The events of 1968 are now history, but their consequences are still palpable within the political thought and the New Left-Old Left controversy. The biggest general strike that has ever occurred remains now, prominently, as a clear working-class rejection and surpassing of both the reformist and the revolutionary tendencies of the Old Left. In this paper it will be argued that, amongst other possible meanings/goals attributed to May 1968, there is a remarkably intriguing couple:
The democratisation of state control in the form of community and local groups inputting to the system.
The refusal of industrialism and the subsequent work-centred philosophy, both in its capitalist and its USSR’s versions. Industrialism would correspond to the idea that people needs are best satisfied by an unceasing and maximising economic growth.i
Contrary to many interpretations, Paris 1968 should not be regarded as an isolated reaction to the stabilisation of the post-war capitalist order or the bureaucratisation of the communist sphere. Precedents like East Berlin 1953 and the Hungarian movement in 1956 object to the isolationist hypothesis. In both cases we find a strong refusal of centralisation and the aim to establish workers’ councils and, in general, a truer democratisation of the decision processes.ii These Eastern European countries were seeking a real socialist order. A system in which, in Sartre’s words, the unity of production and management would bring about a true socialist individual, a human being in all senses, since the “socialist man is human because he governs things; every other order is inhuman to the (variable) extent that things govern man”.iii Sartre points out, as well, that no social struggle should ever be considered an accident of human history, because “they precisely represent the manner in which men live scarcity in their perpetual movement to trascend it”.iv 1968 must be considered within the frame of this permanent battle.
Thus similar disorders can be traced throughout the sixties and before Paris. One example is the student agitation punctually arousing in Berkeley (1964) and later on in West Berlin (1967). These were followed by the Turin disorders of December 1967, with the occupation of some factories and the forced closure of various Italian universities at the beginning of 1968. Finally, in March of the same year, the Polish students’ demonstrations, which had been fuelled by the initial outcomes of the Prague Spring, were violently crushed by the police.
1968 is a year of politicisation and massive street protest: the Tet offensive becomes the humiliating turning point of the Vietnam War, against which a wave of massive protests is going to originate.v From the pitched battle of London’s Grosvenor Square to the riots outside the Chicago convention of the US Democratic Party, stability seems to shatter everywhere. University students become a particularly growing focus of social uneasiness; their furious rioting takes over the streets in Warsaw, Belgrade, Berlin, Tokyo, Mexico City, Milan and, eventually, Paris.vi
Precisely the students’ campaigning against the Vietnam War was at the centre of the chain reaction that spurred the whole movement in Paris. A whole week of confrontations between extreme right groups and leftist student associations ended up in the closure of the Nanterre University on 2nd May 1968. The next day, a meeting was called in Paris’s Sorbonne to protest against that closure; around three hundred students gathered there and, to their astonishment, they noticed that that the police was encircling the whole area. The excuse for that reaction was a rumour that right wing factions were about to attack the assembly. After some negotiations, the authorities let the students leave in groups of 25, men and women separately. The women were allowed out, but when the first batch of men came out they were immediately arrested and forced into waiting police vans. A crowd developed and started to push forward angrily. The first van tried to leave onto the Boulevard St. Michel, but it found the road blocked by a crowd of students getting bigger and bigger. When the police force resorted to tear gas, the open street battle began.vii
During the first days, there was an absolute incomprehension of the events in the press and the government, putting the blame on a small group of agitators and resented outcasts. A fortnight after, 10 million French workers brought the country to a standstill and refused to reach an accord with the De Gaulle’s regime. Government officials later admitted that they believed, then, they could last no more than a few hours. The huge May 29th demonstration could have easily taken the Elyseé Palace and seized power. Richard Helms, director of the CIA at the time, would even describe the events to Lyndon B. Johnson as “a civil war”.viii However, both Trade Unions and the French Communist Party (PCF) insisted in calling on the workers to negotiate the best possible deals and return to their posts. These gradually did so and, after June the 7th, those still resisting found themselves isolated and therefore subject to the most violent repression yet. One school student was drowned in the Seine in the battle to end the Renault occupation at Flins, and two workers were shot dead at the Peugeot factory in Sochaux. Brutality was reinforced with the subsequent banning of several student organisations and some leftist groups. On June 16th, the Sorbonne was finally retaken by a vast police assault. The upheaval was over and, by the end of June, the general election definitely settled things down, the Gaullists scoring a sizeable victory and the PCF being inflicted a severe defeat.ix
A student revolt?
