Publication Details

Worker-Student Action Committees was first published by its authors in Kalamazoo (Michigan) in the spring of 1969 and then reprinted by Black & Red (Detroit) in 1970. (Printed at the Detroit Print Co-op which Perlman co-founded).

The articles making up Part I were all written in Paris between May and July 1968 except for the last which was completed in the US. Some of the articles were published at the time in different journals — details are given in the notes for those articles. In the pamphlet no previous publication details are given for the first article The Second French Revolution but according to the bibliography in ’Having Little, Being Much’ an article with that title was published in the Kalamazoo paper the Western Herald (June 14, 1968).

The 1970 Black & Red edition was copiously illustrated with cartoons and graphics created in France during May ’68. This on-line version is considerably the poorer for not including them.

From Having Little, Being Much by Lorraine Perlman, Black & Red (Detroit), 1989:

[...Fredy Perlman lectured in Italy for a few weeks in the spring of 1968...]

“When the course in Turin ended, Fredy took a train to Paris and found himself caught up in the tumultuous events of May 1968. His experiences during these intense, joyous weeks deeply affected his views and remained a constant reference point whenever he considered possibilities for social change. (...) The act of rebellion itself was exhilarating. The massive street actions in which thousands confronted the forces of the status quo gave rise to hopes that the old world was about to be overturned. Within days, the prestige of political parties, representatives and experts, melted. Many buildings were occupied, and the State’s authority was effectively excluded from these liberated areas. People organized committees to carry out necessary tasks. There was a feverish exchange of views, proposals for collective activity. Discussions went on around the clock — some in an amphitheater where there was a microphone, but mostly between individuals who were discovering the joys that the mass media had deprived them of. There was a widespread conviction that one’s daily activity was about to be transformed and that everyone would participate in choosing and bringing about new social arrangements. Fredy took part in a loosely-organized group of intellectuals, students and young workers who held discussions at the Censier classroom complex and who also tried to communicate their aspirations to auto workers who lived and worked in the Paris suburbs. The Communist Party labor union, the CGT, did not welcome the enthusiastic agitators who came to initiate dialogue with the striking workers for whom it claimed to speak. Union officials feared that they could lose control over “their” strike if the workers insisted on changing the demands from the usual ones concerned with wages to ones which the union could not easily co-opt. Therefore, they kept the factory gates locked and insisted on mediating all contacts with the workers who were occupying the factory. The union bureaucrats finally agreed to transmit an appeal by the “outsiders” to the workers, and one union functionary, using a microphone, gave a distorted account of who the militants were and why they had come to this factory. Since many of the assembled workers were non-French, the outside agitators insisted that the appeal should be presented in Spanish and Serbo-Croatian as well. The union officials grudgingly agreed, and gave the microphone to Fredy who was delighted to convey the actual appeal. On another occasion, when a group of Censier activists went to talk to workers at a suburban factory, a number of them were arrested for trespassing. They had climbed over the factory fence, attempting to speak to the workers directly. At the arraignment Fredy explained to the judge that he was an American professor and that he had climbed the fence in order to carry out research about French labor unions. The judge was undoubtedly skeptical, but charges against Fredy were dropped. Many of the mass demonstrations in Paris ended with the construction of barricades and confrontations with the police. Tear gas was frequently used and demonstrators were chased and beaten by aggressive riot squad police. Though he was never beaten, Fredy fell ill after one demonstration and spent two days in bed, unconscious most of the time. During these action-filled weeks, there was little time for reading, but Fredy learned about ideas and histories which influenced him in the decade which followed: the texts of the Situationist International, anarchism and the Spanish Revolution, the council communists. In July 1968, as law and order were being re-imposed on French society, Fredy returned to the United States (...) (...) Militants from Europe also visited us in Kalamazoo. One of them, Roger Gregoire, stayed with us for several months, working with Fredy on an account and evaluation of experiences the two had shared in May and June 1968 while members of the Citroen Worker-Student Action Committee. The resulting 96-page history and analysis was printed in the spring of 1969. Roger also participated in and observed local actions; and he furnished printing skills for some numbers of the Black & Red periodical which had been launched in September 1968. (...) Printing equipment was not available to us in Kalamazoo, but we did find a printer willing to make negatives of the typewritten copy which had been prepared on a portable Hermes machine and laid out using a makeshift light-box. When we had everything ready to print, we went to Ann Arbor to use the facilities of the Radical Education Project (REP), an SDS printing collective. After they had showed us how to use the equipment, the REP staff treated us as equals and gave us free access to the space. We paid them for the materials we used, helped them with collating or with other menial tasks and left things clean when finished. REP’s openness greatly impressed Fredy, all the more since it was clear to everyone that the texts we were printing did not at all conform to the political perspective of the Ann Arbor Collective. (...) Having Little, Being Much pp. 46–50

Fredy Perlman & Roger Gregoire were subsequently to fall out with one another:

In 1969 Roger Gregoire and Linda Lanphear had gone to Paris intending to continue collaborating on Black & Red projects from there, but they were soon concentrating their attention on the Situationist International (SI), exposing the ideological differences between French leftists and the SI, an organization they were eager to join. Some of Black & Red’s earlier activity in Kalamazoo did not conform to the exacting Situationist principles, and certain ideological guardians of the SI viewed askance the openness of the current printing project in Detroit. According to the ideologues, the most essential political task was to clarify differences between Situationist theory and the perspectives of other leftists. Past association with non Situationist activists would have to be repudiated before Linda and Roger could be considered worthy of admission to the SI’s inner circle. If past errors were acknowledged and if the confessions conformed to the SI’s requirements, the gatekeepers held out hope that Roger and Linda could become participants in the “international revolutionary movement,” namely, become members of the SI. Roger’s and Linda’s repudiation of past errors took the form of long letters addressed to Fredy but submitted to SI officials as proof of their current convictions. In the letters they reproached Fredy for associating with people in Kalamazoo who lacked even the slightest knowledge of the Situationist critique; the letters pointed out that by printing Radical America in Detroit he was continuing his incorrect practice. They urged him to recognize the flaws of Kalamazoo associates, to break off relations with Radical America as well as with all Detroiters who had conventional leftist views and to make the break public by composing, printing and distributing an open letter in which his repudiation would be unambiguously stated. Fredy was deeply hurt by the letters and disappointed in his friends. He was hurt because the Kalamazoo collaboration had been so congenial; Fredy considered the printing projects and the university interventions to have been exemplary acts. The letters distorted what Fredy considered the reality of their shared activity. He was disappointed in his friends’ willingness to humiliate themselves; it was their past they were denouncing as well as his. He had expected them to carry out autonomous projects in Paris, similar to ones they had creatively defined in Kalamazoo. Their letters made him question if the past activity of these individuals had really been so admirable if they could now be accepting purges and advocating ideological purity. Outrage was another of Fredy’s responses to the letters and the one that permeated his reply which began: Dear Aparatchiki,

Your recent letters would have meant much more if a carbon of one and the original of the other had not been sent to a functionary of the Situationist International as part of an application for membership. The logic of your arguments would be impressive if it had not been designed to demonstrate your orthodoxy in Situationist doctrine. The sincerity of your “rupture with Fredy Perlman and Black and Red” would be refreshing if it had not been calculated to please a Priest of a Church which demands dehumanizing confessions as a condition for adherence. You’re a toady. The odor is made more unpleasant by the fact that you chose to approach the Situationist International precisely in its period of great purges (Khayati, Chasse, Elwell, Vaneigem, Etc.). Some people joined the Communist Party precisely at the time of Stalin’s great purges. In a later paragraph Fredy turns one of their complaints against him into an attack on the S.I.: [I]n your letters you refer to my avoidance of the problem of Organization. You’re wrong. I avoid being sucked into organizations of professional specialists in “revolution”; apparently you desire to be sucked in. We disagreed about this in Kalamazoo as well, but with this difference: you did not at that time demand unanimity as a basis for working together. To avoid being sucked into such organizations is not the same as to avoid the problem of being sucked in. Unfortunately, seen through the 3-D glasses you’re wearing today I’m again missing the point. I’m talking about all other bureaucratic organizations, not about the Situationist International. Its bureaucrats aren’t bureaucrats. Its purges aren’t purges. Its ideology is not ideology: it is practice; whose practice? the anti-bureaucratic practice of the proletarians; this is the practice that justifies the intimidations, insults, confessions, purges which are necessary to keep the Coherence coherent. This Organization is unique: unlike all the Stalinist Parties, unlike the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals, the Situationist International is itself the world revolutionary movement, so that one does not apply to Verlaan for membership but for “an autonomous positive existence within the international revolutionary movement” (your letter to Verlaan). The break with Linda and Roger made Fredy even more skeptical that a shared ideological perspective was in itself an adequate basis for undertaking common projects, and it made him decidedly unreceptive to alignments with adherents of Situationism. (...) Having Little, Being Much pp 73–75

Introduction

Who are we? Neither officers nor functionaries of the Worker-Student Action Committees; neither presidents nor secretaries of the movement; neither spokesmen nor representatives of the revolutionaries.

