Anarchism and 1968

Berry, David

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_26

David Berry³

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Abstract

The events of 1968, especially in France, are often thought of as some kind of anarchist or at least anarchistic revolution, yet surprisingly little scholarly work has been done on the role of the anarchists or of anarchist ideas in those events from a historical perspective. This chapter will therefore examine the événements of May–June 1968 in France, drawing not only on the existing secondary literature but also on original research on primary sources including periodicals and pamphlets and militants’ personal archives. It will examine the role of the anarchists in the events, the extent to which the ‘spirit of 68’ can be said to have been libertarian or anarchistic (despite the predominance of Marxists among the gauchistes), and the impact of the events on the anarchist movement. It will be suggested that 1968 can be seen both as the culmination of post-war struggles over the (re)definition of anarchism and, as Tormey (2004) has argued, the beginning of a new radicalism strongly informed by anarchism.

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Notes

1.
Georgy Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics. European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 1.
2.
Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, ‘Conclusion’, in Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, Robert Frank, Marie-Françoise Lévy and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (Eds), Les années 68. Le temps de la contestation (Brussels: Complexe, 2008), 495–502 (497).
3.
Jean-François Sirinelli, ‘Le moment 1968, un objet pour la World history?’, Histoire@Politique. Politique, culture, société, no. 6 (September–December 2008), 1.
4.
Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ‘68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 146–147.
5.
Simon Prince, ‘The Global Revolt of 1968 and Northern Ireland’, The Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 851–875 (866).
6.
See ‘Rudi Dutschke on Revolutionary Democratic Socialism’ in Independent Socialist, 6 (August 1968).
7.
George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left. A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 4. A revised and expanded version of this is to be published as The Global Imagination of 1968: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018).
8.
Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘1968, Revolution in the world-system. Theses and queries’, Theory and Society, 18 (1989), 431–449 (431). See also Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, Anti-Systemic Movements (London: Verso, 1989), and the first chapter of Katsiaficas, Imagination.
9.
Wallerstein, ‘1968’, ibid., 433, 434. Note that Wallerstein uses the term ‘old left’ comparatively loosely, including in it the US Democratic Party.
10.
Ibid., 436. See Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969).
11.
Maurice Brinton, Paris: May 1968 (Solidarity Pamphlet no. 30, June 1968), 1. Reproduced in David Goodway (Ed), For Workers’ Power. The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2004), 223–256.
12.
Philippe Bénéton and Jean Touchard, ‘Les interprétations de la crise de mai–juin 1968’, Revue française de science politique, 20^e année, no. 3 (1970), 503–544. For a more recent overview, see Julian Jackson, ‘The Mystery of May 1968’, French Historical Studies, vol. 33, no. 4 (Fall 2010), 625–653.
13.
Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France,Italy and the United States, c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Marwick’s view has been challenged by Dominic Sandbrook’s Never Had It So Good, 1956–1963: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Little, Brown, 2005).
14.
Gilles Lipovetsky, L’Ère du vide (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). For a critique, see Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Les mouvements des années soixante’, in Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis, Mai 68: La Brèche suivi de Vingt ans après (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1988), 183–197.
