The General Strike in France: 1968

The latest issue of Workers' Liberty features an essay by David Broder on the May-June 1968 General Strike in France, with particular reference to the self-activity of the working class against the will of the union leaders and attempts to implement forms of workers' control and management.

It is followed by an account of the first night of the first factory occupation, which took place at Sud Aviation near Nantes.

Click here to read the pdf file.

May '68: Report on the Occupation of the Sorbonne

A Situationist report on the student-occupied Sorbonne

The occupation of the Sorbonne that began Monday, May 13, has opened a new period in the crisis of modern society. The events now taking place in France foreshadow the return of the proletarian revolutionary movement in all countries. The movement that had already advanced from theory to struggle in the streets has now advanced to a struggle for control of the means of production. Modernized capitalism thought it had finished with class struggle -- but it's started up again! The proletariat supposedly no longer existed -- but here it is again.

By surrendering the Sorbonne, the government hoped to pacify the student revolt, which had already succeeded in holding a section of Paris behind its barricades an entire night before being recaptured with great difficulty by the police. The Sorbonne was given over to the students in the hope that they would peacefully discuss their university problems. But the occupiers immediately decided to open it to the public to freely discuss the general problems of the society. This was thus a prefiguration of a council, a council in which even the students broke out of their miserable studenthood and ceased being students.

To be sure, the occupation was never complete: a chapel and a few remaining administrative offices were tolerated. The democracy was never total: future technocrats from UNEF [the students' union] claimed to be making themselves useful and other political bureaucrats also tried their manipulations. Workers' participation remained very limited and the presence of nonstudents soon began to be questioned. Many students, professors, journalists and imbeciles of other professions came as spectators.

In spite of all these deficiencies, which are not surprising considering the disparity between the scope of the project and the narrowness of the student milieu, the exemplary nature of the best aspects of this situation immediately took on an explosive significance. Workers were inspired by the free discussion and the striving for a radical critique, by seeing direct democracy in action. Even limited to a Sorbonne liberated from the state, this was a revolutionary program developing its own forms. The day after the occupation of the Sorbonne the Sud-Aviation workers of Nantes occupied their factory. On the third day, Thursday the 16th, the Renault factories at Cléon and Flins were occupied and the movement began at the NMPP and at Boulogne-Billancourt, starting at Shop 70. Three days later 100 factories have been occupied and the wave of strikes, accepted but never initiated by the union bureaucracies, is paralyzing the railroads and developing into a general strike.

The only power in the Sorbonne was the general assembly of its occupiers. At its first session, on May 14, amidst a certain confusion, it had elected an Occupation Committee of 15 members revocable by it each day. Only one of the delegates, a member of the Nanterre-Paris Enragés group, had set forth a program: defense of direct democracy in the Sorbonne and absolute power of workers councils as ultimate goal. The next day's general assembly reelected its entire Occupation Committee, which had as yet been unable to accomplish anything. In fact, the various specialized groupings that had set themselves up in the Sorbonne all followed the directives of a hidden "Coordination Committee" composed of self-appointed organizers, responsible to no one, doing everything in their power to prevent any "irresponsible" extremist actions. An hour after the reelection of the Occupation Committee one of these "coordinators" privately tried to declare it dissolved. A direct appeal to the people in the courtyard of the Sorbonne aroused a movement of protests that forced the manipulator to retract himself. By the next day, Thursday the 16th, thirteen members of the Occupation Committee had disappeared, leaving two comrades, including the Enragés member, vested with the only delegation of power authorized by the general assembly -- and this at a time when the urgency of the situation demanded immediate decisions: democracy was constantly being flouted in the Sorbonne while factory occupations were spreading all over the country. At 3:00 p.m. the Occupation Committee, rallying to itself as many Sorbonne occupiers as it could who were determined to maintain democracy there, launched an appeal for "the occupation of all the factories in France and the formation of workers councils." To disseminate this appeal the Occupation Committee had at the same time to restore the democratic functioning of the Sorbonne. It had to take over or recreate from scratch all the services that were supposed to be under its authority: the loudspeaker system, printing facilities, interfaculty liaison, security. It ignored the squawking complaints of the spokesmen of various political groups (JCR [Jeunesses Communistes Révolutionnaires, now LCR], Maoists, etc,), reminding them that it was responsible only to the general assembly. It intended to report to the assembly that very evening, but the Sorbonne occupiers' unanimous decision to march on Renault-Billancourt (whose occupation we had learned of in the meantime) postponed the meeting until 2:00 p.m. the next day.

During the night, while thousands of comrades were at Billancourt, some unidentified persons improvised a general assembly, which broke up when the Occupation Committee, having learned of its existence, sent back two delegates to call attention to its illegitimacy.

Friday the 17th at 2:00 p.m. the regular assembly saw its rostrum occupied for a long time by self-appointed marshals belonging to the FER [Fédération des Étudiants Révolutionnaires, Lambertists]; and then had to interrupt the session for the second march on Billancourt at 5:00.

That evening at 9:00 the Occupation Committee was finally able to present a report of its activities. It was, however, completely unable to get its actions discussed and voted on, in particular its appeal for the occupation of the factories, which the assembly did not take the responsibility of either disavowing or approving. Faced with such indifference, the Occupation Committee had no choice but to resign. The assembly proved equally incapable of protesting against a new invasion of the rostrum by the FER troops, whose putsch seemed to be aimed at countering the provisional alliance of JCR and UNEF bureaucrats. The partisans of direct democracy realized, and immediately declared, that they had no further interest in the Sorbonne.

At the very moment that the example of the occupation is beginning to be taken up in the factories it is collapsing at the Sorbonne. This development is more serious since the workers have against them a bureaucracy infinitely more powerful and entrenched than that of the student or leftist amateurs. To add to the confusion, the leftist bureaucrats, echoing the CGT [the biggest union federation, controlled by the Communist Party] in the hope of being accorded a little marginal role alongside it, abstractly separate the workers from the students. ("The workers don't need any lessons from the students.") But the students have in fact already given an excellent lesson to the workers precisely by occupying the Sorbonne and briefly initiating a really democratic debate. The bureaucrats all tell us demagogically that the working class is grown up, in order to hide the fact that it is enchained -- first of all by them (now or in their future hopes, depending on which group they're in). They counterpose their lying seriousness to the "festivity" in the Sorbonne; but it was precisely that festiveness that bore within itself the only thing that is serious: the radical critique of prevailing conditions.

The student struggle has now been left behind. Even more left behind are all the second-string bureaucratic leaders who think it's a good idea to feign respect for the Stalinists at the very moment when the CGT and the so-called "Communist" Party are terrified. The outcome of the present crisis is in the hands of the workers themselves, if only they succeed in accomplishing in their factory occupations the goals toward which the university occupation was only able to hint at.

The comrades who supported the first Sorbonne Occupation Committee -- the Enragés-Situationist International Committee, a number of workers, and a few students -- have formed a Council for Maintaining the Occupations. The occupations can obviously be maintained only by quantitatively and qualitatively extending them, without sparing any existing regime.

COUNCIL FOR MAINTAINING THE OCCUPATIONS
Paris, 19 May 1968

Gaullism

May' 68: the first factory occupation

The first factory occupation of May 1968 came at the Sud-Aviation aircraft plant in Bouguenais, near Nantes, in north-west France. 2000 workers went on strike, took over the factory and imprisoned the boss in his office. This step was decisive in moving the May movement as a whole onto the terrain of industrial action, deepening the government's malaise and forcing the unions to take sides.

There had been turmoil at Sud-Aviation since February 1968, when the bosses announced a plan to reduce working time from 48 to 45 hours per week, with only a 1% raise in the hourly pay rate to compensate. Yet it was not until April 9th that the CGT, CFDT and Force Ouvrière unions even held a meeting to discuss their reaction.

They were vacillating - but with 76% of workers voting to "take action", they organised a series of short walk-outs. 1 hour on the 9th, 23rd and 24th of April; 45 minutes on the 25th and 29th; only after this yielded no results did the Lambertist activist Yvon Rocton in charge of the Force Ouvrière union section at the plant propose an all-out strike.

A fight on the 30th in which the boss, Duvochel, was chased around the factory, made clear the workers' anger - but the idea of occupying the factory, or even an all-out strike, seemed risky. The CGT, for their part, claimed that raising the intensity of the strikes would mean breaking the unity of the Sud-Aviation workers. So followed another two weeks of occasional short walkouts - two hour stoppages here and there punctuated by an all-day strike on the unions' joint day of action in the region on 8th May.

But there was a rising tide of discontent with the unions’ tactics, expressed not just through riots in the factory, but also in union meetings, and on May 10th a small majority of workers voted for an all-out strike. However, the CGT and CFDT, who were against such a change of direction, simply decreed that the decision would be deferred until a later date. There was also a lack of outside support. This isolation was somewhat alleviated when the workers' isolation was broken with the nationwide strike of the 13th, and the student revolt showed the possibility of resisting the de Gaulle administration. As Francois le Madec writes, the struggle could take on new forms:

On Monday 14th there were the usual sporadic walkouts. Management were going to meet with the union reps in early afternoon: it wasn’t exactly clear why, but something big was in the offing. The atmosphere was electric. During the first afternoon walkout, between half past two and three o’clock, there was a meeting in the corner of Workshop 4. The workers looked like ants in this massive space: they wandered in from all sides, hands dug into their pockets. There were a few whistles and shouts as the now busy crowd packed out the workshops.

