1.
May 1968 had a historic impact in that it put the socialist revolution back on the agenda in Western Europe.
The general strike by ten million French workers, occupying their factories and paralyzing the entire society, including the state, swept away with one motion the whole ideology of the false prophets, who said that the working class in the imperialist countries had been integrated into the consumer society and was so deeply stratithat it fied, divided, and depoliticized would be incapable of standing up as a class against bourgeois order.
And yet, in the midst of a period of economic expansion, when there was neither massive unemployment nor a drop in workers' real income, workers "challenged" capitalism as never before in French history. Their strength, their unity in action, their energy, drew around them for the first time not only the majority of technical workers, but also civil servants, a section of the "middle classes becoming proletarianized," even the "liberal" professions, such as doctors, whose politically reactionary attitudes had formerly been proverbial.
May 1968 revealed, like a flash, the depth of the structural crisis that is shaking up all bourgeois social relations. The fact that the radicalized youth played a detonating role, and that many categories of workers who could not strictly be classed as "manual" workers participated in the movement, is significant in this respect. But we should not draw mistaken conclusions, as Daniel Cohn-Bendit has. It was the socially centripetal force of the Western proletariat today that was confirmed by May 1968—a force infinitely superior to that of the Russian proletariat in 1917, the German proletariat in 1918, or the Spanish proletariat in 1936.
May 1968 was not a solitary harbinger. It was followed by the "creeping May" in Italy in 1969, and then by a new social explosion in Italy in 1975-76; the Portuguese revolutionary process of 1974-75; the formidable rise of workers struggles and mass struggles in Spain, from the demonstrations against the Burgos trial to the "world record for strikes" during the first six months of 1976.
Bourgeois society in southwestern Europe has never recovered the relative equilibrium it had before May 1968. Appearances notwithstanding, it is not about to recover it all that soon. The change in the economic climate and the tribulations of a long period of gloom into which it is sinking do not, of course, contribute to such a restabilization.
Il.
May 1968 represented the highest point of working-class spontaneity since the summer of 1936 in republican Spain. For May 1968 was not desired—much less anticipated and planned-by the traditional bureaucratic apparatuses that still control the organized workers movement. They were scared to death by the explosion, nearly as much as the bourgeoisie. They left no stone unturned to get the situation back to normal. In this way, they once again demonstrated their counterrevolutionary role during revolutionary crises.
But they could not act in such a cynical manner without paying quite a heavy price for their treachery. Prior to May 1968, the implantation of revolutionists in the plants and trade unions was weak and scattered. This, moreover, was one of the main factors that explains why the general strike made such slow progress once the factory occupations had been carried out.
Since May 1968, the layer of the French working class that half-instinctively, halfconsciously is suspicious of the bureaucratization of the CP and SP has grown considerably. The number of plants and unions in which revolutionists are active accounts for the bulk of industry and the public sector. The fact that in March 1978 a million votes went to candidates who clearly stood to the left of the CP and SP, and that these votes in their great majority were to be found in working-class neighborhoods and districts, underscores the magnitude of this change in consciousness.
It is still a minority, without any doubt. But it would have been inconceivable before May 1968. There are signs that a similar phenomenon is taking place in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and even in several relatively more stable countries of capitalist Europe.
However, while May 1968 brought working-class spontaneity to heights previously unknown, it also demonstrated the limitations of such spontaneity. By itself, without previous revolutionary experience, and especially without a revolutionary leadership that had acquired genuine authority in the eyes of broad masses, the French proletariat was not able to cross a double threshold in May 1968.
It was not able to bring forward a sufficient number of elected strike committees in the occupied plants and offices which, by federating and centralizing themselves, could have begun to challenge themselves, coula nave begun to challenge the tottering power of the bourgeois state with the embryo of a workers' counterforce.
Neither did it succeed in forging a plan for a political solution to the crisis that would have been acceptable or at least credible to a majority of the toiling masses.
The two major weaknesses of May 1968 were not inevitably tied together. Theoreti. cally, it is conceivable that the masses might spontaneously establish committees as the embryo of a new state power, even in the absence of a cohesive general political project. For instance, this was the case in Catalonia in July 1936, and in other regions of republican Spain.
Conversely, it is theoretically conceivable that the project of a workers government made up of all the working-class organizations might appear without previously existing soviet-type structures or a workers majority in parliament. This was the case in Germany, in the immediate aftermath of the victorious general strike against the reactionary coup by Von Kapp in 1920.
