After this week’s Coordinating Committee meeting, Lowell showed us a pamphlet that was published by the Sojourner Truth Organization a year after the general strike in France in the spring of 1968. See “General Strike France 1968: A factory-by-factory account,” by Andrée Hoyles.
The Introduction by Sojourner Truth Organization:
In May of 1968, France was shaken by the boldest, most widespread and most promising wave of mass struggle that Western Europe had witnessed in several decades. The struggles reached into every corner of French life, and set in motion a train of events which led to the toppling of President De Gaulle. To many people, the French events demonstrated for the first time the real possibility of revolution in advanced industrial countries.
In the U.S. the commercial newspaper reports of the French events focused on the activities of the students, which were often quite daring and dramatic. They paid very little attention to what was going on in the factories, mills and offices where the largest part of the French population carried out the chores of daily life.
The left-wing press was, if anything, less informative than the commercial press. Every little radical group seized upon the French upheaval as an occasion to produce long analytical articles advancing its particular “line” on how to make a revolution.
To our knowledge, no one has yet published, in this country, any real account of what the French workers were doing during the great days of May ’68. To fill this void, we are publishing this pamphlet. It first appeared as a chapter in the 1969 edition of the Trade Union Register, published by the Institute for Workers’ Control, of London.
One special feature of French life, not explained in the pamphlet, must be d[ealt] with in order for American readers to derive the full benefit of it. In France unlike the situation in basic industry here, union membership is not compulsory and no union has a monopoly on the workers in any enterprise. There are three major union federations, which compete for members in every large factory. All workers, whether or not they are members of any union, have the right to vote for delegates on the joint slate which represents them in negotiations with management.