FOURTH WORLD
19
June 1, to cries of "Elections, Treason!" Put a tiger in their tanks, and
you no longer have a tiger in the streets. Then it was relatively easy for
the government to follow up with a White Terror: eleven "revolution–
ary" student groups outlawed (but not the Occident Movement, and
not the sinister Committees for the Defense of the Republic), over a
hundred and fifty foreign students suspected of having participated in
demonstrations expelled from France, former OAS conspirators par–
doned (part of a bargain struck for the guarantee of army loyalty during
De Gaulle's mysterious helicopter journey of the 29th), and a grand
electoral alliance formed on the principle of "no enemies to the right."
Finally, excuses were found to recapture the faculties one by one.
Yet it is incontestable that the student revolt brought France to the
brink of political revolution. And although political revolution failed, it
is possible that a real revolution - which we can most validly call a cul–
tural revolution - was given form and movement. To understand this,
one must go back beyond the events, beyond the barricades and the
revolutionary dynamic, to the "student condition" and the student
demand.
WE DON'T WANT A WORLD WHERE THE GUARANTEE OF NOT DYING
OF HUNGER IS TRADED AGAINST THE GUARANTEE OF DYING OF BOREDOM.
The inscription on the Sorbonne's walls suggests the students' belief
that modern capitalism has created a new "intellectual proletariat," a
proletariat whose alienation from society is not a matter of wages and
working conditions but of psychology and ideology. The workers are
suspicious of students because they are "sons of bourgeois" who have
never known hunger and insecurity. This is just the point: they are,
on the whole, free from want, free from material insecurity, but this
has been traded against necessary subservience to a social organiza–
tion detelmined by the exclusive goal of productivity, a world where
individual liberty and social justice - and in few places has this been
more true than Gaullist France - have been subordinated to economic
planning which takes as its all-important goal a five percent a year
increase in the gross national product. It is not simply that the machine
is master; we have passed beyond the Luddite stage, and it is now the
machinery of economic planning, and the subordination of all other
sectors of life to it, that must be smashed. And yet it cannot be smashed:
the consensus of modern technological society, the new "social con–
tract," is based on an understanding shared by workers, technicians,
managers and capitalists that the dislocation of this delicate machinery
would be a disaster for all. It is a true infernal machine because the
guarantee of economic well-being reposes on the surrender of freedom.
"You have understood nothing about our movement if you do
