.... a personal experience
Nicolas Baby “,..,. Self-management, this crazy slogan...”
C, SEGUY, general secretary of the GCGT,..
This slogan saw the light ct day in May 1968 for two major reasons, First the CGT could nol afford not to take a position on it -- the idea of self-management was undeniably ‘in the air’. Certain siudent and above all worker experiences leave absolutely no doubt on thai: the Brest CSF factory where the works produced walkie-ialkies and transistors for the strikers and in the Sud Aviation factory in Nantes which was run and operated by the workers themselves under a workers council in which union and non-unionised workers all took part.
‘Phe second reason is quite different: if the CGT general secretary could so drily condemn the passage to the active strike from the passive strike, to the self-management strike, il was due to the fact that for a number of workers -- even very advanced workers -- the slogan was still something empty, “crazy”.
This is mainly due to the fact that the slogan of self- management has been for a long lime the slogan of the anarchist movement. For the French workers movement, the anarchists have been people whe have never intervened in lhe mass movenient. They were rigorously condemned by the leaders of the October Revolution and earlier by Marx himself. Finally the ideas of spontaneity common to anarchists of all tendencies (for whom self-management could perhaps be characlerised as 'No bosses or leaders, on then to self-management’) shocks the sense of organisation that workers almost automatically acquire.
Finaliy, it is true that neilher the collectivist-anarchisis nor other revolutionary currents did much to advance self-management, not only as a prefiguration of socialism as 2 means to fight against the extreme bureaucratisation of society, but also as a slogan for action.
The failure of the anarchists to understand the principle of transition, the fact that they artificially mix up one and the other -- the slogans of a general type for socialism and the immediate demands without making the link between the two, leads them to make self-management a vague idea, to take concrete shape in the far-distant future, ‘Politics of wages and the Bomb" well sums up their position,
But recently new generations of revolutionaries in Europe have gone much further in their practice on this question.
In this article, I will give only a single example: the French high school students movement and the way we have been led -starting from an abstract concept of this ideal -- to re-examine our positions ecriticaliy to refine them and finally to pass into the fire of practice.
THE C.A. L's,
ft must be first of all slated that throughout this year the CAL's (lLyceen Action Committees) have most often formed ihe most dynamic (and politically the most rational} sector of the student movement.
] will give a significant example of this: at the beginning of the university year 1968-69 there were around one hundred high school students excluded because of political views in difierent lycees, ALL WITHOUT EXCEPTION HAVE BEEN REINTEGRATED IN THE SCHOOLS AFTER LOCAL
STRUGGLES, On the other hand, when the university movement faced a Similar situation, it was unable to reply ina united and firm way to the repression, Quite often the agitation in the lycees covered the front pages of the newspapers, while the universities featured much less. {1}
The Henri [V Lycee played a special role in the high school movement. It is considered the "hard core" of the movement. For some time, not only has the Henri IV CAL been considered the vanguard, not only is it the only high school which this year has been able to rally 500 to 550 students on strike (there are 600 students at Henri IV) but even more in the inlernal debates in the CALs, the militants of this Lycee have shown a particularly high political level -- the
opinions advanced by Henri IV still have a big import.
THE EXPERIENCE IN HENRI IV LYCEE
In May 1988 ail educational establishments were occupied by their students. At the beginning the occupation of Henri [V
W took place normally: commissions met throughout the day on Cuba, workers struggles, pedagogic questions, the nature of the Lycee, etc.
But from Jume ithings changed radically. The previous evening during a discussion in the pedagogic commission, the idea of transforming the passive strike into an active one and to run the Lycee ourselves was voted by a crushing majority. Throughout the night, we feverishly organised things as follows. It was clear that there were two sorts of person who had occupied the lycee -- onea core of forty, the others some hundreds of students and parents who simply attended the meetings of the different commissions.
The core group therefore took up several tasks. They divided into work groups: one organised security and self-defence of the lycee against the fascists and police, others the educational self-management of the lycee, other with cleaning services, others with the canteen (they went to the markets in the morning to buy food, controlled the kitchen and financial questions, as well as the menu which was a problem, ..).
Each morning a General Assembly met attended by all the students (although we met in the middle of the general strike, without transport, there were often 400-450 present, some teachers and several dozen parents), The "Council",
elected by this Assembly, was subject to immediate recall and had to report daily on the management of the lycee, to put forward suggestions for the future, elec.
The day was then organised in the following way: in the morning, General Assembly and lessons, in the afternoon and evening, sport and cultural activities (we had thealre groups. students put on plays by Pirandello, extracts from Brecht. . .). For the lessons themselves, we changed the stratification in a horizontal manner into a vertical one. Previously the classes had averaged 40 to 45... we now set a maximum of 10 tol$ a group. The horizontal stralification meant thal students of 15 or 16 never saw older students of 17 or 18. We mixed second and third forms (13 to 16) and first and terminal (between 16 and 18). The more advanced students in the first group went into the second and the more backward vice versa into the first.
