The May events in 1968 France are now remembered by some as merely a watershed for the rise of neo-liberalism. Donald Parkinson aims to complicate this narrative and looks at the role of the French Communist Party’s historical legacy.
1968 brings to mind many world-historic images. From the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, to the student revolts of France and Mexico, to the Cultural Revolution in China, and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, events infused with a revolutionary zeal appeared to challenge the political status quo. 1968 also evokes images of sexual libertinism, an aesthetic revolt against the rational, and a breaking down of drug taboos and general cultural traditions. The former is the revolutionary legacy of 1968, the latter represents its counter-cultural legacy. Looking back, one can see all of these events as part of a global wave of struggles, a potential revolutionary wave against capitalism. The opposite conclusion can also be reached: that the meaning of ‘68 was a watershed in the development of neo-liberal capitalism, a moment of transition from one form of capitalism to another. This clash of narratives begs the question of what the real historical impact of 1968 was and is most clearly pronounced in the narratives around the May events in France.
France in May of 1968 seemed to ultimately represent the merger of the two aforementioned aspects of 1968, the countercultural and the revolutionary. May ’68 can almost be seen as two separate events, one where the students led a counter-cultural revolt against the oppressive, overly authoritarian and culturally conservative Gaullist state and another where workers, through a mass strike, struggled for higher wages and ultimately won some reforms though settled short of a potential revolution. While it is true that these two movements were in a sense separate, by separating them one can almost paint a neoliberal fantasy of May 1968 as a sort of youth rebellion against the dreary tyranny of the old bureaucracy of the labor movement, obstructing the fully flourishing creativity that the younger generation would bring into the world through market opportunity. This reading of May ‘68 in France shows the uselessness of politics, parties, and trade unions as archaic institutions that get in the way of the flowering of individual spontaneity represented by the declassé rebel student. The possibility that this interpretation of May 68 could be used to shore up a neoliberal narrative was summed up by Cristine Buci-Glucksmann in 1978:
“Could we see the return of a liberal or neoliberal culture, which would play society against the state and develop an ambiguous anti-statism to better open up the field for multinational corporations, eager to overcome the barriers of nation-states and French Jacobinism?”1
This dichotomy between the two elements, of student and labor, cultural and economic, society and state, was based in real divisions of the movement. Yet by treating May ‘68 as a sort of vision of revolution for the core, it is possible to overtheorize the divisions of this movement as a sort of universal characteristic of capitalism. May ‘68, for some, represents the death of the working class as a revolutionary agent, showing that the “trade union consciousness”, which Lenin believed the workers could transcend, was really all the class had to offer. Clearly, the working class was just another corporate interest group in society with sectional interests, integrated into the consumer order and only interested in economistic struggles for stability and security, not a class of universal emancipation. This view could easily come from one seeing the May events as the ultimate revolutionary opportunity and coming to grips with its failure. Perhaps it is best to accept that May ‘68 was doomed from the beginning due to the dominance of the French Communist Party (PCF) in the unions that led the strikes (the CGT), and not give in to fantasies of a failed revolution.
May 1968 was a failure of what Karl Kautsky called the merger formula: of merging revolutionary politics with the working class. In other words, no revolutionary organization was able to consolidate the working class into a force capable of taking state power. Instead, the working class’s politicized elements were loyal to the PCF, whose cadre in the factories saw the students that carried bolder revolutionary ideas simply as their future boss. The dominance of the PCF in the working class meant any spontaneous outpouring of struggle would be primarily led by them. In a way, the PCF essentially foreclosed the possibility of a revolution in France through a combination of their own success and the conservatism of their politics. The students had no political means to lead the workers in a revolution, they had not merged their politics with the broader labor movement and were alien to it in that sense. This is the typical understanding of Leninists regarding May 68, what was missing was an adequate revolutionary party. This conclusion is almost too obvious to dwell on for too long. This narrative, the “missed opportunity” for revolution, can be found in the work of Daniel Singer at its most sophisticated.
