The French Revolt of 1968

Introduction and why France matters

Chair: This week's forum is a forum about the revolutionary developments in France. The speaker is Peter Camejo, who is a former student leader at the University of California and still a student leader in Berkeley, and the Socialist candidate for senator in California. I don't think I have to introduce him anymore, so I'll just turn it over to Peter Camejo.

Camejo: The topic for tonight is France, and the events that are going on now in France, and that have been going on since the month of May, are so important that I think it would be fair to say that 99.9 percent of the American public do not understand what they mean. That may not be surprising, but something we've got to try to correct is the fact that, to a great extent, radicals in the United States do not understand it. Part of the reason for this is that in our generation we've seen many things. We've seen the Cuban Revolution, we've seen Che Guevara, we've seen the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. So if tomorrow the radio were to announce that the guerrillas were about to take Guatemala, everybody would be all electrified and excited, and you'd call a meeting to discuss it, and you'd have a huge meeting, and everybody would be excited. Now, the fact that we have something similar to the events in Russia of February 1917, which opened up a revolutionary period which led to the workers taking over Russia, happening in France doesn't quite create as much interest. Yet its importance, if a socialist transformation were to take place in France, if the workers get power, is that the impact on a world scale would make an event in Guatemala look totally secondary and almost inconsequential in comparison.

Part of the reason why American radicals should pay very close attention to France is that if there were a victory in France today, by its implications, you can't even begin to measure them. It would probably bring an immediate end to the war in Vietnam, for one thing. It would probably bring an immediate continental crisis for all of Europe, and I'm going to prove that to you tonight, I hope, and I'm going to try to give a little history. We all know that France exists, but when something like this comes along, we all discover we really know nothing about France. I have to admit that I even had to go look up the population of France. I had forgotten even what it was. One tends to very easily forget. As I went back and tried to read up and find out, I was just amazed at the number of little things that I remember happening at one time or another, but which totally disappeared from my mind, and I'm sure from other people's.

First of all, I'd like to try to answer the question, why France? Why is this happening in France and not, let's say, in some other European country? There are some very important things about France that one should know to get the picture. So let me give a little background to the drama that's now taking place, which right now, by the way, is moving into what do you call it, a curtain break, from Act I to Act II. So we can take our time now and study Act I very carefully. This is probably going to be a long show. I don't think it's going to be quick, because of certain subjective problems that exist in France, which I'll discuss later.

French capitalism between the wars

To give you the background, France was the second biggest world power in the nineteenth century. But what happened was that it developed its capitalism, as opposed to American or British, and even as compared to Germany later, not on its profits being invested within its own country and building up huge industrial power, very, very heavy basic industry. It tended to live off its colonies, and to make such a much higher profit rate in the colonies than inside France itself, that to a certain extent its economic growth, especially after the turn of the century and the First World War, became rather stilted compared to Germany and most certainly the United States. This is especially part of the problem that France faced with the fact that it has a fuel problem. It has a shortage of coal and oil, and it's hard for any country to develop a very big, heavy, solid, balanced industry without a good fuel supply.

It's because of this that the ruling class of France became a little different from the ruling classes of the other countries. After the First World War, and as the Second World War approached, it was very much aware of the fact that it had become a secondary power. It was no longer the deciding power between the imperialist blocs, and in fact it had to maneuver between the contending imperialist forces, the Germans on one side, England on the other, and the United States also. The bourgeoisie of France has what you might call very flexible politics. When the Second World War broke out and it became evident that German imperialism was on the upswing in the first stages, they switched over and adapted themselves to German imperialism. If you remember, France fell very fast and very easily. The reason it fell so fast and so easily was that the ruling class of France had already degenerated to such a point that it could not even organize its own defense. In fact, it didn't want to organize its own defense of its territory as opposed to the Germans, because it was so weak that in the 1936 to 1938 period there was a strike wave quite similar to what's happening now, where thousands of factories were taken over by the workers throughout the country, and something very similar had almost resulted in the workers taking state power. The ruling class of France was much more worried about their own working class rising up and throwing them out than they were about whether Germany overran them, or the United States overran them, or Britain overran them. As long as they were going to keep capitalists in there, they didn't care who overran them.

So one of the things they did was, they were, for instance, totally backward and didn't want to modernize. Like I said, they based their investments on the colonies, not on modernizing themselves. Do you know that the French army depended on pigeons to carry the messages when the Second World War began? They hadn't even organized their radio. When the Germans began organizing their armored divisions, whole armored divisions with the tanks and everything, the French officers said, this is ridiculous, that won't work, and they ordered a handful of tanks and stuff like that. I think the majority of the soldiers in the French army at the time of the beginning of the Second World War, if I remember, I may be wrong about this fact, had guns made from the war in the 1980s [?]. That was the rifles they were carrying. They had one good rifle they hadn't made any bullets for, because the staff had been arguing about which bullet was better and hadn't gotten around to producing any. You can go into this in detail, it's very interesting. But as the German imperialists marched over, the ruling bourgeoisie, which had always been wavering anyway... I don't want to go over the whole history of France, it would just take too long. So if I say something real quick that seems out of context, just excuse me, and you can ask me during the question period if it strikes you.

The fall of France, Vichy and de Gaulle

After the general strike and everything that took place in 1936, a general reaction set in, which I don't want to explain at this time. Any worker who got up in any factory and said, gee, I think that I'm against the war, I'm not for the French patriots, was immediately imprisoned. But in the ruling circles they were all talking that way, about maybe it'll be better when the Germans get here, at least we'll put the workers down, and stuff like that. When the Germans arrived at the gates of Paris, the bourgeoisie raised the slogan, what was it, not one inch, I think it was. In other words, they were going to fight house to house, not one inch, some slogan like that. The concept was you're going to really fight. But somebody must have pointed out to them that if they did that, all their factories and all their investments would probably be blown up in the fighting. So they changed their mind, and all of a sudden the word came out that Paris was to be an open city, which means the Germans could just walk in, with the whole army and everybody ordered not to resist so the city won't be destroyed. Of course, at that point they discover all the monuments and all the pictures and everything they want to save, and they give it a cultural cover.

Soon after that, the majority of the bourgeoisie sides with playing the role of a satellite for German imperialism, and the Vichy government is set up. You've got to understand, the Germans come in, the fascist Germans, the Nazi Germans, they don't say, you're a French owner of this factory, now you can't own it anymore. No, they keep the French management running it, they're getting the profit, but now they're supplying the German war machine and they fit into the German economy. It is true that in some areas the Germans moved in on heavy industry. Whatever industry there was, they wanted Germany to have the heavy industry and France to be a country only of light industry and an agricultural base to feed Germany. But as a whole they permitted the French capitalists to continue running their businesses. That's true even in northern France, and most certainly in southern France, where the French bourgeoisie still ruled through their own Vichy government. Pro-German, not fascist, semi-fascist. It was not quite the same, though at the last stages of the war that changes.

There was one enterprising general who didn't agree with the majority of the ruling class in France in setting up the Vichy government and playing a role of second fiddle to Germany, and he flew over to England, and from England said, fight on. His name was de Gaulle. De Gaulle was a general with sort of monarchist tendencies. He would sort of like to see a return to kings and queens and stuff like that. No one knows exactly, because that's what the word was at the time. But once he got over to England, and they were fighting German fascism, it was very important for him to take the coloring of being a democrat, so he was all for democracy. It was just him and a handful of other guys making statements. He had no power, no nothing, nobody knew who the hell he was. Most of the other generals were sort of mad at him because he broke ranks. They all switched over and joined the Germans.

One of these generals that joined the Germans went over to take over Algeria. His name was Darlan. The American imperialists, who were fighting against fascism for democracy and all things good, motherhood and apple pie, came and invaded Algeria to liberate Algeria from fascist control. The way they liberated Algeria from fascist control is they got together with Darlan, who had been arrested by some overly enthusiastic pro-democratic French, and they turned Darlan over to the American authorities, expecting him to be immediately tried and shot or something, since he had shot all types of people fighting against the Nazis. They had a several-day discussion with Darlan in which he discovered the values of democracy and freedom and decided that he no longer liked German imperialism but in fact that American imperialism was rather stronger. So he switched sides, and he was left in his post as head of Algeria and the whole apparatus set up by the pro-Nazi French generals. That was the famous Darlan case, in which the American liberals went wild because they kept saying, Roosevelt's a liberal, how's he getting along with this guy Darlan?

That wasn't bad enough. There was another guy who switched over from France, the guy who brought the Gestapo into Vichy France, who had organized the police methods and established the Gestapo methods for Vichy France. He was put in charge of the city of Algiers by these now pro-American people who are running Algeria. Of course, the Algerians had no say in what was happening in Algeria. This was all part of liberating Europe and Africa from fascism and establishing democracy. The bourgeoisie in France watched the way the war went and decided the Americans were going to win. They started switching. As soon as they started switching over again, the Germans overran Vichy France and established their direct administration, because they could not do this.

