Students can be the motor of great S change i sodey, The recent eventin France recall an earlier studen movement which led to the biggest general strike so far in history: the events of May and June 1968.
Over thirty years ago, many thousands of people worldwide were won to the idea that society could be fundamentally changed by mass action. A revolutionary transformation seemed not only possible, but imminent. The President, De Gaulle, fled the country, and the question of power began to be posed as an immediate issue
The events of May '68 did not lead to a revolutionary transformation in French society. But '68 changed the situation in France, and Europe in the 1970s, and promised much more than it achieved.
The radicalisation amongst French students started with the US bombing of Hanoi in 1966-67. The movement began as a political and internationalist movement, but not a mass movement.
In fact at Nanterre University, Paris, the - biggest mobilisation was 500 out of 10,000 students on a Sunday. But events don't always move at the same pace.
Anyone witnessing the Nanterre demonstration would never imagine that this same university would soon provoke 'the night of the barricades in the centre of Paris, and the strike of 8-9 million workers.
Nanterre was not unusual for its time. Universities throughout the world were experiencing the development of movements against US imperialism in Vietnam. For all the supposed gains of the long post war boom and the related huge expansion of higher education, students were not content
The De Gaulle government was highly centralised and authoritarian, and was intent on imposing reforms on the education system which would benefit capitalism.
Students found the facilities necessary for study inadequate, and the accompanying education not what they were looking for. Outside university it was getting harder to find the jobs they were looking for. Unemployment topped half a million in France in the midst of a supposed economic expansion, and whilst the state was squandering billions of francs on nuclear proliferation, students were being told there was no more money.
The 'events' began when, on March 22 a meeting was called on campus to protest against the police harassment of students protesting against Vietnam.
Of 10,000 students, less than 200 took part in the meeting. Only two small political currents were involved at this early stage; anarchists and a small revolutionary youth organisation of 300, mainly students, all under the age of 25, called the Jeune Communiste Revolutionnaire (CR) who had been expelled from the Communist Party
Even though the action was small, it started to connect other issues with the war in
1oo noblergitami Joaque ol eignants, travalle Vietnam. A further meeting would take place the next week, and they gave themselves a name; 'the 22 March Movement.' The university management used the police to close down the meeting. This provoked further radicalisation of students, 1,200 of whom occupied the university the next week. place before the the movement nly one further clash was to take
burst open. The police arrested one of the movement's leaders, Daniel Cohn Bendit, after a far right student accused him of assault.
He and the other student leaders were called before a disciplinary committee of the university authorities for distributing leaflets
The university rector decided that day to close down the entire University of Paris, and sent police in to deal with the small protest that had been arranged in solidarity
The police arrived in full riot gear, surrounded the university, and arrested 500 protesters
It was this action which finally provoked a generalisation of struggle, as thousands of students began to gather around the police cordon.
The next day, tens of thousands of students across France were activated by the events. By, the end of the week, 50,000 deven or demonstrated in Paris and the students" movement had attracted the support of workers, in particularly younger workers.
To defend themselves from police aggres sion students erected barricades, and young workers joined them.
Local residents came out to give solidarity and food. The whole process was monitored by pirate radio stations, which gave helpful information to students about the movements of the police. May 13 was to see a bigger mobilisation still: this time trade unionists and students marched under the banner 'students, teachers and workers all together'
After a peaceful dispersal of the demonstration, the students returned to the university to re-occupy, whilst the workers went
And that would have been the end of it. except, it was still only the beginning. Over in western France ,aviation workers decided enough was enough, they blockaded the manager into
This office and occupied the factory.
When workers at a Renault plant in Rouen heard about the occupation in Nantes, the workers, again led spontaneously by younger workers, blockaded their factory too.
By the next day, 80,000 workers were involved in occupations and strikes, including aerospace, metalwork, railways, insurance companies, shops, banks and the print industry. In all between nine and ten million workers were involved in the action.
Workers in the film industry were involved, and began to formulate ideas of how the film industry should be run. A flourishing of artistic expression was characteristic of the period. It must go all the way
A political crisis was brewing, as De Gaulle fled to Germany, announced he could find no way out of the crisis, and called for a referendum.
Those who had believed that the idea of revolution was dead had a difficult job explaining this situation away: yet the crisis lasted only three weeks. By that time, De Gaulle had returned.
The official trade union leadership had regained the control they had lost in the explosiveness of events: the strike committees in the factories called for in tens of thousands of leaflets distributed by the tiny revo lutionary left were only set up in a tiny percentage of cases.
Some have described the events as a transitional general strike under the control of reformist leaderships.
Yet, had the reformist leaders really been in control, then a general strike would never have happened
The 13 May demonstration, even thougt called by the main union federation, the CGT, through pressure from below, was also a desperate attempt by the union leadership to physically keep the students and workers separate with a cordon of stewards
The revolutionary left was too small to exert a decisive influence, but in the wake of the May events expanded rapidly.
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long as the Berlin Wall. to serve as a client state solution to The Occupied Territories are currently characterised by extreme human rights violations, house demolitions, arbitrary curfews and border closures extreme human rights violations, house demolitions, arbitrary curfews and border closures, and the uprooting of
trees and olive groves. Therefore, it
is clear that the so called "peace process" introduced by the Oslo accords in 1996 has failed. In response to this situation, the intifada is a well organised national liberation movement made up of largely young women and men from all social strata and religious backgrounds Meanwhile, Israel is suffering from chronic unemployment, and seen as too dangerous a place for business investment. For the first time in its history, the flow of migrants is out of Israel rather than into it. Neither side benefits from the US/UK's obsession with the stillborn 'Road Map', a vacuous (non) policy rejected by the majority in both societies. The
Road Map does nothing to prevent the ongoing construction of the Policy Forum has come to the conclusion that only a single, secular state can prevent Israel from descending into total apartheid and permanent war.
The two-state solution is a non-starter and serves merely as a distraction from the strug gle. The ANC never proposed a separate existence from white South Africans. The struggle has been watered down by a combi nation of the US, various Arab interests, and , Yasser Arafat's megalomania.
Nevertheless, as the revered Israeli histo rian llan Pappe observed, the lives of the two peoples are so intertwined that Israel can no longer survive as an isolated US outpost:
"A democratic pluralist Israel as part of the Mediterranean is also Israel with many historical narratives. Such an Israel has a chance at a common future."
The most prominent Jewish historian, Benny Morris, now questions whether in fact Zionists went to the Middle East to escape persecution or to exploit, expel, and occup Palestinians.
The role of the left in Britain and around the world must be to forge a grassroots
.... The answer does not lie in