15.
UNEF, AFGE de Strasbourg, De la misère en milieu étudiant: considérée sous ses aspects économique, politique, psychologique, sexuel et notamment intellectuel et de quelques moyens pour y remédier (supplement to 21–27 Etudiants de France, 16 (1966), 12–13. For an English translation, see On the Poverty of Student Life, in Ken Knabb (Ed), Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007), 319–331 (326).
16.
Boris Gobille, Mai 68 (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 5.
17.
Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2002), 8.
18.
Prince, ‘Global Revolt’, 852.
19.
Ross, May ’68, 8.
20.
Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Le gauchisme, remède à la maladie infantile du communisme (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 31; translated as Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (Edinburgh and Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2001).
21.
Vladimir Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964; [1920]), vol. 31, 17–118 (32).
22.
Daniel Guérin, letter to Pietro Ferrua, 5 July 1968, in FΔ721/32/4, Fonds Guérin, BDIC (Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine, Nanterre).
23.
See Eric Hazan, A History of the Barricade (London: Verso, 2015), 123–124.
24.
Antoine Prost, ‘Quoi de neuf sur le Mai français?’, Le Mouvement social, 143 (April–June 1988), 91–97.
25.
Richard Gombin, ‘The Ideology and Practice of Contestation seen through Recent Events in France’, Government and Opposition, vol. 5, no. 4 (October 1970), 410–429 (426). According to Maurice Joyeux, the Sud-Aviation union branch which launched the first occupation included every member of the Nantes FA group. Quoted in 1968: Le congrès de Carrare—Création de l’Internationale des Fédérations anarchistes (Paris: Editions du Monde libertaire, 2015), 37.
26.
Xavier Vigna, ‘Beyond Tradition: The Strikes of May–June 1968’ in Julian Jackson, Anna-Louise Milne and James S. Williams (Eds), May 68: Rethinking France’s Last Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 47–57 (48).
27.
See Jacques Sauvageot (Ed), Le PSU, des idées pour un socialisme au XXIe siècle? (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013).
28.
Roland Biard, Histoire du mouvement anarchiste, 1945–1975 (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1976), 180.
29.
Letter from Guy Daudet to Daniel Guérin, 25 November 1968, FΔ 721/29 bis, Fonds Guérin, BDIC.
30.
Biard, Histoire, 180.
31.
Didier Fischer, L’histoire des étudiants en France de 1945 à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 2000); Patrick Combes, La littérature et le mouvement de mai 68 (Paris: Seghers, 1984).
32.
Gombin, ‘The Ideology and Practice’, 412.
33.
Alain Schnapp and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Journal de la Commune étudiante: Textes et documents novembre 1967–juin 1968 (Paris: Seuil, 1988 [1969]), 473.
34.
De la misère en milieu étudiant, 24.
35.
L’Anarchisme, de la doctrine à la pratique (Paris: Gallimard, 1965) translated as Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970). Guérin, letter to Ferrua.
36.
Ross, May 68, 2 and 3.
37.
Rudi Dutschke, The Students and the Revolution (Spokesman Pamphlet, no. 15, 1971), 8. Translated by Patricia Howard from a speech given in Uppsala, 7 March 1968.
38.
Gobille, Mai, 33.
39.
Edgar Morin and Georges Lapassade, ‘La question ‘micro-sociale”, Arguments, 25–26 (1er trimestre 1962), 2–4 (2).
40.
Morin and Lapassade, ibid. Lefebvre was professor of sociology at Nanterre. See La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), translated by Sacha Rabinovitch as Everyday Life in the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
41.
Raoul Vaneigem, Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith as The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel Books, 2006), 26.
42.
Vigna, ‘Beyond Tradition’, 47.
43.
Gombin, ‘The Ideology and Practice’, 428.
