Steve_Bamlett_blog

Johnson, R. (1972) ‘The French Communist Party versus the Students: Revolutionary Politics in May-June 1968’ New Haven & London, Yale University Press.

There is real joy in reading an old but a good book on left politics, not least because this book poses its questions in terms of the future choices and prospects for the French Communist Party (PCF), which were then – in the 1970s – considerable. The party was divided (at least) between a Togliatti-Italian (PCI) style of electoral politics of the masses and the hard remnants of a Stalinist block (which in CPGB were known as the ‘tankies’ after their support for Russian tank invasions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia).

Those prospects have faded but in 1972 the question of how the PCF reacted to May ’68 was important. This book helps clarify the politics of the PCF that come from a knowledge of Ross (2002) alone. For instance the discussion of Althusser’s complex relationship with the PCF illustrates much more than the relations between a party, thinking itself a ‘vanguard’, and intellectually purer Marxism described, as it was by Althusser, as a science. Johnson’s brilliant analysis of the significance of Althusser’s uneasy truce with the party and its ‘intellectual’ lead, Roger Garaudy (57-60) concludes that, even despite the brilliance of Althusser’s intellect, that the ‘secondary, subordinate role of the bourgeois theorist’ is the main thing we learn about from this episode. ‘Creative theoretical activity no longer guides strategic and tactical decision making’. (p. 59).

The help offered by this book is in understanding the history of socialist ideas sometime thought definitive of May ’68. In theorists from the sublime Rosa Luxemburg, whose ‘cult of spontaneity’ is best understood as a critique of the retrogressive tendency of party organisation, bureaucracy & hierarchy (120f.) Her statement that the, “the ultra-centralism asked by Lenin is full of the sterile spirit of the overseer. It is not a positive and creative spirit’ (cited 121) seems built for ’68.

The definitive role post-war of Sartre (11, 38) and existentialism is also clear here, although Ross is probably correct that identification with Algeria didn’t need Sartre to promote its messages (42). However the characteristic of ‘refusal’ stressed by Ross (2002) could originate in Sartre, whom: ‘discovered a radical freedom by denying the philosophical legitimacy of all social restraints’ (19) and a theory of politically ‘engaged’ (even if it thinks it is not engaged in its bourgeois forms) art (14). The picture of the role of situationism (85f.) & ideas from anarchism, such as autogestion (51, 85) are well described if downplayed.

Some interesting ideas on undereying iconography of the movement emerge. The role of barriers in creating group social identity for the archetypal participant:

… he (sic.) strove to protect himself as a member of a group. He tried to defend the integrity and cohesiveness of the collectivity by constructing a protective fortress. (152)

Daniel & Gabriel Cohn-Bendit (brothers) quoted from the time of the event also shows how behaviours and objects come to have for the participants a similar meaning:

Our first task is to make the students more politically conscious. In practice, this means developing new ways of communication: improvising meetings in various faculty common rooms, occupying lecture halls, interrupting lectures with denunciations of their ideological bias, boycotting the examinations, sticking up posters and slogans, taking over the public address system – in short, taking any action that openly challenges the authorities.’ (Obsolete Communism: The Left -Wing Alternative [1968] p. 56 cited p. 170)

The description of the political significance of the Action Committees as forms with ‘no superior and potentially oppressive “coordinating committee.”’(90) is telling too.