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The revolutionary vanguard in May is generally conceded to have been the youth, youth who very largely escaped control of the traditional organizations and leaderships of the workers movement.
It was the student youth who, first of all began the fight at the university. New movements emerged, like the March 22 Movement at Nanterre. There were formations claiming to base themselves on Trotsky, Che Guevara, Mao Tse-tung. In UNEF, these line formations played a leading role or acted as the motor force, instigating the taking of positions, demonstrations, etc. There was no room for doubt about the relationship of the old leaderships of the workers movement to this student youth. Hardly a word was heard about the Social Democratic students. The Communist students, led by the political bureau, had over the preceding years expelled in successive purges all elements from the Communist Student Union (UEC) inspired by political orientations different from that of Waldeck Rochet – and they were the majority. It was these expelled members precisely who were in the leadership of the “grouplets.”
Banned from the peaceful and spiritless demonstrations which sometimes moved from the Place de la Republique to the Place de la Bastille, and sometimes from the Place de la Bastille to the Place de la Republique, these “ultraleftists” turned up again in the May 1968 demonstrations at the head of tens of thousands of demonstrators. And these were ardent, militant demonstrators not afraid to confront the repressive forces of the capitalist state.
In the student-occupied Sorbonne courtyard the UEC has its place – because the other groups respect workers democracy even for those who have trampled it underfoot for years. However, the authority and influence of the UEC, and through it of the PCF leadership, have been mortally damaged in the student milieu. It is not anticipating the future to say that the PCF leadership has little further chance in this milieu. Observations which it has been possible to make here and there indicate the UEC’s recruitment in the most recent period has been among the most politically backward layers. This is only normal. Once a party has (capitalist) “statesmanship,” as the editor of Le Monde described the PCF, the only ones who can turn toward it in such a period are those who still dream of leading a quiet life in the service of the state or the bosses – not those who dedicate themselves to the socialist revolution.
The university student youth were joined by the high-school youth. The participation of hundreds of thousands of 14- and 15-year-old young people in the May movement is a phenomenon absolutely unprecedented in history. The high-school movement originated in the course of actions in solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution. Some very young militants who sought to campaign for solidarity with the Vietnamese people in the high schools collided with the administration as well as many teachers attached to the old idea of the barracks-type school. In order to struggle against the regime in the high schools, these very young militants founded the high-school action committees (CAL). One of the leaders was expelled from the Lycée Condorcet [4], and this touched off a protest demonstration of several hundred high-school students outside this lycée. This movement grew during the early months of 1968. On May 9, the CAL decided to call a high-school general strike for the following day. This strike was begun in a manner rather like factory strikes. The strike (the high-school students used the same term as the workers) began in the morning; the striking students went out into the streets to go to other high schools in order to bring them out on strike; street meetings were held. In the afternoon, a demonstration of close to 8,000 high-school students went from the Gobelins to the Place Denfert-Rochereau to join the university students and teachers’ demonstration. This demonstration was to end with the night of the barricades in which a great number of high-school students participated. The strike movement extended to the technical high schools and all institutions of the same type. The CAL, democratically representing all of the strikers, initiated several street demonstrations together with UNEF and SNESup.
Politically, the active wing of the CAL shares the views of the university students; it is resolutely anti-capitalist and internationalist. Some pressure from the teachers has made itself felt in the schools, since the secondary-school teachers’ union is in the hands of the Stalinists. But one can be confident that Stalinist influence will not make much headway with this section of youth either.
After May 3 the number of young workers demonstrating side by side with the students grew daily. This was also a revelation: The unions which held sway over the factory workers exercised only relative control over the youth in the factories.
In the months preceding May, on several occasions (Besançon, Caen, Le Mans, Rouen, etc.) there was a conspicuous combativity on the part of the youth in strikes; this could be particularly noted in confrontations which had already occurred in the streets. These were the advance signs of the explosion. These developments showed that the youth were exhibiting signs of a militancy and a combativity which they had not learned from their organizations. But it was still difficult to discern in these manifestations a break with the traditional leaderships and their policy. The youth were unable to assert their views against the union apparatuses because of the lack of workers democracy. It took May to reveal this break. And it came out into the open primarily because the students, by taking the lead with a different policy from the traditional leaderships, offered the young workers a pole of attraction; the young workers flocked to it en masse. Dissatisfied with the policy and methods of the traditional leaderships, they came in large numbers to the Sorbonne to get direction.
Thus, the working-class youth are also showing themselves more and more resistant to Stalinism. The CGT leadership rapidly comprehended the danger facing it. For several months, it had been preparing a “youth festival” for May 11 and 12. Two hours before it was to open it cancelled it on a phony pretext. In actuality, the CGT leaders wanted to forestall the contact which would have occurred between the youth they brought together and those who had come the evening before to fight on the barricades the night of Rue Gay-Lussac – and that was the real youth festival.
It was also the youth in most cases and notably at the Renault plants who took the initiative in the strikes and factory occupations. They did not wait for orders from the union, often violently shaking up the immobility of the trade-union organizations. During the strike, frictions multiplied between union apparatuses and young workers. An impressive picture can be drawn. The May 29 CGT demonstration was called largely to prevent the unions from being outflanked by young workers. At Renault this situation assumed important proportions.
