HAPPENINGS
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run: for whom? to what ends? etc. It is rather to criticize and de–
construct the institution, to determine the orientation that we wish to
give to our work, to determine a program for this work and to realize it.
r.
May 1968
1) The crisis begun in May, 1968, is not a "crisis": through it, we
enter into a new period of history. What has been aimed at and shaken,
through criticism and through struggle, is not only the political regime.
but the social system; and not only capitalist private property, but the
entire organization of life, all the "values" that modern societies. whethel
of the West or the East, use or fabricate, impose or insinuate, to di sarm
desire. You have understood nothing about our movement if you do not
see this: what swept across France - to the point of creating a powrr
vacuum - was not the spirit of professional demands, nor the wish for a
political change, but the desire for other relations among men. Th e force
of this desire has shaken the edifice of exploitation, oppression and
alienation; it has frightened all the men, the organizations, the parties
directly or indirectly interested in the exercise of power, and they are
attempting by all means to suppress it. They will never have done
with doing so.
2) The political oppression of the citizen, the socioeconomic ex–
ploitation of labor, have been denounced in word and act. But the
movement has attacked cultural alienation with the same vigor. Thus
it has brought the revolutionary critique into the whole of the sphere
to which the modern ruling classes have extended their empire. Within
the University, this critique has been directed above and beyond the old
hierarchical relations, to the exteriority of knowledge in relation to life, its
connivance with power; within society, to the monopoly of knowledge by
one social class, to the mercantilization and deproblematization of the
information distributed to the other classes, to the proffering of cultural
objects favoring only those identifications willed by the ruling powers, to
the exclusion of the working classes from the means of understanding–
and expression. What the movement wishes to destroy is the separation
between culture and social experience (the division between intellectual
and manual labor); and also the separation between decision and
practice (the division between managers and executors); and finally
the defamation and recuperation of creative force.
3) Our critique is not merely verbal, it is criticism-as-practice: the
offensive blockage of the academic institution and its subversion to
revolutionary ends, physical combat against so-called order, transgres–
sions. By its forms of struggle, the movement makes manifest the weak–
ness of the overall system. It breathes new life into the workers' struggle,
