Fernando Alcoforado *
May 1968 was a wave of protests that began with student demonstrations calling for reforms in France’s education sector. The academics joined the workers and promoted the biggest general strike in Europe, with the participation of about 10 million people. The beginning of everything was a series of conflicts between students and authorities at the University of Paris in Nanterre, a city near the French capital. On May 2, 1968, the University administration threatened to expel several students accused of leading the movement against the institution. The measures provoked the immediate reaction of the students of one of the most renowned universities in the world, the Sorbonne, in Paris.
The students met the next day to protest, going out on a march under the command of student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit. The police repressed the students with violence and for several days the streets of Paris became the scene of camp battles. The brutal reaction of the government only increased the importance of the demonstrations. The French Communist Party (PCF) announced its support for university students and an influential union of workers, the CGT, called a general strike for May 13. At the height of the movement, nearly two-thirds of the country’s workforce crossed their arms. The people joined the strike, until its official proclamation on May 13. That’s when all of France stopped. There was a set of protests, demonstrations and conflicts in which students demanded reforms in the education sector, women demanded more equality, and workers demanded higher wages. The conquest of the sexual revolution, the increase of labor rights and the end of the Vietnam War were all part of the demands. The movement grew so much that it destabilized the government of the then president of France, General Charles De Gaulle, that, weakened politically, resigned a year later.
The student movement, which began at the University of Nanterre in 1968, spread rapidly throughout Paris, reaching the Sorbonne, the entire Quartier Latin, and, in a few weeks, the main French provinces. This movement erupted at the center of a highly industrialized capitalist Europe after the Second World War, at the height of a capitalist economic growth of almost thirty uninterrupted years (the glorious years). This movement was not reduced to the agitation of university students who were constituted in the force that announced the ongoing rebellion. Student effervescence was, rather, the most obvious manifestation or the sensitive barometer of general discontent and of a major crisis and of a major crisis that had already been announced in the heart of French society, whose deepest origins belonged to the process of economic development inaugurated at the end of the eighteenth century with the 1st Industrial Revolution.
Not only was the capitalist economic order at stake, but the social order itself and with it the alienation to which the entire French population was subjected – the lack of meaning of a bureaucratized capitalist society, where most citizens carried a trivial, mediocre existence, repetitive, repressive and repressed. Every social order was being questioned, the lifestyle, everyday life was under suspicion. An arduous struggle was fought against the bosses and the state. “Ni Dieu, Ni Mâitre!” exclaimed the anarchists, reminiscent of Auguste Blanqui’s motto of the late nineteenth century. “À Bas l’État Policier!” cried other rebels, savagely repressed by the police force – violence organized and concentrated in the hands of the state, which holds the monopoly of arms. This is the report of Concessa Vaz, retired professor at the UFMG, who was an active participant in the events that broke out in Paris, in her article under the title Maio de 1968 e o sentimento do inacabado (May 1968 and the feeling of the unfinished) published on the website <https://outraspalavras.net/destaques/maio-de-1968-e-o-sentimento-do-inacabado/>. The report of Concessa Vaz is confirmed by Vincent Cespedes in his book May 68 – La philosophie est dans la rue, published by Larousse in 2008.
In order to understand what happened in May 1968 in Paris, we must consider that the post-1945 period, ie after World War II, is characterized by strong economic growth, driven by the need to rebuild a devastated Europe and a France in particular, hit by two major world wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945) and a major economic crisis (1929), which resulted in bankruptcies, mass unemployment and a severe global depression. This was the beginning of the so-called “golden years” of unprecedented economic growth of capitalism, and whose leverage factor was productivity gains based on the Taylorist-Fordist model of production based on the “Principles of Scientific Administration” formulated by mechanical engineer Frederic Taylor aiming at the organization of companies and the rationalization of industrial production to make it more efficient and also in the “assembly line” idealized by Henry Ford in the automotive industry. Ford has incorporated the Taylorist principles of division of labor already established and maximized productivity with the accelerated intensification of labor, induced and made feasible by assembly line technology.
The Taylorist-Fordist model has rapidly spread to other sectors far beyond the automotive industry with mass and large-scale production, in order to reduce unit production costs. Fordism, as it came to be called, was thus one of the engines of capitalism that allowed full employment and an increase in the standard of living of workers, by reducing the prices of the goods necessary for their survival and reproduction. This was the system of production that came to govern all capitalist economic growth with its Fordist assembly line and the postwar principles of Taylorist labor organization until the late 1980s when it was replaced by the Toyota system of flexible production. With a centralized production structure, based on time control and worker movements on the assembly line, the Taylorist-Fordist factories absorbed a gigantic mass of skilled workers who performed precise, repetitive tasks, assembling standard parts, repeating the same gestures and submitting to the infernal cadence of the assembly line, brutalized and alienated.
