Revolutionaries (41 page)

The best chance of overthrowing Gaullism was therefore to let it beat itself. At one point – between 27 and 29 May – its credibility would have crumbled so much that even its officials and followers might have given it up for lost. The worst policy would have been to give Gaullism the chance of rallying its supporters, the state apparatus, and the uncommitted against a clearly defined, and militarily ineffective, minority of workers and students. Unwilling to expel the striking workers from the factories by force, the army and police were entirely reliable against an insurrection. They said so. And, indeed, de Gaulle recovered precisely because he turned the situation into a defence of ‘order' against ‘red revolution'. That the
CP
was not interested in ‘red revolution' is another matter. Its general strategy was right for anyone, including revolutionaries, who unexpectedly discovered a chance of overthrowing the regime in a basically non-revolutionary situation. Assuming, of course, that they wanted to take power.

The communists' real faults were different. The test of a
revolutionary movement is not its willingness to raise barricades at every opportunity, but its readiness to recognize when the normal conditions of routine politics cease to operate, and to adapt its behaviour accordingly. The French
CP
failed both these tests, and in consequence failed not only to overthrow capitalism (which it did not want to do just then) but to install the Popular Front (which it certainly did). As Touraine has sarcastically observed, its real failure was not as a revolutionary but even as a reformist party. It consistently trailed behind the masses, failing to recognize the seriousness of the student movement until the barricades were up, the readiness of the workers for an unlimited general strike until the spontaneous sit-ins forced the hands of its union leaders, taken by surprise once again when the workers rejected the terms of trike settlement.

Unlike the non-communist left it was not pushed aside, since it had both organization and mass support from the grass roots. Like them, it continued to play the game of routine politics and routine labour unionism. It exploited a situation not of its own making, but it neither led nor even understood it, except perhaps as a threat to its own position within the labour movement by the bitterly hostile ultra-left. Had the
CP
recognized the existence and scope of the popular movement and acted accordingly, it might just have gained sufficient momentum to force its reluctant allies on the old left into line. One cannot say much more than this, for the chances of overthrowing Gaullism, though real for a few days, never amounted to more than a reasonable possibility. As it was it condemned itself, during those crucial days of 27 to 29 May, to waiting and issuing appeals. But at such times waiting is fatal. Those who lose the initiative lose the game.

The chances of overthrowing the regime were diminished not only by the failure of the Communists, but by the character of the mass movement. It had no political aims itself, though it used political phraseology. Without profound social and cultural
discontents, ready to emerge at a relatively slight impetus, there can be no major social revolutions. But without a certain concentration on specific targets, however peripheral to their main purpose, the force of such revolutionary energies is dispersed. A given political or economic crisis, a given situation, may provide such precise enemies and objectives automatically; a war which must be ended, a foreign occupier who must be expelled, a crack in the political structure imposing specific and limited options, such as whether or not to support the Spanish government of 1936 against the generals' insurrection. The French situation provided no such automatic targets of concentration.

On the contrary, the very profundity of the critique of society implied or formulated by the popular movement left it without specific targets. Its enemy was ‘the system'. To quote Touraine: ‘The enemy is no longer a person of a social category, the monarch or the bourgeoisie. He is the totality of the depersonalized, “rationalized”, bureaucratized modes of action of socio-economic power . . .' The enemy is by definition faceless, not even a thing or an institution, but a programme of human relations, a process of depersonalization; not exploitation which implies exploiters, but alienation. It is typical that most of the students themselves (unlike the less revolutionary workers) were not bothered about de Gaulle, except in so far as the real objective, society, was obscured by the purely political phenomenon of Gaullism. The popular movement was therefore either sub-political or anti-political. In the long run this does not diminish its historic importance or influence. In the short run it was fatal. As Touraine says, May 1968 is less important even in the history of revolutions than the Paris Commune. It proved not that revolutions can succeed in western countries today, but only that they can break out.

Several of the books about the May events may be briefly dismissed. However, Alain Touraine's book is in a class apart.
¹
The author is an industrial sociologist of marxist provenance, the teacher of Daniel Cohn-Bendit at Nanterre, the original flash-point of the student revolt; he was deeply involved in its early stages. His analysis reflects all this to some extent. Its value lies not so much in its originality – where so much has been written, most ideas have already been suggested and contested somewhere – as in the author's lucidity and historical sense, his lack of illusions, his knowledge of labour movements, as well as the incidental contribution of his having first-hand experience. He has, for instance, written the best analysis of the general strike, a grossly under-reported and under-analyzed phenomenon when compared to the quantity of literature about the Latin Quarter. (We know practically nothing of what happened in all those plants and offices, which, after all, produced ten million strikers, most of whom were out of contact with students and reporters.) For foreign readers he has the additional advantage of first-hand acquaintance with other parts of the world, notably the United States and Latin America, which helps to correct the inborn provincialism of the French.

Touraine's argument is elaborate and complex, but a few of the points may be noted. What is happening today is the ‘great mutation' from an older bourgeois to a new technocratic society, and this, as the May movement shows, creates conflict and dissidence not only at its margins but at its centre. The dividing line of ‘class struggle' it reveals runs down the middle of the ‘middle classes', between the ‘techno-bureaucrats' on the one side and the ‘professionals' on the other side. The latter, though in no sense obvious victims of oppression, represent in the modern technological economy something like the elite of skilled labour in an earlier industrial epoch, and for analogous reasons crystallize the new phase of class consciousness:

The main actor in the May movement was not the working class but the totality of those whom we may call the professionals . . . and among them the most active were those most independent
of the great organizations for which, directly or indirectly, such people work: students, radio and television people, technicians in planning offices, research workers in both the private and public sector, teachers, etc.

