A MODEST CONTRIBUTION TO THE RITES AND CEREMONIES OF THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY

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Régis Debray

A Modest Contribution to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary

It has been Holy Unity week. The official ceremonies organized around the tenth anniversary of May ’68 brought together everyone in this country with a name, a status or a decoration and saturated every medium of communication. From left to right, yesterday’s enemies and tomorrow’s friends, the best and the worst—Libération to France-Soir, Séguy to Debré—were in agreement on the absurdity of excluding the main hero from the proceedings. (If an ordinary citizen may be permitted to add his voice to the general clamour: let Dany come home soon.) This unanimity was a good sign. It could suggest that the level of national idiocy is in decline, even a growth of liberalism. Everywhere else, revolutionaries are showered with hatred and imbecility: they are sour assassins, cold monsters, Gulag warrant officers, mass murderers. On the tenth anniversary of Che’s death there was no homage, no round-table discussion or memorial programme on Bolivian television. Nor anywhere else on a continent which once trembled before him, not just for a month or two either. Robespierre was not the toast of Paris in 1805; ten years after October, the name of Lenin still 45

struck fear into the hearts of children in the European countryside. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, but perhaps we should be thankful for small mercies. Its exceptional nature also merits examination. On the left, piety is understandable. Recollection is always nice when you are no longer capable of making things happen. Unable to live on their income, a lot of people consume their capital of time-values: the very old are nothing but memory. The right, for its part, appears young and lively. Why this collusion in dwelling upon a ‘nightmare’? Doubtless the right is always happy to repeat that the old antithesis of left and right is outmoded. But it has plenty of other, more solid reasons for not stinting its pleasure. Not least that it is precisely to the May cult that it owes its youthful vigour. May ’68 was the cradle of a new bourgeois society. It may not yet realize this, but it is time someone told it so. With a bonus in the form of a prediction. The Third Republic by conviction, and the Fourth through inertia, made July 14th 1789 their founding myth. The mature Fifth Republic, and its successors, will be able to declare the entire month of May a public holiday—with a little help from computer technology and productivity growth. The bourgeois republic celebrated its birth, the storming of the Bastille; one day it will celebrate its rebirth, the word-storm of 1968. This is not folklore or fetishism but, for the entire modern West, the paradigm of a long-sought legitimacy: its realized ideal, a future sublimated into legend.

Revolutions of the New World, or How to Regenerate the Old In 1968 there were two Frances: an industrial and technological France, and a social and institutional France. The first was in quick tempo, dynamic, open to the outside: since the war, industrialization and the concentration of capital had been advancing rapidly. Never has humanity known such speedy growth of its productive forces as during the period which changed the face of Europe after 1945; never in its history has France experienced such an upheaval of its infrastructure in such a short space of time. The second France, the France of sentiments and behaviour, was wedded to the leisurely pace at which values and customs evolve. The cleavage between two layers of history during the same period is a common occurrence: in this case, and precisely because of the extraordinary rate of expansion and the brutal reorganization of productive labour, the cleavage became excessive, actually intolerable. French society became ‘anti-economic’, and was beginning to threaten the profitability of France s.a. When the time came to harmonize the first with the second, the gap was so wide that the job had to be attacked with crazy energy. A wind of madness was perceptible in this updating of the France de Papa; it was only the economic bringing the social to its senses, the compulsory submission of the old to the new. At Censier,1 it was decided to ‘abolish the economy’. Obviously, since the hour had come for its enthronement in all the control centres—political, cultural, administrative and ideological. 1

Censier, an annexe of the Sorbonne where many debates took place during May.

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As we know, there were three Mays: the student uprising (‘the revolt of youth’); the upsurge of demands by the workers’ movement (general strike); and the politicians’ May (crisis of the régime). Out of their meeting, rather than their fusion, was born the Movement. But what made this concordance decisive, or explosive, was a latent and suddenly-revealed discordance of which the ‘May crisis’ was at once the symptom and the cure. Three became one because one was becoming two. This asynchrony produced a heart attack and called for the slow resynchronization of the two countries, now well under way. The phase displacement of two circuits required a change of voltage. One country was plugged into 110 volts, the other into 220: connect them up, short-circuit, blown fuse. Rewire the obsolete 110-volt circuit, change the meter, install new trip-fuses. And switch on again. You too must be modern. But don’t say modernization, say revolution. Any businessman will tell you you can make twice as much by using one word rather than another. ‘Chaos’? Not at all. The most reasonable of social movements; the sad victory of productivist reason over romantic unreason; the gloomiest demonstration of the Marxist theory of the finally determining role of the economic (technology plus relations of production). Industrialization had to be given a morality not because the poets were clamouring for a new one but because industrialization required it. The old France paid off its arrears to the new; the social, political and cultural backlog all at once. The cheque was a large one. The France of stone and rye, of the apéritif and the institute, of oui papa, oui patron, oui cherie, was ordered out of the way so that the France of software and supermarkets, of news and planning, of know-how and brain-storming could show off its viability to the full, home at last. This spring cleaning felt like a liberation and, in effect, it was one. The ghettos were opening at last! Starting with the workers’ world, which instead of joining the student marches fell into step with the rest of society. The old framework, in which yesterday’s privileges and hierarchies (justice, medicine, university, church and so on) were cosily preserved, was suffocating life. And the functioning of capital, whose reproduction was causing cracks to appear in these antique conduits; channels which had become too narrow and constricted. The first dam to burst was the university, where the pressure was strongest. Quantitative pressure, with the student population trebled from 200,000 to 600,000 between 1960 and 1968; and above all qualitative pressure, with a style and intellectual framework of instruction and of courses ill-adapted to the new labour market. To manage an increasingly vast and unqualified labour force, capital needed a highly-qualified type of cadre which the higher education networks were no longer producing. Alarm signals were flashing on this side, unseen by the remote controllers of the machine. The magazine Prospective, 1967 No. 14, wrote: ‘We are now confronted with the aberration of an education system teaching values to which schoolchildren, students and end-users—that is, employers—manifestly no longer subscribe’. This displacement was everywhere, more or less marked, experienced by employees as intoler47

