Unprepared for Revolution

OBSOLETE COMMUNISM: THE LEFT-WING ALTERNATIVE by Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit. 255 pages. McGraw-Hill. $5.95.

During "the Days of May," as Frenchmen call the chaotic weeks last year when France lay paralyzed by radical students and workers, much of the revolutionary fervor was provided by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a chubby sociology student of German descent. They called him "Danny the Red"--not only because of his shock of reddish hair but because of the ideas with which he fired his fellow enrages. Dismayed by society, they demanded nothing short of a complete overthrow of the system. Now Cohn-Bendit, banished from France after his abortive attempt at revolution, has combined forces with his brother Gabriel, who is a professor of German at Saint-Nazaire university, to provide "an echo of the great dialogue that was begun in the forum of the Latin Quarter."

Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative turns out to be a surprisingly literate book, considering that it was written in only five weeks. Only half jokingly, the authors note: "The publishers do not seem to be bothered by the fact that their cash will be used for the next round of Molotov cocktails."

As the Brothers Cohn-Bendit see it, the explosion of 1968--with its barricades, its bloody street battles, its crippling general strike--came within a hairbreadth of toppling Charles de Gaulle. "From the 27th to the 30th of May," they insist, "nobody had any power in France. The government was breaking up, De Gaulle and Pompidou were isolated. The police, intimidated by the size of the strike and exhausted by two weeks of fighting in the streets, were incapable of maintaining public order. The army was out of sight; conscripts could not have been used for a cause in which few of them believed. For a short time the state had virtually withered away." To this vision of millennia achieved, the brothers Cohn-Bendit add the somewhat wistful assertion that, if Parisians had awakened to find some major ministries occupied by the demonstrators, Gaullism "would have caved in at once."

Why, then, did the uprising fail? The authors argue that France's workers, although in actual control of many plants, "failed to take the next logical step: to run the economy by themselves as free and equal partners." The reason: they were unprepared for the responsibility, "overwhelmed by the unexpected vistas that had suddenly opened up before them." Beyond that, the Cohn-Bendits blame the established left: the Communist Party, which they scornfully dismiss as "a mere appendage of the Soviet bureaucracy," and the left-wing Confederation Generale du Travail. Both, they charge, failed to exploit existing power vacuums. "The party of order and political wisdom," as Communist Boss Waldeck Rochet described his organization, opted for a Popular Front government. By so doing, say the

Cohn-Bendits, the Communists played into the hands of the Gaullists, allowing them to characterize the conflict as Stalinism v. the established system. The C.G.T. also sold out, they assert, by steering the political energies unleashed in the factories toward the bourgeois goals of higher wages and better working conditions instead of toward political power.

Uneasy Marriage. Yet the authors predict that the 1968 setback is temporary. "When the movement takes the offensive again, its dynamism will return," they claim. "One day the barricades will surely be raised again." But they admit that this will not happen until long-established barriers between French workers and intellectuals are torn down. The May events proved that the marriage between the two factions was at best merely convenient.

To form a worker-peasant-intellectual front, of course, there will have to be leadership--and that is something Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in line with his anarchist leanings, does not want. What he does demand is a revolutionary mass movement "unencumbered by the usual chains of command." Since that can hardly come about without leadership, therein lies the dilemma of Cohn-Bendit and of anarchists in general.

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