Workers' Liberty 10, May 1988

Click image below to download PDF

It began, like many other revolutionary movements, over something small. In March 1967 students at Nanterre, a bleak new campus on the outskirts of Paris, started a campaign for the right to visit each others' rooms after 11pm.

The campaign grumbled along. It drew in other issues - overcrowding, and the content of courses. On 2 May 1968 the exasperated administration shut down the campus.

On Friday 3 May the Nanterre activists went to the Sorbonne, in the centre of Paris, for a protest meeting. There were rumours that fascists would attack the meeting.

Geoff Bell: There is nothing wrong in reassessing Marxist interpretations, but where this has led Socialist Organiser as far as this particular exercise is concerned is to the other side of the class divide. This is illustrated in the January edition of the magazine Workers' Liberty and an article therein by Sean Matgamna.

This is entitled "Ireland: lies the left tells itself". A more fitting headline would have been "Ireland: examples of the lies the right tells itself". For what has now emerged from what at first was a sloppy and impressionistic analysis is the one which stands four square