation ... because they thought the CPF's Vietnam policy too tame."
The CP, like other Stalinist parties around the world, called simply for " peace" in the abstract or for "negotiations" rather than for the imperialist powers to get out of Vietnam and let the Vietnamese people settle their own affairs.
Seale and McConville pointed out that the CVLs were initiated and linked to the Comite Vietnam national:
"In the autumn of 1966, the JCR and its allies, notably some `Castroists' and the Parti socialiste unifie (PSU), a left-wing breakaway Socialist group, set up a Vietnam front organisation as a means of reaching the wider public. It was called the Comite Vietnam national (CVN)... A litter of CVN committees sprang up in the schools and, in spite of the headmasters' opposition, proved so successful that late in 1967 it was decided to mobilise schoolchildren still more energetically for left-wing political action."
It was out of the school Vietnam committees that the CALs were built. "The CVLs", Seale and McConville explained, "provided the infrastructure on which the CALs were to be built, moving beyond Vietnam protest to action in France itself directed against specifically French problems."
Describing this process, they wrote:
"The principal French trade unions and UNEF, the students' union, called a strike on 13 December to protest against government decrees cutting social security benefits. To everyone's surprise, half-a-dozen Paris lycees struck in sympathy ... In January 1968, 16-year-old Romain Goupil, who had organised a picket at the Lycee Condorcet, was expelled on the charge that he had incited his comrades to skip class ... the CVL leaders consulted each other by telephone about their riposte. They decided to call on their comrades to demonstrate - once again, the first time lyceens had ever done so. Several hundred turned up and marched to the slogan of, `Freedom of expression in the lycees' - a line which the leaders correctly believed would be easily understood ..."
On March 22 police arrested five antiwar activists after a spate of bombings against US banks in Paris. That same evening a few hundred university students occupied the administration building at Nanterre in protest at the arrests. The dean of the university responded by suspending all lectures. From then on, meetings and demonstrations took place almost daily at Nanterre.
A campaign of exam boycotts was launched. May 2 and 3 were set aside as " anti-imperialist study days" at Nanterre. Again, the dean panicked, closing down the campus.
On May 3, students at the Sorbonne and CALs at several hundred high schools in Paris declared their solidarity with the Nanterre students. That same afternoon, several thousand demonstrating university and high school students ran up against brutal police repression.
Seale and McConville wrote:
"The street fighting on 3 May, following the police invasion of the Sorbonne, had a shattering effect on adolescents. In many lycees there were immediate strikes. Classes were interrupted as young people abandoned their work to discuss the situation. Many rushed to join the demonstrations; some were wounded. On 10 May the CALs called an all-day strike in all Paris lycees and a teenage force, some 8,000 to 9,000 strong, marched to join their seniors in the great demonstration which ended at the barricades ...
"Once the Sorbonne was occupied, the CALs took over the Grand Amphitheatre for their General Assembly on 19 May. It was then that they decided on the next crucial step - a general strike and the occupation of the schools. The next day the movement was widely followed, with teachers in some cases joining in and spending the night on the premises. Committees were formed to discuss school and university problems, but also politics: subjects like student struggles in Europe, the role of the university in society, student-worker links, and so on ..."
Similar goals were expressed by the more politically advanced leaders of the university students during their occupation of the universities.
But as Seale and McConville commented in their book: "Had the workers not joined the nationwide [student] protest movement, the events of May would have had no more - and no less - significance than the student explosions of Berlin, Rome or Buenos Aires. What distinguishes the French situation ... is that here the students' example was immediately and massively copied, carrying the crisis to a new level of gravity. From one end of France to another men and women in key industries seized their places of work and closed the gates."
On May 7, 30,000 students took to the streets of Paris for five hours, demanding that the universities be opened and that all students protesters who had been arrested be freed.
A mass teach-in took place on May 9 in the streets of the Latin Quarter, the area around the Sorbonne. It was decided to hold a mass demonstration the evening of the following day, Friday, May 10. That became the famous " night of the barricades" when 35,000 students erected barricades and fought pitched battles all night with the CRS, the riot police.
Some 400 students were hospitalised. Many had been beaten unconscious by the CRS. But the students had won. Public outrage at the police brutality - which had been shown on TV - forced the government to give in to the students' demands.
On May 11, the leaders of the three trade union confederations, responding to widespread public revulsion at the police repression, called a 24-hour general strike for the following Monday, May 13.
On that day 1 million workers and students marched through Paris. The students' contingent explicitly called for the end of the semi-Bonapartist regime of President Charles de Gaulle, chanting "Ten years is enough!". Tricolours were torn from government buildings and replaced with red flags. But May 13 ended without any further direction from the union leaders except to disperse.
However, the mass worker demonstration emboldened the students; 20-25,000 of them met and decided to continue the student strike and to occupy the Sorbonne.
On May 14 workers went back into the factories, but with a heightened sense of confidence in the power of mass mobilisation. This was particularly true of the young workers, many of whom had joined the student protests from May 3 to May 10 and had fought with the students on the night of the barricades.
Spontaneously, workers began to occupy their factories. On May 15, the workers at the Sud-Aviation plant in Nanterre locked the manager in his offices and announced they were occupying the plant.
The same day, the workers at the Renault plant at Cleon downed tools and declared a factory occupation. The next day the strike was extended to two other Renault plants, and in the afternoon the massive Renault plant in the Parisian suburb of Billancourt, with 30,000 workers, ground to a halt.
