The Action-Image of Society on Cultural Politicization

Alfred Willener, Alfred Willener

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136446924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Prestazione di assistenza sanitaria

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1970 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

Part I
The Movement as seen by its Participants

Chapter 1
The Student in Action

Activists' Accounts

A great many works have already been published that describe, analyse, or interpret the 'events of May', but much remains that is undocumented or unexplained. The brief accounts that follow are, of course, no more than fragments, but they may serve to illustrate aspects of our interpretation that might otherwise suffer from over-abstraction. Their purpose will be to present at the outset a number of the problems examined in later chapters, within the unity of an extended and very 'open' interview. It is, of course, only one example, though one that we consider to be of exceptional quality. In any case, there is no reason why one should not offer an isolated illustration, provided it is relevant; our aim is not, we hasten to add, to produce an overall account of the 'Mouvement de Mai', but to elucidate a new current of practice and ideas. In order to emphasize the diversity of interpretation, and, naturally enough, of insight found among the participants, we shall complement this material with extracts from other interviews. While it is true that a double juncture took place - Marxism/anarchism, politics/culture - all kinds of subtle differences were to be found, of course, and for many individuals one element of the juncture, or one of the junctures, was of particular importance; in addition, there were those who placed themselves completely outside these junctures.

The Interview with ND

The woman interviewed is twenty-five years old, married, and a third-year student of philosophy and sociology at the Sorbonne. Though not a member of any political party, she has had a certain amount of political experience, mainly in relation to Algeria and Vietnam. She reads newspapers in general, rather than any particular one, and is fairly familiar with the works of Proudhon, Marx, Saint-Simon, Hegel, Fourier, etc. Until May 1968, she paid little attention to political groups within the university, having been put off by the way in which they operated.

She took an active part in the May Movement, and was able, because of her training, to describe it as an observer. Only those passages dealing with the chronological sequence of events have been cut or condensed. The interview took place on 25 May, the day on which negotiations opened in the Rue de Grenelle between the government, the employers' representatives, and the unions, and the day after the important demonstration at the Gare de Lyon that was to end in another night of barricades in Paris and the provinces.¹

How do you think it all began?

It began quite suddenly. Three weeks ago, no one in the Sorbonne dreamt that such a thing could happen. On the Friday, students were arrested inside the Sorbonne.² Actually, I was at a friend's place, revising for my exams. We didn't even put the radio on - it never occurred to us that anything important might happen that would take us away from our work. The events at Nanterre seemed to us to be a really local phenomenon . . . That evening, someone came to tell us what was happening. I dashed over to the Quarter and saw rows of police, guns at the ready, guarding the Sorbonne. I said to myself: 'This means war!' Things came to a head quite suddenly. Right from the beginning there was a terrible 'confrontation of forces'. It was no longer a matter of a flic walking up and down saying 'Move on!', but the police massed together, guns at the ready, wearing crash-helmets ...

Was it then that you felt that 'it could happen'?

I felt that something very important had happened. I've always been fairly interested in politics and wanted a change in a society that is absurd for lots of reasons. But in all our talks together, among our friends, no one seemed to know how to get people out onto the streets so that it could happen.

And at that point, you began to feel that they were on the streets . . .

No, not that night. I said to myself: 'Look! What's happening?' What I felt was that the Gaullist regime was a police regime, which I already knew anyway. Then I went to the demonstration that was organized on the Monday as a protest against the arrests.¹ We marched for hours. People were in the streets, watching us. At that time it was all very much a student affair, but the content of the slogans caused a good deal of surprise. I didn't get the impression that there'd been much mobilization of people, even of the students - I'd say especially of the students, since they were the people I knew best. It seemed much less emotive. I found a good many students there I wouldn't have thought would have been interested.

How do you explain that things developed the way they did?

There were a lot of people who had been working entirely on one problem, Vietnam, for example, or the Third World ... It had been quite useful; it made people more aware of world problems, I think. They carried their reasoning to its logical conclusion, though their thought was still coloured by those problems - those of planetary reorganization.

But how did it spread, at that particular time and place?

I don't think this kind of preparation applied to a great many people. What I mean is that it enabled a certain number of people to remain less confined within the problem of a small political organization. It served as a kind of first experience of political practice - it meant that their demands, their slogans, their arguments took on a more real content, were more firmly rooted in the reality of this society. As for the others, I think they were drawn in very rapidly, in the first week, through their experience of what happened on the streets. I think the confrontations with the police revealed more clearly the repressive basis of that society, that police repression was the expression of a more muffled repression that we knew existed elsewhere, quite apart from moments of crisis . . . On the Monday . . . slogans began to be used ('power to the workers') that went well beyond the student problem . . .

Had there been any attempt to reflect on what was happening, any discussion as to the world you wished to create?

No, at that time it was no more than a criticism of Gaullism.

What was it about Gaullism that you criticized?

