53 years ago today, May 3rd 1968, following conflict between students & University of Paris authorities, students protested the closure of the Sorbonne, setting off a wave of civil unrest by MILLIONS of students & workers.
In the late 60s, French youth assumed they were living under a quasi-benign dictatorship.
The main opposition parties, Radicals & Socialists, had essentially collapsed, which meant that progressive political change via conventional parliamentary channels was all but ruled out.
In 1967, students at the University of Paris had staged protests against restrictions on dormitory visits that prevented male & female students from sleeping with each other. In January 1968, student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit verbally attacked France’s Minister of Youth & Sports.
Cohn-Bendit complained the Minister had failed to address the students’ sexual frustrations. The Minister suggested he cool off his ardour by jumping into the pool, whereupon Cohn-Bendit replied that the Ministers remark was just what one would expect from a fascist regime.
The exchange earned Cohn-Bendit a reputation as an antiauthoritarian provocateur, and he soon acquired an almost cultlike following among French youth.
In March an attack on the American Express office in central Paris resulted in the arrest of several students.
At a protest a few days later in support of the students, more students were arrested, including Cohn-Bendit himself, who, it was rumoured, was threatened with deportation.
The March 22 Movement, which lobbied for the arrested students’ release, emerged in response.
Fearing an escalation of the protests, the dean of Nanterre shut down the campus, & since the students were barred from protesting at Nanterre, they decided to take their grievances to the Sorbonne, in the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter.
On May 3, the police clear the university’s courtyard, where 300 students had assembled. The mass arrests that followed, with help from the national riot police, sparked violent resistance from bystanders, who began pelting the police with cobblestones & erecting barricades.
The police responded with tear gas, clubbings, & more arrests. The University was closed & student leaders proposed a rally for May 10 to demand its reopening, the release of students who were still being held by the police, & an end to the intimidating police presence on campus.
On May 10th, 40,000 student protesters gathered. Police blocked the marchers’ path, so some students began removing cobblestones & erecting barricades for protection.
At around 2 a.m. May 11, the police attacked, firing tear gas & beating students & bystanders with truncheons.
The confrontation continued until dawn. By the time the dust had cleared, nearly 500 students had been arrested & hundreds hospitalized, including more than 250 police officers. The Latin Quarter lay in ruins, & public sympathy for the students, already considerable, increased.
The protest movement came to engulf the whole of France, opening up new possibilities for radical change: the dismantling of authoritarian political structures; the democratization of social & cultural institutions ranging from education to the news media & beyond.
The next several days witnessed the largest wildcat general strike in French history: MILLIONS of workers poured into the streets in support of the students as well as to set forth their own demands. Scores of factories - including those of Renault - were seized by workers.
The French state was badly shaken, yet it weathered the crisis. Charles de Gaulle delivered a dramatic May 30 radio address in which he raised the spectre of a communist takeover, but the French Communist Party had long ago abandoned the dream of a revolutionary seizure of power.
The strikes continued but de Gaulle also announced an election for June 23, assuming that the French people were ready for a return to stability.
He also implicitly threatened to use the army to impose order if the forces of “intimidation” & “tyranny” did not back down.
Hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country marched in counterdemonstrations in support of de Gaulle.
Although strikes & student demonstrations continued into June, the student movement gradually lost momentum, & de Gaulle’s party won a resounding victory.
French society did undergo profound changes in the aftermath, but were more measured & incremental than many wanted.
The May revolt initiated a transformation of “everyday life”, a phrase crucial to understanding the cultural-political implications of #May68, in France & beyond.
The critique of everyday life encouraged activists to focus attention on a variety of qualitative issues & concerns that transcended the narrowly economic orientation of orthodox Marxism: the “sixty-eighters” sought to unmask new forms of ideological coercion & social control.
They realized that with the advent of consumer society, the scope of commodification had transcended the workplace & encompassed almost every aspect of social life, opening up critique of new areas of social emancipation, including feminism, environmentalism, racism & gay rights.
50 years later & we STILL need to confront the underlying problems: political authoritarianism & corruption; media control; structural & institutional disadvantage; consumerism; insecure work; nationalism & levels of wealth inequality not seen since the 1930s; & climate change.
#May68 has its critics, who see it as a childish chaotic outburst, achieving little & substituting economic justice for 'identity politics'. Others see it as the Left at its best: critiquing an authoritarian elite while fighting for both economic equality AND social emancipation.
One of the most significant problems the Left must confront is ubiquitous corporate #propaganda.
The Left is mistaken in thinking that simply 'speaking truth to power', or countering propaganda with truth, is an effective strategy. On it's own, it isn't:
A #THREAD about how forty years of uninterrupted neoliberal ideology has facilitated an elite who have hoarded at least $30 TRILLION offshore, & who fund political parties & free-market #propaganda which legitimate environmental & human exploitation:
To spell out why, we need to unpack both the underlying implication of Andrew Doyle's argument and the reasons why it fails to adequately account for contemporary political dangers.