We’re two militants who met at the barricades and in Censier; who shared a project with each other as with thousands of other militants active in Paris in May and June 1968.

Why are we writing this account of the May-June events? Not in order to describe a spectacle, nor a history which is to “enlighten” future generations. Our goal is to make transparent, to ourselves and to those who are engaged in the same project, our shortcomings, our lack of foresight, our lack of action. Our aim is to clarify the extent to which our concrete actions furthered the revolutionary project.

The purpose of the critique is to permit us to move further in the realization of the revolutionary project, to act more effectively in a situation similar to the one we experienced. Our intention is not to “clarify” the sequence of events which took place in France in order to make possible a ritual repetition of these events, but rather to contrast the limited views we had of the events at the time we were engaged in them, with views we have gained from further action in different contexts. Thus this account and critique of French events is at the same time a critique of shortcomings we found in ourselves and in those alongside whom we struggled afterwards.

This booklet is divided into two parts. The first part consists of articles which are attempts to understand the events as they took place and to define the perspectives behind the actions. The “perspectives behind the actions” are not private philosophies which we attributed to an external “social movement”; they are not the subjective goals of two militants. They are not projections which “detached historians” impose on events from the outside. The perspectives are the basis on which we participated in the revolutionary project. We do not regard ourselves as “external observers” reporting the activities of others. We were ourselves integral parts of the events we described, and our perspectives transformed the events in which we participated. A militant who rejects the constraints of capitalist daily life was drawn to the university occupations, the street fights, the strike, precisely because the collective project, the project of the others, was also his project. At the same time his perspectives, his project, became part of the collective project. Consequently, when he developed his perspectives, the entire group’s project was developed, modified, transformed, since the collective project only exists in the individuals who engage themselves in it and thus transform it. The project is not something which exists in our heads and which we attribute to “the movement,” nor is it something which exists in the “collective mind of the movement.” Specific individuals engaged themselves in a revolutionary project, and other individuals accepted this project as their own and engaged themselves in it; the project became a collective project only when numerous individuals chose it and engaged themselves in it. As the number of people grew larger, individuals with different kinds of experiences defined new activities and new perspectives, and consequently contributed new possibilities to all the others engaged in the project; they opened up new potential directions for the entire “movement.” Consequently the perspectives of an active participant in the movement were in no way external to the movement.

The second part of this booklet is a critical evaluation of our actions and perspectives; it is an attempt to answer why our actions did not lead to the realization of our perspectives. The point of the critique is to enable us to go further, not to repeat what happened in May-June. What was the nature of the project we engaged in? Why did the escalation of the movement reach a certain point and go no further? When we engaged ourselves in the project initiated by the March 22 Movement in Nanterre, did we engage ourselves in the same manner? If not, what was the difference?

Attempts to realize the revolutionary project after the May-June events made us aware that our engagement in the project of the March 22 Movement had been passive. The initial aim of the Nanterre militants was to change reality, to eliminate social obstacles to the free development of creative activity, and the militants proceeded by eliminating concrete obstacles. However, a large number of people who became the “movement” engaged themselves in a different manner. They did not regard themselves as those who had to move against the concrete obstacles. In this sense they were passive. They “joined a movement,” they became part of a mysterious collectivity which, they thought, had a dynamic of its own. By joining the “movement,” their only engagement was to move with it. As a result, concrete people, who are the only ones who can transform social reality, were not going to change reality through their own concrete activity; they were going to follow a mysterious force — “the mass,” “the movement” — which was going to transform reality. Thus we became dependent on an inexistent power.

R. Gregoire

F. Perlman Kalamazoo February, 1969.

Part I

The Second French Revolution

PARIS, May 18, 1968.

The major factories of France have been occupied by their workers. The universities are occupied by students who are attending continuing assemblies and organizing Committees of Action. The transportation and communications services are paralyzed.

“After a week of continuous fighting, the students of Paris took possession of the Sorbonne,” explains a leaflet of a Students and Workers Committee for Action; “We have decided to make ourselves the masters.”

Large student movements have developed in recent years in Japan, the United States, Italy, West Germany and elsewhere. However, in France the student movement quickly grew into a mass movement which seeks to overthrow the socio-economic structure of state-capitalist society.

The French student movement was transformed into a mass movement during a period of ten days. On May 2 the University of Nanterre was closed to students by its dean; the following day the Sorbonne was closed and police attacked student demonstrators. On the days that followed, students learned to protect themselves from the police by constructing barricades, hurling cobblestones, and smearing their faces with lemon juice to repel police gas. By Monday, May 13, 800,000 people demonstrated in Paris and a general strike was called throughout France; a week later the entire French economy was paralyzed.

The first barricade to resist a police charge was built on May 6. Students used newspaper stands and automobiles to build the barricades, and dug up cobblestones which they threw in exchange for police grenades and gas bombs.

The following day the Latin Quarter of Paris was in a state of siege; fighting continued; a large demonstration at the right-wing newspaper “Le Figaro” protested the newspaper’s attempts to mobilize violence against the students. Red flags appeared at the front lines of immense demonstrations, “The International” was sung, and demonstrators cried “Long Live the (Paris) Commune.”

On May 10, student demonstrators demand an immediate opening of all universities, and the immediate withdrawal of the police from the Latin Quarter. Thousands of students, joined by young workers, occupy the main streets of the Latin Quarter and construct over 60 barricades. On the night of Friday, May 10, city police reinforced by special forces charge on the demonstrators. A large number of demonstrators, as well as policemen, are seriously inured.

Up to this point, French newspapers, including the Communist Party organ L’Humanite, had characterized the student movement as “tiny groups” and “adventurist extremists.” However, after the police repression of May 10, the communist-led union calls for a general strike protesting the brutality of the police and supporting the students. When almost a million people demonstrate in the streets of Paris on May 13, students cry victoriously “We are the tiny groups !”

The very next day, Tuesday May 14, the movement begins to flow beyond the university and into the factories. The aircraft plant Sud-Aviation, manufacturer of the Caravelle, is occupied by its own workers.

On Wednesday, May 15, students and workers take over the Odeon, the French national theater, plant revolutionary red and black flags on the dome, and proclaim the end of a culture limited to the economic elite of the country. The same day numerous plants throughout France are occupied by their workers, including the automobile producer Renault.

Two days after the take-over of the Renault plant, Sorbonne students organize a 6-mile march to demonstrate the solidarity of the students with the workers. At the head of the march is a red flag, and on their way to the plant marchers sing the “International” and call “Down with the Police State,” “Down with Capitalism,” and “This is only the beginning; continue the struggle !”

A red flag is flown at the entrance to the Renault plant, and individual workers standing on the roof of the building cheer the marching students. However, the C.G.T., the communist union which had taken charge of the strike inside the plant, is guardedly hostile to the student demonstrators, and party spokesmen are openly hostile toward students who call on workers to govern and speak for themselves directly, instead of letting the union govern and speak for them.

While radio stations continue to broadcast that students are exclusively concerned with final examinations and workers are exclusively concerned with improved salaries, students organize Committees of Action, and factory occupations continue to spread.

In the auditoriums and lecture halls of University of Paris buildings, a vast experiment in direct democracy is under way. The state, the ministries, the faculty bodies and the former student representative bodies are no longer recognized as legitimate lawmakers. The laws are made by the constituents of “General Assemblies.” Action committees establish contacts with striking workers, and leaflets inform workers of the experience in direct democracy which the students are gaining.

At this writing, the workers continue to be represented and controlled by the unions, and the unions continue to demand reforms from the state and from the factory owners. However, the students’ refusal to recognize the legitimacy of any external control, their refusal to be represented by any body smaller than the general assembly, is continually transmitted to the striking workers by the Students and Workers Action Committees.

F. Perlman

Workers Occupy Their Factories

PARIS, May 20, 1968.

The work-force which has taken power in France’s main industries was characterized, in the past, by unbridgeable conflicts of interest. The conflicting interests were exploited by factory owners, by the police, and by the state. With the occupation of the factories the differences have diminished, but they have not disappeared, and the differences continue to be exploited, in modified form, within the occupied factories.

In large factories like Citroën, the main conflict was between French workers and foreign workers. This article will limit itself to the forms of exploitation, past and present, of the conflict of interests between these two groups.

Foreign workers, mainly from Portugal, Spain, Yugoslavia and North Africa, worked for wages which were, on the average, less than half the size of French workers’ wages. The foreign workers had no choice. First of all the foreigners do not know French, and could not inform themselves either of their human rights or of legal forms. The union did not establish schools for them. Secondly, numerous police bureaucracies made it nearly impossible for foreigners to find jobs once in Paris, and sent them back to their own countries after they had spent the money they had somehow saved in their own countries to come to Paris. In other words, the foreign worker is virtually forced to give up his humanity in order to find a job. Consequently, the foreign worker is not willing to risk losing his job even if his very definition of himself as a human being is in question, since he has largely ceased to define himself as a human being. Systematically dehumanized, these workers were easily manipulated by the owners of France’s big industries: willing to work for low wages, they lowered the overall wage scale; willing to work under any conditions, they were used to break strikes.

