Reflections on the May Revolt

I.

Only the future of the workers' movement will decide the fate of the May 1968 movement. What it was will only be revealed when the last word is said on socialism. Seeking the objective meaning of the May days is a futile enterprise and betrays in those who indulge in it a contemplative curiosity without the slightest grasp on reality. But we can try right now to give meaning to what was, since we know what the future should be. The secret of historical necessity eludes us. Only the past was necessary, but its necessity does not commit the future in an absolute manner. Socialism will only be a historical necessity when history has allowed its realization. Socialism as we imagine it — imagining socialism being for us a permanent task — falls within the realm of the possible and the subjective; it is above all a matter of conscience and only secondarily a matter of science. The past belongs to science, the future to conscience. It is not enough to know a lot to move towards socialism, but we will not get there without having previously and consciously imagined and wanted it. Socialism is Utopia as a creative project made of science and ideal, of knowledge and will.

This is the meaning we give to the movement we have just experienced. We derive it as much from the attitude of the students and workers as from the literary manifestations to which the first gave rise. The paving stone and the sentence have the meaning we give them, and this meaning will only be true when the revolution is made. We choose the meaning of the movement as we choose the revolution. The truth of this choice is only a postulate as long as the demonstration is not provided by history.

II.

Did the debauchery of literature provoked by the events of May help the workers and students in revolt to better understand the meaning of their struggle? One can doubt it. In addition to the proliferation of sectarian phraseology of politically engaged young people, who are therefore little inclined to rethink the situation based on a new experience, one could read learned analyses whose authors, without even questioning their own role in the future of the society targeted by the "protest", did not wait for events to settle down to rationalize and prophesy to one another. The most improbable analogies and historical evocations took the place of reflection on the disarray of minds and the impotence of gestures on the one hand, and on the fundamental project on the other. Because if today resembles yesterday, it is above all because past and present are linked by the same defeat. The veneration of failure has taken the form of a cult; worker heroism seems all the more glorious when it results in the triumph of the enemy. Nothing is more masochistic than the historiography of the workers' movement. Thus, the greatest defeat suffered by the modern proletariat is considered universally — and often by the victims themselves — as the greatest victory: the Russian revolution of 1917 is considered to be "proletarian" and "socialist", when it only allowed the creation of a modern proletariat in a State whose institutions all express the negation of socialism, whatever it may be, utopian or scientific1 . In this respect, it can be said that the ignorance and unconsciousness of the left-wing intelligentsia are equal to its bad faith. There is no worse enemy of the proletariat and of socialism than the left-wing intellectual who agrees to be an accomplice in the greatest mystification of the century: Soviet socialism.

III.

The convergence of the student and workers' movements contains the secret of the revolutionary struggles to come; at the same time, it prefigures the essential tendency of the future social transformation.

Linked to a revolutionary goal, the general strike becomes the supreme weapon of the modern proletariat; it reveals the real power of the producers who, at any moment, can stop, or even destroy, the apparatus of production that dominates and oppresses them. The occupation of workplaces symbolizes the future mode of appropriation of productive goods on behalf of society. In France, before the First World War, the theory and practice of the general strike found fertile ground in revolutionary syndicalism, which is the finest lesson that the international workers' movement could give itself in terms of self-emancipation. More than ever, the work of Georges Sorel should be brought out of oblivion and discussed. For it is no coincidence that this thinker was the first in the West to recognize the deep affinities between revolutionary syndicalism and the soviet movement. And his presence will not be superfluous when the New Utopia takes stock of the spiritual heritage that the council movement will inherit. There is here a set of historical and intellectual elements which constitute an inexhaustible source from which the theory of council socialism will draw. But Sorel—no more than Marx—should not be accepted in the totality of his thought. The New Utopia will be made of theory and imagination, calculation and invention, old and new; it will not attach itself to any authority, to any name, to any genius other than that of the anonymous masses who, by inspiring the thinkers of the revolution, allowed them to say and paint their dreams.

