(Translated in Schnapp Document 40)

AND NOW
TO THE FACTORIES!

Call to action by the UJC(m-l) and “Serve the People” Clubs

Anger is rumbling among the masses. A million out of work. Starvation wages. Fascist repression at Dassault Citroën, Simca, and in many other plants. The CRS against workers’ and peasants’ demonstrations in Le Mans, Radon, and Caen.

For several months now, popular revolts have been breaking out against the employers and Gaullism.

Everywhere the reformist party machines, the revisionist leadership of the PCF, and the bureaucratic leadership of the CGT have striven to break the mass movement in Rhodiaceta, at Schwartz-Hautmont, Aluvac, the ceramic factories of Alès, and in many other places. But more and more the CGT and the PCF organizers have been checkmated and unmasked by the mass movement. More and more the masses are becoming conscious of these maneuvers which aim at crushing the class struggle in the factories in order to canalize action in favor of reformist objectives and, above all, of parliamentary debates.

On the occasion of student demonstrations, with violent police repression, popular pressure made itself felt: on Monday and especially Tuesday, workers and young laborers came to demonstrate in the steets with the students. This worker participation reflects the deep-seated anger that exists among the broad masses of the working class against Gaullism, which is a regime of unemployment and misery, and against revisionism, which is a reactionary trick for demobilizing
the masses.

The masses want to fight against Gaullism.

On the question of street demonstrations, their slogans, and their itineraries: from now on we must take up the fight against the obstacles erected by the reformlsts, we must help the masses to overcome these and to clear a way towards the revolutionary class struggle.

Three reactionary forces have leagued together in order to repress and check the revolutionary mass movement.

Gaullism has repeatedly hurled its aggressive troops against the populace, the students, and the workers.

The social democrats (PSU, SFIO, Trotskyites, and the executive commlttee of the UNEF) were quick to try to turn the student movement to account. Their goals are to keep the students isolated from the working class and limit the movement to reformist objectives: “structural reforms for the University, openings for young cadres, etc. These objectives are reflected in the reactionary political line followed these past days by the UNEF officers: at all costs keep the students in the Latin Quarter, limit slogans to absurd student demands, incapable of uniting students with the broad masses of workers and peasants.

The revisionists of the PCF and of the CGT leadership began by brutally attacking the student movement, revealing their true counter-revolutionary nature. The anger of the masses exploded against these traitors, who are police accomplices. Frightened, they have retreated a bit and rallied to the operation of their social democratic friends to limit the movement’s objectives to the three points laid down by the UNEF officers. That is, the revisionists pretend that the workers are demonstrating for academic freedoms.

This is not true: the workers are demonstrating because they want to fight against Gaullism, a regime of unemployment and misery, because they want to make an end to repression. One flag only can unite the broad masses of workers, poor peasants, and students:

The overthrow of Gaullism.
The conquest of freedom for the broad masses of the people.
Control over the exploiters

Let us sweep away the reformist slogans, which are purely academic, as well as the small revisionist and social democratic groups who are working together in an attempt to prevent us from having access to the masses of the people and to the revolution!

We must leave the bourgeois neighborhoods, which are not our concern. We must go to the factories and to the working class neighborhoods to join with the workers.

DOWN WITH GAULLISM

FREEDOM FOR THE MASSES OF THE PEOPLE!

UJC (m-l) , Cercles “Servir le Peuple” Tuesday, May 7, 1968.