Is History About To Rhyme? Fifty years ago, exactly, Paris erupted in what looked like (and, by all accounts, felt like) a revolution. Fifty years on, the same groups that convulsed France in May-June 1968 are again occupying universities and participating in mass strikes.
EMMANUEL MACRON will be hoping that Mark Twain was wrong
about history. In the French President’s ears, the celebrated American novelist’s
famous observation that although history does not repeat itself, it sometimes
rhymes, can hardly be reassuring.
Fifty years ago, exactly, Paris erupted in what looked like
(and, by all accounts, felt like) a
revolution. Fifty years on, the same groups that convulsed France in May-June
1968 are again occupying universities and participating in mass strikes.
There is, however, one feature of the 2018 situation that differs
very greatly from 1968. Fifty years ago, the key strategic priority was to
extend the political struggle into all sectors of French society. Today, the
priority is to draw the divergent campaigns of students and workers closer
together. Or, as the French Left put it: convergence
des luttes – a convergence of struggles.
That the Left is required to reiterate the most fundamental
tenet of collective action: unity is strength; is in many ways symbolic of what
was won and lost in the upheavals of May-June 1968.
Crucial to achieving a proper understanding of “68” is
accepting that politically it was a colossal failure. Convulsed France may have
been by a succession of running street battles between university students and
the feared French riot police, mass protest demonstrations, factory occupations
and a wave of crippling strikes, but the overwhelming majority of French voters
were not persuaded that revolutionary change was necessary. In the snap
legislative elections of June 1968, called in response to the tumult in the
streets, the government of the day won 353 of 486 seats in the Chamber of
Deputies.
But, if “68” was not a political revolution, it most
certainly heralded revolutionary changes in French society and culture and, thanks
to France’s enormous influence on the world’s intellectual and artistic life, our
own.
It was in 1968 that the great “metanarratives” of the 20th
Century – socialism and communism in particular – began their long, slow fade
into the cultural twilight. In the years that followed, the entire modernist project
underwent a similar dissolution.
In its place arose a new project – “post-modernism”. The
failure of the grand metanarratives to deliver on their promises had encouraged
the growth of an all-encompassing scepticism towards any person or party claiming
to have a lock on “The Truth”. Indeed, the whole notion that “The Truth” could even
be unlocked was subjected to unrelenting challenge. The idea that there might
be as many truths as there were people to identify them won widespread philosophical
acceptance. That there was just one universal and unchallengeable definition of
reality was derided as the thinking of dead, white, males.
With the 1989-91 collapse of “actually existing socialism”
in Eastern Europe and Russia, the forces of intellectual and cultural
divergence gathered even more momentum. Questions of individual identity in a
world where all kinds of boundaries were becoming blurred, or dissolving
altogether, became increasingly important, and the prospect of maintaining, let
alone forging, collective political unity was rendered increasingly
problematic.
In what the French situationist philosopher, Guy Debord,
dubbed the “society of the spectacle”, however, one crucial feature of the
post-modernist condition had become harder and harder to discern. Capitalism,
in the absence of its rival metanarratives – socialism and communism – had
grown immeasurably stronger in a fast-changing world where, in Karl Marx’s
famous phrase, “all that is solid melts into air”.
Capitalist technology’s frightening capacity to re-define
humanity’s self-perceptions hid effortlessly in plain sight: its universal
presence making it all the more difficult to see. Not without cause did the
American literary critic and political philosopher, Fredric Jameson, describe
post-modernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism”. If everything can be
true, then it becomes increasingly difficult to describe anything as false. If
late capitalism’s cultural logic gave us post-modernism, then Donald Trump and
his “fake news” can only be its logical outcome.
Except, of course, the social and economic consequences of
late capitalism are not fake news – they are only too real. No matter how high
capitalism’s apologists turn up the static, the blunt facts of joblessness
and/or precarious employment; chronic indebtedness; unaffordable housing;
rising poverty and in-your-face social inequality continue to constitute the
lived experience of a growing percentage of the world’s citizens – even in its
wealthiest nations. The society of the spectacle may constantly be driving them
apart, but the inescapable reality of their daily lives is, with equal
constancy, generating what the old Soviet communists used to call “the
objective conditions” for their coming together.
One of the most memorable slogans of the 1968 “revolution
that never happened” was the surrealist graffiti Sous les pavés, la plage! (Under the paving stones, the beach.) It
captured perfectly the widespread feeling, especially among the young, that for
all its materialistic “success”, the post-war world was one from which
everything sensual and life-affirming had been bled out. The attributes that
made them human, made life worth living, had been drained of colour; buried
beneath tons of grey concrete; reduced to an unbearable sameness. In order to
find the beach, they had first to tear up the paving-stones – and hurl them at
the police.
Divergence, in 1968, made perfect psychic sense. But,
politically, it made no sense at all. Emancipation, if it is to endure, must be
a collective enterprise. The students and workers of 1968 only railed against
the capitalism of their time in various – albeit highly imaginative – ways: the
point was to change it.
Fifty years later, convergence
des luttes – a convergence of struggles – is the only slogan that offers
any hope of sparking a genuine and enduring revolution.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 8 May 2018.