From the point of view of the French workers, the foreigners represented a constant threat. An unemployed French worker had to compete with foreigners willing to work for lower wages in worse conditions. Employed workers, privileged in terms of type of job, working conditions and wages, could strike only hesitantly from fear that the factory owners and the state would use the strike as a pretext to replace French by foreign workers.

In order to justify their relative privileges and to rationalize their fear of the foreign workers, French workers developed psychological outlooks which are nearly identical with racism.

The Communist Party union (the C.G.T.) did not make special efforts to equalize the conditions of the foreigners with those of the French workers. This is largely because the work contracts of most of the foreigners were temporary, and the foreign workers could not vote, which means that the foreign workers did not represent a power base for the Communist Party. And some union spokesmen contributed to a further worsening of the foreign workers’ situation by collaborating with the police repression of the foreigners, and even by publicly defining foreigners as the greatest threat to the French working class.

In order to understand the present clash of the Communist union with the movement for direct democracy, it must be noted that a “union” is not the unified community of workers of a factory or a region, and it does not express the will of all the workers. The “union” is in fact a particular group of people who “represent” the workers, who speak for the workers, who make decisions for the workers. This means that a movement of revolutionary democracy which seeks new political forms for the expression of the will of all the workers (for example, through a general assembly of all the workers), threatens the very existence of the present day “union.” The movement for revolutionary democratization, initiated by students, affirms the principle that the union of workers, namely the entire collectivity, is the only body which can speak for, and make decisions for the workers. In this conception the official union (and the French Communist Party) would be reduced to a service organization and a pressure group with no decision-making power. This is the reason the C.G.T. (and the Communist Party as a whole) has consistently maligned, insulted, and tried to put an end to the student movement, and the reason why union functionaries have tried to prevent any form of contact between workers and students. In this struggle with the revolutionary movement, the Communist Party, viewed by American liberals as the epitome of evil, has fought for goals and has employed techniques long familiar to American liberals.

The first workers to be influenced by the student movement for autonomy and direct self-government were workers who had much in common with the students, namely young, educated and highly politicized workers. The factory revolutionaries are neither the old party stalwarts nor the uneducated and superexploited foreign workers, but rather relatively privileged young French workers. It is these young workers who take part in the continuous discussions of direct democracy and the overthrow of capitalism and statism which take place continuously at the University of Paris. And it is these workers who are the first to call for strikes in a factory, and who define the goals of the strike as a substitution of capitalism and statism by a system of direct, socialist, workers’ democracy.

Once the revolutionary stirring in the factory begins, the union functionaries behave like American liberals in a period of crisis. The union functionaries place themselves at the “head” of what they call the “reform” movement, and instead of speaking of a radical transformation of the socio-economic system, they speak of negotiating with the factory owners (who have de facto been expropriated) for higher wages. And in order to constitute themselves the only legitimate spokesmen for the workers, union functionaries employ a liberal-type “consensus politics” which consists of a maximal exploitation of the conflicts between the interests among the varied levels of workers in the factory.

Union functionaries frighten older, conservative French workers with a threat of the unimaginably violent repression which “anarchist adventurism” will lead to. This threat is given force by the fact that, during the growth and radicalization of the movement, the Communist Party has increasingly cooperated with the state power (which still holds the force of the army in reserve), and by the fact that the Communist Party has not been France’s greatest critic of police repression or even of colonial exploitation. In fact, the policies of the Gaullist regime coincided with the policies of the Communist Party more frequently than not.

And union functionaries try to isolate the revolutionary young workers by making one of their rare appeals for the support of foreign workers. The morning of the factory occupation is one of the rare occasions when a great effort is made to translate union leaflets into all the languages of the foreign workers. And in these leaflets, and through the loudspeakers, the union spokesmen, in characteristically liberal fashion, tell the foreign workers that “our” demands are for higher wages and longer vacations. The use of the first person plural is artificial, since except for the words spoken over the loudspeaker, there is very little contact between the union functionaries and the foreign workers, and the one-way speaker system obviously annihilates the very possibility of a two-way discussion which enables the workers to define what “our” demands actually are.

Although students and revolutionary workers are the dynamic forces behind the occupation of the factories, once all the workers have been convinced to move inside the factory and “occupy” it, union officials close the factory gates on the students standing outside, and they isolate the revolutionary workers on the inside. The union functionaries isolate the young workers from the old by painting the young workers as extremist adventurists who will bring the police running into the factory, and from the foreign workers by insinuating that only the union is fighting for the improvement of wages of the foreign workers, and if the union fails, then the foreign workers might lose their hard-won jobs and be forced by the police to return to their countries.

Since the originality and courage of the students is admired by most sectors of the French population, the Communist Party vascillates between mild support and extreme attacks. And in order to prevent the revolutionary and experimental political forms developed by the students from flowing into the working class, the Communist Party is cooperating with the state, collaborating with its “class enemy” (the factory owners), and exploiting differences of interest among the workers which were formerly exploited by the capitalist state and the owners.

Thus after the factory is occupied by all its workers, the union becomes the only spokesman for the workers. In other words, while the workers as a whole have decided to take over their own factories and to expropriate the owners, the workers have not yet developed political forms through which to discuss and execute their subsequent decisions. In this vacuum, the union makes the decisions instead of the workers, and broadcasts its decisions to the workers through loudspeakers. And at the present writing, the Communist union had decided for the workers that the expropriated factories were to be returned to their owners in exchange for higher wages.

F. Perlman

Citroën Action Committee — I

PARIS, May 30, 1968

The Action Committees born throughout France at the end of May transcend half a century of left-wing political activity. Drawing their militants from every left-wing sect and party, from social democrats to anarchists, the Action Committees give new life to goals long forgotten by the socialist movement, they give new content to forms of action which existed in Europe during the French Revolution, and they introduce into the socialist movement altogether new forms of local participation and creative social activity.

This article will trace the development, during the last ten days of May, of a committee (the Workers-Students Action Committee — Citroën) whose primary task was to connect the “student movement” with the workers of the Citroën automobile plants in and around Paris.

On Tuesday, May 21, a strike committee representing the workers of the Citroën plants called for a strike of unlimited duration. The factory owners immediately called for “state powers to take the measures which are indispensible for the assurance of the freedom of labor and free access to the factories for those who want to work.” (Le Monde, May 23, 1968.)

The same day that the owners called for police intervention, students, young workers and teachers who on previous days had fought the police on the streets of Paris formed the “Citroën Action Committee” at the Censier center of the University of Paris. The first aim of the Action Committee was to cooperate with the factory’s strike committee in bringing about an occupation of the factory. The Action Committee’s long-term goal was to help bring about a revolutionary situation which would lead to the destruction of capitalist society and the creation of new social relations.

Action Committee Citroën is composed of young French and foreign workers and intellectuals who, from the committee’s inception, had equal power and equal voice in the formulation of the committees projects and methods. The committee did not begin with, and has not acquired, either a fixed program or a fixed organizational structure. The bond which holds together former militants of radical-left organizations and young people who had never before engaged in political activity, is an uncompromising determination to dismantle the capitalist society against whose police forces they had all fought in the streets.

The committee has no fixed membership; every individual who takes part in a daily meeting or action is a participating member. Anyone who thinks enough people have gathered together to constitute a meeting can preside; there is no permanent president. The order of the discussion is established at the beginning of the meeting; the subjects to be discussed can be proposed by any member. The committee is autonomous in the sense that it does not recognize the legitimacy of any “higher” body or any external “authority.” The committee’s projects are not realizations of pre-determined plans, but are responses to social situations. Thus a project comes to an end as soon as the situation changes, and a new project is conceived, discussed and put into action in response to a new situation.

On the day when the strike committee of the Citroën factories called on the workers to occupy their factories, the Citroën Action Committee launched its first project: to contribute to the factory occupation by talking to workers and by giving out leaflets explaining the strike. One leaflet was a call to worker-student unity in the struggle “to destroy this police system which oppresses all of us... Together we’ll fight, together we’ll win.” (Leaflet “Camarades,” Comité d’Action Travailleurs-Etudiants, Centre universitaire Censier, 3ème etage.)

Another leaflet was the first public announcement of the committee’s uncompromising internationalism. “Hundreds of thousands of foreign workers are imported like any other commodity useful to capitalism, and the government goes so far as to organize clandestine immigration from Portugal, thus unveiling itself as a slave-driver.”

The leaflet continues: “All that has to end !... The foreign workers contribute, through their labor, in the creation of the wealth of French society... It is therefore up to revolutionary workers and students to see to it that the foreign workers acquire the totality of their political and union rights. This is the concrete basis for internationalism.” (“Travailleurs Etrangers,” Comité d’Action, Censier.)

At 6:00 a.m. on the morning of the occupation, when the Citroën workers approached their factories, they were greeted by young workers, students and teachers distributing the orange and green leaflets. On that morning, however, the young Action Committee militants were greeted by two surprises. First of all, they found the functionaries of the C.G.T. (the communist union) calling for the occupation of the factory, and secondly, they were approached by the union functionaries and told to go home.

