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We occupy the university faculties, you occupy the factories. The one and the other, do we fight for the same thing?
10% of the workers' children are in higher education. Do we struggle for a higher percentage, for a democratic reform of the universities? It would be better, but it is not more important. These children of workers will become students like the others. That a son of a worker may become a company director is not our plan. We want to remove the separation between laborers, workers, and managers.
There are students who, at the end of university, don't find work. Do we fight so that they may find work? For a good employment policy for those with diplomas? It would be better, but it isn't essential. The psychology and sociology graduates will become the recruiters, the psycho-technicians, the regulators who will examine the organization of your working conditions; the mathematics graduates will become the engineers who will develop machines that are more productive and more unbearable for you. Why do we, students who come from the bourgeoisie, criticize capitalist society? For a worker's child, becoming a student means leaving one's class. For a child of the bourgeoisie, it can be the occasion to understand the true nature of his class, to question himself about the social function to which he is destined, about the organization of society, about the place that you occupy there. We refuse to be the enfeebled scholars of social reality. We refuse to be utilized for the profit of the managerial class. We want to remove the separation between active work and reflective and organizational work. We want to create a society without classes; the path of your struggle is the same.
You demand a minimum salary of 1,000 francs in the Parisian region, retirement at 60 years, the 40-hour workweek paid at 48.
These are just and deep-rooted demands. They appear, however, without relationship to our objectives. But, in fact, you occupy the factories, you take the owners hostage, you strike without notice. These forms of struggle have been made possible by the actions long conducted with perseverance in the firms and also thanks to the recent combat of the students.
These struggles are more radical than your legitimate claims because they do not seek only an improvement of the workers' lot in the capitalist system; they imply the destruction of that system. They are political in the true sense of the word: you don't struggle over whether the prime minister changes but over whether the boss no longer has power in the firm or in society. The form of your struggle offers to us, to the students, the model of the truly socialist activity: the appropriation of the means of production and of the decision-making power by the workers.
Your struggle and our struggle are convergent. It is necessary to destroy everything that isolates us one from the other (practice, newspapers, etc.) It is necessary to make the junction between the firms and the occupied universities.
LONG LIVE THE UNIFICATION OF OUR STRUGGLES!
Everyone to the four meetings and to the demonstration at the Lyon train station, today, Friday 24 May 1968, at 7:00 PM.
Source:
Movement of the 22nd of March. Translated by Robert Stephens.
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