The following is an excerpt from a text by Henri Simon entitled “Reflections on reflections around Exchanges” written in June 1979 in response to a text by Michel Besson (MB). Both texts in their entirety can be found on the Archives Autonomies site, along with 185 issues of Echanges et Mouvenemt, all stapled together by Henri.
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I’d like to tell my ‘militant story’ briefly, not at all so that it can be used as an example, but to show how the ideas we try to put into practice are transformed by daily reality and struggles, and that what we do (if we don’t kid ourselves) is totally different from what we wanted to do: it is essential, then, instead of continuing to search endlessly like a wasp at the bottom of a bottle for the way out into the light, to determine how everyday reality and struggles transform ideas and what ideas — often unexpressed (because we often remain as obstinate as wasps) — are hidden behind the real actions of both everyday life and ‘major’ struggles.
I’d like to stress just two things first:
- this evolution, which for me has lasted more than 20 years, is one that most of the rising generations are rapidly passing through, and if today we encounter, with variations in form, the same type of illusions, they fall much more quickly because both capital and its repressive forms contain this 30-year evolution that those of my generation have experienced day by day.
- For me, my ‘militant’ life has never been separate from my life in general. I’ve undoubtedly devoted a lot of my life to ‘trade union and political activities’, and this has guided my whole life, including my ‘family life’ (which has not been without its problems), but ‘total dedication to the cause’ has never made sense to me: although in certain circumstances my life could be interpreted in this way, the eruption of a personal problem meant that individual relationships took precedence over ‘militant work’ for as long as was necessary. In this sense, I’m rather circumspect about the use of formulas like those used by MB: ‘constantly questioning everything, in particular your own social approach, your own conditioning.’ I see this as the source of his voluntarism and as a break with the approach of the vast majority of workers, who never act like that. For them, trying to live is essential, including with everything that elitist morality against conditioning, submission, alienation, etc. can castigate in everyone’s daily life. I didn’t come to activism because I wanted to challenge myself, but ‘like everyone else’ with a body of ‘average’ ideas about family and material life. For the vast majority of workers, the struggle stems from the conflict between their personal efforts to achieve this life (which is in fact partly the ‘life we make for them’) and what the system demands of them, preventing them from achieving what they would like to do. This is the exact opposite of MB’s approach.
I approached ‘wage labor’ (it would take too long to explain how and why) with — because of my social background, my previous family life, the vicissitudes of the war (16 years old in 1939) and to a small extent because of my character (shaped by a life that had been far from easy although not ‘unhappy’) — a good dose of a certain conformism of life, romantic sentimentalism, impulses of individual revolt against all that I considered to be ‘injustice’, and very basic political positions reflecting the aspirations and conflicts of traditional French peasant society at the beginning of the century, shaken up hard but without really achieving understanding by the First World War and the crisis. Basically, these positions, cloaked in humanitarian idealism, were those of social transformation through the ‘most left-wing’ political action and, at that time, they led straight into the arms of the CP.
At the end of ‘43, I belonged to a local “resistance” organisation but, paradoxically, my “refusal to kill” had undoubtedly led to me being classed as a strange individual and I was given the role of nurse; I found myself secretary of a local liberation committee, which, combined with what I saw of the activities of my father, deputy mayor of the village, SFIO, greatly edified me about “politics” at the level of its concrete achievements. My first piece of political writing was a letter published in 1944 by a local newspaper in defence of young communists who had been bullied by a local MRP priest1. However, I was never contacted by the Communist Party to join, and neither was I afterwards, even though I was an active and convinced CGT militant (not very much in line). There’s no doubt that, despite my enthusiasm, some resistances and attitudes must have made me a heretic before my time; without really knowing why, I was also highly suspicious of this political commitment. My vision of a different society, which I was then applying to the CP and Russia, had a marked humanitarian basis and a strong Rousseau-style colouring, which I carried within me like any good son of a petty-bourgeois ‘radsoc’2 society nursed by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.