able and by employers as unprofitable. The growing feminization of the labour force called for a reassessment of the status of women; the failures of the central State called for a new articulation between metropolis and regions; the overloading of the judicial machinery called for a new relationship between offenders and litigants on the one hand and the judicial apparatus on the other. In general, beyond a given level of complexity, decisions are more effective when the level at which decisions are taken is brought as close as possible to the level at which they are applied. The macro can only function with the aid of micros. Above a given level of industrial gigantism (conglomerate, factory), productivity begins to decline, and small organizations become more profitable. The search for maximum profit, as for the most fertile technical innovations, passes by way of the splintering of production units. The demand for identity (the right to be different) which flowered in May came before the functional demands of the system of exploitation. What first appeared as constraints on individual existence turned out to be constraints on turning the entire social field into commodities. Capital aspired to circulate, youth wanted to communicate through the barriers of the past. The imaginary anticipated the real and the law of the heart coincided with the law of efficiency. That’s why, in 1978, ‘the tablets of the law are groaning with all the fruits of May’. Fruits which bear out the promise of the flower. Only a blaze of subjectivity could impose the law of the marketable object on those who rejected it. So the latter played ‘hide-and-seek’. The arrangement was made with the agreement of the future victims, whose consent could only be extracted in the form of disagreement. Order by way of revolt. The sincerity of the actors of May was accompanied, and overtaken, by a cunning of which they knew nothing. The pinnacle of personal generosity met the pinnacle of the system’s anonymous cynicism. Just as Hegelian great men are what they are because of the world spirit, the May revolutionaries were the entrepreneurs of the spirit needed by the bourgeoisie. The fault was not theirs, but that of a universe in which people do not choose to be born: they accomplished the opposite of what they intended. History is at its most cunning when dealing with the naïve. Cultural Revolution

This inversion of a subversive reorganization is not to be attributed solely to ideological delirium; in its way it reveals the existence of an objective subterfuge. A small war was needed to put modern France at peace with itself, and if this fell somewhat short of a shooting war, it went rather beyond a war game. The fact is that it was necessary to fight against the bourgeoisie then in power to persuade it to serve its own interests. When men are not equal to their destiny, someone always turns up to help them in spite of themselves: this was the role of the May protesters. The bourgeoisie was politically and ideologically well behind the logic of its own economic development. Politically, with a Bonapartist régime ‘whose procedures considerably increased the combustibility of social conflicts’ (Henri Weber). Ideologically, 48

with a set of values inherited from the past, the remnant of a by-gone stage of development. To run a society from which it had itself expelled the peasants (who constituted only 14 per cent of the working population by 1968), it retained a peasant mentality. In many ways, people’s acquisitiveness under De Gaulle had changed little since the days of Marshal Pétain, the left-overs of a rural, old-Catholic world which De Gaulle had buried physically but not yet psychologically. All the anal gratifications of retention, boundary delimitation and the miser’s stocking could not long stem the pressure of the new flux, but they were still obstructing it too much. A Monsieur Homais2 could hardly preside over the elimination of the corner shop in a country filling itself with ‘major outlets’. The development of the capitalist mode of production and distribution no longer needed everything that still survived here and there, in people’s minds and in the social tissue, of Work-Family-Country.3 What use is a cult of work when the main source of surplus value is no longer the quantity of work supplied but its technological quality, in other words the grey matter employed? And when leisure itself becomes a commodity—an activity generating employment and profits? When, and because, the productivity of labour increases in the developed countries, ‘free time’ becomes productive in its turn. What use is the patriarchal family, from the moment the main obstacle to industrial growth resides in the old family firm with its outmoded management and technology? The hereditary capitalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became a ball and chain for shareholder capitalism; thanks partly to the effects of May, the concentration of finance capital and industrial restructuring were able to progress, resulting in large industrial groups consolidated after May (SaintGobain, Pont-à-Mousson, GEC, Usinor, etc.). Soon Servan-Schreiber, future Minister of Reforms, would be able to propose in a manifesto of advanced capitalism, Ciel it Terre (1970), ‘the abolition of the hereditary transmission of ownership of means of production’. Fatherland? At a time when the Common Market is prescribing the removal of the last customs barriers, when the multinationals are becoming the decisive motor of world economic development, when the reorganization of French capital is imposing increased dependence on American and German financial groups (Westinghouse, Honeywell, Boeing, etc.), the Fatherland . . . well, there’s July 14th for that, every day has its own duties. Capital’s development strategy required the cultural revolution of May. Commodities have no sense of strategy; neither capital nor the revolution was conscious of its rôle. Both are ‘movements’: processes, as we call things that work by themselves. Things with integral motors go best. Spontaneously, the tide swamped useless barriers: the dead weight of tradition, the envy of the displaced, the comfort of routine. Look around you, in shop windows or at the television screen. The 2

Monsieur Homais, the apothecary, a typical local worthy, in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Travaille, Famille, Patrie: slogan of the Pétain régime.

3

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slogans, the books, the personalities and the ideas of May are ‘going very well’. Commodities as well, thanks. Better and better, faster and faster. Merchandise is a moveable feast, swirling and ungraspable; May was the feast of mobility. People did a lot of marching in May, and for a lot of reasons. A malicious sociologist could attribute this urban mobilization of the upwardly socially mobile to the delayed transformation of a country still congealed in its traditional hierarchies: a ritual compensation, an assertion of claims on the future. Revenues climbing up the scale after a temporary freeze, charging up the street: symbolic movement. Is so much entropy to be regretted? All that fabulous energy wasted in the streets, ‘liberated’ in the open air without concrete work or point of application? Regret is in fashion, so let’s not succumb to it completely. Transformed by the various State mechanisms into reforms, draft laws, statutes, settlements, amendments, Secretariats of State and Ministries (for Reforms, the Condition of Women, the Quality of Life, Manual Labour, the Environment, Youth, Desire, New Energies, New Ideas, etc.), all the effort—despite inevitable wastage inherent in this type of operation since the beginning of time—has been carefully turned to profit by the very system against which it was mobilized. To put the bourgeoisie on the road to the New World, the May militants had to endure the thumping handed out by its ‘special detachments of armed men’. It is not hard to understand why young ‘revolutionaries’ have subsequently lost some of their enthusiasm for sacrifice and the cult of abnegation. ‘Run, comrade, the old world is behind you.’ There was a good deal of running in May; it is the role of vanguards to precede the movement and show the way. The distance which revealed itself at the time between the cultural scouts and the main body of the social and political column was the space separating an opaque and cumbersome centralized State from an agile, splintered civil society in the throes of selfrenewal; the distance separating the actual bourgeoisie from its self-image. The State closes the gap more every day. The continued growth of the system, essential to its survival, has been, and continues to be, based on the launching impulse of May. The new functions of capital have found their adequate organs. The Patriarch’s retirement was signalled in April 1969 (backlash to May ’68) by the combined vote of the foreign exchange speculators of the Bourse and the agents of change in the Sorbonne; Pompidou the Latinist, born of schoolteacher parents at Montboudif, made way for Giscard the economist, born in Coblenz, the son of an international financier. Classical humanism passed the torch to MIT systems analysis, the école normale graduates in the ministerial offices to brains-trusts of trained administrators; the old State bourgeoisie to the new financial bourgeoisie. Subversion played a part in the passage from the old to the new, but all it destroyed was the relations linking management techniques to methods of domination within liberal society. We have moved on from a shy technocracy (hidden behind patriarchal charisma) to a triumphant technocracy; in other words from flagrant authoritarianism (but only a façade) to shy 50

authoritarianism (more diffuse and more real). The baton has been passed on successfully. Well done, young mole!

