Communist France as a result of 1968 events?

As I recall there was a disconnect between the PCF and the revolutionary students in 68, the party had already started to grow less militant in the years immediately after the death of Thorez. But even if you solve that issue well enough for the leftists to take Paris, how will they defend themselves against an inevitable NATO invasion?
 
As I recall there was a disconnect between the PCF and the revolutionary students in 68, the party had already started to grow less militant in the years immediately after the death of Thorez. But even if you solve that issue well enough for the leftists to take Paris, how will they defend themselves against an inevitable NATO invasion?

With their nuclear arsenal? That’d probably discourage a reckless response.
 
You know, Sandor Voros, an American Communist who was a commissar with the International Brigades in Spain and campaign manager for Earl Browder's 1936 presdential bid, once wrote that in the 1930s the one group that was absolutely certain that a communist revolution was impossible in America was...the Communist Party. I think that much the same could be said about the PCF's evaluation of the French situation in 1968. They are not going to risk a civil war (and one where, unlike Spain, they can't even be claiming to defend constitutional legality) in a country where the military is against them and the Red Army can't help. Even if de Gaulle panics and resigns, the most I can see is Mitterand being asked to form a provisional government, with new elections to be held shortly which would at most make a new "Popular Front"-style government (with Communist participation but not in the very top positions) possible. The CGT would tell the workers that (in Maurice Thorez's words in the 1930s) "It is necessary to know when to end strikes." Some of the more radical students might object, but even among the students the strike would burn itself out as sentiment to give the new government a chance would undermine it.

Such a government, while not "Communist", would be more left-wing than the original Popular Front of 1936 or the Socialist govenments of the 1980s, partly because the PCF's position vis-a-vis the Socialists would be considerably stronger. There would be more nationalizations, but most small and medium-sized business and some big business would remain in private hands. France would nominally stay in NATO, but I don't see NATO sharing secret information with it. And the Left would probably be voted out of power within a few years--the PCF simply will not have the power to stage a coup or rig future elections in its favor even if it wants to. (Some people worried about a left-wing government in 1968 drew an analogy with Czechoslovakia in 1948--but here the Communists do not control the armed forces, the Socialists are not led by a Communist sympathizer like Fierlinger, and there is no potential threat of Soviet intervention.)
 
It would look really, really bad for the US and NATO to intervene...and they would intervene. It would be the Western Hungary 1956 or Czechoslovakia 1968, even if it does go down to subterfuge, spies and assassinations. The shoe is on the other foot. The clear point, for the Soviets and the world, is that you say you're open to the self determination of free peoples, yet when it runs contrary to your vision, when it goes outside your control and bumps up against the walls of freedoms you allow these people to exist in and yet pretend there are no walls, you stop it. Moreover, you'll let fascists like Franco and dictators rule and take over nations. And if a right wing cabal had taken over France, you would have preferred that to a Communist takeover. Yet, because they are Communist, that is when you crack down? You will allow a tyranny which makes no excuses that it is dictatorship, rather than Communism as asserted by the will of the people? Less freedom in the "Free World"? That is the hypocrisy. And even for anticommunists outside of the United States, it is a blunt statement that the United States is not interested in a free, independent Europe. Just like the Soviets, it is interested in a sphere of influence for global assertion of power, which it just so happened that permitting a free democratic Europe was best for. Again, the concept that the freedom is actually limited, and it was simply wider than the USSR allowed to its satellites, but when the satellites of the United States went outside of those limits, the US reacted in kind.

You can debate the complexities of all of that. And that is not an innate truth and fact concerning what that intervention would be, or the morality of it. But the point is that is the message that is ripe for exploitation and assertion by the world, Communist and otherwise. And in the years that follow, it will have a serious, detrimental, deteriorating effect on the US and West in the Cold War. I think, seeing where the situation in Europe began to evolve by the 1980s, it would make Europeans chafe under the idea that there freedoms are not actually free. It is only that they had existed within confines before 1968, and had not bumped up against those limits. And when they see those limits are there with 1968, they will never unsee them, and view themselves as in a cage of mostly benevolence but a cage nonetheless.
 
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How do ultraleft workerists overcome the PCF / SFIO(f)?
How do the students appeal to people engaged in the productive or non-productive reproduction of capital?
Why do the PCF or SFIO(f) perceive a "go order" or "need" respectively?

France in 1968 wasn't as politically advanced in proletarian struggle as Italy, or Czechoslovakia, or Hungary ten years prior.

yours,
Sam R.
 
I would point out that even in 1968 there was no big communist takeover, there was a frankly communist program at the Elysée in 1981 with Mitterand.
That's a bit of a delayed fuse but I believe it still works.
 
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