Reply to Debray

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Reply to Debray Régis Debray’s epigrams on May ’68 are certainly amusing. All the same, they are dubious and even rather mystifying. What the ex-prisoner of Camiri says in substance is that if the May movement had not existed, French capitalism would have had to invent it! In his view, ‘the logic at work in the uprising ten years ago was one not of rupture but of reconciliation’ . . . the general strike ‘served as a factor tending to stabilize fundamental class relations’; and it is from 1968 that ‘in Europe, the West wind began to prevail over the East wind’, and so on. If we are to believe him, in short, the ‘cybernetic’ crisis of May ’68 constituted a decisive moment in the self-regulation of French society, in the process of liquidating its archaisms and in the tailoring of attitudes to the new demands of the accumulation of capital. This is the real meaning, the obective function, of the explosion of May, unknown to its protagonists, who ‘accomplished the opposite of what they intended’. Forgetting a Detail

It does not require genius to see where this reasoning falls down. In situating the truth of May in what has become of May ’68, and of certain sixty-eighters, Debray simply ‘forgets’ one little detail: the movement did not triumph, but was defeated by a bourgeois reformist counter-offensive, whose broad lines can easily be retraced. It is this counter-offensive, not the movement itself, which shaped post-May. To attribute to the general strike of May–June ’68—even in an unconscious and ‘objective’ relationship—responsibility for the various palliatives introduced by the victors to consolidate their domination, and avoid new explosions in future, may be a joke, but it is not in good taste. This kind of reasoning could be used to claim that the Popular Front strikers of ’36 were clearing a path for an American New Deal, accelerating the concentration of capital, giving birth without knowing it to ‘indicative planning’ à la française, the public financing of private accumulation and the mercantilization of leisure. . . No, the protagonists of May ’68 did not accomplish ‘the opposite of what they intended’. They did not accomplish what they intended either, because their bourgeois reformist adversaries did not give them time: on 30 May, after General De Gaulle’s fighting speech and the reactionary demonstration which followed it, the leaders of the workers’ movement agreed to resolve the conflict in reformist fashion by imposing a general return to work and referring their capitulation to a general election organized by the régime. The far left lost the initiative from that moment, and the movement was liquidated in three 66

weeks by the concerted action of the CRS and the union full-timers. The toughest sectors were isolated and suppressed by force: a week of battles in June at the Renault Works at Flins (one killed); several days at Peugeot at Sochaux (two killed by bullets); police occupation of the Sorbonne and many other university centres; dissolution of eleven far left organizations and imprisonment of their leaders; purging of State organs (200 journalists hunted out of the state television, ORTF); sacking of the most combative worker militants. . . . The Recovery

As one would expect, the Giscardo–Gaullist coalition, invigorated by electoral victory, undertook a long-term reorganization of its system of domination, whose weaknesses had been spectacularly exposed by the May explosion. This reorganization was of transparently ‘hegemonic’ type, designed not to crush the popular movement by means of despotic power, but to weaken it by division, and channel it towards programmes and modes of action which would be compatible with the functioning of the capitalist system. In consequence it implied certain concessions to the new aspirations revealed by the movement, or rather, a specific processing of these aspirations to defuse their subversive potential and exploit them as factors tending to consolidate the régime. This is the ‘rational kernel’ of Debray’s thesis. In its hegemonic aggiornamento the dominant class uses the stick, but also the carrot. In its way and for its own purposes, it takes into account the new popular expectations and demands. It is in this distorted, alienated form that Power turned the May movement to its advantage. The prototype of this move was to be found in the Edgar Faure law reforming the University—passed almost unanimously by an Assembly of CRS-blue elected in June ’68—which instituted, behind a smoke-screen of ‘autonomy’, ‘co-management’ and ‘multi-disciplines’, competitive universities on the American model. The same measures led to the re-launch of ‘participation’, the removal of General De Gaulle in the spring of ’69, the blueprint for a ‘New Society’ proposed to Frenchmen of goodwill by Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the ideal of ‘advanced liberal society’ erected by Giscard d’Estaing, and so on. For their part the traditional workers’ parties, just as frightened of the May movement as the bourgeoisie, and just as eager to return to the proven norms of republican legality, moved in a way which was analogous in all respects: expelling extreme-left militants from the unions (principally the CGT, as the CFDT, which wanted to build itself up, at first pretended to be much more tolerant); isolating and denouncing movements among school and university students, and later all the mass movements born out of the impact of May (feminist, regionalist, ecological, etc). And simultaneously trying to adapt to the new aspirations and the new combativity of the workers (an effort denounced as ‘recuperation’ by the far left), with a view to re-establishing and consolidating the grip of the apparatus on workers and youth: the Socialist Party’s swerve to the left at its Epinay Congress in 1971; the discovery of ‘self-management’ as a ‘mobilizing myth’, first by the Socialists and 67

later by the CP; setting up of the Union of the Left, signature of the ‘common programme’, etc. The liberal pro-American France of 1979 is indeed descended from May ’68, but as its negation, not as its completion. As the Gulag is descended from the democracy of the Councils, and Stalin from Marx! Double Blindness