On previous days, the C.G.T. had opposed the spreading strike wave and the occupation of the factories. Yet on the morning of the occupation, arriving workers who saw the union functionaries reading speeches into their loudspeakers at the factory entrances got the impression that the C.G.T. functionaries were the ones who had initiated the strike.

However, the union, unlike the student movement and unlike the workers who had initiated the strike, was not calling for an expropriation of the factories from their capitalist owners, or for the creation of a new society.

The functionaries of the communist union were calling for higher wages and improved working conditions, within the context of capitalist society. Thus the functionaries strenuously opposed the distribution of the Action Committee’s leaflets, on the ground that their distribution would “disrupt the unity of the workers” and would “create confusion.”

The union functionaries did not spend too much time arguing with the Action Committee militants because the factory occupation did not take place as they had “planned” it.

Sixty percent of the labor force of the Citroën plants are foreign workers, and the vast majority of them are not in the C.G.T. (nor in the smaller unions). When a small number of union members entered the factory in order to occupy it, they were kept out of the workshops by factory policemen placed inside by the owners. The vast majority of the foreign workers did not accompany the union members into the factory; the foreign workers stood outside and watched. The union officials made a great effort to translate the written speeches into some of the languages of the foreign workers. The foreign workers listened to the loudspeakers with indifference and at times even hostility.

At that point the union officials stopped trying to chase away the Action Committee agitators: in fact, the officials decided to use the agitators. Among the militants there were young people who spoke the languages of the foreign workers, and the young people mingled freely with the foreign workers. On the other hand, the union officials, seasoned bureaucrats, were institutionally unable to speak directly to the workers: years of practice had made them experts at reading speeches into loudspeakers, and their loudspeakers were not leading to the desired effects.

Thus the functionaries began to encourage the young agitators to mix with the workers, to explain the factory occupation to them; the functionaries even gave loudspeakers to some of the foreign members of the Action Committee. The result was that, after about two hours of direct communication between the foreign workers and the Action Committee members, most of the foreign workers were inside the factory, participating in its occupation.

Proud of their contribution to the occupation of Citroën, the Action Committee people went to the factory the following morning to talk to the occupying workers. Once again they found themselves unwelcome. A large red flag flew outside the factory gate, but the young militants found the gate closed to them. At the entrances to the factories stood union officials who explained they were under strict orders (from the union’s — and the C.P.’s — central committee) not to let students or other outsiders inside the factory. The young agitators explained that they had played a crucial role in the factory’s occupation, but the expression on the faces of the union functionaries merely hardened.

That evening the Citroën Action Committee had an urgent meeting. The committees members were furious. Until now, they said, they had cooperated with the union; they had avoided an open confrontation. Their cooperative attitude had made no difference to the union officials; the committee militants had merely let themselves be used by the functionaries, and once used up, they were rejected. It was about time to confront the union openly. The committee drafted a new leaflet, one which called on the workers to push past the union and take control of the factory into their own hands.

Due to the presence of union guards at the factory entrances, a relatively small number of workers read the leaflet. However, among these workers there were some who resented the union take-over inside the factory, and some who began attending the meetings of the Citroën Action Committee and participating in the political discussions at Sorbonne and Censier.

At this point the Citroën Committee together with other action committees at Sorbonne and Censier composed a call to action for the workers inside the factories. “The policy of the union leaders is now very clear; unable to oppose the strike, they try to isolate the most militant workers inside the factories, and they let the strike rot so as to be able, later on, to force the workers to accept the agreements which the unions will reach with the owners,” the leaflet explains. However, the leaflet continues, “the political parties and the unions were not at the origin of the strike. The decisions were those of the strikers themselves, whether unionized or not. For this reason, the workers have to regain control over their work organizations. All strikers, unionized or not, unite in a Permanent General Assembly ! In this Assembly, the workers themselves will freely determine their action and their goals.”

This call for the formation of General Assemblies inside the factories represents an appeal to expropriate the capitalist class, namely an appeal for insurrection. With the formation of a General Assembly as the decision-making body inside the factory, the power of the state, the owner as well as the union ceases to be legitimate. In other words, the General Assembly of all the workers in the factory becomes the only legitimate decision-making power; the state is bypassed, the capitalist is expropriated, and the union ceases to be the spokesman for the workers and becomes simply another pressure group inside the General Assembly.

Unable to communicate these ideas to the workers at the factory, the Citroën Action Committee drafted a new project. Since sixty percent of the factory’s workers are foreign, and since the foreign workers live in special housing projects provided for them by the factory owners, the Citroën Committee decided to reach the workers at their homes. The foreign workers were spending their days at their living quarters since they were no longer able to transport themselves to the factories (the transport to the factories is also furnished by the factory owners, and was obviously not being furnished during the strike).

Since this project was conceived during a period when gasoline was scarce in Paris, most of the participants had to hitch-hike to the housing centers. Several related projects were suggested by the Action Committee militants to the foreign workers. First of all the foreign workers were encouraged to help those strikers who were calling for worker-control of the factories, and not merely for wage-raises. And secondly, the foreign workers were encouraged to organize themselves into action committees in order to cope with their own specific problems.

The Action Committee’s project initiated and stimulated various kinds of activities among the foreign workers. In some of the living quarters, courses were organized for foreign workers who know no French. In Nanterre, for example, the occupation committee of the University of Nanterre granted a room to a newly formed Action Committee of Yugoslav workers. The room was to serve for political meetings and French lessons. In another center, workers organized to protect themselves collectively from abuses by the landlord’s (namely Citroën’s) agent at the housing center. In some of the ghettos around Paris, where poor workers had run out of food for their families, trucks were found to transport food from peasants who contributed it at no cost. Contacts were established between the foreign workers and the revolutionary workers inside the factories. Foreign workers were encouraged to join French workers in the occupation of the factories. On each excursion to the living quarters, the Citroën Action Committee members told the foreign workers not to let themselves be used as strike breakers by the factory owners.

In all of the contacts between the Citroën Action Committee and foreign workers, the Committee’s internationalism was made clear. When the committee members called for the expropriation of the owners and the establishment of workers’ power inside the factories, they emphasized that the power over the factory would be shared by all laborers who had worked in it, whether French or foreign. And when some foreign workers said they were only in France for a short time and would soon return home, the Action Committee militants answered that the goal of their movement was not to decapitate merely French capitalism, but to decapitate capitalism as such, and thus that, for the militants, the whole world was home.

F. Perlman

From Student Revolt to General Strike: A Frustrated Revolution

PARIS, June 13, 1968

The explosion which paralyzed France in May 1968 was a frustrated revolution and a clear warning. It represents a frustrated revolution to the students and workers who were rushing, almost blind with joy and enthusiasm, into a new society. But the revolt and the strike are a warning to all ruling classes, a warning to capitalists and bureaucrats, to governments and unions. The frustrated revolutionaries are beginning to take stock of the accomplishments and are attempting to pinpoint the shortcomings. However, the revolutionaries are not the only ones who are taking stock. The forces of repression are also undertaking the task of analysis; they too are taking stock of the accomplishments, or rather the dangers unveiled for them in May 1968. And the revolutionaries will not be the only ones who will prepare for the next crisis; the ruling classes will also prepare, and not only in France. Politicians, bureaucrats and capitalists will define the forms of the May revolution, so as to prevent their reappearance; they will study the sequence of events, so as to prevent a recurrence of May 1968. In order to remain ahead of the forces of reaction, the May revolutionaries will have to provide more than souvenirs; they will have to see the general models behind the specific sequence of events; they will have to analyze the content behind the forms.

The sequence of events which led to a sudden confrontation between French state capitalism and a determined revolutionary movement caught both sides by surprise. Neither side was prepared. But the moment of hesitation was fatal only to the revolutionaries; the ruling class took advantage of the brief pause to extinguish the fire. The fact that only one side gained from the pause is understandable; the revolutionaries would have had to rush into the unexplored, the unknown, whereas the “forces of order” were able to fall back to well known, in fact classical forms of repression.

The revolutionary movement rushed forward at tremendous speed, reached a certain line, and then, suddenly disoriented, confused, perhaps afraid of the unknown, stopped just long enough to allow the enormous French police forces to push the movement back, disperse it and destroy it. Reflection now begins on both sides. Revolutionaries are beginning to define the line which was reached; they are determined to go beyond it “next time.” They had come so close, and yet were pushed back so far ! To many it was clear that steps into the unknown had been taken, that the line had in fact been crossed, that the sea had in fact begun to flow over the dam. To many it was not surprising that the dam should be reinforced, that efforts to stem the tide should be undertaken. What they had not expected, what they only slowly and painfully accepted, was that the sea itself should begin to ebb. They accepted the retreat with pain because they knew, as they watched the waters recede, that as high as the tide had risen, as close as the flood had come, the sea would have to gather much more force, the tide would have to rise far higher, merely to reach the level of the dam once again.

