Essay help RE: Paris '68

I've got four due in tomorrow.

I'm in the 2nd year and I'm doing Politics, had to repeat my first year...

http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/ws93/paris39.html

Here's a short article and a link to a pamplet on 68 - make sure you reference it correctly now 8)

The library's pretty shit, have you tried the Senate House library?

the first point to make will be to say that it weren't a students movement, it was a workers movement.

not quite true if anything it was a product of technocratic reforms and raising aspirations amongst not only students but actual workers as well. Anyway the most advanced sections of the student movement understood themselves as increasingly proletarianised and as such merely articulating a wider malaise.

Actually, revol what with you're name and you're abov comments and you're 'anti-activism' I'm curious have what do you make of the Solidarity article and the Perlmand book?

They both place a lot of emphasis on the significance of students standing outside factories handing out fliers and getting ideas out there. And both seem critical of the idea of the kind of spontaneous-class-consciousness that you seem to think comes from 'struggle'. In other words they both seem to emphasize the role of activists.

This is an honest question and not me trying to get in a dig at you.

what i mean by that is that the reforms were being pushed through that were seeking to modernise frances economy, more working class kids had to be educated further and as such the universities were being rationalised, it was no longer the playground for the sons and daughters of the wealthy but increasingly taylorised institution churning out comparmentalised, disciplined labour units. As well as that you had a working class that whilst materially better off than past generations was increasingly militant, they ha wached their parents work their asses off so they would have a roof, food and television and now that they were almost guaranteed that they still weren't content, also perhaps for the older workers the empty promises of the post war days when labour was extolted as the saviour of the republic.

anyway if you want a good analysis get yourself a copy of Danny and Gabriel Cihn Bedits Obsolete Communism; The Left Wing Alternative.

And don't calll me a wanker dipshit.

Agree with those who have insisted on May 68 as essentially a working class movement. The official media (and historians) nearly always dismiss it as a ‘student riot’, completely obscuring its real significance the reawakening of proletarian struggle after decades of counter-revolution. At its height there were ten million workers on strike; no less important was the phenomenon of assemblies, action committees, innumerable discussions about the possibility of a new society, and the re-emergence of the communist movement. May 68 was the beginning of an international wave of workers’ struggles between 1968 and 1974 the ‘hot autumn’ in Italy 69, the Codobaza in Argentina in the same year, the Polish workers’ revolt in 1970, the miners’ and dockers’ strikes in Britain in 72 and 74, and many others. After all the theories about the working class being integrated into ‘consumer society’, these struggles were the proletarian response to the first effects of the world economic crisis which began to develop in the 1960s.

I wrote my history coursework in sicth form about whether "France really was on the verge of a revolution" following the events of May 68. I can send it to you if you're interested.

Regarding your own questions, I would first like to point out that that there were two important linked but distinct groups invloved in the events of May 68: the students and the workers. To be honest, if 10 millions French workers hadn't "spontaneously" striked on May 14, I'm not sure the student riots would have really lasted very long; they were only a couple of thousand of them. And I think an important factor why this mouvement failed to spread is arguably that it was not a single mouvement! It was many different ununited left-influenced groups acting as "chienlit" (Maoists, Trotskyists, Anarchists, as well as the UNEF)- reflecting the general divisions within the French political parties.

Also, it's true that in the short-run, the events failed to spread to a large part of the population, which was characterised by the huge demo in support of De Gaulle on May 30, and this can simply be explained by the silent majority's fear of this student violence. The bourgeoisie did not want a civil war or a revolution so appealed to the good old general and his army to restore law & order. On top of that, I believe there was a still widespread bitterness within much of the population at the violent loss of Algeria a couple of years earlier and having the nation's pride already undermined, it could not stand to have all these disruptions on its own doorstep and needed to be reassured that its coercive system did actually work.

But, at the same time, the spirit of these revolts did not simply get lost and I believe had a long-term impact on the evolution of French society. Most notably, I guess, was the election of the so-called Socialist Party in 1981 and their attempted wide-spread reforms (even though many of them were ineffective and Mitterand backed away from them as soon as the Right put political pressure on his government).

Oh, and don't forget that if you considering the reasons why the uprising did not spread across France, do not forget that, to a large extent, anything that happens outside of Paris, or fails to have any significant impact on the population of the capital city is generally seen as irrelevant and not worth the worry by the government.

for any libcom library junkies, we now have the perlman/gregoire piece:

http://libcom.org/library/worker-student-action-committees-france-1968-perlman-gregoire