Model and General Rehearsal May ’68 was the first national general crisis neither stemming from nor resulting in a conflict, in the sense of a change of political régime. Was it, then, anodyne or insignificant? Far from it. But the crisis, though considerable, reached no extremes and had no conflictual outcome. This is the movement’s originality, the measure of its break with the old world and with the habits of the political establishment. Conflict means, in effect, polarization between friends and enemies, frontal alignment and final decision. Nothing to do with labile, capillary, plural May. The days of May replaced the sawtooth, up-climax-down rhythm of crisis by the fluidity of a following breeze lifting, gently shaking, whirling, irradiating, diffusing. That is why May, which had no dénouement, is still working in our heads and on the street. Long duration and long range made one. Let us leave aside the fanciful speculation of Fathers Clavel and Frossard4—Afflatus, Spirits, Graces—and note the unusual. For once, instead of becoming more marked, the potentialities of conflict were slowly reabsorbed without a general confrontation: no civil war, no clash, no blood, it’s been said often enough. Also that in replacing Galliffet with Grimaud,5 liberal civilization achieved a notable victory over itself and its past barbarities. Nor was Louise Michel6 at the rendezvous:’ bad instincts head south, to settle among the blacks and the Arabs’. Less has been said about the paradox, apparently unique in history, of a revolutionary movement followed not by counterrevolution but by a very benign electoral reaction, returning the same régime; and a government for which repression of the remnants of the movement counted for less than political and administrative assimilation of its impetus; in which Marcellin, in a word, was less characteristic than Edgar Faure. ‘Power to the imagination’: without striking a blow, the street slogan becomes the programme of the most exposed Minister, revolt becomes an article of law. This is the unprecedented innovation of May ’68, signalled in advance by a slogan on a Nanterre wall: ‘It’s not a revolution, sire. It’s a mutation.’ Revolution is a political term, mutation a term used in biology. Hypothesis: May ’68 was the moment in the development of advanced capitalist society when the automatisms of social biology began to carry the day against the political logic of options and programmes. If May was a crisis, it was more cybernetic than political, to such an extent that in order to understand its dynamic as well as its results, the usual categories of Leninism or materialism have to give way to those of systems and information theory. ‘Dementia’, ‘delirium’, ‘irrationality’ 4

Maurice Clavel, a Catholic writer who helped inspire the ‘New Philosophy’; André Frossard, commentator for Le Figaro. Gallifet and Grimaud: police chiefs in Paris at the time of the Commune and the May events respectively. 6 Louise Michel: leader of the petroleuses, the women’s vanguard during the Commune. 5

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signify nothing more than the emergence in the social field of a rationality at that time unfamiliar to the public: that of servomechanisms. Those for whom May was an abomination, those for whom it was Revelation, those who received grace and those who feared disgrace, the indignant mandarins and the ageing first-communicants: were not they all suffering from a lack of distance from the event, favouring strong emotions but damaging to observation? Might not a simple change of scale enable Raymond Aron and Maurice Clavel to calm down a little in their evocations of the demoniac or divine spirit of the cursed/blessed spring? Dare one suggest that they trade in their spectacles for ‘the macroscope’ and (since they cannot manage Marx) Michelet for Joël de Rosnay7 (whose book is very accessible)? In this country there is always a High Priest on hand to stand in as pundit (the Catholic and rural nineteenth century again). So we were beaten over the head by, at the lowest estimate, a ‘crisis of civilization’; pretty soon (inflation made this inevitable) it became ‘an instant of eternity’, a ‘divine yawn’ or a ‘supernatual gap’, where an averagely wellinformed student would have been content to see ‘negative feedback’ or regulatory retroaction, as safety valves are called these days. Let’s not sneer: the theory can get away with being fashionable, it is very serious and far-ranging. Unlike ‘runaway’ or positive feedback which would have overloaded the system to disintegration point, the May crisis worked (independently of the wishes of its agents) as a selfregulating factor, correcting the effect of internal disturbances in the neocapitalist machine. During the confrontations, as in the final profitand-loss account, complementarity prevailed over antagonism, favourable retroaction over hostile reaction. At the beginning, of course, there was some antagonism on the spot—the warning signal for the corrections would not have been given without it—but of what might be called a non-antagonistic type: a thermostat-crisis enabling the machine specifically to readjust the complementarity of its constituent parts (classes, institutions, practices). Thus, a crisis in the system may have been confused with a crisis of the system, without anyone noticing that the former is capable precisely of enabling the latter to be avoided. In France, the classic land of revolutions, history as drama could only and dramatically. That ’68 should have served as a factor tending to stabilize fundamental class relations—assuming in addition an internal reorganization— would prove then that our modern bourgeois societies may have reached the homeostatic maturity of complex systems, making them more vulnerable to external hazards but also flexible enough to integrate threats of rupture into the dynamic stability of the whole. What matter that the development of contradictions produces endless upsets and disparities, disorders in fact, if the machine has become adept at making order out of disorder, an order superior to the disorders that engender it and which it endlessly provokes? The organization integrates its disorganized periods, not as phoney development costs, but 7

Joël de Rosnay, contemporary populariser of cybernetics.