The mood was explosive. Slogans were shouted, and you could see the tension on everyone’s faces. The handful of scabs who dared to keep on working were given a seeing to. You could feel drama in the air. A scab who braved the pack was sprayed with a rivet gun: he went pale and stood as stiff as a starched shirt.

The workers walked out and stood outside the windows of the bosses’ office, where the union reps were being received.

Le père Duvochel [a song about the boss] rang out, followed by the Internationale. Waiting for the next walkout planned for half past three, workers started to talk. There were lively debates and animated conversations. Would the bosses make a reasonable offer?

At half past three was another meeting of all the staff. The union reps had emerged from the bosses’ offices. The CGT rep climbed on a metal mounting-block to speak, but saw worried faces… What news did he have? When he had silence, you could only hear the dull thudding of the compressors and the echo of the machines’ belts turning. He reported that the bosses’ answer was still no.

At once the crowd started to break up: the union reps shouted “Silence!”. At first the workers ran, but then slowed to creep round the western side of the huge offices. The stairs were weighed down by the mass of men gripping the guide-rails. Low voices could be heard, chanting “Ho! Hiss! Ho! Hiss!”. Finally, the door crept open and the crowd burst into the tracing room, their cries dampened by the soundproofed ceiling. The temps were petrified: what were they going to do? The crowd called on them to join their number, but there was a moment’s hesitation… the workers tried to contact the temps’ reps; the crowd advanced through the offices; the anger mounted; but a few temps didn’t want to follow. Finally, the temps’ reps called for a walkout: there were cries of victory among the occupiers. Through the windows you could hear some of the workers crowded in the yard.

They took the stairs down to the director’s office on the first floor. Songs and slogans reverberated through the corridors as the crowd flowed into the hall and occupied the management corridor.

The director came out of his office, flanked by his personnel manager. He forced a smile and said “I am your prisoner, do with me what you will”, a statement greeted with shouts of “Duvochel will give in! We want our pay back! Sign the deal!”. The director replied “You’re not going to get very far with that”.

Anger was reaching a climax. The crowding in the corridor was terrible. The lights kept going out. Fists drummed on the walls to the rhythm “Com-pen-sa-tion”. The director was pushed about roughly, and in vain did he try and escape from the hands of this gang in their dirty blue overalls. An ORTF [French state television] reporter they found there with a camera in his hands (no doubt, he was invited in by the bosses) was precipitously pushed through an office door.

It was impossible to breathe. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, and the smell of oil on the workers’ overalls and sweat made the crowding unbearable. A bar of soap flew over the workers’ heads, striking the boss on the shoulder, and this was followed by a jet of water thrown from the toilet door. What was going to happen? Would somebody lose their nerve? For now at least they were only using their fists to strike up the Internationale.

Already at this stage some people scared by the power of the revolt had hurried out of the premises. But a spontaneous occupation was beginning. Union men arrived and told all the boilermakers to help them seal shut the exits in order to stop workers reluctant to strike leaving the building. Men were already guarding the main exits.

In the management corridor a state of relative calm had been restored, and the director was allowed to telephone Paris. They waited. They sat around. They offered the boss a chair. The men sat on the floor of the corridor and began a series of revolutionary anthems, which would last throughout the first night. Their throats were dry: a litre of red wine passed from mouth to mouth. They offered some to the boss but he refused. They played cards.

The union reps returned from the heart of the factory. They asked them what was happening with the blockades at the exits: they told them that the boilermakers had done a good job, and the metal doors on the western and eastern exits had been soldered shut. The other doors, albeit not soldered, were bolted shut. The occupation was a fortress. There were speeches in the yard, and the workers organised patrols to watch over the exits.

People who did not participate in the action (or barely did so) emerged from their offices and workshops, impatient in the expectation that the problem would soon be sorted out… they didn’t understand the top management. The Paris bosses were totally silent, refusing to negotiate.

The normal time for clocking off came and went, and they had to start thinking about dinner: some people went to the boulangerie and the local grocer. Helped by a few volunteers the canteen staff prepared some Viandox [a product similar to Bovril]

They rigged up a loudspeaker in the bosses’ offices, and the first refrains echoed around the factory.

At the main entrance there was something of a panic, with a few people finding good excuses to escape the plant. It must be said, people were very worried, fearing that the police would come to clear out the factory and thinking about the consequences. Food supplies were a problem: the local boulangeries would not open again until the morning.

News of the occupation spread quickly: workers’ wives and friends came to see what was going on, hoping to speak to their husbands through the gates or talk to the men perched on the walls. The food brought by the workers’ wives and their support on that first night was a vital fillip for the troops’ morale.

But still no news from Paris. Now everyone was thinking about the night ahead. For beds they used boxes, stretchers, packets of fibreglass, rags, shavings of wood…

Some scabs still hoping to escape sidled along the fences, concocting plans for escape, but the more militant pickets going round were keeping an eye out for them. Workers reluctant to strike were out in force at the main entrance, despite the authorisation given to women and workers over sixty years old to leave the plant. Some pretended that they had fallen unconscious or were having nervous breakdowns. An ambulance took them home, the noise of its siren leading many people in the surrounding area to believe that there had been a fight in the factory and the ambulance was taking away the injured.

There was in fact only one injury: someone broke their leg trying to jump across a ditch. But it would be difficult to get opponents of the strike to admit the truth.

As time passed and night came, there was more and more tension at the main gates. There was a busy crowd: people were here, there and everywhere. All the other exits were tightly guarded by pickets, already solidly in place around the factory.

But the main gates were the most vulnerable, and it was here that people wanting to leave the occupation made all their efforts to try and escape. Most of them were temps, of whom there were around 150. They were increasingly angered as all their attempts to break through the blockade were rebuffed. The gates were in the hands of “People’s Guards” who enthusiastically carried out the unions’ joint instructions.

Faced with failure the people trying to escape tried to work together. Some line managers who would later take part in the “scabs’ committee” harangued: they had to bloc and try and break through the blockade by force, even if the human blockade was five or six ranks deep in front of the gate.

The picketers were ready and stood steadfast. The confrontation was brutal, and no quarter was given. In the mêlée you could hear no few daft “philosophical” arguments the rights of the individual and the right to work. But every scab who dared say his piece would get a lecture about workers’ rights!... They were allowed to speak, but not to leave.

But these holy “philosophers” were stubborn: they insisted… The situation remained rather dangerous, since they were organised together, angry and had their eyes fixed on the gates that weren’t being opened for them. But God knows what they were waiting for or what they expected to get out of this: a pressie from the picketers, perhaps? They seemed totally unaware of the importance of what was happening; they were only motivated by their little daily routines and the desire to go home.

For God’s sake! “Democracy” can be difficult at moments like that!

The defence of the main gate was reinforced, since it was important strategically. If they managed to get through there, the whole movement might have gone under. Furthermore, given the course of events, the picketers became more skittish and more unrelenting. But these were only arguments about organisation and exasperation caused by the events: most of the time they just had to go out and get snacks or take food for a striking worker from one of their friends or relatives.

On the other hand, for a few vulnerable souls ill-prepared for such happenings the workers’ “militia” banded together at the entrance raised a few moral and intellectual dilemmas! Without doubt, many of them only had a few fairly naïve ideas about factory occupations gleaned here and there from little history books or sentimental and superficial memories of June 1936.

But those who wanted to leave met with failure, and their exit-by-force was never carried through… their rubbish leaders eventually gave up. They thought about making a few individual openings through the security ring surrounding the factory, hoping to evade the patrols who continued to circle the factory and scoured through the bushes; the bushes where a few scabs had planned to hide themselves for a few hours before reaching their selfish little abodes.

The other scabs stood silent in front of the entrance or returned in small groups to the yard, waiting for better times. Most of them, despite everything, did manage to escape during the first days and nights of the occupation. But that would be no great threat to the success of the factory occupation. Nor was it a great loss for most of the people actively involved in the “new commune” which was being born. These people would later be found in the scabs’ committee. To each his own: the fainthearted outside, the “workers making history” inside.

What mattered was that the gates held, and the movement with them… Some will always make great play of criticising the harsh measures taken to achieve this, at a crucial stage of the occupation. But this type of preaching has no grip on events. They talk a lot about the brutal attitude of over-zealous pickets and of kidnapping… But to the over-zealous preachers who make these easy criticisms we say “Could it have been done differently?” Given the circumstances, the so-called “prisoners” were agents provocateurs causing trouble and regrettable confrontations which would not have taken place if it was not for their reactionary and anti-democratic attitude to a strike which was proven to be supported by the majority of workers. They are poor little preachers who know nothing except how to jabber on about the little ‘morals’ of their exploiters.

