A Talk on May 1968 and Occupy

Thanks for inviting me. I want to thank you all for coming, and also everyone who made this event possible. I’m going to talk about the situationists and the Occupy movement. Most of you are pretty familiar with the Occupy movement, so I won’t need to say too much about that in advance. Some of you may not be very familiar with the situationists, so I’m going to talk about them a bit, and then after that we can see what kind of connections there may be.

But first, maybe I should put myself in context so you have an idea where I’m coming from. I discovered the situationists back in 1969 and 1970, and was very struck by them. I sought out some local situationist-inspired people and started experimenting with my own situationist-type agitations — as I understood them, which was only partially. Then I went to France to meet some of them and started learning French so I could read their writings, most of which were not available in English. Eventually I ended up going to France many times, and my French got good enough that I could translate a lot of their writings. Most of my own writings and agitations have also been inspired by them. Though I have a few slight differences from them, I’m pretty much in agreement with almost everything they said and did.

The situationists started in Europe in the early 1950s as a tendency issuing out of avant-garde movements like surrealism and dadaism. Where the name “situationist” comes from is that the situationists looked back on surrealism and dadaism and felt that those movements, which had started out with revolutionary intentions — they very explicitly wanted to change the world — had ended up as works of art in museums or on the walls of rich people. The situationists attributed this failure to the fact that these movements had still remained within the “art” context. Even though they were on the cutting edge of art, they were still painting pictures that had a frame around them, or doing things that had a metaphorical frame around them, so to speak — creating something that takes place within a certain time or space and then it’s over. So the situationists said, rather than creating works of art, we want to create situations — a situation being a kind of hypothetical activity that did not have boundaries; something that would keep spreading and triggering other situations, and so on. When they founded the Situationist International in 1957, the term “situationist” referred to that. And with the word “International” they were obviously harkening back to the First International and other revolutionary international groups.

So where they started out was this personal, cultural standpoint rather than political. The political was simply the consequence, the implication. The first thing was: We want to liberate outselves. Here we are right now: what are we going to do? And if you want to liberate yourself, they thought, you need companions. You can’t do it by yourself. And even if you have some companions, you’re still going to run up against obstacles. If you say, “Let’s see what we want to do with this city block, with this building, with this space,” obviously you’re going to run up against the property system; and also against the different kinds of habits and customs people have, you run up against the fact that most people are walking around kind of like sleepwalkers. So their own liberation meant that everybody has to be liberated.

When you look around to see how that might be done, you enter the political or historical realm and realize that other people have been trying to do this for centuries. We can look back and say that at certain moments there were hints of how we might go about it. The Paris Commune, or various revolutions in the early twentieth century. None of them succeeded, so you try to figure out why didn’t they succeed? The Russian Revolution seemed promising at first — but it turned out to be a disaster. So what was the problem there? The Spanish revolution seemed very promising, but it was crushed, so you can’t exactly say they were doing something wrong, they were just overpowered. Anyway, the situationists looked back at these past efforts, trying to piece out what were the mistakes and what might still be valid tactics. I’m not going to go into detail about their evolution, but in general they came to the conclusion that they wanted a society of total self-management; a total democracy that would overthrow capitalism but would do so in a manner that was antiauthoritarian and antistate. They attributed the failure of the Russian Revolution and its follow-ups to the Bolsheviks’ vanguard party notion, the notion that you had to have a party to lead the revolution — a party which ends up being a bureaucracy that heads the state, and so on, with the disastrous results that are well known.

So while maintaining their personal or cultural standpoint, the situationists also had this radical political perspective, with workers’ councils, popular assemblies, wildcat strikes, and so on being the kinds of things they thought were promising.

Fast-forwarding a little bit: in 1966 there was a scandal at the University of Strasbourg in France that brought the situationists above the radar. There was a little pamphlet called On the Poverty of Student Life that came out of it which was reprinted in tens of thousands of copies all over France and made headlines all over Europe. They had pulled off this subversive coup at Strasbourg and nobody knew how to pigeonhole it. What’s going on there? The gist of it was that situationist theses and tactics were being expressed for the first time on a massive scale.