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as its driving elements. What is incompatible is complementary, what upsets stabilizes, what attacks strengthens. Not every social system, we should remember, has the good luck to be in crisis: it costs the system known as ‘actual socialism’ very dear not to be able to afford disorder. In the developed capitalist system, crisis is a normal state, the sign of good health, the mainspring of its advances. It is order which would mean death. This cybernetic model is of course doubly abstract. Firstly because of its very nature as metaphor extrapolated too far from its area of validity: a society is not an ‘intelligent’ machine. Next because, if French society had been so modelled, it would not have needed May ’68. It is precisely because there was no overload fuse in the institutional system (exaggeratedly concentrated in the person of De Gaulle, the régime having already eclipsed or eliminated intermediary bodies, assemblies and notables) that the short-circuit was able to take place. Thus, May ’68 could be the living proof of the utopian nature of mechanical ruminations. ‘Comrades and friends! Let us not forget the class struggle! The State Monopoly Capitalist system is condemned by history, doomed to an inevitable withering away owing to the unresolvable contradiction between the limitless development of the productive forces (scientific and technical revolution) and private appropriation, and so on. Battered by the redoubled blows of the workers, mobilized in growing numbers by the catastrophic aggravation of the crisis . . .’ etc., etc. We all know this golden oldie, waxed some time in the 20s and top of the hit parade several times since. . . . Is it impossible to do without the ‘final crisis’? It has finally been admitted—a basic truth at last treated as such owing to the efforts of Jacques Attali8 and some others—that economic crises constitute the regulating and transforming moment of the ‘dynamic of commodities’, ‘the place where order is re-established’. And what if, in market societies not only determined but openly dominated by the economic factor, the same plan of order through noise also ruled social and political crises? More exactly: what if the internal elimination of social struggles enabled political crises to be eliminated too? And if that meant the and of politics? The ‘revolutionary’ kernel of the message of May: the revolution is no longer needed. Henceforth, things will sort themselves out unaided, on the social level, either pre- or post-politics (open to choice); that is, without direction, planning or conscious will. Which would explain the noise made by May, and its endlessly drawn out echoes; for it is this ‘noise’ in person which continues to structure the current reorganization of our ‘informational codes’. Which would also explain that it took time to decode the message, since it was itself coded back to front. For example, as the ‘first great crisis of State Monopoly Capitalism’, or a ‘crisis of the third type’ according to Ernest Mandel (the first type being linked to war, the second to major economic crises). That can certainly be said. ‘Pre-revolutionary crisis’, or post-revolutionary? Certainly not the last, in any case. There will be 8

Jacques Attali, French Socialist economist. 53

other, more serious crises—the price of the stability of the system. The combativity of the masses can only increase in the future? One can only hope this is true. Integration in no way signifies the absence of contradiction. Poetry not Politics

A revolutionary situation is not one that carries the revolution in its belly, but that which narrows all the options down to one: revolution or counter-revolution, mounted on the extreme left or the extreme right, all half-way compromises being plainly materially impossible. The crisis becomes conflictual when it has accumulated enough intolerable uncertainties to be unable to tolerate even one more day of indecision. What is striking about May is the indecision of each side, the vacillation, the difficulty of extracting a conclusion. Which finally imposed itself, in the form of dissolution of parliament and general elections, by default, like undertow rather than response. The Movement, for its part, experienced less a retreat or rout than an ebbing and exhaustion. Which made the outcome an average between the two—the ‘new society’ of Chaban-Delmas—the resultant of the parallelogram of forces in play. As if the marvellous spontaneity of the birth carried within itself an abortion through inertia. It is known today, and even a source of pride, as if resulting from a surplus of grace, that there was no leadership, no plan, no intention, still less a ‘conductor’ ordering the woodwinds about from Peking or Havana. Cohn-Bendit: ‘People were not looking for a confrontation on 11 May. The idea at the beginning was to have a big party in the Sorbonne courtyard. The barricades went up by themselves.’ Grimaud: ‘There were no tactics on the leftist side, the street fighting was improvised from day to day, which was lucky for the forces of order’. The May movement was aggressive and clashed with enemies it had not sought—the cosh, threats and tear gas—but did not lead to a struggle between two hostile camps, two wills each seeking to dominate the other. No enemies, no targets, no objectives: there were hard clashes, perhaps all the harder for being not confrontations but collisions. Franco had been hated, Laval and Ridgway had been hated, but De Gaulle was not hated. As Clara Malraux said: ‘We couldn’t have both joy and hate. And it was joy that mobilized us.’ Revolutions of love seldom result in love of revolutions, and social self-regulation does not accept the outside control of politics. Let each be responsible for himself, says the vulgate (‘vulgate’ is what one calls the doctrine of others). Which means in this context: let each make his own forces of order. Efflorescence by sprinkling. Happiness through the diaspora. Dislocation as paragraph z in the manifesto. Is not this the whole poetry of May, that the movement should be an and in itself, like language for the poet or the game for the player? Perhaps the best gambles have no stakes. The injured of May struggled against a generic being who happened to be called De Gaulle. Between a setting and a foil, less than an enemy but more than a reagent: what was meant by State, System, Old World. One might almost say, it was 54

the epoch: the Father, the Law, the Symbolic. At this level of generality, one could only reject en bloc. March 22nd did not concern itself with detail; in other words it had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with politics—as Alain Touraine, who was rather spoilt at the time with the wealth of ‘social movements’ and ‘self-production of society’, was later to explain very well. People did not want a right wing government; they were ferociously against it. They did not want a left wing government either; they were not at all in favour. Mendès-France, Mitterrand, Waldeck: still the Old World, the incarnation of the system. Left and right, same fight. Well, how about no government at all. Every time the shadow of some alternative or provisional plan was erected in a corner, there were storms of facetious abuse. Unhappily a society, any society, abhors a vacuum, like nature; it has to have a government, any government. Then we’ll have one. The old one, that is; no hassle, it’s there already. One strategy is to turn the elements of the established system against the system itself. Whether it was the Roman republic giving way to the Empire, imperial Rome to the barbarians, feudalism to the monarchy or the old regime to the Revolution, no social or political system has ever been overthrown from the outside without some contribution from a number of institutions, men and techniques from the previous system. Even the Paris Commune had its share of recidivists. . . . When people want to make, not even the Revolution but anything at all, uncritical indignation and upper-case disgust are not sufficient. Sooner or later the moment comes to roll up one’s sleeves and fight word-toword with the world’s prose. The students of the May movement kept their hands clean; just clean enough to be cut off. A deliberate purity, suicide rather than accident. The question of means was not even raised; it had already been overtaken in people’s minds by the moral or religious question of ultimate ends: end of growth, end of discipline, end of knowledge. Eschatology has never led anyone to victory, still less to battle; what’s-the-point is just as disarming to the opponents of established values as to their supporters. There we are: apart from a few backward crazies sold on old-style revolution (on which the JCR had some very good ideas), the aim of the May movement was not to do, but for the students to be (better) and the workers to have (more). The meeting of these three verbs caused the explosion. But they were not conjugated; hence the spark was followed by extinction and the movement broke down. The extension of the movement from place to place by spontaneous contagion, and its slow foundering through successive dislocations, underlined the defect of articulation. May was not able to invent a new language in time, nor to articulate a phrase with the old one. The vocabulary was there, syntax was lacking. To give it substance, be and have would have had to be subordinated to a common do, but the only thing in common was a refusal of any subordination to anyone else. The very idea of subordination—to a leadership, a structure of action, a plan—was repellent to the anti-authoritarian revolt. And the very idea of taking the plunge (risking a rupture) panicked the worker vanguards (who did nothing to develop the anti-capitalist potential taking shape, here and there, in the workers movement). Total: no total. An inert sum, a 55