The events of May ‘68 showed that uncertainty and internal unevenness can remain hidden behind any apparently healthy social ensemble. As Sartre has put it, “society, from afar, seems to stand unaided; from close to, it is riddled with holes”.x The Sorbonne take-over was not only an outburst of student indignation, but also the ample realisation that something was wrong with the way they led their lives, namely, the way their lives were led on behalf of them. The student element in the revolt cannot be superseded as a mere anecdote, because they someway contributed to it with a great deal of cultural background and ideological agitation.
V. Fisĕra suggests that the context of the above mentioned anti-bureaucratic movements of Prague and Warsaw had a relevant influence over the initial Nanterre protest: a great deal of what the students reclaimed was self-determination of what they wanted to learn and how to achieve it.xi They soon realised that the senseless and blind hierarchy at University reflected the social hierarchies of an increasingly growing economy, a French economy that faced EEC integration with a dehumanising modernisation process and the withering away of any creative potential.
On May 15th the General Assembly of students-workers on strike would adopt, at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Sorbonne, a three-point platform that summarised their grievances:
They criticised the social selection at the basis of every stage of the educational system, from primary schools to universities. As Gorz puts it, the Fouchet reforms in France endorsed the creation of “specialists”, individuals that would be completely incapable of relating “their particular knowledge to the general movement of science, or their particular activities to the overall process of social praxis”.xii The emphasis of the reforms was overwhelmingly focused in technical proficiency.
Which meant that the contents and methods utilised produced human beings that were absolutely unaware of the crudest socio-economic realities.
Students and workers needed collaboration and mutual support to bring about changes.xiii
According to Gorz, a fourth key to partly understand the initial revolt could as well be of a more practical nature: the students began to experience that the link between academic success or higher education and social promotion were becoming tinier and tinier.xiv The capitalist meritocracy resembled a farce.
Gorz has recognised that, being this so, they went beyond their particular concerns as future job-seekers and constituted an important “spiritual weapon” for the movement. xv They would shoot subversive proclamations instead of bullets: why not organising work in a way that can develop the individual’s creative faculties? Why not reuniting productive work and learning processes? Were not the prolonged university years a way of making unemployment less conspicuous, a sort of “forced unproductive labour”?xvi
Even the politics of Reduced Working Hours (RHW) was present, at times, amongst the students’ interrogations:
Since production no longer had any use for a significant proportion of the available labour force, why not spread the socially necessary work over the whole population, thereby reducing the working week to twenty or thirty hours?xvii
It is therefore inaccurate to qualify the students’ protest as merely concerning their own interests: they opposed a general and more or less coherent overview of both the state-planned and the private-planned industrialism. However, Gorz assumes that this degree of consciousness is not enough and it eventually lacks “action and will” to translate it into consistent politics.xviii Any revolutionary change nowadays, and this is a lesson from May ‘68, has to resort to resources and participatory organisation as soon as it unfolds: it needs the material weapons that so badly lacked during the Paris revolt.
Therefore the students’ struggle was still very much ideological. A public opinion study by R. Pierce and P. Converse has revealed that the French upheaval could have been predicted from some 1967 polls in which four main attitudes towards the general political situation were measured. The most radical opinions were to be found in the attitudes concerning a broad left-right location, more precisely pro/con the De Gaulle regime.xix Which would demonstrate that, although rejecting the Stalinist model of the USSR and the PCF, the students’ considered themselves a sort of “true left”. The fact that the bulk of them fought against bureaucratisation in the name of Trotskyism is quite revealing.
Besides, and apart from the almost common denominator of Trotskyism, the existing internal divisions within the students’ collective were mainly due to ideological slants. As it usually happens with ideology-centred associations, or today within many of the so-called new social movements, these diverse groupings ended up radicalising shallow differences and losing sight of fundamentals. B. Brown enumerates the main tendencies:xx
Communists. They intended to create a corps of professional revolutionaries. There were two Trotskyist organisations (JCR and FER) and a Maoist one (VJC).
A loose and diffuse movement of anarchists and surrealists. There were anarchist societies, the mysterious situationists, and the March 22 Movement (those who initially rioted at Nanterre and the Sorbonne).