The seals on all the doors and exits of the factory were now secure. All along the 1800 metre perimeter wall which encircled the factory, workers devoted themselves to careful work planning and strengthening guard-posts. Personal and collective initiative burst forth everywhere. They set up installations reminiscent of soldiers’ watchtowers in the countryside. The blockade took place quickly and efficiently. They had to hurry as night closed in: it would be a night of unforgettable memories for all concerned, on one side or the other. A clear, cool night… brimming with activism: hard for a few splitters but exciting for the participants.

Revolutionary anthems blaring from a powerful loudspeaker echoed around the huge management offices. The director’s “guard of honour” sang along. This guard of honour was scattered pell-mell, albeit clustered in the tight, smoke-filled corridor which led to the director’s office: the men were sat, either on chairs or the floor, in an entanglement of arms and legs in overalls.

Outside a ring of fire was in the works. The cold of the night fell on the workers’ lightly-clothed shoulders, and everywhere a thousand flaming braziers cast arabesques into the spring night. All these hungry fires consumed an incredible amount of fuel. Contraptions went round in all directions carrying huge quantities of planks, logs and boxes… All night you had the feeling of living in the middle of a tank column, such was the noise of engines cutting through the silence. The enormous reddish flames lit up the walls and also served as spotlights, which was of great help to those watching from guard-posts along the walls.

Small groups of scabs wandered round the factory all night, like sleepwalkers, with their little bags in their arms, hoping to find a way out or some gap in the surveillance that would allow them to escape. These people’s wandering around, clasping little bags in which people normally carried snacks, displayed the “reluctant” workers’ lack of understanding of what was taking place.

The posts which were rather more spread out 'into nature' were served by some odd contraptions: boxes which normally served as packaging for fridges made by Frigeavia, a workshop at the factory which made fridges. The workers wedged themselves into these improvised 'coffins', lay down and closed the boxes again to protect themselves from the cold. Seeing all these bodies lined up in rows in these boxes, one could not help but think of mummies in their tombs! They only took off their work shows. This morbid sight had a fantastical allure, added to by the hallucinogenic effect of the brazier flames. The few white faces you could see in the boxes had a spectral quality when lit up by the flames. The effect was eye-catching, and you couldn’t help but smile, knowing that they were alive and well and your friends. But few of them managed to get much rest, since the day’s events had been so exciting. How could you sleep on a night as special as this? That morning they left their families at home and now, voilà, they suddenly found themselves thrown into an extreme confrontational situation. Groups of people who couldn’t sleep gathered round fires and conversed in hushed tones. There was an amazing feeling of solidarity, brotherhood and power in this bivouac assembly.

News of the occupation quickly spread to the households of Nantes and the surrounding area. A few cars driven by worried wives circled the plant, stopping before the guard post fires. Names were shouted over the walls and through the bars. But it was difficult to make contact with this or that occupier lost in the mas of men scattered across the workshops, offices, wagons and boxes. Only later, when loudspeakers were installed at the main entrance to beam out the names of the comrades asked for, could contact finally be made more easily.

Throughout the night a team of volunteers went from one post to the next carrying an enormous stew pot full of burning hot bouillon and snacks, which served as some comfort on this cold night. For almost everyone this was a night without sleep, a night of nervous tension, all eyes focused on the guard-posts and ears straining to hear news from Paris. But Paris slept…

The big offices were lit up, a permanent headquarters. There, there was no question of trying to sleep even for a minute. It was the place where picketers and activists came to see the boss. For many this was the first time they had met: each of them introduced themselves. In the last few hours “power” had changed hands in the factory. An atmosphere of free discussion reigned; conversation with the old “authorities” was direct and good-humoured; there was curiosity but not hatred.

Revolutionary anthems followed one after the other without end. The corridor was very musical indeed: some songs were moving, sung in unison or listened to in complete silence by the bosses’ guards, and made these people of strength and solidarity - smoking cigarette after cigarette as they supervised the door – watch the birth of this new brash and loud working-class order with deadpan faces. What did they feel as the night wore on? Without doubt, they could only have a limited view of given their lack of direct participation in events outside the office at the guard-posts.

The cold, pale dawn had not yet come to an end, an odd sight for these tired men shivering with insomnia and the nerves build up over the last month. The frippery bodies started to clamber out of their boxes. Their bearded faces hung heavy; their eyes were as red as the last night’s brazier fires. But the moment would pass: time to wake up and have a coffee. Down the length of the wall they could feel the hawthorns; a perfumed bouquet for the “campers” every breakfast-time. Spring and the strike had both arrived: in the morning daisies and hawthorns would start to flower on the cabin roofs.

Throughout the day on 15th May, the factory and its surroundings looked like a giant building site, but the workers soon improved the scene and their ramshackle structures, beginning to construct coverings and cabins. No need for leaders or orders from the union for this ant colony. Solidarity and self-discipline could work wonders.

The “commune” took shape, a “People’s Administration” putting things in place with surprising efficiency. Participants, supporters and locals were struck dumb by all this upheaval. Soon enough, around a kilometre down the road from the factory, a sign put up by the trade unions’ joint committee delineated the borders of the occupied area. It invited passers-by to take a diversion down the Couëts road to get to the Château-Bougon aerodrome.

A hundred metres from the plant they duly erected a blockade with chicanes for cars; there was a special way through for pedestrians. Notices were dug into the ground. New regulations were enacted: to take the “rue de l’Aviation” required a special pass: the “exterior” guard stopped people not from the factory venturing within their “perimeter”.

Only trade union, political party and student delegations that came in the early hours of the morning to bring solidarity to the striking workers were allowed in: but they were not allowed past the red barriers placed around the plant.

At the main entrance they set up an information service with loudspeakers: its work was unceasing and tiring, since workers’ relatives, delegations and all sorts of visitors kept coming in. By the end of the afternoon the square in front of the entrance was packed with people. Until late in the night the loudspeakers did not stop calling people and broadcasting communiqués and trade union instructions. From now on this noise would be a constant part of occupation life.

The speakers were relentless: such-and-such comrade was called to the main entrance… this comrade… that comrade…

After the last day’s anger, an unbelievable tumultuous mood continued to reign at this “iron gate”, both on the walls and among the crowds. Some of them had spent practically a whole day and night on the wall. Wives, mothers and friends were pressed up against the gates trying to see this or that friendly face, get a message across or pass across some food. Along the walls of the offices loads of young women were pressed against each other, trying to hold the hands of their young husbands or fiancés stretched through the bars of the windows.

Whatever comfort this may have offered the striking workers, the situation was plenty confused and tense. The picketers kept the doors firmly sealed, since the success of the occupation could hardly allow for any laxity. Despite this there was a certain degree of movement between the occupation and the outside world, with small groups of men going out to see their family on the other side of the gates: there was time to embrace, have a little chat and hand over a basket of food before going back. When these men had returned, others could go out in their place. They therefore tried to have some sort of balance between the numbers going out and the numbers coming in. Although there were, inevitably, some confrontations between the “supporters at the gates” (who were not exactly delighted) and the workers coming out, the men understood that they had to return all the same.

To guarantee permanent control over this worn-out post the exhausted picketers were taken off duty. They decided to “liberalise but formalise” the exits with a system of badges. Each worker was given a little card on which was written his name, the time of exit and return. The badge was signed by a trade union rep and recorded in a book. This safe-passage also allowed him through the road blockades. This “administrative and regulatory” measure allowed them bit by bit to relieve the gates while maintaining the strength of the occupation. All these details did nothing to cloud the mood.

But a bolt out of the blue in the afternoon changed the atmosphere, as the first report of success passed into the hands of the information service. The speaker cried with joy: the Renault factory at Cléon is on strike! The news spread through the aisles… the men crowded at the gates were overcome with fresh enthusiasm, and the announcement met with cries of joy.

Now the question was on everyone’s lips: is the strike going to spread? Renault: that meant something… everyone was filled with hope. Would there be a general strike tomorrow? They had talked about it so much before, but never really believed it.

May' 68: the Sorbonne Soviet

An extract from libertarian socialist Maurice Brinton's diary of the events in France in May-June 1968


On Saturday 11 May, shortly before midnight, Mr Pompidou, Prime Minister of France, overruled his Minister of the Interior and his Minister of Education, and issued orders to his 'independent' Judiciary. He announced that the police would be withdrawn from the Latin Quarter, that the faculties would re-open on Monday 13 May, and that the law would 'reconsider' the question of the students arrested the previous week. It was the biggest political climb-down of his career: For the students, and for many others, it was the living proof that direct action worked. Concessions had been won through struggle which had been unobtainable by other means. Early on the Monday morning the CRS platoons guarding the entrance to the Sorbonne were discreetly withdrawn. The students moved in, first in small groups, then in hundreds, later in thousands. By midday the occupation was complete. Every 'tricolore' was promptly hauled down, every lecture theatre occupied, Red flags were hoisted from the official flagpoles and from improvised ones at many windows, some overlooking the streets, others the big internal courtyard. Hundreds of feet above the milling students, enormous red and black flags fluttered side by side from the Chapel dome, What happened over the next few days will leave a permanent mark on the French educational system, on the structure of French society and - most important of all - on the minds of those who lived and made history during that hectic first fortnight. The Sorbonne was suddenly transformed from the fusty precinct where French capitalism selected and moulded its hierarchs, its technocrats and its administrative bureaucracy into a revolutionary volcano in full eruption whose lava was to spread far and wide, searing the social structure of modern France.