Andrew Doyle asserts that the term "fascism" is misused to the point of recklessness, echoing George Orwell’s 1944 observation that the word had been rendered meaningless. Doyle’s concern is not uncommon—but imho, it’s ultimately misplaced, especially in today’s context.
While it’s true that “fascism” is sometimes deployed rhetorically or hyperbolically (eg by Trump), Doyle’s framing dangerously downplays the genuine resurgence of fascist-adjacent movements across the Western world and undermines the analytical clarity necessary to confront them.
Boris Johnson appears to have had a secret meeting with billionaire Peter Thiel - perhaps the most fanatical of the libertarian Oligarchs and co-founder of the controversial US data firm Palantir, the year before it was given a role at the heart of the UK’s pandemic response.
The hour-long afternoon meeting on 28 August 2019 was marked “private” in a log of Johnson’s activities that day and was not subsequently disclosed on the government’s public log of meetings.
Elon Musk has been amplifying far-right accounts again, including Tommy Robinson, Rupert Lowe, and numerous anonynmous known #disinformation superspreader accounts like 'End Wokeness'.
Let's examine the context for yesterday's march in Richard Tice's constituency, #Skegness.
After decades of neglect, Skegness (pop 20K), stands out on key socio-economic markers on national averages: residents are older; whiter; lower full-time employment; higher rates of few/no qualifications; and concentrated deprivation - it's far-more deprived than most of England.
History repeatedly teaches us that burdening already struggling communities is a recipe for disaster.
These communities have been crying out for help for DECADES, but successive UK Govts have largely ignored their pleas, and continued to increase inequality, which harms us all.
🧵 @Rylan Asylum seekers coming here aren’t technically "illegal." International law (the 1951 Refugee Convention) allows people to seek asylum in any country regardless of how they arrive or how many countries they pass through, as long as they're fleeing persecution or danger.
Allow me to explain why asylum seekers aren’t “illegal”, and how misinformation and nasty demonising and scapegoating rhetoric by certain politicians and media, including news media, has made some British people less welcoming of asylum seeekers.
@Rylan
People fleeing war, torture, or persecution have the legal right to seek asylum.
The 1951 Refugee Convention, which the UK helped write, says anyone escaping danger can apply for asylum in another country no matter how they arrive: claiming asylum isn't a crime.
Farage's illiberal, immoral, & unworkable authoritarian plan involves ripping up human rights laws forged after WWII, which protect British people, & wasting £billions of UK taxpayers' money, giving some of it to corrupt misogynistic totalitarian regimes. theguardian.com/politics/2025/…
Leaving the #ECHR, repealing the Human Rights Act and disapplying international conventions
The UK would be an outlier among European democracies, in the company of only Russia and Belarus, if it were to leave the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
Opting out of treaties such as the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, the UN Convention against torture and the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention would also be likely to do serious harm to the UK’s international reputation.
It could also undermine current return deals, including with France, and other cooperation agreements on people-smuggling with European nations such as Germany.
The Society of Labour Lawyers said the plan would “in all likelihood preclude further cooperation and law enforcement in dealing with small boats coming from the continent and so increase, rather than reduce, the numbers reaching our shores”.
Farage said he would legislate to remove the “Hardial Singh” safeguards – a reference to a legal precedent that sets limits on the Home Office’s immigration detention powers – to allow indefinite detention for immigration purposes. This would be highly vulnerable to legal challenge.
Many of the rights protected by the ECHR and the Human Rights Act are rooted in British case law, so judges would still be able to prevent deportations, even without international conventions.
Reform UK’s grotesque far-right mass deportation plan is not just economically and socially illiterate (Britain an ageing population and low birth rate) rely on striking “returns agreements” with countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Eritrea and Sudan, offering financial incentives to secure these deals, alongside visa restrictions and potential sanctions on countries that refuse.
These are countries where the Home Office’s risk reports warn of widespread torture and persecution.
It would risk the scenario of making payments to countries such as Iran, whose regime the UK government has accused of plotting terror attacks on British soil.
The Liberal Democrats called the payments “a Taliban tax”, saying the plan would entail sending billions “to an oppressive regime that British soldiers fought and died to defeat”. They said: “Not a penny of taxpayers’ money should go to a group so closely linked to terrorist organisations proscribed by the UK.”
A reminder of the one, viewed 310,000 times, for which she was jailed, which urged people to burn down asylum seeker hotels after the #Southport attack - which had nothing to do with asylum seekers.
While all these tweets of Connolly's were made before her incendiary post, they don't say which year they were posted.
They can be accessed here, via The Wayback Machine, which has archived more than 916 billion web pages.
Connolly's tweet (top right) was in response to the tweet on the left, which criticised Laurence Fox for posting an upskirt photograph of Narinder Kaur.
The next one (right centre) was Connolly asking Kaur if she had 'flashed her gash'.