That scandal set the stage for the May 1968 revolt in France, one of the major upheavals of modern times. Most of the people who were knowledgeable participants in that revolt attributed a lot of the influence to the situationists. When you look at the thousands of graffiti that appeared during May ’68, you see that a lot of the slogans were quotes out of the situationist articles and books. Things that a month earlier people would say, “This is impossible to understand, this is some sort of weird, incomprehensible Hegelian-Marxist-surrealist something or other.” Then a very different situation comes up in May 1968 and suddenly those same ideas are on the walls, and people look and say, “Yes, that’s it!” Because it’s not just a question of understanding in a kind of intellectual way, it has to do with your own engagement. If you’re actively engaged in something, if you’re experimenting with something, then these ideas and insights from previous revolts, previous struggles, suddenly take on a new meaning. You can see what they mean, you can see them more practically.

So I’m going to tell you a little bit about what happened in May ’68, and here you’ll start seeing some things that will sound similar to the Occupy movement, and some things that are different. They were rather different situations, but there are some overlaps.

In early 1968 there was a little group called the Enragés who were very explicitly inspired by the situationists. They were students, but they were bad students — students who were in grad school, as they put it, to get the best the schools had to offer, namely: grants. They perpetrated class disruptions, leafleting, etc., in ways that challenged the left as well as the right; in ways that brought in some of the same kind of themes that the situationists had been talking about during the preceeding ten years.

This agitation by the Enragés touched off other agitations. (You may have heard about the March 22nd Movement, which was more well known and widely reported. That was a more timid offshoot of the Enragés.) And these agitations went on for a couple months, becoming more and more scandalous, and at a certain point some of the students were kicked out of the university. This provoked large protests in early May, and the way in which the Enragés had triggered this was such that it quickly went beyond just students. There were huge crowds of people protesting against the disciplining of those radical students, and this segued into street fighting.

That might sound kind of strange. Usually student issues stay within the university and outsiders don’t particularly care what goes on there. Suffice it to say that around May 10 or so, in the area around the Sorbonne, the large Paris university, there were street fights with police, and dozens of barricades, so that they actually had more than a square mile barricaded off.

When I use the term street fighting, you may be thinking, “Oh was it like Occupy Oakland?” No, it wasn’t like Occupy Oakland, because it was actual fighting. It was not just shouting at the police and throwing a bottle or two. I’m not saying this to recommend it or to put down the recent confrontations in Oakland, but just to say that in Paris they were actually fighting the police. They were throwing paving stones. At that time many Paris streets had old-fashioned paving stones and you could just dig them up and throw them. Again, I’m not saying whether this was wise or not. The point is that that’s what happened, and the French people at that time could relate to it.

France at that time, and most of Europe for that matter, had a somewhat different attitude about police. Remember that World War II was not that far back, and the Gestapo and other forces like that had a very bad image. So the police, however brutal they may be — and French police are certainly brutal — they were not carrying around all the heavy-duty armor and high-power weapons like we see with American police. For those historical reasons, whenever there was urban street fighting, a large part of the French population would tend to sympathize with the rioters and root against the police.
Anyway, after more than 24 hours in which there was significant street fighting, the police eventually prevailed, and they arrested around 800 people who were involved in the fighting. But the media coverage was such that lots of people all over France sympathized with the rioters and were outraged at the police. This outrage was so massive that the de Gaulle government pulled back the police. It was analogous (but on a much larger scale) to what happened at Occupy Oakland October 25 and 26: There was such massive outrage about the police brutality that the government just pulled them back.

And when they pulled them back, all the people (including the people who had been arrested and then let go) converged on the Sorbonne and occupied it. The Sorbonne is a huge university — it would be like occupying the whole UC Berkeley campus. And what they did then, they did not just have it for students. They invited everybody to come in and take part. That was one of the things that made a significant difference compared with previous student movements. So lots of other people came in and they had a large general assembly in a Sorbonne auditorium that could hold thousands of people.
Then other people started occupying other buildings. There wasn’t yet a specific call to “occupy buildings,” people just thought it was a good idea: The buildings were empty and you could take one over if you had some use for it. Radical groups took buildings and people in other cities in France started taking over their universities and other buildings. And in that kind of chaotic process, around May 14, 15, 16, in the Sorbonne general assemblies they were electing committees to take care of different things, as is necessary when you’ve got thousands of people, and also a Sorbonne Occupation Committee that would be reelected every day.