The physical occupation of the Sorbonne was followed by an intellectual explosion of unprecedented violence. Everything, literally everything, was suddenly and simultaneously up for discussion, for question, for challenge. There were no taboos. It is easy to criticise the chaotic upsurge of thoughts, ideas and proposals unleashed in such circumstances. 'Professional revolutionaries' and petty bourgeois philistines criticised to their heart's content. But in so doing they only revealed how they themselves were trapped in the ideology of a previous epoch and were incapable of transcending it. They failed to recognise the tremendous significance of the new: of all that could not be apprehended within their own pre-established intellectual categories. The phenomenon was witnessed again and again, as it doubtless has been in every really great upheaval in history.

Day and night, every lecture theatre was packed out, the seat of continuous, passionate debate on every subject that ever preoccupied thinking humanity. No formal lecturer ever enjoyed so massive an audience, was ever listened to with such rapt attention - or given such short shrift if he talked nonsense. A kind of order rapidly prevailed. By the second day a noticeboard had appeared near the front entrance announcing what was being talked about, and where. l noted'. 'Organisation of the struggle'; 'Political and trade union rights in the University'; 'University crisis or social crisis?'. 'Dossier of police repression'; 'Self-management'; 'Non-selection' (or how to open the doors of the University to everyone); 'Methods of teaching'; 'Exams', etc. Other lecture theatres were given over to the students-workers liaison committees, soon to 'assume great importance. In yet other hales, discussions were under way on 'sexual repression', on 'the colonial question', on 'ideôlogy and mystification', Any group of people wishing to discuss anything under the sun would just take over one of the lecture theatres or smaller rooms. Fortunately there were dozens of these. The first impression was of a gigantic lid suddenly lifted, of pent-up thoughts and aspirations suddenly exploding, on being released from the realm of dreams into the realm of the real and the possible. In changing their environment people themselves were changed. Those who had never dared say anything suddenly felt their thoughts to be the most important thing in the world and said so. The shy became communicative. The helpless and isolated suddenly discovered that collective power lay in their hands. The traditionally apathetic suddenly realized the intensity of their involvement. A tremendous surge of community and cohesion gripped those who had previously seen themselves as isolated and impotent puppets, dominated by institutions that they could neither control nor understand. People just went up and talked to one another without a trace of self-consciousness. This state of euphoria lasted throughout the whole fortnight I was there, An inscription scrawled on a wall sums it up perfectly'. 'Déjà dix jours de bonheur' (ten days of happiness already).

In the yard of the Sorbonne, politics (frowned on for a generation) took over with a vengeance. Literature stalls sprouted up along the whole inner perimeter, Enormous portraits appeared on the internal walls: Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro, Guevara, a revolutionary resurrection breaking the bounds of time and place. Even Stalin put in a transient appearance (above a Maoist stall) until it was tactfully suggested to the comrades that he wasn't really at home in such company.
On the stalls themselves every kind of literature suddenly blossomed forth in the summer sunshine: leaflets and pamphlets by anarchists, Stalinists, Maoists, Trotskyists (three varieties), the [left social-democrat] PSU and the non-committed. The yard of the Sorbonne had become a gigantic revolutionary drug-store, in which the most esoteric products no longer had to be kept beneath the counter but could now be prominently displayed. Old issues of journals, yellowed by the years, were unearthed and often sold as well as more recent material. Everywhere there were groups of 10 or 20 people, in heated discussion, people talking about the barricades, about the CRS and about their own experiences, but also about the commune of 1871 , about 1905 and 1917, about the Italian left in 1921 and About France in 1936. A fusion was taking place between the consciousness Of the revolutionary minorities and the consciousness of whole new layers Of people, dragged day by day into the maelstrom of political controversy. The students were learning within days what it had taken others a lifetime to learn. Many lichens came to see What it was all about. They too got sucked into the vortex. I remember a boy of 14 explaining to an incredulous man of 60 why students should have the right to depose professors.

Other things also happened. A large piano suddenly appeared In the great central yard and remained there for several days. People would come and play on it, surrounded by enthusiastic supporters. As people talked in the lecture theatres of neo-capitalism and of its techniques of manipulation, strands of Chopin and bars of jazz, bits of La Carmagnole and atonal compositions wafted through the air. One evening there was a drum recital, then some clarinet players took over. These 'diversions' may have infuriated some of the more single-minded revolutionaries, but they were as much part and parcel of the total transformation of the Sorbonne as were the revolutionary doctrines being proclaimed in the lecture hails. An exhibition of huge photographs of the 'night of the barricades' (in beautiful half-tones) appeared one morning, mounted on stands. No-tine knew who had put it up. Everyone agreed that it succinctly summarised the horror and glamour, the anger and promise of that fateful night. Even the doors of the Chapel giving on to the yard were soon covered with inscriptions: 'open this door - Finis, le tabernacles','Religion is the last mystification'. Or more prosaically: 'We want somewhere to piss, not somewhere to pray'. The massive outer walls of the Sorbonne were likewise soon plastered with posters - posters announcing the first sit-in strikes, posters describing the wage rates of whole sections of Paris workers, posters announcing the next demonstrations, posters describing the solidarity marches in Peking, posters denouncing the police repression and the use of CS gas (as well as of ordinary tear-gas) against the demonstrators. There were posters, dozens of them, warning students against the Communist Party's band-wagon jumping tactics, telling them how it had attacked their movement and how it was now seeking to assume its leadership. Political posters in plenty. But also others, proclaiming the new ethos. A big one for instance near the main entrance, boldly proclaimed 'Défense d'interdire' (Forbidding forbidden). And others, equally to the point: 'Only the truth is revolutionary', 'Our revolution is greater than ourselves', 'We refuse the role assigned to us, will not be trained as police dogs'. People's concerns varied but converged. The posters reflected the deeply libertarian prevailing philosophy: 'Humanity will only be happy when the last capitalist has been strangled with the guts of the last bureaucrat'', 'Culture is disintegrating. Create!','I take my wishes for reality for I believe in the reality of my wishes'; or more simply, 'Creativity, spontaneity, life'. In the street outside, hundreds of passers-by would stop to read these improvised wall-newspapers. Some gaped. Some sniggered Some nodded assent. Some argued, Some, summoning their courage: actually entered the erstwhile sacrosanct premises, as they were being exhorted to by numerous posters proclaiming that the Sorbonne was now open to all, Young workers who 'wouldn't have been seen in that place' a month ago now walked in groups, at first rather self-consciously, later as if they owned the place, which of course they did.

As the days went by, another kind of invasion took place -- the invasion by the cynical and the unbelieving, or - more charitably - by those who 'had only come to see'. It gradually gained momentum. At certain stages it threatened to paralyse the serious work being done, part of which had to be hived off to the Faculty of Letters, at Censing, also occupied by the students. It was felt necessary, however, for the doors to be kept open, 24 hours a day. The message certainly spread. Deputations came first from other universities, then from high schools, later from factories and offices, to look, to question, to argue, to study.

The most telling sign, however, of the new and heady climate was to be found on the wails of the Sorbonne corridors. Around the main lecture theatres there is a maze of such corridors', dark, dusty, depressing, and hitherto unnoticed passageways leading from nowhere in particular to nowhere else. Suddenly these corridors sprang to life in a firework of luminous mural wisdom - much of it of Situationist inspiration. Hundreds of people suddenly stopped to read such pearls as: 'Do not consume Marx. Live it'; 'The future will only contain what we put into it now'; 'When examined. we will answer with questions'', 'Professors, you make us feel old' ; 'One doesn't compose with a society in decomposition'', 'We must remain the unadapted ones'; 'Workers of all lands, enjoy yourselves' : 'Those who carry out a revolution only half-way through merely dig themselves a tomb (St Just), 'Please leave the PC (Communist Party) as clean on leaving as you would like to find it on entering '; 'The tears of the philistines are the nectar of the gods',' 'GO and die in Naples. with the Club Mediterranée'; 'Long live communication, down with telecommunication' ' 'Masochism today dresses up as reformism ; We will claim nothing. We will ask for nothing. We will take. We will occupy'; 'The only outrage to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was the outrage that put him there'', 'No, we won't be picked up by the Great Party of the Working Class', And a big inscription, well displayed'. 'Since 1936 l have fought for wage increases, My father, before me, also fought for wage increases. Now I have a telly, a fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet all in all, my life has always been a dog's life. Don't discuss with the bosses. Eliminate them.'