But the fact is that in May 1968, neither one of the crucial weaknesses of the movement proved possible to overcome spontaneously. This is what explains why the revolutionary crisis did not give rise to a revolutionary situation. The bourgeois government was momentarily paralyzed, but not disintegrated to the point of being incapable of recapturing the offensive. From then on, the ebb of the mass movement became inevitable, after a slight lull. With the complicity of the French Communist Party and General Confederation of Labor leaders above all, de Gaulle was able to end the explosive protest of the entire social structure through the simple expedient of legislative elections.
For ten years, it has become commonplace to assert that May 1968 was compelled to fail for lack of a political focus. In his April report to the CP Central Committee, Georges Marchais restated this conclusion, giving it, however, an extremely narrow meaning. He identified this lack of a political focus as the absence of a "Union of the Left," the absence of this type of electoral pact, in the June 1968 elections (l'Humanité, April 28, 1978).
But apart from the fact that the strikers were hardly calling for elections, and that it has not been shown that they would have demanded them if the equivalent of the "Union of the Left" had existed, Marchais glossed over the CP's acceptance of parliamentary elections as an outcome, although neither a CP-SP accord, nor even an agreement involving bourgeois formations in addition to the workers parties, existed.
In other words, this was a belated admission that the elections could not have represented any political solution whatever under such conditions. So Marchais was admitting that the principal concern of the Stalinist apparatus was to stifle the movement, not to enable it to triumph. This is a sizable admission.
Making a connection between the defeat of May 1968 and that of March 1978, Edmond Maire, leader of the French Democratic Confederation of Labor, stated: "The great lesson of these last ten years for the entire workers movement in our country ... is that we have gone from the social mobilization with no political alternative in May 1968 to the other extremeeverything for political change, everything through the elections, with no social mobilization. That is March 1978." (Le Monde, April 25, 1978.)
The parallel is indeed striking. But doesn't Maire share some of the responsibility as one of those who deliberately put the brakes to "social mobilizations" against the Barre plan, on the pretext of not frightening the "undecided" voters? As it turns out, those much-talked-about "undecided" voters pulled the levers for the bourgeois parties anyway in March 1978, while several millions of workers still voted for those same parties. These workers could have been convinced to vote for the organized workers movement, if they had previously been brought into a huge, united movement in defense of their immediate interests.
A purely and vulgarly electoralist political strategy has been shown not to pay off even from a strictly electoral standpoint. Above all, however, what underlies this strategy is a conception of "politics" that is the very foundation of reformism, a strategy that Edmond Maire has anything but rejected in its entirety, even if he appears to offer moderate criticisms of it "around the edges."
Political change and a political alternative are thus glibly identified with electoral and parliamentary perspectives and activities, which Maire criticizes at best for avoiding an "autonomous convergence" with the social struggles of workers. However, if there is a lesson to be drawn from May 1968-as, moreover, from all the revolutionary crises that have unfolded in the industrialized countries in the twentieth century, including the Portugese revolutionary crisis of 1975-76, even though Portugal is the least industrialized of the imperialist countries-it is precisely that these immense explosions and "social" mobilizations have an immediately political dimension and impact.
A general strike not only "challenges" the power of each boss taken separately, or of all the bosses taken together; it "challenges" the power of the bourgeoisie as a class. This elementary truth, which appears as far back as the Communist Manifesto, is lightly dismissed today by reformists of all varieties. The CP leaders are old hands at this, from Waldeck Rochet to Georges Marchais, Séguy included. But Edmond Maire is no exception either.
At the point at which "politics" is no longer reduced to electoral and parliamentary activity-which does not mean that such activities should be ignored or underestimated—it becomes clear that the mass of workers, through their organs of self-organization, their multiple forms of mobilization, and the proliferation of democratic activities of control at the grassroots, can "engage in politics" and find a "political focus" much more easily and efficiently, because they do so collectively, than through electoral activity, which they generally enter into only in a fragmented, if not atomized way.
And it also becomes clear that the whole course of developments leading from 1972 (the real "post-May 1968") to March 1978 owes nothing to chance, but follows a relentless logic. The Union of the Left was conceived as a political escape valve to prevent another May 1968. It was a preventive maneuver aimed at redirecting the enormous anticapitalist potential stored up in broad layers of the French working class as a result of May 1968 into reformist channels of class collaboration, based on a program compatible with maintaining capitalism.
