Paris May 68
Source: The May Events Archive of Simon Fraser University;
Source: Simon Fraser University, The May Events Archive;
Translated: by Anonymous and Mitchell Abidor.
We are not a movement of an -ism. We don’t have a label and we don’t want one. Our keyword is the word REVOLUTION.
That’s why we don’t have a flag: the red flame that flies above the Odéon has nothing to do with communism. It is a warning sign, just as the black flag is not an anarchist symbol but simply means STOP. This is all because we want to show our presence and our will to act, because we say “Enough” to the present society, to its reformists and to that intrigues that allow it to survive.
We don’t have a doctrine, but rather a single principle: it is SOCIETY WHICH MUST BE AT THE SERVICE OF THE INDIVIDUAL, AND NOT THE OPPOSITE. Consequently, it is man who must make society.
Currently it is society that shapes mankind and reduces it to nothing but an instrument of consumption and production in service to capitalism. Reforms, however large in appearance, will change nothing at the heart of the problem; at the very best they would change for a few months or years the exploitation of the individual and the alienation which makes him a perfectly docile tool of big capital.
WHAT’s NEEDED IS A RADICAL CANGE OF THIS SOCIETY’s STRUCTURES, whatever the means needed to succeed in this transformation. We don’t have an alternative program or platform, because we are revolutionaries and not reformists. Our movement has the goal of creating a revolutionary reality: we must destroy the current society of paralyzing, alienating, and dehumanizing bourgeois production and consumption.
What the students- who are now workers like the others- wanted to realize in the academic world, the entire mass of workers, students, artists, laborers, employees or otherwise, now want to realize at the national level, and then internationally.
Therefore, no program. But we consider that revolutionary acts of destruction are at the same time creative: Contesting the current structures allows us to specify, to progressively define the theoretical structure of society to which the revolution will give birth.
We currently live in a pre-revolutionary time, hence one of destruction. This permanent struggle, engine of all true progress, will arrive at the revolution, a positive reality, but in no way definitive, for there is no established revolution.
And so we say that THE REVOLUTION WILL BE PERMANENT OR IT WILL NOT BE AT ALL.
Protest will be permanent in the same way.
Revolutionary Action Committee. ODEON