Twenty years on: May 68 revisited - 1968 student unrest in France

TWENTY YEARS ON: MAY 68 REVISITED By DANIEL SINGER

The ghost of communism is not haunting Western Europe. Paris is no longer the capital of revolutinary hope. A visitor returning there after a long interval could hardly believe that this was the same town where twenty years earlier the established order was trembling, and imagination was supposed to seize power. Ironically, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary, the French staged one of these general elections which, for all the apparent pomp and passion, in no way question the nature of the regime -- no more, that is, than do similar polls held in Britain, Germany, or the United States. Mutatis mitandis, Prague is not the only European city to have gone back to "normal." Does it mean that hopes aroused by the uprising of May 1968 were mere illusions, that the issues raised by rebellious students and striking workers, in dramatic if utopian fashion, have become irrelevant? Before trying to argue the opposite, I should reveal my vested interests.

When the sudden French crisis showed the depth of discontent hidden beneath the glittering surface of capitalist society, and the general strke, by paralyzing the country, confirmed the social power of the working class, I raised the question of whether Marxism might not be returning to its original terrain, in a book eloquently entitled Prelude to Revolution.(1) Naturally, I could plead that publishers don't like question marks and that the optimistic message, as every reader of the book will admit, was hedged with all sort of qualifications. Such pleading, however, would be superfluous. Once again "the golden tree of life" proved much greener than all the theoretical predictions. Even we who denied that capitalism had discovered the secret of permanent growth -- and we were not many at the time -- did not know that a major economic crisis was just round the corner and would entirely alter the political horizon (paradoxically, in the short run, strengthening the establishment and weakening its radical opponents). Even we, who had accused the French Communist Party of selling its revolutionary birthright for a mess of electoral pottage, did not guess that it would pay the penalty so rapidly, helping the Socialist Party to recover and Francois Mitterand to perform the part of "normalizer." Even we, who had learnt in our Marxist textbooks that the ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling class, did not imagine how quickly capitalism would carry out this task, how easily intellectuals could be bribed into betrayal. These disappointing years were at the same time quite instructive. Yet before we look at the facts and draw lessons from them, we must, at least for the sake of a new generation, recall it only in shorthand what did actually happen in that jolly month of May.

(1)Daniel Singer, Prelude to Revolution, France in May 1968; (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970).

The French May and Its Specificity

It all started on May 3rd when the rector of the Paris Academy, presumably on orders, called i n the police to the Sorbonne to evict a few hundred student activists. This highly exceptional move had an extraordinary sequel. The "ringleaders" arrested, the students did not make verbal protests. They counter-attacked, with the Parisian cobble-stone (le pave) soon matching the hand grenades. There followed a week of bloody skirmishes and joyous demonstrations. The tougher the repression, the larger the number of students beaten up or arrested, the stronger the movement grew. The student strike spread throughout the country. Professors, researchers, young workers from the suburbs joined the demonstrators in Paris. By May 10th the leaders of the growing movement could no longer play for time. When the government refused to respond to the main slogan of the prostesters -- "free our comrades" -- and surrounded the Sorbonne with an armada of policemen, they just could not tell the demonstrators to disperse and go home. Staying put in the Latin Quarter and facing a police armed to the teeth, the students began spontaneously to put up barricades. The whole nation was watching or rather listening to the dramatic confrontation, as much of the dialogue was held live on the radio. Would the government opt for compromise or would it dare to strike? At two in the morning the order was given to clear the streets. At dawn the Latin Quarter was a sorry sight. Battered and beaten, the students were militarily defeated and politically victors. The government now yielded on all issues, proclaimed not even negotiable the day before. The left-wing parties, and particularlay the Communists, who on the eve had been giving the students sermons on law and order, had to rally behind them. On May 13th paris witnessed one of its biggest demonstrations ever, a million or so people marching behind the banner "Students, Teachers, Workers -- Solidarity." The slogan was an omen.