I must also have had the organisational fibre carried by this ‘impulse towards others’ and the ‘need to be socially useful’ (I can explain where that came from, but it would take too long). In 44-45, I set up a youth group in the village where I lived, formally attached to the unified PC-SFIO organisations under the label ‘Front National’ (not to be confused with the English National Front). It was there that I met Odette, who was to become my wife. This meant that I had to find a job and there was only one way out: Paris. 99% of the young people in the village, which had been drained of all economic activity by the concentration and mechanisation of farming, had no other option. Without expressing it like that, I could see how my idealistic aspirations were shattered by daily realities, my own which were also everyone else’s collective reality.
It would also take too long to explain why I ended up as an insurance clerk; it was a matter of individual choice: I thought that my state of health — quite badly damaged by the war — prevented me from doing any hard work (I could well have become a manual worker, I came close to becoming one on several occasions: carpenter, gardener, cheesemaker... chemist); it stemmed from a social impossibility: my parents‘ finances and my own meant that I was absolutely barred from any university or research career that I could have effectively pursued at that time (sciences); and it was also a result of rejection: of a certain number of jobs that I had been offered and that I judged to be too “committed” to the employers’ side or to supporting the system. In all this, I was certainly much more determined than I appeared, and even in the ‘modesty of my ambitions’ there was perhaps more shyness and lack of self-confidence than rejection of the system and rebellion. As time goes by, I realise how easy it is to pin ideas and feelings on behaviour which, on closer inspection, is more or less the same as that of anyone else in the same situation at the same time.
Naturally, given my body of ideas as I have set them out, I joined the CGT and became an activist. Paradoxically, my political belief in an enlightened bureaucracy (which I thought was the CP) led me to an insurance school to train middle-level technicians: the company had just been nationalised along with the biggest insurance companies; it was a step towards socialism and I saw no contradiction in ‘succeeding’ in this way and becoming a small manager (the lowest echelon). In the same vein, I became a law graduate while still working. At the same time, there was the end of ‘national unity for the reconstruction of capital in France’ and, on the trade union front, the break between the CGT and FO; at the level of a nationalised company colonised by socialist technocrats, this resulted in the construction of an in-house FO union to which the majority of former CGtists belonged. The disgusting way in which this was done clashed so much with my conception of trade unionism at the time that my revolt was transformed into a defence of the CGT, with arguments which would no doubt have made the hairs stand up on the head of a Stalinist, but which the Stalinists used to defend their apparatus. Although not a typical militant, I found myself secretary of the CGT trade union section and even more committed to militant trade unionism. Those were the days of the witch-hunt, and you had to be a hardliner to stay in a minority CGT in a national company. What’s more, I was doubly suspect: suspect because I was the ‘extremist’ (classified as a communist at the time and something else later) and not at all the sort of person in the apparatus with whom you could have a chat ‘between bosses’; and suspect because we were taking grassroots action against the boss and against all the union bureaucracies, including our own. I didn’t have to refuse much in the rest of my ‘career’: it was immediately confined to documentation and archive work; I was judged, to my great delight, incapable of commanding anyone; in 25 years I only had to refuse 2 or 3 proposals for promotion which obviously smacked of the direct purchase of the militant as was commonly practised with shop stewards; on the other hand, I fought several times to avoid sanctions because it was no longer my personal struggle but that of everyone else too; I didn’t shirk from reprimands, warnings, disciplinary councils and finally the dismissal that came in 1971.3 I knew that this could happen at one time or another; I always avoided finding myself in a bind or committing myself or others to ‘adventurist’ actions (the 5 years of CGT militancy had been a hard enough lesson for that), but in movements or even individual struggles the prospect of being punished or fired never weighed on my commitment. As soon as I could, on the other hand, I always took certain material precautions so as not to put my family in a difficult situation from one day to the next.