The ruling classes have been warned; one must assume that they will take the necessary precautions. Analysis of the particular cracks in the dam through which the floodwaters rushed will be undertaken by both sides. Such analysis will be a documentation of a particular event, a history of a revolution that failed. On the basis of this documentation, ruling classes will prepare themselves to prevent the recurrence of the same event. This is why revolutionaries cannot use the documentation as a basis for the preparation of a future event: the same cracks will not be found twice in the same dam; they will have been repaired, and the entire dam will have been raised. A future tidal wave will find new cracks in the dam, cracks which are as invisible to insurgents as to defenders of the old order. This is why conspiratorial organizations which plan to rush through a particular crack in the dam are bound to fail: no matter how ingenious their “central committees,” there is no reason to assume that the “directors” or “leaders” of the conspiratorial group will be able to see a crack which the directors of the established order cannot see. Furthermore, the established order is far better armed with tools for investigation than any conspiratorial group.

Historians will describe through which cracks the sea rushed in May 1968. The task of revolutionary theory is to analyze the sea itself; the task of revolutionary action is to create a new tidal wave. If the sea represents the entire working population, and if the tidal wave represents a determination to re-appropriate all the forms of social power which have been alienated to capitalists and bureaucrats at all levels of social life, then new cracks will be found, and if the dam is immaculate it will be swept away in its entirety.

At least one lesson has been learned: what was missing was not a small party which could direct a large mass; what was missing was the consciousness and confidence on the part of the entire working population that they could themselves direct their social activity. If the workers had possessed this consciousness on the day they occupied their factories, they would have proceeded to expropriate their exploiters; in the absence of this consciousness, no party could have ordered the workers to take the factories into their own hands. What was missing was class consciousness in the mass of the working population, not the party discipline of a small group. And class consciousness cannot be created by a closed, secret group but only by a vast, open movement which develops forms of activity which aim openly to subvert the existing social order by eliminating the servant-mentality from the entire working population.

F. Perlman

Citroën Action Committee — II

PARIS, June 24, 1968.

Experience and Perspectives

The Citroën factories employ about 40 thousand workers in Paris and its surroundings. A total of 1500 workers are in unions. Inside the factories, the owners organize repression by means of management agents, a private police and a “free union.” About 60 percent of the workers are foreign, and they are employed on the more onerous assembly lines.

On Friday, May 17, work stoppages took place in the workshops of numerous factories. Such an event had not occurred for decades. On that day several workers went to the Censier Center of the University of Paris and described the police repression, the impotence of the union, and the fighting spirit of the workers. The factory workers, they said, were ready to stop work on the coming Monday if pickets were available and if the information were spread through the factories. Together with the Citroën workers, Censier students prepared a leaflet to be distributed the following day at all the Citroën plants.

The following day, Saturday, the CGT (General Confederation of Labor) distributed a leaflet calling for a strike on Monday and demanding a minimum wage of 600 NF (about US $120) a month. Numerous factories all over France were already on strike. At Citroën the CGT had a very small membership; was the CGT taking the initiative, it was asked, in order to gain control of a movement which up to this point had been out of its control?

The May 20th Strike and the Occupation

Worker-student action committees had been functioning at the Censier Center since May 13. After the first exchange between the Citroën workers and the students, a new committee was formed. The Citroën Action Committee prepared two leaflets for May 20, one addressed to all the workers, the other to the foreign workers at the Citroën factories. The committee’s aim was to inform the workers of the student movement which had challenged the capitalist system and all forms of hierarchy. The leaflets did not challenge the union nor the union demands. On the contrary, the leaflets suggested that the union demands challenged the capitalist system the same way the students had challenged it. The leaflets expressed an awareness of the common enemy of the workers and the students, an enemy who could not be destroyed unless the workers controlled the productive forces. The occupation of the factories was seen as the first step towards workers’ power.

The first leaflet said:

Millions of workers are on strike. They are occupying their workshops. This massive, growing movement goes beyond the established Power’s ability to react. In order to destroy the police system which oppresses all of us, we must fight together. Workers-Students Action Committees have been constituted for this purpose. These committees bring to light all the demands and all the challenges of the ranks of the entire working class. The capitalist regime cannot satisfy these demands.

The second leaflet, printed in four languages, was addressed to foreign workers:

Hundreds of thousands of foreign workers are imported like any other commodity useful to the capitalists, and the government even organises clandestine immigration from Portugal, thus showing itself as a slave driver. These workers are ferociously exploited by the capitalists. They live in terrible conditions in the slums which surround Paris. Since they are underqualified, they are underpaid. Since they only speak their own language, they remain isolated from the rest of the working population and are not understood. Thus isolated, they accept the most inhuman work in the worst workshops. ALL THIS BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO CHOICE: They left their countries because they were starving, because their countries are also under the yoke of capital. Victims in their own countries, they are victims here too. All that has to end. Because they are not ENEMIES OF THE FRENCH PROLETARIAT: ON THE CONTRARY, THEY ARE THE SUREST ALLIES. If they are not moving yet, it is because they are aware of the precariousness of their situation. Since they have no rights, the smallest act can lead to their expulsion, which means a return to hunger (and to jail). Through their labor, the foreign workers participate in the creation of the wealth of French society. They must have the same rights as all others. Thus it is up to revolutionary workers and students to see to it that the foreign workers ENJOY THE TOTALITY OF THEIR POLITICAL AND UNION RIGHTS. This is the concrete beginning of internationalism. The foreign workers, who make up an integral part of the working class in France, together with their French comrades, will massively join the radical struggle to destroy capitalism and to create a CLASSLESS SOCIETY such as has NEVER yet been seen.

On May 20, students and workers of the Citroën Committee distributed leaflets and talked to workers at all the entrances to the Citroën factories. The first contacts with delegates of the CGT were negative. The delegates tried to prevent the distribution of the leaflets. The pretext was that the variety of leaflets would destroy the unity of the workers and would create confusion. “It would be better,” the delegates said, “if the elements external to the factory went away: they give a provocative pretext to the management.”

However, a significant number of the Communist Party and CGT functionaries who had come to give a strong hand to the CGT were external to the factory, namely they did not work in any of the Citroën plants. The CGT officials gave out leaflets which demanded, among other things, a minimum wage of 1,000 NF ($200), namely nearly twice as much as they had sought two days earlier.

In the street, the union delegates communicated with workers through loudspeakers. The students of the Citroën committee, on the other hand, mixed freely with the French and foreign workers. Since the foreign workers were not obeying the CGT calls to occupy the factory, the union officials decided to use the students. Instead of trying to chase away the young “agitators,” the officials encouraged the action committee militants to continue to make personal contact with the foreign workers. The result of two hours of direct communication was that the majority of the foreign workers were inside the factory, actively participating in its occupation.

The Gates Are Shut By The CGT

On May 21, the second day of the occupation, the action committee militants found all the gates of the factory closed, and union delegates defended the entrances against “provocateurs.” Thus the young militants were cut off from the contacts they had had before the occupation. Young workers inside the factory protested vigorously against the threats which were hurled at the “elements external to the factory.” The CGT had become the new Boss. The union did all it could to prevent workers from becoming aware of the fact that the occupation of the factory was a first step toward the expropriation of the owners. To struggle against this unexpected new force, the action committee addressed itself to the workers in a new leaflet:

Workers: You have occupied your factories. You are no longer controlled by the State or by the ex-owners. Do not allow new masters to control you. All of you and each of you has the right to speak. DON’T LET THE LOUDSPEAKERS SPEAK FOR YOU. If those behind the loudspeakers propose a motion, all other workers, French and foreign, must have the same right to propose other motions. You, THE WORKERS, have the power. You have the power to decide what to produce, how much end for whom. You, THE WORKERS, control your factories. Don’t let anyone take the control away from you. If some people limit your contacts with the outside, if some people do not allow you to learn about the profound democratization taking place in France, then these people are not trying to represent you, but to control you. The occupied factories have to be opened up to all comrades, workers as well as students, in order to enable them to make decisions together. Workers and students have the same objectives. Despite the government, the universities are already open to all. If the loudspeakers decide instead of you, if the loudspeakers broadcast the decisions ‘we’ have made, then the men behind the loudspeakers are not working with you; they’re manipulating you.

A second leaflet, prepared by several action committees, was also distributed. This leaflet called for the formation of general assemblies of all the workers which would bypass the union and prevent any small group from speaking in the name of the workers and from negotiating in the name of the working class:

... The political and union officials were not the originators of the strike. The decisions were made, and must continue to be made, by the strikers themselves, whether they are unionized or not ...

In order to circumvent the CGT and to continue its work of liaison and information, the Citroën committee launched three new projects: actions with foreign workers in the slums and the dormitories; contacts with strikers at the entrances of the factories; liaison between the politicized workers at the different Citroën factories.