result without an operation. Conclusion: you do not measure the level of consciousness by the degree of combativity, nor the strength of a revolutionary impulse by the intensity of the complaints. The thirst to be is metaphysical; politics were put in a minority by the students in May. By whom? By metaphysics, so say the metaphysicians. It is their job to say that. Before, they stayed close to the walls and spoke in low voices, uncertain as to their indispensability to the daily lives of their fellow-citizens. Since ’68, they have been flying. Still transported by the divine surprise: what a comeback! You hear nothing on TV, radio and in editors’ offices these days but the beating of wings and the rustle of souls: God blows past on every breeze. The former combatants applaud, understandably since it is more flattering to have been cuckolded by the Holy Ghost than by the petrol pump scabs of Whitsun ’68. It is also less risky. As Frossard says, you don’t have children with the Holy Ghost. France has no oil, but it has ideas. At the and of May, unfortunately, it needed petrol more than ‘sublime’ ideas. The economic factor put paid to the non-politics of May. ‘Strategy’ means in the first place will: a thought-out conception based on the real, a deliberate orientation towards a possible end. When actions follow one another involuntarily, even games theory stays silent. Morgenstern would have had nothing to say about the May crisis: entangled, the decisions watered one another down or cancelled one another out, neutralizing each other in general indecision. And randomness ruled until De Gaulle took the decision to leave for BadenBaden, at last recovering the initiative which, to tell the truth, nobody really wanted to take away from him. He had won, then; but the Movement had not lost. It was not a drawn game. No bid, no stake, no adversaries. What could it gain and what had it to lose? In Bolivia, Che had failed: battle had been joined, with him in it, to achieve defined ‘war aims’. Lenin and Trotsky won at Petrograd; we know what would have been lost if they had not. Since Popper, there have existed in rational logic ‘non-falsifiable’ propositions (whose falsity cannot be demonstrated). This places them outside science, and it is not surprising that since May they have formed part of the dominant discourse. All that remained was the inauguration of ‘non-losing’ political initiatives, for which there is no criterion that could distinguish between success and failure: an action outside strategy, in a sense. Short of measuring success by the editorial space occupied in the next day’s newspapers. To judge of the results of an undertaking, it is necessary to develop and articulate it, therefore to be patient and cunning, to take time. Pleasure does not wait; nor does profitability. Neo-capitalism only tolerates short cycles: in the turnover of capital, of stocks in the factories, of books in the windows and of ‘debates’ in people’s minds. Brevity has become the value-standard, criterion of permitted revolts and measure of permitted insolence. When it has no sequel, it glitters; if it drags on a bit, the smell of paperwork begins to hang about it; if it becomes persistent, it’s worse than fading away, it’s sent down with no appeal. Now everything is now, news is bought for cash, a 56

different front page headline every day. The slow, convoluted tempo of the projects of yesteryear—and of all popular wars—has given way to the blow-by-blow timing of ad-men and commentators: stagemanaged events and theatrical strokes in front of the TV cameras. Strategies have gone out of the window; instead we have the play of chance and necessity. It’s the end for historical politicians, those who followed what was called in Old Bolshevik ‘the general line’ and in Old French a ‘grand design’ (the great quarrel of Shakespearean characters). The beginning of navigation within sight of the coast. Poets are those who do, invent, choose between possibilities. What if the bear-trap poetry of May slipped us into an age of iron, without landscape or values, where our history will be made without us, in little touches, in small jolts, a week at a time, a mosaic of figures and news-items? With the and of politics would begin an involuntary but comfortable servitude. The abandonment of dialectic (that form of thought which aimed at adding everything up starting with a freely stated end) would involve some inconveniences, including that of no longer being the subject of one’s history. In ’68, Zeus revenged himself on Prometheus. ‘I hate all gods’ . . . said ‘the first saint and martyr of the philosophic calendar’ (Marx). To which post-May replies: ‘All gods are adorable, you can’t have enough idolatry’—from Mick Jagger to the Heavenly Father. The people become a ghost-object manipulated by invisible hands, shackled to the rock of opinion polls and TAM ratings, hit parades and the latest trade balance. Our little epigones of Leon Bloy and Barrès are right:9 May was ‘divine’, Prometheus couldn’t get what he wanted from it. ‘Rest assured that I will never exchange my unhappy fate for your servitude . . .’ Hermes beats his wings. The hero keeps his feet on the ground, but it is he who steals the fire. There are two infallible signs by which one may recognize that a society is losing its grip on the present, that an epoch is giving way to itself by abandoning the real to diviners and magi: exorcism and nostalgia. In dealing with the future, prophesy replaces forecasting; in dealing with the past, celebration replaces investigation. Loss of the sense of practice is often accompanied by an intense self-satisfaction. Look at our ceremony: a widespread, prolix, corporate narcissism: better to hire one another than kill one another, isn’t it? No experimental account, nothing but a state of soul and a prose-poem. No political analysis. Nothing that resembles a gamble, a set of instructions or a will. Nothing usable, operational or dynamic, of the order of: ‘What could we have done wrong? What would have enabled us to succeed? How can we do better next time?’ For answer, you get a fine philosophic sauce (made of the rather footling sixth-form rhetoric which passes for metaphysics these days) when it would be much simpler, more respectable and undoubtedly more stimulating to serve the fish up raw (nothing shameful about it, there’s even something to be said for it) like this: we don’t want all that to succeed at all; we’re perfectly happy where we are, we have plenty of time, and long may it last, the 9 Leon Bloy (1846–1917), a virulently reactionary and apocalyptic Catholic writer; Maurice Barrés (1862–1923), monarchist writer and politician, identified with the campaign against Dreyfus, and proponent of the culte de moi.

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good time of despair. To do something one day together, something bigger and more interesting than any of us, is no longer our problem. The issue now is whether to be interviewed, filmed, published, recognized, admired, talked about: the ‘to be or not to be’ of post-May. An anniversary as cruel as an x-ray. That defeated ‘revolutionaries’, ten years after their defeat, should be in their own country in all the culturally, socially and economically powerful places: what does it indicate? That soft revolutions (analogous to soft architecture, energy sources and drugs) are more effective than the brutalities of the armed masses? That the strategy of the word pays better than the strategy of violence? Words, words. A new indication that the logic at work in the uprising ten years ago was not of rupture but of reconciliation. With life, they say. Yes: life with a capital L for them, in the metropolitan centres, and death, with a small d, for three billion others.