Because it postulates, against all the evidence, the homogeneity, continuity and organic character of the process leading from May to post-May, the analysis proposed by Debray reveals itself as unworkable. In reality, it makes its author miss the main lessons which we might learn from the events, and their fate. In the first place, it prevents him from perceiving the revolutionary potentialities of the May crisis. Although it is very apparent that the general strike of May–June ’68 was not a revolutionary crisis in the Leninist sense (crisis and disintegration of the State and organization of an alternative power by the workers); although, therefore, the conquest of State power by armed insurrection was not even considered; nevertheless it represented much more, however displeasing to the PCF, than a simple, but rather long drawn out, conflict over the more equitable distribution of the ‘fruits of expansion’. Both the authority system and the bourgeois model of civilization were called in question, raising the possibility of generalizing workers’ control over production and popular control of all institutions; of disputing bourgeois power on all levels and in all the fields; of winning new democratic rights and liberties for the workers; and of re-examining the aims and modalities of capitalist development. The spread of practical, wide-ranging struggle along these lines (by no means out of the question, as the examples of Lip and, on a larger scale, the Italian Workers’ Councils were to demonstrate) would have constituted a powerful radicalizing movement among workers. The general strike of May/June put in question not only the personal power of De Gaulle but the very structure of the Fifth Republic and could have produced before very long an authentically revolutionary situation, if its political and social logic had been driven home against the ruling power. The general strike did not lead inevitably to Giscardian liberalism. It did not point in one direction only but harboured various possibilities, including revolutionary possibilities. If these have all been shortcircuited and neo-liberal possibilities brought to the fore instead, it is because of, and by means of, a body of political decisions and practices to which Debray pays little attention: the strategy of the PCF and the CGT, designed to reduce the biggest general strike in French history to a simple list of demands; the reformist policy of the main labour movement, deliberately barring the way to any systematic anti-capitalist struggle in the factories or on the State level; the inability of the revolutionary left—politically confused, and, in any case, insufficiently established in the labour movement—to promote such a struggle on a practical level or to impose unity on the traditional workers organizations; the fact that the initiative was therefore left to the ruling class 68

and the Gaullist State which, after a month of trial and error, found an effective riposte and put it into operation; dissolution of the Assembly and legislative elections, based on a return to work; the formation of ‘Committees for the Defence of the Republic’ and a spectacular reconciliation with the former members of OAS, to ensure active support from the army. Régis Debray effectively denies that the May movement had any revolutionary potential (from his account, a reader would get the impression that the movement occurred mainly in the Sorbonne and at the Odéon) and totally ignores the share of responsibility for the defeat that must be attributed to the reformist leadership given to the workers movement. True, from his viewpoint there was no defeat; ‘the fruits bore out the promise of the flowers’. . . . The Period opened by May

His incomprehension of May ’68 is repeated in his lack of understanding of the period begun by May ’68. Just as he fails to see the anti-capitalist potential of the May Movement, Debray does not perceive its longterm subversive effects: egalitarian and democratic aspirations (‘selfmanagement’); the desire to live by values other than those of productivism and consumerism, touching every sphere of society and giving rise to wide-ranging practical struggle; the women’s liberation movement, the sexual minority movements, regionalist and neo-nationalist movements; movements for reducing prices, consumers’ movements, movements of tenants, prisoners, soldiers, lawyers, teachers, medical workers, journalists, etc. . . . Obviously these movements, and their demands, are not revolutionary by definition; where they are inwardlooking and cut off from one another and the labour movement they can even assume a conservative rôle. The subversive charge they carry only becomes active to the extent that they can integrate themselves into the hegemonic advance of the whole labour movement. But it is precisely the spread and the intensity of egalitarian and democratic aspirations throughout the social fabric which provides the labour movement with the objective base of a broad anti-capitalist class alliance, however ineffective may have been its efforts so far to adopt them and integrate them into its political strategy. The long-term effects of May ’68 can be seen today in the French steelworkers’ struggle against unemployment, not only in the content of their demands (reduction of hours to 35 a week without loss of income, the right to live and work in the country) but in the forms taken by their struggle: kidnapping the chairman, sacking the management offices, attacking police stations when the police interfere, occupying the regional television centre and using its channel to publicize their struggle. . . . . More generally, the long-term effects of May ’68 have appeared in a level of combativity and class consciousness, a balance of strength between bourgeoisie and proletariat distinctly more favourable to the workers than that prevailing before May ’68. A balance of force which exacerbates the hegemonic crisis of the French bourgeoisie and is making especially difficult, if not impossible, its plans for ‘reorganizing’. In the years immediately following May the traditional workers 69