In the official conception, the solemn march was to have been the beginning of the end. It proved to be the end of the beginning. Ths students had shown that courage paid and the mighty state was not unyielding. On the morrow of the great demo the first strike started near Nantes. The day after it was the turn of the Renault car works in Normandy. That evening, the Communist-dominated CGT, the biggest labor confederation in the country, decided to join the movement and spread it in the hope of keeping control. It was high time as the tide was now sweeping the country, invading province after province and branch after branch. After ten days the number of strkers was put at 10 million, or roughly hafl the working population (an American equivalent would be something like 60 million). The country was paralyzed.

When everything was at a standstill, the minds started to move in a different fashion and the ciris changed nature. Students began to dream aloud about changing the world; technicians, researchers, and teachers started debates about their function in society; while workers in some occupied plants talked about their role in production and the meaning of the hierarchical order. With red flags flying over many factories, the employers and their government concluded it was a high time to get down to business. The CGT was eager to oblige. During the night of May 28th, the revolutionary students and their allies, having chanted "we are all German Jews," set rather symbolic fires inside the Bourse. The day after, a Saturday, the representatives of the government, the employers, and the labor unions sat together in search of a deal. The concessions made to the workers, mainly the promise of bigger pay packets, were quite impressive by normal standards. Only the times were not normal, and the CGT leaders who went straight from there on Monday morning to face their supporters at the Renault works in Boulogne-Billancourt probably eaxpected no more thatn a conditional approval. What they had not bargained for was total rejection. This resounding no, echoed in factories throughout France, precipitated an unexpected third act, three days of political interregnum when everything looked apparently possible.

The dynamic wing of the movement gathered its forces at the Charlety sports stadium not knowing where it was heading. Left-wing politicians thought their hour had struck. Francois Mitterand, assuming an impotent De Gaulle would resign, offered his services for the Presidency; in the interval, matters could be run by a government headed by Pierre Mendes-France and including the Communists. The latter, not to be treated as junior partners, staged an impressive mass demonstration as proof of their strength. The government was in a state of panic: the General had vanished. Actually, as everybody was burying him, De Gaulle was in the process of ressurection. Up until then, as the social movement was rising, he seemed at a loss. But by now he had grasped the crucial lesson: the Communists had no wish to push the movement forward and, if challenge openly, they themselves would help to demobolize it. To dramatize the situation, De Gaulle travelled to Baden-Baden to get the blessing of the armed forces from General Massu of Algerian fame. Back in Paris on May 30th, he announced a general election and threatened all those who would try to prevent it by paralyzing the country. As soon as his broadcast was over, it was the turn of his supporters to demonstrate.

Were the Gaullist marchers in the Champs-Elysees as numerous as the left-wingers who had crossed Paris on May 13th? Probably not quite, yet it does not matter. The two huge demonstrations symbolized a country split in two, and for a spell it looked like a collision course. Only for a spell. The day after, Georges Seguy, the Communist leader of the CGT, proclaimed that his confederation would impede nothing, that it was eager to negotiate not only at the top but at all levels. The army of labor was thus being disbanded. Knowing that an unfinished upheaval is no preparation for a poll, the Communists had opted for electoral defeat. It proved rather difficult to bring the strikes to an end, but by June 30th the right was duly returned to office. The evenements were virtually over.

What lessons can be drawn from the events, summarized here as briefly as possible? If the French crisis had ended with the march on May 13th, it would have differed only marginally, in drama and color, from other student revolts that year spreading from Berkeley to Tokyo. What made France, and later Italy, qualitatively different was the response of the workers, however ambigious and filtered through the Communist Party it may have been. The student revolt in Paris had precipitated the biggest general strike in the country's history. In a centralized system, an elected monarchy, the problem of power was rapidly put on th agenda. What is more, the progressive paralysis of the economy led people to question all values and all institutions. Only this and nothing more. An immediate revolutionary solution was never at stake. Those who would -- the students, the revolutionary "grouplets" -- couldn't. Those who could, or had claimed that capacity as their birthright -- the Communist -- wouldn't. (Whether the situation was potentially revolutionary is, in this context, irrelevant. Viewing the situation, like all the other parties, in electoral terms, the CP refused to push the movement as far as it could go.)