The bourgeoisie and the reformist bureaucracies especially fear a new May 1968 because they foresee-not without reason-that in the next upheaval, the workers' self-organization will take a tremendous leap forward, compared with both May 1968 and June 1936. The spread of the idea of elected strike committees within the trade-union movement, the presence of revolutionists in practically all the large factories, the change in the relationship of forces between the bureaucracy and the broad working-class vanguard, even the aftereffects of the idea of selfmanagement, both in the SP and the CGT and CP, make it possible to foresee such a development.
It is therefore no accident that, despite their rhetoric about self-management and elected shop committees, the bureaucracies of the SP and CP, CFDT and CGT-not to mention FO (Workers Force)-scrupulously avoided organizing the Union of the Left among the rank and file, scrupulously avoided mobilizing the bulk of their members in political activity, let alone involving them in determining the content of the Common Program.
It is no accident that the Union of the Left was never anything more than a bureaucratic coalition at the top; that no one ever made a stab at building the famous "dynamic of unity," and that one or two sordid fits of temper within this bureaucratic coalition were sufficient to halt this dynamic, throw it off kilter, and break it.
It is here, as well as in the refusal to mobilize the workers against the Barre plan, in defense of their own immediate interests, that it is necessary to seek the underlying causes of the March 1978 defeat. For, owing to this, the outcome of the elections rested essentially on the hope of changing the intentions of three or four hundred thousand voters. With a different conception of politics, a class conception, based on unity in action and united organization of the entire class, the results would have been quite different.
Ill.
May 1968 was an immense hope. For many of its participants and central figures, it was a disappointment in the medium term. The very audacity of May 1968, which made it a startling revelation of the historic possibilities that would be opened up in the industrialized countries by overturning the capitalist regime, thus became a source of frustration, political and ideological confusion, and demoralization.
There is an "existential" aspect to this phenomenon which cannot be ignored by anyone who still has a heart, which no "revolutionary computer" can replace. The young students and workers-we repeat that this phenomenon was not and is not limited to the student milieu-who played a detonating role in May 1968 wanted "all of it, right now." Such bursts of energy are what fueled all the great revolutions of the past. Those of the future will be no different.
To repudiate or disparage such impulses as "anarchic" or irrational in the name of "political realism" is to refuse to take a stand on the barricades, to line up with the everlasting Plekhanovs with their "it was wrong to take up arms." It is to refuse to follow Marx to the Paris Commune, or Lenin to the Russian soviets. It is to demonstrate that one is not a revolutionist, despite all the great written and verbal vows, and, above all, to demonstrate that one does not understand what a revolution is.
But when the downturn followed the upsurge, when it became obvious that the victory of the revolution, and even a new their tractors through Nantes.
May 1968, was not at hand, many of those who took part in May 1968 refused to accept the "return to normal" to which the working class in its immense majority is condemned, and which Parisian wit, with its brilliant gift for succinctness, summed up in the saying: "métro, boulot, dodo" (subway, work, sleep).
This attempt to "jump over the problem" can take very diverse forms-sinking into the subculture and a transient existence; retiring to small villages in the mountains; trying to "do your work in a way that fits in with revolutionary conditions"; or even, more commonly, "living your own life instead of being politically active."
All of these "May 1968 walking wounded" have abandoned the battle for a collective solution in favor of the search for individual solutions (knowing full well, in their heart of hearts, that the mass of proletarian wage-workers will not follow their example.
So what is involved is a real retrogression of consciousness, even if it is sometimes camouflaged by ultraradical political talk. What is involved, in fact, is an abandonment of militancy and anticapitalist activity. As far as the regime is concerned, 10,000 farmer-craftsmen-selfsufficient-consumers—let alone 10,000 farleft, unorganized teachers-are infinitely less dangerous than 10,000 members of a revolutionary organization.
This phenomenon has always accompanied the phases of temporary setbacks in the revolutionary upsurge. We saw it after the 1905 revolution in Russia, after 1923 in Germany, not to mention after the bloody defeat of the Paris Commune. It was even more pronounced after 1968 in those countries where a strong upsurge of workers struggles did not take over the reins from a declining student movement.
In the United States and West Germany, and in Japan to some extent, the return to private life, the feeling of resignation, and even the political degeneration of the veterans of 1968 took place much more rapidly and visibly than in France, Italy, or Great Britain.