Another narrative is that which sees May ‘68 as a breaking point in the post-war era and the beginning of the transition to neoliberalism. The best exposition of this argument is found in Boltanski & Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, which sees May ‘68 as a pivotal moment in the transformation of a rigid Fordist ‘spirit’ of capitalism to the modern neoliberal spirit of capitalism. Boltanksi & Chiapello argue that capitalism requires a sort of general value system in the work ethic that keeps laborers disciplined in the labor process. A wage is not simply enough to motivate workers often, creating a need for the discipline of workplace psychology. Boltanski & Chiapello define the spirit of capitalism as “the ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism”.2 Max Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic is cited as essentially the ‘spirit’ of classical Fordist capitalism, which was perfected in the period from 1930 to 1960. In this theory, critique is the force which changes the ‘spirit’ of capitalism. May ‘68 was a revolt against this particular spirit of capitalism, and became a lynchpin in ushering what they call a ‘new spirit of capitalism’. This ‘new spirit’ is characterized by increased casualization and flexibility of labor markets, alongside a form of management that promotes ideas of self-initiative from workers instead of the pure despotism of the boss. May ‘68 was a critique of the prevailing spirit of capitalism according to Boltanksi & Chiapello, which sent capitalism into a legitimacy crisis that incorporated aspects of the critique into a ‘new spirit’.
To say the student rebels in May ‘68 were simply revolting for individual freedom, held back by the conservative labor bureaucrats and conservative workers, is a gross oversimplification that serves bourgeois ends. Michel Clouscard’ Capitalism of Seduction is another example of the “May 68 as neoliberalism” narrative, claiming that May 68 simply ushered in an era of “libertarian liberalism” where “everything is permitted but nothing is possible.” May 68 was simply the opening up of greater spheres of human activity to the domination of the market. Going against this trend, Alain Badiou makes a critical response to those who would say the legacy of May 68 is merely neoliberalism:
“The strength and the distinctive feature of the French May 68 is that it entwined, combined, and superimposed four processes that are, in the final analysis, quite heterogeneous. And the reason why interpretations of that event differ so much is that they usually recall one aspect of it and not the complex totality that gives it true grandeur.”3
Student radicals in May wanted to win the workers over to their side, and they largely believed in the revolutionary potential of the working class. They did not see their revolt as separate from the workers’ struggle. While some factories had gone on strike outside the purview of the CGT/PCF, these factories had the presence of various Trotskyist and Maoist groups with connections to the student movement. Daniel Singer’s Prelude to Revolution notes that the students didn’t believe in the notion of an ‘outdated working class’ and instead put enormous faith in the working class, seeing their participation as key to the success of any revolution. Workers councils were a key point of agitation of student radicals, who believed that by acting as a militant minority they could push the strike into a more revolutionary direction by promoting the formation of mass assemblies.
Of course, there was a counterculture element to the student revolt of ‘68 in France. But to pretend as if this had no relation to class struggle is crass laborism. The stultifying and repressive administrative order that the French students were revolting against was a tool of the capitalist class to discipline society as a whole according to their interests. This regime of what is called ‘dirigisme’ in France was moralistic and repressive, which made ideas of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse on sexual freedom popular amongst the students. The revolt against this state, while not necessarily a proletarian revolt, was nonetheless a just revolt against the oppressive nature of what was a capitalist order built on as a sort of technocratic project.