The other feature was fairly classical. The young rebels wore yesterday's clothes to tackle the issues of tomorrow. The active minorities which inspired the movement and gave it a sense of direction may have felt that they were re-enacting the seizure of the winter Palace, and some of their leaders that they were playing the part of Lenin or Mao. Yet it was one of the first Western rebellions for a long time without model: the Soviet one had been discredited, and this was part of the problem with the CP; the "cultural revolution" fashionable at the time had little to do with its Chinese original. Even if in often crude and clumsy terms, the young rebles were reaising questions connected with problems facing advanced capitalism: not only the distribution of the product, but the very purpose of growth; the reasons for the hierarchial division of labor or for the artificial expansion of the unwithering state. However upopian their solutions, they were groping towards a radical alternative, revealing a glimpse of the future.

The Restoration

Naturally, the general election of 1968 brought nothing to an end, bar the counting. General de Gaulle's departure in 1969, to take but one example, was a direct consequence of the previous year's crisis. What mattered most for the French establishment, however, was to obliteratte the glimpse of an alternative; and this, because it concerned mainly its supporters, was the task entrusted to the respectable left. It was up to the Socialists and to the Communists to convice their electorate of two connected points: that the reborn belief in radical change, in a revolutionary break, was based on a hallucination; that a proper use of the ballot, on the other hand, could enable people to "change course" (changer de cap, the title of the Communist program) or even to "change life" (the title of the Socialist one). Because it was socially stronger and in greater need of a substitute for its shattered "revolutionary" reputation, the Communist Party was ready to make much bigger concessions, which may seem inronic in retrospect. By 1972 the two partners produced their counterpoint to the May movement, the Common Program of government, arguing that important reforms could be carried out gradually, wityhout a break, within existing institutions.

It took them so long because the protest movement was far from spent. It had undermined the ruling ideology in the schools, the university, and the cultural media. It had sapped the belief in the work ethic. And it was still spreading. The two crucial newcomers of this half-century -- the ecological movement and feminism -- were both late developments in France, following and not preceding 1968. If, despite the undermining of its pillars, the ideological edifice still stood, it was because the various currents never coalesced, since each sought its own direction.

Simultaneously, the "grouplets" -- whether Trotskyist, Maoist or libertarian -- had become groups (though not parties). The Maoist Gauche Proletarienne, or GP, with the help of its famous fellow-travellers, Jean-Paul Sartre, did steal the lime-light for a time. It managed to focus attention on such relevant issues as the plight of prisoners or the exploitation of immigrant labor. But its propaganda was as crude as it was spectacular. The GP seemed to live in a world of make-believe where every summer was to be hot, where foreign workers were the vanguard of the proletariat, where the Communists (i.e., the "revisionists") were the "principal enemy" and the revolution was just round the corner. Reality refusing to conform to such a vision, an organization of this kind was bound to collapse sooner rather than later.(*)

(*)Why it did not cross the line leading to terrorism, as in Italy or Germany, is another matter requiring longer explanation.

Yet the GP was not alone. Finally, it was the movement as a whole which proved short-lived. Imagination never seized power after 1968. Questioning the role of political parties, the May movement never invented an organizational substitute. It never elaborated a project capable of brining its warring factions together for long-term action. It did not outline the contours of a hegemonic coalition. Thus, though it did raise all the problems that marked the period, the May movement never looked like a realistic alternative, gradually emerged as the only possible "solution."

If one defines the May movement as the force groping toward a solution beyond the confines to established capitalist society, it was last seen acting, or rather reacting, collectively at the time of the takeover by the employees of the Lip watch factory at Besancon in 1973. The leaders of this "work-in" never claimed that theirs was a case of self-management, of autogestion; you don't build socialism in a single factory. But the workers running their plant by democratic means and selling the watches through a militant network all over France in complete breach of the law did capture the imagination of the contestataires. Actually, when the death of Georges Pompidou precipitated a presidential election in 1974, there was question of picking charles Piaget, the leader of Lip, as the symbolic candidate of the New Left.

