In popular thought, the youth and student movements of France May 1968 have been linked with the thinkers of what is known as French theory. Gabriel Rockhill considers the actual…

From the article:

Bourgeois history has primarily retained from ’68 the spectacle of the student-led revolts in the heart of Paris: the barricades in the Latin Quarter, the occupation of the Sorbonne, the libertarian sloganeering, and so forth. A significant segment of the intelligentsia, particularly anarchist, Maoist, Trotskyist, libertarian socialist, and Marxian currents, wrote in support of these revolts and often joined them in the streets and the various occupations. Marxist-Leninist intellectuals generally questioned the strategic clarity of the unorganized petty-bourgeois and anticommunist politics of many of the more vocal students, which they criticized for being gauchistes and beholden to the illusory belief in a revolutionary situation.5 At the same time, many of these intellectuals also recognized the youth uprising as an important catalyst for a new phase of class struggle, and they stalwartly supported the mobilization of workers.

These different segments of the intelligentsia, as we shall see, were not those that rose to global prominence as major contributors to the phenomenon known as French theory.6 On the contrary, those marketed as the ’68 thinkers—Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, and others—were disconnected from and often dismissive of the historic workers’ mobilization. They were also hostile to, or at least highly skeptical of, the student movement. In both senses, they were anti-’68 thinkers, or at a minimum, theorists who were highly suspicious of the demonstrations. Their promotion by the global theory industry, which has marketed them as the radical theorists of ’68, has largely obliterated this historical fact.

  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Yes, the left wing in France, or what is seen as the left in terms of the intellectuals mentioned in the article that the author has disdain for, regressed since 68. France since then has acted as an auxiliary force for US hegemony with it's project in Africa.

    De Gaulle broke with these paleo-colonial and pro-American illusions simultaneously. He conceived then the triple ambitious project of modernizing the French economy, of leading a process of decolonisation making it possible to substitute a flexible neo-colonialism for henceforth outmoded old formulas and of compensating for weaknesses intrinsic to any average country like France by European integration.

    Within this latter perspective De Gaulle conceived an Europe capable of being autonomous with respect to the United States not only on the economic and financial plain, but also at the political and even, in the long term, military level, just like he conceived, also in the long run, the association of the USSR with the European construction ("Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals").

    But Gaullism did not outlive its founder and, since 1968, the French political forces, both the traditional right as well as the socialist left gradually returned to their former attitudes. Their vision of European construction narrowed down to the dimension of the "Common Market", between France and Federal Germany (so much so that when the German unification was realised, people were somewhat surprised and anxious in Paris...) and with the pressing invitation to Great Britain to join EEC (forgetting that England would be the Trojan horse of the Americans in Europe).

    Naturally, this slide implied the abandonment of any French Arab policy worthy of name, i.e. any policy going beyond the simple defence of immediate mercantile interests. On political level, France behaved objectively in the Arab world as in sub-Saharan Africa, as an auxiliary complementary force of the strategy of American hegemony.

    • Samir Amin, The US imperialism and the Middle East. Link