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LATIN AMERICA: The Legacy of May ’68

Analysis by Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, May 28 2008 (IPS) - Nearly 190 years after the storming of the Bastille, Zhou En-lai, premier of China from 1949 to his death in 1976, said it was “too soon to tell,” when asked about the significance of the French Revolution. Perhaps the same can be said of May 1968.

Four decades after the events that shook the government of General Charles de Gaulle in France, there are those who see them from a distance as a pointless student uprising, while for others they represent a lost opportunity to bring about a fundamental shift in history.

But basically, May ‘68 is associated with an explosion of student protests that defied the world of grown-ups and their social and cultural mores, but ended up being co-opted by the establishment. The slogan “Let’s be realistic, demand the impossible”, gave way to “politics is the art of the possible”.

“El Mayo de los Pingüinos” (The May of the Penguins) is the title of a book released this month in Chile by two young journalists, Andrea Domedel and Macarena Peña, who deftly outline the birth and “domestication” of the high school student movement that brought the Chilean government of socialist President Michelle Bachelet to bay two years ago.

Although there are significant differences between the two cases, comparisons can be drawn between the 1968 student barricades in Paris and the demonstrations mounted by thousands of high school students in Chile, known as “penguins” because of their white-on-black school uniforms, who 38 years later replaced the cobble stones of the Latin Quarter with blogs, instant messaging, and cell-phone text messages.

Chilean sociologist Manuel Antonio Garretón wrote in the forward to the book that both events demonstrated that student movements do not in and of themselves generate social change or give rise to new policies, and that no matter how noisy they are, they tend to peter out.

In his controversial commentary, Garretón said that just as the “penguin” movement dwindled in 2006 as excitement over the approaching world football cup in Germany grew, the proximity of summer vacations in France led to the demobilisation of the student protests in Paris in 1968, in the midst of an impossible alliance with the parties opposed to de Gaulle (1890-1970), who governed that country from 1959 to 1969.

Whatever the case, the events of May ‘68 are open to a broad range of interpretations, being seen as an exercise in anarchism and nihilism by some and as the seed of a utopia that is still struggling to burst forth and become an instrument of political transformation by others.

Four decades later, the French Communist Party (PCF) and its then secretary-general Waldeck Rochet (1905-1983) are still considered responsible for taking the air out of the riots by the “bourgeois” students who were undermining the theoretical role of the proletarian vanguard.

On May 3, the day the first of many protests was held at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and other student activists, L’Humanité, the official publication of the PCF, stated in an editorial that the student rioters were “false revolutionaries who must be unmasked.”

But by May 15, when Renault’s 15,000 workers went on strike and occupied the car maker’s plants, locking managers in as well in some cases, it was clear that the Communists and the parliamentary left in general had been left behind by their grassroots bases.

The general strike, which eventually involved roughly two-thirds of the country’s workforce, came close to toppling de Gaulle who, however, refused to step down and instead made two moves that would eventually consolidate the Gaullists’ hold on power.

The first, negotiated with the trade unions and the PCF, was a May 27 announcement of a 10 percent across-the-board wage hike and a 35 percent increase in the minimum wage. The second came three days later, when de Gaulle announced early elections.

Rochet and Socialist leader François Mitterrand (1916-1996) accepted the electoral challenge, convinced that French voters would turn to the left to pull the country out of the crisis. But instead, the “silent majority” gave a landslide victory to the Gaullists, who won 358 of 487 seats in the legislature.

In this return to the status quo, France’s Communists took refuge in orthodoxy and ended up cutting their ties to the new left, while forging closer links to the Soviet Union, and backing the August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which cut short the “Prague spring”.

Years later, Georges Marchais (1920-1997), Rochet’s successor, would join an alliance with the Socialists that would bring Mitterrand to the presidency from 1981 to 1995, in an echo of the Popular Unity experiment in Chile, which was brought to an end by the 1973 coup d’etat staged by General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

Marchais did not fully achieve the status of reformist in the international Marxist movement. In supporting the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the PCF went against the current of Eurocommunist leaders critical of Moscow like Enrico Berlinguer of Italy and Santiago Carrillo of Spain.

The regression of Communism in Western Europe, and France in particular, could be seen today as one of the invisible lessons of May ’68, which also had diverse impacts on youth and leftist movements in Latin America.

In this region as well, France’s student rebellion took on a mythic quality and loaned not only chants and slogans but also a bit of theory to an emerging new left largely inspired by legendary Argentine-Cuban guerrilla leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and to the struggles of university students.

Opposition to outmoded authoritarian higher educational systems is almost a century old in Latin America, if one takes into account the “Grito de Córdoba”, a manifesto issued by students at the National University in that central Argentine city that gave rise to the national university reform movement in June 1918.

In August 1967, just nine months before May ’68, students at the conservative Catholic University in Chile, inspired by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), demanded in-depth changes.

The occupation of the university by student protesters was disparaged in an editorial in the El Mercurio newspaper as a “Marxist plot against the hierarchies of the higher education system.”

On Aug. 16, 1967, the students hung a gigantic banner in front of the central university building, reading “Chile: El Mercurio Is Lying”.

The conservative newspaper, one of the oldest Spanish language papers in continuous publication in the world, did not lose its position as the country’s most influential paper, but the Catholic University students’ slogan has not stopped haunting it.

The influence of the left in the local student movement grew along with the struggles for more democratic higher education in Chile, and bolstered by May ’68, the movement took on a state of permanent agitation, demanding more democratic rules for university admission and co-government by students, professors and alumni.

The election of the Popular Unity government in September 1970 coincided with the entry into force of a university reform that gave student votes in elections of university authorities 25 percent more weight.

All of this was swept away by the Sept. 11, 1973 coup, the culmination of a destabilisation strategy against the government of socialist president Salvador Allende, carried out with the active participation of El Mercurio.

While the military regime cracked down on dissent in a “dirty war” in which more than 3,000 people were killed and “disappeared”, dictator Pinochet took over the universities and proclaimed “Ladies and gentlemen, we come to the university to study, not engage in politics.”