By Karen Fredericks
Each working day those of us who have a job get up, shower, put on our clothes and travel to work. At morning tea we drink a cup of coffee, eat a cream cake or smoke a cigarette, worrying briefly about the state of our health. If there are others in the tearoom we may discuss a workmate's wedding, or child, or a recent football game. In the washroom, just before we return to our desks, or to our place on the line, we sometimes stare at ourselves in the mirror, thinking, "There must be more to life than this".
Occasionally management try to lift morale (and productivity) with a corporate encounter session run by some overpaid, new-age management consultant who makes up fairy stories about "linear management structures" and forces us to sit around in small groups drawing meaningless flow charts on pieces of butcher's paper and telling the boss careful lies about how we "feel". The consultant then produces a glossy report which gives the boss advice on how to improve international competitiveness, which basically consists of a list of people to retrench.
On Friday night many of us go to the pub and get blotto. It gives us an excuse to rant and rage about how we really "feel" about our wages, about our supervisors, about Keating's balance of trade figures and about our lives. If we're drunk we have an excuse, and the courage, to yell and scream, "There must be more to life than this!"
In Paris in May of 1968 this private desperation, this individual anger, became a collective anger, and then a collective resolve to change lives. Touched off by the spirited and imaginative protests of students sick of being treated like inanimate fodder for the French economy, working people began to talk to each other, to organise together, to lock the manager in his office and to fly the flag of "workers' control" on the roofs of the workplaces in which they had once felt imprisoned, and which they now occupied.
In the 15 years before the revolt of May-June '68, France scrambled to modernise its industries so that it could compete on the world market. The drive for international competitiveness combined with the centralised, bureaucratised structures through which power had been exercised in France since Napoleon, to produce a brisk, chromium-plated and competitive society in which disciplined work on the production line became the lot of the majority of working people.
In the universities, too, competition was stiff, curricula were fixed and immutable, and students felt themselves to be sausages in a machine, with their adult humanity, their imaginations and their creative capacities ignored or even suppressed.
The protests which marked the beginning of the revolt of '68 occurred at Nanterre, then a new university campus located in an industrial wasteland in the suburbs outside Paris. Residential students were almost entirely isolated from "the outside world". There were no common rooms, no cultural facilities, and even the library was still unfinished. The residential blocks in which the students lived were segregated, the men's block facing the women's across an open space.
The students chose the strict segregation of men's and women's residential blocks, and the rules against "fraternisation", as the first target for their protest. This issue was indicative of the students' broader grievance, that the state and the university treated them as children, allowing no input from them on any aspect of university life.
Initially the students were seen by the broader community as spoiled brats making a fuss over nothing. But the violent response by the state to student protests, and the success of student propaganda (in which they were assisted by artists and intellectuals, including some as prominent and respected as Jean-Paul Sartre) in getting across the broader questions, soon drew the sympathy, and then the solidarity, of working people.
Australians, by contrast, are incapable of revolt. We are content to produce what we are told and consume what we are allowed. We have been bought off with the
spoils of third world exploitation. Our cars, televisions and kitchen appliances keep us docile in our private little worlds. The mass media feed us lies and we swallow them whole.
Revolution is something that happens overseas or in the past, and only where people are starving. Not here. Not now.
This remains the view of the vast majority of those who are working for social change in Australia, and even those who support revolutions in the third world. They are doubtful, to say the least, about the potential for mass political action in our own country. Those of us who remain convinced that it is always a possibility, a potential, are labelled "romantics" by our friends and "loonies" by our enemies.
It's true that our society seems ever more individualistic, from the competitive atmosphere at university, at the expense of creative learning, to the attachment of people for their motor cars, at the expense of the natural environment. It is also true that powerful forces are doing all they can to reinforce and perpetuate the atomisation of our society, to prevent to cross-fertilisation of ideas and dissatisfactions from one sector of society to another and, most of all, to prevent "private" problems being recognised as societal problems.
But the students of Nanterre were isolated. When their campus was closed to prevent them from meeting, they marched to the Sorbonne to join with other students. When the Sorbonne was closed down, they took to the streets of Paris and gathered up workers and intellectuals, and when they were gassed and beaten by the police they continued to meet, to talk, to get their message out to the rest of France.
The time was obviously ripe for their message, but still no-one foresaw the incredible events. In January of 1968 in France, things seemed quiet, orderly and boring, rather as they do here and now.