1. Post-Industrial Society and the New Working Class

In this chapter, the events of May-June 1968 will be analyzed from the perspective of existential Marxism as indicating the beginning of a new radicalism emerging, however indistinctly, in opposition to advanced capitalism.  We must first understand the social changes that formed the context of May 1968, and on this basis the value of existential Marxism in analyzing the events can be estimated.

By the 1950s and 1960s it was clear that a new social world was in process of formation: huge corporations, concentrating vast wealth, dominated an increasingly non-competitive economy; the state played a pivotal role in regulating numerous aspects of the economy; firms began to organize consumption through the media, through style changes, and through built-in obsolescence; scientific and technical accomplishments surpassed the sanguinary dreams of the prophets of progress; trips to the moon, nuclear reactors, synthetic products, computers, knowledge about vital reproductive processes, even the disturbing growth of pollution (which was, after all, a sign of man's technical capacity to interrupt nature).  Human environments shifted to new suburbs and new cities.  The spread of leisure activities, film, sport, automobile, transformed the most common day-today experiences.  Sexual mores drastically reduced puritanical practices.  Nothing seemed secure against these changes.  The earlier sluggishness of the French economy, attributed by many to the Malthusianism of the

361

III.  Toward an Existential Marxism

capitalists, vanished overnight.  Technocrats like Servan-Schreiber recognized that France was well on its way to a fundamentally new order of society. [1]The cherished balance of the French economy between agriculture and industry was erased.  In the 1930s, the agricultural sector took over 40 percent of the work force; by 1945 it was down to 36 percent, and by the late 1960s to only 15 percent.  In this spectacular new world, what would become of the working class and its politics?  Could one still speak of a work class, or had it been altered beyond recognition?

While liberals and technocrats foresaw the disappearance of working-class radicalism,[2] and while the Communist Party, under Thorez and Rochet, simply repeated the formula of increasing pauperization with no sense of the changes in the proletariat's nature,  a diverse group of intellectuals and sociologists [3] began to describe a very different working class.  Working independently, Friedmann (Le Travail en miettes, 1956), Touraine (L'Evolution du travail ouvrier aux usines Renault, 1955), Mallet (Les Paysans contre le passé, 1959), Belleville (Une Nouvelle classe ouvrière, 1963), and Gorz (Strategy For Labor, 1964) dispelled the myth of a unified proletariat by studying the working class empirically and pointing up the differences in types of jobs, skills, and salaries.  Thus a far more shaded picture of the working class under advanced capitalism began to emerge.

The best articulation of the meaning of advanced capitalism for the working class

 1 The American Challenge, trans.  R. Steel (N.Y., 1968).
  2 Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago, 1964) and The World of the Office Worker, trans.  D. Landau (Chicago, 1971).
  3 In English see Dick Howard, "French New Working Class Theories," Radical America, 3:2 (March-April, 1969), 1-19, which is favorable and Donald Hodges, "Old and New Working Classes," Radical America, 5:1 (Jan.-Feb., 1971) 11-32, which is critical.  In the U.S., Veblen anticipated in many respects the theory of a new working class.

362

Epilogue

came from an existential Marxist, André Gorz, the political editor of Les Temps Modernes through the 1960s and a disciple of Sartre.[4] Gorz's book, Strategy For Labor, [5] which had a large impact on the New Left internationally, took its point of departure from the proletariat's material well-being.  No longer at a subsistence level, the working class to Gorz could not be a revolutionary force if it were organized around the issue of poverty or exploitation: these quantitative criteria were not a threat to capitalism. [6] Additionally, advanced capitalism, in need of sophisticated technicians, altered, Gorz showed, the composition of the working class in favor of highly educated, mental workers, reducing by automation unskilled and blue-collar positions.  Only the concept of alienation provided a critical tool to unite the new and old workers around a radical program.  To him, the chief evil of capitalism was not exploitation but the alienation of the workers' creativity.  Gorz's conclusion anticipated the events of May: to combat alienation, worker self-management, autogestion, must be the focus of the socialist movement.  Workers must unite over the structural reform of the enterprise toward control of the process of production, a reform that would be revolutionary because it would dismantle the capitalist apparatus while putting an end to alienation.  Reform and revolution were not antinomies but the same process once technology prevented the military seizure of

  4 The filiation of new working class theorists and existential Marxism is striking.  In addition to the facts mentioned in the text there are the following.  Gorz was a disciple of Sartre.  Their contact began with Sartre's interest in Gorz's novel Le Traître (Paris, 1957) for which he wrote the Preface.  See his "Sartre ou de la conscience à la praxis, and "Sartre et le marxisme," both in Le Socialisme difficile (Paris, 1967) trans. by N. Denny as Socialism and Revolution (N.Y., 1973).  Mallet and Touraine offered versions of Sartre's progressive-regressive methods.  See Touraine, La Sociologie de l'action (Paris, 1965) 53.  Also, they continued in Lefebvre's direction of studying the media, leisure, and consumption within a Marxist totality.
  5 Trans.  M. Nicolaus and V. Oritz (Boston, 1967) from Stratégie ouvrière et néo-capitalisme (Paris, 1964).
 6 Ibid., 3.

363

of the state.  To the sociologist, Alain Touraine, in La Société post-industrielle, [7] the focus on worker control of the firm highlighted the political character of the despotism of capital and the struggle against it: "The general problem of the workers' movement is that of the nature of power relations between rulers and ruled." [8]  Advanced capitalism required a new response from the workers:

In modern societies, a class movement manifests itself by direct political
struggle and by the rejection of alienation: by revolt against a system of
integration and manipulation.  What is essential is the greater emphasis
on political and cultural, rather than economic action.  This is the great
difference from the labor movement, formed in opposition to liberal
capitalism.  Such movements are scarcely beginning but they always talk
about power rather than about salaries, employment or property.[9]

Yet the strategy for autogestion complemented the analysis of the "new working class." The discussion of the new working class began with the existential Marxist journal

 7 (Paris, 1964) trans.  L. Mayhew (N.Y., 1971).
  8 In G. Friedmann and P. Naville, eds., Traité de sociologie du travail (Paris, 1962) Vol. 2, 281.
 9 Post-Industrial Society, 74.
 10 A. Geismar, et al., Vers la guerre civile (Paris 1969) 85.