Contacts At The Factory

At the Balard and Nanterre factories, daily meetings took place between the workers and the action committee. The subject of the meetings was a basic political discussion on the nature of the student movement and its relation to the strike. The factory workers became increasingly conscious that the strike had become transformed more and more into a traditional union strike. They deplored the demobilization and the depolitization of the pickets, which had been accompanied by a massive desertion. At the Balard factory, at night, for example, a small number of young people defended the factory. All the young workers’ attempts to organize were sabotaged by the union bureaucracy, either in the form of direct opposition or in the form of seeming to forget problems.

The nonunionized young workers attempted to break out of their isolation. They contacted militants of the CFDT (French Democratic Confederation of Labor) who seemed to favor student-worker contacts, but the CFDT’s intentions were political rather than revolutionary; the minority union tried to enlist new members, and the popularity of the student movement among the workers made it opportune for the minority union to associate with the student movement. Secondly, the young workers sought contacts with militants who wanted to work within the union by organizing the rank and file against the officials. Thirdly, the young workers contacted the Citroën Action Committee at Censier, and after the last week in May they worked increasingly with the action committee. At the end of May, the young workers no longer felt either sure of themselves or supported by their comrades within the factory. Police forces had taken repressive steps against strikers in other sectors, and the young workers felt isolated and looked for outside support.

In order to respond to this need for rank-and-file organization, the Citroën Committee proposed a series of actions. Peasants were sending food from the countryside to Sorbonne and Censier; contacts had been established between peasants, action committees and workers. The Citroën Committee informed the workers about the possibilities to obtain food and to contact the peasants directly. The problem was to find means of transport, namely at least one Citroën truck which would transport workers and students to the countryside. This suggestion was favorably received by the workers, and its organizational potential was profoundly grasped. But the workers did not want to take on themselves the responsibility of taking a truck which belonged to the owners, and so they looked for union support. The union representatives sent the workers to the union’s central committee at Balard. The central committee was willing to contact the peasants, but only on condition that the whole action was centralized, that it was all directed by the union’s central committee; these conditions would have sabotaged all attempts at rank-and-file organization.

The second form of action proposed by the Citroën Committee was to establish contacts among the workers of different enterprises. However, such contacts could not take place inside the factory since the factory had become an impregnable bastion guarded by the union bureaucracy, which opposed any rank-and-file contacts among the workers. Thus the problem was to fight for free expression and for the possibility of worker exchanges.

The third form of action proposed by the action committee was to contact the foreign workers at their dormitories. There were two aspects to these contacts: they were a means to radicalize the struggle by including foreign comrades in the strike pickets, and the contacts were a means to do away with the exhausting struggle of the strikers against strike-breakers, who were generally foreign workers manipulated by the management of the factory; the foreign workers were manipulable because they were generally unpoliticized, uninformed; on several occasions the management had called them together to vote to return to work.

The Foreign Workers’ Dormitories

The dormitories for foreign workers enable the owners to exploit the workers twice, namely during the day and again at night. The living quarters are managed by Citroën agents who do not let anyone enter, even members of the workers’ families. For example, at the dormitory at Viliers-le-Bel, thirty miles out of Paris, the workers live in forty-eight apartments with fourteen people in each two-or-three-room apartment. The assignment of workers to apartments is done arbitrarily. Thus Yugoslavs are housed together with Spanish and Portuguese workers. The workers are rarely able to communicate with each other. They work in different shifts and in different workshops. The workers pay 150 NF ($30) per month. From this single dormitory, the factory clears 50,000 NF ($10,000) per month.

Members of the Citroën Committee who spoke the languages of the workers established contacts at the dormitories in order to inform the foreign workers about the action committees, and to establish connections between the strikers and foreign workers. The aim of the committee was to enable the workers to organize themselves into action committees in order to cope with their specific problems: transport to the factories, food, the struggle against the repressive conditions inside the factory, and contacts with French comrades. French language courses were organized in several centers after the workers organized themselves into committees and found classrooms in nearby student-occupied universities or in local culture centers. In the slum and ghetto areas, food supplied by peasants and distributed by action committees was taken to poor workers and their families. On all occasions, the foreign workers were informed of the different forms used by the employers to break the strike by using foreign workers as strike-breakers. Numerous foreign workers were put in contact with strikers, and they took an active part in the occupation of the factory.

The aim of all these actions was to enable, and encourage, rank-and-file organization among the workers.

A small number of workers, isolated in the factory, posed the problem of defending the factory against all forms of aggression. The union had given the order to abandon the factory “in a dignified manner” in case anyone attacked; this order was explained in terms of the “relation of forces.” The Citroën Action Committee placed numerous “pickets” outside the factory, and on one occasion the “pickets” defended the factory from an attack by strikebreakers and toughs hired by the owners to chase out the occupying strikers.

The Rank and File Committees

An increasing number of workers went to the Censier Center to seek contacts with the action committees, and the workers transformed the character of the Citroën Committee and they opened perspectives for organization and action by the workers themselves inside the factory. Meetings between the Citroën Committee with the Inter-Enterprise Committee and with workers from the Rhône Poulenc chemical plant opened further perspectives.

Rhône Poulenc workers familiarized the workers of other enterprises with the organization of rank-and-file committees which had taken place very successfully inside their factory. The echo was immediate. Citroën workers recognized that the rank-and-file organizations, where the decision-making power over the running of the strike remained with the workers themselves, was the solution to the problems they had faced during the strike. However the period in which the Citroën workers became familiar with the Rhone Poulenc rank-and-file committees no longer permitted the launching of such an organizational project inside Citroën, since this was one of the last factories still on strike, and since the strike had become a traditional union strike.

The Rhone Poulenc workers, who called on comrades in other plants to follow their example, also pointed out that real workers’ power could not be realized unless rank-and-file organization was extended to other parts of the capitalist world. And during the time when the Citroën workers were learning of the experiences of the chemicals workers, some members of the Citroën Committee went to Turin to establish contacts with the Worker-Student League grouped around Fiat, the largest enterprise in Europe. In Turin, information was exchanged on the struggles of the workers in Italy, on the similarity of the obstacles posed by the unions in both countries, and on the significance of the action committees. The organization of rank-and-file committees and the problem of worker control opened up perspectives for the comrades in Turin. As a basis for further contacts, the two groups established a regular exchange of information (leaflets, journals and letters), exchanges of lists of demands, and direct contacts by workers and students. Italian comrades arrived in Paris from Milan in order to establish similar contacts with the Citroën Committee, and some members of the Citroën Committee itself returned to other countries (such as England and the United States) in order to generalize the international contacts.

The Strike for Material Demands

On Saturday, June 22, after the CGT reached an agreement with the Citroën management, workers in the Citroën Committee who opposed the return to work sought contact with other organized forces in order to prepare an action for the following Monday. The workers prepared a leaflet which explained that, in terms of the union’s material demands, nothing had been received by the workers:

...While the CGT union considers itself satisfied with its agreement with the managers, a large majority of the workers, aware that the crumbs received do not correspond to their five weeks of struggle nor to the strike which began as a general strike, are ready to continue this struggle ...

On Monday morning, three different leaflets opposed to the return to work were distributed. The CGT officials were not able to find workers willing to distribute their leaflets. The union’s forces had passed to the opposition; union delegates and officials were booed during the meeting before the vote. Workers expressed themselves physically to allow speeches by workers opposed to the return to work. During the meeting, a union representative who could not speak because of the booing, demanded to be heard in the name of democracy, and then denounced the workers who booed him as “those who want to wave the red flag of the working class higher than the CGT.”

Perspectives

Dissatisfaction with respect to the material demands, and disillusionment with the union, caused the workers to analyze in depth a problem which had been touched earlier by the Citroën Committee, namely the problem of whether militant action should take place inside the union or outside it. A large number of unorganized workers were trying to concentrate their force by forging new forms of organization. Once the problem of the union was solved, the Citroën Committee would be able to develop and enlarge the perspectives for action which could be drawn from its experience.

For the Citroën workers, the Citroën Action Committee is an organ for liaison and information. Within the context of the committee, the workers are able to coordinate their efforts to organize rank-and-file committees in the factory’s workshops. At the weekly meetings with another action committee, the Inter-Enterprise Committee, Citroën workers learn that similar organizational efforts are taking place in other enterprises, and through their contacts abroad they learn about the efforts of automobile workers in other countries. The workers are aware that the revolutionary significance of the rank-and-file committees can only find expression in another period of crisis. The rank-and-file committees are seen as a basis for the massive occupation of the factories, accompanied by an awareness on the part of the workers that they are the only legitimate power inside the plants (namely that no special group can speak or negotiate for the mass of the workers). The massive occupation, accompanied by the workers’ consciousness of their power as a class, is the condition for the workers to begin appropriating, namely using, the instruments of production as an overt manifestation of their power. The act of overt appropriation of the means of production by the workers will have to be accompanied by organized armed defense of the factories, since the capitalist class will try to regain the factories with its police and with what remains of its army. At this point, in order to abolish the capitalist system and to avoid being crushed by foreign armies, the workers will have to extend their struggle to the principal centers of the world capitalist system. Only at that point would complete worker control over the material conditions of life be a reality, and at that point the building of a society without commodities, without exchange and without classes could begin.

by Members of the Citroën Action Committee (Roger Gregoire and Fredy Perlman)

Liberated Censier: A Revolutionary Base

PARIS, July, 1968 KALAMAZOO (Michigan), August, 1968

Introduction

The revolutionary movement which showed its head in France in May and June, 1968, has been maligned and misunderstood by the capitalist press, the Communist Party press, and the presses of “revolutionary” grouplets.

