Alain Krivine was one of the speakers at the 1968 And All That event in London last Saturday. I’m not in a position to give much of a report on the whole day. A comrade from Belfast decided at the last minute that he wanted to speak at it but without taking the trouble to let anyone know much in advance and it fell to me to chaperone him. Unsurprisingly the Woodcraft Folk got an audience of more than a dozen and John got three. All was not lost as his talk was recorded for that small bit of posterity that will want to watch it.

When you’ve seen as many Provie commemorations as I have you develop a real aversion to anything marking an anniversary. They usually are little more than a bureaucracy legitimising itself. Saturday’s event was very different. It had an emphatic political pluralism which, in the bits that I saw, encouraged participants to think rather than declaim. It’s a shame that there aren’t more events pulling together a spectrum of the left that can encourage the same spirit.

Comrade Krivine gave pretty much the same speech on a lunchtime light entertainment show on French TV called Vivement Dimanche the next day. The host is something like the French Michael Parkinson. Each Sunday a guest is interviewed and is allowed to invite other people onto the show. On Sunday’s edition Olivier Besancenot was the main guest for three hours in which time he talked about the LCR, his job, illegal immigrants, Stalinism, music, the price of food and work related illnesses. This is on a Sunday light entertainment show.

I’ve extracted a couple of sections. In the first Krivine talks about his interpretation of May 68. For brevity I’ll put it into bullet points

• It was more than a cultural and sexual revolution. People fought for themselves.
• The best slogans did not come from the political people. They emerged from below
• Millions of people became aware of their own strength.
• It was the very beginning of a new working class – office workers, IT, technicians with new demands
• Three quarters of the population has more reason to revolt now than in 1968
• In 1968 there were 400 000 unemployed. Now there are several million.
• In 1968 environmental situation was not as bad.
• It was easier to make ends meet back then
• Now there are two million students and more than half of them work
• In many ways things are worse now than in 1968

To which Besancenot added

• It’s a reference point each time something happens
• For the last five years there has been a youth explosion every year – school and university students, young people in the working class areas
• People think that their May 68 is still in front of them
• In February 68 the bosses were saying that it’s impossible to raise wages.
• In June wages went up by 30 % after a general strike.
• In 68 the revolutionaries had a let of certainty. It’s important to doubt.
• the weight of the revolutionary past is heavy
• Stalinism, as well as the tens of millions of dead, discredited the idea that any society but capitalism is possible
• So it is necessary to reinvent a new project for society

The second section deals with the sans papiers which probably translates as illegal immigrants and concludes with a video clip of a number of young asylum seekers.