364
 

Arguments in 1959.[11] Concepts of the new working class varied with each thinker.  Belleville's book, Une Nouvelle classe ouvrière of 1963, published in the Les Temps Modernes collection, was a modest study of a few of the more technologically advanced firms.  He found that new workers--scientists, engineers, technicians--struggled with capitalists not over salary, but over questions that hit at the hear of the control of the company. [12] In a 1962 strike at Neyrpic, the new workers protested management policy in which profit considerations were at odds with the social utility of the products.[13] Belleville noted the absence of a proletarian mentality among the new workers, modestly asserting that they were only "potentially" a part of a new labor movement. [14] Even so, the CP's notion of pauperization was clearly seen to be obsolete and could not account for the new shape of the working class.[15]

Serge Mallet's La Nouvelle classe ouvrière, also of 1963,[16] was less hesitant than Belleville and elicited a deeper response.  From a working-class background, Mallet, who was killed in an automobile accident. in 1973, had joined the CP after World War II, only to become disillusioned by the 1950s.  At this time he was befriended and supported by Sartre.  Hence the theorists of the new working class -- Gorz, Belleville, and Mallet -- had direct contact with existential Marxism.  In La Nouvelle classe ouvrière, Mallet argued that the highly trained workers in the advanced industries were not only part of the working class;  they were its  avant-garde. In every way, the new working

  11 "Qu'est-ce que la classe ouvrière française?" Arguments, 12-13 (Jan.-March, 1959) with contributions by Touraine, Mallet, Mottez, Mothé, Le Brun, Barjonet, Betraz, Collinet, Crozier.
  12 Belleville, Une Nouvelle classe ouvrière (Paris, 1963) 188.
  13 One of the leaders of the May movement, Alain Geismar, referred to the Neyrpic strikes as the first tangible manifestation of white collar militancy.  Op. cit., 84.
 14 Belleville, op cit., 18.
 15 Ibid., 10.
 16 Partly translated as "Socialism and the New Working Class," International Socialist Journal, 2 (April, 1965) 152-172.

365
 

working class was potentially more radical, at the present conjuncture, than the traditional, manual, blue-collar workers.  The overall structure of capitalist society had changed fundamentally, altering the nature of the working class.  In the nineteenth century, the labor movement was dominated by workers who maintained their craftsmanship in the new industrial plants.  Then came a second phase of the labor movement in which workers performed Taylorized operations, without the older sense of a metier.  Nineteenth-century syndicalism became twentieth-century unionism, in which workers were passively disciplined by huge organizations like the CGT and the CP.  Better educated, having important technical skills, the new working class of the mid-twentieth century resembled, in some ways, the workers of the nineteenth century.  In the advanced sectors of industry, automation generated a new situation for workers.  Mallet divided the new working class into engineers, organized in research units, who "produced the conditions of production," as distinct from those who worked in the traditional production situation.  A series of strikes in the advanced firms in the early 1960s revealed the traits of the new working class to Mallet.  They were organized by the workers in each firm without craft distinctions or huge labor bureaucracies.  Young, with secure jobs, they worked in small teams on potentially creative tasks.  Unlike the mass production workers of the CGT, the new workers took an interest in the entire firm.  Their strikes were not total shutdowns, but carefully prepared disruptions at one point in the highly synchronized process that cost the capitalists dearly.  Unlike the old working class, they would not be bought off with higher material benefits having rejected culturally the petty bourgeois ethic that bad just won over the blue-collar workers:

At the center of the most complex mechanism of modern capitalism,
the new working class is brought to realize the inherent contradictions
of the system more quickly than any others.  Precisely because its basic

demands are largely satisfied, the new working class is led to pose
other problems which cannot find their solution in the sphere of con-
sumption.  It is the hierarchical nature of industry that is placed in
question by each partial demand on the control question.[17]

The modern working class has an immediate interest in uninterrupted
technical advance, with all its consequences: a substantial fall in working
hours, new professional status, changes in employment.  Capitalism, on the
contrary, has a tendency to hold back the development of the productive forces,
because their development tends to bring a fall in the rate of profit and implies
more and more reliance on economic instruments of a socialist character,
whose effects capitalism cannot fully master.[18]

Gorz, Belleville, Touraine, and Mallet all found that the organization of work among technicians and engineers required a degree of autonomy from the capitalist and a degree of conscious team work unknown to blue-collar workers.[20] In the highly complex tasks of the new working class, creativity was mandatory:

. . . in scientific industries, stimulated by automation . . . the work itself
takes on a potentially--or even actually-- creative character and there is a
latent conflict between the teams of scientific and technical workers, con-

367
 

scious of their abilities and eager to valorize their labor power and
the capitalist management of the firm, whose policy subordinates . . .
this valorization to criteria of short or long-run profitability.[21]

All four advocates of the new working class were united in their objections to the traditional leadership of the labor movement, to the CP and the CGT.  They disagreed in emphasis over the place of the new working class in the larger socialist struggle, but the political strategy that emerged from their analysis was that of a syndicalist movement for structural reforms, not a general strike and certainly not including a Leninist Party.  They objected to the alienating consequences of bureaucratic organizational structure as much as they did to capitalism.  Gorz and Belleville, more than Mallet and Touraine, saw a possible unity of the Dew and old working classes.  However, none of them accounted for the role of clerical white-collar workers.  Also, they mistook the few strikes among technicians, scientists, and engineers as a general oppositional consciousness.  They overlooked the role of many new workers in the direction of blue-collar workers, indeed, in their exploitation.  In 1971, Gorz retracted much of his earlier

  21 "Capitalist Relations of Production and the Socially Necessary Labor Force," in A. Lothstein, All We Are Saying . . . (N.Y., 1970), 168-169.  Taken from Le Socialisme difficile.

368
 

enthusiasm for the new working class. [22] Nevertheless, the concept of the now working class brought to the open the notion of autogestion and concretized the concept of alienation, providing focal points for the movement of May, 1968.  Gorz also called attention to the new importance of students in advanced capitalism, to their place in the reproduction of the labor force, and to schooling as preparation for a proletarian role in industry.  Hence the theoretical basis was laid for an alliance between students and workers that found a realization in 1968.  At the very least, it would have to be conceded that the laboring force, taken as a whole, was a new working class; that the primary focus of its struggles, if it would unite, would be self-management and alienation; and that the traditional leadership of the labor movement was inadequate in its theory and in its organizational structure.  With the concept of the new working class, the existential Marxists thought they had found, at least potentially, a new proletariat that corresponded to their analysis and their theory.  Since there could be no Marxism without a class basis of some sort, the concept of the new working class fulfilled a vital need of existential Marxism.
 
2. From the Spectacle to the Festival

No one anticipated the events of May. [23] Even with rising unemployment and low salaries for many workers, France in 1968 was a stable, prosperous, advanced industrial

  22 "Techniques, technicians et la lutte des classes," Les Temps Modernes, 27:301-302 (Aug.-Sept., 1971) 141-180.
  23 A bibliography of materials on May, 1968, is L. Wylie, F. Chu, M. Terrall, France: Events of May-June, 1968: A Critical Bibliography (Pittsburgh, 1973).  The following have been useful to me: René Andrieu, Les Communistes et la révolution (Paris, 1968); J. Ardagh, The New French Revolution (London, 1968); Raymond Aron, The Elusive Revolution: Anatomy of a Student Revolt, trans.  G. Clough (N.Y., 1969); Geismar, op. cit.; R. Gombin, Le Projet révolutionnaire: éléments d'une sociologie des événements de mai-juin, 1968 (Paris, 1969); R. Johnson, The FCP vs. The Students (New Haven, 1972); H. Lefebvre, The Explosion:: Marxism and the French Upheaval, trans.  A. Ehrenfeld (N.Y., 1969) from L'Irruption de Nanterre au sommet (Paris, 1968);  Charles Posner,