This revolt against the technocratic state ultimately failed to join up with the revolt of labor. The French Communist Party and the aligned CGT unions were not willing to go beyond reformist demands and embrace the social radicalism of the students. The PCF was a party that grew through French patriotism, appealing to its role in the French Resistance to Nazism as a way of striking a chord in the national consciousness. The French left always had a comfortable relation with French nationalism since the French Revolution of 1789 seemed to point towards a form of French patriotism that was compatible with internationalist universalism. The scattered groups of students, despite their faith in the working class’s spontaneous energies, could not speak to the workers the way the PCF did. The PCF had proven itself in the battlefield against the Nazis, they were a vanguard of the nation at its best moment. Yet this nationalism in the French Communist Party, like all nationalism that isn’t transcended, went in a chauvinistic direction. This was most explicitly demonstrated by the PCF’s position of neutrality on the Algerian war of independence.
This is of importance to the general story of May ‘68 because of the role of anti-imperialism in the initial student mobilizations that led to the riots, solidarity strikes, and then the full-on general strike, itself commanded by the PCF. Throughout the university, students had formed committees of action against the war in Vietnam, these projects often taken up by small Maoist grouplets. The buildup of these committees was what composed the organizational infrastructure of the student revolt, which would, of course, include elements beyond anti-imperialism. Yet the importance of anti-imperialism and solidarity with the revolution in Vietnam, the Cultural Revolution in China, and the general anti-colonial movement, was a major radicalizing factor behind the students. Of course, the general narrative when regarding the students focuses on the infamous occupation of the Sorbonne, where a “general assembly” was held. Yet often downplayed in remembering May 68 were the demonstrations against the war on Vietnam the built up to this occupation, organized by groups like the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire (JCR).
The strong anti-imperialist sentiments that animated student rebels were in contradiction to the PCF’s own history of national chauvinism. While it is true that the PCF gave support in words to the Vietnamese, their desire to be a “respectable party” in French society meant their position was one of moderation, calling for peace talks rather than an immediate withdrawal. This was seen as an inadequate position that continued the legacy of the Communist Party’s softness on colonialism. Group like JCR that were involved in the formation of the Committees against the War in Vietnam saw the PCF’s position as a moderate attempt to balance France’s colonial legacy with the rights of the Vietnamese people. This was also at a time where voices like Mao and Che had risen popular critiques of the Soviet Union as being an inadequate ally for third world national liberation movements, making the PCF even more suspect due to its relationship with Moscow. As a result, the most militant students who opposed imperialism found themselves outside and against the PCF. The line of peaceful coexistence on a geopolitical scale being pushed by Official Communists simply did not resonate with popular anger towards the war, which in France was expressed by calls of support for the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. It was the JCR, not the PCF, whose militant protests against the war ultimately (one at the Bank of America) sparked the student riots.
Maoism, Trotskyism, anarchism and even a small tendency of Guy Debord’s Situationism were united by a general opposition to bureaucracy. The PCF represented the worst excesses of Stalinist bureaucratic stagnation, and all of these tendencies were able to share a sort of an anti-bureaucratic embrace of action committees and workers councils. This opposition to bureaucracy further built up a divide between the revolutionary students and the PCF, who themselves commanded an increasingly conservative labor bureaucracy. Despite all the differences between Maoists, Trotskyists, and anarchists, a common opposition to bureaucracy helped give the students unity to their critique. Trotsky’s own critique of Stalinism and the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution obviously resonated those alienated with the PCF ruling labor bureaucracy. To many, the Cultural Revolution in China seemed to symbolize a new and more authentic alternative to official Communism as Mao called on students to go after the bureaucracy, launching a struggle that would go beyond even this. Anarchists, represented by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, had developed a whole vision of a self-managed economy and critique of political parties. Despite major differences in these ideologies, these groupings could all unite in the street in the name of revolution and rebellion against the Gaullist state and the labor bureaucrats holding back the working class. However, the critique of the labor bureaucracy is often expressed in a way that can show contempt of the everyday needs of workers, making attacks on unions that “merely fight for crumbs” come off as elitist and alien to working-class reality.