According to the liberal capitalist press, the student revolt and general strike can be understood in terms of the “peculiar characteristics” of Gaullist France. According to the Communist Party press, the university occupations and the general strike represent a reform movement, with students fighting for a “modern university” and workers for the satisfaction of material demands, both groups being disrupted by a “handful of madmen and adventurers.” According to some “revolutionary” grouplets, the movement in France is either an example of the efficacy of “revolutionary vanguards” and “leaders,” or else it is an example of the lack of vanguards and leaders. There is also an eclectic version: the “rise” of the movement illustrates the efficacy of the revolutionary vanguards, and its “decline” illustrates what happens to a movement which has no vanguard.

These “explanations” do not explain why anything happened in France in May, 1968. Student revolts and factory occupations are not among the “characteristics” of French society, nor did “peculiar” conditions for such behavior appear in France precisely in May, 1968. The “normal” behavior of students and workers in capitalist society, the desire of students for more privileges and of workers for more goods, does not explain why students and workers ceased acting “normally” and started struggling to destroy the system of privilege.

The explosion of May-June 1968 is a sudden break with the regularities of French society, and it cannot be explained in terms of those regularities. The social conditions, the consciousness of students and workers, the strategies of “revolutionary” sects, had all existed before May, 1968, and had not given rise to a student revolt, a general strike, or a mass movement determined to destroy capitalism. Something new appeared in May, an element which was not regular but unique, an element which transformed the “normal” consciousness of students and workers, an element which represented a radical break with what was known before May, 1968.

The new element, the spark which set off the explosion, was “a handful of madmen” who did not consider themselves either a revolutionary party or a vanguard. The story of the student movement which began in Nanterre with a demonstration to end the war in Vietnam has been told elsewhere. The actions of this student movement were “exemplary actions”; they set off a process of continuous escalation, each step involving a larger sector of the population.

One of the steps in this process of escalation was the occupation of Censier, annex of the University of Paris Faculty of Letters (Sorbonne). Not as publicised as the actions or personalities of the Nanterre student movement, the activity which developed at Censier during the last two weeks in May parallels and supplements that of the March 22 Movement. This essay will try to describe the steps in the process of escalation as they were experienced and interpreted by the occupants of Censier.

What happened in Censier cannot be explained in terms of French everyday life. The occupants of Censier suddenly cease to be unconscious, passive objects shaped by particular combinations of social forces; they become conscious, active subjects who begin to shape their own social activity.

The occupants of Censier aim at the destruction of capitalist social relations, but they do not define themselves as the historical subject who will overthrow capitalism. Their actions, like those of the March 22 Movement, are exemplary actions. Their task is to communicate the example to a larger subject: the workers. To make the example overflow from the university to the working population, the Censier occupants create a new social form: worker-student action committees.

Each action is designed to go beyond itself. The aim of the occupants of Censier is not to create a self-governing commune in that building, but to set off the occupation of factories. The occupation of Censier is a break with continuity; the occupants’ aim is to create other breaks.

The occupants do not proceed on the basis of what is “normal,” but on the basis of what is possible. Radical breaks with everyday life are not normal, but they are possible. A movement with the slogan “anything is possible” proceeds on the basis of the potential, not the usual.

The task of these revolutionaries is not to define the conditions which make revolution impossible, but to create the conditions which make revolution possible. This orientation is probably the most radical break of March 22 and Censier with the traditional Western Left, which begins by pointing to the “objective conditions” (for example, the apathy, self-interest and dependence of workers) which make revolution impossible. The French movement begins by pushing beyond the “objective limits,” an orientation which it shares with a handful of Cuban revolutionaries and Vietnamese revolutionaries who began struggling at a time when any analysis of “objective conditions” would have led to a prediction of certain defeat. The French revolutionaries broke out of the psychology of defeat, the outlook of the loser, and began struggling. Their struggle, like that of the Cubans and the Vietnamese, was exemplary: the example overflowed to sectors of the population who are far stronger and more numerous than the initial revolutionaries.

In the spirit of March 22 and Censier, this essay will not deal with the “objective conditions” of French society, but with the exemplary actions which ruptured those conditions; it will not deal with the apathy, self-interest and dependence which make the self-organization of workers and students impossible, but with the role of Censier in creating the radical break which made their self-organization possible; it will not deal with the conditions which prevent communication and cooperation among workers and students, but with the role of Censier in making such communication and cooperation possible. The essay will not try to explain why the Censier movement did not get further, but why it got as far as it did.

Exemplary Character of the University Occupation

To understand why university students in an industrially developed society are “enraged,” it is essential to understand that the students are not enraged about the courses, the professors, the tests, but about the fact that the “education” prepares them for a certain type of social activity: it is this activity they reject. “We refuse to be scholars cut off from social reality. We refuse to be used for the profit of directors. We want to do away with the separation between the work of executing and the work of thinking and organizing.” By rejecting the roles for which the education forms them, the students reject the society in which these roles are to be performed. “We reject this society of repression” in which “explicitly or implicitly, the University is universal only for the organization of repression.” From this perspective, a teacher is an apologist for the existing order, and a trainer of servants for the capitalist system; an engineer or technician is a servant who is super-trained to perform highly specialized tasks for his master; a manager is an agent of exploitation whose institutional position gives him the power to think and decide for others. “In the present system, some work and others study. And we’ve got a division of social labor, even an intelligent one. But we can imagine a different system...” This division and sub-division of social labor, perhaps necessary at an earlier stage of economic development, is no longer accepted. And if growing specialization is associated with the birth and “progress” of capitalist society (as was argued, for example, by Adam Smith), then the rejection of specialization by future specialists marks the death of capitalist society.

Students have discovered that the division of social tasks among specialized groups is at the root of alienation and exploitation. The alienation of political power by all members of society, and the appropriation of society’s political power (through election, inheritance or conquest) by a specialized ruling class, is the basis for the division of society into rulers and ruled. The alienation (sale) of productive labor by producers, and the appropriation (purchase) of the labor and its products by owners of means of production (capitalists), is the basis for the division of society into bosses and workers, managers and employees, exploiters and exploited. The alienation of reflective activity by most members of society and its appropriation by a specialized corps of “intellect workers” is the basis for the division of society into thinkers and doers, students and workers. The alienation of creative activity by most people, and its appropriation by “artists,” divides society into actors and audience, creators and spectators. The specialized “professions” and “disciplines” represent the same pattern: a particular economic task or social activity is relegated to a particular individual who does nothing else, and the rest of the community is excluded from thinking about, deciding or participating in the performance of a task which affects the entire community.

By refusing to be formed into a factor or a function in a bureaucratically organized system (even if it is an intelligently organized system), the student is not denying the social necessity of the tasks and functions. He is asserting his will to take part in all the activities that affect him, and he is denying anyone’s right to rule him, decide for him, think for him, or act for him. By struggling to destroy the institutions which obstruct his participation in the conscious creation of his social-economic environment, the student presents himself as an example for all men who are ruled, decided for, thought for, and acted for. His exemplary struggle is symbolized by a black flag in one hand and a red flag in the other; it is communicated by a call to all the alienated and the exploited to destroy the system of domination, repression, alienation and exploitation.

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“On Saturday, May 11, at 6 in the evening, militants of the May 3 Action Committees occupy the annex to the Faculty of Letters, the Censier Center. All night long and on the days that follow, the atmosphere is similar to that of the “night of the barricades,” not in terms of violence, but in terms of the self-organization, the initiative, the discussion.” The university ceases to be a place for the “transmission of a cultural heritage,” a place for training managers, experts and trainers, a place for brainwashing brainwashers.

The capitalist university comes to an end. The ex-university, or rather the building, becomes a place for collective expression. The first step of this transformation is the physical occupation of the building. The second step is discussion, the expression of ideas, information, projects, the creative self-expression of the occupants. “In the large auditoriums the discussion is continuous. Students participate, and also professors, assistants, people from the neighborhood, high schoolers, young workers.” Expression is contagious. People who have never expressed ideas before, who have never spoken in front of professors and students, become confident in their ability. It is the example of others speaking, analyzing, expressing ideas, suggesting projects, which gives people confidence in their own ability. “The food service,” for example, “is represented at the meetings by a young comrade: he’s thirteen, maybe fourteen. He organizes, discusses, takes part in the auditoriums. He was behind the barricades. His action and his behavior are the only answer to the drivel about high-schoolers being irresponsible brats.”

