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    Freedom in Solidarity: My Experiences in the May 1968 Uprising
    Freedom in Solidarity: My Experiences in the May 1968 Uprising
    Freedom in Solidarity: My Experiences in the May 1968 Uprising
    Ebook158 pages1 hour

    Freedom in Solidarity: My Experiences in the May 1968 Uprising

    By Kadour Naïmi and David Porter

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    About this ebook

    Kadour Naïmi came from Algeria to study in France in 1966, four years after his country’s liberation from colonial rule and two years before a different liberation movement exploded in France. Capturing the youthful enthusiasm and revolutionary earnestness of the young rebels he joined, Naïmi’s account of May ’68 is a memoir like no other. Spirited and inspiring, it manages transmit important historical lessons amid stories of sex, studies, and street-fighting. This is his first book published in English.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAK Press
    Release dateJun 11, 2019
    ISBN9781849353519
    Freedom in Solidarity: My Experiences in the May 1968 Uprising
    Author

    Kadour Naïmi

    Born in 1945 in Algeria, Kadour Naïmi pursued studies in theater direction at the École Supérieure d'Art Dramatique du Théâtre National de Strasbourg (1966–1968), then received a sociology degree at the University of Louvain-La-Neuve (Belgium, 1979). He worked in various countries as a playwright-stage director and a scriptwriter-filmmaker. He is also an author and journalist. He supports the principle of social self-management to eliminate every form of economic exploitation, cultural alienation and political domination, and their replacement with a human community of freedom in solidarity.

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      Book preview

      Freedom in Solidarity - Kadour Naïmi

      Dedication

      AK Press dedicates this book to

      the memory of David Porter

      (1939–2018)

      Preface

      When I was young, reading accounts of persons who had fought for freedom and solidarity was quite invaluable. They encouraged my enthusiasm to act in the same way, clarified my ideas, provided me with guides for practical action, and allowed me to form relations with people who shared the same ideals for joint action.

      This is what convinced me of the usefulness of presenting my own personal account.

      Included are facts of history, as they happened, for a particular young person during a grassroots social movement. This person is not a revolutionary but simply a student, interested in participating in social change to improve his own existence. As well, this student originated from Algeria, in what is called the Third World. Thus are linked the problem of national liberation and a different sort of social liberation. The text explains why and how that convergence occurred.

      Beyond this, the social movement evoked is original: it concerns the grassroots revolt of May–June 1968 in France. The account allows one to observe the aspects of this uprising that enacted the unending historical process of humanity toward its liberation from economic exploitation, political domination, and psychological alienation.

      Finally, this text shows how exceptional social phenomena of great scale, on the one hand, and the daily and ordinary existence of individuals, on the other, became interconnected.

      In the end, the basic question remains: what seeds were left by the May–June movement in France? The response belongs to those who still believe in a society of freedom in solidarity.

      The gestation for the birth of my months of May–June 1968 lasted several years. My personal case demonstrates that the movement that marked this period was not a simple chance explosion of youths without great significance. My account, of course, is a recollection from fifty years later. I tried to be as faithful as possible to what happened. However, the language I use here is not exactly the same that I would have used at the time, when quite young and with less education and experience.

      Foreword

      In a 1999 survey among French anarchists, the events of May–June 1968 in France were ranked alongside the Paris Commune, Ukraine’s Makhnovist revolution, and the Spanish revolution of the mid-1930s as one of the key anarchist events in contemporary European history. While anarchists and antiauthoritarians are those most inspired by that insurgency, large numbers of others and French society generally were deeply changed by the militant actions, critiques, and passions of that period.

      For a few weeks, French workers carried out the largest wildcat strike in history. At the height of this period, some ten million (one-fifth of the population) were on strike, and workers typically occupied workplaces to prevent further activity. Many bosses were locked inside, and some workers began discussing resumed production through their own self-management. University and lycée students throughout France took to the streets, often setting up barricades against the police, then occupied campuses for weeks as autonomous zones of freedom. As the author well describes, in these contexts suppressed social desire finally gained release; free and passionate thinking and relationships quickly emerged. Many existing social barriers and privileges were simply ignored. A new, truly utopian society seemed at hand for millions as daily life and consciousness drastically shifted from a vertical to a horizontal focus. Even after the forced retreat a few weeks later, the unleashed passion and militant commitment among large numbers had liberating effects in the next decades, leading them to confront and subvert traditional relations of domination toward women, queers, students, prisoners, psychiatric patients, and others, as well as toward nature itself.

      In many respects, the impact and legacy of May 1968 were comparable to those of the 1960s in the United States, but the French experience was unique in its condensed intensity on so many fronts. To remember the full impact of the time is to acknowledge that, quite unexpectedly, underlying volcanic social forces can suddenly discover vulnerable cracks in the system through which to surge forth and transform society. Continued fear of such forces and the system’s vulnerability require elites to distort and denounce the true nature of that explosion.