What the United States wanted to do was have Vichy France switch. They negotiated and they tried to get it, not to disrupt. In other words, you'd have the same generals who didn't defend France, who then became pro-German, have them then become pro-American, and you'd have the same government, the same administration, just switch sides. But a problem developed, and that was that the French people intervened. They began to fight the Germans on their own, and their own Vichy government, to try to overthrow it and establish a government which would be more to their liking. This made the value of de Gaulle go up. It's like his stock. Because de Gaulle was a hero to these people. They didn't like Darlan and so forth. And the United States saw the tremendous value of having a government in France that the people would listen to. This was very true for the French millionaires, too. The Vichy government had become totally unpopular, was about to be overthrown. The government in Algiers, Darlan's government, was totally unpopular. The only man or section of the ruling class which had some popularity among the French masses and was pro-capitalist and would defend the rights of these millionaires who had switched sides now twice was de Gaulle. So he very rapidly rose in prominence.

He took over the Algerian government, first with a coalition. By the way, Darlan was assassinated and somebody else took over for him soon after this deal. The first deal was made, but this other guy, I forget his name, got together with de Gaulle and they split it fifty-fifty. De Gaulle's followers got fifty percent of the government, the other guy got fifty percent of the government, and they ruled Algeria together. It was during that time that they took the right to vote away from the Jewish people in Algeria, and that was what they called a concession to democracy and so forth. Gradually de Gaulle wins out, and the ones connected with the Vichy government are thrown out of the government of Algeria, and de Gaulle takes over the whole thing.

When de Gaulle does that, simultaneous with his getting control of Algeria, the Lebanese declared their independence. They just arbitrarily passed a motion that they were independent. The first act of de Gaulle was to crush the Lebanese, and send people in, and have the government people who did that arrested. As it turned out, they had a discussion, and they settled the Lebanese question with the Lebanese sort of getting independent. The reason for that was that Britain and the United States moved in and said, no, look, de Gaulle, don't get carried away. Your country's overrun by the enemy. You guys aren't going to have any more colonies. They're ours from now on, including Lebanon, but now we make arrangements here. And de Gaulle said, but what could he do? So he let the United States and England settle the problems in Lebanon.

The Liberation, the Communist Party and the return of de Gaulle

France came out of the Second World War with the bourgeoisie once again fearing not so much Germany or the United States and so forth, but the workers of France, just like they had just before. They had been so weak, and they had seen the danger of the workers taking power. First of all, when the American troops arrived in France, city after city, including Paris, was liberated by the underground. They drove the Germans out. Actually the Germans were retreating, so it's not like they drove them out under different types of conditions; they drove them out when the Germans were losing anyway, but they drove them out, and they took over the cities. I'm trying to give you a quick history of the bourgeoisie in France. Later on I'll describe even more briefly the history of the working-class movement. I'm just trying to show you their problems so you can understand why things broke out in France, why it's such a weak link in the whole setup.

When they came back, the bourgeoisie had a big problem. As the Germans left, the workers in each factory were there, and many of them had arms, and there were no American troops there to protect the owners and the management, who had all collaborated with the Nazis. Simultaneous with the Nazi army withdrawing, management withdrew and disappeared. They didn't go to Germany, but just went into hiding. They had always explained to the workers how it was necessary to help the Germans; as one writer put it at that time, it was necessary for them to go home and think up some other reason for having collaborated with the Germans to explain to the workers. So what happened was that the workers took over the factories and started running them for themselves. Fifteen workers walked in and called up the other workers and got the Renault plants reopened, a huge one in Paris, thirty thousand workers. The subway workers made up their own schedule, set the whole thing up, and applied to the provisional government, which was set up as soon as de Gaulle arrived. Now here was the question in France: who was going to run France? Was private property going to be respected, the property of the same people who had been pro-Nazi back and forth, or were the workers now going to own the factories, take over?

It was a critical moment. There were some right-wing forces in France. There was de Gaulle's army. There was a whole mess of different underground groups. Most of them worked in class terms, though some were not. Some would defend private property. So the key to that period was how to disarm the workers in order to prevent them from taking power, and how to get the companies back into the hands of the owners. In order to do that you had to have someone in the government that people had trust in. So first they put de Gaulle in. He became the head of the government. But that wasn't enough, because you needed someone that at least had control over the apparatus of the armed workers, and that was only one organization, the Communist Party. So the bourgeoisie called on the Communist Party to help them disarm the workers, and they successfully made it. They disarmed the workers. They made it through that period.

Now, they had another problem. The French economy collapsed. It was disastrous. Nothing was happening. It wouldn't work. De Gaulle talked about how great France was going to be, how there was going to be no more French imperialism. It was going to be the French Union. That's when people who like each other work together, not like one man over another. So Vietnam and Algeria and all of them would no longer belong to France; they belong to the French Union, and France would just be another country in the French Union. So the great revolutionary Communist Party of France said, oh, well, that's different. In that case, we support it. When the bourgeoisie in France wanted to send troops over to Vietnam, which had now also declared its independence, it was an independent country, it was a French minister of armaments, a Communist Party member, who requested the budget for the funds to send the expeditionary force of French soldiers to retake Vietnam. Because there was no more imperialism, you see. This was just for the French Union. With the help of the Communist Party they were able to try to begin, but it didn't work.

De Gaulle tried to maintain independence from the United States, and the bourgeoisie in France for a little while tried, and that just didn't work, and by 1947 they had to say, okay, we cannot be really independent, we have to be pro-United States and accept whatever the United States wants. In return the United States gave the Marshall Plan and revived the economy by just pumping billions of dollars, I think it turned into a total of thirteen billion dollars in the next years, into the economy of France. A prosperity began in France and the other parts of Europe in the mid-'50s. This prosperity changed a lot of things, and I'm going to try to go a little faster now, so I'm not going to go over it. By the way, this is where the gold problem begins, in the mid-'50s. Maybe during the question period [?] I'll explain why de Gaulle is so hung up on gold, why it's such a valuable little weapon for him.

But once again the bourgeoisie found itself very weak. It had a parliamentary democracy in which the workers' parties, the Communist parties, the Socialist parties, played a very heavy role. It was losing the colonial wars. It lost in Vietnam. Then it just couldn't make any headway in Algeria. And its economy was once again weak. And once again the bourgeoisie, in its ever-wavering back and forth, trying to make concessions to keep the working class from overthrowing it or trying to be tough, decided to move in the direction of being tough and favored the setting up of a more direct rule by de Gaulle again. So de Gaulle came back into power in 1958. Let me say that the groundwork for de Gaulle's coming back into power was laid in Parliament with the support of both the Socialists and the Communist Party. I won't go over that right now. So de Gaulle comes back into power, and things went well for him at first. There was an economic upswing in the early '60s, and everybody was very happy with him. But an economic downswing began in '65.

De Gaulle's maneuvers and the strike waves

This second downswing laid the groundwork, plus the fact that France had the regime of a de Gaulle, for the explosion that took place. I want to go over a little bit what happened in this period so you can grasp how something like the biggest general strike in the history of the world, encompassing a larger layer of workers and going for a longer period of time, took place in a country in which, as late as the month of April, anyone, if you had asked anywhere in the world, would have said to you that France was living under prosperity. There wasn't any depression like the 1930s, or some major crisis, or runaway inflation like Germany in 1923. Basically it was under prosperity. And you should have such a mammoth outbreak of class struggle.

First of all, let me just go over briefly what de Gaulle did. After the prosperity came back in the middle of the 1950s, the French bourgeoisie once again tried to free itself a little bit from the United States, because the United States economically was starting to really move in, and so the French bourgeoisie was going to be knocked out, not only out of its colonies, but out of France. Many key plants and industries in Europe, the United States now controls the majority of, like, for instance, the whole computer industry. They wanted to maneuver a little bit. And what the maneuvering meant was finding markets for French goods, maneuvering within the European market to avoid the dominance of West Germany instead of France in the European market. And de Gaulle began, like they say on TV, to connect with his personality. De Gaulle loves to travel and interfere in other people's affairs. The truth was, when he came to power he started just that. What did he do? He starts trading with China, with Cuba, with Russia, with every goddamn place he can trade with that the United States can't trade with, any market he can find. He goes to Mexico. He went to Canada and declared for Quebec independence. He sent his emissaries [?] everywhere. He toured all of Latin America, and all he's doing everywhere is looking for markets. He sent a top guy over to Spain and buddied up with Franco. He went into Czechoslovakia, to Poland, to Russia. And like I say, he recognized China.