We were a group of young people who were very active in the CGT section of the company and we did what we wanted, practically ignoring the directives of the central office. We weren’t just work mates, we met up outside work and supported each other. This was what MB describes as his aspiration for contacts within a group. Odette and I had two and then three children and my family life was not separated from this militant life. Political contacts came about by chance. They also came at a time when I couldn’t do otherwise, because of my trade union commitment, which at the time was closely linked to the international context (the Cold War), but to ask questions at every level about this policy. My ideas about nationalisation, the CP, the CGT, the union and my ‘petty-bourgeois’ ideals took a big hit. If I kept the same impulses, it’s quite obvious that they took very different forms. I could just as easily have met an anarchist or a Trotskyist: I met a guy4 from SB who worked in the same company and was also in the CGT. From discussion to discussion I joined SB in 52-53: I was thirty. Before that, I’d been the ‘leader’ — secretary of the strike committee — for ‘my’ first big strike — three weeks. The SB meetings, attended by about fifteen people once a week, weren’t restrictive: for a while I listened more than I took part; I entered a world and problems that I’d hardly discussed before, on the one hand they had a relationship with what I was going through, on the other hand they didn’t. I also found friends there who reproduced on another level what MB describes and which was not very different from what I encountered afterwards at ICO or Echanges: closer relationships with some, personal and/or political affinities; relationships that would also evolve over time and with each person’s social life. I have to say that at the time I had a rhythm of life that, if it hadn’t been supported more by this collective impetus than by my individual impulses, I wouldn’t have been able to keep up for long: I had my job, my union militancy (leaflets, newsletters, meetings), my family life (I built a good part of a house with my own hands), SB meetings, contacts with friends and all the problems that life raised at the time: no car, no telephone ... I didn’t write, except for leaflets and the bulletin at work. I found a way to read, but I don’t really remember when.
It took almost two years for the CGT union to get the section back under control until, in 54, I was expelled both from my duties as secretary and from the union; during those two years of underhand battles, disgust was the dominant feeling and one by one the friends left. It has to be said, too, that the nucleus broke up under the overall pressure of the system: expansion was growing and it was easy to find a better job elsewhere; the necessities of life for everyone also pushed them there. We stayed friends for a while, then our lives diverged. With those who stayed, we kept in touch to discuss everything that was going on, but it was no longer the same. Most stayed outside the union, but only because they’d been pushed out; no one was anti-union, at most they criticised the leaders or this or that delegate. I spent three years in the wilderness. I wanted to leave the company: I started computer courses and went back to university to study English. The great explosion of 19555 swept all that away; I refer you to the text on the ‘AG-Vie Staff Council’ published in SB.
When MB asks what autonomous action is, I answer, that’s what it is, and 20 years later, that’s still what it is when it happens: It happened during a trade union strike; it broke out at a time when there was virtually nothing left of the network of friends I mentioned earlier; I myself was a bit disconnected and my ongoing participation in SB didn’t do me much good in that respect; what I said in an assembly only expressed my reaction but it was also everyone else’s reaction; I was in no way a ‘militant’ but only a spokesperson, reflecting back to all my workmates their own feelings at that moment. When MB asks what solidarity is: it’s the ability to find enough money in 5 minutes to buy a mimeograph machine and hire a theatre for a general meeting, it’s the formation of a ‘council of elected delegates’, none of whom had ever even thought of holding a position as a delegate, it’s teams of more than thirty agreeing for more than 15 days to give up an hour every morning before work to distribute leaflets in all the insurance boxes... I could go on and on. The only real solidarity is that which is forged in and through the struggle around the necessities of the struggle and not around some ideal of total questioning. Of course, all this lasted the space of one struggle. It was what I experienced at the time that made a great leap forward in my understanding of how struggles unfolded. A network had been created that was very different from the youth gang I mentioned earlier. Even though I was often the only one regularly distributing the box bulletin that came into being at the time, over the next 15 years we would meet up every week, sometimes two or three, sometimes thirty or so, trying to defend ourselves through the same channels that our own experience had revealed to us. Sometimes it was militancy, sometimes it was really autonomous action: I refer you to the ICO collection for details of all this.