369
 

society.  De Gaulle had ended the ministerial shuffle that so weakened the state during the Third and Fourth Republics; he had rescued France from its most troubling colonial question and raised her to the center of world diplomacy.  Economically, the French "Miracle" put the nation on the highway of the third industrial revolution.  With centralized economic planning, France appeared the very model of an emerging technocratic society.  Yet this model society came perilously close to revolution in May-June, 1968, undergoing the most radical domestic upheaval since 1945 in Western Europe.  None of the traditional Marxist or liberal explanations, it seems to me, account for what happened.  The events of May brought into question the future of advanced technological societies, imposing possibilities of social transformation that until then were nothing but idle dreams.  Commentators differed widely on the meaning of May: on one side, Raymond Aron considered it a nihilistic psychodrama, an "unpatriotic" happening [24] led by "fascist" students, [25] without deep significance for France's future; on the other side, to Lucien Goldmann, it was the apocalypse of man, the final reconciliation of subject and object, of freedom and community.  The spokesman for Le Figaro was projecting his pessimism, fearing the collapse of an all-too-fragile civilization into an unliberal barbarism.  The Lukaesian critic optimistically fantasized his perfect drama of human realization. 1968 may still be too close for final appraisal if only because the future alone can determine its historical weight.  However, it can be argued
 
 ed., Reflections on the Revolution in France: 1968 (Baltimore, 1970); Intercontinental Press, ed., Revolt in France (1968); A. Schnapp and P. Vidal-Naquet, Journal de la commune étudiante (Paris, 1969); P. Seale and M. McConville, Red Flag/Black Flag (N.Y., 1968); D. Singer, Prelude to Revolution (N.Y., 1970); Alain Touraine, The Movement of May, trans. L. Mayhew (N.Y., 1971); Alfred Willener, The Action-Image of Society, trans.  A. M. S. Smith (London, 1970); Sylvan Zegel, Les Idées de  mai (Paris, 1968).
  24 Aron, op. cit., xv.
25 Ibid., 275-276.

370
 

that the main elements of the May movement, when compared to previous social movements and rebellions, were symptomatic of the new era of advanced society.  The events brought into the open the latent conflicts that had not been politically prominent because established parties, Gaullist and Communist, had repressed them.  Social relations and cultural forms lagged considerably behind the potentials of an advanced economy.[26] By opening the eyes of France to arbitrary hierarchies and needless alienations, the upheaval, from this perspective, pulverized the notion of the end of ideology.  In Touraine's words: " The May Movement was a thunderbolt announcing the social struggles of the future.  It dispelled the illusion that improvement in production and consumption result in a society in which tensions replace conflicts, quarrels replace disruptions, and negotiations replace revolutions."[27] Bureaucratic capitalism had extended its control so completely over the traditionally non-integrated private worlds of leisure, family life, and consumption, had so coordinated, organized, and manipulated the world of everyday life, that a spark at one point in the society could quickly envelop the whole in the flame of revolt. [28] To Touraine, it was against this all-pervasive regimentation, rather than against any particular person or social category, that the May movement erupted.  For these reasons, the uprising came to most observers as a bolt from the blue.  Yet intellectuals had been analyzing the new conjuncture since the Hegel renaissance, and existential Marxism had announced as a possibility what the events of May indicated as the deepest current of the emerging social formation.  Granting the hazards of writing contemporary history, I will argue that the abortive revolution of May becomes intelligible through the lenses of existential Marxism.

  26 Touraine, The Movement of May, 54.
 27 Ibid., 79-80.
  28 Ibid., 347.  Cf. also Morin, Lefort, Coudray, La Brèche (Paris, 1968).

371
 

The story of May-June, 1968, is familiar.  A handful of students led in an unconventional manner by Cohn-Bendit, a student of Henri Lefebvre at Nanterre, detonated a student uprising throughout France [29] that spread to the working class and brought French society to a complete halt. De Gaulle's government and the government of the working class, the CP and the CGT, found themselves without effective control of their constituencies.  Perhaps for the first time in the history of advanced industrial society, the routines of everyday life were totally upset by dissident groups.  From Nanterre in March, to the Sorbonne on May 3rd, to the Renault factory at Flins on May 16th, the rebellion spread quickly.  What appeared at first as the pranks of children, the schoolboy's chahut, soon became a general threat to established authority.  After ten days of street battles between students and police, with popular sympathies going to the students, the Sorbonne and schools throughout France were relinquished to the students. Just as the authority of the state was overturned in academia, so the authority of the capitalists was brought down in the factories.  Ten million workers went on strike, and they did so not by going home or picketing but by taking control of their workplaces.  France was without electricity and oil, without mail, telephones, garbage collection, banks, and stores; movie houses were closed, the production of commodities was stopped.  Everywhere the smooth bum of the technocratic machine was silenced.  Liberated from the deadening pressures of everyday routines, the French paused and then began talking and relating to each other in new ways, ways that evidenced creative powers that had hitherto lain dormant.  In the eyes of many, the monstrous spectacle of

 29 It was true that French higher education in particular was highly over-centralized and that the system suffered from a doubling of the student population in the 1960s.  Yet the irrationalities of the educational structure particular to France cannot explain the events of May, since similar student strikes broke out at that time in many places, like the U.S., where these disfunctions did not apply.

372
 

meaningless toil and passive consumption gave way to an exhilarating, joyous festival.

We must examine the groups that participated in the festival of May: their composition, their overall unity or disunity, the kind of organizations they generated, the consciousness, ideas, and programs they activated and expressed, and the tone of life in the schools, the streets, and the factories.  The relation of the intellectuals to the events must be noted, but, more significantly, we must study the ability of their theories to illuminate what happened.

From May 3rd to May 13th the upheaval was limited to university and lycée students.  Cohn-Bendit, "disorganized and unorganizable," and the March 22nd movement, followed by the Trotskyist groupuscule, JCR, ignited the student protest.  At Nanterre in March, "Dany the Red" expressed the suffocated desires of youth: he asked Michel Crozier, who was lecturing on the U.S., why be did not mention Vietnam; he asked a sports minister who had written on contemporary youth why his book contained no mention of sex.  Here was the tactic from March 22: compel the repressive institution to reveal its repressiveness.  At the Sorbonne on May 3rd, the anarchic group again confronted the authorities and they fell into the trap.  The police were called onto the sacred grounds of the university to make arrests.  Incredulous, the other students watched and then began to confront the police.  The battle quickly escalated and for over a week barricades, tear gas, and striking clubs filled the streets of the Latin Quarter.  With De Gaulle in Rumania, Pompidou, faced with the whole of public opinion behind the students, called off the police.

If the university revealed its connection with the repressive state by using the police, the CP, the supposed instrument of revolution, revealed its conservatism.  Humanité quickly denounced the students as "adventurers." The CP conflated subjective and psychological categories, like adventurer, with objectivist social analysis, disregarding

373
 

the actual desires of actual groups.  To the Party, the consequences of the students' action in relation to capitalism had to be fruitless.  Since the students had bourgeois parents, their actions could not be revolutionary.  Althusser, who agreed with the wooden formula of the CP,[30] might have used his own theory to express better the CP's meaning: the structural effects of the students' practice could not have an impact on the larger social instance.  When the workers came out in support of the students, the CP and structuralism had more difficulty justifying their positions.