At the time they made an excellent argument against the United States. Every time they do something like this (like they sold 450 buses to Cuba) the United States would scream, because the United States has a blockade on Cuba and a blockade on China and so forth. And France was desperately maneuvering on the basis of its prosperity. Part of this gold business is their maneuver. It's one of the weak points in the American economy, that it can't deal too much with this question of gold. France happened to have gotten itself into a creditor situation with the United States and was able to use the gold thing as a lever. He pulled out of NATO. He's done everything like that to save what's left of French capitalism. In other words, these maneuvers, these grandiose appearances of making headway, are really like the last desperate gasp of a once imperialist power that wants to remain so, but is becoming dominated by the United States, by the Washington-Bonn West Germany financial arrangements as opposed to Paris financial power. France's concept is to become the center. With de Gaulle, it was France who was to become the center of the economy, and have an England, Bonn, West Germany, France bloc, and extend the markets into Eastern Europe and into Russia, and be able therefore to deal with the United States, compete with the United States. It was bound to fail, because France doesn't have the basic industry to do it. Well, it looked good for a little while while they were having prosperity. But then came problems.

They just weren't making the rate of profit they wanted to make. And under capitalism, one knows that the rate of profit is, you know, God-given. One must make at least seven percent or something like that, I forget what figure it is, or you have to take measures. De Gaulle being a very strong government, being not a parliamentary government but what Marxists call Bonapartism, which comes from Louis Bonaparte, which in effect means that an individual rules above Parliament, that is, he's got very direct ability to rule, to make governmental decisions, and the Parliament plays a very secondary role. Under that condition they were able to move quickly on the working class in some ways, like a wage freeze, while prices continued to go up. The first section of the French working class that began to not like the situation, [inaudible] in '65, was the government workers, workers in the railroads, postal workers, all those workers in the nationalized industries, but even the white-collar governmental workers. They were the first ones to feel it, because the government was able to hold down their wages more than it was able to hold down the wages of workers in private industry.

You've got to understand that the working class in France has tremendous traditions of union struggle. The general strike is something that they've had various times. And they have political parties that they look to, to consider their parties, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, which I want to go over in a second. So they're very combative. They have never been completely defeated. They've never had real fascism over their heads, except in the German case, when it was a foreign fascism. It wasn't like they were defeated in conflict with their own bourgeoisie. A series of waves of strikes began to take place, the first small, sometimes large. There was a one-day strike of three million workers in 1965. And in 1966 there was another wave of them. On December 11th one of the trade union federations, one of the smaller ones, called for a general strike, suggested the idea of a general strike. These things began to mount up.

Now, what were the economic factors doing? This is crucial to understand the lessons of the French events. It wasn't that all of a sudden they had poverty in France. It wasn't that all of a sudden their wages were cut in half. All it was is they had a certain standard of living and it began to decline a little bit. Two, three, four percent. And the workers don't like to have their standard of living decline, so they start fighting back. They strike. They try to negotiate. Negotiations don't go too well, so they get a little more militant. And as the workers began to get a little more militant on their simple economic demands, the different factions in the trade union movement began to get a little more militant. The bureaucrats on top began to shift a little bit to try to recruit. There are three competing trade union federations. There's the CGT, dominated by the Communist Party. There's the Christian unions, which dropped the word Christian. That's one of the steps in radicalizing so that they could get other workers. They don't want to be tied up anymore. You have to have people agree on that type of thing in order to get them to join your union. And then there's Workers' Force, the FO. The FO is the weakest one, so they're the ones who called for a general strike. You try to recruit some of the members of the others.

The Communist Party primarily is strong in the unions in private industry, not in the governmental. That's where the FO is at its strongest, and the Christian unions. So there was a gradual series of waves, getting bigger and bigger, first a million workers and three million workers going out on strike, not being able to win much. The economy in France was still going bad, though not, like I say, to any big degree. And then the government did things like take away part of their medical plan, which really infuriated them. You have these factors: the beginning of a decline in the living standard of the working class of an advanced country that's highly organized in the sense of consciousness, and in many industries completely organized union-wise, with deep traditions of struggle.

The students: from the Algerian war to the UEC

Then you have one other factor, which I want to spend quite a bit of time on to explain why this thing was triggered. And then I'll go over why the social revolution has been trying. That's where I'll explain the differences between the Communist Party and what they've done, and then we can draw some lessons for the United States in this. This other factor is a very, very important factor, and that's the students. All of a sudden these students come out of Paris and they're rioting and building barricades and so forth, and you wonder where they came from. Their history really starts in 1956. In 1956 the Algerian war reached a certain point when the government passed what they called the special powers, which gave Guy Mollet, who was then the head of the government, the Socialist, the special powers to fight the Algerians. They were voted by the Communist Party and everybody. At that time some students became involved in fighting the Algerian war, like in the United States. They weren't all that radical. They were just against the war in Algeria. And they started doing things, like burning draft cards. I don't think they have draft cards. I don't know what they burned. They did something. They would try to stop the trains. They had a slight movement.

Out of that, the students connected with the Communist Party decided they wanted to set up a Communist Party student group called the UEC, Union des Étudiants Communistes, whatever. That's French; happy you didn't know the difference anyway. This group went through an evolution. With 1965 and the development of the war in Vietnam, the whole policy of the Communist parties throughout the world, which had already undergone the impact of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union (you've got to understand, if you tell people somebody's a god for years and years and years, and you have an organization that believes somebody's a god, and you have their picture on the wall, and you've got their picture in your pocket, and you walk around with their picture, and every morning you get up and say, thanks, Stalin, for the existence of God, or something, and then one day you tell them the guy was really a bastard, that's a real shatter). Could you imagine if tomorrow, today, the Maoist groups in the world have made Stalin look like he was just a secondary angel? The way they've built Mao up, Mao has never made an error in his whole life, and to barely question that puts you in physical danger if you're anywhere, either in China or near one of these groups. Pick up a magazine out of China today, and if there's a page in it that doesn't have Mao's picture, the editor's fired. You think I'm kidding? You'll find me one that doesn't have at least Mao's name carefully, elaborately displayed on the page with some phrase like "Our Father who art in Peking."

That's right. So you see, that 1956 thing, when Khrushchev got up and said that Stalin was no good, that was a real blow. And then came Vietnam, where these people are really fighting for liberation, and the French Communist Party is doing nothing, and they started going back over the history in Algeria, and the whole thing started adding up. Student radicalization began. They wanted to fight against the war in Vietnam, and the Communist Party didn't want to fight. It began to have an impact among the students. A left opposition began to develop among the student Communist Party organization. That left opposition was very small. There were only four thousand students in the organization. The Communist Party is an organization which polls millions and millions, five, six million votes or something.

It was from this group that... let me explain one other thing so you understand how it developed. Something's really funny. They hold elections for president every seven years. In 1965 they had the last elections. And de Gaulle was obviously going to run, and he was obviously going to win, as the situation was, for anybody who could sit down and figure out votes and how they voted before and how people were going to vote this time. So the left was stuck. The Communist Party didn't want to run a Communist Party guy for president, because then that would show that the Communist Party couldn't win and it was weak and that its votes were going down. They wanted to find some general left figure so that it could support him along with everybody on the left, and you couldn't tell who really lost. The Socialist Party didn't want to associate itself with the Communist Party, because at that time they figured it was better to be independent in terms of getting votes. The Socialist Party of France, by the way, has nothing in any way related to socialism. It's just part of a name and a tradition. Its program is no different from any of the politicians we have around here. The Communist Party is really not much different either, but I'll go over that in a second. But it is different.

They were all maneuvering, and the Socialist mayor of Marseille, Defferre [?], it's a beautiful city, all people who know French, please leave, was announced as the candidate. But nobody was happy with him, because he kept saying he's not going to make any deals with the Communist Party, and it was like a factional thing, the Socialist was going to put his people in, so the Communists weren't going to support him. The whole thing was a real mess. So a tiny little pro-capitalist party (it would sort of be like, I don't know, there's no parallel in the United States, but some little capitalist party) nominated some little unknown guy by the name of Mitterrand. So this was everybody's big opportunity. He was against de Gaulle. He liked NATO, he was for crushing the Vietnamese and all those things, but he disliked de Gaulle. And he said he was interested in having everybody support him. He was non-exclusionary towards who would support him. Then it became just who can get on the boat fastest. The Communist Party immediately endorsed, and the Socialist Party endorsed him. Everybody did. So here this guy who belongs to a nobody party, and that was precisely his strength, got all these endorsements. It's like finding a politician who hasn't done anything, so he's got no record, and therefore he can't be attacked. Of course, this guy had a record, but I mean, insofar as factional politics of the left go.

