'You can't sleep once your eyes are opened'

CRITICALLY INCLINED

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the historic student and working class uprising of May/June 1968, in France. The short-lived spring-thunder had extraordinary political and cultural spin-offs internationally, including in India, even as it launched a frontal attack on 'normality' and 'convention', leaving an indelible mark on the practice of 'Left' politics worldwide.

In retrospect, 'May '68' might have been a political 'failure', in that the protesters did not succeed in changing existing power equations, but its social impacts were enormous. Besides re-asserting a new imagery of revolutionary politics as a 'cultural celebration', it also succeeded in overturning the conservative morality of the time pertaining to religion, patriotism and respect for authority, replacing it with the more contemporary liberal morality of voluntarism, sexual liberation and human rights.

The term 'May '68' itself stands for a series of student protests and a workers' strike in France, beginning in Nanterre University in March and spilling over till almost to the end of June, the ripple-effect of which caused the eventual collapse of the ruling government of Charles de Gaulle.

It began as a series of spontaneous student strikes in several universities and schools in Paris, following confrontations with university administrators and the police. The administration's attempts to quash the strikes with brutal police action only inflamed the situation, leading to street battles in the Latin Quarter, followed by a general strike by students and nation-wide strikes by ten million French workers, roughly two-thirds of the French workforce.

The revolutionary situation evaporated almost as quickly as it emerged. Workers went back to their jobs, after a series of deceptions carried out by the mainstream Left unions, and the French Communist Party (PCF).

It is difficult to precisely identify the politics of the students who sparked the events of May 1968, much less of the hundreds of thousands who participated in them. There was, however, a strong strain of anarchism, particularly in the students at Nanterre.

A fairly good idea of the mind of the movement can be got from the posters, graffiti and slogans that it generated. Since the uprising also drew students of art, music and media, there were some inspired forms and messages that it threw up. The graffiti gave a sense of the rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers.

For example, emblazoned above the Odeon Theatre, Paris, which the students 'captured' and 'occupied' for two weeks, and where all the noisy student 'revolutionary council' meetings (or 'Sorbonne Soviets') took place, was emblazoned the message, "When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeoise Theatre, all bourgeoise theatres should be turned into National Assemblies."

Other gems of the movement include:

'Don't be Normal';

'Beware, you will end up dying of comfort';

'Be realistic! Demand the impossible';

'Terminate the University';

'Commodities are the opium of the people';

'Art is dead, don't consume its corpse';

'Boredom is counter-revolutionary';

'The Radio lies';

'Yes to factory occupation';

'Stalinists, your children are with us';

'Every view of things that is not strange is false' (after Paul Valery);

'You can no longer sleep quietly once you have opened your eyes wide'.

One of the charismatic leaders of the uprising, the then 23-year-old Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and his brother Gabriel, senior by ten years, have produced an excellent account "" in their book, Obsolete Communism; The Left-Wing Alternative (Andre Deutsche, 1968) "" of the build up to the movement and the actual events in May-June when the drama was played out in the classrooms, factories and streets of France.

They enumerate the simmering campus environments in the West through the mid-sixties as protests against the Vietnam War escalated. There was also the explosion in youth culture implicit in the Hippie movement, the Beatles, Woodstock and the violent sit-ins of 1968 at Columbia and Berlin Universities. Preceding this, were the 'battles for the dormitories', demanding the lifting of restrictions against the intermingling of sexes in campus hostels.

Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on April 4, 1968, leading to a radicalisation of the Black Rights movement and the emergence of the Black Panthers. Ten days before the famous October 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, a student-led demonstration ended in a storm of bullets in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas. The super Black athletes from the US, Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Lee Evans were to raise Black Fist salutes to the American flag as they stood on the podium to receive their medals.

In Italy and Argentina, students and workers were protesting. In Belgium, students at Louvain were up in arms. In Poland and Hungary, students protested restrictions on free speech by Stalinist regimes. In Czechoslovakia, the 'Prague Spring' spurred the imagination, until it was crushed.

Many involved with 'May '68' were also inspired by a strain of political thought called tiers-mondisme (third-worldism). Students celebrated resistance movements in countries like Cuba, Vietnam or China, and revered figures such as Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela and Mao Zedong. Student struggles were tied to their support to these third-world movements.

Yet, no mass-based revolutionary party emerged then, that could guide the working class and the newly conscientised students to a further level of struggle. That task still lies ahead.