The exemplary action of March 22 and JCR needed an organization form.  Still without overall direction, the students organized themselves into action committees.  The action committees of the May movement had much in common with the Soviets of 1917 and evoked the long history of workers councils.  Yet in the conjuncture of 1968 there were new elements.  Extremely democratic, the action committees were intended to be the organizational form that would replace the bureaucratic institutions that dominated advanced society.  More than expedients of the revolution, they were the future society itself in embryonic form.  Instead of presenting a coherent program for a new society, the action committees were already that society.  It was the form of organization that counted, not a codified platform, since only from within liberated relations could thought and action become non-alienated and creative.  The image of society presented by the action committees was one of continual, free creation. [31] In this context, new energies were discovered and the rebels had to be reminded to go to sleep.  From many accounts the action committees gave birth to a ludic mode of existence, anticipated by Arguments: "Proletarian revolutions will be festivals or they will not be, for the life they herald will itself be created in festivity.  Play is the ultimate rationality

 30 "A Propos de l'article de M. Verret sur 'mai étudiante," ' La Pensée, 145 (May-June, 1969) 3-14.
 31 Willener, op. cit., 68.

374
 

of this festival, living without boredom and enjoying without limitation are the only rules that will be recognized."[32]

Moreover, the action committees were not limited to the work situation.  They cared for children, procured food, wrote and mass-produced leaflets and posters, and discussed openly the ideas of the participants.[33] At Nantes, where for a few days the rebels took charge of the city government, action committees administered everyday needs.  Elsewhere students went to the suburbs and residential action committees cropped up.  Workers came to the Sorbonne and worker-student action committees were formed to build ties between the two groups.  Later, in some plants, workers organized themselves into committees which, in a few instances, resumed production under worker control.  Highly autonomous and democratic, the committees were in these instances effective organizations that also eliminated the alienating effects of hierarchy and reification.

In the end, the action committees did not grasp state power and they were charged with anarchic spontaneity.  Yet there was a coordinating committee that sought to direct the overall movement; that is, here was some form of leadership.  By infiltrating each committee the JCR Trotskyists also tried to shape the movement.  More anarchistic March 22nd rejected the need for leadership in any form.  The Maoist-Althusserian UJC-ML was interested only in the workers, with their ideal of servir le peuple 33a, and played only a limited role during May.  The sectarian Trotskyists of FER shunned the movement from the opening days.  The national student union, UNEF, was an umbrella institution.

 32 De La Misère en milieu étudiant, cited in Willener, op. cit., 173.
 33 Seale, op. cit., 122.
  33a Another Maoist group, whose members became part of UJCML, centered around the journal Cahiers pour l'analyse.  Members of this group, Milner, Miller, Beni-Lévi, had split from Althusser in the mid-1960s.  With May 1968, they abandoned theoretical practice for the factories.

375
 

Geismar's teachers' union, SNE-sup, never managed to provide leadership either.  Hence, none of the groups behind the explosion were able to coalesce the movement into a national political vehicle.  Yet the action committees did achieve a non-Leninist form of organization which was claimed to be appropriate to advanced society.  It was not clear that the failure of the committees to provide a national political force was due to the structure of their organization rather than to the contingency of events.

On May 13th the CGT called for a one-day nationwide strike to support the students.  By doing so, the union thought it could express sympathy with the protestors while controlling the workers, some of whom had joined the students at the barricades.  Like the CP, the CGT was unmasked as a conservative organ, unwilling to struggle for the workers' control of the factory.  Throughout May and June it did all in its power to prevent students and workers from mixing and to steer the workers toward traditional demands that would not challenge the authority of capitalism in the firm.  The CGT and the CP viewed the upheaval as a Gaullist plot, intended to split the workers from their "vanguard" organizations.[34] By their "irresponsibility" the students had engendered a situation that supposedly worked to the benefit of capitalism.  For the Communists, there was no revolutionary situation in May, and the petty bourgeois students were only fomenting a useless civil war.  Its image of May was "one of the most powerful-perhaps the most powerful-movement for material benefit" ever witnessed in France.[35] In this way, the CP and CGT reduced the qualitative, revolutionary demands of May to quantitative, co-optable proportions.

On May 14th, workers at Sud-Aviation stopped work against orders from the CGT.  Their action spread quickly and in a few days the wildcat strike counted ten million workers, practically the entire work force of a nation of fifty million.  Like the students,

 34Andrieu, op. cit., 103.
35 Ibid., 168.

376
 

the workers did not unanimously support the radical demand of autogestion or reject the benefits of consumerism.  Still, in several respects this general strike manifested the new conjuncture.  First, it was sparked by the students, and many workers saw the students as victims of hierarchical, alienating institutions, like themselves.  Second, it was primarily young workers who led the strike, those who were not yet well-integrated either into capitalist structures or into the CGT.  Their protest, like that of the students, was as much against the traditional leadership of the workers' movement as it was against capitalism.  Third, the workers rejected the CGT's notion of its interests, presenting new demands that reflected the tensions of advanced capitalism.

The major unions met with the state on May 25th, arriving at the Grenelle agreements, which gave workers substantial, even unprecedented, material gains.  When Séguy, the leader of the CGT, presented the package to the workers at Renault he was met with a resolute NO! To his complete bewilderment, the workers in large majority would not go back to work.  It is not possible to conclude that the workers were now so well paid that they disregarded material benefits.  What probably happened was that, during the strike, the discipline of the CGT in the plant had broken down and workers talked freely among themselves and in some cases with students.  Many began to express deep discontent with the stifling of their creativity in the work process.  In countless plants the workers evidenced their desire for control of the production process, for responsibility and variation in work. [36] At a CSF factory in Brest the workers resumed production, making what they deemed important: walkie-talkies to help the strike.  At the Rouen  naval yards the workers  helped the students to  distribute  revolu-

  36 E. Mandel.  "The Lessons of May," New Left Review, 52 (Nov.-Dec., 1968) 23-24.

377
 

tionary literature, showing sympathy for the students' ideas in defiance of the CGT.  At the Atlantic yards in Saint-Nazaire the workers refused to agree to the demands of the CGT itself.  In all of these cases and in others, the workers, more dissident than their leadership, were redefining their own situation along lines of alienation.  In the words of one student, here is what happened at Sud-Aviation:

The strike was not voted in this firm in order to achieve traditional
benefits, but for benefits concerning the management of the enterprise
by workers. . . . Workers here made contact with students . . . inviting
them to come to explain to the workers the student movement.  The
discussion was lively and quite rapidly it was established that the true
problem posed by the movement was that of power which, at the level
of the enterprise, implied self-management.[37]

The fourth new aspect of the general strike was the composition of the participants.  Not only were young workers breaking with the CGT, but the "cols blancs"--the technical, intellectual workers-played a substantial role in the strike.  As Touraine pointed out:

One of the significant aspects of the May Movement is that it
demonstrated that sensibility to the new themes of social conflict
was not most pronounced in the most highly organized sectors of the
working class.  The railroad workers, dockers, and miners were not the
ones who most clearly grasped its most radical objectives.  The most
radical and creative movements appeared in the economically advanced
groups, the research agencies, the technicians with skills but no authority,
and, of course, in the university community.[38]

378
 

In many plants where the CGT was weak, workers disregarded their status differences and joined together in the strike and the discussions.  In some advanced firms, the "cadres," middle management, joined the strike.  Physicists and unskilled laborers recognized their common oppression.  In the strikes of the Compagnie de Té1égraphie Sans Fils of Brest, the Compagnie Générale d'Electricité and the Commission de l'Energie Atomique, the technical intellectuals were crucial.[39] In the sectors where blue-collar workers were in the minority--like the ORTF, the government-controlled radio, and TV stations--workers presented demands for self-management.  What all of this means is that Marx's vision in the Grundrisse of the incorporation of technical intellectual work into the factory had already occurred, and that the workers' movement, when freed of the unionism of the CGT, reflected current conditions.  Surely many, even a majority, of the blue-collar workers were content with revendications; and many, even a majority, of technical workers, saw themselves more as professionals than as proletarians.  Yet the May events clearly indicated that there was a potential new working class and that the direction of the future would have to reflect this fact.  The CFDT, formerly a Catholic union, was deeply influenced by the events and took up the battle for self-management.  Still, it argued for self-management without completely challenging private property. Autogestion could be distorted into a reformist position, just as the CGT had made exploitation a reformist program.

