Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (108 page)

For a while, it seemed possible that a social revolution might be achieved by non-violent direct action. Mao’s power, which grew out of the barrel of a gun, was abandoned by the hippies and their fellow travellers for ‘Flower Power’. The Beatles sang
All You Need Is Lave
and the youth echoed the sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic. But the pacifist phase of the New Left was comparatively short-lived. The student unrest in Europe and America in 1967 and 1968 led to a violent confrontation with the State. The oppressive response of the authorities showed that the ruling elites would never peacefully acquiesce in change. The spontaneous uprising in France in the spring of 1968, initially triggered off by students and followed by a general strike and the occupation of factories, seemed to augur a revolution along classic anarchist lines.

In other European States, student movements, inspired by their comrades in America and France, called for educational reforms and deepened their analysis of the capitalist State. Small anarchist associations, along with dissident Trotskyist and Maoist groups, suddenly found their literature to be in demand. The prevailing mood of the movement was profoundly anti-authoritarian.

In Germany, Rudi Dutschke made this libertarian undertow amongst
the students more explicit, despite his Marxist background. ‘The present-day nationalization of the whole society’, he insisted, ‘creates the basis for an understanding of the anti-state and anti-institution struggle of the radical extra-parliamentary opposition.’ The opposition was no longer directed against mistakes in the System but was aimed ‘at the whole way of life of the authoritarian state as it has existed up to now’.
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Since the aggression of the United States in Vietnam had prompted the symbolic entry into the Western capitals of the Third World and all its concerns, every radical opposition to the System must necessarily assume a global dimension. Dutschke therefore called for a student-worker alliance to overthrow capitalism and the State. His voice however was soon silenced: inspired by the assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 a young German right-winger put several bullets in Dutschke’s head and body and nearly killed him.

In practice, the student movements in Germany and Britain did not go far beyond the occupation of academic institutions, the call for greater academic democracy, and street demonstrations against US aggression in Vietnam. There was no question of them directly challenging the State as in France. Although they were profoundly libertarian in tone, self-conscious anarchists did not play a major role in the student unrest.

The greatest European uprising of the 1960s occurred in France during May 1968, when the student rebellion triggered off the occupation of the factories and one of the greatest general strikes in history. It had been long taken for granted on the European Left that a classic revolution was no longer possible in Western countries. As the British historian Eric Hobsbawm observed at the time, the events in France were ‘totally unexpected and totally unprecedented’.
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President de Gaulle ordered the French army in Germany to the frontier and moved troops up towards Paris. It seemed for a brief moment that the social revolution was about to happen.

But while the workers occupied the factories, they did not work in them and failed to turn their strike committees into administrative organs of self-management. In the event, a ten per cent pay rise accepted by the reformist Confédération Générale du Travail and the offer of new elections by de Gaulle led to the collapse of the strike, and the students left for their holidays and their comfortable family homes. They had failed to uncover the beach under the paving stones of Paris. Nevertheless, the May — June events proved the most important uprising in France since the Paris Commune of 1871.

The rebellion was distinctly libertarian in character. The French anarchist historian Jean Maitron described the events which shook France
for six weeks in the spring of 1968 as a definite form of anarchism.
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Daniel Guérin, whose book on anarchism became a best-seller at the time, wrote in a postscript afterwards that the revolution was ‘profoundly libertarian in spirit’ and that ‘all authority was repudiated or denied’.
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He was particularly impressed by the call for self-management which echoed in university and factory. In Britain Tom Nairn in his analysis of the events declared boldly soon afterwards: ‘The anarchism of 1871 looked backwards to a precapitalist past, doomed to defeat; the anarchism of 1968 looks forward to the future society almost within our grasp, certain of success.’
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In retrospect, it would seem that many of the ideas and tactics at the time were profoundly anarchist in character, although those professing them would probably not have called themselves anarchists. The events marked a great resurgence of anarchist theory but they did not lead to an organized social movement. It was as if a sudden libertarian tidal wave had come from nowhere and threatened to wash away the State, only to subside as quickly as it had come. It was left for historians to pick over the confused flotsam which it discarded in its wake.

The slogans of the movement undoubtedly seemed directly inspired by the anarchist tradition. Graffiti on the walls in Paris declared: NEITHER GODS NOR MASTERS; THE MORE YOU CONSUME THE LESS YOU LIVE; ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION; IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID; BE REALISTIC: DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE. All mis revealed a profoundly anarchist sensibility at work. But unlike previous revolutions which were primarily concerned with overcoming economic scarcity, the French revolutionaries in a society of abundance were preoccupied with the transformation of every day life. They looked to self-liberation as the basis for social liberation. And while the revolt was started by the students, it developed into a mass movement, cutting across traditional class divisions. The uprising rapidly passed from resistance to the State to a direct and permanent
contestation
with it.
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The first rumblings were heard at Strasbourg University in 1966 when the government-sponsored student union was taken over by those who wanted to destroy it. It inspired André Bertrand’s comic strip account
The Return of the Durutti Column
– a direct reference to the legendary activities of Buenaventura Durruti during the Spanish Civil War. The Situationist Mustapha Khayati also issued his widely influential tract
The Poverty of Student Life
, in which he calls for a revolutionary alliance between workers and students, victims both of the spectacle of consumer society. The most revealing document to emerge, however, from the student movement was the Appeal issued from the open assembly of the occupied Sorbonne of 13–14 June 1968. Although some of the theses contradicted each other, they stated mat there are ‘no student problems’ for students are workers
themselves — the ‘ lumpenproletariat of the consumer society’. The global dimension of their struggle was recognized in the thesis that the ‘solidarity of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is set against the lumpenproletariat of the Third World’. Above all, they stressed that they chose the means of their ends, that is, ‘the power from which every form of violence and repression can be excluded as the foundation of its existence and the means of its survival’.
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The students reaffirmed personal liberty, the innocence of desire, and the joy of creativity, play and happiness. In the Sorbonne amphitheatre a slogan declared: I TAKE MY DESIRES FOR REALITY, BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF MY DESIRES. Outside in the Place de la Sorbonne one could read: FREEDOM IS THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF OUR DESIRES.
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Anarchists in France at the time formed only small groups centred around magazines like
Socialisme ou Barbarie
and
Noir et Rouge.
Critical of its dogmatism, many had left the French Anarchist Federation and developed an eclectic critique of contemporary society. There was therefore no organized anarchist movement to speak of in France at the time. But individual anarchists undoubtedly influenced the anti-authoritarian groups called the 22 March Movement and the Situationist International who played an important role in the events. In addition, the anonymous crowds of
enragés
(fanatics) who belonged to no organization expressed profound anarchist sentiments without apparently being aware of their origin.