So they all supported Mitterrand. Well, some of these dudes didn't go for that. It's just like in the United States, talking about McCarthy, why he's supporting the... Very similar. So they didn't want to support him. The Communist Party didn't like this. It started getting really rough with them. To make a long story short, in the beginning of 1966 they expelled the left wing in Paris and expelled fifty members of the student Communist group in Lyons. Let me explain, because this is very interesting, and it's interesting to give the dynamics of how things were changing. First, there had been, in early 1965, a left opposition, and the Communist Party had been able to maneuver bureaucratically and get a majority at a conference. They got 350, the opposition had 150 votes,

their delegates. So the 350, you know, democracy, you give the other side proportional representation, nothing doing, they just took the whole leadership, the whole National Committee. But when they tried to expel, they found that their supporters were divided almost fifty-fifty. Eighteen of the sixty members of the National Committee of the student group resigned in protest over the expulsions in Paris, and allowed them to come to the convention. And at that convention they were expelled. And upon being expelled, they set up a new organization called the JCR, Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire, which is crucial to understanding what happened. This group came into existence in 1966. It was revolutionary and communist, and immediately took the lead in developing antiwar activity against the war in Vietnam. It was expelled, I think it was in April, no, in March, and by the first week that it was expelled, it called for a week of antiwar demonstrations, the week of May 16th, because the Communist Party wouldn't hold them, in spite of the Communist Party, [inaudible] calling on everybody to do it. Then they held, later on that year, a huge mass meeting in Paris, like a teach-in, against the war. And they began activity at the student level, trying to radicalize, mobilize and activate, the type of thing we've seen here in the United States.

The Communist Party student group just collapsed. Another group developed, a small pro-China group, in a second split from the Communist Party group, but it never became very consequential. So while the workers were developing their mood to be much more daring, much more thinking in terms of being combative, striking, among the students this new tendency was beginning to get popular and to grow. And every time we'd call international days of protest against the war in Vietnam, the JCR would get student mass demonstrations organized and so forth.

May 1968: the Latin Quarter, the factories and the strike

So it was the conjuncture of these two processes which created the explosion. And here's why. Here's what happened. The students were the weakest link in terms of ideological control over the society. The Communist Party lost control of them. They had their independence. They began talking and saying things which had been taboo in France, in terms of reaching any mass layer, for decades. That is, revolutionary communism, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, whatever you want to call it, Trotskyism, all those terms, that type of stuff. It appeared again in France, and the students were quite receptive to it. Some mass student actions broke out, and came the famous day of the fight in the Latin Quarter. Let me just say one thing about the background to that fight. The way it happened was this. There were some campus protests that created the May 2nd movement, the March 22nd movement, earlier this year, in different universities. The JCR planned a mass meeting in early May, I think it was May 9th, and invited some members from the German SDS, the Socialist Student Relief Society [?] over there, to speak at it. The details of this you can get in the Militant by buying the issue before this one, which has the whole detail of how this process took place. I'm just going to describe it briefly.

Six thousand students showed up for this JCR meeting, and the SDS speakers were not allowed to go to the meeting by the French government. A tremendous protest atmosphere developed. The JCR projected the idea of getting all student groups together, all tendencies [?], forming a coalition for action, creating a united effort in any sort of action among all student groups. That was very crucial and helpful, because it took all students, no matter what political level they were at, and brought them together through a democratically elected steering committee, which represented everybody, to be able to act together. This resulted in demonstrations which ended up in the confrontation with the police, May 10th and 11th. The police action against those students brought tremendous sympathy on the part of the whole mass of the population in France for the students.

On top of that, don't forget that the workers were itching to get into a fight, to find some way to fight better to get back their standard of living. And what happened was that a demonstration was held, for which the figures run, if you're the pro-bourgeois press, at about [inaudible], and the pro-working-class press runs at one million. Workers and students took part, and then workers took over a factory in one of the aviation districts, just the way the students had taken over the Sorbonne. Once they did it, it had a spark effect. Sparks don't always work. If the situation isn't right for it, you could take over the local dime store or something, and everybody wouldn't take over all the dime stores. That type of situation only happens when the objective conditions are ripe for it. One of the reflections that it was ripe for it was the fact that the working people in the Latin Quarter supported the students in their fight with the police. Read that report and you can really feel it. And you know that the tempo and the mood of the people were very compatible. They were anxious to get into a fight against the government to change the conditions, the way things were. That was an indication that times were ripe for it. And the reflection of it was that once this one factory sat down, then the big auto factories, the Renault factories, the Citroën factories, the ones that have always been the vanguard of the French working class since their creation, sat down. Once that happened, it just spread like wildfire. A thousand factories taken by the workers. The red flag was put on them. The students demonstrated demanding a workers' government. Socialism. Take power.

And you end up in the most fantastic thing, where in a matter of three or four days you have nine million, ten million working people on strike, two million farmers setting their day to demonstrate, and the 500,000 students that exist in France demonstrating, taking over every university in France. Taking them over. Walking in, electing their committees and starting to run them directly. The first impact that this had, and it's hard to see it from here, but think of yourself in France, was this. I don't know how to think of a parallel; it's like a Nazi walking around covered by a preacher's uniform, with a robe, and all of a sudden you take the robe off. That's what happened to de Gaulle. Because here he is, as he says, the legitimate power of France. Here you have the parliament, and this represents the people of France. But look, there are fifty million people in France. Ten million people on strike, the average French family is five, two million farmers, 500,000 students. Multiply those by five and you get 62,500,000, when the population is fifty million. So you know that at least some families had two people on strike. Assuming that it can't be the whole population, because there's some that still back de Gaulle (in fact they put on a demonstration, there are several thousand), you've got to figure that a good five million, so some families had three people on strike, and it was clear that it was eighty, ninety percent of the population.

Now, if France is a democracy, like the United States, we're a democracy too, I bet you, there's obviously no problem. The overwhelming majority have clearly stated where they stand, and they have very clear demands. Minimum wage so much, united, all of them in agreement. What are you going to hold the referendum for? You've just held it. More than voting, they're sitting down and taking all the factories and raising banners and saying, that's our demand. It's a standing-ovation type of referendum. Why do you need to vote anything? It's done. An overwhelming [?] majority. They're all standing up in the streets and holding up their hands, voting, continuously, twenty-four hours a day. Now, they should stop and tell us that's the overwhelming majority. If this is a democratic government, then there's obviously no need to negotiate anything. It's settled, right? But they entered into negotiations.

Bourgeois democracy exposed: de Gaulle's election call

You have to ask yourself, to really understand how this exposes what I mean, it just takes the robe off, it just exposes what a bourgeois democracy is. We Marxists, we're very dogmatic and stuff, and we believe that behind bourgeois democracy is a small ruling class, a minority that really rules society, that's got the power. Now in France, the overwhelming majority voted for some things, and then they entered into negotiations. Who was negotiating with the French people, because they were on strike? It was this little ruling minority. They held control. The police followed their orders. They never tested it, but the army, theoretically, most certainly the officers, followed their orders. They had control of all the governmental buildings, and it turned out they were the government. By God, just what Marx said. And they negotiated with the people of France, supposedly a democracy. In fact, de Gaulle got on TV and said, I am dissolving parliament and holding an election in the future,

[Tape break]

to save us from a violent, dictatorial rule. That is, the majority might take power. To the bourgeoisie, that is tyranny. Because if they can't rule, anybody else ruling is tyranny. So if the majority should rule, that to him is tyranny. So the ruling class is exactly what they mean by a communist dictatorship, that they should lose power and the majority should rule. That's exactly what de Gaulle means. He said, we may not even hold those elections. A good politician doesn't say it until he has to. It goes to show de Gaulle's getting old. But he wanted to make it clear that he meant it. He was saying to the bourgeoisie of France, which was ready to move out again, move to England or Algeria or somewhere, back to Germany (of course there were no planes and stuff, so that situation was really bad), he wanted to assure them that he really meant it. So if you go back and read those speeches now, they're forgetting about it because the thing didn't develop the way they thought it might. And don't kid yourself, they had one line, I'm sure, the hot line straight to the White House, working this thing out, on who was ready to do what in case of what.

He got up there in effect and said, we may not even have these elections, and I will rule. Meaning, I, representing this tiny minority, we aren't surrendering. Marx also said that they don't surrender. Now you ask yourself: if the workers are the majority, they have their organizations, by the way, democratically elected. They elect their delegates and everything, in the unions. They have their political parties they support and so forth. They have all these organizations set up. They were setting up in some areas committees, factory strike committees. The students had taken over the university, elected. How come de Gaulle is on TV? Why didn't one of these workers' elected representatives get on TV and put de Gaulle under house arrest, to be tried for any one of 2,892 crimes that he's committed in violation of the law, shooting Algerians and all types of things like that? Just put him under house arrest. Get on TV and say, the majority have clearly voted. The demands will be met. There are some people who are trying to set up a dictatorship of a minority against the majority. We're going to assure the majority is going to rule. There's going to be elections. We're going to set up our workers' councils. And from now on, the majority have indicated that workers can control the factory. From now on, they control the factory. And those people that used to own factories, you can apply for work, and we guarantee them work. We're going to make sure that, and so forth.