One does not have to be an anarchist to argue that France came very close to a revolution in May.  On May 24th, De Gaulle went on television to save the situation with a program of "participation" in all institutions.  But what followed was a night of riots and protests.  The situation had only become more tense.  The leader of the left confederation, Mitterrand, gave a news conference on the 28th proposing a provisional

  39 Geismar, op. cit., 83.

379
 

government to be headed by himself or Mendès-France, speaking as if the Fifth Republic was already past history.  The day before, a huge rally was held at Charléty stadium, with Mendes-France present, where victory seemed at hand, but, forbodingly, no one seemed to know what to do with the favorable circumstances.  On the 29th, Cohn-Bendit, who had been expelled from France, surreptitiously returned.  With this apparent power vacuum, De Gaulle, unsettling his staunchest supporters, could not be located.  Had the old man decided to retire?  In 1830 Charles X had done so in less dangerous circumstances.  In fact, De Gaulle had gone to Germany to assess the loyalty of his troops, an indication of how far the situation had progressed.  What is more, General Massu could not guarantee that the soldiers would fire on the workers.  To solidify the army's support, De Gaulle seems to have made a deal whereby, in return for support, the rebel leaders of the Algerian crisis--Salan and the rest--would be released from prison: in mid-June they were, in fact, freed.  At this point, near the end of May, revolution, civil war, or a coup d'état seemed certain.  France came that close to the first socialist revolution in an industrialized society.  But Mitterrand rebuffed a coalition with the CP and, at Charléty, Sauvageot of the UNEF and Geismar of PSU and the leader of SNE-sup were confused.  The left was without strategy.  Hence De Gaulle, after contemplating retirement, came back on television and with a mere gesture was able to restore the situation.

Just as the composition and forms of the groups that participated in the May festival were new, so too were the ideas, the consciousness, and the principles for reorganizing society.  One caveat: even for a relatively limited event like that of May-June, 1968, it is not possible to know the concepts and aspirations of every group, much less every indi-

380
 

vidual.  Studies have been made and continue to be made by sociologists, [40] but the historian's task is still formidable.  There are different kinds of evidence: the writings of the student action committees during the events; the affiches produced by the art students; the discourses of the groups like the Internationale situationniste, who are known to have influenced some of the participants; the journalists' columns; the positions of the political forces printed in their periodicals; the interviews given by participants.  With this chaotic melange, no wonder the structuralists want to eliminate consciousness from the human sciences.  Nevertheless, certain patterns do emerge which are significant in their novelty.

It is clear that the intellectual vanguard of the students thought of students as apprentices of advanced capitalism, not as petty bourgeois destined for command of society.  Their analysis focused on the features of the university structure which were coordinated with the interests of capitalism.  They argued that advanced capitalism needs technical intellectuals, that the university becomes an arm of capitalism, shifting its gears to the command of the economy.  Students become labor commodities subject to the reified relations of the school.  The critical and cultural functions of the university become lost under the pressure of the mass production of trained workers.  Hence students, like the workers, were alienated in repressive, hierarchical organizations.  The process of the reproduction of labor power took on the same dehumanized attributes as the process of production, disregarding the concrete desires and needs of the student body.

Using a melange of ideas from Rosa Luxemburg, André Breton, Wilhelm Reich, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Lefebvre, Sartre, Marcuse, Mao, Guevara, and the Situationists, students conceived of the society as a spectacle, threatening the humanity of its subjects.  During May the walls became theorists:

 40 E.g., Willener, op. cit.

381
 

In the past the visible opposition to Gaullist capitalism came from the CP, which comprehended France in 1968 much as it did in 1936, at the time of the Popular Front.  In the imperialist stage of capitalism, the argument ran, monopolies replaced competition, transforming the state into "fascism." The struggle of the Left had to be for parliamentary democracy, which was threatened.  All talk of socialism was premature.  Stifled behind the bureaucracy of the CP, the workers' true discontents did not emerge.  Against the "filthy Stalinists" (Cohn-Bendit), the May movement aspired to a qualitative change in social organization, a cultural as well as economic and political revolution.  Although the students rejected the authority of the older intellectuals, their basic concepts were prefigured by the existential Marxists.  In the words of Cohn-Bendit,

Some people have tried to force Marcuse on us as a mentor: that
is a joke.  None of us have read Marcuse.  Some read Marx, of course,
perhaps Bakunin, and of the moderns, Althusser, Mao, Guevara, Lefebvre.

383
 

Althusser, Mao, Guevara, Lefebvre.  Nearly all the militants of
the March 22nd movement have read Sartre.  But no writer could
be regarded as the inspiration of the movement.[42]

One group whose ideas were found in the affiches was the Situationists, who were located at the Faculté des Lettres of Strasbourg.  I have already shown the role of Lefebvre, who taught there in the mid-1960s, in their intellectual development.  The Situationists created a mini-May in 1966, disrupting the university and publishing a very popular pamphlet, De La Misère en milieu étudiant, which was an application of the theory of the Arguments group to student life.  In 1968, the Paris Situationists set up the first action committee at the Sorbonne.  Socialisme ou Barbarie also had an influence on the events of May.  Cohn-Bendit had attended meetings of a study group that included Claude Lefort and in general, at Nanterre, Socialisme ou Barbarie had been widely read before 1968.  Most of the positions in Cohn-Bendit's book, Obsolete Communism, can be traced back to Socialisme ou Barbarie.  Moreover, at Nanterre the faculty had introduced the concepts of existential Marxism.  Lefebvre taught sociology there.  Also, the philosophy department was dominated by phenomenologists and existentialists (Ricoeur, Dufrenne, Lévinas) and was staunchly anti-structuralist.  In sum, however, we cannot say that existential Marxism was thoroughly assimilated by the students; nor can we say that they acted in its name.

The documentation of the ideas of May suggests a main emphasis on openness and fluidity of relationships and consciousness aiming toward the flowering of desire and active creativity.  A combination of Sartre's concept of freedom and Lefebvre's notion of unalienated festivity best captures the vision of the students.   Completely absent from

  42  Cohn-Bendit, The French Student Revolt, trans.  B. Brewster (N.Y., 1968) 58.

384
 

the ideas of May were traditional liberal notions of the individual as atomic, freedom over society, society as an objective other, emotion as in contradiction to reason.  Reified ideologies and institutions would be avoided, for the students, by the reciprocity of "shared experience." Certainly the students did not carefully articulate these notions; discourse itself was an evil to them.  But the standpoint from which their Arguments or epigraphs emerged was that of existential Marxism.  Its notion of free choice of one's destiny in collective action was called autogestion by the students and was their central demand.  Perhaps the quotation they took from Nietzsche best expressed their state of mind: "One must have chaos in one's soul to give birth to a dancing star"--in Sartrean terms, one must live freedom authentically to avoid bad faith.

