gemini://beyondneolithic.life:1965/badiou_archive/the_communist_hypothesis/we_are_still_contemporaries_of

There are three parts to this set of essays on May '68. The first is a lecture given in Clermont-Ferrand in 2008 at the invitation of the 'Les Amis du temps des cerises' association in 2008. The second is an article written 'in the heat of the moment' in July 1968 and published by the Belgian journal Textures (nos. 3-4) in the winter of 1968. The third is the fall version of an article on capitalism's systemic crisis published in a shortened version by the daily "Le Monde" in late 2008. I reproduce it here because the two earlier texts deal mainly with the question of capitalism and its parliamentary political organization.

The first answer is decidedly pessimistic. We can now commemorate May '68 because we are convinced that it is dead. Forty years after the event, there is no life left in it. Or so say some who were once the notables of '68. 'Forget Mai 68', Cohn-Bendit tells us, now that he has become an ordinary politician. We are living in a very different world, the situation has changed completely, and we can therefore commemorate the best years of our lives with a clear conscience. Nothing that happened then has any active significance for us. Nostalgia and folklore.

There is also a second and even more pessimistic answer. We are commemorating May '68 because the real outcome and the real hero of '68 is unfettered neo-liberal capitalism. The libertarian ideas of '68, the transformation of the way we live, the individualism and the taste for jouissance have become a reality thanks to post-modern capitalism and its garish world of all sorts of consumerism. Ultimately, Sarkozy himself is the product of May '68, and to celebrate May '68, as André Glucksmann invites us to do, is to celebrate the neo-liberal West that the American army is so bravely defending against the barbarians.

The first is that this interest in '68, especially on the part of significant numbers of young people, is, on the contrary, an anti-Sarkozy reflex. Even as its importance is being denied so strongly, we appear to be looking back at May '68 because it is a potential source of inspiration, a sort of historical poem that gives us new courage and that allows us really to react now that we are in the depths of despair.

And then there is another, and even more optimistic, hypothesis. This commemoration, and even the official, commodified and deformed side of it, may mask the vague idea that a different political and societal world is possible, that the great idea of radical change, which for 200 years went by the name of 'revolution' and which has haunted the people of this country for 40 years now, is still quietly spreading, despite the official pretence that it has been completely defeated.

We have to understand one essential point: the reason why this commemoration is complicated and gives rise to contradictory hypotheses is that May '68 itself was an event of great complexity. It is impossible to reduce it to a conveniently unitary image. I would like to transmit to you this internal division, the heterogeneous multiplicity that was May '68.

There were in fact four different 'May '68s'. The strength and the distinctive feature of the French May '68 is that it entwined, combined and superimposed four processes that are, in the final analysis, quite heterogeneous. And the reason why interpretations of that event differ so much is that they usually recall one aspect of it and not the complex totality that gives it its true grandeur.

May '68 was primarily an uprising, a revolt, on the part of young university and school students. That is its most spectacular and best-known aspect, the one that has left the most powerful images, and which we have recently been revisiting: the mass demonstrations, the barricades, the battles with the police, and so on. It seems to me that we have to extract three characteristics from these images of the violence of the repression and the enthusiasm. First, this uprising was at the time a worldwide phenomenon (Mexico, Germany, China, Italy, the USA…). It was therefore not a specifically French phenomenon. Second, it has to be remembered that the university and school students represented a minority of young people. In the 1960s, between 10 and 15 per cent of the age cohort took the baccalaureat. When we talk about 'university and school students', we are talking about a small fraction of young people, and they were very cut off from the broad m asses of working-class youth. Third, the novel elements came into two categories. On the one hand: the extraordinary strength of the ideology and the symbols, the Marxist vocabulary and the idea of revolution. On the other: the acceptance of violence. It may well have been defensive and anti-repressive, but it was still violence. That is what gave the revolt its particular flavour. All this makes up one May '68.

The second, and very different, May '68 was the biggest general strike in the whole of French history. In many respects, it was a classic general strike. It was structured around the big factories, and organized mainly by the unions, and especially the CGT. Its point of reference was the last great strike of this type, namely the Popular Front. We might say that, given its scale and its general features, the strike took place, in historical terms, in a very different context from the youth rebellion. It belongs to a context that I would describe as being more classically 'on the left'. Having said that, it too was inspired by radically innovative elements. There are three such elements.

