The New York Review Abroad by Robert B. Silvers Read Free Book Online

is not work, it is the free development of the individual. Work means taking orders from someone set above you. The student says that in the revolution, automation will replace the kind of work which is slavery. Work will then consist of participation. There will be no oppression of power because there will be a constant toing and froing between those at the base of society and those at the top, a vital current. Machines will function but the goods and services they produce will be a means for leading a life of better value, and not ends which prove that the individual owns things or acquires status. He says the students and the workers combining together could achieve this kind of society: not the intellectuals who are void because they reflect problems peculiar to them, outside the context of society. To be truly revolutionary, you have to experience reality.
    This discussion was naïve. Often at the Sorbonne and the Odéon one heard things worse than naïve, chaotic and stupid and dull, andone longed to hear a professor talk for half an hour about Racine. There was wisdom though perhaps in the relief of talking simply as an act, like action painting. Talk, uninhibited, crude, theoretical, confessional, has overtaken Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux, and other cities. It is the breaking out of forces long suppressed. Not just the Sorbonne and the Censier, the Beaux Arts, the Odéon, were filled with talk but also the streets themselves. Another part of the French revolutionary tradition had emerged—the idea of joining forces with others in the streets—
dans la rue!
In the Rue de Rennes I find myself standing in a group of shoppers and shop assistants outside a closed Monoprix. A frustrated shopper is saying indignantly, “Where will all this end? In communism, universal poverty.” “Not at all,” says a natty black-coated worker, “Communism means
more
refrigerators,
more
television sets,
more
automobiles.
Le communisme, c’est le luxe pour tous
.”

    This definition shows how difficult it is for the students—conscious, many of them, of themselves as bourgeois, and seeking for a world in which material things are subservient to other human values—to get on with the workers, most of whom, of course, want consumer goods. The relation of the French students to “
les ouvriers
” is not unlike that of the American students to the Negroes. It cannot be seen just politically, but as a love affair in which the guilt-conscious whites and bourgeois are trying to win the members of what they regard as a wronged class to their own ideas of what are real values.
    Not that the students want altogether to dispense with washing machines and refrigerators. Their attitude is shown in a document of thirty theses drafted at the Censier by a group called
Les Yeux Crévés
. It begins by defining the students as a privileged class, not so much economically as because “we alone have the time and possibility to become aware of our own conditions and the condition of society. Abolish this privilege and act so that everyone may becomeprivileged.” It goes on to say that students are workers like everyone else. They are not parasites, economic minors. They do not condemn “
en bloc
” the consumer society. “One has to consume, but let us consume what we have decided to produce.… We wish to control not only the means of production but also those of consumption—to have a real choice and not a theoretic one.”
    It is significant that the movement of the students at the Sorbonne—called the movement of the
22 Mars
—started among sociologists at the newly built extension of the University in the desolate industrial suburb of Nanterre. A long declaration by Cohn-Bendit and some of his colleagues, in
Esprit
(the May number), depicts the sociology students as seeing sociology as a statistical account of existing society, the result of American influence. The very few sociology students who would get jobs after they left the university