Day after day the courtyard and corridors are crammed, the scene of an incessant bi-directional flow to every conceivable part of the enormous building. It may look like chaos, but it is the chaos of a beehive or of an anthill. A new structure is gradually being evolved. A canteen has been organised in one big hall, people pay what they can afford for glasses of orange juice, 'menthe', or 'grenadine' and for ham or sausage rolls. l enquire whether costs are covered and am toad they more or less break even. In another part of the building a children's creche has been set up, elsewhere a first-aid station, elsewhere a dormitory. Regular sweeping-up rotas are organised. Rooms are allocated to the Occupation Committee, to the Press Committee, to the Propaganda Committee, to the student- worker liaison committees, to the committees dealing with foreign students, to the action committees of Lyceens, to the committees dealing with the allocation of premises, and to the numerous commissions undertaking special projects such as the compiling of a dossier on police atrocities, the study of the implications of autonomy, of the examination system, etc. Anyone seeking work can readily find it. The composition of the committees was very variable. It often changed from day to day, as the committees gradually found their feel. To those who pressed for instant solutions to every problem it would be answered: "patience, comrade give us a chance to evolve an alternative. The bourgeoisie has controlled this university for nearly two centuries. It has solved nothing. We are building from rock bottom, We need a month or two...''

Confronted with this tremendous explosion which it had neither foreseen nor been able to control the Communist Party tried desperately to salvage what it could of its shattered reputation. Between 3 May and 13 May every issue of I'Humanité had carried paragraphs either attacking the students or making slimy innuendoes about them. Now the line suddenly changed, The Party sent dozens of its best agitators into the Sorbonne to 'explain' its case. The case was a simple one. The Party 'supported the students' - even if there were a few 'dubious elements' in their leadership. It 'always had'. It always would. Amazing scenes followed. Every Stalinist 'agitator' would immediately be surrounded by a large group of well-informed young people, denouncing the Party's counter-revolutionary role. A wall-paper had been put up by the comrades of Voix Ouvrière on which had been posted, day by day, every statement attacking the students to have appeared in I'Humanite- or in any of a dozen Party leaflets. The 'agitators' couldn't get a word in edgeways. They would be jumped on (non-violently). ''The evidence was over there, comrade. Would the Party comrades like to come and read just exactly what the Party had been saying not a week ago? Perhaps I'Humanité would like to grant the students space to reply to some of the accusations made against them?'' Others in the audience would then bring up the Party's role during the Algerian War, during the miners' strike of 1958, during the years of 'tripartisme' (1945-1947). Wriggle as they tried, the 'agitators' just could not escape this kind of 'instant education'. It was interesting to note that the Party could not entrust this 'salvaging' operation to its younger, student members. Only the 'older comrades' could safely venture into this hornets' nest. So much so that people would say that anyone in the Sorbonne over the age of 40 was either a copper's nark or a stalinist stooge. The most dramatic periods of the occupation were undoubtedly the 'Assemblées Générales', or plenary sessions, held every' night in the giant amphitheatre. This was the soviet, the ultimate source of all decisions, the fount and origin of direct democracy. The amphitheatre could seat up to 5000 people in its enormous hemicycle, surmounted by three balcony tiers. As often as not every seat was taken and the crowd would flow up the aisles and onto the podium, A black flag and a red one hung over the simple wooden table at which the chairman sat. Having seen meetings of 50 break up in chaos it is an amazing experience to see a meeting of 5000 get down to business. Real events determined the themes and ensured that most of the talk was down to earth.

The topic having been decided, everyone was allowed to speak. Most speeches were made from the podium but some from the body of the hall or from the balconies. The loudspeaker equipment usually worked but sometimes didn't. Some speakers could command immediate attention, without even raising their voice. Others would instantly provoke a hostile response by the stridency of their tone, their insincerity or their more or less obvious attempts at manoeuvring the assembly. Anyone who waffled, or reminisced, or came to recite a set-piece, or talked in terms of slogans, was given shod shrift by the audience, politically the most sophisticated I have ever seen. Anyone making practical suggestions was listened to attentively. So were those who sought to interpret the movement in terms of its own experience or to point the way ahead.

Most speakers were granted three minutes, Some were allowed much more by popular acclaim. The crowd itself exerted a tremendous control on the platform and on the speakers. A two-way relationship emerged very quickly. The political maturity of the Assembly was shown most strikingly in its rapid realization that booing or cheering during speeches slowed down the Assembly's own deliberations. Positive speeches were loudly cheered - at the end. Demagogic or useless ones were impatiently swept aside, Conscious revolutionary minorities played an important catalytic role in these deliberations, but never sought - at least the more intelligent ones - to impose their will on the mass body. Although in the early stages the Assembly had its fair share of exhibited nests, provocateurs and nuts, the overhead costs of direct democracy were not as heavy as one might have expected.

There were moments of excitement and moments of exhortation. On the night of 13 May, after the massive march through the streets of Paris, Daniel Cohn-Bandit confronted J M Catala, general secretary of the Union of Communist Students in front of the packed auditorium. The scene remains printed in my mind. ''Explain to us'', Cohn-Bandit said, ''why the Communist Party and the CGT told their militants to disperse at Denfed Rochereau, why it prevented them joining up with us for a discussion at the Champ de Mars?'' "simple, really'' sneered Catala. ''The agreement concluded between the CGT, the CFDT, the UNEF and the other sponsoring organizations stipulated that dispersal would take place at a predetermined place. The Joint Sponsoring Committee had not sanctioned any further developments...'' ''A revealing answer'', replied Cohn-Bandit, ''the organizations hadn't foreseen that we would be a million in the streets. But life is bigger than the organizations. With a million people almost anything is possible. You say the Committee hadn't sanctioned anything further. On the day of the Revolution, comrade, you will doubtless tell us to forego it 'because it hasn't been sanctioned by the appropriate sponsoring committee'...''

This brought the house down. The only ones who didn't rise to cheer were a few dozen Stalinists. Also, revealingly, those Trotskyists who tacitly accepted the Stalinist conceptions - and whose only quarrel with the CP is that it had excluded them from being one of the 'sponsoring organisations'. That same night the Assembly took three important decisions. From now on the Sorbonne would constitute itself as a revolutionary headquarters ('Smolny', someone shouted). Those who worked there would devote their main efforts not to a mere re-organisation of the educational system, but to a total subversion of bourgeois society. From now on the University would be open to all those who subscribed to these aims. The proposals having been accepted the audience rose to a man and sang the loudest, most impassioned 'Internationale' I have ever heard. The echoes must have reverberated as far as the Elysee Palace on the other side of the River Seine...

The Lambertists

Pierre Lambert was in his time one of those “orthodox Trotskyists” who kept a banner of anti-Stalinist revolutionary Marxism flying in the worst years of Cold War and declining class struggle.

They tried — incoherently, but they tried — to resist the move of most “orthodox Trotskyists”, in the early 1950s, to see the Stalinist parties as the “owners” of all short-term revolutionary possibilities; they tried to sustain the idea of building an independent revolutionary working-class party against both capitalism and Stalinism.

Today the “Lambertist” organisation, now known as the Parti des Travailleurs (“Workers’ Party”), is a shadow of its former self. It has lost the thousands-strong activist base which Lambert won in the 1970s; it retains only some cranky ideas and a bureaucratic internal regime to remind Lambert’s disciples of what once was. The death of the sect-leader Lambert is far less sad than the tale of those who followed him, committed revolutionaries who acquiesced to the rule of an petty tyrant and his coterie in the belief that they were contributing to the cause of socialism and the liberation of humanity, and were politically destroyed and demoralised by the experience.

Lambert’s early record was rather better. Having joined the Trotskyist movement in 1939, Lambert was arrested in the early months of the Second World War and sentenced to a year in prison for his “anti-militarist” attitude to the French government. Escaping en route to prison, Lambert joined Henri Molinier’s La Commune group, but was soon expelled due to his hostility to the organisation’s efforts to win supporters from the Nazi-collaborationist Rassemblement National Populaire.

In 1943 Lambert joined the Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste, which the following year merged into the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI), an ancestor not just of the Parti des Travailleurs but also of another current French Trotskyist group, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire.

By the end of the Nazi occupation, there were maybe three hundred Trotskyists in the PCI in France. These activists attempted to organise unrest in industry as well as promote working-class internationalism, using the slogan “behind every Nazi soldier is a German worker!” to combat the French chauvinist ideas of the Kremlin-backed Parti Communiste Français, whose watchword was “everyone kill a German”. Facing tough circumstances, the PCI mounted a heroic effort to propagandise for socialism among the German troops, organising the clandestine production and distribution of a newspaper Arbeiter und Soldat (“Worker and Soldier”). No doubt, the PCI bent the stick too far with its June 1944 claim that the Normandy landings would see no improvement over the rule of the fascist Vichy government. It took a while before they could recognise that bourgeois democracy was in fact being restored in France. Their hopes that the end of the Second World War would end with a revolutionary wave akin to the struggles of 1917-1923 proved to be naive. Nonetheless the group had a firm orientation to working-class political independence.