Columbus’s Egg To begin with, there was the fabulous discovery that Europe is in America. At the time, of course, nobody could see it at all. Nor could Columbus, five centuries earlier. Approaching the West Indies, it was obvious to him that he had reached Marco Polo’s Asia: the coasts of Cipangu, just before Cathay, as Japan and China were then called. Christopher Columbus did not look at what was before him but read the coastline through his portulans, placing each discovery in the setting of an old name. We should not forget that the modern age had been born of itself in perfect conformity with the middle ages. In France, all the Columbuses of modernity thought that behind Godard they were discovering China in Paris, when in fact they were landing in California. Their sails were filled by the West wind, but they were steering by the Little Red Book which said the opposite, like explorers equipped with Ptolemy’s Geography. Chairman Mao never seemed so infallible to his European disciples as he did at the exact moment in history when, in Europe, the West wind began to prevail over the East wind. In May ’68 words were always preferred to things, but in the and things prevailed over words: it was just a matter of time. May ’68: the and of ancient history and the beginning of a new social geography. With its consequence: substitution of sociological study for political discourse. The passage from history as will to history as evolution. Columbus landed in Haiti in 1492, but it took until 1507 for a Cosmography to risk baptizing as ‘America’ what were until then known as the rediscovered territories of the Orient. In the meantime the persistent Asiatic mirage had given the strange inhabitants the name Indians. It would only take a decade for the deluded ones of the Old World, who lived through ’68 as a search for the lost territories of the Revolution (‘No movement for the last century has resembled so closely that which Marx had in mind in 1848’—Glucksmann, 1968), to begin to look their discovery in the face. They still doubt the evidence of their eyes and reject wholesale a recent past to which they have become strangers; so rapid has been the change of scenery that they no longer recognize themselves in their former role. ‘May ’68?’, mused Serge July, director of Libération, in a piece called Ras-le-Mai (3 March 1978), ‘That was a century ago’. Not without reason; travellers are well aware that 58

voyages in space are also voyages in time. To change continents is to change centuries. Seen from ’78, May ’68 looks as antique as the port of Honfleur seen from Manhattan. All the same, it is from there that the former combatants embarked to cross the Atlantic on the way to conquer the new society of communication. Immigrants who have succeeded in their chosen country gather in associations, but do not care to remember their country of origin in too much detail. By catapulting itself backwards into the future, France was only observing the oldest law of history: quid pro quo. The latter’s scale matched the stake. Real society cut its moorings in the mythologies of the past by a sumptuous firework-display of exploding myths: the Revolution, Civil War, the Proletariat, Strategy, the Vanguard, the People, Power, and so on. As if to enter the Twenty-first Century, France needed a last look at all the trappings of the Nineteenth. One minute more, Mr. Hangman. . . . The victory of the new bourgeois society over the old proletarian dream, of the electronic courtiers over the artisanal Commune, thus took place under the auspices of Marx, Kropotkin and Sorel. The victory of tomorrow’s prose over yesterday’s poetry unleashed the most astonishing display of floral games the old France had ever seen. Paris made barricades of wrecked cars, and the individually-owned motor car triumphed over ghost barricades. France devoted itself to Marxist talk as never before, to liquidate the Marxism in its head. Its student youth tasted the delights of anarchy, to sugar the pill of the new capitalist order. Was it necessary to fancy ourselves Maoist to become American? The reversal of reality in people’s brains was part of the strangeness of May: a telescoping of pious images and school memories, of good hearts and overstuffed heads. The surest way to get an exact idea of the thing is to read the works of the period backwards, in the mirror. The Movement’s intellectuals were thus a little more perfect than nature, in the May version of the role appropriate to the intelligentsia: calling black white, striking twelve at two o’clock and signalling left to turn right. Books like Gluckman’s Stratégie it Révolution in France, 1968 and Vers la guerre civile by Alain Geismar, Serge July and Erlyn Morane are worth an attentive re-reading. They contain stupefyingly abstract analyses of an abstract situation, in which speculation retrieves its prime meaning of optical phantasmagoria: an image inverted in the mirror. Random examples of the backward prognostics of the time: ‘May, nevertheless, has put the revolution back on its feet (. . .), it has replaced revolution and class struggle at the centre of all strategy. Without wishing to play the prophet: by ’70 or ’72, France will be in revolution’ (Vers la guerre civile, p. 16); ‘1848 1968: the Communist Manifesto is the order of the day of a decisive battle which seems to be under way’ (Glucksmann). Everyone is entitled to make mistakes, especially while involved in action. In fact, these evaluations appear both much more, and much less, than simple ‘errors of judgement’. Much less, because symptoms of a collective hallucination. Much more, because signs of a mode of thought by unanswerable assertion, unsupported by analysis or demonstration, of which May ensured the supremacy. These ‘errors’ have never been treated as such by their authors; 59

that is, treated politically, as matters for reflection and correction. They have simply been prolonged by unexplained inversion. ‘. . . worth an attentive re-reading’: an idiotic phrase, a pre-May phrase. From a time when books existed by themselves and reading held its own against television, magazines and comics. When written words counted for as much as spoken ones, and in any case more than the author’s physiognomy. When attention could still cope with details amid the tide of daily signals. In a word, nobody is going to read these works of politics-fiction, which are no longer discussed—especially by their authors; and this is a pity. A warning to enthusiasts of old values, of the smile-through-tears or mad-giggle-of-terror type. People will turn instead to the TV, all that remains to us. They will look, they will listen: these admirable processions going out to the people of Billancourt, certain that ‘the workers will take the torch of Revolution from the fragile hands of the students’; persuaded that they were making history and that the old world was out of breath because it was between breaths. . . . It is not sacrifice that makes tragedy, but blindness. In this respect the Belle Époque rushing off to the massacre in 1914 with a fresh and joyous song on its lips is worth as much as our post-war generation, which had not yet forgotten the songs of brotherhood and hurled itself against locked gates mistaking its past for a future, and ’68 for ’36. Nation and Proletariat