Though it did not come off, the very idea showed to what extent the preoccupations were by the electoral. Indeed, it may be argued that the presidential poll of 1974 marked the highest point in the potential rise of social democracy in France. Francois Mitterrand, the recently chosen first secretary of a renewed Socialist Party, was then the candidate of a United Left. The Communists, on that occasion, dutifully and even eagerly performed their part as juniors in the coalition, and the two partners ran their campaign on the hopeful assumption of the Japanese rate of growth. And Mitterrand missed victory by a cat's whisker.

The Economic Crisis Reshapes the Landscape

The irony is that this moment in 1974 of near fulfilment for French social democracy was also the time when the premises on which its success rested really collapsed. It is by now generally admitted that the crisis which hit that year was not caused by the jump in the coast of crude oil; it had been duly heralded by a fall in the rate or profit. On the other hand, the dramatic rise in petroleum prices did accelerate the process and reveal the crisis to the general public. Indeed, so deep was the conviction that capitalism had found the secret of eternal growth that the economic crisis took everybody -- left, right, and center -- by surprise. This is not the place to analyze the nature of this crisis, or to ponder how the system will emerge from the resulting predicament, but since it has completely altered the political equation, we must look at its consequences for the European left in general and the French movements in particular.

The shock of 1974 -- 75 was so stunning because it came after 30 years of unprecedented prosperity and deep changes in the social structure of the population. The May uprising, it must br remembered, came during this long cycle, while the going was apparently good. It revealed the seamy side of the "miracle," the depth of pent-up discontent. There is no doubt, however, that the doubling of living standards within a generation helped the opponents of the May movement to plead that life could be altered within the existing system.

In France probably the most striking social change during this postwar period was the mass migration from country to town. The virtual vanishing of the peasant was coupled with a slow growth of the industrial proletariat and a much nore rapid expansion of white-collar workers. The boom years required a substantial import of foreign labor, while the shift to tertiary employment involved the mass entry of women into the labor market. The crisis preserved this last trend, while affecting all the others. Despite the closing of frontiers to foreign labor, the industrial slump led to a returm of mass unemployment, with the traditional strongholds of the working class, such as mining, iron and steel, the car industry, and shipbuilding being particularly affected. Labor unions would have had difficulty coping with all of these trends even if they had a strategy, but they clearly had none.

Poltically, the respectful left was even more bewildered. The relative success of the capitalist economy had been such that even the Communists, with the Soviet model shattered, was resigned to seeking solutions within the system. In France the left, guided by conditioned reflexes, refused to face the new situation. In 1981 it reached office in a country entirely open to foreign compeition with a nice Keynesian program as if nothing had happened -- one reason for its rapid ideological and practical bankruptucy.

Failure of the old left does not mean success of the new. In a sense, the temporary blunting of radicalism by the economic crisis is not unusual; in the short or even medium run, unemployment tends to moderate the temper of the working class. This time, however, the change was more profound. The 1960s had seen the makings of a new trend. Some sections of the labor movement had begun to make qualitative demands, to question the logic of the system, to refuse monetary compensation for, say, unhealthy working conditions, to ask for a reduction in the hours of work and even for some form of workers' control over the organization of labor. But the social climate created by the economic crisis was very unpropitious for this budding plant. Who cares about "enrichment of tasks" or meaningful work when one's immediate preoccupation is to get (or keep) a job, of any kind whatsoever.

Worse was still to come. Qualitative demands had been linked with a strategy known in Italy as one of "structural reforms" and in France as "revolutionary reformism." Its objectives were always somehow ambiguous. Were the reforms, as the protagonists of this strategy claimed, links in a chain leading beyond the confines of capitalist society, or were they designed to improve it and ensure its survival? In France, the economic crisis and the subsequent accession of the left to officer gave a clear answer. The spokespeople of the so-called Second Left -- Michel Rocard or Jacques Delors, the Socialist ministers, or Edmond Maire, the leader of the CFDT -- dispelled any possible doubt. Capital was for them to ultimate horiaon and flexibility was thus designed to make the system work better. It was not compromise but surrender, and their conduct must have discredited, at least for a time, what had looked like a search for a radicl alternative.

