Steve_Bamlett_blog

Some ideas about May 1968 from Abidor, M. (2018) ‘May Made Me: An Oral History of the 1968 Uprising in France’ London, Pluto Press.

This is a rich resource in that it brings together accounts from Paris veterans (already established political workers, new students, anarchists and voices from outside Paris. It also mixes accounts from different domains of ‘la lutte’: workers representatives (including from the Communist Unions, and the PCF), workers, farmers’ (peasant) representatives [on land ownership 129ff, 136], learner groups – showing diversity of experience, analysis and interpretative approach (perhaps even of memory).

Key themes get recycled / reinterpreted

 The role of autogestion / ‘self-organization’ in factory settings (149), the role of Action Committees and Assemblies. This, in the mouths of committed situationists has a Debord like ring. The content of the revolt is psychosocial – it reads discourse as a manifestation of rebellion at a deeper level, using Freud and Reich (on the role of social & libidinal change) in this case. Thus Jean-Jacques Lebel on what the workers really wanted and how that might differ from its articulation by the unions and the PCF. He says that the workers recollect the issue as a ‘bread-and-butter’ one, and will have told Abidor that (as some did):

…, on the conscious level it’s true what they told you, and on the other hand it’s not true because of their desire to take control over their own existence and to transform their relationship to their own work … To dream, to desire more (p.30).

The idea is to ‘change life’ (82).

Politically the issue is a move from centralized power to bottom-up forms that are resisted by the PCF (p. 144).

There is much here about the role of the ‘critical university’ in the aims of the learner movement (90) and a lot about the meaning of the rebellion as resistance to ‘lies’ and falsity (family, government, bosses, lecturers) – 156, 166, De Gaulle 175. The main source of lies are things that consider themselves as solid objects that endure – and embody notions of authority and the right to regulate others’ (155, 158). Hence the role of disobedience 137.

However the venom directed at mere appearances – presumably versions of Debord’s ‘spectacle’ – is more nuanced than I expected. Potiron, the farmers’ leader is fascinating on symbols (131):

… we hung up our sign. It was symbolic, and through it the farmers would understand, like me, that our enemy wasn’t the workers. We were farmers but we were first and foremost workers, and the symbol was that we wanted nothing to do with the monarchy – because even though we were supposedly living under a republic we were living under a monarchy – since power was hereditary. Now we were entering democracy. (p.131)

There is debate on the role of images in art that immediately attaches itself to themes of leadership and its negation (p. 161). Myriam speaks of the background import of situationist thinking but also the flexibility of terminology & ideas:

She talks about the ‘cultural’ nature of the struggle:

… but within an international environment, with myths which we constructed around events going on in the world. … The school had a photo lab, and the idea was to reproduce the image of Che, who’d been killed shortly before. We felt the need for an iconography, for a myth.

A factory worker’s tools are complex systems:

… you can look at them as the tools of our exploitation, but as workers you could view them as our property. (p.149).

Now for some images!

Steve