They and not the old working-class collectivities of miners, longshoremen, railroads, gave the general strike its specific character. Its core incidentally lay in the new industries: the Automotive-Electronic-Chemical complex.

According to Touraine, a new social movement suited to the new economy is emerging, but it is a curiously contradictory one. In one sense it is a primitive rebellion of men who depend on older experiences to cope with a new situation. It may produce a revival of patterns of militancy or, among the new recruits to the social movement who have no such militant experience, something analogous to populist movements in underdeveloped countries, or more precisely to the labour movement of the early nineteenth century. Such a movement is important not for the fight it is now carrying on along old political lines, but for what it reveals of the future: for its vision rather than its necessarily feeble achievement. For the strength of that vision, the ‘utopian communism' which it created in 1968 as the young proletariat created it before 1848, depends upon its practical impotence. On the other hand this social movement also includes or implies an up-to-date kind of reformism, a force which may serve to modify rigid and obsolescent structures of society – the educational system, industrial relations, management, government. The future dilemmas of revolutionaries lie here.

Was this new social movement ‘revolutionary' in May – apart from its ‘revolutionary' formulation of a ‘counter-utopia' of libertarian communism to meet the ‘dominant Utopia' of the academic sociologists and political scientists? In France, Touraine argues, the new movement produced a genuine
revolutionary crisis, though one unlikely to achieve revolution, because, for historical reasons, the social struggle, politics, and a ‘cultural revolution' against all forms of manipulation and integration of individual behaviour were combined. There can be no social movement today which does not combine these three elements, because of the ‘progressive disappearance of the separation between state and civil society'. But at the same time this makes the concentration of the struggle, and the development of effective devices for action, such as parties of the bolshevik type, increasingly difficult.

In the United States, by contrast – perhaps because of the absence of state centralization or a tradition of proletarian revolution to focus it – there has been no such combination of forces. The phenomena of cultural revolt, which are symptomatic rather than operational, are the most visible. ‘While in France', Touraine writes, ‘the social struggle was at the centre of the movement and the cultural revolt was, one might almost say, a byproduct of a crisis of social change, in the United States cultural revolt is central.' This is a symptom of weakness.

Touraine's purpose is not so much to make judgments or prophecies – and in so far as he does so he will be criticized – as to establish that the May movement was neither an episode nor a simple continuation of older social movements. It demonstrated that ‘a new period in social history' is beginning or has begun, but also that the analysis of its character cannot be derived from words of the revolutionaries of May themselves. He is probably right on both counts.

¹
Alain Touraine,
Le mouvement de mai ou le communisme utopique
, Paris, 1969.

The characteristic revolutionary person today is a student or (generally young) intellectual, the word being understood to mean anyone who earns or looks forward to earning his living in an occupation which is chiefly recruited from those who have passed a certificate of some kind of academic education or its equivalent. In backward or underdeveloped countries this may include anyone with secondary or even in some areas primary schooling; in developed countries it increasingly tends to mean anyone with a post-secondary education, but not necessarily those whose education, at whatever level, has been primarily vocational, such as accountants, engineers, business executives and artists. One might say that the intellectual is a person holding a job for which the qualification is one which does not teach anything about holding specific jobs. In this sense the definition used here converges with the more familiar conception of the intellectual as someone using his or her intellect in a way which is sometimes defined in a circular fashion and not often very clearly. However, it is preferable to stress the occupational aspect. It is not the fact of thinking, independently or otherwise, which gives intellectuals certain political characteristics, but a particular social situation in which they think.

That revolutionary persons are today characteristically intellectuals (which does not mean that intellectuals are
characteristically revolutionaries), can be verified by analyzing the membership of the organizations or groups, generally quite small, which today claim to be committed to revolution in its most literal sense, to insurrection or the total rejection of the
status quo
. It would presumably not be true of countries undergoing revolution or in revolutionary, insurrectionary and semi-insurrectionary situations, but it is certainly true not only of developed ‘western' countries, but also of countries in which the situation of the labouring masses is such that one would expect them to be revolutionary.
¹
Even there we often find, as among the Peruvian guerrillas of the 1960s or the Indian Naxalites, that intellectuals predominate. So, though the following discussion will deal primarily with ‘developed' countries, some of it may also be relevant to others, if perhaps only marginally.

To say that most revolutionary persons today are intellectuals is not to say that they will make the revolution. Who will make revolution, if at all, is a more complicated question, as is the rather more superficial problem who, other than the advocates of immediate insurrection or armed struggle who claim a monopoly of the term, is entitled to call himself revolutionary. For the purpose of the present paper it is not essential to answer either, since its concern is not so much with the objective as with the subjective element in making revolutions. Those who reject or resent any involvement in the
status quo
, and indeed any activity not directly and exclusively designed to ‘confront' capitalism with a head-on challenge, are certainly revolutionaries in the most literal sense, and for the purposes of my argument it does not matter that others can also claim to be, perhaps more effectively at times. The point is that most of these all-out revolutionaries are intellectuals, which
raises interesting problem both about intellectuals and about ‘being revolutionary'.