In May 1968, students, through their gestures of total protest — although ineffective in the last resort — communicated to workers that spirit of refusal which is the first condition of revolutionary struggle. The student revolt — which threw disarray into the minds of professional thinkers on the lookout for historical models — had nothing comparable to an event such as the Commune of 1871. There was not and could not be a "student Commune", but nostalgia for the glorious past was enough to plunge certain minds into revolutionary mythology. The simultaneity of the action unleashed in the universities and in the factories is in itself full of lessons; It revealed that the workers' movement has no truth except as a total fact, both material and spiritual: the paving stone in the student's hand represented, rather than expressed, the negation of the established order, while the occupation of the factory and the office concretized, if only temporarily, the expropriation of the propertied class and the challenge to the authority of the employers and to state power. What the workers did, the students thought; emanating from two separate movements, action and idea went hand in hand to ultimately lead to failure. And this was all the more fatal because the revolutionary finality, instinctively felt by the worker, only presented itself in the consciousness of the students in a confused and contradictory way: Marxism — especially in its Leninist disguise — was, in the days of May, the ideological factor which sterilized rather than fertilized the revolutionary awareness among the workers and students.

Although mostly negative, the lesson of May is of capital importance for the future of the movement: council socialism will either be realized as a utopia or it will not be realized. The New Utopia, conceived by the student, must, in order to become a reality, enter the consciousness and imagination of the worker.

IV.

Marx did not abolish utopia; on the contrary, he renewed its meaning by broadening its sphere of application. For him, utopia becomes a single process in two stages: revolution and creation. Before him, the utopians imagined and thought of creation independently of the men by whom the new city was to be built; at most, they counted on an elite. Marx saw men first; in this sense, he is the most utopian of utopians: little concerned with the future society, he is concerned only with the destruction of the present society and with the consciousness of the class that elevates revolution to the rank of a total requirement. If Marx refused to offer "recipes for the pots of the future", it is because his goal was more radical, more utopian in a sense, than that of his precursors: he wanted the end of prehistory, the advent of human society, the birth of man to be the work of "the most numerous and most deprived class" and not that of an inspired revolutionary minority. Having made his own the goal of the utopians, he preferred to consider the means of achieving it instead of repeating the criticisms and descriptions of his masters. The utopia of the revolution becomes with him an ethics of revolutionary behavior, an ethics that he wanted to base on a theory of history. Such is the meaning of this "new materialism", in other words of this "materialist sociology" that he summarized in a few lines in the Foreword to The Critique of Political Economy (1859). Engels and, after him, the whole school, obscured the problem by opposing science and utopia. Marx wanted to support, demonstrate, utopia by science in order to reconcile the two. Science does not engage action, its domain is abstraction and not practice which is application; its only aim is to demonstrate its possibilities and limits; on the other hand, utopia gives meaning to action and proposes ends to be achieved, but its practical solutions have proven ephemeral. Thus, certain utopians (Cabet, Owen) go so far as to create models in the hope of seeing their example imitated. Marx will reject these illusory solutions but will keep the fixed ends by expressing them using a more abstract terminology — classless society, without State, without money, dictatorship of the proletariat, integral man.

V.

The chances of council socialism are linked to the workers' awareness, not of any social theory (Marxist or not), but of a system of values, let's say of an ethic. The students in revolt do not all adhere to a doctrine and those who claim to be Marxists are divided into several tendencies which never cease to fight each other. And yet, recent events have shown that a common attitude could be adopted by politically divided students and workers, but united in the negation and refusal of a social order considered and felt to be harmful. Bourgeois morality erects the alienation of man as a universal norm; so-called communist morality rivals bourgeois morality in respecting these same values ​​that bourgeois and communists mutually accuse each other of "betraying". And the world is perishing under the threat that this escalation poses to it. Man is sacrificed to bourgeois and communist "humanism". The two moralities differ only in the degree of hypocrisy and imposture that each of them manifests in its proclamations of virtue and humanity.

