Mills on May ’68

Demanding the Impossible, Jennifer Mills, newmatilda, May 2008.

Choice quotes:

“The movement’s strengths were its diversity and spontaneity, which is why it’s so often quoted by anarchists when they’re trying to tell people what to do. But those strengths are also what makes soixante-huit hard to pin down as a piece of history, to slot neatly into our [sic] narrative of post-war European development as tending inexorably toward democracy.”

“A quick look at the APEC and G20 protests will illustrate that technologies of surveillance have altered the policing of protest movements. Police at G20 had the media-savvy trick of making no [sic] arrests on the day then rounding up protesters across the country for months afterwards on painstakingly collated evidence. I’m not sure how much all this is costing the taxpayer but it’s costing the protesters a packet – it seems like there’s a new benefit gig every week – and now the Victorian Police will be compensated for their losses.

[“By the time it was all over, police had about 10,000 photographs and 3500 hours of footage to scan for malefactors. The white paper overalls worn by so many “persons of interest” presented a challenge. Police had to rely on glimpses of shoes, bandanas, glasses, earrings, moles, teeth and T-shirts to identify suspects. When the raids began around Melbourne and later in Sydney, police headed straight for clothes cupboards. The 109-page official Summary of Offences reads like a rag-trade inventory.”]

The methods of ‘68 have certainly been influential – if we remember nothing else, we remember the slogans. Many of the aesthetic techniques of the Situationists which infected the revolutionary attempt have since been seized upon by artists and media makers – the popularity of culture jamming, including shows like The Chaser, owes its existence to the Situationist International and intellectuals such as Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem.

As Naomi Klein has pointed out [sic] in No Logo, corporations are also appropriating the aesthetics and tactics of street artists and jammers. But for a generation which grew up after punk these double ironies are a fact of culture.

Perhaps the hardest thing of all about continuing the anarchist project is the art of navigating its tired language. Take crimethinc, at its best a movement which breaks revolutionary ground for a new generation of youth, at its worst a set of dirgeful instruction manuals for emos. It is part of the pleasure of youth to be alienated from the mainstream, but it is also true that times have changed. Information and choice are everywhere, and you can get a bottle of chardonnay for seven bucks. But are we any more free or merely saturated in images of freedom?”

On “corporations… appropriating the aesthetics and tactics of street artists and jammers“, see Anne Elizabeth Moore, Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity, The New Press, 2007.

On “punk”, “double ironies” and “facts of culture”, see Nike Web Site Is Taken Over By Protesters, Matt Richtel, The New York Times, June 22, 2000; The Empire Strikes Back… for a while anyway. There’s a million other examples. Go create some more. (That’s an order.)

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
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2 Responses to Mills on May ’68

  1. SD says:

    Crazy coincindence, I was just at the New Matilda site reading that article before jumping over here. I was disappointed with it though. Here’s the long comment I left (it refers at the start to a comment posted there by someone else):

    Unfortunately, I agree with Surdo… what’s the point? It doesn’t really offer anything to engage with, any hope. I’m currently writing a small piece bout May ’68 for Mutiny zine and was sent a link to this and I’m a bit disappointed. I’ll try not to repeat ‘cos Surdo pretty much said what I was thinking.

    But to try and add a separate point – actually a question – what’s the freakin’ point of the two paragraphs trying to connect May ’68 with the current situation here? Yeah, it makes sense when writing an analysis of an historical event to connect it with the present but these really seem forced and not saying too much.

    As a person ‘rounded up across the country’ after G20 I particularly think this was a pointless connection to draw. I’m confused with what you’re saying – because in the end it’s costing us (‘the protesters’), because it’s costing the taxpayers (wow, classically, cliched mainstream journalism there), and because the police are receiving a payout it was a failure? No. Have you talked to any of us about it? This is dangerous writing with one of us sitting in jail and the rest of us facing that consequence when we go to trial.

    There’s many problems that can be pointed out with the G20 protests but this is lazy writing, seemingly straight from the Murdoch press. I know none of this was the main point of your article, but I did struggle with the point at all and this bit on the G20 just added to that. And to be somewhat facetious (though no more facetious than you mentioning G20 in the same article as May ’68), and extend what you seem to be saying about the G20, should anytime a street protest becomes spontaneously militant, should we just walk away thinking about taxpayers? We don’t all have that luxury.

    Cheers,
    SD.

    This was hard to write and I hope it’s not too mean, but I think it’s a real important time to be careful about how we write about the struggles of other people and not undermine solidarity, and I do hold lefty writers who have the privilege of having a widely-read forum to put their stuff on to tougher standards.

  2. @ndy says:

    Hey SD,

    As I understand it, Jennifer is indeed trying to relate the events of May ’68 to contemporary Australian events. Whatever else has changed between now and then, apparently one of the more important changes is a technical one relating to policing protest, consisting, on the one hand, of the employment of intensive forms of surveillance, and, on the other hand, a tactical adaptation in the apprehension of suspected criminals.

    On the whole, it’s not a great analysis, and depends for its purchase on the existence of a generational perspective: youth are youth; times change; ‘freedom — real or illusory?’; et cetera.

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