organizations were able to capitalize upon the new spirit they had done so much to frustrate. More than one million workers entered the trade unions. The votes cast for the Communist and Socialist Parties climbed back out of the pit, to reach levels not equalled since 1945. The Presidential candidate of the Union of the Left, who in May ’68 had sought after his own fashion to identify himself with the movement, came within a hair’s breadth of electoral success. This is another story— though not one unconnected to the impetus of May—and we know how it ends; once again the leaders of the workers movement have made the bourgeois leaders seem like masters of political strategy; once again one could compose paradoxes about how the Socialist and Communist leaders have saved the system, but by encompassing their own defeat not that of their adversary. But even this story is not quite finished yet. There remains a balance of forces which is precarious for the hegemonic position of the French bourgeoisie and which bars the road to its plans for re-organization. We must also say that today there is a revolutionary left which, however small, is now a factor in national political life and in the workers movement, as it was not pre-May. Not only is the revolutionary left larger, but it has learnt something from the last ten years and remains open to the future. The aggravation of bourgeois crisis imposes two basic tasks on revolutionary Marxists: to elaborate a strategy for transition to socialism which is adapted to the national and international conditions in advanced capitalist countries with old democratic traditions; and to combat the hold of reformism over West European workers, with a view to re-composing the whole labour movement. Debray has nothing to say about these problems. His text contains many just insights and a few sound polemics. But the overall thrust is a grotesque misinterpretation. The Heart of The Debate

Besides, the fundamental argument with Régis Debray bears less on May ’68 than on the reality of the transition to socialism in Western Europe. Faithful to his early Third-worldism, Debray remains convinced that no revolutionary prospect, however tenuous and unprecedented, can exist in Western Europe so long as it continues to occupy a dominant position in the international division of labour and consequently continues to drain wealth from the Third World. Since no authentic revolutionary movement can jolt the well-fed, privileged West, any movement claiming to be revolutionary is really just a parody, a façade or an imposture. These, it seems to me, are the presuppositions which shape Debray’s perception of the ‘events’. They were very widespread during the 60s, when capitalist expansion was at its strongest and when the rise of colonial revolutions suggested to some people that the ‘proletarian nations’ were about to supplant the ‘national proletariats’ as the protagonists of revolution. From all the evidence, these postulates contain a grain of truth buried with a thick coating of apologetic mystification: precisely what was revealed by the French and Italian upheavals. 70

Must we repeat that the existence of a second base of exploitation in the Third World certainly widens the margin of manoeuvre for the Western imperialist bourgeoisie, but that it abolishes neither the exploitation of the wage-earning masses of the West nor the contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production? That the possession of colonial empires did not save the advanced capitalist countries from experiencing the years of depression, unemployment and hunger between the two world wars? Or that the capitalist world has now entered a phase of prolonged stagnation, intensified international competition and monetary disorder which is forcing the different bourgeois governments to impose on their respective working classes an austerity programme which the workers refuse even to discuss? The situation is pregnant with conflicts and social explosions, and in the very centres of imperialism. And if we look back on the last decade must we register the existence of two hermetically sealed worlds, North and South, never the twain shall meet? Did not May ’68 demonstrate a complex and reciprocal relationship to revolution in other parts of the globe? To read Debray one would think that the international dimension of the May movement was simply deluded Maoism. Before May there was the Tet offensive, the Bolivian campaign, the anti-Shah demonstrations of the German students; after May the demonstrations in Mexico City, the Cordobazo, the Spring storm of 1970 in the Philippines. Like May these defeats opened as well as closed a chapter. What are we to make of the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship? Was there not some reciprocal relationship between the events in Lisbon and those in Luanda? And what has Teheran to teach us about the antiquated scenarios of ‘old revolutions’? There are a lot of questions here. Without filling in all the answers we can be sure that they could given no sustenance to an undialectical Third-worldism that confines revolution to the most impoverished zones of the globe. ‘The European by birth’, as Debray calls him, is not obliged to wait for demography to do his work for him, meanwhile contenting himself with ‘scraping 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’. He can do more and better; prepare the conditions for an assault from within. Henri Weber Paris, March 1979

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