But there is a more directly political aspect of the phenomenon that deserves to be singled out. May 1968 saw the massive outflanking of the bureaucratic apparatuses by the masses, first the masses of youth, then the masses of workers. But given the level of experience and consciousness of the broad masses, this could still happen only occasionally.
Even if workers councils had emerged in May 1968, the CP and SP would have accounted for the great majority of those elected at first. (It is true that a genuine situation of dual power would have offered ideal conditions for chipping away at this majority, provided there was a revolutionary party that was already sufficiently strong and following a correct political line).
As a result, the period opened up by May 1968, not only in France, but throughout the southwest of Europe, Great Britain, and elsewhere, was dominated by two features: on the one hand, the numerical growth experienced by revolutionary organizations, which is an indication of the beginning of the regroupment of the workers movement; and on the other hand, the maintenance of reformist control over the organized workers movement, which indicates the relatively unshaken ability of the traditional apparatuses to "coopt" the masses' fighting potential, and redirect it into channels that fit in with maintaining capitalism. Operations like the "Union of the Left" in France, the "historic compromise" in Italy, and the "Moncloa pact" in Spain symbolize this ability.
It follows that revolutionists in the "post-May 1968" period are faced with a long-term job, one that is less exciting than the barricades, factory occupations, or elections of strike committees, but which, even if it is only partly completed, will determine the success of future May 1968s: the ongoing fight to win influence among the masses who are still dominated and misled by the bureaucratic apparatuses, to chip away at, push back, and finally break (which most likely will happen only in the course of a revolutionary situation) the control that these apparpines atuses still exert over the broad masses.
This gives particular importance to a stubborn, systematic policy of unity in action, of propaganda for the workers united front, for a CP-SP government. Such a policy must be linked, whenever possible, with unifying initiatives in and for action, and with agitation around immediate and unifying demands when the time is ripe and they can abruptly become credible and capable of mobilizing broad masses.
There is no contradiction between applying the Leninist policy of the united front and an effort to take qualitative leaps forward in building a revolutionary party and international. Such efforts necessarily involve successive experiences of revolutionary unity (regroupment) on the basis of a clear, correct program and general political line.
We are thoroughly convinced that the question of the relationship of forces between the revolutionary and reformist organizations plays an important role in maintaining the reformists' control over the workers movement. For the masses, their organizations are their weapons in the class struggle. They prefer their customary blade, even if it is dull, to no blade at all, or to one that is miniscule and can "cut" only crumbs, not a normal-sized loaf.
To create a revolutionary organization that is sufficiently powerful to serve as a pole of attraction for thousands of disgusted workers, revolted by the repeated betrayals of the reformists, but whose rebellion remains isolated and without prospects for lack of a viable alternative organization-that is an important aspect of the fight to break the hold of the bureaucratic apparatuses over the masses.
But it is not the key aspect. The key aspect is still a political one-the way in which the consciousness of the broad masses makes its own progress on the basis of their own experience; the penetration of the revolutionary Marxist program, slogans, and objectives among these masses.
That is why, in my opinion, there is an indissoluble bond between the struggle for unity in action by the working-class organizations (culminating in the slogan of a CP-SP government), the struggle for a program that can meet the aspirations of broad masses, warning the masses that the SP and CP will not carry out this program, the fight for a united mobilization of the masses and for their selforganization, and the struggle to immediately strengthen the revolutionary Marxist organization and its political influence on the class, a struggle that also involves carrying out propaganda and education around our whole program, including the conquest of power by the proletariat.
That is how Trotskyists approach the political problems of the post-May 1968 period. But not all the participants and central figures in May 1968 were, or have become, Trotskyists-far from it. This is even truer of the whole West European far left. As a matter of fact, the understanding of the necessary interrelationship between the building of a revolutionary organization and the stubborn battle to wrest broad masses away from the traditional bureaucratic apparatuses, with a line of class independence and unity, represents one of Bolshevism's unique theoretical achievements—from Lenin's "infantile disorder" to the transitional program of the Fourth International-which the other currents to the left of the reformists have not yet, or to an insufficient degree, assimilated.
These currents, in general, drew conclusions from May 1968 about the unbroken decline of the SPs and CPs, and their inability to maneuver among the masses or win back a section of the vanguard. This premature, false judgment was often combined with mistaken theoretical analyses. The SP was said to be a bourgeois party, indistinguishable from other agents of big business; the CP had ceased to be a workers party from the moment it became an agent of "social imperialism"; one or the other (or both) had become "socialfascist" parties, and so on. This led them into extreme sectarianism toward these parties.
