Quotes from "Technocracy and Rebellion: The May Events of 1968"

"Although the Events occurred in France, they reveal many of the underlying causes of student protest throughout the advanced capitalist world, including the United States" (21).

"As giant corporations and state agencies swallowed up more and more of society, as technology threatened to invade hitherto protected domains such as education and medicine, progress through blind technological advance was finally challenged" (22).

• Reminds me of where we are today as robots take over blue collar jobs and white collar jobs become more and more difficult to come by. Are we headed for a similar revolution?

"Most student movements of the 1960s were defined by solidarity with the oppressed in whose name they made these universal demands" (23).

"French students saw the university as an idealized model of the social world in which differences in knowledge justified different functions and privileges. One leaflet comments: 'For us the faculty and the student body are only grotesque miniaturizations of social classes, projected onto the university milieu, and this is why we reject the right of the faculty to exist as such'" (24).

"In sum, the students found themselves at the leading edge of a contradiction that cuts across all modern societies, the contradiction between the enormous knowledge and wealth of these societies and the creativity they demand of their members, and the mediocre use to which this knowledge, wealth and creativity is put. And they believed they had a solution to the problem in a transformation of the place of knowledge--and their own future role--in a social structure. They wrote, 'We refuse to be scholars, cut off from social reality. We refuse to be used for the profit of the ruling class. We want to suppress the separation of execution, reflection and organization. We want to construct a classless society'" (26).

"Continuing for the most part to confine the union struggle to wages and working conditions and the political struggle to elections, the Party completely misunderstood what was new about the movement: its demand for workers' self-management and for the transformation of daily life and culture. As a result, the communists found the new student opposition contesting their own leadership of the working class from the left" (28).

"That such results could have been achieved, shows that the communists had disastrously underestimated the political consciousness of the workers they were attempting to lead" (29).

"The struggles of May briefly dislocated one of the structural bases of capitalist democracy: the allegiance of the middle strata to the established parties and institutions. Opposition exploded among teachers, journalists, employees in the 'culture industry,' social service workers and civil servants, and even among some middle and lower level business executives" (31).

"In practice, the middle strata in revolt did not see themselves as members of either the ruling or the working classes and, in contrast with the latter, their demands were primarily social and political. Their protest focused on the absurdity of 'consumer society;' they denounced the bureaucratic organization of their work and demanded the right to participate in the determination of its goals" (32).

"Civil servants, like students and communication workers, attempted to include the previously excluded, and to switch their allegiance from the state to the population as though they themselves represented a middle term" (34).

"[The researchers that earned good livings making surveys and studies for the various ministries] were aware that their work, on becoming the 'property' of the purchasing ministry, served to justify pre-established policies or was ignored where it conflicted with them. Often the researchers felt these policies were not in the best interests of those very populations they had been called on to study. This is an alienating situation and during May, 'It suddenly seemed intolerable that the researcher should have in the final analysis no control over the product of his work'" (35).

"In opposition to the accepted wisdom--that society is fate, that the individual must adapt to survive--revolutions demand that society be adapted to the individuals" (36).

"As a result, industrialism has conintued to develop on the track originally set by its capitalist origins. Its central problem is still control of the labor force which, lacking ownerships or identification with the firm, has no very clear reason to favor its success. The instruments of that control, management and technological design, have rooted the system so deeply in consciousness and practice that it seems the outcome of progress as such. The fact that the system has been shaped not only by the technical necessities but also by the tensions of the class struggle has been forgotten" (40).

"The defining characteristic of a revolution is not that it is stronger than the state, but that it abruptly calls the existing society into question in the minds of millions and effectively presses them into action. A revolution is an attempt by these millions to influence the resolution of a profound social crisis by violent or illegal means, reestablishing the community on new bases" (42).

"Progress will be what we want it to be" (43). (Protesting students' slogan)