What begins at this point is a process of collective learning; the “university,” perhaps for the first time, becomes a place for learning. People do not only learn the information, the ideas, the projects of others; they also learn from the example of others that they have specific information to contribute, that they are able to express ideas, that they can initiate projects. There are no longer specialists or experts; the division between thinkers and doers, between students and workers, breaks down. At this point all are students. When an expert, a professor of law, tells the occupants that the occupation of a university is illegal, a student tells him that it is no longer legal for an expert to define what is illegal, that the days when a legal expert defines what people can and cannot do are over. The professor can either stay and join the process of collective learning, or else he can leave and join the police to re-impose his legality.

Within the occupied university, expression becomes action; the awareness of one’s ability to think, to initiate, to decide, is in fact an awareness of one’s ability to act. The occupants of the university become conscious of their collective power: “we’ve decided to make ourselves the masters.” The occupants no longer follow orders, they no longer obey, they no longer serve. They express themselves in a general assembly, and the decisions of the assembly are the expression of the will of all its members. No other decisions are valid; no other authority is recognized. “The students and workers who fought on the barricades will not allow any force whatever to stop them from expressing themselves and from acting against the capitalist university, against the society dominated by the bourgeoisie.” This awareness of the ability to express oneself, this consciousness of collective power, is itself an act of de-alienation: “You can no longer sleep quietly once you’ve suddenly opened your eyes.” People are no longer the playthings of external forces; they’re no longer objects; they’ve suddenly become conscious subjects. And once their eyes are open, people are not about to close them again: their passivity and dependence are negated, annihilated, and nothing but a force which breaks their will can reimpose the passivity and dependence.

The general assembly does not only reject former masters, former authority; it also refuses to create new masters, new authority. The occupants conscious of their power refuse to alienate that power to any force whatever, whether it is externally imposed or created by the general assembly itself. No external force, neither the university administration nor the state, can make decisions for the occupants of the university, and no internally created force can speak, decide, negotiate, or act for the general assembly. There are neither leaders nor representatives. No special group, neither union functionaries, nor a “coordinating committee,” nor a “revolutionary party,” has the power to negotiate for the university occupants, to speak for them, to sell them out. And there’s nothing to negotiate about: the occupants have taken over; they speak for themselves, make their own decisions, and run their own activities. The State and the capitalist press try to set up leaders, spokesmen, representatives with whom to negotiate the evacuation of the university; but none of the “leaders” are accepted: their usurped power is illegitimate; they speak for no one. In the face of this appearance of direct democracy, of grass-roots control (the Capitalist and Communist press call it “anarchy and chaos”), the State has only one resort; physical violence.

Consciousness of collective power is the first step toward the appropriation of social power (but only the first step, as will be shown below. Conscious of their collective power, the university occupants, workers and students, begin to appropriate the power to decide, they begin to learn to run their own social activities. The process of political de-alienation begins; the university is de-institutionalized; the building is transformed into a place which is run by its occupants. There are no “specialists” or “responsibles.” The community is collectively responsible for what takes place, and for what doesn’t take place, within the occupied building. Formerly specialized social activities are integrated into the lives of all members of the community. Social tasks are no longer performed either because of direct coercion or because of the indirect coercion of the market (i.e. the threat of poverty and starvation). As a result, some social activities, like hair dressing and manicuring, are no longer performed at all. Other tasks, like cooking, sweeping the rooms, cleaning the toilets — tasks performed by people who have no other choice in a coercive system — are left undone for several days. The occupation shows signs of degeneration: the food is bad, the rooms are filthy, the toilets are unusable. These activities become the order of the day of the general assembly: everyone is interested in their efficient performance, and no one is institutionally coerced to perform these tasks. The general assembly is responsible for their performance, which means everyone is responsible. Committees of volunteers are formed. A Kitchen Committee improves the quality of the meals; the food is free: it is provided by neighborhood committees and by peasants. A service of order charges itself with maintaining clean toilets stocked with toilet-paper. Each action committee sweeps its own room. The tasks are performed by professors, students and workers. At this point all of the occupants of Censier are workers. There are no longer upper and lower class jobs; there are no longer intellectual and manual tasks, qualified labor and unqualified labor; there are only socially necessary activities.

An activity which is considered necessary by a handful of occupants becomes the basis for the formation of an action committee. Each person is a thinker, an initiator, an organizer, a worker. Comrades are being seriously injured by cops in the street fights: a floor of Censier is transformed into a hospital; doctors and medical students care for the patients; others without medical experience help, cooperate and learn. A large number of comrades have babies and as a result cannot take part in activities which interest them: the comrades unite to form a nursery. The action committees need to print leaflets, announcements, reports: mimeograph machines and paper are found, and a free printing service is organized. Townspeople — observers and potential participants — stream into Censier constantly and are unable to find their way around the complex social system which has started to develop within the building: an information window is maintained at the entrance and information offices are maintained on each floor to orient the visitors. Many militants live far from Censier: a dormitory is organized.

Censier, formerly a capitalist university, is transformed into a complex system of self-organized activities and social relations. However, Censier is not a self-sufficient Commune removed from the rest of society. The police are on the order of the day of every general assembly. The occupants of Censier are acutely aware that their self-organized social activities are threatened so long as the State and its repressive apparatus are not destroyed. And they know that their own force, or even the force of all students and some workers, is not sufficient to destroy the State’s potential for violence.

The only force which can put the Censier occupants back to sleep is a force which is physically strong enough to break their will: the police and the national army still represent such a force.

The means of violence produced by a highly developed industry are still controlled by the capitalist State. And the Censier occupants are aware that the power of the State will not be broken until control over these industrial activities passes to the producers: they “are convinced that the struggle cannot be concluded without the massive participation of the workers.” The armed power of the State, the power which negates and threatens to annihilate the power of collective creation and self-organization manifested in Censier, can only be destroyed by the armed power of society. But before the population can be armed, before the workers can take control of the means of production, they must become aware of their ability to do so, they must become conscious of their collective power. And this consciousness of collective power is precisely what the students and workers acquired after they occupied Censier and transformed it into a place for collective expression. Consequently, the occupation of Censier is an exemplary action, and the central task of the militants in Censier becomes to communicate the example. All the self-organized activities revolve around this central task. Former classrooms become workshops for newly formed action committees; in every room projects are suggested, discussed, and launched; groups of militants rush out with a project, and others return to initiate a new one.

The problem is to communicate, to spread consciousness of social power beyond the university. Everyone who has attended the general assemblies and participated in committee discussions knows what has to be done. Every action committee militant knows that the self-confidence in his own ability, the consciousness of his power, could not develop so long as others thought, decided and acted for him. Every militant knows that his action committee is able to initiate and carry out its projects only because it is a committee of conscious subjects, and not a committee of followers waiting for orders from their “leaders” or their “central committee.”

Censier exists as a place and as an example. Workers, students, professors, townspeople come to the place to learn, to express themselves, to become conscious of themselves as subjects, and they prepare to communicate the example to other sections of the population and to other parts of the world. Foreign students organize a general assembly to “join the struggle of their French comrades and give them their unconditional support.” Realizing that “the struggle of their French comrades is only an aspect of the international struggle against capitalist society and against imperialism,” the foreign students prepare to spread the example abroad. East European students express their solidarity and send the news to their comrades at home. A U.S. group forms an Action Committee of the American Left, and they “plan to establish a news link-up with the U.S.A.”

Most important of all, Censier’s main contribution to the revolutionary movement, the worker-student action committees, are formed. “Workers” ... “To destroy this repressive system which oppresses all of us, we must fight together. Some worker-student action committees have been created for this purpose.” The formation of the worker-student committees coincides with the outbreak of a wildcat strike: “In the style of the student demonstrators, the workers of Sud-Aviation have occupied the factory at Nantes.”

Revolutionary Consciousness of Social Power

The workers of a highly industrialized capitalist society suddenly cease acting “normally”: they stop working, and they do not go out on an “ordinary” strike for material demands. They occupy their factories, and they begin to talk about expropriation.

To understand this radical break with the usual behavior of workers, it is necessary to understand that this unusual behavior is an ever-present potentiality in capitalist society. The existence of this potentiality cannot be understood in terms of the material conditions of the workers, but only in terms of the structure of social relations in capitalist society.

The basic fact of life in capitalist society is the alienation of creative power. The alienated power of society is appropriated by a class. Concentrated in institutions — Capital, State, Police and Military — the power alienated by society becomes the power of the dominant class to control and oppress society. To the creators of the power, the institutions which control and oppress them seem like external forces, like forces of nature, permanent and immutable.

The alienation of creative power and the appropriation of that power takes place through the act of exchange.

The producer sells his labor; the capitalist buys the labor. In exchange for his labor the producer receives wages, namely money with which to buy consumer goods. The purchase and sale of labor in capitalist society reduces labor to a thing, a commodity, something which can be bought and sold. Once the labor is sold to the capitalist, the products of the labor “belong” to the capitalist, they are his “property.” These products of labor include the means of production with which goods are produced, the consumer goods for which the producer sells his labor, and the weapons with which the capitalist’s “property” is protected from its producers. The alienated products of labor then take on a life of their own. The means of production no longer appear as products of labor but as Capital, as objects and instruments which emanate from the capitalist, as the “property” of the capitalist. The c