The feature of the events of May that I would like to draw most attention to was its festive tone, its absence of reification in consciousness and relationships, an astonishing openness of personal encounters. (The Latin Quarter was without cars.) The direct communication of the spoken word, even to total strangers, transformed the stiff politeness of bourgeois interactions.  All the walls between people seemed to crumble in a flash, dissolving old inhibitions, defenses, and fears.  Many people, not only students, but old and young, men and women, intellectuals and workers, the specialized and the unskilled, spoke simply about what shape the world should take, what should they do and be, what life should be like.  There was thus a metaphysical quality to the talk: it seemed possible that reality could be changed.

The [social] pyramid had melted like a sugar loaf in the May sunshine.
People talked to each other, they understood one another at once.  There
were no more intellectuals, no more workers, only revolutionaries discussing
everywhere, generalizing a communication from which only "proletarianist"
intellectuals, or other would-be organizers, felt excluded.  In this context, the

the word "comrade" found its true meaning once again: it really
marked the end of all separation between people.[43]

3. Sartre and Lefebvre Explain History

The response of intellectuals to May was almost universally approval.  Technocrats like Michel Crozier were hostile, [44] and Aron saw himself as the lone voice of sanity amidst a general madness.  Structuralists were also skeptical, staying away from the Sorbonne as if it housed the plague. [45] Significantly, Lévi-Strauss lamented the death of his ideas because of May: "In France you know structuralism is no longer in fashion.  Since May, 1968, all objectivity has been repudiated. The position of the youth corresponds more to that of Sartre." [46]  At one point, Althusser went to the Latin Quarter, accompanied by Louis Aragon, the veteran poet of the CP, only to be booed for not leaving the Party.  Still, the authorities fancied structuralism dangerous and Jacques Lacan was dismissed from the Ecole Normale Supérieure after May.  Overall, structuralists maintained silence during May, giving the students and workers no support.  In Althusser's case this was baffling since one of the groups, the UJC-ML, was led by his followers.[49] Within the existential Marxist camp, the Arguments group fully supported the upheaval.  They were nevertheless spurned as revisionists precisely by those groups (the Situationists) who borrowed heavily from them.  Edgar Morin was jeered; Henri Lefebvre was threatened

  43 R. Viénet, Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations (Paris, 1968).  For the same impression cf. Seale, op. cit., 93 and Ardagh, op. cit., 471.
 44 Johnson, op. cit., 84.  
45 Ibid.
46 N.Y. Times (Dec. 31, 1969).
47 Johnson, op cit.
 48 D. Cooper, The Death of the Family (N.Y., 1971) 73n.
  49 Oelgart, B., Idéologues et idéologies de la nouvelle gauche (Paris 1970) 125.

386

physically; and Axelos was insulted with bags of excrement at his door.[50] Sartre, upon offering his services to the liberated Sorbonne, fared a little better.  And yet Mascolo and Lapassade, from Arguments, participated in the Writers and Artists Action Committee.

In the last analysis, the relation of existential Marxism to le joli mai is determined by its capacity to make the events intelligible.  Although it is true that some liberals like Servan-Schreiber [51] saw in the protesting students and workers a voice of healthy reform, they tended to ascribe these reforms to further modernization and rationalization of society, not to the expression of a qualitatively new set of possibilities.  It seems to me that it was the existential Marxists who were best able to discover and to explain those features in the events of May that were new to protest movements and that make May 1968, so historically significant. [52]

In 1968 Lefebvre taught sociology at the place where it all began: Nanterre.  His small tract about May, The Explosion, developed from a concrete sense of what the students were up to, one that was often lacking in books on the subject by other intellectuals.  From this contact, Lefebvre translated the discontents and hopes of May into the language of his existential Marxism, avoiding many of the issues, like spontaneity versus a party that tended to obscure so many discussions of the upheaval.  He trod a careful course between the antinomies that caught the attention of others: May represented to him the kind of new protest that made sense only in relation to the new stage of capitalist society.  It was not a matter of workers versus students, of the old or new proletariat, of generational or oedipal conflict.  With the increasing concentration of

 50 Willener, op. cit., 92.
 51 The Spirit of May (N.Y., 1971).
  52 The book on May 1968 by Morin, Lefort, and Castoriadis, La Brèche (Paris 1968) demonstrates the same strengths as Lefebvre and Sartre, but I do not have the space for a full discussion of it.

387
 

decision-making power in a tiny technocratic elite, the vast majority of the population, in all sectors, experienced a sense of anomie and alienation, of pointless activities and empty theories. [53]

With the conquest of scarcity, Lefebvre saw the entire population being subjected to the deadening pressures of consumerism.  The action of the students symbolically expressed what others felt: hence the rapidity with which the strike spread and the universality of support.  The politics of spontaneous confrontation was the only means of avoiding the establishment's enormous powers of co-optation.  Self-management, the universal cry, was directed not at special spaces of experience but at everyday life itself.  Politics and culture were fused as the students challenged all reified forms of experience: learning based on distant, authoritarian contacts between teachers and students; art segregated from life; work in which planning and thought were divorced from active production. Lefebvre claimed that only his theory of urbanism could express the central themes of the new contradictions.[54] The protest was against the totality of everyday life, not merely against the workplace or the parliament.  The method of confrontation was a great refusal, in Marcuse's sense, that eluded the ubiquitous manipulations of big-brother bureaucracy, It was in the streets, on the walls, that the challenges were made.  "Contestation is an all-inclusive, total rejection of experienced or anticipated forms of alienation.  It is a deliberate refusal to be co-opted." [55] The students combined "urban guerrilla warfare" with "urban celebration," violence with festivity.[56] in a blend that caught the technocratic ruling class totally off guard.

To traditional Marxists, Lefebvre's analysis was weak just where the May movement was weak: it had no strategy for the future, no leadership, no coherent revolutionary or-

 53 Lefebvre, op. cit., 97.
 54 Ibid., 98.
55 Ibid., 67.
56 Ibid., 115.

388
 

ganization.  The reply of the existential Marxist indicated the difficulty of the problem: anything with system, with fixed leadership, with coherent strategy, inevitably fell into the hands of the bureaucracy, became reified, and contradicted the very nature of the initial project of socialism.  A deeper sense of the situation in advanced societies was emerging: it was not so much that rational planning was proscribed in a romantic flourish, but that theory and action had to be integrated in the concrete, immediate creativity of politics.  Everything had to be subordinated to the union of desire and action in the self-managed group if the struggle was to be pointed against reification and alienation. For Lefebvre, a "new praxis" of urbanism emerged in May in which "the term 'political' is restored to its oldest meaning--the theoretical and practical knowledge of the social life in the community."[57] Only movements that began from this point spoke truly to the context of advanced society because advanced technology made this unity, for the first time in human history, a practical possibility.