On the other side too, in the mirror, the same cock-and-bull story, another thwarted hope. Nationalist frenzy was already frenzy as nationalism; marxist-leninist frenzy was already frenzy as leninist revolution. The Champs-Elysées of May 30th match the Champ-deMars of the 13th, the Committees to Defend the Republic match the Base Committees: Malraux-Debré, the blind clairvoyants, give answer to Geismar-Cohn-Bendit, pathetic puppets to sympathetic mascots. Each camp buried its head in the folds of an old flag, tricolour or red and black, so as not to look the present in the face: our present without flag or anthem, without colour or feeling. The French way to America passed through May ’68; only a crisis could remove our handicaps. In its march towards normalization, in effect, modern French society dragged along with the rest of its baggage two very embarrassing collective values: the idea of the nation and independence, and the idea of the working class and revolution. These two concrete universals—the two last, of which we will speak to our children as of princesses in fairy tales—had for more than a century structured the ‘French ideology’, located the armature of our political dramaturgy and supported the material framework of a social machinery. Anchoring points for a complex of organizations, practices and agencies, they organized action on both sides. How to get rid of these values? By putting both of them in the hands of professionals. A value exists historically as long as there exist amateurs ready to sacrifice themselves 60

for it. To prevent thoughts of the nation and of socialism from occurring here and there, it is necessary and sufficient for these things to be entrusted to specialized functionaries. Here, a career army; there, a party in the hands of apparatchiks. These days, conscripts can be used to clean crude oil off the beaches; but it is ‘the professionals’—half volunteers, half mercenaries—who go off to ‘save the lives of our nationals’. Same division in the CP: while militants yawn over absurd tasks in which they no longer believe, the ‘historic interests’ of the working class are the exclusive concern of the apparatus. When the big questions are reserved for the full-timers, they soon become the object of grass-roots cynicism. A head without a halo today means a headless corpse tomorrow. Can the actual nation and the actual working class long survive their disappearance as myths in the consciousness of citizens or workers? It looks doubtful, judging by the way national antagonisms are fading in the developed industrial world as interdependence grows, and class antagonisms within each nation are fading away behind a de facto solidarity based on the joint exploitation of the world market. We shouldn’t be too quick to see this as a shipwreck. Fluctuat nec mergitur is the motto of post-May. Dismasted, rudderless, pocked with fissures and holes, the modern societies rule the waves, as if sets of standards were no longer essential to the progress of social values: currency, codes, institutions, rites and signs. One can live without them, provided one chooses to live in the short term, that is to survive. The short term answers perfectly the needs of capital, whose forward march is stimulated by the absence of a horizon. It is disintegrating, they say; it is leaking like a sieve; it is exploding. On the contrary, it is held together by the holes, empty space can bear weight. So when will people stop believing that the moon is made of green cheese, that the reassembly of bourgeois society is its destruction, that the reconditioning of everything is a dismemberment? To get the spring cleaning done properly it was necessary to send two antideluvian giants to join their ancestors. An idea only takes root in the masses—in other words, becomes myth—through the intermediary of an individual image, a particular name. The commotion of May ’68 liquidated Lenin in the mind in the same delayed and surreptitious manner as it liquidated De Gaulle in fact. For the departure of the General in April ’69 was a delayed effect of May, just as the ideological defeat of Leninism was brought about by the anti-authoritarian flowering. It takes your nearest and dearest to really do you an injury. Their ungrateful children struck down the putative fathers of the Party and the Fatherland with cheers of appreciation. The totems were murdered by referendum; in May ’68, the militant ideal was liquidated by the militants and the patriotic ideal by the patriots. A social idea does not simply pass away: before dying, it has to become taboo. The two interdependent and competing religions of the nation and the proletariat expired in May in a frenzy of rituals and sacred chants. The cacophony of liturgies concealed and permitted the liquidation of the dogmas. On both sides, the erection of taboos took place in a delirium of magical thought. 61

The chronological displacement rendered the illusions lyrical on both sides. People who are late always have a tendency to shout. 1968 was the moment when the world market informed the nation-state that its services were no longer required (‘too small to solve the big problems and too big to solve the small’); when the economic displaced the military from centre-stage in confrontations between nations; and when the internationalization of the world economy short-circuited the old prestige of the sovereign State. The moment, therefore, when for the French bourgeoisie the tricolour became more or less ridiculous, inconvenient or touching (depending on the individual) but in any case anachronistic. At the same time 1968 was the moment when the workers’ movement, in the main, discovered itself to be integrated into the imperialist machinery for pumping world surplus labour, from which it benefits not nearly enough, but does after all benefit. In consequence of which, the European proletariat having far more than its chains to lose to the world Revolution, the biggest strike in French history could and with the satisfaction of so-called quantitative demands. The moment, therefore, when for recognized representatives of this class the red flag, the clenched fist and the Internationale slipped into a more or less embarrassing and in any case superfluous folk-lore. In sum, the material reality of the developed capitalist countries dictates that at present there is no more a national bourgeoisie than there is proletarian internationalism (except in the form of historically doomed survivals). In May ’68, to familiarize themselves with this new but very real world, the bourgeoisie gathered at the tomb of the unknown soldier singing the Marseillaise, and the students stuck red flags on factory gates to the strains of the Internationale. This is what we in France call ‘a historic event’. After a certain age, you have the history you can get, not the history you want. A Festive Funeral

Ten years later, the battles are waged openly with the fronts reversed, and French society dares to seem what it is. An anglophone President of the Republic chimes the hour of globalism while a communist Secretary-General takes his device from Action française: ‘All that is national is ours’. What does it signify, this permutation of positions assigned to the partner-adversaries by a hundred years of history? That the ‘universality of the French language’, the challenge to America and the grand alliance with the Third World are no longer the concern of the big financial bourgeoisie, which uses American logistics to send its German legionaries to restore, in Zaire and elsewhere, the order of the multinationals. No more mission, but a practical task: to optimize the rate of profit of industrial enterprises, therefore to watch over their competitiveness in the world market. That the immigrants, the Palestinians and the Angolans are no longer the concern of the French workers, so that within his political family Georges Marchais shocks nobody when he prefers a big sports ballyhoo to solidarity with Argentina’s torture victims. Goodbye to missions, historical rôles and other dictatorships of the proletariat. The main concern of the French working class (in its immense majority) is to reduce the scandalous social inequalities which still prevail in the country, by means of a 62