It should be noted that mass production gave rise to mass consumption and transformed society, in turn, into a world of robots, with codified lifestyles and routines rigidly demarcated with the standardization of everyday life. The same hierarchical principle of Taylorist-Fordist production was reflected in equally centralized universities, whose deans, such as puppets, were to meet, first and foremost, the technological needs of French capitalism, to the demands of the productive system then implanted and disseminated. Concessa Vaz affirms in her article quoted above, that it was not by chance that the enraged students of Nanterre cried, even before May 1968, that they did not want to be “des chiens de garde de la bourgeoisie” (“guard dogs of the bourgeoisie”). Concessa Vaz also asserts that the French government, in turn, was in the hands of General Charles De Gaulle, who commanded France with similar austerity, without consultation and ruling by decree, and exercised enormous political control through the media of then: the television and the radio. The limits of his government were clearly expressed in the already trivial “slogan” in the May demonstrations: “Adieu, De Gaulle, dix ans, ça suffit” (“Goodbye, De Gaulle, ten years, enough!”).
In the mid-1960s, the Taylorist-Fordist production system began to lose its effectiveness. Productivity slowed, capitalists attempted to compensate for the fall by reducing real wages, further degrading working conditions, promoting partial unemployment, and, by accident, accelerating the already infernal cadences of the assembly line. The workers, especially the masses of specialists, revolted against the weight of the crisis that began to fall on their shoulders, and the imbalance settled. Concessa Vaz, a witness to the rebellion of May 1968 in France, states in the article quoted above that the workers decided to join the striking students and refused to play “perdre sa vie à la gagner” (“lose life to win -over there”). Such refusal also appeared in the form of absenteeism at work, denial of work, or in the form of sabotage. But it was probably the salary conditions of the skilled workers, the absolute majority of the Fordist workers, who pushed the workers into revolt and joined the students. This adherence was definitely engraved on the flags that fluttered everywhere with the words: “étudiants, professeurs, ouvriers” (“students, teachers, workers”). It was this historical junction between the intellectual work and the manual work that made May of 1968 in France a particular and differentiated event in relation to what happened in the rest of the world.
On May 25, 1968, the day after the most violent night of spring riots with 200 injured, two dead and ten million workers on strike, negotiations were held between the government, employers, workers’ union and students. Thirty hours later, Prime Minister Pompidou announced the outcome of the negotiations, including wage increases, reduction of working time, revolution in trade union rights, reduction of taxes on wages, among other concessions. The leaders of the CGT workers announced the victory. Throughout the country, the agreements entered into have been considered, however, acts of treason. Indeed, the agreements reached were not up to the gigantic mobilization of May 1968. It was also said that a pre-revolutionary situation was aborted and betrayed by the communists of the PCF. May 1968 represented, therefore, a defeat of the forces that wished to make profound changes in French society (CESPEDES, Vincent, May 68- La philosophie est dans la rue, Paris: Larousse, 2008).
A new May 1968 may happen all over the world because the conditions prevailing in May 1968 have worsened even more over time. We are now facing a world in which human beings are totally alienated that do not realize what is happening. They accept without discussing the unfortunate life that was planned for them. The current production system colonizes all walks of life. People have resigned themselves to this life because they think that there can be no other model of organization of society. And that’s where the force of present domination lies: to create the illusion that this system that colonized the whole face of the Earth represents the best that humanity has ever built in terms of social organization. To dream of another world has become a crime criticized unanimously by the media and the public powers. In parliamentary democracy, there is no opposition to the “status quo”, as the dominant political parties agree on the essentials of the conservation of present capitalist society. There are no political parties likely to come to power that doubt the dogma of the market. The representative and parliamentary system limits the power of citizens by the simple right to vote, that is, to nothing. Parliament’s seats are occupied by the vast majority of the ruling economic class, whether it be the right wing or the intended democratic social left. The alienation of people is the main weapon used by the owners of the means of production and political power to avoid raising the world’s population awareness of the economic and political bondage in which she is subjected and from it results the rebellion against the inhuman economic and political systems in force.
* Fernando Alcoforado, 78, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is the author of 13 books addressing issues such as Globalization and Development, Brazilian Economy, Global Warming and Climate Change, The Factors that Condition Economic and Social Development, Energy in the world and The Great Scientific, Economic, and Social Revolutions that Changed the World.
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