It is necessary to go a bit more into the question of the “young hoodlums” and other youth belonging to the “gangs” in the working-class districts who for years have been a frequent subject of discussion in the press. Because they participated extremely combatively in the street battles, striking fear into the forces of repression, the most violent abuse was heaped on them from various quarters. During the events, the minister of the interior Fouchet, never sparing in his use of scare words, dared to use the word “scum” to blacken these youth. These young people have nothing in common with the real scum, the riffraff who are also the best defenders of the bourgeois order. At the time of the Ben Barka affair they were on the best terms with the highest police officials, they often operated as a kind of auxiliary police service, and they mingled with secret police agents who gravitate around the highest spheres of the Fifth Republic. It is in the gangs de Gaulle is appealing to for “civic action” that you find the scum. This scum extends from the highest rung of society to the riffraff who protect the underworld. These supporters of the Fifth Republic are in the best tradition of Napoleon III’s “December 10 Society.”
The “young hoodlums” and other youths who were slandered by this rabble-rousing minister are nothing more than young workers whom the neo-capitalist consumer society has reduced to more than precarious conditions of existence and employment. Lacking in vocational skills, the first to be thrown out of work by technological progress, without hope, harassed daily by a police force which considers repression the highest form of education, they have built up a ferocious hatred of the repressive forces. This was, if you will, a very elementary form of developing political opposition to capitalist society. With rare exceptions, no one has had a real dialogue with them. With an unfailing instinct they took the side of the students. Their interest was in taking their revenge for all the harassment the police had subjected them to. During the events, a radio reporter asked one of these young men what his motive was in taking part in the demonstrations. He may have expected a more or less awkward political answer. “I came to beat up cops,” the youth told him. According to the press reports, very few cases of looting were noted during the struggle. This proves that these youth were not interested in appropriating this or that product of the consumer society they were deprived of, but were much more interested in attacking police stations and the stock exchange. In the days of fighting, these young people, like many others, underwent a political ripening which will have its effects in the future.
* * *
With the exception of the student milieu where there were well-developed and politically well-defined organizations representing a minority of the students and with the exception of the CAL’s beginning to spring up among the high-school students, everywhere else the youth had no organization of their own. In this situation, the only solution lay in the extensive improvisation that actually occurred. Whether the bureaucrats like it or not, this improvision, giving full freedom to the development of different points of view, produced results far exceeding those which the bureaucrats obtained with all the modern means at their disposal. This was so because for the first time in a very long time the initiative of every individual was appealed to. No personality was repressed; everyone could express himself with full freedom. Not only could individual personalities express themselves without constraint but in these conditions they expanded daily.
I will not give a profile here of the youth or adult political groups which were in the vanguard of the movement. The events provided an opportunity to test each of them, their men and their politics in confrontation with developments. This question will be dealt with in separate articles. What it is important to define here is the general framework so that what these groups did at different moments of the action can be understood and judged better.
In any case, there was no team or group in the movement with sufficient authority to impose its will unchallenged. At each stage discussions developed, even at the beginning of demonstrations (at Denfert-Rochereau for example) or even during demonstrations (the Gare de Lyon for example). In a general way, the results were far from bad. No serious mistakes were committed. Moments of uneasiness or uncertainty, like May 8, were quickly overcome. Things did not deteriorate until the last. By May 29 it was necessary to determine a strategy and a tactic capable of setting the movement on the road to the conquest of power. But the vanguard as constituted did not command the objective elements necessary for such an effort. This situation must be altered because the struggles tomorrow will be much more arduous and the question of leadership will become vital.
The vanguard, which was politically heterogeneous and within which only minorities were organized, had overall a high political level. It recognized that the movement’s object was the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a society building socialism. It recognized that the policy of “peaceful and parliamentary roads to socialism” and of “peaceful coexistence” was a betrayal of socialism. It rejected all petty-bourgeois nationalism and expressed its internationalism in the most striking fashion. It had a strongly anti-bureaucratic consciousness and a ferocious determination to assure democracy in its ranks. It accepted the existence of different political groups as normal; it feared only, because of the Stalinist experience, control of the movement by any one of these groups.
On many occasions one saw this vanguard collectively reaching decisions which revealed a high degree of political maturity. But I would fall short of my responsibility if I did not say that in some cases a still inadequate capacity in the area of strategy and political tactics could be noted. If I speak of ultra-left tendencies in this movement, it is not to indulge those militants still influenced by the Stalinists. I have no reason to concede anything to the prejudices fostered by the Stalinists. However, we find in such ultra-left tendencies a manifestation which is common to all revolutionary youth groups in every period. These tendencies are heightened at the present time in reaction to the extreme reformism and betrayal of the PCF. I am profoundly convinced that once this rebel youth gains a revolutionary response from an appreciable part of the working class, it will have no difficulty in acquiring the strategic and tactical capacity indispensable for tomorrow’s extremely arduous struggles.
4. The French lycées are on the order of the English “public schools” like Eton and Harrow. The Lycée Condorcet is one of the elite lycées, along with the Lycée Louis le Grand and the Lycée Henri IV. Expulsion from such a school could represent a serious threat to a student’s future career. – Ed.
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Last updated: 10.12.2005