But let us not anticipate. The drastic changes in the economic climate, according to pure logic, should have affected the right even more then the left. After all, it was restoring the image of capitalism to its true color and, bu the same token, destroying the fashionable new myth of "capitalism without crises." The gospel of growth had beome the religion of the Western World, the establishment's perfect counter to the egalitarian aspirations of the people. Now, this smokescreen dispelled, the nature of capitalist society would seem plain to see, with its injustice, inequality, and absurdity illustrated once again by mass unemployment.

Here, then, there seemed to be a serious risk that revulsion against this society in crisis might unify the various protest movements, provide them with a common purpose, turning sporadic confronatations into a frontal attack and skirmishes into a decisive battle. The paradox is that the Western right, pretty shaken by 1968 and apparently threatened by the economic crisis, found in it the means for a spectacular ideological recovery. France is a good example to show how Western capitalism, without the gulag, can produce at the right time and in the right place the "universal ideas" required for its survival.

The Ideological Defeat of the Left

Thus, what the capitalist establishment feared most was that the economic crisis could bring with it a threat of united action. What was, therefore, required was an ideology damning the very search for a global project. To proclaim that our system, however bad, was better than "all those that have been tried from time to time" was fine, though no longer enough, since the young rebels themselves had abondoned the Soviet model. It was indispensable to convince them that, if individual rebellion might be right, and form of collective action was bound to turn society into a vast concentration camp. This was the message needed in the mid-seventies and, with the help of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, it was the message duly delivered by the so-called nouveaux philosophes. There is no necessity to bother here with the intellectual content of this cheap remake of The God That Failed, patched up entirely with borrowed ideas. What is of interest for out purpose is the tremendous success of this exercise in propoganda and, particularly, the indispensable part played in it by "children of May" turned preachers against the evil of revolutionary solutions. Yet in order not to exaggerate the importance of a few turncoats, one must put the relationship between the movement and the so-called new strata in its proper context.

The students rebelling against society in 1968 were also questioning their futures and as such were finding an echo among teachers and researchers, social workers, and all sorts of cadres unhappy with their own role. Nineteen sixty-eight can be described as a portent of things to come, insofar as it outlined an alliance between the fast-changing working class (including the newly-alienated white collars and the highly-skilled technicians quite close to the social frontier) and the fast-growing sections of the professional intelligentsia. It foreshadowed not a marriage with the middle classes but a cleavage within the latter. But it only foreshadowed. With the movement defeated and the New Left having failed to appear as a credible alternative, these cadres who had been tempted for a time had to seek other solutions to defend their immediate rather than long-term interests. Incidentally, it can be argued that the electoral advantage of the Socialists over the Communists is largely due to their greater success in wooing these "new strata."

Another point to keep in mind is that the turncoats are not typical. Many youngsters active in 1968, once the movement collapsed, went back to cultivate their own gardens, devoted their energy to their profession or even when they resigned themselves to rallying to the Socialist Party, did so without any illusions, faute de mieux. Those who have been most in the limelight are precisely the people who now preach the perpetuity of capitalism or the necessity for the Left to love private enterprise with the same passion with which yesterday they had forecast the doom of capitalism and advocated civil war. Indeed, in the case of some Maoists turned new philosophers, they altered their ideas without changing their manner of thinking. They used to chant Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Lin Piao. Then, ten years later, in the same primitive fashion, only reversing the line, they described Karl Marx as the grandfather of the gulag. What made French converts peculiar and some of their pronouncements so distasteful was their smugness and self-satisfaction. They seem to be as proud of their past as they are pleased with their present: the French breed of convert is righteous rather than repentant.

Even weathercocks need an element of stability, a rod around which to turn with the wind. For the French recanters this stability is provided by "anti-communism." To be more precise, while the word is the same, the content is not. The born-again champions of capitalism used to attack the French CP as insufficiently anti-colonialist because it had not backed the Algerian insurgents enough and was advocating merely peace in Vietnam instead of victory for the FLN. Now, though the white man's burden rather than the wretched of the earth marks their vocabulary, they are still true to themselves, because they remain anti-CP. Yesterday, they branded Communist apparatchiks as traitors to the cause and described CGT bosses as the main obstacle between the working masses and power. Today revolution is for them the supreme sin, but they remain faithful to their "anti-communism." They have to cling to this concept as the only element of artificial continuity in their life. Indeed they are rather proud of their achievement. They have rendered their country a great service. They were the prime movers in getting rid of a powerful Communist Party.(2) But was it such a great service, and are they not claiming too much?

