Tomorrow it was May

In Stoke, at the university, we speak, on the occasion of its anniversary, about the Events of May 1968, the general strike, of the battles between students and the police in the Latin Quarter, of the wrenching of paving stones and metal grilles from the streets, and the throwing up of barricades. We speak about the groupuscules, about the action committees that replaced the bureaucratic institutions of the state, about non-Leninist forms of organisation, of molecular revolution (Guattari) and the creation of moments (Lefebvre), of situations (Debord). 

We speak about a breaking with causality, a bifurcation, a lawless deviation (Deleuze and Guattari); we speak of the void of the zero point between hope and despair (Duras). We speak about the continuity of modern mathematics, of Dada and the Cubists, of Heisenberg's theories and the critique of representation extended by workers and students to society itself (Lyotard).

We speak about the Dziga Vertov Group, of the dissolution of individuality into the forces of the revolution (Gorin), of new forms of collectivity, of community. We show excerpts from the collective's British Sounds; we speak about sit-ins and teach-ins, about the collective production of handbills and posters, about graffiti and the refusal to disperse.

Towards lunch, our stomachs rumbling, we talk about the occupation of Nanterre, the Sorbonne and the Theatre de l'Odeon; we talk of the occupation of the six main plants at Renault, and of the closure of the ports of Le Havre and Marseilles. We speak of the men and women of the streets, about 'an inaugural moment of speech' – about the welcome that each could bid the other with no other justification than that of being another person (Blanchot). We speak of De Gaulle's fumbling address on French television, and of panic in government circles, and of the carnivalesque redoubling of the power of authority in the disarray of the marchers (Blanchot again).

After lunch, in a temporary food coma, we speak of the banning of far left groups in France, and of the retaking of the Sorbonne and the infiltration of the police into schools and universities. We speak of the workers returning to work, and the triumph of the Gaullists, returned to government with a good majority at the General Election in June. We speak of the Czechoslovak Spring, crushed by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact. We speak about the collapse of the Cultural Revolution into terror, and the suppression of Guevara-inspired guerillas in Latin America.

The room seems to grow dark. We feel depressed, terribly depressed. But we invoke, as the afternoon wears on, the title of one of the collectively written tracts of the Students and Writers Action Committee, whose participants included Butor and Roubaud, Sarraute and Duras: Tomorrow it was May. How moving! How beautiful!

Tomorrow it was May: and so we speak, too, about the Hot Autumn in Italy in 1969, and the British miner's strikes of 1973-4, about Italian workerism and Autonomia. We invoke the ghosts of Fourier, Blanqui, Luxemberg; we speak of Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Cabral, and then we drink with our fellow attendees through the night.