Vol. 36 No. 1 1969 - page 33

FOURTH WORLD
33
technological, anti-organizational form of authority and human solidarity
represented by the soviets. Indeed, the Napoleonic centralization and
hierarchization of the French state - of which the University's struc–
ture is a faithful reflection - makes France more immediately vul–
nerable to an anarchist revolution than to a classic Marxist revolution:
the average citizen's experience of the state is one of intolerable bu–
reaucracy. The slogan "Nationalize the factories," taken up during the
crisis by the CGT and the Communist Party, is traditional Marxist doc–
trine, but it does not mean much to the workers since so many of them
already work for nationalized sectors - the railroads, the coal mines,
Renault, Sud-Aviation - which have merely transferred private capi–
talist practice into the public sphere, and given the proletariat no new
status. The revolutionary cry, which the demonstrators shouted despite
union directives, is "The factories to the workers." This is the true
echo of 1848 or 1871, and it was at the origin of the movement of
strikes and occupations which followed the example given by the stu–
dents at the Sorbonne: the movement began outside the union frame–
work, with workers (particularly the young ones) grouping themselves
into action committees, raising the red flag over their factory and de–
manding, not simply higher wages and shorter working hours, but
"worker power" in the factories. It was only after the initial moves had
come from the "base" that the strike movement was taken in hand by
the CGT and channeled into classic wage and hour demands.
Edgar Morin was able to claim that the students set up the first
working communism in a western democracy: they expropriated the
means of production and instituted the communal exercise of power. As
the crisis developed, the concept of the "action committee" became
central, not only in the University and the factories, but in the state
radio and television, in the cinema, in the arts and letters, even in
residential neighborhoods: groups began fonning, to discuss the crisis
and prepare future "direct action" which was often undefined in char–
acter, sometimes given form in a program, but always directed to an
expropriation of power from the traditional hierarchies of management,
its redistribution to those directly concerned by its exercise, rejection
of the conception of representation as the delegation of responsibilities
in favor of direct assumption of power. The most remarkable instance
was the ORTF, the state television and radio services, where the jour–
nalists and technicians unilaterally declared the independence of their
organism from the state, gave it a new structure and a new statute.
That is, while political revolution failed, and led to inevitable
reaction, the future of a real revolution was drafted in the spontaneous
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