(2)Herve Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Generation. II les annees de poudre Paris: Seuil, 1988), pp. 640-642.

The Communist Void

The second question can be answered quite easily. They do exaggerate their importance. Francois Mitterrand did much more to bring the CP down to size, and Georges Marchais, taken here symbolically for the CP leadership as a whole, incomparably more. Seen in perspective, the conduct of the French Communist Party in the last twenty years looks as if it were guided by a death wish, by some obsessive passion for suicide.

May 1968 undoubtedly played a significant part in this dramatic decline of the CP. Its essentially electoralist line had been initiated earlier. The crisis of 1968, however, revealed that, whatever the rhetoric, the Party had no revolutionary option and therefore a popular front alliance with the Socialists was imperative. Could not the French Communists take advantage of the situation and, like their Italian counterparts, gain a hegemonic position on the French left? To do so, the French CP would have had to break its close links with Moscow earlier and proceed with its own transformation much faster. It managed to take half-measures half-heartedly, to move in two directions and, finally, to lose both ways.

Under the leadership of Marchais, the CP dropped some of its major concepts, such as the dictatorship of the proletriat. It did it without any genuine debate and without any attempt to fill the resulting ideological void. Previously, the French CP had condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 only to resign itself to its "normalization." Subsequent, it distanced itself from Moscow during its "Eurocommunist" phase in the mid-seventies, only to approve the invasion of Afghanistan and General Jaruzelski's coup against Solidarity in Poland afterwards.

The relationship with the Socialists was no less contradictory. To begin with, the Communists, needing a partner, helped the Socialists to recover. Then, having founding out that the alliance favored the more moderate partner, they suddenly discovered that the Socialists were no "revolutionaries." Breaking the pact, in 1977, they brought about the unthinkable -- the defeat of the left in the parliamentary elections of the following year. Three years later, they paid the price: Marchais was badly beaten by Mitterand in the first ballot of the 1981 pesidential poll. The Communists then entered his government without any preconditions. They stayed in, without real influence, for three years, including two years of austerity, proclaiming that this government was better than any previous left-wing administration. The day after their departure, they called it an example of bourgeois betrayal.

Indeed, it was their own behavior that was probably the main reason for the Communist downfall. The CP was ready to admit past mistakes, including its behavior in 1968, though never to cast doubt on its current infallibility.(3) It even got converted to self-management, to the famous autogestion, for years dismissed as the sin of the gauchistes. Yet who could believe in this conversion when every year the stifling of debate and the elimination of successive oppositions confirmed that the CP could not conceive of power as something that was not flowing from above? It deserved to lose and did so spectacularly. For a party committed to an electoral road, the milestones of its decline are plain to read. Before 1968 the CP used to get well over one fifth of the votes cast in France. In the presidential poll of 1981 Georges Marchais captured 15.5 percent. In the parliamentary election of 1986 the CP was down to 9.7 percent, on a par with Le Pen. In the presidential poll of 1988 Andre Lajoinie got no more than 6.8 percent.(4)

(3)See, for example, the speech of Georges Marchais at the 25th congress of the French CP in L'Humanite, February 7th 1985.

(4)It is true that there are precedents for such an electoral fall. The Gaullists, who had approached 40 percent in local elections and still gathered 20.4 percent of the poll in the parliamentary election of 1951, had only 4.4 percent in the parliamentary poll five years later. But the Gaullists were not a normal party. They were a Rally (the Rassemblement du Peuple Francais or RPF) around General de Gaulle and by 1956, his first assault repelled, the General had retired to his tent or rather to Colombey-lesdeux-Eglises.

