No but thanks for the recommendation.
I do wonder if general strikes are feasible in today's world, or at least America. It might be more effective to cause a collapse in one vulnerable sector of the economy like transportation.
May '68
Blake Sanders
Luke Carter
This thread is fucking amazing quality
Lincoln Kelly
it is strange that that actually proves marx to be wrong on the whole "revolution will happen on the most advanced capitalist states first (19th century Belgium i think is what he said).
also it draws on the question that is the proletariat really the revolutionary class? i mean 60s france failed, 30s spain and so on "fascisms are the result of failed revolutions" as its sometimes said. Anyway, the the ones who succeeded are actually the ones which the peasantry was the main revolutionary force. I suppose that it happens because in is those extreme poverty regions (rural areas) that the the poor have nothing to lose and commit fully, and also that it is also in those regions that the ideological and repressive apparatuses work less efficiently.
Samuel Jenkins
Bullshit. It failed precisely because its rejection of these structures. Rejecting all of it and putting nothing in its place just leads to an orgy of carnival that goes nowhere and fizzles out when people grow tired of the event.
Nolan Adams
The Communist Party and labor unions literally backstabbed French proles by negotiating an end to the strikes with the government and employers without any sort of popular solicitation. They were objectively a counter-revolutionary force by any fucking metric. How you can even consider pretending otherwise is beyond me. But then again, tankiës are no more capable of identifying a counter-revolution than a goldfish of realizing he's swimming in circles in a bowl.
"Wah wah, unruly proles won't obey the guideline set by the 'Communist' Party and bourgeois unions! Call the cops!"
Cooper Collins
I hope smashies are planning shit for the 50th anniversary.
Landon Young
Where I live, Belgian cultural institutions have organized a bunch of exhibitions on the theme of political agitation but that's about it. :^)
Alexander Ross
I feel like zizek would have something profound to say about that, but I am too much of a brainlet to articulate it.
Wyatt Morris
Yeah, but the PCF was revisionist by this point and this was well-known in international Leninist circles–even though the party did quite well electorally. The Unions were hit or miss, some supported the uprisings initially and some didn't, but most came around to supporting the student rebels for a time but…
Unions, while playing an important role in class struggle and proletarian life and organization aren't inherently revolutionary. The student radicals failed to put forward a coherent plan to transform society and so the they missed the opportunity to seize French state power when that was open, its hard to blame the unions for taking the deal that was offered to them considering this.
Many of these student radicals literally became the French establishment post-68. The only thing that came out of 68 was the destruction of the quality of French university education and the fall of de Gaulle's nationalist anti-capitalist government in favor of a pro-US, pro-Israel, pseudo-leftist ultra-liberal establishment favoring globalization.
The student radicals of 68 have long been idealized and so have many of the ordinary (typically petit-bourgeois) students who participated in it but the student radicals were at least as guilty as the revisionists when it comes to the outcome.
Funnily enough, the radical right actually staged a a series of coups a decade earlier that succeeded in bringing down the fourth French Republic and five French governments. The difference here being that they were actually serious about taking power unlike the petit-bourgeois student leaders of 68.
I think objectively-speaking, the French far-right caused more long-lasting chaos in the post-war period than the docile French Left. The memory of May 68 has been made into a fantasy for red liberals, akin to the image of the hippie in America, the dream comes so close to succeeding in the media portrayal but never quite can. It's short-comings are never honestly dealt with but we are told by anarchists and many different varieties of mealy-mouthed western leftists that 68 is the model that we must expire to while at the same time they denounce the Russian revolution as a failure. It is also doubly ironic that these same leftists who denounce Leninism as "trapped in a fossilized past" and constantly call for "reinvention" always look upon 68 nostalgically through rose-color glasses and even go so far as to comment that it was "a miracle"
t. Michael Parenti
Joseph Long
You better be joking, mate.