The fact that it was a government produced by a military coup d'état, which, in spite of certain policies accepted by the Communists in the field of foreign affairs, for example, was in fact a repressive government that was carrying out a foreign policy that gave some satisfaction to the Left. Not that I consider the Communists as belonging to the Left. I'll come back to that later . .. The biggest thing I learnt in all this business, and I learnt it right from the beginning, was that the internal problems of a country - we were well aware of this, of course - determine the significance of that country's politics to a far greater extent than do external problems, which are merely the super-structure, which collapses as soon as one begins to criticize internal problems. .. We also learnt very quickly that the mode of contestation open to us in this relation of forces, this police state, was violent contestation.

On the Monday, when you saw the first police charges, the first wounded, the first tear-gas victims . . . did you remember anything you had read of similar historic events, in other times and places?

It's very curious, but everything is new in such cases. You try to work out what's happening in terms of what you see.

Could you say something about the Friday night. . .¹

The Friday night was something much more broadly based, that is, there were young workers, there were university teachers - about 50,000 people altogether. The extraordinary thing about it - to us, at least, who were used to peaceful marches from the Bastille to the Republique, organized by the Party and the CGT² - was that everyone took it upon himself to say how such a demonstration should be organized. Obviously, when there are 50,000 people that's no easy matter. But the people belonging to the most strongly represented tendencies explained through hailers how they saw the demonstration, so for once nobody was telling us that we had to choose between the CP demo and the pro-Chinese demo, with all the political implications and limitations on the mode of contestation that such a choice would have involved.

How did people express their approval?

For example, there was this guy saying: 'We'll go this way. They told us to go to Issy-les-Moulineaux, we'll go to Issy-les-Moulineaux.' Then we said to each other, 'He's a pro-Chinese', judging by what he said at the microphone. So people went up to him and asked him why he had said that, and a discussion got going. There was a certain amount of indecision, but people were really discussing among themselves. The exciting thing about that case was that the decisions were discussed. There were people who explained those decisions out loud so that everyone could hear. Someone had tried to carry his point of view simply by saying 'We'll go this way', but people did not follow him without knowing why.

What were your own feelings, seeing this unusual process at work?

Well, I said to myself: 'Right! Now why did he tell us to go that way?' I went over to him and tried to find out why he wanted to go there. I discussed it with him . . .

Had you any desire to go a different way?

Actually, no. But I'd no particular wish to go to Issy-les-Moulineaux. If we're going to oppose the regime, then we should do it where it hurts most.¹

Is that what you thought beforehand?

No, one discovered it. You see, I'm not as young as most of the students and I had a lot of old reflexes from earlier demonstrations. I was constantly having to stop myself. I understood what was happening, and said to myself, 'Hell, there I go again, reacting in the same old idiotic way!'

For the others, for the younger ones, did it seem quite natural, then, or was it simply a sort of apprenticeship?

It was an apprenticeship for everyone, of whatever generation.

How was the decision taken?

It was, after all, a demonstration to obtain the release of the arrested students, so we decided to march past the Sante prison, the symbol of our prison society. When we got to the Santé, people started to shout, 'Free our comrades!' And, suddenly, everyone started arguing, saying that it was just as disgusting for all the others who were in there; that, really, there were people who had been locked up for social reasons that were just as absurd as those for which the students had been arrested in the Sorbonne. People started shouting, 'Free the prisoners!' One always rose to a higher social level. It was very interesting.

Was it quite clear that 'prisoners' meant 'all the prisoners', not just 'our prisoners'?

Yes. I've talked with a lot of guys who've worked in remand homes. Really, the fact of arresting someone is a failure on the part of society. Anyway, that's how they see it: a society that has no other way of intervening but by making an arrest - repression, in other words.

Were there any banners declaring allegiance to a party or a union in this demonstration?

What has happened recently is very interesting. The banners referred to people's work. They were syndicalist in presentation - but whereas the union claims to be non-political, it's at the work level that political problems arise. That's another thing that was disproved by the facts - people came with their union banners, but in fact they were participating more and more in demonstrations of a political nature and the political parties couldn't stand the pace. Because if a party had arrived at that time and tried to impose its organization on a movement that had decided to find its own internal structure, it would have been an act of aggression against that movement.

Did people manage to group themselves behind the banners?

They started off like that, but these divisions broke down very quickly.

Right, what happened then? You got to the Latin Quarter and found the police guarding the Sorbonne. What did you decide to do then?

Confronted by flics dressed up as they were and in the state they were in, even when there are 50,000 of you . . . Anyway, we didn't know our own limitations and possibilities. In fact, it was the flics who enabled us to discover them, because before our guys didn't know the extent of their own courage.

Who proved the most courageous?

The eighteen-year-old lads. Then, by the Friday, there were the workers. We felt that our problems were all closely connected: qualifications, unemployment, a society in which people couldn't develop properly . . . What's more, those aged between eighteen and twenty have been educated under conditions of terror - the terror of exams, of dates that are always being changed, etc. Those kids have lived through all this in a state of constant anxiety. And then there is the fact that for that generation the Communist Party has meant much less than for the others, that the Party's line on peaceful coexistence and negotia...