The two major student unions: UNEF (leftist) and UEC (the communist one, created in 1956).
This appalling convergence of ideological positions has been defined as “fanatical” and as a product of “resuscitated Bolsheviks”. One way or the other, they seemed to be aware of the glory as well as the mistakes of the past and the worst outcomes of pseudo-liberating attempts such as the 1917 revolution. However, at the same time they were not looking realistically enough to the modern conditions when it came to organise a hypothetical seizure of power. According to Viénet:
Some of them mixed this historical exoticism with the geographic exoticism of a more or less Guevarist revolution of underdevelopment. If any of them picked up a militant from time to time this was in no way the result of the truth of their analyses or actions, but simply of the decomposition of the so-called communist bureaucracies.xxi
Which lead us onto another point: there was not a determined attempt to gain proselytes. Rather than a Leninist effort to create a political consciousness, there was a cult of spontaneity and improvisation, especially in the case of Situationism.xxii The Situationist philosophy ultimately impregnates most of the cultural legacy of May ‘68, and it is worth looking at it in more depth.
The legacy of graffiti and posters that the upheaval left behind are primarily due to Situationist principles. And these were principles that basically turned socially consented values upside down:
Merchandise: we will burn it.
The forest precedes man, the desert follows him.
People who work are bored when they do not work. People who do not work are never bored.
But where does it all come from? The International Situationist was created in Italy in 1957 as a response to the contamination inflicted to art by commerce, trade and business.xxiii Creativity should always be essentially free and readily accessible to the public. The International Situationist re-emerges in Strasbourg in 1966, in a series of student revolts that would actually become a rehearsal for Paris ‘68: a document would be produced there, with the title of “The Poverty of Student Life”, that would actually become the Situationist manifesto. That document stated, roughly, that art should always be over politics and its aggressive tones would decisively inspire many revolutionary slogans.
We will come back to the Situationist philosophy, since it stands out as a quite a significant and straightforward way of dealing with creativity, working time and individual freedom. Let us now examine the working-class role in the events of May, once they were spurred into action by the students’ agitation. Let us have a look at the nearly 10 million labourers that, according to the situationists, “a stratum of privileged managers, trade unionists or party leaders in the service of the modern bourgeoisie, whom courtiers they had become, worked to integrate [...] into a rational management of the economy”.xxiv
The general strike
Gorz has pointed out that a cultural change has occurred in the working sphere: no one identifies himself/herself with his/her work anymore. Mainly because the question of what and how should one produce, the social priorities met with one’s work, and the styles of life involved in it, are absolutely beyond one’s control.xxv It is not only the toughness or the repetitive nature of a specific job, but the complete lack of personal rewards or involvement that one experiences doing it. However, this critical awareness has not been always there in that form. In fact, the difference is that this awareness now exists regardless of the more or less humane condition of the tasks accomplished. It does not matter if your post is of an ever-changing nature, it has to do with the ultimate objectives and with the capacity to plan its changeable circumstances.
In that sense, 1968 seems to stand as a turning point. Let us examine the story of the biggest general strike in history. At the height of the student protest, with television and radio broadcasts showing the devastation left behind, the burnt out cars, and the remnants of barricades, the French trade unions decided to take the chance and therefore they called a one-day general strike as well as a massive demonstration. This reaction frightened the officials: the Prime Minister immediately announced the release of prisoners and the reopening of the Sorbonne. It was too late.xxvi
By the 16th about fifty factories had been occupied, by the 17th 200.000 workers were on strike. On the 18th the trade unions started to fear that the magnitude of the movement could easily escape their control, therefore the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail) desperately tried to link the action into a campaign for pay increases and better working conditions. The CGT monopolised almost entire industrial sectors such as automobiles, aircraft and railways: its membership was estimated to be around 1.5 million workers. With a considerable potential and political weight, the CGT had progressively displaced their radical demands and, like its Italian communist partners, it had encouraged milder approaches embedded in the so-called “structural reforms”.xxvii When, on May 25th, the workers rejected the Grenelle accord with the government and the businesses, the CGT representatives could not believe it. Due to the extraordinary character of the moment, they had obtained a substantial 7% wage increase and a whole set of quantitative improvements for the French working class. They got the minimum wage augmented by 1/3, a slight reduction of the working week, more family allowances, and half-payment for the time they had been on strike.xxviii What else could be done?