There remains the question of the effect, the consequences of this spectacular fall. Drawing the lesson from the events of 1968, Sartre's Les Temps Modernes made the bitter comment: "We knew we could not make a revolution without the Communists. We now know we cannot make it with them." It was common knowledge, these lines suggested, that no revolutionary break could take place in France without the mass of the workers who supported the CP; it was now obvious that the leadership of the party had no intention of participating in such an upheaval. From these premises the conclusion was drawn by the movement that whatever form the break should actually take, no radical transformation of French society was possible unless the Communist Party changed its very nature, or, since this seemed unlikely, until it was swept aside. There post-1968 mood, many took it for granted that the forces so unleashed would be harnessed by a really radical movement. Others, less vocal at the time, assumed that the disappearance of the CP would simply help them to play politics without risks, in the style of France's northern and western neighbours.

The coexistence of such expectations illustrates the dual role performed by the French CP in the postwar period. On the one hand, by its reputation, its revolutionary rhetoric, its Marxist vocabulary, it was helping to preserve the belief in the radical break, in the possibility of genuinely altering life through political action (and this distinguished France and Italy from, say, Britain or Germany). On the other hand, its system of command from above, its absence of inner life, its ideological sclerosis ensured that this favorable opinion would never be exploited. In 1968 it partly contributed to create a situation in which its revolutionary impotence was revealed. Thereafter, its fate may well have been sealed. The snag is that, as its decline coincided with the turn of the tide, instead of helping the rise of a new radical movement, it prepared the ground, at least temporarily, for the normalization of France.

For this, however, the French left still had to learn that there was no scope for reforms either. To teach this, the Socialists had to get into office with the Communists as very junior and very useful partners.

Normalization and the Ghost of May

Francois Mitterrand always wanted to "redress the balance" of the French left, that is to say, reduce the weight of the Communist Party, and he made no bones about it. At the same time I do not think, for reasons explained elsewhere, that he intentionally planned the surrender of the Socialists in office.(5) The defeat of the Left was written into its electoral victory in 1981, which coincided with ideological subservience, the absence of a social movement and the lack of any analysis of the economic crisis. Once the Socialits, so disarmed, discovered that their Keynesian program was leading them nowhere, Mitterrand altered his line altogether. Since he could not gain laurels as a socialist reformer, he would go down in history books as the man who brought France into the established Western pattern by depriving it of dreams of a different future.

(5)Daniel Singer, Is Socialism Doomed? The Meaning of Mitterrand. (New York: Oxford Universsity Press, 1988).

Within less than two decades the supporters of the French left had been submitted to a tough ordeal. In 1968 they had recovered hope together with a vague belief in a real alternative. It took quite a time to convince them that, if May was an illusion, something similar could be achieved by parliamentary means. By the time they seemed converted, the sudden collapse of the Socialist-Communist alliance deprived the left of certain victory in 1978. Then, in 1981, the disenchanted lefists had electoral victory thrust upon them in the presidential poll; it was not so much their victory as the defeat of the other side. Still, one does not look a gift horse in the mouth. But, after a year of illusion, the left was to find out that its side was following in the footsteps of its predecessors, that Socialist austerity did not differ greatly from that practiced by the conservatives. The road led from hope to hopelessness and resignation.

If May 1968 was essentially the rebirth of hope, the end of marginalism, the rediscovered belief in change beyond the confines of the system, then Mitterrand can be fairly described as the gravedigger of May. He was not alone, nor did he set out to earn that title. The Socialists had actually begun by borrowing the vocabulary of the May movement. Yet once in office, presiding over a perfectly orthodox policy of austerity, they had to convince their supporters that there was no alternative and could be none; they had to persuade them to expect no "miracles," electoral or otherwise. The drop in the support for the Socialists and their President was a measure of the disappointment among the electorate of the left. The recovery of that support was a sign of the resignation of that electorate. The French, like their neighbours, had to accept that there was nothing beyond that capitalist horizon.

