France’s May of 1968 brought on the largest industrial strike in the history of modern capitalism. What began as a student movement quickly overflowed the walls of the universities to spread throughout french society, with hundreds of factories not only being shut down, but occupied. What did not emerge during the strike however was the re-opening of the factories under workers’ control. Production was brought to a standstill, but no real step was taken to create a workers’ self-managed economy.
The example would be given five years later, with the Lip watch factory occupation; an occupation that would resonate throughout the country, mobilising thousands in acts of solidarity and serving as a model for new forms of anti-capitalist protest and rebellion.
We share two extraordinary film testimonials of the Lip occupation, films that record not only a history, but seek to intervene in the present.
For many of those who participated or witnessed the Lip movement, there was a “before Lip” and an “after Lip”.
The winds of May 68 in France: the Larzac
An often forgotten or ignored dimension of May 68 were france’s peasant movements, which preceded 1968 and would continue after the student movement and general strike came to an end.
The Larzac protest and land occupation against government plans to expand a territory for military training were emblematic in this regard. And as the LIP factory occupation quickly overflowed the walls of the factory, so too would Larzac echo throughout the country, redefining anti-capitalist action.
The latter could no longer be imagined as concentrated exclusively in industrial spaces, nor submissive to political parties and ideological preconceptions of what the revolutionary subject must be. Larzac generated a movement of combative solidarity that violated older schemes of rebellion and revolution, and placed at the centre concerns for the land, ecology, peasant forms of life and self-management that resonate still, with indigenous and peasant movements, and the more recent ZADs.
We share two texts below, one a brief introduction to the Larzac movement, a reflection by Joseph Bové, a participant in the movement, and a film record of the events. We close with a recent documentary-road trip through various ZADs in europe, contemporary and past, beginning and ending with Larzac.
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