What they were incapable or unwilling to realise was that the worker’s negative enclosed a clear message. It was the deep voicing of aspirations and long-suffered discontents beyond percentages and monetary rewards; it was the total abhorrence of an industrial rationality or, to put it more simply, the vague comprehension of what the real struggle was all about.
An idle factory became an ideal atmosphere for tackling essential issues like those of RHW and real democratisation of the social decision-making. At the same time, as D. Singer puts it, the workers had to extend, sooner or later, beyond their factory gates in order to understand their own feeling of divorce from the product of their labour, the deeper reasons for their meaningless situation.xxix In other words, they needed to assimilate that the productive environment, in which they lived and worked, did not have to be dictated necessarily by technological progress. On the contrary, technological progress was a means of dictating how that environment should function. Only by distancing themselves from their factory gates they would be able to comprehend that industrialism is, at the end of the day, a man made machine that is historically determined. But no effective organisation appeared in order to plan and implement a determined change, a strategy of action.
Singer believes that they would not have even needed to leave the plants, as every idle factory could have been transformed into a “school” or “cell” of real socialism with little effort. However, he laments, “great pains were taken in May to see that in most cases the education should not go much beyond picketing”.xxx
The fact is that the workforce had brought France to a standstill and the rule of the government and the management lay in ruins. Thus they had the power to do it. Workers at the Sud-Aviation factory, for example, had been the first ones in responding to the student protest, and they had been downing tools for 15 minutes every Tuesday morning because of a long running dispute with their managers. This was power. On Tuesday 14th May, the Sud-Aviation workers decided to spread their action to every section of the plant, and they rapidly locked up 20 members of the management in their offices.xxxi They immediately formed an action committee and agreed to spread the action. They were exercising power.
The personnel at the Schlumberger factory explicitly declared that their attitude “had nothing to do with wages”. A well-known slogan of the situationists read “never work”. Employees of the FNAC stores assured that they had “gone on strike not for the satisfaction of our particular demands but to participate in a movement which has currently mobilised ten million intellectual and manual workers”. They were all re-gaining unrestrained control over their lives and recapturing time.
Therefore the strike was not just about pay and working conditions. It was about power. By trying to limit the strike to some economic demands the trade union leaders were in reality trying to derail the movement by denying its scope and breadth.
In the meantime, the PCF underwent a severe crisis of identity. It refused neither to react nor to lead the worker’s upheaval. This apparently striking incoherence of the PCF makes Arrigho et al. arrive to a clear conclusion. They think that, during the early 60’s, the emergence of new social movements was just secondarily concerned with the inefficacy of the Old left but, as the decade went on, “the emphasis began to shift, as the new movements began to be more and more critical of the old movements”.xxxii By standing aside, the PCF was digging its own grave. Because PCF and CGT, both communist organisations, seemed to have in their hands the opportunity of a lifetime, right in front of them. Everyone was joining the revolutionary movement: from bank employees to insurance staff, from department stores to the researchers of the Meudon Observatory.xxxiii The anecdote of the Odéon theatre speaks for itself. When the enraged students occupied its premises, the administrative director withdrew to the back of the stage. After a minute of surprise, he took a few steps forward and cried out that, now that the students had taken it, they should keep it, and they should not ever give it back: he encouraged them to burn it first.xxxiv
Having a closer look, though, there was no incoherence at all in the behaviour of the communists: those occupying universities, factories, and public places, wanted the system of services to serve the people, not the people to serve the system. This was not the praxis of a communist centralised state such as the former USSR, of whose influence the Euro-communism would only start to get rid after the Prague take-over. In 1968, the PCF declared itself to be based on “democratic centralism”; Gorz has unveiled this qualification as organisational rigidity for an underdeveloped and despotic Russia. Nothing to do with the French western democracy of the time.xxxv Moreover, the highly institutionalised position achieved by both the PCF and the CGT would have been risked by a professed support of the protesters. Revealingly, at one point the CGT was distributing leaflets to the students advising them not to demonstrate in front of the Renault factory at Billancourt, because it would likely upset the government and there could be an undesirable reaction against trade unionism.xxxvi
Even Michel Rocard’s PSU, from a socialist position of “revolutionary reformism”, backed the 1968 movement with more emphasis than the communists: some of its members would even take active part in punctual demonstrations.