The workers would have marched to the barracks. Just think about how close France was to a socialist revolution. Then I'm going to explain why it didn't happen. The police are built to fight every day against the population, their own population, not the army. The French army is made up of conscripts, just like draftees, just like the American army. They don't even have as many volunteers. It's a conscript army. It is made up of workers' sons, farmers' sons. Don't forget, France is on strike. Their families are on strike. Their families are writing them letters about how they're holding out, how they're running out of food and so forth. You can't call on them to shoot those strikers. If the workers had gone to those barracks and said, okay, you guys come on out and join us in demonstrations, they would have come. Elect your own committee. Send your representatives. Give us the guns. The police said to the government in those critical moments that they would not fight the workers. You know why? Not because the police all of a sudden discovered that they should be nice. They just figured out that they'd have the living daylights kicked out of them. And those who figure that type of thing sometimes lose, especially people who have a bully's mentality like these police do; all of a sudden they discover they're not so anxious when they know they're going to be outnumbered and trounced. In fact, they threatened to go on strike too, and if the workers had marched into the police stations to disarm those police, they would have declared a strike. I give you odds [inaudible].

Then when they got on TV, the workers' representative could have put not only de Gaulle under house arrest, he could have ordered the army units to immediately arm all the factory units and so forth, to make sure that no minority can overthrow the people, arm the people, defend their own rights, and hold democratic elections, allowing even the bourgeoisie, they can run on the program that the factories will be turned back over to them so they can be millionaires again and not have to work for a living. They can run on that program. We'll see how many votes they'd get. This is it.

Why it did not happen: Petrograd 1917 and the bureaucrats

Now, why didn't it happen? To understand the events of France, that's what you've got to study carefully. Of course, it's going to happen, but it's going to take a little while. The closest historic parallel to that is Petrograd, 9th [?] February 1917, when the workers did the exact same thing, except they actually went out and took the guns from the army, everything I've said, except when the guy got on TV (there was no TV in those days) but went to the parliament, the socialists. What they did do was, the socialists went to the parliament, at that time called the Duma in Russia, and looked around for guys like de Gaulle, because they'd all gone into hiding. We're knocking on the door. Is there anybody in here? Anybody to rule Russia? And they found six or seven of them hiding in a room. They said, hey, my God, Jesus, we've taken power, and we're socialists, and our theory explains to us, and we're not interested in that, workers' control. They're all from the middle class, these socialists. They said to the guys, look, first there's feudalism, then there's capitalism, and there's socialism. We've had feudalism in Russia, now we've got to go to capitalism. It's terrible. The workers are taking power, historically, but you're a capitalist, come and take power. So they dug up Prince Lvov. He became the head of the government, and mainly they dug up this Kerensky, who was sort of like de Gaulle [?]. He discovered, I'm going to save Russia and the whole thing. Very similar to that, in the fact that the workers actually moved and had the power for a moment, these socialists, certain leaders of the workers, who aren't themselves workers, but whom the workers have trust in because of historic reasons, put the power in somebody else's hands.

Now, let's look at France. France is a very close parallel to this. Trade union bureaucrats have privileges. Like all bureaucrats, they have developed a mentality over the years, in an apparatus, an organization, to maintain those privileges, which is fundamentally hostile, as basically hostile as the AFL-CIO bureaucracy in this country, to seeing the workers rise up, arm, take power, because that would destroy their privileges. Not only that, but they don't feel comfortable with rank-and-file workers. They're never around them to begin with. They feel much more comfortable in literary circles, in the middle class, or right down with de Gaulle. In fact, one of the greatest moments for any American trade union bureaucrat is when he's invited into the White House, allowed to have a cup of coffee, and then told to go out the back door. That's the highest point in his life. His dream. To be accepted, so he can sit down and talk to the Rockefellers and be treated like one of the gang. That's what they dream.

The Communist Party's no different in France. It's got a record one mile long of doing this, since the beginnings of the '30s, since the '34-'35 period. I told you about how they voted for sending the troops to Vietnam. Let me just tell you a few little incidents along the road so that, you know, I'll give you more empirical proof if you want, but just to give you a feeling how deep this conservative aspect of the Communist Party is in France. After the French re-entered Vietnam, they had a problem. They had made a deal with Ho Chi Minh, and they had been able to get their troops into Haiphong. They got the supplies ready and everything to go to war to try to take over Vietnam again, but they were ready to do it, and they wanted a pretext. So they found a pretext, and the general wired from Haiphong, now what do I do? He was given the orders: bomb the Vietnamese section. So under General Leclerc's orders, the Haiphong Vietnamese quarter [?] was bombed and shelled by the French, killing 6,000 Vietnamese. After this happened, they had a vote of confidence in General Leclerc, honoring him and congratulating him for the work he had done, in the parliament in France, of which 182 Communist deputies voted for it. The whole time that the Algerians were fighting for independence, the Communist Party referred to them in the 1945 period as fascists who must be crushed, and supported the bombing of Madagascar, where 80,000 casualties were suffered. The bombings of Algeria. The French Communist Party in 1956, as I said before, voted for the special powers for the French to fight against the Algerians.

The Communist Party's role in the strike

Their record is like one continuous line. Now look at their record when these strikes started. What's the first thing they did? When the students started demonstrating, they called them hooligans and adventurers, and tried to appeal to anti-German racist prejudice against Danny the Red. They referred to him as the German. The right-wingers call him the German Jew. They called these students adventurers, told everybody to keep away from them. When it became clear that the overwhelming mass of the sentiment of the country was for these students, the Communist Party [?] couldn't any longer maintain this position, because they'd lose their ranks, so they shifted a little bit. They said, yeah, the students got a pretty bad deal there, so we'll have to be for them and so forth, but keep away from them. Then the workers took the factories. The Communist Party didn't tell them to take the factories. They didn't tell them to strike. It happened completely out of their control. But once it happened, what were they going to say? So it's already there. The Communist Party comes out and says, strike. Take the factories. To keep control over the goddamn thing.

What the ruling class was trying to judge was, can the Communist Party deliver? Can it maintain control? Then the students started marching to the workers, like they marched on the Renault factory to talk to them. That is what threw the panic into those trade union bureaucrats. Suppose they talk to the workers about socialist revolution, how to take power, and all that stuff, and that starts getting common. Workers start having joint meetings with students. They start leafleting them. So the first thing they ordered, and they have an apparatus in the French Communist Party, they have what they call defense guards, workers' guards, which they use for patrol, like when they go on demonstrations, as the monitors. Those guards, those monitors, have never fought the police. But they have fought other workers throughout the last twenty years, including students. So they sent these guards to the gates to meet the students and told them they can't come in. Workers: we don't want to mess with you guys. If you guys came in here, the police might attack us. Us poor little workers. There's only thirty thousand of us in this Renault plant. You come in here and those goddamn cops will come all the way over from Paris and attack us.

One of the things that really scared the living daylights out of them was the fact that young workers started going out with the student demonstrations, siding with the students as opposed to the Communist Party. Then they went and negotiated with de Gaulle's government. You've got to understand what that means. The Communist Party, the strongest representative of the workers, like in Russia at that point it was the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, goes and gives legitimacy to de Gaulle's government, which has no base, nobody's supporting it anymore of any consequence. Once they negotiated, it's in effect saying to the workers, this is still the government. You're not the government. And they raised the slogan that what we should do now is change the ratios in Parliament. That was their big political demand. They got their guts. They got up all their courage. And said, in effect, to the ruling class, if things get really rough, we'll run the government for you. You've got to understand, Thorez became vice president of France. Thorez was the head of the Communist Party at the end of the Civil War [?]. He became vice president of France the last time they had a major crisis, in 1944 to 1946, in order to disarm the workers. In effect, what Duclos was saying to the French ruling class was, you need us again, we'll do it again, because that way we keep our privileges. But their ability to do that depends on their having control over the working class.