All these things were not specifically discussed at SB but with a few SB buddies or those known through SB — particularly Chazé and Cajo. One had the experience of workplace struggles, the other the theoretical reflection which corresponded to what I was experiencing. Apart from these discussions — mainly through exchanges of letters — there was a break between my workplace activity and my participation in SB. Apart from Chaulieu’s great theoretical machinations, it was the political events that fuelled the discussions: the Algerian war, Poland and Hungary. Here too I refer to what I wrote about SB during that period. ICO was different (I’m not talking about the group born of the split with SB, but the group of work friends that survived under that name): for ten years, it was a bit like what MB would like to see at Echanges; but not with the relationships he would like to see established at Echanges. Most of them had their own lives, their own company experience, their own network of friends, a bit like me at the GAs, and an experience of struggles which, with a few variations, was more or less identical. It was very interesting to talk about what we were going through, it helped us a lot to better understand our own experience and to see things from a less particular point of view. But none of us wanted to turn it into a militant group activity. On the other hand, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with ICO because it didn’t give me the theoretical input that I would have liked. The same personal relationships I mentioned earlier, other contacts and readings partly filled the gap, but not entirely.
I’ll stop here because most of my friends know what happened next. It can be found in ICO, un point de vue, and in De la scission de SB à la rupture avec ICO. It wasn’t all at once that my ideas on militancy and on the real movement of struggle took shape and deepened: first, my experience had given shape to a set of tendencies which themselves arose from the transformations in French society between 1945 and 1975; second, this experience was revealed through the knowledge of the experience of other workplaces (like MB, I always tried to find out what each person’s personal experience was and their relationship to the struggles, but this knowledge can also be acquired by reflecting on the fragmentary elements provided by all sources of information; contacts with friends at work or elsewhere, however warm they may be, don’t necessarily provide that and you can’t be everywhere at once); third, my discussions or readings provided me with an even more general vision and a reflection linked to the whole historical process, even if that was far from satisfactory. Depending on the period, each of the three aspects either coexisted with the others, or one of them predominated: it wasn’t a question of choice; it would have been easy to delude myself and say that my action was always ‘total’. In reality, more often than not and through the interplay of external circumstances, one of the aspects predominated, relegating the others for a time. At Echanges, it is currently the third aspect that predominates, and not by chance. The New Movement text tried to deal with these problems in a general and perhaps not sufficiently explicit way.
I don’t want to repeat here the normal conclusions of this too brief presentation: that the struggle arises not from the intervention of militants but from the conflict between the personal interests of the workers and the interests of the boss; that the ‘militant’, if he does indeed ‘intervene’, is never more than an instrument whose actions are ultimately dictated not by his ideas and his ‘revolts’ but by what the workers want and do according to their interests, which are determined by the overall balance of forces at the time, that organisations of struggle (even an elementary struggle is always ‘organised’, but often not in the traditional sense of the term) emerge from the struggle but can only be temporary in character, that solidarity is not what some dream of as a ‘communist’ relationship but what is established in the course of such struggles (I include in this just as much what exists in the day-to-day life of workplaces in very different forms)... I’ve developed all this in various texts and I could give many examples from my own experience or that of others in different countries. I think that everyone’s experience, MB’s in particular in what he began to experience in his factory work, can contribute to this discussion: indeed the New Movement was — deliberately — concise as a kind of thesis but nobody ever wanted to make a bible out of it; MB first has to formulate more than criticisms which in the end say nothing, either about his experience, or about his relationship to the class struggle (which he nevertheless demands of others); I only find in it his desire for a privileged relationship within a group, nothing else.
Henri Simon 1979