May '68 an element of revolt that was also internal to youth. These young workers used what were often described as 'wildcat strikes' to distinguish them from the unions' traditional 'days of action'. It should be noted that these 'wildcat strikes' began as early as 1967, and that the workers' May '68 was not simply an effect of the students' May '68, for it anticipated the latter. This temporal and historical link between a movement organized by educated young people and a workers' movement is quite unusual. Second radical element: the systematic use of factory occupations. This was obviously an inheritance of the great strikes of 1936 and 1947, but it took place on a wider scale. Almost all the factories were occupied and decked with red flags. Now that is a great image! You have to have seen what this country looked like with all the factories flying red flags. No one who saw it will ever forget it. Third 'hard' element: -at this time and in the years that followed, the systematic practice of kidnapping bosses, and peripheral battles with 'security' or the CRS. This means that the point I was speaking about just now — a certain acceptance of violence — existed not only within the school and university youth movement, but also within the workers' movement. And finally, it has to be remembered, to end our discussion of the second May '68, that, given all these elements, the question of how long the movement should last and how it should be controlled was acute. There was a contradiction between the CGT's desire to take control, and practices that were steeped in what the historian Xavier Vigna calls 'working-class insubordination', and there were conflicts within the strike movement.

There is a third, and equally heterogeneous, May '68. I will describe it as the libertarian May. It concerns the question of the changing moral climate, of changing sexual relations and of individual freedom. That question was to give rise to the women's movement, and then the movement for homosexual rights and emancipation. It would also have an impact on the cultural sphere, with the idea of a new theatre, new forms of political expression, a new style of collective action, the promotion of happenings and improvisation, and the états généraux du cinéma. This too constitutes a distinctive component of May '68, which we can describe as ideological, and while it did sometimes degenerate into a snobbish and party-going anarchism, it was still in keeping with the general mood of the event. One has only to think of the graphic power of posters that were designed in the studios of the Ecole des beaux-arts in May.

It has to be recalled that these three components remained distinct, even though there were major overlaps between them. There could be significant conflicts between them. There were real clashes between gauchisme and the classic left, as well as between political gauchisme (represented by Trotskyism and Maoism) and cultural gauchisme, which tended to be anarchistic. All this produces an image of May '68 as a contradictory effervescence, and by no means a unitary festival. In May '68, political life was intense, and it was lived in the midst of a multiplicity of contradictions.

I would like to argue that none of these components is the most important, because there was a fourth May '68. This May was crucial, and it still prescribes what the future will bring. It is more difficult to read because it unfolded over time and was not an instantaneous explosion. It is what came after the merry month of May, and it produced some intense political years. Although difficult to grasp if we stick closely to the initial circumstances, it dominated the period between 1968 and 1978, and was then repressed and absorbed by the victory of the Union of the Left and the miserable 'Mitterrand years'. We would do better to speak of a ''68 decade' rather than of 'May '68'.

There are two aspects to the process of the fourth May '68. First, there is the conviction that, from the 1960s onwards, we were witnessing the end of an old conception of politics. Followed by a somewhat halting search for a new conception of politics throughout the decade 1970-80. The difference between this fourth element and the first three is that it was completely obsessed with the question: 'What is politics?' It was at once a very theoretical and very difficult question, but it was also a product of the many immediate experiments to which people committed themselves with such enthusiasm.

The old conception we were trying to break away from at this time was based on the dominant idea (shared by activists of all kinds and in that sense universally accepted inside the 'revolutionary' camp) that there is such a thing as a historical agent offering a possibility of emancipation. It was variously known as the working class, the proletariat and sometimes the people, and though there were debates as to its composition and its size, everyone agreed that it existed. The shared conviction that there is an 'objective' agent inscribed in social reality, and that it offers the possibility of emancipation, is probably the biggest difference between then and now. In the meantime, we have had the bleak 1980s. At the time, we assumed that the politics of emancipation was neither a pure idea, an expression of the will nor a moral dictate, but that it was inscribed in, and almost programmed by, historical and social reality. One of that conviction's implications was that this objective agent had to be transformed into a subjective power, that a social entity had to become a subjective actor. For that to happen, it had to be represented by a specific organization, and that is precisely what we called a party, a working-class or people's party. That party had to be present wherever there were sites of power or intervention. There were certainly wide-ranging discussions about what that party was. Did it already exist, or did it have to be created or re-created? What form would it take? And so on. But there was a basic agreement that there was a historical agent, and that that agent had to be organized. That political organization obviously had a social basis in mass organizations that plunged their roots into an immediate social reality. Which raised the whole question of the role of trade unionism, of its relationship with the party, and of what was meant by a unionism based on the class struggle.