44.
Nicolas Hatzfeld, ‘Peugeot-Sochaux: de l’entreprise dans la crise à la crise dans l’entreprise’ in René Mouriaux, Annick Percheron, Antoine Prost and Danièle Tartakowsky (Eds), 1968—Exploration du Mai français (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992), vol. 1, 51–72 (63).
45.
Hatzfeld, ibid., 52.
46.
Groupe Noir et Rouge, Autogestion, Etat, Révolution (Paris: Editions du Cercle/Editions de la Tête de Feuilles, 1972), 9.
47.
The proceedings were published as L’Actualité de Proudhon (Bruxelles: Université libre de Bruxelles, 1967).
48.
Alexis Bonnet, ‘L’autogestion et les cédétistes lyonnais’, in Dreyfus-Armand, Frank, Lévy and Zancarini-Fournel (Eds), Les années 68, pp. 363–378 (363).
49.
CFDT, ‘Positions et action de la CFDT au cours des événements de mai-juin 1968’, in Syndicalisme no.1266 A (November 1969), 54.
50.
Vigna, ‘Beyond Tradition’, 52.
51.
Vigna, ibid., 54. On this issue, see Ken Coates, ‘Democracy and Workers’ Control’, first published in Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn (Eds), Towards Socialism (London: Fontana, 1965); republished in Ken Coates, Workers’ Control: Another World Is Possible. Arguments from the Institute for Workers’ Control (Nottingham: Spokesman for Socialist Renewal, 2003), 33–55.
52.
A CGT member of 20 years’ standing, quoted in Vigna, ibid., 55.
53.
Ibid., 56.
54.
Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 9.
55.
Ibid., 9–10.
56.
Ibid., 10.
57.
The Trotskyist JCR, Jeunesses communistes révolutionnaires, and the Maoist Union des jeunesses communistes (marxistes-léninistes) were created in 1965/66 after being expelled from the PCF’s student organisation, the UEC, Union des jeunesses communistes.
58.
See ‘Programme de la Tendance syndicale révolutionnaire fédéraliste (TSRF)’ in Liaison des Etudiants Anarchistes, Anarchistes en 1968 à Nanterre (Paris: Acratie, 1998), 35–40.
59.
Gombin, ‘The Ideology and Practice’, 420.
60.
Daniel Bensaïd, Une lente impatience (Paris: Stock, 2004), 80.
61.
Daniel Bensaïd and Henri Weber, Mai 68: une répétition générale (Paris: Maspero, 1968), 101.
62.
Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, ‘Le Mouvement du 22 mars. Entretien avec Daniel Cohn-Bendit’, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, 11–13 (1988), special issue on ‘Mai-68: Les mouvements étudiants en France et dans le monde’, 124–129.
63.
Roland Biard, Dictionnaire de l’extrême-gauche de 1945 à nos jours (Paris: Belfond, 1978), 244–247.
64.
Gombin, ‘The Ideology and Practice’, 420–421.
65.
UGAC, Lettre au mouvement anarchiste international (n.d. [1966]), quoted in Biard, Histoire, 162.
66.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit in Anarchism in the May Movement in France (n.d.), translated by “N.W.” from Magazine littéraire no.18 (June 1968), 10.
67.
Cohn-Bendit, Anarchism in the May Movement, 14–16.
68.
Gombin, ‘The Ideology and Practice’, 415.
69.
Ibid., 422.
70.
Edgar Morin, ‘L’Anarchisme en 1968’, Magazine littéraire 19 (1968), available at www.magazine-litteraire.com/archives/ar_anar.htm (accessed 6 October 2002). See Jean-Christophe Angaut, ‘Beyond Black and Red: The Situationists and the Legacy of the Workers’ Movement’, in Alex Prichard, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta and David Berry (Eds), Libertarian Socialism. Politics in Black and Red (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017), 232–250.
71.
Dreyfus-Armand and Cohn-Bendit, ‘Le Mouvement du 22 mars’, 124.
72.
Gombin, ‘The Ideology and Practice’, 422.
73.
Dreyfus-Armand and Cohn-Bendit, ‘Le Mouvement du 22 mars’, 124–129. The provos were a heterogeneous group of libertarian activists in Amsterdam in 1965–1967 who adopted a playful and provocative approach to protest and were concerned with action rather than theorising. See Niek Pas, ‘Subcultural Movements: The Provos’, in Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (Eds), 1968 in Europe: a history of protest and activism, 1956–1977 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 13–21.
74.