That was more than could be said for the Parti Communiste Français which allied itself to Charles de Gaulle and served in a cross-class government after the end of the war. Among many Communist Party crimes in this period perhaps the most ignominious was its complicity in the bombing of Sétif in Algeria — overseen by its Minister of Aviation, Tillon — which left 45,000 dead. The Trotskyists supported national liberation movements in France’s colonies — for example organising Marseilles dockers not to load arms into boats headed for Indochina.

But the CP’s patriotic aura from the Resistance, and the great prestige of the Soviet Union, assured it a dominant role in the working-class movement, with over a million members and near-monopoly control of the apparatus of the largest union federation, the Confédération Générale du Travail.

Pierre Lambert became the central trade union organiser for the PCI, which grew to about 1000 members by 1947.

The PCI was divided. Yvan Craipeau, Paul Parisot, Albert Demaziere were influenced by the arguments of the American Trotskyist Felix Morrow, who called for less declamatory revolutionism, more attention to concrete political demands including simple democratic demands, and more recognition of the realities of relative bourgeois stabilisation. They hoped to build a broad party by merging with the left-moving youth of the social-democratic SFIO.

A minority, led by Pierre Frank, Marcel Bleibtreu, and others, denounced Craipeau’s group as “right wing”. Lambert was not a major figure in these political battles.

Since 1944 the CP had been able to prevent almost all strike action. In April-May 1947 the dam broke, in a big strike at the Renault Billancourt car factory. Trotskyists played a big role in this; Pierre Bois, a member of a forerunner group of today’s Lutte Ouvrière was a strike leader, and PCI members were also active at Renault.

The Communist Party left the government coalition. In November-December 1947 the CP launched a big strike wave, but pretty much as a political gambit to counter the harder attitude De Gaulle and the bourgeois parties were taking to the CP with the development of the Cold War.

The right wing in the CGT, with CIA backing — and a fair number of left-wingers, too, including anarcho-syndicalists — split from the CGT to form a new confederation, Force Ouvrière.

At first the rise in strikes encouraged the PCI. The “left wing” of Frank and Bleibtreu won a majority at the November 1947 congress of the PCI. Agitation to “build the revolutionary party” became more strident.

The strikes, however, were the start not of a real rise in working-class self-assertion, but of the dark years of the Cold War. The Communist Party waged war on all Trotskyists and independent minded revolutionaries in the labour movement, hounding its opponents out of the CGT, breaking up meetings and perpetrating physical assaults.

In early 1948 the PCI suffered a major collapse. Its weekly paper stopped appearing after 16 April 1948; it resumed regular publication, and then in diminished format, only from November, with just three issues published in the interim.

Most of the left wing Socialist Party youth went into to Jean-Paul Sartre’s short-lived Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire; so did many of the Craipeau wing of the PCI. Two smaller groups in the PCI who believed the Soviet Union to be state capitalist also left.

The rump PCI struggled to reorient itself in a world that was developing in a way completely different from what they had expected.

For a while, activity with the “Titoites” — supporters of the Tito regime in Yugoslavia, which had fallen out with Stalin in summer 1948 — appeared to offer the PCI a way out. Like many Trotskyists, Lambert had been expelled from the CGT in 1950. He started work in Force Ouvrière, and, helped by funds from the Yugoslav embassy, was able to start a newsletter advocating trade-union unity on a democratic basis. The PCI also organised some 3000 volunteers to go to Yugoslavia in work brigades.

But all that was based on gross illusions about the nature of the Tito regime; ended embarrassedly when Tito backed the USA in the Korean war; and anyway brought the PCI little profit.

Michel Pablo, the main international leader of “orthodox Trotskyism”, started to argue that a Third World War between the USA and the Stalinist bloc was imminent and certain; that in that war, the Communist Parties would be forced into a “roughly revolutionary orientation against capitalism”; and that Trotskyists should therefore join the Communist Parties.

Bleibtreu and others criticised Pablo (though, in hindsight, very insufficiently: their attitude to Tito and Mao was no more critical than Pablo’s). They rejected Pablo’s notion that world politics was defined by the two “blocs”, US imperialism and Stalinism; they contested Pablo’s ideas that there was no point in opposing World War Three and that in any case nothing of any significance could be done before World War Three.

Lambert still played little role in the theoretical debates. But he tended towards Bleibtreu, who had a majority in the PCI. And then in early 1952 Pablo instructed the PCI to send most of its activists into the French Communist Party.

The PCI readily agreed to send a limited number of peopple in to do “fraction work” within the CP. Pablo insisted that the PCI must send its leading activists in, even if they would have to make grovelling denunciations of their Trotskyist “past” in order to gain entry — and, of course, in those days of high Stalinism, they would have to.

The PCI split. A majority, maybe 150 as compared to the thousand members of 1947, defied Pablo. A couple of dozen, with Frank, complied. Lambert, with his trade union work relying on networks in Force Ouvriere, went with Bleibtreu.

Lambert was still not the “leader” of the group. Over the next three years or so, he became that. The “theoreticians”, Bleibtreu, Michel Lequenne, Jacques Danos, Marcel Gibelin, were forced out between 1953 and 1955.

From all accounts, this was not just a matter of Lambert being authoritarian. Bleibtreu and the others were demoralised and disoriented. They were flummoxed, and understandably so, by the way the world had turned out.

Lambert had no better theories. But he did have ideas about what to do, organisational talent and energy to make them happen, and a temperament that left him not too bothered about the theoretical issues.

Lambert developed contacts among left wingers in Force Ouvriere and in the Socialist Party, and in the wing of the Algerian independence movement led by Messali Hadj. Operationally, in the mid 50s, the Lambert group became almost a variety of anarcho-syndicalism.

Its paper La Vérité had headlines like: “The odious comedy of elections will change nothing. Let’s prepare the struggle for power!” (16 December 1955); “General strike for bread and peace” (28 September 1956 and against 19 September 1957); “War and poverty or socialist revolution” (27 December 1956); and “The general strike can win 10,000 francs increase for all and peace in Algeria” (17 October 1957). Week after week it hammed away on the call for troops out of Algeria, wage increases, and a general strike to win them.

1958 brought a sudden shock and a drastic shift in orientation. In May 1958, General De Gaulle was brought back to power by a military coup, executed by the army in Algeria. He abolished the old parliamentary constitution and set up a new presidential “Fifth Republic”. As it turned out, De Gaulle would retain an essentially bourgeois-democratic regime rather than going further, and concede independence to Algeria; but many leftists thought they faced a military dictatorship.

Meanwhile, Messali Hadj’s movement was eclipsed by the rival Algerian-nationalist FLN, and moved towards compromise with De Gaulle.

Dismayed, the Lambertists shut down their weekly paper, declaring that “It is not slogans for action, which is impossible for now, that the vanguard workers need today”. In the modest duplicated bulletin they started to replace it, they wrote: “The working class today is incapable of intervening as such in political struggles”.

A heavy stress on defensive demands, on the “workers’ united front”, and on deep burrowing within trade-union officialdom, came to be the hallmarks of the Lambert group.

They developed extensive contacts within the world of free-masonry and a habit of having “undercover” members in the most unlikely places. Lionel Jospin, who would eventually become Socialist Party prime minister, turns out to have been still been paying dues to the Lambertist group as late as 1987, when Jospin was already a well-integrated part of the inner circle round Socialist Party president Francois Mitterrand.

The 1952 split in the PCI merged into an international split in “orthodox Trotskyism” in 1953. Lambert joined a new international network with Gerry Healy in Britain and James P Cannon and the Socialist Workers’ Party in the USA. They were known as the International Committee of the Fourth International.

In 1963 Healy’s and Lambert’s groups separated from the Americans. In 1970 Lambert would split from Healy, rejecting the British group’s increasingly manic ultra-leftism; but by the 1960s Lambert’s group, in its internal organisation, had become much like Healy’s.

There was a culture of top-down control, rather than of democracy. More and more, everything was centred round Lambert’s efforts to build a strong organisational machine and to establish a network of contacts and influence around by bending the ears of people in prominent positions. At the end, all the general secretaries of Force Ouvriere for the last forty years felt obliged to honour Lambert by attending his funeral.

Lambert’s most famous ally was Alexandre Hébert. Hébert, a self-proclaimed anarcho-syndicalist, was operationally a careerist bureaucrat and the little Napoleon of the Force Ouvrière union in Loire-Atlantique from 1947 until 1992 (now succeeded by his own son, Patrick!). Moreover, as I discovered when I interviewed Hébert in researching a study of May 1968, his attitudes to immigrants are racist. In 1995, he contributed to Jean-Marie le Pen’s paper Français d’abord (“The French first”), outlining his hostility towards immigrants. Hébert and his periphery joined the Parti des Travailleurs.