The Socialist Party plays the same basic role, except they're not the major force anymore. They used to be, in the 1936-38 period. The workers learned from that experience that the Socialist Party is worthless, so they quit it, and they started voting Communist. Basic heavy industry, the Renault workers, those types of very strong bases of the control of the Communist Party. They switched over to the Communists, about two to one as opposed to the Socialists. And now they're beginning another historic switch, just like the working class of Petrograd and Moscow switched from the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks to the Bolsheviks from February to October, on the experience they've just gone through. The workers have tested the Communist Party, to see what it can produce. Now there's a left opposition saying that they're no good, that they're rotten, based on the JCR and some workers in some factories, like the Renault plants and some others, where there are revolutionary communists. They're like the Bolsheviks. They're saying, this doesn't work, we should have taken power. Just like the Bolsheviks said, you should never have handed the power over to anybody in February. The Soviets should have taken power, the democratically elected councils of workers and farmers and so forth. The revolutionary socialists in France right now are saying you should set up councils in every factory and in the universities, and we should have taken power. So you'll begin to see the shift as more and more workers begin to move over, away from the Communist Party, to the revolutionary socialists. That's the next stage. For that, we'll have to go through a big period.

Lessons for the United States

Let me end, so we get to questions, and I'll take up some of the other things I want to say during the questions. I'll slip them into questions. Let me then just say this. That's the stage we're at right now. The thing, with tremendous upswing, they didn't get anywhere. The government now is playing it both ways, the ruling class. One is to threaten that they'll really come down, though they're scared as hell to make a test of strength, and at the same time give some concessions. They did that in 1936. Even if for a little while companies run at a loss, get them back in the factories. Get things working. Get them demoralized. Then we can work out some political deals. Get some illusions about something else. Get organized. Get time. Find out which units are reliable. Maybe recruit some more paratroopers. Put a little money into some fascist gangs who haven't gotten organized. Play for time. That's their first attitude. So it's both threatening that you're going to use military force, which immediately sent the Communist Party running, and the promise: imagine, we're going to hold elections again. That was it. That's a big promise. A tiny little minority that's got no power says it's going to hold elections again, and in return the Communist Party says, oh, great, we can participate in those elections, and they say, everybody go back to work. That's the stage it's at.

I want to say two other things just to end. There are some secondary lessons for Americans from this that are fantastic when you stop and think about it. Everybody except for very small groups, percentage-wise, most certainly in the population, like the Socialist Workers Party and the [inaudible] in the United States, most radicals, if they didn't believe it, at least had deep sympathy for the concept that Marcuse had raised: that because of the fantastic prosperity in the advanced industrial countries, the type of worker struggles that we saw in the nineteenth century and so forth were over. That what we saw during the Depression, and maybe an exceptional case here and there at the end of the Second World War, that that thing had been solved. The advanced workers weren't going to make socialist revolutions like that anymore. It was going to come some other way. It was going to come in the colonial world. Everybody agrees that socialist revolutions can happen in the colonial world, but they can't happen in the advanced countries.

All of a sudden this shatters that. If you stop and think about it, if you analyze it, it shows that even with a slight decline in the standard of living, the actual objective conditions where workers could take state power can arise. It doesn't even have to be a big depression or mammoth inflation, with the population basically completely employed, living at a qualitatively higher standard of living than any colonial country, even though the country is bordering countries like Italy, Spain and Greece. Does Greece border France? I don't think so. [inaudible] Thank you.

The other thing is that, notice, the revolution that was taking place in the colonial world... The socialists have said there are three parts to what's happening in the world today. There's the revolution within the Soviet Union and the others to get political democracy, not to change the planned economy, but to get political democracy. There's the revolution of the advanced countries, and the revolution of the colonial countries. And we said, as a crisis on a world scale that is now beginning to deepen, if capitalism continues, these three processes interrelate, and they give impetus to each other. As the colonial revolution advances, the danger of a revolution will increase more and more in the advanced countries. And this will give an impetus to the struggle for more democracy in the Soviet bloc. And notice what has happened. You have Czechoslovakia, the student demonstrations in Poland. You have this beginning to develop. You have the rising in France, and at the same time you have the continual expansion of the colonial revolution. One thing that was lost sight of is that all this is going on as the Vietnamese are trying to take Saigon. What we're entering now in France will have deep repercussions throughout all Europe. Where people before were pragmatic, American SDS-type oriented, like SDS, when it was first founded, it began with the idea that you have to infiltrate the power structure. They changed it a little bit. But they were always pragmatic, like the support of Johnson in 1964. And it was always like, just looking at everything, Marxism was wrong. You don't have a long-range perspective where the American working class is going to move. That's ruled out and stuff like that. And you have to build a socialist movement.

What does France do to all these theories? What will it mean for the youth in all of Europe, in France, in Italy, in Germany? What type of groups are they going to join now? What's their perspective, when they see that the power was right around the corner, if they could win the sympathy of the workers? And in France, with this experience, in the next six months it's conceivable that there'll be a socialist revolution. Let me make one last prediction. If there is, the best moment for it was lost. Because now the bourgeoisie is a hell of a lot more prepared, and that means that France will probably have to go through a period of civil war before they take power.

Questions and discussion

Question: [inaudible]

Camejo: Let's first deal with this question about giving concessions. The American ruling class is much better off economically than the French. They have tremendous, much more resources, much more wealth. You just stop and think of the comparison. The French armaments budget in 1964 was $1,800,000,000. But the Americans, with what, 50, 60 billion, and it's now 70 billion, they're spending $30 billion a year in Vietnam. It just makes France look like nothing. Now it is true that insofar as the United States can continue to give higher pay, like every time the workers demand something, be able to give concessions, it tends to have the general impact of placating and maintaining the workers politically. You've got to remember one very important aspect of this. One is that that is what keeps them apolitical. There's nothing ingrown, basic or definitive about it. And it has a different side to it. You sell your future when you use that technique. If you ever want to be a member of a ruling class and oppress another class, it is always better to smash them really good, and try to keep them smashed. Once you try to win them through concessions and concessions, that's terrific, that's the best way, things are calm, collected and sober, and so on. But when you can't deliver those concessions, that class has gotten psychologically used to winning, and everything else, like the American working class, has never been defeated. It has never known a dictatorship. It believes it has the right to free speech, to unions, to everything, and it believes that so deeply that the day you can't give those concessions, the radicalization in this country will make the radicalization in France look like nothing.

Let me finish. The question is, are you going to have a change in the economic situation? Let me make the argument. This is the crucial argument. This is the crucial question of the whole history of the world. Will the American mass of working people intervene in history on the side of all those people who are trying to make revolutionary change? And that, most people agree, depends on whether the American economy can continue its upward swing. Now let me tell you this. We hope that the economic problems that France is having are nothing compared to what we are about to face in the next period of history in the United States. We don't set any time on it, but let me explain why. Let me give you two proofs, first the empirical and then the theoretical. Take the empirical proof. I'm well aware of the financial process. No, no, not financial, not gold and that type of stuff. Let me just point out an empirical proof. The United States has been at its maximum prosperity in its whole history, the highest point of capitalism in world history, in the last twenty years, and it hasn't been able to wipe out poverty even within its boundaries, while maintaining the whole capitalist world on a world scale at a point where even huge sections of it are declining during the prosperity. For instance, actual food consumption per person in Latin America has dropped since the end of the Second World War. So you're dealing with a system that is a worldwide system, and at its epicenter here it is not able to solve the problems of the masses during its highest point. In fact, it has not been able to solve the basic problems within its own boundaries. Take the housing question. Slums. They've existed all along. They're growing. It can't even solve that. And that's at its high point. At its max. When it expanded into all the markets. When it has taken markets from everybody. When it's making the highest rate of profit it has ever made in its history. It can't maintain full employment. It has even whites living in poverty [?]. It gave figures that millions are going hungry in the United States. So you have to make this empirical point: at its best, it didn't begin to solve the problem.

Now, what your theory would have to hold is the following. That it is about to go into a terrific change. That the prosperity we have seen is nothing compared to what's about to happen. That the United States is about to begin to expand in an economic outburst that's unparalleled. The system will start working and begin to solve these problems. Otherwise, one of two things is going to happen. The gradual process of social revolution throughout the world will have a huge ideological impact on the United States, which will change it, and which will change its economy, because if the United States loses its markets all over the world through socialist revolutions, it will destroy the American economy. Or the other is going to happen: it can't maintain the high standard of living anymore. Let me just give you a point of fact. Isn't it true that the ruling class of the United States is starting to think about de-escalating in Vietnam? Because they're starting to get inflation. For the last two years, the standard of living of the American workers has not gone up. In other words, right at this point when we're talking, when the French are almost coming to power, which would immediately create a crisis in all Europe and be disastrous for the American economy, you have a situation where the American ruling class can't even give higher pay right now, and has to think about de-escalating in the colonial revolution, where it's fighting only one tiny country of seventeen million, when there's still one and a half billion people in the colonial world. So to give the perspective that the United States is going to maintain this prosperity and the workers are not going to move, you have to move another notch. You have to say, well, all right, there'll be times when the standard of living is going to drop in the United States, but the American workers are different from the French workers. They're just not political like that. They're not going to move like that. Then you have to develop a thesis that, if you carry it to its logical conclusion, American workers aren't like workers everywhere else in the world. They're not the same species. That's all. So, all right, I'll let you ask one. Okay, go ahead. That's good.