Dreyfus-Armand and Cohn-Bendit, ‘Le Mouvement du 22 mars’, 124–125. Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1967), translated by Ken Knabb as
The Society of the Spectacle (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014).
75.
See, for example, Cohn-Bendit, Le gauchisme. Guérin reports that he borrowed the term ‘libertarian Marxist’ for the title of his book Pour un marxisme libertaire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1969) from some young Italian leftists in Trento and Milan. See his ‘Le marxisme libertaire’ in Anarchi e Anarchia nel mondo contemporaneo (Turin: Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, 1971), 442–457 (443).
76.
Biard, Histoire, 195.
77.
Jean-Jacques Lebel in Le congrès de Carrare, 32.
78.
Ibid., 32–33.
79.
Extract from Gino Cerrito, Anarchismo 70, i Quaderni dell’Antistato 2 (1971), in Le congrès de Carrare, ibid., 157–166 (160).
80.
Ibid., 164.
81.
Daniel Guérin, Rosa Luxembourg et la spontanéité révolutionnaire (Paris: Spartacus, 1982; first published 1971), 12.
82.
Gaston Leval, ‘Pour une renaissance du mouvement libertaire’ in Anarchi e Anarchia, 588, 597.
83.
Maurice Joyeux, ‘Mai 68 … sous les plis du drapeau noir’, Le Monde libertaire (June 1988). See David Porter, ‘French anarchists and the continuing power of May 1968’, Modern & Contemporary France, vol. 24, no. 2 (2016), 143–159.
84.
Biard, Histoire, 183.
85.
Jean Maitron, Le Mouvement anarchiste en France (Paris: Maspero, 1983), vol. 2, 131.
86.
Jean Maitron, ‘La pensée anarchiste traditionnelle et la révolte des jeunes’, in Anarchi e Anarchia, 543–578.
87.
René Viénet, Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), quoted in Maitron, ‘La pensée anarchiste traditionnelle’, ibid., 562–563.
88.
Quoted in Maitron, ibid., 564–565.
89.
Jean-Pierre Duteuil, Nanterre 1968: Notes on the background to the 22 March Group (Hastings: Christie Books, 2014).
90.
Morin, ‘L’anarchisme en 1968’, 22.
91.
Ibid., 22–23.
92.
Paul Goodman, ‘The Black Flag of Anarchism’, New York Times Magazine (14 July 1968), in Taylor Stoehr (Ed), Drawing the Line Once Again. Paul Goodman’s Anarchist Writings (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010), 89–97. On France, see Jacques Julliard, ‘Syndicalisme révolutionnaire et révolution étudiante’, in Esprit (June/July 1968), 1037–1046.
93.
Ibid., 89.
94.
Ibid., 91.
95.
See Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005).
96.
Anthony Arblaster, ‘The Relevance of Anarchism’, Socialist Register (1971), 157–184 (174).
97.
Ibid., 167.
98.
Ibid., 167.
99.
George Woodcock, ‘Anarchism Revisited’, Commentary (1 August 1968), 55.
100.
Katsiaficas, Subversion, 1.
101.
Goodman, ‘The Black Flag’, 93–94.
102.
Francesca Polletta, Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 128, quoted in Horn, Spirit, 196.
103.
Marwick, The Sixties, 14–15.
104.
Pietro Basso, Modern Times, Ancient Hours: Working Lives in the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2003), 30.
105.
See Colin Crouch and Alessandro Pissaro (Eds), The Resurgence of Class Conflict in Western Europe since 1968 (London: Macmillan, 1978), 2 vols.
106.
Horn, Spirit, 194.
107.
Wallerstein, ‘1968’, 437, 439.
108.
Simon Tormey, Anti-capitalism a beginner’s guide (London: Oneworld, 2013), Ch. 2. Katsiaficas makes the same argument in Subversion.
109.
Katsiaficas, Imagination, 8.

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Department of Politics, History and International Relations, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK
David Berry

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Department of Politics and International Relations Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK
Carl Levy
Department of Politics, History and International Relations, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK
Matthew S. Adams

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Berry, D. (2019). Anarchism and 1968. In: Levy, C., Adams, M.S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_26

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_26
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