The truth is that the working class will indeed have to struggle against their own bureaucracy, and the workers in the PCF were not ready, willing, or capable of doing this. The PCF bureaucrats in the CGT were antagonistic to the radical students and portrayed them as outside agitators with dangerous ideas. The PCF could only call for ‘structural reforms’ in the face of the crisis, making no real appeal to the working class to use its power to make a revolution.4The students were a threat to the labor bureaucracy because they wanted to make a revolution, and despite being the only party in opposition to Gaullism the PCF was dedicated to not making a revolution. Its history of social-chauvinism, its bureaucratic paternalism, and loyalty to Moscow, afraid of the ‘cold war’ heating up with Vietnam already raging in the background. Revolution in France was the last thing the USSR wanted, and the PCF was in the last instance loyal to the foreign policy interests of the USSR.
There is no doubt the PCF played a poisonous role in the struggle of May ’68, but why? To understand this it is necessary to make a deeper look at the history of the PCF. To understand why the organization was the organization, we must unpack its historical path. How did a party that claimed the revolutionary title of Communist, once part of Lenin’s Comintern, become a party that refused to even entertain the idea of revolution when a general crisis had paralyzed the nation, sending DeGaulle to Germany?
The answer to this question begins from the very beginning of the French Communist Party. In WWI most French socialists proudly marched into imperialist war, promoting the idea of the “sacred union” of the French nation. The SFIO split over the war, but truly anti-imperialist socialists were a minority. The CGT, initially formed on revolutionary principles, would promote class cooperation for the war. Even before the war opposition to colonialism from French socialists was the exception rather than the rule, with some French socialists serving in the colonial lobby.5
It would be this faction of SFIO that would form the nucleus of the PCF as the French Section of the Comintern. To merge with the Comintern, acceptance of its 21 conditions was expected, which entails support for anti-colonial revolutions. The aim of the 21 conditions, in general, was to purge reformist elements. Yet according to French Communist Alfred Rosmer, a leader in both Communist and syndicalist circles, many members of the camp which supported “The sacred union” of the nation in WWI made their way into positions in the French party, inspired mostly by opportunism.6 This suggests that chauvinistic and nationalist distortions of revolutionary Marxism influence the PCF from the beginning. Historian Claude Liauzu also noted that in the press of the PCF in its early day there’s little agitation regarding colonial questions compared to other communist parties. There is no doubt that the social chauvinism influenced the French party regarding its colonial past, and one can almost use this as a yardstick to measure how much a party ultimately is nationalist and loyal to the bourgeoisie in the end.
Pro-colonial attitudes first mostly openly came from the Algerian section of the party, a colony of France since 1830 that was considered an essentially integral part of France. In 1922 a member of the Algerian section, Sidi Bel Abbès, argued that the Communist revolution was necessary in France before Algerian independence was possible otherwise Algeria would revert to feudalism. French communists also spoke of the lack of a “revolutionary past” of indigenous Algerians, with typical French chauvinism that sees a national French revolutionary tradition that is exceptional compared to the rest of the world. The idea essentially sees the French as bringing socialism to Algeria as a continuation of its colonial legacy, with the colonized having no agency in the world revolutionary process, nonetheless the potential to take up communist politics themselves. These kinds of racist attitudes seem to have been accepted by the party despite its formal declaration of anti-colonialism to be allowed in the Comintern. This is not to say these views were unopposed. Most famously Ho Chi Minh, who at this time was a member of the French section in occupied Vietnam, recognized this and would suggest concrete steps to improve the standing of the French party regarding anti-colonialism at the 5th Congress of the Comintern.7 These suggestions included promotion of leadership in the Comintern of colonized peoples and actually covering colonial issues in the party press. Other members like Abdelkader Hadj Ali were fierce anti-colonialists and had the backing of Lenin’s words to make their cases. The French party was able to avoid complete decay into chauvinism and nationalism by showing their ability to oppose the invasion of Morocco by Spain which France joined in on in the Rif war and take an anti-colonial position when push came to shove. Yet the influence of social-chauvinists in the party was able to prevent the party from leading a strike of 100,000 workers against imperialism.8
By the early 1930s, the French Communist Party had been turned into a thoroughly bureaucratic centralist party under Stalin’s leadership in the party, which saw policy being mechanically imposed by the Russian party more than ever before. First, during the third period from 28-34, the Comintern parties were forced to enact sectarian policies to prepare for the final onslaught on capitalism while the soviet union waged a militarized industrialization campaign that saw essentially a war on the peasantry. Yet by 1934, Stalin and his cadre zigzagged in policy after Hitler came to power, and it was clear that the fascists had cashed in on the political turmoil of the depression of the late ’20s and early ’30s rather than the Communists. The USSR decided to align itself with the Allies, the imperialist enemies they had previously declared war on and called for an end to their colonial empires. Hence the beginning of the popular front, which was essentially an attempt for communists to make an alliance with world imperialism against fascism.