Question: One thing that is unique in France, of course: you do have the power structure. You have a group of capitalists who do control the industry, they are concerned with perpetuating their own power. However, the American capitalist is a little shrewder. They're more concerned with perpetuating the corporation.

Camejo: Yeah, okay, that's the second part of your question.

Question: They may sacrifice their own power. They may grant the workers some power.

Camejo: Yeah, let me answer that part of your question.

Question: This will forestall the revolution.

Camejo: Right, let me answer that question. That is simply unadulterated bull. The American capitalists have been concentrating capital unparalleled. They make the French look like they've shared the capital with everybody, compared to the way it's concentrated in this country. That business about everybody else's stock, I know that's an illusion. Not an illusion. That is the biggest myth. Look, let me explain to you. I start a company, okay? And I own a million dollars, and I've got a nice company going, and I'm making ten percent. And goddamn it, there's a market opened up, and I just don't have another million dollars to build another whole factory and get that market and make ten percent. So I walk up to you, and you're a worker, my stupid, dumb American worker, and I say, I want you to share. This is a people's capitalism. A million of you give me one dollar, and I'll give you all the stock, and I'll give you five percent on it. Well, sure, you get somebody else's money, you've got a million dollars, you build yourself another factory, you run it at ten percent, you take five percent, you share five percent with the other people. So in other words, what the capitalists do through the stock business is they try to borrow from the working class to build up their capital even greater. And that section that the workers give, like owning stocks, is an insignificant portion, two, three percent of the capital accumulated in this country. And that percentage is declining steadily. In fact, you'll find that the average family in the United States, at the high points of prosperity, are not with money in the bank, with stocks saved up. They are, in fact, at this very moment, sixty billion dollars in debt. So if someone said to the American workers, hey, the whole economy collapses, because the money doesn't exist...

Speaker from the floor: They're trying to reach the middle class, or middle-class standards.

Camejo: Well, that's another example. That's ideological propaganda. This is about "middle class." What they mean by "middle class" is that you have a slightly higher standard of living than people in the 1930s. You've got your own house and your car, on which you're paying a mortgage. That's called middle class. It's very tricky wording, because "middle class" has a real meaning, which they try to imply through this. That is, you're no longer a worker. Ninety percent of the American people are working class. It's the highest country in the world in concentration of workers. France has two million farmers out of fifty million people; the United States has no such thing. That's what they try to tell them. It's like American students. They tell them, you're not a profession. That's right, a plumber is a profession. And take students. Students is the extreme case. They tell students, you're middle class. And a student says, yeah, I'm not a worker, I'm middle class. And he's out there going for interviews for jobs, saying to himself, I'm middle class, I'm not a worker. And he's a programmer, or he works as a social worker, something like that. And he keeps saying to himself, I'm middle class, I'm not a worker. Regardless of what people think they are, there is an objective reality. A guy in an insane asylum thinks he's Napoleon, he still isn't Napoleon. And we sort of live in a communal insane asylum. Millions upon millions of people say, I'm not a worker, as they punch in their cards. But when that type of thing works, that type of propaganda and that type of mythology can be created only under conditions where you have a gradually rising standard of living, where people, deep inside, don't even believe it.

What it is, is that they set up a value scheme where you're looked up to if you're not a worker. They don't realize that what it is, is an inverted acceptance of the capitalist concept that the rich are superior, more intelligent, better, and poor people are generally bad. It's another aspect of racist prejudice. Basically, people are prejudiced against black people because they're poor. If black people were richer in this society, it'd be awful hard to whip up the type of racial prejudice. It's all aspects. If a rich guy walks into the room, and he's got millions of dollars, everybody's like, oh. And workers accept the ideology. They take the values from their ruling class and they imitate them. Now, when their standard of living begins to drop...

Speaker from the floor: An American flag.

Camejo: Yeah, an American flag. Patriotism is a perfect example of exactly that type of thing. But that breaks down under crises. I didn't even mention, for instance, the crisis of the youth. The whole American youth are going through a crisis, a moral crisis, most certainly, and the war in Vietnam is creating a political crisis. And this is the next generation. And this is under the period of maximum prosperity. So I think that if you really look at it, let me give you one other sign for American workers. America is like extremes. It's going to be an extreme thing. It's been the extreme gainer of capitalism, the highest standard of living, the most privileged, where people have the deepest illusions about bourgeois democracy because of that extreme. When they radicalize it will also be, and this is what people can't understand about the dialectic, one of the most extreme. The way to understand it is this. The day the standard of living really begins to drop in this country, the first real term where they have to cut the pay two, three, four, five percent, the workers in this country won't think twice, just won't think twice, of not only taking over their factories like they did in 1937, a thousand American factories, the workers sat in and took them over, starting with Flint in November something or other, 1936. They'll walk into City Hall. You send the cops down to fight the workers, American workers? Grab a stick and kill a cop in ten seconds. Cops are supposed to be out there chasing black people and criminals. They're supposed to be going out and hitting white people? That's how dumb American workers are, that's what's been told them by this society. And they're all armed to the teeth. Isn't that the case? It's not like France, where some communists will come along and say, go on, and they say, what are you talking about, we're already on. Just like in France, the revolution is sparked like that over conditions that develop. It's not that everybody in the United States is going to start buying Capital and start reading it and become socialist and then vote for socialism. It's going to be that they're going to go through direct experiences like they did in Vietnam. Like, for instance, they'll elect McCarthy president, and this is probably even going to happen, just give me a for instance. Like McCarthy, he doesn't end the war.

It's like a little shocker. Maybe he escalates, invades some other country. That's no problem. Actually, no problem at all for McCarthy to do that. He just finds a pretext. That's easily done enough. So these types of shocks, of experiences: they'll first vote in Democrats. That won't work. So they'll say, hey, these Democrats and Republicans are no good, let's have our own party, let's have a labor party. They elect those in. And they don't change the system, and they can't solve the problems either. Meanwhile, a left wing, a socialist wing, begins to develop. In the United States we don't have the problem of a mass Communist Party. The workers have illusions. The tendency will be to break from the Democratic Party and possibly go all the way over to very advanced ideas, because once they break, they're open to all ideas. And right now it just happens to be a fact that there are more revolutionary socialists in the United States than there are reformist socialists, because it's pretty hard to be a socialist to begin with. So that tends to give the advantage to the more revolutionary.

And that's, by the way, the whole key to the next future of the United States. If we can build a YSA, like the German SDS, like the French JCR, thousands and thousands and thousands, given even the slightest turn, we can turn to that working class and start recruiting young workers all over the goddamn place. And workers won't care about the word socialism, communism, all that. That business about the flag and communism, it's terrible, but they just drop that. You come in and say you're a Communist, it's all good. Workers don't understand. You don't understand what we mean by Communist. Everybody says it's bad. It's like the devil. The devil's bad. But if God gave you a pay cut, they'd start saying, what's that? What's that? That's the way they are. The majority of the workers in France are Catholics. They believe that God says that communism is the devil. They're both Communists; that won't slow them up. Some of them, it might, but generally it tends to...

And then there's the other case, the young kids who all of a sudden wake up. Look at young black kids today. You go back thirty years, when the workers were fighting in this country and black people were primarily farmhands in the South, and you talk to one, take an interview, the concepts, the ideas, right? Now you take a young kid in the ghetto and ask him what his concepts and ideas of America are. There are some big changes taking place. And these changes in ideas, among young people, students. Don't forget that in the United States over fifty percent of the kids who graduate high school enter college. When you're talking about the student community, you're talking about working-class people, kids who come from working-class homes who are going to be workers no matter what they think. And they're radicalized and they're alienated. In other words, you have all the symptoms of a beginning here. And even, in comparing to the French workers, the American working class, the distance between Meany and Reuther [?] is just a tiny little dawn [?] example of the type of rifts that are beginning already within the working class, of demanding a little more, wanting the bureaucracy to fight more. Very, very early. Nobody's saying that American workers are radical, that you can go talk to them about socialism yet. But the two years that we've had of inflation because of the war has already created a nervousness in the American working class.

