News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[Ken Knabb's Bureau of Public Secrets has the best
collection of material on May 1968:
http://www.bopsecrets.org/
Concerning the events of May 1968, I especially recommend
redy Perlman and Roger Gregoire's eyewitness account,
_Worker-Student Action Committees_:
http://www.geocities.com/%7Ejohngray/peractil.htm
--DC]
http://tinyurl.com/6m5gor
LATIN AMERICA: The Legacy of May ’68
Analysis by Gustavo González
SANTIAGO, May 28 (IPS) -- Nearly 190 years after the storming of the
Bastille, Zhou En-lai, premier of China from 1949 to his death in 1976,
said it was "too soon to tell," when asked about the significance of the
French Revolution. Perhaps the same can be said of May 1968.
Four decades after the events that shook the government of General
Charles de Gaulle in France, there are those who see them from a
distance as a pointless student uprising, while for others they
represent a lost op****tunity to bring about a fundamental ****ft in
history.
But basically, May ‘68 is associated with an explosion of student
protests that defied the world of grown-ups and their social and
cultural mores, but ended up being co-opted by the establishment. The
slogan "Let's be realistic, demand the impossible", gave way to
"politics is the art of the possible".
"El Mayo de los Pingüinos" (The May of the Penguins) is the title of a
book released this month in Chile by two young journalists, Andrea
Domedel and Macarena Peña, who deftly outline the birth and
"domestication" of the high school student movement that brought the
Chilean government of socialist President Michelle Bachelet to bay two
years ago.
Although there are significant differences between the two cases,
comparisons can be drawn between the 1968 student barricades in Paris
and the demonstrations mounted by thousands of high school students in
Chile, known as "penguins" because of their white-on-black school
uniforms, who 38 years later replaced the cobble stones of the Latin
Quarter with blogs, instant messaging, and cell-phone text messages.
Chilean sociologist Manuel Antonio Garretón wrote in the forward to the
book that both events demonstrated that student movements do not in and
of themselves generate social change or give rise to new policies, and
that no matter how noisy they are, they tend to peter out.
In his controversial commentary, Garretón said that just as the
"penguin" movement dwindled in 2006 as excitement over the approaching
world football cup in Germany grew, the proximity of summer vacations in
France led to the demobilisation of the student protests in Paris in
1968, in the midst of an impossible alliance with the parties opposed to
de Gaulle (1890-1970), who governed that country from 1959 to 1969.
Whatever the case, the events of May ‘68 are open to a broad range of
interpretations, being seen as an exercise in anarchism and nihilism by
some and as the seed of a utopia that is still struggling to burst forth
and become an instrument of political transformation by others.
Four decades later, the French Communist Party (PCF) and its then
secretary-general Waldeck Rochet (1905-1983) are still considered
responsible for taking the air out of the riots by the "bourgeois"
students who were undermining the theoretical role of the proletarian
vanguard.
On May 3, the day the first of many protests was held at the University
of the Sorbonne in Paris, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and other student
activists, L'Humanité, the official publication of the PCF, stated in an
editorial that the student rioters were "false revolutionaries who must
be unmasked."
But by May 15, when Renault’s 15,000 workers went on strike and occupied
the car maker’s plants, locking managers in as well in some cases, it
was clear that the Communists and the parliamentary left in general had
been left behind by their grassroots bases.
The general strike, which eventually involved roughly two-thirds of the
country’s workforce, came close to toppling de Gaulle who, however,
refused to step down and instead made two moves that would eventually
consolidate the Gaullists’ hold on power.
The first, negotiated with the trade unions and the PCF, was a May 27
announcement of a 10 percent across-the-board wage hike and a 35 percent
increase in the minimum wage. The second came three days later, when de
Gaulle announced early elections.
Rochet and Socialist leader François Mitterrand (1916-1996) accepted the
electoral challenge, convinced that French voters would turn to the left
to pull the country out of the crisis. But instead, the "silent
majority" gave a landslide victory to the Gaullists, who won 358 of 487
seats in the legislature.
In this return to the status quo, France’s Communists took refuge in
orthodoxy and ended up cutting their ties to the new left, while forging
closer links to the Soviet Union, and backing the August 1968 Warsaw
Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which cut short the "Prague spring".
Years later, Georges Marchais (1920-1997), Rochet’s successor, would
join an alliance with the Socialists that would bring Mitterrand to the
presidency from 1981 to 1995, in an echo of the Popular Unity experiment
in Chile, which was brought to an end by the 1973 coup d’etat staged by
General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).
Marchais did not fully achieve the status of reformist in the
international Marxist movement. In sup****ting the 1980 Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan, the PCF went against the current of Eurocommunist
leaders critical of Moscow like Enrico Berlinguer of Italy and Santiago
Carrillo of Spain.
The regression of Communism in Western Europe, and France in particular,
could be seen today as one of the invisible lessons of May ’68, which
also had diverse impacts on youth and leftist movements in Latin America.
In this region as well, France’s student rebellion took on a mythic
quality and loaned not only chants and slogans but also a bit of theory
to an emerging new left largely inspired by legendary Argentine-Cuban
guerrilla leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara, and to the struggles of
university students.
Opposition to outmoded authoritarian higher educational systems is
almost a century old in Latin America, if one takes into account the
"Grito de Córdoba", a manifesto issued by students at the National
University in that central Argentine city that gave rise to the national
university reform movement in June 1918.
In August 1967, just nine months before May ’68, students at the
conservative Catholic University in Chile, inspired by the Second
Vatican Council (1962-1965), demanded in-depth changes.
The occupation of the university by student protesters was disparaged in
an editorial in the El Mercurio newspaper as a "Marxist plot against the
hierarchies of the higher education system."
On Aug. 16, 1967, the students hung a gigantic banner in front of the
central university building, reading "Chile: El Mercurio Is Lying".
The conservative newspaper, one of the oldest Spanish language papers in
continuous publication in the world, did not lose its position as the
country’s most influential paper, but the Catholic University students’
slogan has not stopped haunting it.
The influence of the left in the local student movement grew along with
the struggles for more democratic higher education in Chile, and
bolstered by May ’68, the movement took on a state of permanent
agitation, demanding more democratic rules for university admission and
co-government by students, professors and alumni.
The election of the Popular Unity government in September 1970 coincided
with the entry into force of a university reform that gave student votes
in elections of university authorities 25 percent more weight.
All of this was swept away by the Sept. 11, 1973 coup, the culmination
of a destabilisation strategy against the government of socialist
president Salvador Allende, carried out with the active participation of
El Mercurio.
While the military regime cracked down on dissent in a "dirty war" in
which more than 3,000 people were killed and "disappeared", dictator
Pinochet took over the universities and proclaimed "Ladies and
gentlemen, we come to the university to study, not engage in politics."
(END/2008)
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
|