This is what the student revolt was directed against, thus giving full meaning to the virtually insurrectional strike of the workers. Instinct and spontaneity predominated in both camps, and yet it was the same fundamental call that graffiti, posters, and drawings clearly translated, announcing the reign of the New Utopia. The immense critical force, long contained or stifled, of socialism, anarchy, and revolutionary syndicalism had just exploded: spreading to all minds, it was immediately a firework display of subversive ideas that burst into the press and tracts, to finally degenerate into literature.

It is possible that the fight will resume, in France and elsewhere, in the East as in the West. But for future struggles to become something other than material for literature, other than a new chapter in the history of the glorious defeats of the working class, we should ask ourselves less about the causes of these permanent failures than we should try to define the objectives to be achieved and the means to be employed; in short, we should imagine the New Utopia.

VI.

One can conceive, as a first step, of the constitution of an international movement for council socialism which would set itself the initial task of proclaiming its charter of values. This movement could be constituted openly in countries of "formal" democracy — where freedom of expression and association are respected as much as the freedom to exploit the labor force — and secretly in countries decreed socialist by the grace of state power — where free criticism, guaranteed by the constitution, can lead and often leads to the loss of physical freedom, of the right of habeas corpus . For, the height of mystification, we have come quite naturally to denounce the enslavement of man by capital, under the bourgeois regime, while we accept, without the slightest criticism, the total submission of man to state power in countries where it is no longer private capital which is the master. The new movement will have to face this dilemma: either to note that the division of the world into capitalist countries and socialist countries is a poor myth systematically maintained by the two systems of exploitation and domination; it will then have to imagine, from this observation, the New Utopia; or to accept this false division which leads to the acceptance of a war of total destruction, thus forcing one to abandon oneself to fate. It is better to consider that everything still remains to be built than to see socialism where it does not exist.

VII.

The charter of values ​​of council socialism will be critical and ethical. As a critique of current modes of social domination, it will be the condemnation of all established regimes, whether liberal or totalitarian, capitalist or pseudo-socialist. As an ethic, it will constitute itself the heir to the spiritual heritage bequeathed by socialist thinkers of all times and all places. Whether they are utopian or scientific. The thought of socialism is in no way the prerogative of those who have claimed it and who, today, claim to adhere to it. It predates the schools and professions of faith openly proclaimed socialist. It is present, implicitly or explicitly, in all schools of wisdom since Greco-Latin and Eastern antiquity, it survives in the religious heresies of the Middle Ages and Modern Times, it takes a concrete form in the imaginations of the utopians; and as for the writings of the so-called "scientific" socialists — starting with the "founding fathers" — they are steeped in a spirit of egalitarian ethics, which also predates its translation into terms of theory2 . One will search in vain for a more utopian, and therefore more ethical, vision of a communist society than that set out in the most famous charter of so-called scientific socialism: "The old bourgeois society, with its classes and class conflicts, gives way to an association where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all". (The Communist Manifesto)

VIII.

The movement of workers' councils must be prepared in the minds before being externalized in revolutionary actions, the most decisive of which will be the insurrectional and managerial strike, conceived as the supreme violence by the very fact that it will disarm the class enemy and reduce it to impotence. The entire strategy of non-violence finds its triumphant expression in this strike. Thus can be realized the imperative that Georges Sorel defined as the necessity of "preserving the revolution's character of absolute and irreformable transformation" which gives socialism "its high educational value" (Reflections on Violence, p. 238). The preparation of minds is an integral part of revolutionary action. By constituting themselves in councils, the workers enter into the first phase of an action which includes several, before and after the outbreak of the general insurrectional strike, the decisive stage being that of the passage to the execution of the management plan. What the unions and the workers' parties have been unable to achieve, the workers' councils make their essential task: to be the schools of socialism first, and the organs of management of the socialist economy next3 .