From the early 1960s, the Lambert group grew again. It had won over a very slow trickle of discontented CPers and well-known intellectuals such as the historians Jean-Jacques Marie and Pierre Broué. It grew seriously among students, and began to copy the Healy view that its sect was the revolutionary party in embryo. The most startling example was the group’s attitude towards the student movements of the late 1960s and the general strike of May-June 1968.

Despite the low ebb of the workers’ movement, the years leading up to “May ‘68” saw a rise in student activism, with questions such as the Fouchet plan’s technocratic reorganisation of the education system, war in Vietnam, and sexual radicalism feeding a burgeoning movement.

The Lambertists’ CLER was the largest student organisation to the left of the Communist Party. It favoured basic bread-and-butter student unionism and stressed that building their own organisation was the best way of fighting the Fouchet reforms. The sexual revolution was very much off the agenda of this group! Eschewing meaningful engagement in anti-war activity with the youth group JCR (close to the mainstream Fourth International) or the Maoist youth, the UJCml, the CLER imitated the Lambertists in industry and arranged a panoply of “action committees”, “co-ordination committees” and “committees for struggle” which were in reality very shallow fronts for their own organisation. CLER was however (of course!) interested in taking positions in the bureaucracy of the students’ union UNEF!

Over the winter of 1967-1968, as Strasbourg and Nantes universities and the Nanterre Faculty of Paris University saw rising waves of student activism, including anti-war demonstrations, occupying halls of residence in protest against gender segregation, and large student strikes, the Lambertists focused their efforts on building a rally of their own members and periphery, looking to galvanise their “party” rather than agitate in broader movements.

The January/February 1968 issue of the CLER newspaper Révoltes carried a call for “a rally of 3,500 youth at the Mutualité on the 29-30 June”, and articles on both domestic and international politics ended with a call for activists to attend this event, as if it were some catch-all solution. The next month, the April issue of Révoltes, had the same theme. One might have assumed that the plans for a rally like this would have been shelved in early May, when protests leading to the occupation of the Sorbonne by police, street battles which pitched students and young workers against the riot cops and anger at the victimisation of student activists signified great unrest among the student population. Even if other groups had played a greater role in setting events in motion than the Lambertists, a revolutionary organisation worth its salt would have wanted to get involved in the struggle. Yet Lambert’s group abstained.

The most notable flashpoint came on the evening of 10 May 1968, when a demonstration of students, lycée pupils and young workers through Paris, protesting against the police occupation of the Sorbonne, met with lines of riot police and blockades in the Latin Quarter. After several days of skirmishes and small clashes, both sides were spoiling for a fight. The demonstrators levered up cobblestones, benches and street signs to construct some sixty barricades, with eight-foot paving slabs for foundations.

Twenty thousand people stood their ground against police aggression, piling up branches, petrol-soaked pieces of wood and even cars to fend off a police attack. The JCR occupied a flat as a command base and communicated to activists over the radio. But where were the Lambertists?

Having refused to cancel a planned “vanguard” meeting at the Mutualité to organise the demonstration for 13 May, the Lambertists’ five hundred-strong contingent did not reach the Latin Quarter until one in the morning, marching up to the barricades in close formation and holding red banners aloft. Upon their arrival on the front line the group’s leaders grandly announced to the protestors that they refused to “risk the necks of the revolutionary vanguard” in a supposedly pointless fight, and — calling upon the students to “disperse and organise strike committees” — promptly marched away again. Révoltes explained that “without the revolutionary party, there can be no victorious struggle. We know that we represent the only force able to organise the workers’ and students’ fight.”

Knowing that in fact they had already lost any opportunity to organise the workers’ and students’ fight from the outside themselves, the Lambertists had already gone home when the police launched their three-hour campaign to clear the streets of protestors by means of tear gas and truncheons.

The organisation was not all bad. The first factory occupation in 1968 was the direct result of the agitation of Yvon Rocton, an OCI member who was a Force Ouvrière militant at the Sud-Aviation aircraft plant near Nantes. Rocton had built up an activist base at the plant, whose workers were fighting a difficult campaign against cuts in working hours, and the strength of the student movement and the crisis of de Gaulle’s administration gave impulse to more radical workers to risk the occupation tactic rather than just occasional strikes. Rocton was able to win the argument for an occupation of the factory, but the workers also kept their boss as a prisoner in his office for over two weeks during the occupation.

The efforts of Alexandre Hébert were rather less admirable. With the Nantes police force in disarray following the sacking of their headquarters on 13 May, and the local council in considerable trouble as groups of workers in the suburbs of the city began to take over food and petrol distribution for themselves, Hébert arranged with the leader of the social-democrat local government and the head of the police (who, like Hébert, were freemasons) for the trade unions to take over the administration of the Town Hall. It was not “dual power”, as described in some accounts; at Hébert’s instigation the trade unions sought to prop up the authorities and face off spontaneous working-class action. The local authorities did not react at all to the union bureaucrats’ “taking power”, and were even invited to speak at public meetings staged by the unions for the sake of public information. As Noir et Rouge explained.

“Given the deficiency of the old authorities (police prefecture and municipal government) but also with their active support, the trade unions jointly used their respective organisations, and supporting bodies, to put in place a new power structure. Far from reopening the huge modern distribution centres — of which the workers were on strike — which would have meant taking “risks” and an attack on the rule of private property, instead they supported the small-scale farmers and shopkeepers. Stuck in the middle between this ‘social base’ of theirs and the old police and administrative apparatus, the inter-trade union committee would limit itself to pathetic vacillation until the ‘return to normality’.”

It was such bureaucratic manoeuvres that marked Pierre Lambert’s decline, rather than the grotesque physical assaults and sexual abuse of Gerry Healy committed against comrades of the OCI’s sister organisation in Britain.

The Lambert organisation constantly declared itself to be going from strength to strength, never reviewing its own problems; but in fact, after growing in the 1970s, it declined in the 1980s. Lambert expelled most of his close collaborators, one after another: Michel Varga, Charles Berg, Pierre Broué, Stéphane Just...

At the same time the Lambertists puffed up a ridiculous posture of openness. They declared a new “broad” party, the Parti des Travailleurs, supposedly comprising Socialist, Communist, Trotskyist and anarcho-syndicalist “currents”. In fact, the group is weak (except in Force Ouvriere officialdom!), and the diverse “currents” fictional.

The Parti des Travailleurs complains that the European Union is an affront to the “sovereignty” of France and calls for the “defence of the Republic”. The EU is blamed as primarily responsible for almost all social ills, and the Lambertists denounce “Brussels” is a vehicle for the agenda of the Vatican. In the 2007 Presidential elections the Parti des Travailleurs promoted Gérard Schivardi, who declared himself the “candidate of the mayors” and stressed that he would defend “mayors’ rights” against the Paris government.

It is hard to look at the career of Pierre Lambert and think of him as a defiant opponent of Stalinism or a fighter for the working class. In reality, he was neither, and the sectarian mores of his organisation were matched by its complete lack of internal democracy and debate and the ensuing stagnation of ideas.

Of course, his comrades’ intervention in the labour movement was not wholly fruitless. But essentially the activity of the Lambertist group came to be geared towards sect-building and winning influence among trade union bureaucrats rather than encouraging the working class to organise itself. Lambert’s story, in the end, is an object lesson in sectarianism, a sad chapter in the history of the Trotskyist left.

Ideology

Education, education, alienation

At Education Not for Sale's recent 'Education for Freedom' conference, I led off in a session on critiques of the organisation of education. I handed out this article, which appeared last year in Solidarity

The demand for free education is often linked to the assertion that “education is a right, not a privilege”. The right of access to education for all represents a great social conquest for the working-class, a gain perhaps even akin to healthcare. That right must be defended. But it would be short-sighted to think that the education system represented everything we want, or was not in its own way alienating, a weapon in the armoury of bourgeois ideology designed to serve the needs of capital.

Marxists oppose the division of intellectual and manual labour inherent in bourgeois society. This division is perpetuated by an educational system which divides young teenagers into those “better suited” to “academic” subjects and those deemed fit only for vocational courses. It could even be said that this government’s education agenda poses the division even more crudely than the imposition of “career paths” upon children under the old 11-plus system.

The UK now has 2,800 specialist schools, city academies and city technology colleges — 80% of all secondary schools — replacing what Alastair Campbell famously referred to as “bog standard comprehensives”. Examinations are used as enforcement for the targets and quotas of a technocratic régime. Education has become about competition, not intellectual enrichment.

Such schemes are nothing new - the not dissimilar technocratic Fouchet “reforms” of French education in the 1960s were a central cause of the student revolts culminating in the May 1968 general strike, which saw over 10,000,000 workers on strike, and occupations of factories, lycées (colleges) and universities.

One event key to the radicalisation of French students came in November 1966, when “Situationist” students elected to the leadership of the Strasbourg students’ union used university funds to produce 10,000 copies of a pamphlet, On the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy.