The May events did not profoundly change Lefebvre's thought or action if only because he was perhaps one of the few to foresee them.  More than Lefebvre, it was Sartre who was jolted from his intellectual slumber by the festival, even though his Critique, in some uncanny way, practically wrote the scenario for much of what was to occur.

Very quickly, Sartre leaped to the support of the students.  On May 8th, Le Monde carried a declaration, signed by Sartre, De Beauvoir, and others, calling on workers and intellectuals to join the students.[58] Two days later, a manifesto appeared in Le Monde, signed by Sartre, Gorz, Lefebvre, Lacan, and others, characterizing the movement as an effort to escape an "alienated order" of society, not simply a project of university reform.  Existential Marxists saw May in a world-historical perspective, not as a French phenom-

 57 Ibid., 155.
58  Contat, op. cit., 463.

389
 

enon.  On May 12th, Radio Luxembourg carried an interview with Sartre, who favored the student tactic of contestation and street fighting. [59] On May 20th, Le Nouvel Observateur printed an interview between Sartre and Cohn-Bendit, in which the intellectual, with gracious self-effacement, took the role of the interviewer, allowing Dany to speak his mind freely.  In addition to public statements in the media, Sartre was a constant visitor of the "liberated zone" in the Latin Quarter.  On May 20th he spoke at the Sorbonne, applauding the students' "new conception of a society based on full democracy, a marriage between socialism and freedom." [60] Socialism and freedom--the program Sartre had fought for since the days of the Resistance--had won the day.

In the interviews that he gave during and after the events, Sartre was struck by the students' spontaneous awareness of the unity of theory and action.  Their demands for university reform, which Raymond Aron viewed as pure barbarism, were completely backed by Sartre.  Student power to participate in choosing faculty--the one demand most difficult for the older generation to appreciate--made eminent sense to Sartre.[61] The existential Marxist agreed with the students that the university embodied a sterile concept of learning in which the authority of the teacher could not be challenged.  True learning, to him, demanded a constant challenge, an active criticism that should be open to all members of the society, not just to a tiny elite. [62] Sartre asserted that the students were expressing the demands of a new working class for self-management in every aspect of life.

More important than Sartre's sympathetic comprehension of the events of May, was the ability of existential Marxism, especially in the Critique, to make this social experience

 59 Ibid., 464.
60 Ibid., 466.
 61 Situations (Paris, 1972) Vol. 8, 188.
 62 Ibid., 189.

390
 

intelligible. [63] In two interviews in 1969 [64] Sartre was asked to explain how the Critique anticipated the May explosion.  He spoke of the war in Vietnam as an origin of May, since it vastly expanded the "field of the possible." If a tiny peasant society could resist America, advanced society was vulnerable. [65] In fact, the lesson of May, for Sartre, was that revolution in advanced society could now be regarded as a possibility.  In terms of the Critique, the project of revolution required the moment of the subjective grasping of its possibility.  The Critique also made clear the relation of the student-worker movement to the established oppositional institutions.  The CP and CGT were bureaucracies that serialized the workers, opposing the, group-in-fusion and making militant action impossible.[66] The traditional Left had lost the power of the negative, since it aped the inertia of the ruling class in its structure.  The difference between the group-in-fusion and the series lay behind the CP's conservatism during May.  To Sartre, the May movement lacked the leadership of a party that would not stifle the creative freedom of its members and still be able to direct the revolution.  May was a cultural revolution without a political revolution, and hence it bad to fail.  Nevertheless, it presented advanced society with its true negation for the first time: the struggle against alienation and for self-management confronted technological society with its limitations and contradictions.

The more striking parallels between the Critique and the May movement were not mentioned by Sartre, either out of modesty or because he thought them too obvious.  His

  63 This was noted only by one commentator in France.  A pseudonymous professor from Nanterre [Epistemon], pseud. for Didier Anzieu in Ces Idées qui ont ébranlé la France (Paris, 1968) 76.  Johnson, op. cit., also tried to understand May through the Critique, 151-152.
  64 "Itinerary of a Thought," op. cit., and "Masses, Spontaneity, Party," op. cit.
 65 "Itinerary," op. cit., 63 and "Masses," op. cit., 239.
 66 "Masses," op. cit., 235.

391
 

understanding of the emergence of negativity in the social field, the formation of fused groups amid seriality, captured remarkably what happened in May.  As in his description of 1789, the sudden comprehension by the students, and later by the workers, of mutuality through external threat was the spring of action during May.

The university was an excellent example of Sartre's concept of the practico-inert.  [67] Students were indeed serialized by an institution that appeared as an alien Other.  The university confronted the students not as a field for them to refashion, but as a totally fixed set of relations whose origin and meaning were obscured by the fragmentation of knowledge into compartmentalized disciplines and by the contemplative nature of the knowledge that was imparted.  Here was a perfect illustration of a detotalized totality.  Furthermore, there was a strict separation between teacher and student, bifurcating the praxis of learning.  Also, relations between students resembled Sartre's concept of the series, with competition for grades creating a scarcity that had to be interiorized by the students and that compelled them to regard one another as interchangeable, depersonalized enemies.  A similar analysis could be rendered of the workers' conditions.

On May 3rd, as the students watched their companions being loaded into police wagons, they saw in the other their own situation.  Mutual recognition led to the formation of groups-in-fusion, breaking the atomized seriality of the structure of everyday life.  A Sartrean account of the origin of May compares favorably with those of other groups.  Gaullists and official Marxists invoked a weak conspiracy theory, blaming everything on a handful of troublemakers from outside France (to which the students and workers, 30,000 strong, chanted "we are all German Jews and we are all small groups").  With somewhat more pertinence, many liberals attributed everything to the

  67 [Epistemon], op., cit., 78-81, also attempts to apply the categories of the Critique  to May '68.

392
 

obsolescence of the university.  Others used psychoanalysis with its theory of students acting out oedipal tensions to diminish the proportions of the May events.  On the other hand, Sartre's theory seems to allow the events to be grasped more concretely.  It would be possible to trace in detail how the students and workers retotalized the practical field in the new situation, without resorting to determinism, reductionism, or irrationalism.

What Sartre had not accounted for in the Critique was the ability of exemplary action to stimulate the latent violence of ruling institutions and to provoke the external threat.  This was the genius of  Cohn-Bendit and the March 22nd Movement.  In other words, a revolution could be sparked by the oppressed themselves and did not require an unintended cataclysm, like a depression, or an aggressive action by the ruling class, like Louis XVI surrounding Paris with his troops.  The weight of the practico-inert in tension with the transcending freedom of collective action was condition enough for revolution.

Sartre's dialectics of individual and group, thought and action, freedom and necessity were all exemplified in May.  During the uprising the individual, by himself, did not contemplate revolution and then act on it.  The individual in the situation pre-reflectively projected himself through the other and then, from the mutuality of projects, from the existential quality of the group-in-fusion, intellectual representations of the group's consciousness emerged.  Freedom was not a product of individual thought or even of individual action; it required the structure of the group-in-fusion as its condition of existence.  Suddenly each student totalized his own field, expanding this totalization to include all the oppressions of the university structure, and later, after May 13th, all of the oppressions of the larger society.  Similarly, the workers, serialized on one side by capitalism and on the other by the CGT and the CP, saw themselves in the students' act-

393
 

ion on the barricades.  How many times had they battled the police?  Were not the demands of the students for autogestion applicable to their own condition?  In many cases the first step of negation was followed by the second step of group formation.  Out of the barricades came the action committees.