Spontaneously, like during the Free Speech Movement when they were gathered around that police car on the Berkeley campus,[*] the people in the Sorbonne general assembly decided that anybody could speak for three minutes (it’s interesting that the May ’68 people spontaneously came up with the same time limit as the FSM). So a lot of people spoke about what they proposed for the assembly to do. Then after a bunch of those statements they had a vote to see who was going to be on the Occupation Committee to coordinate things till the next day. On the first day one of the Enragés, René Riesel, was among those who were elected — on the basis of the program that he had proposed, namely: total direct democracy in the Sorbonne, and calling for occupation of the factories and the formation of workers’ councils.

Some time after that first Occupation Committee was elected, several of the members drifted away and Riesel and one or two others were left with all the responsibility. Following the mandate they felt they had, they issued this press release:

Comrades, Considering that the Sud-Aviation factory at Nantes has been occupied for two days by the workers and students of that city, and that today the movement is spreading to several factories (Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne in Paris, Renault in Cléon, etc.), THE SORBONNE OCCUPATION COMMITTEE calls for the immediate occupation of all the factories in France and the formation of Workers’ Councils. Comrades, spread and reproduce this appeal as quickly as possible. Sorbonne, May 16, 1968, 3:30 p.m. [SI Anthology, p. 435]

Under most circumstances an appeal like that would be considered delirious; and in fact many of the people who were present probably thought that: “What, we just got here and you’re talking about subverting the whole country?” But notice how they phrased it: “Considering that” people have already started doing these things. That is, they were noting that this appeal was based on things they already saw developing, not just something they came up with out of their heads. And the fact is that within two weeks of that appeal, more than ten million workers had occupied just about every factory in France. And France at that time only had about 50 million people. In other words, this was most of the workers in France, at least those in the bigger cities and factories.

Now when these factories were occupied, the process was complex. But one of the things that was not very complex was the role of the unions. The unions were totally against this movement. And the Communist Party and the Socialist Party were totally against it. The Communist Party in particular was rabidly denouncing this whole movement that I’ve been talking about, saying that it was the work of provocateurs, and that workers should be responsible and pay no attention to these anarchistic things that were going on.

Bureaucratic, hierarchical institutions sense when they are being challenged. Needless to say, a movement with everybody occupying all the factories and forming their own direct-democratic assemblies leaves the unions nowhere. Ditto with any party that’s claiming to lead the proletariat and so on. In the case of the Communist Party, they were vehemently against it. The unions in the factories were also against it, but they had to be a little more subtle about it, because they were right there with the workers. So when this stuff started happening, when the workers were saying, “Hey, are we going to occupy our factory?” Then the union bureaucrats are like, “Er . . . oh yeah, let’s do that, we want to express our solidarity with blah blah blah” or some other meaningless thing. Anyway, one way or another the bureaucrats insinuated themselves into the movement and put the brakes on. But to do this they also had to pretend to be part of it. Like, “Oh yeah, maybe we’ll call a one-day symbolic general strike against de Gaulle or something.” Well, this movement had nothing to do with de Gaulle. That was totally irrelevant.

So the result is that you have millions of workers striking, and they’re in the factories rather than staying at home so the companies can’t call in scabs. But then the question is, where do we go from here? How do we organize this? But as long as the factories were isolated and the union bureaucrats were still more or less in control, the workers in each factory didn’t really know much about what was going on in other factories. And the unions made sure to keep the gates locked — they said, “We don’t want any provocateurs to get in here!”

Now, to come to the Occupy movement, I think that many of you can already see some parallels here, and also some differences. One of the parallels is that there was a dynamic initial action in an important city — Occupy Wall Street in New York and the Sorbonne in Paris — and almost magically this spread, by imitation. It didn’t spread by missionary work, by people saying please support us or something like that. It spread because people saw something interesting happening that they could relate to — maybe for the first time in their lives — and people all over the country started doing likewise, more or less, as far as they could figure out what to do. In both cases we have the real dynamic sense that people are waking up who have been sleepwalking pretty much all their lives — that’s not a criticism, that’s just how capitalism works: like we’re sort of going around in a stupor all the time. We’re not used to using our minds, we’re not used to experimenting, we’re not used to questioning things very much, and if we do question things we do so in predictable ways.