more equitable distribution of income. To put it crudely: to increase our share of the cake, without breaking the oven or the baking dish. Marx notes somewhere that humanity is always happy to take leave of its past. You seldom see a more festive funeral than this has been. On both sides of the Seine and wading through a river of saliva, ‘reactionaries’ and ‘revolutionaries’ shared the duties of pallbearer and accompanied the old world singing to its final resting place. The only confusion was over the identity of the deceased. The people of May thought they were burying capitalism, when in fact they were seeing the last of their socialist illusions. The people of June thought they were heaping earth on anti-France, when they were handing French government to the Trilateral Commission. The extras of ’68 were not mistaken: it was indeed ‘the beginning of the and’—of their and. As always, the winners were absent; the real heroes of the drama are people who did not feature in any of the news photos. Take a good look in your album of the days of glory. You will not see Bergeron heading the May 13th procession, nor Barre and Giscard shouting themselves hoarse with drunken grandiloquence under the Arc de Triomphe on the 30th. They are the real victors of May—and through May. Do you hear them laughing silently in front of their television, while you are wiping away a tear shed for your lost youth? We have the images and feeling; they have the future and reality. In the Champs-Elysées, as in the Boul’ Mich’, the ideological smoke was too thick to reveal at the time the scale of the confidence trick to the future marks. When the fog of words thinned out sufficiently, which took several years, a grey day dawned on our washed-out world. In the Elysée, Giscard had virtually exorcised the ghost of De Gaulle; Marchais had wiped out the memory of Colonel Fabien,10 in the square of the same name. The messianisms were dead, taking with them some suddenly-aged Messiahs. In the enlightened brains of the left, Ivan Illich had dethroned Althusser, conceptless utopia replacing concept without object: a way of noting one’s impotence, by facing bad luck with a good heart. On the right, Raymond Aron was evicting André Malraux, the disillusioned dryness of figures supplanting grandiose but inexact antitheses: a way of moving to the defensive while keeping a grip on the essential. And on the extreme left, which made people sit back to back in the New-World-campus manner, Jesus-freaks, rock and love arrived: Berkeley ’68. The French cultural and political vanguard will henceforth be the last carriage in the American train. The bitter destiny of the provinces. Libération, May 1978: ‘It has taken us exactly ten years to get rid of all the mythologies inherited from May, all the concepts which restricted and structured the consciousness and political thought of the time; to make a critique of them, to dare to confront all the contradictions which undermined our efforts, and to begin at last to reflect freely. Ten years to follow our utopias, our imageries to the bitter and. And get over it. Ten years finally to liberate ourselves from May; the light came afterwards, not at the time. The blank page, year zero, starts now, following the theoretical purge and the illumination of our illusions.’ 10

A Resistance hero. 63

When all is said and done, ten years isn’t long to come to terms with your century.

Conclusion by Way of an Apology It’s bad to speak evil of something that was beautiful, and just as bad not to mention the evil done by the beautiful as it ages. The task of the intellectual is not to distribute compliments, but to try and describe what is; his purpose is not to seduce, but to arm. The real, behind mere ugliness or prettiness, is neither good nor evil. Where is the reality of May? In the experience of May? In its own context this is highly respectable, and far be it from us to trample on the holy things of May (‘the greatest adventure of a generation’). But when emotion is used to shut off all discussion by advancing itself as an explanation, it recalls vividly the old terrorism of ‘experience’, standby of good colonials (you natives know them, don’t you?) and bad poets. Render unto the moment that which is the moment’s—the truncheon in the small of the back, the tottering of certainties, the spark of love, the sighting of the UFO of revolution—and to history those things that are history’s. Without entering into the pointless argument between the emotive and the intelligible; for there is no symmetry of outlook between the individual vision of a social phenomenon and the social evaluation of individual visions, between the emotion of an instant and the analysis of a long period. Those who were there have given ample definitions of May: magnetism, flash, glitter, weightlessness; poems have not been lacking, and some are admirable (‘Nuit de Mai’, Richard Deshayes, Libération, May ’78). Would it be forbidden for those who were not there to try and articulate what May has become—if it is true that the truth only exists as ‘derived-truth’ (Hegel)? Since the truth is always revolutionary, as people say for pleasure, it follows that what is revolutionary is rarely pleasing, for the spelling out of a truth is tedious, its utterance thankless and its very nature invariably wounding to our illusions of sovereignty. It is true that the traces of the event have seemed to reveal more about its historical function than its own features. But, if the reality of May is what May became, it can hardly be said that May became what it was; but that it was worth questioning its metamorphosis, without evasion. The communion of egos on the barricades becoming generalized egocentrism, the gift of self, the cult of me, the exaltation of liberties, the enshrinement of inequalities, revolutionary romanticism, counter-revolutionary romanticism, challenge, submission, mad desire for justice and wide acceptance of injustices—could all this be a new mystery of the faith before which reason must incline? It’s a time for falling on one’s knees and making acts of contrition. But was May about transforming the world or about enjoying the spectacle of its disarray? If such was the case, better to keep quiet. In resigning ourselves to the discredited and displeasing language of analysis, we have put our money on the first hypothesis. At the very and of it all, the man who goes to his grave stammering about the ecstasy of a single day or the one who looks decay in the face, the man who blows on the ashes or the one who tries to light 64

another fire elsewhere—which of them has the most corpses in his mouth? In reality, we can put up with our May; the fire has revived in Africa and America. . . . The imposture of official dissent and of arrests à la carte, of exclusively European human rights and of the inhuman humanist standard which is based on the exorbitant scale of planetary inequalities—an imposture which holds centre stage in our society— will last as long as its material bases of reproduction: a long time still, but not eternally. Looking at it globally, the distance between the northern and southern hemispheres is increasing; wealth in food resources, technology and available energy is emerging as the prerogative of a smaller and smaller minority. The dominant ideology of ‘human rights’, which contains a bizarre blend of the political decomposition of May and the most classic imperialist practice, both represents and travesties (like all judicial ideology) a relation of social forces. It indicates simultaneously the growing awareness in the industrial West of the extreme fragility of its world domination and its will to defend it by any means, economic, technical or military. For precise economic reasons, respect for the white man’s rights passes by way of the violation (systematic in principle but variable in its methods) of the right of brown, black, yellow and red men. If that is the game, sooner or later the floor will go to demography. The overthrow of the capitalist system remains the only bet compatible with our dignity, and it is not a wild one. While awaiting the and of ‘the and of History’, that is the rebirth (which does not depend on us) of local conditions enabling a political project to take shape once more, the European by birth still has the opportunity to scrape his grain of sand from the ramparts of the fortress-West, by lending a hand to the ‘barbarians’ struggling outside the walls against our sophisticated barbarism. That’s not enough? ‘Better less but better’. Paris, May 31st 1978 Translated by John Howe

Acknowledgement: The above extract is taken from Régis Debray, Modeste contribution aux discours et cérémonies officiels du dixième anniversaire, Maspero, Paris 1978; it comprises pp. 1–45, 87–90. 65