The constitution of workers' councils as schools of socialism and embryos of the future workers' power inaugurates the revolutionary process; it is the best guarantee of the success of a movement which will be that of the "most numerous and most miserable class", that of the alienated producers conscious of their alienation and given themselves the mission of realizing their own emancipation and working for the liberation of humanity. No vanguard, no general staff, no elite, however immense the political genius of the leaders who guide them, can substitute themselves for the entire working class in the accomplishment of this emancipatory task. The old structures of the workers' movement were in the image of bourgeois society. The unions and workers' parties, while publicly displaying a revolutionary aim, were, by their very nature, linked to the institutions of the society which they aimed to transform. Caught in their own game, they ended up ensuring the continuity of the social system which they claimed to overthrow. From a moral point of view, their modes of action could not appear otherwise than as a permanent "betrayal"; but if appearances show the "immorality" of the unions and workers' parties, the sociological analysis of the mechanism of the system obliges us to recognize the fatal character of this betrayal and this immorality. In fact, parties and unions expressed the will of a non-revolutionary class, always ready to bargain its labor power and its freedom at the best price. Depending on the circumstances, this bargaining could bring more or less immediate advantages to the combatants, but the stakes of the fight did not endanger the existence of the exploiting class and the State.

What the classical organisations of the working class could not achieve in the past and probably will not succeed in achieving in the future, the new movement has the best chance of accomplishing: it is, to use the words of Rosa Luxemburg (who was then thinking of workers' parties), the very movement of the working class. By constituting themselves in councils, the workers take their destiny into their own hands and undertake that historic initiative which the Communist Manifesto makes the condition of their triumph.

IX.

Workers' councils are the form of organization that is most capable of promoting, in the living conditions of mass society, the actions of self-emancipation on which the success of the movement depends. A gathering of individuals who are conscious of themselves and convinced of the revolutionary purpose of their struggle, the council is both an end and a means, in contrast to the union and the party which maneuver the anonymous mass of their members to make them serve ends foreign to, or even opposed to, the class they are supposed to represent. By its reduced dimensions, the council can escape anonymity and the alienation of its power. The individual can remain himself there, and if he changes himself, it is under the direct influence of those he rubs shoulders with and whom he changes in turn. Self-education is inseparable from common education, each member bringing to the council — which is a microcosm of reflection and creation — his individual gifts and generosity, so that each one enriches himself by spending himself: before becoming the constitutive cell of the new society, the council prefigures it in the behavior of its members.

This anticipation will only seem chimerical to those who are unaware of the history of acts and gestures of self-emancipation, less visible and less graspable than the loudly reported highlights of the workers' epic that marked the workers' movement from its beginnings to recent years. The history of these manifestations of the workers' movement, while still little known, nonetheless offers a great wealth of constituent elements for imagining and building the New Utopia that a dying world calls for. The universal crisis of which we are today witnesses and victims makes the return to Utopia appear as the only rational outcome left to a humanity threatened with extinction. The supposed realism of the men who govern humanity is only the insane expression of this agony and this threat. Statesmen, whatever their "greatness", are, by their state of mind, contemporaries of the troglodytes. In the East as in the West the same madness reigns; only the degree and the form vary.

It is against this universal reign of insane stupidity that students and workers rose up in France and elsewhere: they were not always aware of it, but such was the profound meaning of their gesture, and it is this hidden meaning of their action which transforms the failure

in success. Others have understood it better than them and, among them, the supporters of the regime have had to throw off the mask. They suddenly had the vision of the end of the world, of the world that was theirs. They know that from now on the path is traced for the revolution that was looking for itself; they know that the stakes are total. They are preparing themselves for an existence of troglodytes, in harmony with their conscience. If they fail, the revolution will have saved them in spite of themselves. Because from now on the revolutionary finality coincides with the biological finality tout court, and the revolution has become the categorical imperative for any man who wants to survive and avoid sinking into a pre-human existence.

X.