      The account in this book is unique. While French-language books on the event continue to appear, especially in decennial anniversary years, new literature in English has dwindled. Thus, the present account can educate and inspire a new generation of English-language readers previously unexposed to this critical social rupture.

      This account also accomplishes a rare linkage of the dynamics of national and social liberation. The author, Kadour Naïmi, is Algerian. In his early twenties, in 1966, he came to France to study, just four years after Algeria gained national independence following 130 years of French colonial rule and a painful eight-year guerrilla war. Not only does Naïmi recall his personal participation in dangerous anticolonial demonstrations, he also links Algerian and French upheavals through the notorious French general Massu, the leader of violent, torturing repression in the Battle of Algiers and the savior of de Gaulle’s conservative French regime in 1968. While the author rejected Algeria’s postindependence military dictatorship, he equally wished the overthrow of French capitalist democracy in 1968. Nevertheless, in Algeria of the early 1960s, Naïmi was quite inspired by the massive workers’ self-management movement, involving hundreds of thousands of workers, that emerged spontaneously in farm, factory, and commercial units throughout the newly independent country following the exodus of European bosses and managers immediately after the war. Self-management on this scale was found historically only in Russia of 1905 and 1917 and in revolutionary Spain of the mid-1930s. Encouraged by this example, Naïmi easily and enthusiastically embraced the self-­management principle put forward in many dimensions of the May 1968 upheaval in France.

      The author also repeatedly and rightfully relates the French movement to Third World revolutions beyond Algeria—in Cuba, China, Vietnam, and elsewhere. He learned and was inspired by the U.S. Black Freedom movement, from Italian student revolts, and from U.S. and Japanese movements against the war in Vietnam. Quite consciously, he and his comrades at the time placed the French revolt in this broad internationalist perspective.

      Naïmi recollects with a first-person voice his youthful direct participation in the French upheaval and easily conveys the nature of his personal observations, relationships, elations, and eventual disappointments in the process. He does not provide an orthodox historical account, though critical events of these two months are highlighted. Instead, Naïmi’s grassroots vantage point allows readers to clearly understand how each new stage of the process felt and was analyzed by anonymous participants at the base. This well-­articulated personal experience invites readers to imagine themselves in the dynamic revolutionary contexts.

      Finally, the account is framed by Naïmi’s anarchist orientation. As he acknowledges and explains, this was not his political self-identity at the time, despite strong antiauthoritarian beliefs and his inspiration by the principle of self-management. The anarchism he critiques in his account is the individualist variety, not the tradition of social anarchism that was unknown to him at the time. Yet that absence of explicit anarchist ideological background helps readers understand Naïmi’s movement in that direction as the events of May–June 1968 unfolded. In fact, this same process characterized the experience of many thousands of non-anarchist participants who, because of what they felt, observed, and lived through, were subsequently attracted to anarchism. The number of self-identified French anarchists in May 1968 was quite small, yet the spirit and insights of anarchism rapidly proliferated throughout the country, as symbolized by the ubiquitous presence of black flags along with the revolutionary red. This deep and intense exposure of millions in France to anarchist themes truly left a revolutionary impact on French culture, politics, and individual lives for generations up to the present. As the author of this book concludes, The spirit of May lives on. Despite extensive propaganda for five decades by political and cultural forces hostile to that generalized insurrection, the liberatory spirit and ideals behind it will not and cannot disappear.

      David Porter

      January 2018

      Author of Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria

      1: A Pamphlet Illuminates the Poverty of Life

      In November 1966, I was in my second month as a student in stage direction at the École Supérieure d’Art Dramatique of Strasbourg.

      One day, I found myself in the meal line at the student restaurant. Someone offered me a free pamphlet. I took it and read the title: On the Poverty of Student Life, A Consideration of Its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Especially Intellectual Aspects, with a Modest Proposal for Doing Away with It. Oh la!

      I learned that the publication of this text was a real scandal.

      Several months earlier, I had been pleased to know that a group of anarchist-tending students had gotten themselves elected to the leadership of the AFGES (General Federal Association of Strasbourg Students). This was the equivalent of the local section of UNEF (National Union of French Students). Their program? To dissolve that organization serving the authoritarian state in favor of a self-managed movement of university students.

      And here was the result, the pamphlet, and what content!

      Written by members of the Situationist International and students of the local UNEF section, the text was published using money provided by the university to the student organization to better supervise the herd—an excellent example of a good diversion of public funds.

      Immediately, my head filled with enthusiasm. How could it not when reading these first lines of the text: "It is pretty safe to say that the student is the most universally despised creature in France, apart from the policemen and the priest."

      Despised! . . . How much I suffered! How much I suffered from that at the time!

      I was a twenty-one-year-old Algerian, scarcely arrived from a country where I was colonized and had taken my modest role in the struggle against the abominable colonial system. I had participated in grassroots demonstrations for independence, risking police and especially military repression.

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