But when events confirmed the electoral, and indeed political, hold of the traditional apparatuses over a large section of the toiling masses, these centrist currents (including a Maoist-centrist, or ex-Maoist centrist faction) executed a series of right turns, opportunistically adapting to the maneuvers and vocabulary of the reformists. Both opportunism and sectarianism, and sometimes a combination of the two, lead to the same result: failure to provide the masses with a real, viable alternative political strategy to that of the reformists. The reformists' control is not seriously challenged.
In Italy, and especially in Portugal, where the reformists were compelled to shed their masks in the crudest fashion, these disastrous errors of the centrists heavily reduced the price that the SP and CP leaders had to pay for their betrayals. Events have thus confirmed that the task of building an alternative revolutionary leadership of the proletariat, a task whose urgency was underscored by May 1968, can only be accomplished on the basis of the program of the Fourth International.
IV.
May 1968 inaugurated a period of crisis for bourgeois governments in southwestern Europe, combined with a rise of mass struggles that placed the possibility of a socialist revolution on the agenda in the short run. But a rise of struggles, like the crisis of bourgeois social relations, does not develop in an uninterrupted fashion. It inevitably goes through ups and downs.
In retrospect, we can say that during 1974-76, the maturing or outbreak of prerevolutionary crises in the four countries of southwestern Europe became more and more synchronized.
The summer and autumn of 1975 in Portugal, the first six months of 1976 in Spain, the end of 1975 and beginning of 1976 in Italy, the period leading up to the March 1977 municipal elections in France, were marked by the impetuous, and in some cases extraordinary, rise of militancy on the part of the masses, combined with disarray and pronounced defeatism among the bourgeoisie. The latter even began to "vote with its feet" in Portugal. A signifi. cant flight of capital underscored the fact that in these four countries big business did not size up the situation much differently than did revolutionary Marxists.
It is now certain that a series of reversals or pauses have taken place in these four countries. November 1975 in Portugal, the summer of 1976 in Italy, the signing of the constitutional pact between Suárez on the one hand and the Spanish Socialist Workers Party and Spanish Communist Party on the other, March 1978, not to mention the autumn of 1977 in Franceprobably mark the points at which these reversals occurred. They are not all of the same importance or gravity.
Without a doubt, it is in Portugal that the reversal has been most dramatic. Having established a more efficient repressive apparatus and reconsolidated the state apparatus, the bourgeoisie, with the help of the SP and also the CP, went on a systematic offensive against all the conquests of the masses in the 1974-75 period. The working class and its allies have now been forced back onto the defensive.
In Italy, the workers in the big factories have so far been victorious in blocking the capitalists' plans for restructuring. Now, however, resistance has been made much more difficult owing to the combined effects of ten years of nearly uninterrupted mass struggles that have nonetheless not led to any political alternative; a full-scale, chronic recession, with its impact on jobs, particularly for the youth; and the campaign by the CP and trade-union leaderships in favor of the bourgeois austerity plan and the CP's participation in a government of national unity. The Moro affair has resulted for the time being in strengthening the appeals for national unity, and is making it harder for the working class to fight back.
In France, opportunities for a bourgeois offensive have been expanded by the division in the workers' ranks brought on by the SP and CP leaderships since the autumn of 1977, and by the deep disappointment caused by the failure of the Union of the Left in the March 1978 legislative elections. This is already making itself felt in the economic sphere (massive layoffs in the hardest-hit sectors, the hike in publicservice rates). It will be continued with maneuvers aimed at wooing and dividing the SP. Moreover, the reformist leaderships' policy of division is continuing and is reflected in the lack of a united response by the trade unions.
In Spain, the participation of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party and Communist Party in the project of institutionalizing a bourgeois parliamentary democracy and establishing an austerity policy have dealt a blow to the mass movement and given a breathing spell to the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, the workers organizations have undergone a powerful reinforcement, and the politicization of the proletariat is continuing. A renewal of mass struggles is possible at any time.