THE LESSONS IN THE SELF-MANAGED LYCEE
These changes (which were not simply technical at all)
operated on the basis of major principles being established (education must be based on criticism; without interest in the student there is only 4 caricature of education; mixing different grades at the Lycee; "deparcellisation" of education - i,e. end to artificial subject division and division from society). We thus began our experience in self-management.
Each morning (around three hours of work) was devated to the single and the same question. Thus we had the time to: - hear a talk on the question, given by a student particularly well versed in the question, or by a "specialist" (teacher, economist, journalist) invited by a work group beforehand. - to then hold a critical debale in which everyone gives his viewpoint (and from this point on the “specialist” plays no more important a role than anyone else).
finally to duplicate off copies of what we have said for (he benefit of other work-groups.
CHANGES IN SUBJECTS STUDIED
Finally, we have modified radically what we have sludied:
introduction of new matters previously not studied in the Lycees: sociology, economics, psychoanalysis, sex education, etc,
- suppression of taboos on study of Hegel and Marx in Philos - the study of de Sade in French, the workers movement in Hislory, contemporary music and jazz in Music. - there were other innovations: for example, fusion of History and Geography so that the study of the latter is no more static and dated; the study of contemporary phenomenon {for example, the invitation to a unionisl; invitation to a journalist to debate the war in Algeria and independence, ithe Boumedienne putsch, . , }.
If to all that is added the atmosphere of enthusiasm and fervour, of hope belonging to all revolutionary crises and the spirit of seriousness and organisation, which was astonishing, you get an idea of whal was "the experience of educalional self-management at the Henri IV lycee."
SOME_REFLECTIONS ON THIS EXPERIENCE
Aiter the retreat of the revolutionary upsurge, we were
forced to also retreat and abandon our experience. On the other hand, the internal debates in the CALs, were always very lively, have forced us 1o deepen our viewpoint on the "'alternative university model". as well as on the slogans to be put forward in this period of pause for the French revolutionary movement.
It would take too long and be too fastidious to go through all the debates in which we have been opposed to the sectarians and dogmatigls of all gender, or even to outline all the different phases through which we ourselves have passed before we
reached the following conclusions, after two years of union practice in the high school milieu,
ON THE "MODEL"
We said at the beginning of the Revolution that the goal of militants should not only be simple workers’ control over the university, nor simply a self-managed university in which the life shall be regulated by a staff-student council. What we wanted in the more or less long term, was the fusion of unitsjof production and units of education, The creation of self-managed units being both schools and factories, is what we want. There rests, we believe, the only way to firevent the university being an institution cut off from social life and forming an elite in the country, and the only way to break the division between intellectual and manual work,
As for the slogans we put forward, it is now impossible for us to put forward such a slogan to mobilise the masses, For nol only could this concept nol be realised until well after the Revolution and cannot therefore take concrete form until a relatively distant date, but it is moreover incomprehensible at ihe present time to the masses. Our role is therefore to ensure that the high school students fight around questions which affect them, to have their political consciousness raised through their own experience and not through abstract propaganda. i —_
To do that, we must start from the university and high school field,
We have therefore put forward the slogan of student control over school life as the fundamental basis of our struggle. We demand that the lycee General Assembly be able to: - manage the political and cultural activities of the Lycee {theatre, cinema club) without any restrictions.
- have the right of veto on the financial management of the lycee ("open the books"'...),
- participate in drawing up a timetable,
- in liaison with the teachers, organise the pedagogic life of the lycee without any interference from the administration. Parallel with this, we demand a contro] by the unions over employment and education in general.
Thus, in fighting for these demands, which are easily understood, and through struggle, they will themselves understand the need to go beyond the positions they have upheld until then and go to more radical demands, Only through their own experiences and particularly in May 1968 when the mass awareness went ahead by leaps and bounds fantastically in a short period of time, will the students understand the need to get aut of the purely institutional framework to intervene directly in social struggles, to seek a juncture with the proletariat for the destruction of the State apparatus.
The task is to go fram the contesting of the university to that of society as a whole,
The conclusions now are clear; militants must give concrete content to self-management, to say "That is the type of society we want to build. That is what we are fighting for."
Between the demand for bread and the Revolution, there is a link, It is for us to show it.,.
(1) This agitation culminated in the affair at Louis-le-Grand
Lycee when on May 2, 1969 group of fascists entered the
lycee beat up students and threw a grenade. That ripped
off the hand of one of our comrades. Another lost his
eye, Most believe that the fascist commando benefitted
from police complicity. Teachers at the school are
firmly of this opinion.