Nevertheless, it was not only because of the lack of guidance from supposedly revolutionary social forces that the May movement gradually faded away. A cohesive platform and a stage-by-stage development of the struggle could as well have aroused from inside. It did not happen, and this leads us to the troublesome question of designing and running an effective organisation leading to radical social changes. And, in doing so, the no less difficult challenges of maintaining popular participation and the required flexibility.
Organisation
The 1968 upheaval can be regarded as a transition from an isolated, individualised and privatised conflict with industrialism (embedding in this term both capitalism and the USSR’s state planning) to a collective one. Once we reach this stage, a culture of opposition emerges as a distinctively human and shared experience, “rooted in human relations that are relations among autonomous beings”.xxxvii
This oppositional culture must, however, conform itself as a more or less organised body without being trapped into the iron law of the oligarchies. If there was anything lacking in May 1968, it was an effective and all-embracing structure like that, a distinct basis on which to relay and from which to alter the economic rationality of industrialism as profoundly as possible.
From the very beginning, some action committees were formed. These would reproduce quickly and everywhere from May 9th onward, reaching the figure of one hundred at the height of the general strike. They were mainly based on the Paris region and they got to celebrate some sort of “general assemblies”, like the one at the Sorbonne on May 19th. During that meeting, two recommendations were accorded: that a permanent delegation of 10-30 members would meet once every couple of days, and that the issues raised would be political, essentially having to do with the transformation of society. Nevertheless, internal division and ideological misunderstanding, almost from the beginning, plagued the reality of the functioning of this “general assembly”.xxxviii To start off with, four types of alternative committees existed at the margins of those represented at the Sorbonne.
Student-worker action committees. They concentrated on strengthening the links between those two collectives and, although they remained close to the main action committees, they used to meet separately at the Censier annex of the Faculty of Fine Arts.
Committees for the support of the people. They were the descendants of precedent single-issue protest groups against the Vietnam War. Composed mainly of Maoists, they principally focused on fighting the police repression. Unlike the others, they maintained some connection with “institutionalised” political movements and parties.
Revolutionary action committees. Already present at Nanterre, they embraced the Situationist perspective and the March 22 Movement’s manifesto.
Committees for a popular government of democratic union. These remained within the sphere of the PCF and they were created as late as May 21st not to push the 68′ movement forward, but to channel it hideously into parliamentary waters.xxxix
If this was not enough complication, even within the main action committees mentioned there were three different sorts: local committees based on small districts and neighbourhoods, university committees with their own specialised branches and, finally, work committees in factories and offices.
It comes as no surprise, then, the fact that only three general meetings were eventually held in Paris during the May events, the three of them confuse, full of disparate gatherings, and incapable of reaching clear determinations.xl
In conclusion, the diverse committees seemed to become an end in themselves or, at their best, they could figure out an uncertain future of idyllic brotherhood. The most the beloved spontaneity of May ‘68 achieved, in terms of organisation, was a mere vision, an imaginative and utopian horizon in which, in the words of one of its leading voices (that of Daniel Cohn-Bendit):
One can imagine another system in which everyone will work at productive tasks -reduced to a minimum thanks to the progress of technology- and in which everyone retains the possibility of pursuing, at the same time, continuing studies. It will be a system of simultaneous work and study.xli(my italics)
That is all very well, but how?
Significance
Organisational lacks condemned the 68′ movement to failure. Most of its proposals remained in the realm of sheer imagination and wishful thinking. Momentarily freed from the daily routines and the slavery of a heterogeneously structured time, the French “paused and then began talking and relating to each other in new ways, ways that evidenced creative powers that had hitherto lain dormant”.xlii On the walls of the Sorbonne someone wrote that that was it, that was already the society they wanted to establish. This assessment, although far from being accurate, related to the way primary needs were being met. In this sense, there were some action committees that successfully engaged in socially constructive tasks such as caring for children, procuring food, writing and mass-producing informative leaflets or posters, and setting up participatory discussions in which everyone had a voice.xliii
Let us eventually examine some important meanings that can be attributed to the May 68′ movement. In his difficult and extensive study of social transformation and collective conflicts, J. P. Sartre posits, however, a question of principle: we cannot grasp nor attribute a meaning to historical events because this is only possible for those who experienced them. The only way of approaching that significance may be finding out “the ensemble of factors that helped to arrest it”.xliv
What arrested the movement, then? We have already confirmed the lack of support from the CGT and the PCF. Which ultimately reflects the political bankruptcy of both institutions and the culmination of their integration into the system.xlv
Moreover, there was the correlative and extreme drive for spontaneity working against the revolution from inside. There was too much time lost in futile debate because of the inability to set clear priorities. There were too many brilliant and provocative slogans, but most of them vague and naive. There was some voting on projects and strategies, but these were too hastily conceived.xlvi
Gorz, a first-hand observer of the events of May, has dissected some of those possible “arresting factors” at work in any revolutionary situation.xlvii
He believes that “effective action, which requires a method and an overall view of ends and means, may grow out of the new sensibility that violent revolts set free”.xlviii It is worth remarking, then, that there was action during the May revolt; was it effective, though? There was that cultural opposition that violent protests always liberate and spread; again, it originated mere actions, namely, not effectively targeted and structured actions.