If we persist in giving the word "utopia" the meaning of unreal and unrealizable, the reform projects proposed by the ruling classes and political masters of the contemporary world are more utopian, and therefore more unreal and unrealizable, than the models of society imagined from Plato to Wells. All these thinkers have sensed and foreseen the catastrophic course of a historical development given over to the instinct of domination of the possessing classes and of deranged individuals ready to sacrifice the salvation of the species to their thirst for power. Karl Marx, who had the genius to express the most utopian vision in terms of science, once spoke to English proletarians about the threat that a humanity that has reached the height of its technical inventions will have to face. His speech was therefore addressed to us, who have survived two world wars, Nazism, fascism and Stalinism, and who see preparing in bloody preludes a probably fatal confrontation between two worlds that are of the same essence, since the political systems that govern them represent, in different disguises, the same absolute disdain for the mass man, for the average individual subjected to the most misleading political, philosophical and religious propaganda. That Marx chose an audience of workers to deliver the apocalyptic remarks that we are about to read will only surprise those who, Marxists or not, have never understood that, through the mouth of the author of Capital, is expressed just as much the spiritual, therefore absolute, message of the workers' movement and socialism as the scientific, therefore relative, truth of a thinker of genius:

"There is a striking fact which characterizes our century, a fact which no political party would dare to contest. On the one hand we have seen the birth of industrial and scientific forces which could not have been imagined at any previous period of human history. On the other hand we perceive the symptoms of a catastrophe such as will eclipse even the famous horrors of the end of the Roman Empire.

In our day, everything seems pregnant with its opposite. The machine has the marvelous power of shortening work and making it more productive; we see it starving and overworking the workers. By some strange evil spell of fate, the new sources of wealth are transformed into sources of distress. The victories of technology seem to be obtained at the price of moral decay. As humanity becomes master of nature, man seems to become a slave to his fellow men or to his own infamy. It seems as if even the pure light of science needs, in order to shine, the darkness of ignorance and that all our inventions and all our progress have only one aim: to endow material forces with life and intelligence and to reduce human life to a material force. This contrast of modern industry and science on the one hand, with modern misery and dissolution on the other; This antagonism between the productive forces and the social relations of our time is a fact of overwhelming evidence that no one would dare deny. Some parties may deplore it; others may wish to be delivered from modern technology and therefore from modern conflicts. Or again, they may believe that such remarkable progress in the industrial domain requires, in order to be perfect, a no less marked decline in the political order. As for us, we are not fooled by the perfidious spirit that never tires of pointing out all these contradictions to us. We know that the new forces of society demand new men who master them and make them do good work. These new men are the workers. They are, just like the machines themselves, the invention of Modern Times. In the signs that disconcert the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy and the poor harbingers of decline, we recognize our noble friend, the old mole who knows how to work so quickly underground, the worthy pioneer: the Revolution.

The English workers are the first-born of modern industry. They will certainly not be the last to come to the aid of the social revolution produced by that industry, a revolution which means the emancipation of their own class throughout the earth, an emancipation as universal as the rule of capital and wage slavery."

Man the victim of his own "infamy", the industrial worker the "invention" of modern times, the revolutionary initiative reserved for the oldest and most evolved proletariat... these are affirmations which must always be meditated upon and recalled to those disciples who have the superstition of personal incarnations and imagine that the revolutionary action of certain individuals brought to the forefront of history is identified with the revolution itself, that is to say with the proletarian revolution as understood in Marx's discourse. The actions of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao — names that appear or disappear according to the whims of history and those who write it — aimed only to produce, by means of state power (not without reason called "workers'"), enormous proletarian masses, living machines, taxable and subject to forced labor at will, which every economic system needs to pass from a primitive stage to a higher stage of capital accumulation.

With their political omnipotence, these masters of the state apparatus have succeeded in making the idea that socialism is the reign of the planning state of exploitation and of the Party as guardian of ideological purity universally triumph; they have even succeeded in having accepted as "socialist" the return to the methods of feudal exploitation and the medieval Inquisition4 .