What was unique in both of these movements was that people actually entered into a collective experiment. It’s messy and complicated; you can look back and make fun of all sorts of features of both movements. But to me that collective experimentation is what is overwhelmingly important in the two movements — actually much more important than asking what program they espoused. Whether or not they declared themselves against capitalism or the state or whatever, to me that’s secondary. What’s important is the dynamic of this kind of movement.

In the first leaflet that I wrote when the Occupy movement was just starting, there’s one thing I stressed and want to stress again here: the autonomy of each Occupy. This is totally obvious, nobody can disagree, but oddly enough I’ve never heard anyone else even mention it, let alone call attention to how significant it is. This is a little different even than in France. Every single Occupy in the United States is totally autonomous. Can you think of any other movement that worked that way? There have been other mass movements in the United States, but they generally start someplace, then sweep across the country. Like, say some people are opposed to some war. They start locally doing some protests or whatever, but almost immediately they start coordinating nationally, and soon there’s some big group or coalition. The slogans and the plans and the scheduling generally come from that group, and the role of individual groups is just to support that national coalition or to join together for a march at Washington DC or something like that. You can think of all these movements — anti-apartheid, anti-nuke, anti-globalization, or against various wars — but the Occupy Wall Street thing was in Wall Street and then it just popped up all over the place.

I’m originally from Springfield, Missouri. It’s in the Bible Belt, it’s a place where Bush is still popular, for example. It’s very provincial. But now there’s an Occupy Springfield Missouri! And it didn’t happen because some emissary from Occupy Wall Street went back there and started it, it was formed by people in Springfield. And some of those people were Republicans. Most of them weren’t, of course, but I just mention that to make a point. This is not necessarily the expected left-versus-right scenario. All kinds of different people in different places sensed that there was a new paradigm here, there was a new possibility, there was a new movement that suddenly made new experiments possible. They might look to other places like Occupy Wall Street for inspiration. But they might also say “We’ll do it our way. They’re doing that way over there and that’s fine for them, but let’s do it a little differently here . . .”

But I think you’re all pretty familiar with the Occupy movement, so I think we can segue into the questions at this point.

Q: Were the situationists interested in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts?

A: Definitely. Some of the situationists’ critiques of the spectacle, of modern alienation, derive a lot from Marx’s writings on alienation.

Q: Was there a relation between Occupy and the Arab Spring?

A: The Occupy movement was directly inspired by the Arab Spring and other similar movements in Greece and Spain.

Q: There have been countless uprisings over the millennia, and now we’re seeing this new marvel of being able to communicate instantaneously. Previously, there might have been an uprising in one place and people in the neighboring regions wouldn’t even have known about it. What’s your impression of the effect of these modern means of instantaneous communication. Do they help out or not?

A: I think they help out a lot. I know there’s also the common criticism that people get addicted to their computer screens and don’t relate to each other personally and so on, and of course that’s also happening. But as far as radical movements are concerned, everybody knows that the Arab Spring movements in Tunisia and Egypt and so on would hardly have existed without social media; or at least they wouldn’t have been so well known or spread so fast. Or to take the case of the factory occupations in May ’68: If there had even been just cell phones then, things might have played out very differently. Some worker might call his friend over in another factory and say, “Hey what’s happening over in your factory?” “Oh, we’re doing such-and-such.” “Hmm, that sounds like a good idea, maybe we can try that here.” But instead, they had to go through the unions bureaucrats, of all people. They call up the factory and a bureaucrat answers and says, “No, nothing’s happening, go home, we’re doing our occupation here just fine, don’t bother us.”

Q: During May ’68 why didn’t the workers, once they were occupying their factories, why didn’t they start working again in a self-managed way and prove what they could do?