But in what ways does a revolutionary upheaval achieve effectiveness in its actuation? Gorz explicitly refers to the action committees of 1968 and makes a revealing statement:
These organs of “dual power” become effective in taking power and in destroying the capitalist state when they are co-ordinated organisationally and unified ideologically by an overall political vision and a credible political leadership.xlix
Limitless spontaneity leads nowhere. Incapable of moving beyond the first moment of fierce rejection, the movement became progressively an end in itself: nothing more, in the end, than an outbreak of liberating violence without a clear cause. There was no synthesis, no intermediary objectives by which to canal the actual seizure of power at the factories or at the Sorbonne. There was no comprehensive guide.l
Amongst other possibly arresting factors, Gorz finds out, too, that there is a vague sense of guilt in demanding a better life within developed countries. Does it apply to the 1968 revolt? Let us examine the argument.
It still seems somewhat egoist, nowadays, to complain about the meaninglessness underpinning a majority of the western-based workforce. The Third World situation should be tackled first because their populations lead a much more miserable existence. This is partly true, but Gorz points out that Third World deprivation is the main outcome of an imperialist-like globalisation of finance and trade, and western workers are not only forging these chains, but their own ones at the same time. Workers do not share the profits that accrue to huge International Corporations, and therefore we all have a legitimate right to demand improvements in our situation, since the industrialist mode of production turns:
Cities into slums, simultaneously producing affluence and new types of poverty, academic sophistication and new types of illiteracy and ignorance, technical perfection and mutilated human beings working efficiently for sterile and destructive purposes.li
The contradiction between the needs of the Third World and the needs of the Western population is false, and emanates from wrongly conceived and conservative premises. These are the real contradictions of our contemporary world:lii
Logic of industrialism
Needs of people everywhere
Addressed by reformist social democracies
Addressed by revolution and true socialism
A question of degree
A question of total challenge
Technical-economical rationality
Genuinely democratic and participatory rationality
Within capitalism/state-planning
Anti-capitalist and decentralised
Institutional
Enforced by collective action
Conceded changes
Changes effected and controlled by people themselves
Having exposed the argument, we must agree that if there is something that the May revolution achieved was the absolute dismissal of that conservative “sense of guilt” for the Third World calamities. The 68′ revolutionaries felt completely entitled to protest and cry out their anger; sadly, they did not go much further.
For some the general strike and the radical outbursts of the students came out of the blue, because wages were rising by an average 5% a year in France, and economic expectations in general were felicitous. Car ownership, for instance, had doubled over the previous ten years, fridge ownership had trebled and TV ownership us up five times.liii However, the fact that these welfare measurements were certainly much lower in any Third World country did not constitute a valid justification for consent and silence at home. It did not prevent the 68′ upheaval to raise fundamental questions and partially expose some fake contradictions of a “brave new” French capitalist growth. Which is, maybe, the only valuable achievement of the May events: the suggestion that shameful links are searchable between an unrestrained economic rationality and the Third World’s perpetual misery.
May 1968 generated a legitimate outcry for a qualitatively better existence in an already affluent western society. Legitimate, because no consolation can be found in being wealthier if your lifestyle is meaningless. Particularly legitimate, since your meaningless lifestyle perpetuates the poverty of others.