However, the cumulative effect of these developments in the four countries should not be underestimated. Thus, the fact that the downfall of the dictatorship in Spain was not accompanied by a revolutionary crisis has considerably increased the chances of an anti-working-class offensive in Portugal. The defeat of the Union of the Left in March 1978 in France-and the lack of a strong upsurge of struggles that would have been touched off by the Union of the Left coming to power, by way of a response to the bourgeois reaction that would have followed it—has widened the margin of maneuver, in the short run, for the Spanish, and especially the Italian, bourgeoisie. The change in the situation in the four countries of southern Europe cannot be denied. Still, it would be a mistake to confuse this with a change in the character of the period.
In none of these four countries has there been a qualitative change in the class relationship of forces. Nowhere has the working class been defeated in a head-on combat. Nowhere has its potential for struggle been fundamentally tapped. And above all, nowhere has the bourgeoisie been capable of stabilizing its rule in a way that is the least bit durable. The economic depression prevents it from carrying out a policy of reforms successfully. The relationship of forces still prevents it from carrying out a policy of repression (the first important test in this regard will probably come in Portugal).
We are still, then, in a situation of extremely unstable and fragile equilibrium, in which neither of the two main classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, is capable, for the time being, of imposing "its" solution on the social crisis. In this situation, an accident of whatever kind-political, social, economic, or fiscal-can set off either a revolutionary explosion, or a counterrevolutionary, much more aggressive offensive of the bourgeoisie. The immediate result of one or the other outcome would be either to once again reverse the international tendency, or to strengthen it each time through a cumulative process.
It was correct to point out in 1972-75 that such a situation of unstable equilibrium could not be prolonged indefinitely under conditions of economic depression, in which the process of capital accumulation cannot be renewed in a meaningful way except by a significant increase in the rate of surplus value.
Such an increase has not been achieved anywhere in southwestern Europe. But it was incorrect to establish too rigid a timetable for the inevitable test of strength between the classes, to underestimate the duration of the crisis of bourgeois rule (which can be explained, in the last analysis, by how grave this crisis is).
The nature of this crisis of long duration is what enables us to reassert the conclusion that the reversal that has taken place was conjunctural and not structural, that what is involved is ups and downs in the context of a period that has not changed. As long as the working class has suffered no serious defeats, and the bourgeoisie has not found the resources necessary to restabilize the situation, new "May 1968s" remain possible and even inevitable in southwestern Europe, with all their international repercussions.
Our current is the only one today-as it was prior to May 1968—that remains firmly convinced of the timeliness of the socialist revolution in capitalist Europe. Momentarily dazzled by the radiance of May 1968, the leftist intelligentsia has returned to its old demons of the past. Its skepticism with respect to the revolutionary potential of the proletariat in the imperialist countries prolongs that of the reformists and revisionists of all stripes.
A near-universal shout arises from the disillusioned third worldists (Samir Amin-see Monthly Review, June 1977), Maoists (Peking Review, No. 45, 1977), and even from the repentant ex-terrorists (the most typical example is that of Horst Mahler in West Germany), from the battlescarred veterans of May 1968, echoing the siren song of the Eurocommunists and left Social Democrats: "Stop dreaming about an impossible proletarian revolution! And therefore, stop being proponents of an uncompromising class struggle, because it will not lead to any material prospects! Be realistic! Get involved in practical politics, in other words, carry out a policy of 'bold' reforms that adhere to a 'consensus,' to class conciliation."
If the "new philosophers" in the style of Glucksmann and the supporters of the anti-Marxist offensive add their shrill voices to this chorus, it is because by pushing logic to extremes, and basing themselves on the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy which they denied in the past, they intone the "end of Marxism" and the "end of politics" as the inevitable outgrowth of the "end of revolution" and the end of the class struggle.
All of this gives a feeling of déjà vurecalling the period before May 1968, when sociologists babbled about the "depoliticization" and "apathy" of youth. What was left of these sage theories after May 1968?
The impressionists and opportunists of this conjunctural lull will get their comeuppance this time too, as during the previous cycle. It is capitalism, not Marxism, that is in crisis. It is not the proletariat that has been structurally weakened, but bourgeois domination. To deny this, in the light of May 1968 and of all that has happened since, is to deny the facts.
The great revolutionary battles are ahead of us, not behind us. The historic stake of these battles is such that the only political realism worthy of the name consists of systematically preparing for them in every area of social activity-including the theoretical level-and to prepare the broad masses, educationally and effectively. Yes, it was only a beginning. Yes, the combat continues. Yes, the chances of winning, beyond any doubt, are real and intact.