This gave us something that still survives today: the idea that there are two sides to emancipatory political action. First, there are social movements bound up with particular demands. The unions are their natural organizations. Then there is the party element, which consists in being present in all possible sites of power, and of bringing to them, if I can put it this way, the strength and content of the social movements.

This is what might be called the classic conception. In '68, that conception was broadly shared by all actors, and everyone spoke the same language. No matter whether they were actors in dominant institutions or protesters [contestataires], orthodox communists or gauchistes, Maoists or Trotskyists, everyone used the vocabulary of classes, class struggles, the proletarian leadership of struggles, mass organizations and the party. There were, of course, violent disagreements about the legitimacy and significance of these movements. But everyone spoke the same language, and the red flag was everyone's emblem. I insist that, despite its vehement contradictions, May '68 was united under the red flag. May '68 was the last time — at least until today and probably, alas, tomorrow — the red flag flew over the country, the factories and the neighbourhoods. Nowadays, we scarcely dare to unfurl it. Towards the end of the month of May, in 1968, it could even be seen flying from the windows of the apartments of a fraction of the bourgeoisie.

But the secret truth, which was gradually revealed, is that this common language, symbolized by the red flag, was in fact dying out. There was a basic ambiguity about May '68: a language that was spoken by all was beginning to die out. There is a sort of temporary lack of distinction between what is beginning and what is coming to an end, and it is this that gives May '68 its mysterious intensity.

It was, in practical terms, beginning to die because May '68, and even more so the years that followed, was a huge challenge to the legitimacy of the historical organizations of the Left, of unions, parties and famous leaders. Even in the factories, discipline, the usual form of strikes, the labour hierarchy and the unions' authority over the movements were being challenged. Working-class or popular action might at any moment break out of its normal framework and appear in the form of what were seen as anarchic or wildcat initiatives. And, perhaps more important still, there was a radical critique of representative democracy, of the parliamentary and electoral framework, and of 'democracy' in the state, institutional and constitutional form. We must not forget, finally, that May '68's last slogan was "elections piege a cons" ['Elections are a con']. And it was not just an ideological craze. There were specific reasons for this hostility to representative democracy. After a month of student and then unprecedented working-class and popular mobilizations, the government succeeded in organizing elections, and the result was the most reactionary Chamber of Deputies anyone had ever seen. It then became clear to everyone that the electoral dispositif is not just, or even primarily, a representative dispositif: it is also a dispositif that represses movements, anything that is new, and anything that tries to break away from it.

All this — all that 'great critique', to use the language of the Chinese revolutionaries, and it was essentially negative — helped to convey a new vision, a vision of politics that was trying to wrench itself away from the old vision. The attempt to do that is what I call the fourth May '68. The fourth May '68 is seeking to find that which might exist beyond the confines of classic revolutionism. It seeks it blindly because it uses the same language as the language that dominated the conception it was trying to get away from. Hence the (obviously inadequate) thematic of 'betrayal' or 'renunciation': traditional organizations were supposedly betraying their own language. They were — to use the beautiful, colourful language of the Chinese once more — 'raising the red flag to fight the red flag'. The reason why we Maoists called the Parti Communiste Français and its satellites 'revisionist' is that we thought, in the same way that Lenin thought of the Social-Democrats Bernstein and Kautsky, that these organizations were turning the Marxist language they seemed to be using into its opposite. What we failed to see at the time was that it was the language itself that had to be transformed, but this time in an affirmative sense. All these images of a possible link between these different Mays were our centre of gravity as we searched so blindly. The fourth May is the diagonal that links the other three. all the new initiatives that allowed us to circulate between these three heterogeneous movements, and especially between the student movement and the workers' movement, were our treasure-trove.