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i Dobson, M. (1990) Green Political Thought, Unwin Hyman, p. 175
ii Viénet, R. (1992) Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement. France, May ‘68, London: Rebel Press, p. 14
iii Sartre, J. P., (1991) Critique of Dialectical Reason, London: Verso, p. 125
iv Ibid., p. 13
v The Tet Offensive [WWW Document] http:www.marxist.com1968 vietnam.html
vi Itzin, C. (1980) Stages in the Revolution, London: Eyre Methuen, pp. 1-2
vii Gunn, I.: May 68: France’s Month of Revolution [WWW Document] http:www.marxist.com1968 may68.html
viii Jauvert, V., Quand la CIA annonçait la guerre civile, Le Nouvel Observateur, 23rd April 1998, nº 1746, p. 16
ix Ibid.
x Sartre, J. P., (1991) Critique of Dialectical Reason, London: Verso, p. 13
xi Fisĕra, V. (1978) Writing on the Wall. May 1968: A Documentary Anthology, London: Allison and Busby, p. 35
xii Gorz, A. (1973) Socialism and revolution, London: Penguin, p. 122
xiii Atelier Populaire (1969) Posters of the Revolution. Paris ‘68, London: Dobson
xiv Gorz, A. (1973) Socialism and revolution, London: Penguin, p. 18
xv Ibid., p. 21
xvi Ibid., p. 20
xvii Ibid.
xviii Bowring, F., Misreading Gorz, New Left Review, May-June 1996, nº 217, p. 111
xix Pierce, R. and Converse, P., Attitudinal roots of popular protest: the French upheaval of May 1968, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Autumn 1989, Vol. 1, nº 3, pp. 221-239
xx Brown, B. (1974) Protest in Paris. Anatomy of a Revolt, New York: GLPress, pp. 61-68
xxi Viénet, R. (1992) Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement. France, May ‘68, London: Rebel Press, p. 13
xxii Johnson, R. (1972) The French Communist Party versus the Students, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 111
xxiii Brown, B. (1974) Protest in Paris. Anatomy of a Revolt, New York: GLPress, p. 88
xxiv Viénet, R. (1992) Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement. France, May ‘68, London: Rebel Press, p. 12
xxv Lodziak, C. & Tatman, J. (1997) André Gorz: A Critical Introduction, London: Pluto, p. 84
xxvi Gunn, I.: May 68: France’s Month of Revolution [WWW Document] http:www.marxist.com1968 may68.html
xxvii Singer, D. (1971) Prelude to Revolution, New York: Hill and Wang, p. 99
xxviii Brown, B. (1974) Protest in Paris. Anatomy of a Revolt, New York: GLPress, p. 21
xxix Singer, D. (1971) Prelude to Revolution, New York: Hill and Wang, p. 236-237
xxx Ibid.
xxxi Gunn, I.: May 68: France’s Month of Revolution [WWW Document] http:www.marxist.com1968 may68.html
xxxii Arrigho, G. et al. (1989) Antisystemic Movements, London: Verso, p. 101
xxxiii Viénet, R. (1992) Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement. France, May ‘68, London: Rebel Press, p. 72
xxxiv Ibid., p. 77
xxxv Johnson, R. (1972) The French Communist Party versus the Students, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 114
xxxvi Singer, D. (1971) Prelude to Revolution, New York: Hill and Wang, p. 154
xxxvii Lodziak, C. (1995) Manipulating Needs: Capitalism and Culture, London: Pluto, 1995, pp. 103-107
xxxviii Singer, D. (1971) Prelude to Revolution, New York: Hill and Wang, p. 270-271
xxxix Ibid.
xl Ibid., p. 72
xli Johnson, R. (1972) The French Communist Party versus the Students, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 90
xlii Poster, M. (1975) Existential Marxism in Postwar France, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, p. 372
xliii Ibid., pp. 374-375
xliv Sartre, J. P., (1991) Critique of Dialectical Reason, London: Verso, p. 402
xlv Gorz, A. (1973) Socialism and revolution, London: Penguin, p. 37
xlvi Atelier Populaire (1969) Posters of the Revolution. Paris ‘68, London: Dobson
xlvii Gorz, A. (1973) Socialism and revolution, London: Penguin
xlviii Ibid., p. 16
xlix Ibid., p. 30
l Ibid., pp. 36-39
li Ibid., pp. 9-10
lii Ibid., p. 159
liii Gunn, I.: May 68: France’s Month of Revolution [WWW Document] http:www.marxist.com1968 may68.html