In France in May-June 1968, there was a potentially revolutionary situation.
For several months leading up to May, students had protested for better conditions. When the government used riot police to stop their protests, the students resisted their attacks, inspiring workers to support the students. When workers supported the students, the capitalists sacked them.
Then students started to occupy campuses. Workers started to occupy factories and offices. Everyone took part: seamen, undertakers, doctors, hotel staff, bank clerks. Journalists took over television stations. Students and workers directed traffic.
There were 10 million workers on strike. Another 2 million farmers supported them, plus 600,000 students. Since the total population was 50 million, the overwhelming majority of families had at least one, if not two, people involved in the strike. The majority of people in France were out on strike.
The capitalist government was losing its grip. When President Charles de Gaulle tried to hold a referendum, he couldn't get any workers in France to print the ballots. He went to Belgium, and the workers there also refused.
The army minister informed de Gaulle that troops could not be relied upon to fire on civilians. Soldiers' committees had sprung up in barracks in support of workers and students.
Nightly street marches chanted: "Run forward comrade, the old world is behind you." The French people got a glimpse of a new world, where they could take control. A street pamphlet read: "This is the time to plan our rule of tomorrow, direct supplies of food, organisation of public services, transport, information, housing, etc ... For the abolition of bosses! All power to the workers!"
After two months, the movement was betrayed by the leaders of the conservative and Stalinist French Communist Party. It used its domination of the union movement and other movements to prevent the rise of any organisation that could have led a revolution. When they felt that the movement might get out of their control, they told workers to go back to work and stopped radical students from trying to talk to them.
What if a genuinely revolutionary organisation with a strong base in the workers' movement had existed in France at that time? What could it have done?
First, it could fight for the formation of a strike council of the whole country. The strike council could simply say: "Well, it's clear we have a majority. We're going to have free elections to decide all the questions at issue here. And these elections are going to be run by the strike council because the government has shown itself to be undemocratic."
Elections for this council could be held in factories, offices, campuses, schools, the ranks of the army and local suburbs. Delegates representing working people and the community could all come together.
Then it could be proposed to this council that all key industries and services be handed over to workers' and community control. A discussion would then begin about what priorities were necessary in production, education, health, recreation facilities, environmental repair, affirmative action programs for women and so on.
That is democracy. That is what a revolution looks like.
[Excerpted from What Resistance Stands For, available at Resistance Bookshops. See page 2 for details.]
From Green Left Weekly, March 29, 2006.
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