The pamphlet too crudely condemns naive students as unaware of bourgeois ideological manipulation. It sees trade unions and workers’ parties as nothing more than part of the system. It lashes out at everything. Perhaps the charge that students are willing to be “treated like babies” seems less harsh when we consider that the university system at that time included curfews and single-sex halls of residence where, in some cases, no visitors were allowed after 10pm... and most students didn’t make a fuss. But such conditions are even nowadays in force under régimes such as the Iranian theocracy, where students have fought bravely against the repression of their political and social activities, as well as in defence of the labour movement.

What On the Poverty of Student Life... does offer is a scathing critique of the social role of the university. Students are allowed to live in poverty, while they are inundated with the information deemed necessary for them to play a productive role in capitalist society. They are not exploited as such, for they do not produce value. But their role is both transitory and firmly within the framework of the needs of business.

“Modern capitalism and its spectacle allot everyone a specific role in a general passivity. The student is no exception to the rule. He has a provisional part to play, a rehearsal for his final role as an element in market society as conservative as the rest. Being a student is a form of initiation. An initiation which echoes the rites of more primitive societies with bizarre precision. It goes on outside of history, cut off from social reality. The student leads a double life, poised between his present status and his future role(...)

“Protected from history, the present is a mystic trance. At least in consciousness, the student can exist apart from the official truths of ‘economic life.’ But for very simple reasons: looked at economically, student life is a hard one. In our ‘society of abundance,’ he is still a pauper.”

The special freedom of youth is simply a myth, the manifesto goes on. Where is the freedom in escaping the authoritarian family only to come under the authority of the technocratic university? The role of the university system is not to inspire, to promote critical and independent thought, but to churn out specialists with a narrow, but utilitarian, world-view:

“A mechanically produced specialist is now the goal of the ‘educational system.’ A modern economic system demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking... In time, if critical thinking is repressed with enough conscientiousness, the student will come to partake of the wafer of knowledge, the professor will tell him the final truths of the world.”

These two extracts are not merely a throwback to a different age where students were respected less and could not say as they thought. The Blairite government has an identical attitude towards education “reform” as the French right did 40 years ago. “Education, education, education” comes with the condition that education serves profitability.

Upon coming to power in 1997, Tony Blair outlined his vision for education, “The focus upon education is not something that we plan for one term, one year, one Parliament. It is there for good. For there is no greater task as we face the challenges of a new global economy and a new Millennium. The countries that invest in their young people are the countries that will succeed. And if there is one issue on which I wish to be judged above all, it is this one... Business needs our schools and universities to be successful, which is why I have been keen to involve them more and more in developing our thinking — and in providing resources”

You bet he has. Aside from the marketisation of secondary education, New Labour has consistently made efforts to provide university courses which are economically useful.

Its ministers have hardly been equivocal about expressing how much better this is than so-called “education for its own sake”. In December 2004, facing criticism over course cuts, the then Education Minister Charles Clarke outlined his plan to protect just six key categories which qualified as “safeguarded courses”. This moniker implies that everything else is under threat — and the courses left behind aren’t exactly everyone’s cup of tea. Fancy “courses relevant to EU accession states”?. Or maybe you’d prefer “vocationally oriented courses, especially for technology and creative/cultural industries”? Courses suited to building economic ties with the Arab world (sorting out contracts in Iraq?) and the Far East were also touted.

Clarke comments that “it is the wider social and economic role of universities which justifies more significant state financial support”. Clearly the “social” impact of medical training programmes, which universities are having to cut back as strategic health authorities trim their budgets to reduce the NHS deficit (The Times, 28 October), is secondary to the “economic”.

The biggest joke in all this, of course, is that the government is keen to get more people into further and higher education — the aim is for 50% of young people to reach higher education by 2010, and Education Minister Alan Johnson has suggested that the school-leaving age be raised to 18 for anyone who doesn’t meet a certain “standard”.
Capital needs a well-educated workforce, particularly key for British governments as low-skilled manufacturing and service sector jobs move abroad. A vocational education is thus central to the Blairite-technocratic plans for working-class kids. The bourgeois-liberal classical education, which even now has not totally capitulated to post-modernism, is reserved for a lucky few bourgeois.

Given all this, the government’s attempt to portray subjects like history, literature and classics as élitist is more than slightly hypocritical. Charles Clarke doesn’t mess around with those woolly old-fashioned notions of study (an “adornment to society”) for its own sake. “One of the main purposes of university is to encourage people to think. But education for its own sake is a bit dodgy, too. The idea that you can learn about the world sitting in your study just reading books is not quite right.”

Strasbourg students commented on this change in the system’s imperatives: “There was once a vision — if an ideological one — of a liberal bourgeois university. But as its social base disappeared, the vision became banality. In the age of free-trade capitalism, when the ‘liberal’ state left it its marginal freedoms, the university could still think of itself as an independent power. Of course it was a pure and narrow product of that society's needs — particularly the need to give the privileged minority an adequate general culture before they rejoined the ruling class (not that going up to university was straying very far from class confines). But the bitterness of the nostalgic don... is understandable: better, after all, to be the bloodhound of the haute bourgeoisie than sheepdog to the world’s white-collars. Better to stand guard on privilege than harry the flock into their allotted factories and offices.”

In the face of technocratic “reforms” of education, it would be foolish, as much of the bourgeois media does, to hark back to the earlier pre-technocratic age of fewer students and governments happy for working-class kids not to get into higher education. The much-decried “media studies” type-courses are not the “fault” of today’s students — deemed stupider than ever by the Mail, Express etc. — but have been created to fit new types of job which workers must do.

There was never anything like universal “study for its own sake” in any case. But what would education be like in a communist world, where the economic reality is a society of abundance and the detritus of the class order, bourgeois ideologies — whether authoritarian or post-modern — and alienation had been cleared away?
That there would be equal opportunity for all and an open, critical, reflective culture goes without saying. Hard as it is to envisage that future, I think a tempting glimpse is offered by the way in which students ran occupied universities, above all the Sorbonne, during the general strike of May 1968.

Of course, it was a creation of largely middle-class students within the parameters of a deeply inequitable economy, and there can be no “student power” over education as an island in a sea of capitalist exploitation and alienation. The best elements of the student movement realised this at the time. The experiment collapsed quickly. But. for a few weeks, revolutionaries of all flavours attempted to make the Sorbonne something radically different from the seat of indoctrination and preparation for work (whether as exploited or exploiter) which it was run as by the ancien régime.

They got rid of the old ideologies, the boring “traditional” philosophy and social sciences. The university was opened up to everyone — young workers from Paris’s great industrial plants, above all Renault and Citroen, flocked to take part in the huge democratic discussions on revolution, culture and sexuality which took place in the occupied lecture theatres. Some accounts show that most of the “public interest” in the events was morbid curiosity in the latest activities of “the revolutionaries” rather than participation. But at least in May 1968 the students announced an end to the division between workers and students, between the university‚ and the rest of society. Anyone who wanted to be a “student” could be. Why, as the Stalinists in the French Communist Party would have it, stop workers from being able to engage in inspiring debate and ideas?

The Sorbonne Occupation Committee abolished all of the university’s petty regulations, decreed the end of exams and made progress from one year to the next of a course automatic.

Important too, if perhaps underemphasised by the students, was the idea of transforming the workplace. Why should it be a site of drudgery and boredom, rather than one where workers can express themselves?

The students and their “worker-student action committees” did all too little to attempt to bring this seed of revolutionary, independent thinking into the factories themselves. The university had become “social”, but they recognised the division of intellectual and manual labour by leaving the factories closed, under the stewardship of the union bureaucracy. Although virulent opponents of the Stalinists, they complacently they allowed them to smother the general strike, failing to put up a fight as the “Communist” CGT union’s heavies guarded occupied factories from the student activists who came in solidarity with the workers.

The union bureaucrats said they needed to keep the machines safe, but what they really needed to do was keep the workers’ consciousness firmly in their own hands, away from student influence (“provocations”).

In 1966 the bourgeois courts had been equally keen to suppress dissident students, and in response to On the Poverty of Student Life... took action to assuage the fears of “worried parents”. Upon shutting down the Strasbourg student union for “misusing funds” the judge neatly summarised the pamphlet’s points. “These publications express ideas and aspirations which, to put it mildly, have nothing to do with the aims of a student union. One has only to read what the accused have written, for it is obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adolescents, lacking all experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories, and perplexed by the drab monotony of their everyday life, make the empty, arrogant, and pathetic claim to pass definitive judgments, sinking to outright abuse, on their fellow-students, their teachers, God, religion, the clergy, the governments and political systems of the whole world. Rejecting all morality and restraint, these cynics do not hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and a world-wide proletarian revolution with ‘unlicensed pleasure’ as its only goal.”

I do not claim that a communist education system would simply mean that students, or indeed “everyone” would debate anything and everything in a completely unstructured way without any guidance at all (perhaps that is Blair’s plan, given that lectures and tutorial hours are on the decline). Five-year-olds will still need direction. But what we will see will surely be a radically realigned common understanding of why we as human beings want to educate ourselves. Education will then be free, open and democratically controlled, not forced to “pay its way” either through fees or through the need to submit itself to profitability.

May 1968 - Joan Miró