At the time May '68 was getting under way, I was a lecturer in Reims. The university (which was in fact a small university centre where a first-year foundation course was about the only thing on offer) went on strike. So one day we organized a march to the Chausson factory, which was the biggest factory in town to have gone on strike. That sunny day, we marched in a long, compact procession towards the factory. What were we going to do when we got there? We didn't know, but had a vague idea that the student revolt and the workers' strike should unite, without the intermediary of the classic organizations. We approached the barricaded factory, which was decked with red flags, with a line of trade unionists standing outside the gates, which had been welded shut. They looked at us with mingled hostility and suspicion. A few young workers came up to us, and then more and more of them. Informal discussions got under way. A sort of local fusion was taking place. We agreed to get together to organize joint meetings in town. The meetings went ahead, and became the matrix for the establishment of the 'Chausson solidarity fund'. This was something completely new and had links with the Union des Communistes de France marxiste-léniniste (UCFml), the Maoist organization established in late 1969 by Natacha Michel, Sylvain Lazarus, myself and a fair number of young people.

What happened at the gates of the Chausson factory would have been completely improbable, even unimaginable, a week earlier. The solid union and party dispositif usually kept workers, young people and intellectuals strictly apart in their respective organizations. The local or national leadership was the only mediator. We found ourselves in a situation in which that dispositif was falling apart before our very eyes. This was something completely new, and we were both immediate actors and bewildered spectators. This was an event in the philosophical sense of the term: something was happening but its consequences were incalculable. What were its consequences during the ten 'red years' between 1968 and 1978? Thousands of students, high school students, workers, women from the estates and proletarians from Africa went in search of a new politics. What would a political practice that was not willing to keep everyone in their place look like? A political practice that accepted new trajectories, impossible encounters, and meetings between people who did not usually talk to each other? At that point, we realized, without really understanding it, that if a new emancipatory politics was possible, it would turn social classifications upside down. It would not consist in organizing everyone in the places where they were, but in organizing lightning displacements, both material and mental.

What inspired us was the conviction that we had to do away with places. That is what is meant, in the most general sense, by the word 'communism': an egalitarian society which, acting under its own impetus, brings down walls and barriers; a polyvalent society, with variable trajectories, both at work and in our lives. But 'communism' also means forms of political organization that are not modelled on spatial hierarchies. That is what the fourth May '68 was: all those experiments were testimony to the fact that an impossible upheaval was taking place. It was politically possible to change places, thanks to a new kind of prise de la parole and the tentative search for forms of organization adequate to the novelty of the event.

Ten years later, the process of the Union of the Left and the election of Mitterrand partly repressed all that, and seemed to impose a return to the classical model. We went back to the 'everyone in their place' typical of that model: the parties of the left govern when they can, the unions put forward demands, the intellectuals intellectualize, the workers are in the factories, and so on. As in all returns to order, the misadventures of a 'left' that was in reality already dead fostered a short-lived illusion amongst broad fractions of the people at the very beginning of the 1980s, between 1980 and 1983. The left could not give politics a new lease of life; it was a ghost, and it smelled strongly of decay. We saw that very clearly with the 'austerity' regime of 1982-83, when the workers who went on strike at Talbot were described as Shi'ite terrorists, when the detention centres were opened, when laws were passed to put an end to family immigration, and when the Prime Minister Pierr Bérégovoy embarked upon an unprecedented financial liberalization that began by making France part of a ferocious globalized capitalism (for the systemic crisis in its ferocity, see below).

Having closed that parenthesis, we can say that we are still struggling with the difficult questions raised by May '68. We are the contemporaries of '68 from the point of view of politics, the definition of politics, and the organized future of politics. I therefore use the word 'contemporary' in the strongest possible sense. Of course, the world has changed, and of course categories have changed. The categories 'student youth', 'workers' and 'peasants' now mean something different, and the union and party organizations of those days are now in ruins. But *we have the same problem*, and are the contemporaries of the problem revealed by May '68: the classical figure of the politics of emancipation was ineffective. Those of us who were politically active in the 1960s and 1970s did not need the collapse of the USSR to teach us that. Countless new things have been experimented with, tried out and tested both in theory and in the practices that are dialectically bound up with it. And it still goes on thanks to the energy of a handful of activists, intellectuals and workers — and no distinction is made between them — who appear to be working in isolation. They are the guardians of the future and they are inventing the future. But it cannot be said that the problem has been resolved: what new forms of political organization are needed to handle political antagonisms? As in science, until such time as the problem has not been resolved, you have all sorts of discoveries stimulated by the search for a solution. Sometimes, and for the same reason, whole new theories see the light of day, but the problem itself is still there. We can define our contemporaneity with May '68 in similar terms. It is another way of talking about our fidelity to May '68.