In the Critique, the group-in-fusion led to the organization, the oath, the terror, and finally to re-serialization in institutions.  The dialectic of groups-in-fusion followed a slightly different pattern during May.  They began to divide their labor and become organizations; the action committees were democratic organizations that preserved the creative praxis of the group-in-fusion.  But oaths were not taken, even symbolically, and terror did not enter the organizations.  During the festival, the protestors did not perceive the denial of their action in the freedom of their comrades.  This was important.  The absence of terror could be used to explain the failure of the May movement, since terror worked to stiffen the self-defense of the revolution and to direct it politically toward the final overthrow.  On the other hand, the absence of terror within the action committees could be explained through the profundity of the new consciousness and new relations germinating there.  The crucial fact was that the action committees did not turn to the enemy as Sartre thought they must.  They did not become obsessed with the threat of the old authority, as had Robespierre and the long, tragic history of revolutions.  In large part, the students had avoided terrorism.[68] Therefore, they did not carry out witch hunts in their own camp in search of the omnipresent, infiltrating enemy.  Perhaps the event did not last long enough.  Yet one can speculate that what made it possible for the action committees to avoid the terror was the fullness with which they actualized the new relations of reciprocity. The students and workers in the specific cases mention -

  68 Ibid., 81-84, for examples of tense Situations in which the students avoided terrorism.

394
 

ed above escaped the circular return to serialization by living the new society in the groups they had established.  The revolt against the series and the emergence of creative action were not two distinct phases of May but moments in the same dialectical process.  Hence the rebels discounted, no doubt unrealistically, the threats of De Gaulle and the capitalists.  The May movement chose to negate authority and to build new structures at the same time.  The commentators who bemoaned the rebels' utopian demand for immediate revolution tended to miss the point of what they had done.

Here was both the weakness and the strength of May.  It was able to define itself against the enemy without having the enemy define its own structures.  Sartre had argued that the enemy's seriality would necessarily be introduced by the revolutionaries as they struggled against it.  The events of May suggest that the circularity of the Sartrean dialectic could be broken by the preservation of the group-in-fusion.  The closer that means and ends were united, the less the rebels were, subject to reserialization.  It is not at all clear that the failure of May could be attributed to its refusal to divorce means and ends and push for instrumental action against the state.  It might rather be argued that it had no chance of total success in any case and that many of the rebels knew this since they chanted, "This is only the beginning." From an: existential Marxist perspective the May events were successful in showing the possibility of non-atomistic social relations and in showing that these relations were not the direct consequence of overthrowing property but of a new, intersubjective praxis.  The lesson of May was that social transformation in advanced society must concentrate on the immediate creation of new relations of reciprocity rather than concentrate on overthrowing the enemy.  Exemplary action embodying the new principles must be combined with negative unmasking of established oppressions.

395
 

Furthermore, if it is accepted that advanced society nurtures the demands for self-management, for the end of alienation, for qualitative rather than quantitative changes in society, it could be said that the continued development of advanced society, the ever more profound serialization of people in more bureaucratic, more powerless relations, creates ever more surely the conditions for the emergence of the group-in-fusion; that the continued spread of the contradictions specific to advanced society, its need to integrate and control more and more aspects of daily life, prepares the ground for a deeper and more widespread May movement.  It seems clear that the proletarianization of the old middle class, the technicians, and the white-collar workers in service industries prepared these groups to be able to identify their own Situations with those of students and blue-collar workers.  By the same token, the weaknesses of May called for a new kind of politics that could centralize the impulses of the action committees.  In fact the Left coalition formed after May 1968, including Socialists and Communists, took up the program for worker self-management, a demand that the CP traditionally opposed.  Still, it is not clear that this coalition would promote the full implications of the May events should it gain an electoral victory.  At the very least, it seems that the transformation of advanced capitalism into socialism will have little in common with the transformation of feudal, agricultural societies into industrialized societies, whether on the model of the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks.  To the extent that a new theory is needed for this unprecedented process, existential Marxism seems appropriate.

The May events forced Sartre to reexamine the question of the relation of the intellectual to the movement.  Once more his life was in question.  Should he now resume his position as gadfly of the CP?  Was it possible for the intellectual to regard himself as a man of theory who preserved the interests of pure criticism against those of

396
 

politics and action?'[69] Sartre's action after 1968 manifested another change in his attitude.  He began to act.  In the street, he distributed a Maoist newspaper when the regime had banned it.  He was placing his body, not merely his mind, on the line.  In 1970 an interviewer pressed Sartre on the apparent changes May, 1968 had stimulated in his life.  Hesitantly, he agreed with the interviewer that abstruse writing, like his new book on Flaubert, needed to be supplemented by writing that was readable by the masses.  Further, the intellectual bad to lend himself to political action to an extent that he had previously avoided.  Selling prohibited newspapers in the street was contestation.

By 1971, Sartre accepted what was in France the Maoist model of a cultural revolution without terror, thereby rescinding the circularity of the social dialectic in the Critique.  It was possible to forget the CP and develop a different sense of Party leadership.  At last Sartre was freed from his ambiguous reliance on the Party.  Giving up the CP in turn, changed the situation for the intellectual.

Then May, 1968, happened, and I understood that what the young
were putting into question was not just capitalism, imperialism, the
system, etc., but those of us who pretended to be against all that as well.
We can say that from 1940 to 1968 I was a left-wing intellectual and from
1968 on I became -an intellectual leftist. The difference is one of action.[71]

  69 In 1965 Sartre still basically maintained his old position.  See, "Plaidoyer pour les intellectuals," Situations, Vol. 8, 375-455.
  70 "Sartre Accuses the Intellectuals of Bad Faith," New York Times Magazine (Oct. 17, 1971), 118.
 71 Ibid.

397
 

false without the risk of the body.

Unity of theory and practice still eluded Sartre, for his position contained numerous difficulties and contradictions.  Virtually a cultural institution in France, he could not carry out contestation without having it become a spectacle, as his newspaper hawking certainly was.  More deeply, I sense a certain inability in him to develop a politics that both follows from his theory and is personally satisfying to him.  For what, after all, were Sartre's politics in the 1960s?  There were the strident appeals for violent action in the Third World, especially in the preface to Fanon's Wretched of the Earth; then, after 1968, there was the call for intellectuals to put down their books and go to the workers, servir le peuple.  These are, of course, possible projects; yet Sartre continued to pour out thousands of pages on Flaubert that, valuable as they are, few proletarians would ever read.  The point here is that his politics do not fully confront the experiences of advanced capitalism in France.  Instead they seem to flee from relevant theoretical and practical work, from the challenges posed by the new conjuncture, as if impelled by a guilty conscience.  Sartre still seems to struggle against his own best talents.  In wanting to save himself from the characteristic bad faith of the intellectual--hiding behind one's knowledge--he moved to bad faith at a second level, that of the ultra-revolutionary.  None of this is meant to diminish the great significance of his thought, which, I have argued, goes far toward conceptualizing the path of liberating social change.
 
398