1968 Barricades in Bordeaux
The lessons of "I love you! Oh! Say it with paving stones!" requires us to look at the night of May 10th, morning of May 11th 1968. It was the Night of the Barricades, when French Students and French Riot Police engaged in a battle of astonishing fury which resulted in a wave of public sympathy for the student cause and great dishonor for highly armed and brutish Police. French Industrial Unions declared a General Strike. In anticipation of the confrontation the students had built obstacles some of which could be set on fire, they tore up cobble stones, these were the paving stones of the "I love you" slogan.
The Next two slogans refine the Situationist influences on 1968 relate to the workers and their unions:
"Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases. My father before me fought for wage increases. Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet my whole life I've been a chump. Don't negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them."
"Worker: You are 25, but your union is from the last century."
In 1968 there were a number of large production facilities in and around Paris employing a huge numbers of unionized workers. Many of these workers had a Marxist sympathies, they were inclined toward a more socialist society and had been since the second half of the 1800's. There was an active Communist Party in France which had made up a high percentage of the French Resistance fighters in the Second World War. The French Communist Party along with other European Communist Parties had traditional and fraying ties with the Soviet Union. By 1968 Marxist thinkers had moved on from the corruptions of the Soviet Union and French Students contemptuously referred to members of the French Communist Party as The Stalinists.
"Down with the Stalinist carcass! Down with the recuperator cells!"
Recuperator cells in this context came from the Situationist understanding of the way in which often subversive and radical ideas were co-opted, absorbed, basically neutralized by mainstream, bourgeois society. And indeed, in the years that followed the uprisings of May '68 was widely commercialized.
When thinking about the differences between student and worker action in that year, the workers addressed the desire to improve terms and conditions of work. The students many of whom were aware they were bound for middle management, not greatness, wanted society to change.
The French Sociologist Alain Touraine, who taught at a new university built in the 1950's outside Paris called Nanterre, in his study of 1968 made the observation that as the structure of the Economy moved away from Industrial Production to Services, a post industrial society would be characterized by Social Movements rather than the industrial actions of unions looking for better working conditions.
"In a society that has abolished all adventures, the only adventure left is to abolish society."
We have the stuff, the Situationist influence suggested, what we want is a different sort of Spectacle. What's a spectacle, you ask. It's an understanding of stuff that doesn't see it as the work, the hopes, dreams, the essence of a man, but as an appearance, a spectacle, an image that can be both fetishized and as a commodity it can be bought and sold in a market place. It traps us in an eternal present by breaking down time and history and putting us in a continuous, unchanging, superficial now.
"We are pacified by distractions!" Alain Touraine saw in the revolt of his students, not a struggle for the power of the state but demands for cultural autonomy and a fight for self-management. It was an uprising against conservative cultural norms.