Thus, we feel less stupor at the Czechoslovak "affair" — which is part of the normal chain of political-military gestures of Soviet imperialism — than disgust at the stupidity and ignorance displayed, on this occasion, by the specialists of "socialist" knowledge. Our position is very simple: if we understand that the "socialist system" of the USSR is an immense enterprise of oppression and mystification, and therefore the negation of all the human values ​​that constitute socialist ethics (from Godwin to Marx and beyond), the coup de force that has just been perpetrated is added to the already old list of crimes of the Russian power, at the top of which is the "affair" of Kronstadt. Once it is understood that socialism does not exist anywhere in the world today, everything becomes blindingly clear and there is no longer any need to wonder at length about the motives of Russian action in Czechoslovakia, just as there was nothing surprising in the crushing of the Budapest Commune in 1956. On the other hand, the moral defeat inflicted on Soviet imperialism by the passive resistance of an entire population will remain the great lesson of the events, whatever their outcome.

Today, only one problem must be posed and discussed: that of socialism, which is still only a utopian issue, and which will remain so as long as there are states and wage earners, police forces and armies, churches and ideologies.

XI.

We started from the idea that the "objective" meaning of the May movement will only be revealed by the outcome of the future battles of labor against capital and the State. This outcome will depend on the spirit and the will that will animate the struggle of workers and students, now united in the same total demand. Future salaried worker, the student revolted against his future condition as a slave of capital and the State, and it is through this anticipation that he immediately joined the workers' struggle. It is in the student that the spirit that deserted the union and political leaderships, accomplices of capital and the State, was embodied.

These are the symptoms that we, the partisans of council socialism, detect in the events that are taking place today in many parts of the world and which have taken on an unsuspected magnitude. It remains to define the strategy of the struggle of the new movement. It is up to the workers' councils and the student councils to elaborate their plans of struggle and the objectives to be achieved in each of the stages of the general movement. Having undertaken for several years, although with modest means, to propagate the thought of council socialism, we were less surprised to see the slogan of "workers' councils" appearing for the first time in France, on walls and in tracts. Not that we attribute an exaggerated importance to an influence that could only be very limited, but we consider ourselves as the heirs of a revolutionary tradition which, for having had a quasi-esoteric character for a long time, has maintained itself and strengthened itself in the shadow of the official movement. May 1968 will have helped to awaken, in action, a thought which must henceforth take root in the consciousness of all those who campaign for the realization of the New Utopia.

• 1The devastating extent of this mystification can be measured if we consider that Herbert Marcuse, whose name was stupidly mixed up in the events of May, takes on board — as a good Marxist dialectician and poor reader of Marx — the myth of the existence of "socialist" countries. In a recent interview, he brilliantly summed up his position, which is a typical example of the confusion of left-wing minds: "I have always said that I completely reject Stalinist repression and the repressive policy of communism (!), while admitting that the socialist (?) base of these countries contains the possibility of a development towards liberalization and finally towards a free society." ( L'Express, No. 898, September 1968, p. 130.) Marcuse would be hard pressed to indicate to us the geographical location of this "socialist base", decreed by the masters of state power and erected as an article of faith by their paid ideologues and their imitators in the West. A little "Marxism" — that is to say scientific socialism — is certainly enough to understand, for example, that if Hitler was only possible on a "capitalist basis", Stalin is inconceivable if we attribute a "socialist basis" to the USSR.
• 2In this vein, it can be said that there is more socialist substance in The Soul of Man under Socialism by the poet Oscar Wilde than in any political text by the professional revolutionary Lenin.
• 3See Anton Pannekoek's pamphlet, Workers' Council (of which we publish three chapters below), which should however be submitted to discussion and criticism, with a view to providing certain additions in the light of the history of the councils before and after 1917.
• 4If one could torture and kill in the name of Christ, why not exploit and oppress in the name of Marx? Doctrines—whether religious or political—serve to disguise a reality that is fundamentally the same everywhere. The point is not to be fooled.