The Popular Front in France saw a massive general strike and the creation of a coalition government involving the Communists led by social-democrat Leon Blum. The party embraced French patriotism and with no doubt developed a mass following. Party leader Maurice Thorez embraced French nationalism and no longer embraced class war; what as embraced by the party was a unity of French patriots against fascism. Looking back to 1789 as evidence of a progressive French nationalism, the PCF became social-patriots in hope to win support from the bourgeois against Fascism. This meant opposition to colonialism, however, was dropped and Thorez openly supported French imperial interests. Party documents made the support of colonialism “civilizing mission” more explicit rather than slightly implicit. The party reinvented itself almost, becoming not so much Communist as left-nationalist workerism. The fascists were the bad French, while the good French worker was anti-fascist and therefore a Communist Party follower.
This reimagining of the party would be reinforced by its experiences in WWII, where the French Communists played a key role in the anti-fascist resistance against the Axis powers. Completely abandoning class war for national unity was the goal of the French communists in the resistance, to a greater degree than even during the Popular Front. The legacy of Communist Party leadership in the resistance further increased the mass base of the French party. But one could say that the party recruited on the grounds of national pride as well as pride in being part of the working class. This nationalist workerism was a product of the PCFs evolution and has is its seeds at the beginning of the party. But by the end of WWII, the PCF had essentially lost any revolutionary legitimacy. During both the Popular Front and the War of Resistance the party played a moderating role, ensuring to the capitalist class they were no threat to the rule of private property. And they weren’t, as the party chose to help establish a capitalist government rather than make revolution when the workers of France were armed and the Nazis defeated.
The Algerian Revolution would further reveal the bankrupt nature of the PCF, but this time in its failure to support Algerian independence and the defeat of the French military. While Trotskyists smuggled weapons to partisans in Algeria, the PCF was essentially silent and refused to call for the French to leave Algeria. The colonial legacy of France as part of their national mythology was more important for the PCF to maintain than to act as a proper “tribune of the people” and oppose all oppression, regardless of nationality. By now most serious revolutionaries realized that the PCF was not going to be a vehicle to communism unless they harbored illusions of reforming it from within. Yet its legacy in defending the nation against fascism, upholding a “progressive” French nationalism, and being able to use its position in society to negotiate a better deal for the working class in the “post-war compromise” gained mass loyalty to the PCF. It is for these historical reasons that the organization of the PCF had developed into a mass workers organization yet one with essentially conservative politics.