I answer these questions so long, but let me say one last thing. If the majority of people believed that a social revolution was necessary, or even that it was possible and good, it would happen. You have to always presuppose in every society that the majority at that moment don't believe it's possible, nor that it's desirable. So the fact that the American workers don't think that socialism is good is just an empirical fact that has to be for capitalism to continue in this country. In fact, they won't think that except all of a sudden, in a moment, like right now the French workers at this moment might say, Jesus, it's actually possible for us to take power. And that type of concept will come out of mass struggles. And then the question will be posed in this country like it is in France: is there a leadership? Is there an organization in the leadership that's won the workers through the process before these things have come to pass, that can then show the way, win over the working class, and actually take the immediate steps? That's what we're doing. Another name for the Socialist Workers Party could be Committee for the Taking of State Power by the Working Class in the United States. That's the purpose. And it'll never be popular and big until the moment comes when that can actually be done.

What de Gaulle and the ruling class will try next

What he [de Gaulle] has to do now is this. He's trying to mobilize all the reactionary forces in the country, put a uniform on them. That's the only role he can play. That's when he got tough. He did that. That's why he was able to pull 200,000, 300,000 people into the streets. The one thing that would unite the bourgeoisie in all its factions is to stop the workers, which takes the form, in propaganda, of "communist totalitarianism." Also, it's to make a mammoth campaign now to say there's a minority trying to take power, who want to do what's happened in Russia, with a tyranny and all that, to play on every backwardness they can find in the population, to try to scare the farmers and so forth away from it. This will mean they'll take your farms away. In other words, he wants to put the specter right off the bat of a workers' revolution in the worst possible terms he can, as opposed to capitalism in its propaganda best possible form, democracy and freedom and so forth. And that's also to prepare the psychology of the whole country for possible civil war.

In the elections before this, his policy was to appeal to the French people as the man who was opposed to the United States and to the Soviet Union. He was the man that represented French independence. France was going to be a colony to no one. The Communists would not take power and make it a colony of Russia. The American monopolies wouldn't take over and make France over. He was independent. Now he just shifts the whole propaganda dance to being the free world, democracy against communist totalitarianism. He's got to try to draw the line that way and try to force, for instance, the Socialist Party away from the Communist Party.

By the way, let me say something about that business. The ruling class does not like the fact that the Communist Party has any influence over the workers. They know that they can use them, and they'll use them. But they would prefer to smash the whole Communist Party of France and have real reactionaries run the union. They would really like fascism. So if the Communist Party succeeds, let's say for the next three years, in continuously stopping the revolution, and the workers get completely demoralized, and a fascist regime triumphs in France, they won't congratulate the Communists and shake hands. They'll execute them. In other words, they'll be their own gravediggers. One way to look at it, you can really understand what I mean this way: imagine a trade union bureaucrat who is so bureaucratic and presses down so much on the workers that the union gets destroyed. He loses his privileges.

And when the question is posed, like it is today in France, all power for the ruling class or all power for the workers, there's no compromise, because there's no stability until one destroys the fighting capacity of the other. And what's the fighting capacity of the workers? Their unions. Their basic organizations. Until those are tamed. And how can they be tamed when an organization like the Communist Party, which the ruling class doesn't control directly, can never be sure it can be tamed? And which left currents develop? Don't forget the Communist Party is not a monolithic thing. There are all types of left wing. In fact, in the papers they said even on the Central Committee there were rebels starting to appear in the Communist Party, the younger members, wanting a more radical policy. Imagine what must be going through the mind of the young Communist Party member, the worker. How many of them are going to start? So the whole Communist Party apparatus is not a secure way to rule. So you can expect that they want a mammoth campaign against the Communist Party, and to try to force every other political tendency to have to choose between extremes. And they hope on that basis, especially at a parliamentary level, to be able to maintain their majority.

Further questions

Question: Yes? I'd like to ask, was there any correlation [?] in France with the [?] type of intervention that we have in the United States, with the Revolutionary Action [?]...

Camejo: Give me an example. What do you mean, like what we have in the United States?

Question: Like people, the CIA, coming in and busting up the Panthers, trying to put down the [inaudible].

Camejo: Right, yeah. Well, the CIA is obviously in France, and now I'm sure that their budget for France has gone astronomically up. They're mobilizing lots and lots of people. But you've got to understand that what happens to the Panthers and what happens to us here is partially because they're able to get away with it. In France, after May 10th and 11th, when the workers came out, you could not get away with it anymore. They have attacked the students several times in test projects to see whether the workers respond. You've got to remember that if the police came to get the kids out of San Francisco State, and it meant an immediate general strike, the police would not go to San Francisco State. I remember what happened. After this big battle, they arrested students, I don't know, a thousand students, some huge figure. The government released them and dropped all charges. Why? They didn't violate laws? Every city was a violation of the law. They even [inaudible] personnel. That's kidnapping. That's a penalty in the United States. You think they're bringing charges against one worker? They dare? Laws and so-called law and order are only effective if you've got the force to do it. And the ruling class can completely forget about its laws. There are laws now on the books: you can't strike here, you can't strike there. There are laws covering just about everything so no worker could strike. Well, strikes will happen. So they can't test that law. They'd have to arrest all the strikers. So what they do in this country, and what you can do in that type of situation, is totally different.

Now, the government is very intelligent. The ruling class, they'll probe. They'll try, like maybe arrest one student, and see what's the reaction. There is no reaction. Keep at it. They'll escalate. If the workers get demoralized and they don't fight back, they'll escalate. And the people who've been the most daring, the most courageous, like the JCRs, they would face a fantastic repression. They'll try to behead the most conscious elements. And they will try to do it with the help of the Communist Party. What do they need? They need the Communist Party to make statements like, these are Trotskyite fascists who are disruptors of the labor movement, these are troublemakers who are against the president. [inaudible] And so the average worker gets all confused. There's his leader. The question is, which side do the workers go on? They'll use anything. They'll have the Communist Party. They'll put a Communist Party minister in charge of education, who will do the arresting. That's what they did in '45, '46. So we can expect all types of things to happen. But the key to it, the key, is whether this new vanguard, the JCR, the student revolutionaries, the equivalent to the young socialists there in France, which is now becoming quite large and winning all types of young workers, can go to the young workers and, as each one of these conflicts comes, increase their influence. So every time the government tries to compress it, it just deepens their influence and lays the groundwork for the next mass upsurge. All of a sudden you'll see committees pop up where they're electing, in every goddamn factory, a JCR, or the equivalent in their worker organizations, like the Internationalist Communist Party or the Communist Union [?], electing these representatives to represent them, and they call a National Workers' Council and put de Gaulle under house arrest [?]. Which variant is going to take place is very hard to predict now. But that's why we say the thing is in motion now. It's got to have one settlement or another. It'll either move way to the right, the ruling class will win, or through experiences the working class is going to develop a revolutionary wing and take power.

Question: I want to cite an isolated case. When the coal workers, the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, made demands, the capitalists in control realized that to give them what they really wanted would completely take the profits away from mining coal. So what they did, essentially, was, okay, yes, we'll give you a concession, but no new members can be joining your union. We'll give you what you want, but as long as nobody joins your union. Then, under this little fraud, they automated, and they just waited for the union members to die out. I see right now where the assembly-line technique is dying out in America. They realize that to make concessions to the workers is going to drain their capital, and they'd rather put it to better use, which would be to automate and to introduce cybernetics. Do you see this as a threat to the workers?

Camejo: Yeah. Let me explain.

Question: I mean, an immediate threat.

Camejo: Yes, I understand. Let me explain. This is a very important point that you bring up. What has happened is this. The trade union bureaucrats in this country have taken the policy of good conditions for fewer workers as the policy of each specific trade union, like the miners. They got smaller and smaller. Steelworkers the same, smaller and smaller, but higher and higher pay for the fewer that are left, in order to make that one industry. They fight at the one-industry level. Then the workers become exploited. It's tough for them, and the new industry making the automated machinery, they're ununionized, many of them. But the key thing to understand about France is that the working class didn't move in component parts. It moved as a whole class. You've got to understand that. When one union strikes, like a factory over here strikes, a capitalist politician gets on TV and says, there are strikers, there's management, and there's the public. And the public is getting tired of the strike, like if it's a subway strike or something like that. And they play this. Now we're sending in a neutral mediator who represents the public. But when the class strikes, the whole class, then this business of privileges to a minority and all that stuff all breaks down. In France they said the public, they said it because it's like a ratchet, a train to go through the maze, and you put it in and it goes through the maze. As American reporters, the public is getting tired of the strike now in France. I saw them saying it, I almost fell off my chair. What public? They're all on strike. Forty million people out of a country of fifty million are on strike. He says, the public? Who's that? Two or three guys walking on the street? They're the public, they said. So when they strike like that, the level of the struggle in France has reached a totally different level. What can they say? You've got all the workers represented, even the ununionized; they struck. They're part of it. They belong to political parties and stuff. So it's a qualitatively different situation.