Workers' Liberty 3/19: When the workers rise, part two
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France, May 1968
France 1968: When ten million workers took capitalism by the throat [1968]
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“I hate the revolution like sin” said the hangman of Germany’s 1918 revolution, the Social Democrat Ebert. Less direct, but equally clear after the events in France, is the recent statement of the parliamentary leader of the French Communist Party, Robert Balanger: “When we talk about the revolution we now think in terms of a political struggle in which our party agrees tofight the bourgeoisie with their own weapons.”
1968: The Year 0f Miracles!
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It was as if a conscience-stricken god said to himself one day in the mid-60s: “I suppose I have been a bit rough on the poor old Trots; setback after setback, massacre after massacre, blow after blow, for four decades now....
The power next time [1968]
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Editorial, Workers Fight No 7, June 1968
Class struggle in France May-June 1968
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The May 1968 general strike in France is often bracketed with the other events of that year. Although student activism did play an important role in “detonating” the factory occupations movement in France, to see the general strike as just one among many acts of “resistance” is to denude it of its class content. It was a tooth-and-nail struggle in which the working class withheld its labour power, brought the de Gaulle administration to its knees and had the ability to take state power from the ruling class.
Occupying Sud Aviation
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The first factory occupation in 1968 took place at the Sud Aviation aircraft plant at Bouguenais near Nates. François le Madec, a CFDT union activist at the factory, gave this account of the first night of the strike in his 1988 book L’aubépin de mai (The Hawthorns of May). Translated by David Broder.
“We didn’t machine gun our teachers”
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In 1968 I was a 14 year old student at a posh school in the centre of London. Events of that year did not pass unnoticed even among the sons of the bourgeoisie. The film If made an impression and, even if we didn’t machine gun our teachers, there was at least one organised protest there demanding the right to party unconstrained by school rules on Saturdays.
Not going back
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If you’ve been listening to the Radio Four’s series, 1968, a selection of old radio news broadcasts from each day of that year, you will know that it has got quite exciting (as exciting as Radio Four gets), covering events and France over the last two months.
My '68: “My opinions snapped into focus”
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In 1968 I was student at Cambridge university.