From then, the strike wave swept the country. As one young Renault worker put it: "The students started the train rolling, and we thank them for that. Once we saw the train was off and running, we climbed aboard."
Within a week, the strike involved about 10 million of France's 15 million workers.
The mass student struggle had acted as a detonator of a massive worker revolt. But a detonator cannot work unless there is some potentially explosive material for it to ignite. What was that potentially explosive material?
While the industrial capitalist countries had experienced nearly two decades of rapid economic growth, social inequality had widened. For about a million and a half French wage-earners, hourly rates of pay were so low that only extensive overtime allowed them to climb above subsistence level.
Moreover, by May 1968 unemployment had soared to over half a million, hitting young workers particularly hard. In Burgundy, for instance, 29% of young people under the age of 25 were unemployed.
Union rights in workplaces were negligible. The only way the workers could express their grievances was through explosive direct actions. Already in 1967, young workers fought pitched battles with police during strikes at the Renault plants at Caen and Le Mann.
As Seale and McConville observed: "The notion was gaining in the working class that, if it were to bring the employers to the negotiating table, it must act from strength. This was the profound meaning of the factory `occupations' ..."
In taking such direct mass action, the workers set in motion a massive social revolt that had clear revolutionary potentialities.
This was most evident in the formation of the comites d'action right across Paris. They sprang up in schools, universities, government offices, professional associations, and workplaces, but also in residential areas.
According to Seale and McConville: "What they had in common ... was the idea that revolution is something you do yourself, not something you leave to others. They were the expression of a will for direct, extra- parliamentary action."
This movement reached its peak in the last week of May, when there were at least 450 action committees in Paris alone. However, they remained localised and with only loose coordination on a city-wide basis.
Outside Paris, similar developments took place. The most advanced occurred in the city of Nantes, in southern Brittany, on May 26. A central strike committee - representing workers', farmers and students' unions - set itself up in the town hall, becoming the real municipal authority.
The prefect, representing the central government in Paris, was left with no staff except a doorman, and a small force of police which he dared not use.
Commenting on this development, Seale and McConville wrote: "In Nantes the strikes crossed the frontier from protest to revolution. There emerged embryonic institutions replacing those of the bourgeois state which were paralysed by the strike ..."
For about a week, from May 24 to May 30, the fate of de Gaulle's government hung in the balance. But the Communist Party union leaders refused to call for the government's removal.
Indeed, while 10 million workers were on strike, they even refused to call a general strike against the government. They restricted the official aims of the strike to economic demands - for higher pay, shorter work hours, earlier retirement. They joined with the government in denouncing the radical students as "provocateurs".
On May 29 the Communist Party-led CGT union federation called a million- strong demonstration onto the streets of Paris in which, for the first time, the Stalinist leaders allowed political slogans to be raised. They put forward the vague demand for a "people's government".
At the end of the march, the CGT bureaucrats hastily ordered the dispersal of the crowd. There was no rally, no speakers.
That night de Gaulle consulted with his generals. A plan was apparently drawn up, and the most loyal army units were mobilised. A military operations headquarters was set up in Verdun. The next day at 4.30pm, de Gaulle made a televised speech in which he announced the dissolution of the National Assembly and called new parliamentary elections for June 23.
The CP leaders welcome de Gaulle's decision. In the weeks before the election, they vied with the Gaullists to be seen as champions of "law and order". In the week after de Gaulle's speech, the employers reached agreements with the union leaders. In the election, the Gaullists increased their support.
From mid-May to mid-June 1968, France was gripped by the greatest labour revolt in its history, and yet it ended in elections that strengthened the ruling parties. Many on the revolutionary left attribute this to the " betrayal" of the French Communist Party. But how were the French CP leaders able to carry out this betrayal with so little opposition from 10 million striking workers?
Here we come to the decisive lesson of May-June 1968. While the French working class undertook actions that had a potential revolutionary dynamic to them, the working class in its immense majority did not cross the frontier between striking for immediate economic demands and striking to radically change society.
It was the lack of revolutionary consciousness among the majority of workers that the reformist union leaders were able to rely on to march them back into the fraud of parliamentary elections.
The revolt - despite its scale and militancy - confirmed once again that, as Lenin had expressed in his 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done?: " The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness ..."
Revolutionary socialist consciousness, Lenin stressed, could be brought to the working class only from outside the spontaneous struggle with the employers and their governments, through the persistent ideological and organisational work of a revolutionary Marxist party.
The revolutionary Marxist forces in France in May-June 1968 numbered only 300-400 people. They were in no position to challenge the ideological hegemony of the reformist labour leaders.
Looking back on the events in a recent interview, Daniel Bensaid, a leading JCR activist at the time and now a leading member of its successor organisation, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, made similar points. He said:
"Some may 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. We don't know, and it depends on what we do now.
"... the working class had been formed by the years of prosperity and expansion of the welfare state, democratic rights. 1968 was not a revolutionary crisis like those of the 1920s or 1930s ...
"Yes, there was a deep movement of the working class that was shaking the bourgeoisie: but there was no `subjective factor', 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. We can now see that better."
Bensaid concluded with the following comment: "There is a general move to depoliticise the interpretation of 1968. We have to defend the real political content and the dynamics of 1968, not just to celebrate but to give it some present political meaning."
For us today, that means rededicating ourselves to strengthening the consciously revolutionary forces in this country so that we can be better prepared to transform the spontaneous worker revolts that the capitalist austerity drive is inexorably preparing into a revolutionary struggle for workers' power and socialism.
