Here are two more takes on May 68.
rb
The first is from Rene Vienet (Enrages and the Situationists in the
Occupation Movement--France May-June 1968. Autonomedia Press):
"...in the space of a week, millions of people had broken with the weight
of alienating conditions, the routine of survival, ideological
falsification and the inverted world of the spectacle....The festival
finally gave real holidays to people who had only known working days and
leaves of absence. The hierarchical pyrmaid had melted like a dump of sugar
in the May sun...The streets belonged to those who were digging them up.
Everyday life suddenly rediscovered, became the centre of all possible
conquests. People who had lived their whole lives in offices declared that
they could no longer live the way they had before."
And Vienet also paid tribute to Fourier's identification of the building of
barricades as the best example of passionate work:
"Fourier had already remarked how it took workers seveal hours to put up a
barricade that rioters could erect in a few minutes. The disappearance of
forced labor necessarily coincided with the free flow of creativity in
every sphere: slogans, language, behavior, tactices, street-fighting
techniques, agitation, songs and comic strips. Everyone was thus able to
measure the amount of creative energy that had been crushed during the time
of survival, the days condemned to output, shopping, television, and to
passivity erected as a principle." (Quoted in Sadie Plant, 1992. The Most
Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in the Postmodern Age.)
The other take is from Michel Foucault, even though he was in Tunisia at
the time (for which he was roundly criticized by Marcuse and others). The
following is from a 1978 interview with L'Unita, the daily newspaper of
the Italian Communist Party:
"...[S]ince the time of my adherence to the [French Communist Party, in the
early 50s]...the experience of politics had left a rather bad taste in my
mouth. I had closed myself up in a kind of speculative scepticism....In
Tunisia, however, I felt compelled to give personal support to the
students, to experience and take part in something absolutely different
from all that muttering of political speeches and debates that occurred in
Europe....I think for instance of what Marxism was and how it functioned
among us as students during the years 1950-52; or when I think of what it
represented for a country like Poland, where for most young people it had
become an object of total disgust (leaving aside the question of their
social conditions) and where it was taught like the catechism; or if I
recall all those cold, academic debates on Marxism in which I participated
during the early 1960s in France....
Well! In Tunisia, on the contrary, everyone was drawn into Marxism with
radical violence and intensity and with a staggeringly powerful thrust.
For those young people, Marxism did not represent merely a way of
analyzing reality; it was also a kind of moral force, an existential act
that left one stupefied. And I felt disillusioned and full of bitterness
to think of how much of a difference there was between the way the Tunisian
students were Marxists and what I knew of the workings of Marxism in Europe
(France, Poland, etc.). So Tunisia, for me, represented in some ways
the chance to reinsert myself in the poltiical debate. It wasn't May of
'68 in France that changed me; it was March of '68, in a third-world country."
And, later in the same context, Foucault talks of his view of ideology
over "praxis".
"...[W]hat on earth is it that can set off in an individual the desire, the
capacity, and the possibility of an absolute sacrifice without our being
able to recognize or suspect the slightest ambition or desire for power and
profit? This is what I saw in Tunisia. The necessity for struggle was
clearly evident there on account of the intolerable nature of certain
conditions produced by capitalism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism.
In a struggle of this kind, the question of direct, existential, I should
say physical committment was implied immediately. Finally, the reference
to theory. This was not....the essential thing....the theoretical Marxist
preparation offered to the Tunisian students was not very in-depth; nor was
it developed very deeply. The real debate among them, on the choice of
strategy and tactics, on what to do, did not involve a detailed analysis
of the various Marxist ideological tendencies. It was something else
entirely. And that led me to believe that without a doubt the role of
political ideology, or of a political perception of the world, was
indispensable to the goal of setting off the struggle; on the other hand,
I could see that the precision of theory, its scientific character, was an
entirely secondary question that functioned in the debates more as a means
of deception than as a truthful, correct, and proper criterion of conduct.
.....When I returned to France in November--December 1968, I was quite
surprised and amazed--and rather disappointed---when I compared the
situation to what I had seen in Tunisia. The struggles [in France],
though marked by violence and intense involvement, had never brought with
them the same price, the same sacrifices. There's no comparison between
the barricades of the Latin Quarter and the risk of doing fifteen years in
prison, as was the case in Tunisia. [Discussing] that 'hyper-Marxism" in
France, that unleashing of theories, anathemas, the splitting up into
factions--all very disturbing and of very little interest. All of this
was really the reverse, the polar opposite of what had attracted me to
Tunisia.....I decided [then] to remain aloof from that round of endless
discussions, of 'hyper-Marxistization,' of indominatable discursivity,
that was the life of the universities....[Instead] I tried to accomplish a
series of actions that would really imply a personal, physical committment
that was real and that posed problems in concrete, precise, definite
terms, within a determinate situation."