The decisive issue is the need to cling to the historical hypothesis of a world that has been freed from the law of profit and private interest — even while we are, at the level of intellectual representations, still prisoners of the conviction that we cannot do away with it, that this is the way of the world, and that no politics of emancipation is possible. That is what I propose to call the communist hypothesis. It is in fact mainly negative, as it is safer and more important to say that the existing world is not necessary than it is to say, when we have nothing to go on, that a different world is possible. This is a question of modal logic: how, in political terms, can we move from non-necessity to possibility? Because quite simply, if we accept the inevitability of the unbridled capitalist economy and the parliamentary politics that supports it, then we quite simply cannot see the other possibilities that are inherent in the situation in which we find ourselves.

Second, we have to try to retain the words of our language, even though we no longer dare to say them out loud. In '68, these were the words that were used by everyone. Now they tell us: 'The world has changed, so you can no longer use those words, and you know that it was the language of illusions and terror.' 'Oh yes, we can! And we must!' The problem is still there, and that means that we must be able to pronounce those words. It is up to us to criticise them, and to give them a new meaning. We must be able to go on saying 'people', 'workers', 'abolition of private property', and so on, without being considered has-beens, and without considering ourselves as has-beens. We have to discuss these words in our own field, in our own camp. We have to put an end to the linguistic terrorism that delivers us into the hands of our enemies. Giving up on the language issue, and accepting the terror that subjectively forbids us to pronounce words that offend dominant sensibilities, is an intolerable form of oppression.

And finally, we have to realize that all politics is organized, and that the most difficult question is probably that of what type of organization we need. We can resolve it through the multifaceted experiments that begin in '68. For the classic party dispositif, and its social supports, the most important 'battles' were in fact electoral battles, and that is a doctrine that has given all it can give. It is worn out and no longer works, despite the great things it was able to achieve or promote between 1900 and 1960.

We have to discuss our fidelity to May '68 on two levels. At the ideological and historical level, we should draw up our own balance sheet for the twentieth century, so that we can reformulate the emancipation hypothesis in contemporary terms, now that the socialist states have failed. And we also know that new local experiments and political battles are going on, and that they will provide the backdrop that will create these new forms of organization.

This combination of complex ideological and historical work, and theoretical and practical data about new forms of political organization, is the defining feature of our times. I would readily describe this as the era of the reformulation of the communist hypothesis. Then what is the virtue that means most to us? You know that the revolutionaries of 1792-94 used the word 'virtue'. Saint-Just asked the crucial question: 'What do those who want neither virtue nor terror want?' His answer was that they wanted corruption. And that indeed is what today's world asks of us: to accept the wholesale corruption of minds under the yoke of commodities and money. The main political virtue we need to fight that now is courage. Not only courage when we face the police — though we will certainly find that — but the courage to defend and practice our ideas and principles, to say what we think, what we want, and what we are doing.

To put it in a nutshell: we have to be bold enough to have an idea. A great idea. We have to convince ourselves that there is nothing ridiculous or criminal about having a great idea. The world of global and arrogant capitalism in which we live is taking us back to the 1840s and the birth of capitalism. Its imperative, as formulated by Guizot, was: 'Get rich!' We can translate that as 'Live without an idea!' We have to say that we cannot live without an idea. We have to say: 'Have the courage to support the idea, and it can only be the communist idea in its generic sense.' That is why we must remain the contemporaries of May '68. In its own way, it tells us that living without an idea is intolerable. And then a long and terrible resignation set in. Too many people now think that there is no alternative to living for oneself, for one's own interests. Let us have the courage to cut ourselves off from such people. I am a philosopher, so let me tell you something that has been said again and again since Plato's day. It is very simple. I am telling you as a philosopher that we have to live with an idea, and that what deserves to be called a real politics begins with that conviction.

1. We Are Still the Contemporaries of May '68

1. May '68 Revisited, 40 Years On