The libertarian impetus of the 22 March Movement, formed at the cradle of the revolt — Nanterre University — came through in its celebration of spontaneity, improvisation and self-expression. Its participants felt they were involved in a permanent festival, at home everywhere. In its assemblies they arrived at decisions by the ‘sense of the assembly’ and sought not the seizure of power but its dissolution.
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They criticized both superpowers as being merely varieties of the same State capitalism. They challenged all forms of repression in existing society. Their tactics, slogans and propaganda were invented as they went along. They saw their actions as ‘exemplary’ in the struggle against the capitalist State. As de Gaulle correctly observed, they were ‘in revolt against modern society, against consumer society, against technological society, whether communist in the East or capitalist in the West’.

Although the movement had no leaders, the media took up Daniel Cohn-Bendit, better known as ‘Danny Le Rouge’, as its spokesman. He was a twenty-three year-old Nanterre sociology student at the time. Typical of the eclecticism of the movement, he called himself both an anarchist and a ‘libertarian Marxist’: while Bakunin was the greatest influence on him, he also acknowledged that Trotsky, Mao and Marcuse had played an important part in his intellectual education. His anarchism was evident in his opposition
to capitalism and the State, his condemnation of Soviet communism, and his advocacy of workers’ control and self-management.

In his book written soon after the events with his brother Gabriel,
Le Gauchisme, remède à la maladie sénile du communisme
(1968; translated into English as
Obsolete Communism: The Left Wing Alternative
), he drew out the libertarian implications of the 22 March Movement. A great part of the book was a sustained polemic against Bolshevism, both Leninist and Stalinist, focusing in particular on the repression of the anarchist opposition during and after the Russian Revolution. At the same time, it recorded how the students recognized that all revolutionary activity is collective and involves a degree of organization, but they challenged the need for a revolutionary leadership as well as the need for a party, since the latter inevitably reduces the freedom of the people to ‘freedom to agree with the party’.
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New forms of organization were developed in the students’ local action committees which were seen as evolving the means of coping with specific situations. They welcomed the vast chain of workers’ committees which emerged to bypass the calcified structure of the trade unions.

The anarchist nature of their recommendations is clear in their insistence that in the future the movement must resolve to respect and guarantee ‘the plurality and diversity of political currents within the revolutionary mainstream’, to struggle against the formation of any kind of hierarchy, and to ensure that all factories and businesses are run by those who work in them.
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Above all, they argued that the revolution was not made in the name of some abstract ideal or on behalf of a party:
’C’est pour toi que tu fais la révolution’
(You make the revolution for yourself). Daniel Cohn-Bendit has since thrown himself into the activities of the Green Party in Germany, but he has not entirely forgotten his libertarian youth and he continues to seek greater social autonomy within the confines of the State.

The other important libertarian group which came to prominence during the May — June events in France in 1968 were the Situationists. They originated in a small band of avant-garde artists and intellectuals influenced by Dada, Surrealism and Lettrism. The post-war Lettrist International, which sought to fuse poetry and music and transform the urban landscape, was a direct forerunner of the group who founded the magazine
Situationniste Internationale
in 1957. At first, they were principally concerned with the ‘supersession of art’, that is to say, they wished like the Dadaists and the Surrealists before them to supersede the categorization of art and culture as separate activities and to transform them into part of everyday life.
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Like the Lettrists, they were against work and for complete
divertissement.
Under capitalism, the creativity of most people had become diverted and stifled, and society had been divided into actors and spectators, producers and consumers. The Situationists therefore wanted a different kind of revolution: they wanted the imagination, not a group of men, to seize power, and poetry and art to be made by all. Enough! they declared. To hell with work, to hell with boredom! Create and construct an eternal festival.

At first the movement was mainly made up of artists, of whom Asger Jorn was the most prominent. From 1962 the Situationists increasingly applied their critique not only to culture but to all aspects of capitalist society. Guy Debord emerged as the most important figure: he had been involved in the Lettrist International, and had made several films, including
Hurlements en faveur de Sade
(1952). Inspired by the libertarian journal
Socialisme ou Barbarie
, the Situationists rediscovered the history of the anarchist movement, particularly during the period of the First International, and drew inspiration from Spain, Kronstadt, and the Makhnovists. They described the USSR as a capitalist bureaucracy, and advocated workers’ councils. But they were not entirely anarchist in orientation and retained elements of Marxism, especially through Henri Lefebvre’s critique of the alienation of everyday life. They believed that the revolutionary movement in advanced capitalist countries should be led by an ‘enlarged proletariat’ which would include the majority of waged labourers. In addition, although they claimed to want neither disciples nor a leadership, they remained an elitist vanguard group who dealt with differences by expelling the dissenting minority. They looked to a world-wide proletarian revolution to bring about the maximum pleasure.