A People's History of Europe: From World War I to Today by Raquel Varela

Author:Raquel Varela [Varela, Raquel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Politics
ISBN: 9780745341354
Google: MuziyQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 48856349
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2021-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

6

Crisis and Revolution: From May 68 to the Carnation Revolution

When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theatre, all bourgeois theatres must become national assemblies.1

Odéon Theatre, Paris, May 1968

Our destiny will be forged by our hands.2

1 May in liberty, Portugal 1974

May 68, the revolution: again ‘the impossible becomes inevitable’

In May and June 1968, the biggest strike in France’s history ever took place in France. It paralysed the country, leading to shortages. ‘The necessities of life, normally taken for granted, now appeared visibly as the products of human labour.3 But its reach went far beyond Paris – from the City of Lights to Mexico and Buenos Aires, from Beijing to Berlin, from Prague to Turin, everyone lived fully that month of May 1968: the upper classes and their leaders, with anxiety. Most students, working classes and intellectuals with an invigorating enthusiasm, exclaimed: ‘We shall fight, we shall win, Paris, Rome, London, Berlin.’4

If the two biggest post-war revolutions in Europe, Portugal in 1974 and Poland in 1980–81, occurred in countries under dictatorships, without a tradition of democracy or reformist parties, May 68, on the contrary, showed that it was possible to question capitalist accumulation and private property occupying factories, exercising workers’ control over production in advanced capitalist countries, with a regime of bourgeois democracy. For the global revolutionary left it was, recalls Ian Birchall, proof that socialist revolution was a realistic option for the coming decades in advanced capitalist democracies such as Britain, West Germany or the United States.5 For the ruling classes in Europe, it was scary.

Charles de Gaulle was left without reaction for several days. Little help could then be had from France’s sister countries: in the factories of Turin, in the streets of Berlin, in the cities of the USA, the ‘imagination’ of millions of workers who had remained silent since the war ‘had come to power’. In the early days by the voice of their children, those of the post-war baby boom, now university students; in the following days, by the might of the biggest workers’ strike in the history of France.

The detonator was the student protest whose culmination is the night of the barricades, when students barricade themselves on the streets of the Latin Quarter, in the Sorbonne area, throwing stones at the police, who brutally repress the demonstration, sparking the reaction of the workers’ movement in solidarity. More than nine million workers were involved, in all the branches of French industry and in every reach of society from the Meudon Observatory to the Folies Bergères.6

The post-war baby boom and the scientific and technological impulse, pari passu with the social conquests of the Welfare State, had opened universities to the working classes. The number of students in higher education had gone from 175,000 to more than half a million in ten years (between 1958 and 1968).

The 1968 strikes cannot be understood outside the context of the 1967 cyclical crisis and the period of global workers’ initiative, with its nerve centre in the North American car factories and in May 1968 in France, resisting the intensification of work,7 according to sociologist Peter Birke.

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