How a birthday is celebrated is often symbolic. For the twentieth anniversary of May, the French staged a presidential election, the main significance of which was its relative insignificance. As in other Western countries, it did not even pretend to cast doubts on established institutions, to threaten the regime, to raise problems clashing with the existing order. If May 1968 was a passionate reassertion that history never comes to full stop and that there is a future beyond capitalism, the election of 1988 was its counterpoint. It was not an anniversary celebration for May, rather its belated funeral oration.

Yet dead and duly buried, the ghost of the May refuses to lie down. The spirit of May is clearly not more alive but undoubtedly more relevant than it was at the time. The questions raised in 1968 -- over the meaning of growth, the purposes of the social division of labor, the menacing size of the ruling Leviathan and its real function -- could be and were dismissed as rather utopian or not very urgent at a time when the economy was apparently forging ahead, incomes were rising and the welfare state was ensuring unprecedented security. Today in a Europe with millions of jobless, where our inventive ability leads to longer lines of unemployed, where the welfare functions of the state and social security in general are being threatened, these are no longer abstract or distant questions. The capitalist establishment countinues to rule not because it provides valid answers, but because it has managed to foster the spirit of inequality, to divide the working people between the skilled and the unskilled, the better paid and the worse off, the employed and the unemployed. The left will not stand a chance again until it tackles the questions raised in 1968, builds its answers into a coherent project, opposing its own logic to that of capital.

What are its chances? In France there is denying that its original advantage, the belief in an alternative, has been shattered. Its future is partly dependent on the answer to two connected questions: is the resignation, a natural result not only of the economic crisis but of a series of letdowns, a lasting phenomenon? Can the revolutionary tradition, two centuries old, be dissolved as easily and as permanently as the vote for the Communist Part? Of the latter collapse, incidentally, we have only seen so far the negative effects, the service this has rendered to the ruling ideology. It remains to be seen how the void is being filled. If the Soviet model as such is obviously destroyed, the Soviet bogey, since perestroika, no longer scares. There are vague signs of a changing mood -- notably the student demonstrations and spontaneous strikes in France towards the end of 1986 -- suggesting that the young generation is not quite as Americanized and submissive as it had been painted. Mitterrand's normalization may prove ephemeral after all.

But what is now required is more than a mere revolt limited to national frontiers. It is, to begin with, a vast project appealing to the working people of Western Europe. There can be no question of looking back, hoping to repeat the seizure of the Winter Palace in entirely different surroundings. To get a response, the project will have to deal with such matters as labor and leisure, culture and communications in the age of the robot and the computer. It will have to face various issues of which the sixty-eighters were only dimly aware; our place in the universe and survival in the still-nuclear world; the new role of women both today and in the projected society. It will have to succeed where May failed, in inventing new forms of organization and democracy both on the shopfloor and in the country at large. The task is undoubtedly tremendous, yet the movement will not even begin to fulfill it unless it is willing to reassert its own logic, ready to clash with the allegedly bneficial rule of the market, the wisdom of profit, the presently undisputed reign of capital.

"Be realistic, ask for impossible" remains the message of 1968 most relevant for our day, provided it is not interpreted poetically as jsut a flight into fancy. The limits of the possible are being defined for us all the time by our environment, our media, our pundits and preachers -- it is what our society is ready to tolerate. The allegedly "impossible" leads us straight to the classical dilemma of socialism, namely that the questions it raises and the struggle it must carry through are rooted in existing society, while the answers it should provide lie ultimately beyond the frontfiers of that society. The right is now dominant in the world not because of what it offers, but because of the absence of another vision, of a radical alternative.

With so many great expectations shattered, I will not end with any forecast, only with two remarks. The first is rather gloomy. Even if the existing order is "built on sand," it does not mean that another, our own, is ripe and ready to take over. The second is one of cautious optimism. History, the Frenchy say, offers no second helpings, l'histoire ne repasse pas les plats, which is quite clearly inaccurate. The snag is that its conception of time differs from our impatient calculations. The lean years in between, as we have bitterly learned, are measured in scores rather than sevens. All the more reason to prepare the alternative assiduously during the lengthy intervals of seeming immobility so as not to miss the appointment during the privileged moments when history, like in 1968, beckons us to action.

COPYRIGHT 1988 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
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