The easy narratives of May ‘68 that see it as a petty-bourgeois struggle or a pure worker struggle, both serve differing political agendas. One is for a sort of workerist purism, pointing out how the students were completely at a disconnect from the workers in a way that is reified. The other is the idea that the true revolutionary instincts of social liberation contained within the students were held back by the old conservative ways of labor bureaucracy and the hope for working-class revolution canceled. What both approaches take for granted is a separation in principle between the economistic demands of the workers and the demands of the students based on social freedom. The aim should not be to counterpose these types of demands as if they are unrelated, as if only the bread and butter class struggle is what matters to workers. Rather we should look at the failure of the students in May ‘68’s to take critiques around sexual freedom, anti-imperialism, and the repressive bureaucratic society and merge them with the labor movement. Clearly, there were historical reasons this didn’t happen, but not because the nature of the students’ demands and the demands of the workers were something that couldn’t be integrated into a holistic critique of the capitalist system. Communists do not simply focus on issues of wage labor and strikes, but in opposing all oppression of both modern capitalism and lingering traditions maintained from past oppressive societies. It is essential that this critique is merged with the class struggle, which happens through developing a Communist party with a mass presence in the working class that, unlike the PCF, takes a strong stance against chauvinism.
There can be no doubt that the events of 1968, particularly in France, have shaped how the current left views revolution. For some theorists like Gilles Dauve and Antonio Negri, May ‘68 represented a change in the very structure of capitalism that showed a fundamentally new terrain of struggle, one that wasn’t mediated by the institutions of parties and unions. The idea that revolution will be a spontaneous rising of the people, through a sort of “social strike”, and not the political victory of a party or group of parties, has its roots in the events of May. Street protests, riots, and occupations have now become a sort of strategy in themselves, a product of the new era signaled by May ‘68. Even Trotskyist groups see in every spontaneous uprising of the people a hope for the formation of workers councils and see the spontaneous assemblies formed in movements as progressive regardless of their political content. However the left remembers May ‘68, it seems to have a grip on modern left politics, meaning it’s important to see beyond the myths and ideological confusion that often haunts how the event is interpreted. With the rise of a social-conservative critique of capitalism (Bannonist populism, nationalist social democracy) challenging the neoliberal ‘spirit’ of capitalism in favor of a more nationally based capitalism, it is imperative that the left embraces the kind of social issues that the students of ‘68 fought for rather than counterposing them to the bread-and-butter issues of the workers. The opposition to imperialism, the fight for sexual freedom, and the critique of the state that the radical students carried with them in ‘68 should not be seen as antagonistic to the workers struggle. The failure of the conservative workerism of the PCF should warn us of the inevitable failure of similar politics being replicated today.
The legacy of May ’68 in France is in many ways no different than the overall legacy of many of the revolts in the Third World and Eastern Bloc in the long term. Take the Vietnamese struggle and the Cultural Revolution for example. While Vietnam’s struggle against imperialism eventually led to a Vietnam that is an independent nation state integrating into the world market, the overall struggle of Vietnamese national-liberation had to fight world capitalism as well as feudal remnants. The Cultural Revolution in China saw masses of Chinese workers, students and peasants engaged in a struggle for communism that would extend beyond the control of the party-state, leading to Mao’s crushing of the working class through the PLA that created the atomized working class which Dengism was able to impose market reforms on. Revolts in the Eastern Bloc against the Soviet bureaucracy were just revolts from democratic rights against the bureaucratic paternalism over the workes in an exploitative society but ultimately contributed to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the vicious capitalist predation that followed in its wake. It is possible to reduce all of these events in history to merely being breakthroughs for the development of capitalism, as one could do for May ’68. Yet to do so is to do violence to the complexities of history through a one-dimensional perspective where all history is simply a progressive conquering of the spirit by “market forces”. We must not become victims of a historical narrative that paints all opposition to capitalism as inevitably recuperated by a totalitarian capitalist system that allows no contradiction.
- https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/12/18/may-68-crisis-marxism-1978/
- Boltanski & Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, 8.
- Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, 35
- https://www.marxists.org/history/france/may-1968/lhumanite-05-25.htm
- https://isreview.org/issue/104/front-populaire-and-making-french-communist-party-1920-1962
- See Alfred Rosmer’s account of the early Comintern, Lenin’s Moscow.
- https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ho-chi-minh/works/1924/07/08.htm
- https://isreview.org/issue/104/front-populaire-and-making-french-communist-party-1920-1962
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