A: That’s what the situationists urged. But there’s only so much you can do. Bear in mind that when we have a gathering at Occupy Oakland, it’s self-selected, a few hundred or a few thousand people who are really gung ho. Imagine if you had all of Oakland in such a situation, wondering What shall we do? and you tried to propose to do this or that, and there are thousands of people who are totally clueless, you have just ordinary average people who are maybe just now beginning to be jostled a little bit by the movement. They’re working all the time and trying to take care of their families, and when they’re off work they just want to take it easy. People’s usual impulse is to get away from their workplace as much as possible and zone out with beer and TV or whatever. It was amazing enough that ten million French workers worked up enough enthusiasm to occupy their factories. It takes a little while to even conceive of the idea “Let’s take it over this factory for ourselves and run it.” And then in those factories you’re depending on the union bureaucrats to relay the news to you, and those bureaucrats are telling you, “Keep calm, go home, pay no attention to these outside agitators.” The situationists did indeed try to break through that, but it’s a hard nut to crack.

Q: So where is it going to go? After 45 years what is the influence of the situationists?

A: I would say that the single biggest influence is that back in the 1950s and ’60s the situationists emphasized participation. That’s the flip side of their famous critique of the society of the spectacle, which is a critique of the modern form of capitalism that renders people more and more passive. The implication is that to break out of that passivity, you have to participate. And despite people’s impression about the sixties — the counterculture was indeed pretty participatory, but the New Left was not so much. When I was in New Left actions, there was usually some leader up there on a platform giving a speech, and you participated by going to the march or demonstration and listening to those speeches. If you said, “Can I do something more?” they might say, “Well here, hand out these leaflets for us” — leaflets that you didn’t write and that you might not even know much about. It was only a few people like the situationists, or the Diggers or the New York Motherfuckers, who were saying, “Hey, get in there, experiment, do it yourself, even if you make mistakes, make your own mistakes, learn from it, don’t rely on some leader up there to tell you what to do.” That seems totally obvious now, but back then it wasn’t so obvious. So that’s one thing that spread from the situationists into the antinuke movement and all these other movements in the more recent decades that have picked up on that antihierarchical, participatory thing that they inspired.

Q: In May 1968 were there provocateurs? And then afterwards was there any rightwing backlash?

A: The whole thing happened so fast and spread so rapidly that it was beyond provocateurs. If enough things are going on, it’s hard for provocateurs to get any leverage. But if things narrow down, if everyone’s focused on just one issue or event, then it’s child’s play for a few provocateurs to get in and shift the mood or the debate. And it just takes one provocateur to throw a molotov cocktail or plant a bomb or whatever and totally stun everyone and distract attention from everything else. But in France that would have been totally irrelevant, because during the street fighting there actually was fighting, so what would a provocateur have done in that situation? And when the fights were over, when they stopped fighting and proceeded with occupying and assembling and reaching out to the factories, any appeal for violence would have been a glaringly obvious provocation. Similarly, once the Occupy movement had spread all over the place, its nature as a spontaneous, popular, democratic, nonviolent movement was so overwhelmingly evident that anybody proposing “Let’s go out and do a violent action” would have been so obviously a provocateur, or an idiot, that nobody would have paid any attention.
As far as what happened afterwards, no, there wasn’t a backlash. As the situationists noted, one of the amazing things about May 1968 was that in all history there had probably never been such a massive revolt that did not succeed but that also did not get crushed. After the movement was over a few people were arrested, but that provoked murmurs of resuming the revolt and the authorities backed down and released everyone. And that was despite the fact that the buildings had been totally illegally occupied all over the country.

Q: Do you know what the conditions of those French workers were at that time?

A: Their condition was as good or better than usual. The economy was running fine. Before the May revolt no one noticed any particular crisis. In fact, the situationists poked fun at the kind of leftists who are always on the lookout for some economic crisis. After May ’68 certain leftist groups inevitably said: “Aha, as we can see in these statistical tables, back in December 1967 there was a slight downturn of this or that. That accounts for the revolt.” In contrast to crises that used to be earthshaking and undeniable, like the Great Depression, they have to use a magnifying glass to find these supposed statistical dips. The May revolt had nothing to do with the economy. And it had nothing to do with the government, either. There wasn’t any Vietnam War or anything else that people were protesting against. Like the Occupy movement, May ’68 was not a protest against some particular grievance, but a reaction against a whole system that was continuing to produce innumerable grievances; an insane and anachronistic system that was preventing people from having pleasant and meaningful lives. That’s the one big similarity of the two movements.

Slightly edited transcipt of a talk by Ken Knabb at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Oakland on February 5, 2012. For a video recording of it, see www.bopsecrets.org/videos.htm.

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