 Ond wedi ddweud y myfwg y gallai i'r rhiwbeth yng nghymru yma yn 1968. A'r hynny, mae'r hyn yn gyntaf o'r ysgol, mae'n myfmwyno mewn Mexico, i'r US, i'r Pakistan, i'r Tethysalvaethia, i'r Franth. Ond oherwydd o'r tych yn gwneud, yw'r ffocwsau o'r ffocwsau o'r rhaid i'r Franth. Felly, yn ysgol, yn y fawr, yn 1968, rydyn ni'n gwleidio'r ysgrifennu ystod yn hystu'r fan. Mae ymddorach yn ysgrifennu yn gweld, ac yn ysgrifennu yn gwybod hefyd, yn ysgrifennu ymddor ymlaen, yn ysgrifennu'r llaw. Felly, mae'n credu bod yn nhw'n gwybod i'w ddweud o'r gweithio. A'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio i'w ddweud o'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Roedd y gallwn hyn yn y ddin, mae yma'n byw yn lleolhef yn y cyfrifol yntaladau yma. Roeddwn wedi bod yn lleolhef yn cyfrifol. Rwy'n dda bod hyn yn y creusos. Roeddwn i'w crysis, mae ar y件ion, gyda'n gwybodaeth i'r Brion. Ond yn y brif yn oed i'r ysgol Euro-economi, ac rwy'n gyd yn angen i ddim yn rotheru'n mynd i'r bobl yn y cwmni yn y Gymru i'r ymgwybod, Yn y cwymys ydych chi'n gweld y cyfnod, sy'n gweithio i chi'n gweithio'r cyflwyno a'r fathau, yw'r cyfnod, yw'r cyfrifau, yw'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno a'r cyfrifau a'r cyfrifau a'r cyfrifau o'r unionau yn teimlo i gyflwyno. Rydym wedi bod yn gwneud oherwydd amlightaeth yw ddefnyddio'n llwyddiad o'r hynny'n gwneudio'r ddechrau yn y llwyddiad oherwydd. Ond yna bod y gallwn ei wneud i gynnig oedd yng Nghymru yn cael ysgriff to time of crisis. Worker's are always under pressure from the bosses, from the ruling class, and there's always a conflict of interest between the working class and the ruling class, and it's just in times of crisis that this becomes more cute and struggles more likely to happen. So in all of the countries that there was revolutionary movements, there had been growth, but I guess it's also important is that this growth was quite often uneven. So Pakistan, for example, saw big revolutionary movements, and the economy in Pakistan was growing at over 5% a year, but it was mostly confined to the ruling class. The yearly wage was only £35 a year in West Pakistan, and in East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh, it was only £15 a year. So even though the country was growing economically, most people weren't seeing the benefits of that. Mexico is another example. It was experiencing a boom in 1968 in the so-called Mexican miracle, but growth was really uneven, and the vast majority of people still lived in poverty. So this is one of the reasons why there was still revolutionary movements. Another reason that people, especially on the left, didn't really anticipate what was going to go on in France was that at this time, very kind of academic-y Marxist ideas were quite widespread, so a lot of people had kind of written off the working class, especially the working class in the West as a revolutionary class. They said, oh, the working class in the West is bourgeoisified. They've been bought off by the ruling class, and so they started to look to other groups to maybe be the ones to start a revolution. So some people started to look to the prisoners. Some started to look to the students. A lot of people started to look to the students as the ones who could change society, but this is a fundamentally flawed plan. While young people are vital for a revolution, and students included in that, and are quite often the most radical group in society, young people, students, especially, are still quite a small section of society and quite a powerless section of society. If students go on strike, might be a bit annoying to certain people, but if the work is going on strike, the country shuts down. So by ourselves, students can't force a revolution. But we can create really successful revolutionary movements when we unite with working people, with ordinary people, with the majority of society. And this is what happened in France in 1968, and this is one of the reasons why the movement was so successful. But it wasn't just France that the students started things. In Czechoslovakia, the movement there started out with the students and intellectuals. But it wasn't even spreading to the working class, but the threat, when it started to look like the working class, might join in on this movement. The bureaucracy in Czechoslovakia was petrified and the state clamped completely down on the movement. Pakistan's another example. It started with students protesting in Dhaka and then it spread to the workers, became a general strike, and then it really posed a threat to the ruling class. So similarly, in France, the events started out with the students at Sabon University, where the students have been protesting for a few weeks, but it all started kicking off on the 3rd of May because they'd occupied a courtyard and the police tried to move them. And the students fought back and the rector shut down the university, which was only the second time, the only other time it got shut down was when the Nazis invaded Paris, so it was quite serious. But the students didn't just go home, they took to the streets. The student unions called out for strikes and over the next few days, the first few days in May, in 1968, there was battles between police and students on the streets. On May the 6th, there was really a lot of fighting. Almost 500 people were arrested and almost 1,000 were injured. But I guess May the 10th was a bit of a turning point in these early days. So the friend riot police, the CRS, got sent in to the Latin Quarter and the riot police just started breaking into people's houses, beating people up, and it was like a massive riot. Like 700 people were injured, 400 people were hospitalised. It was quite serious, but what's kind of important about this isn't that there was a riot, but for the first time residents start to fight as well. They start to back the students up. So they get heavy objects from their houses and throw it down onto the police. Barricades go up in the street. And it was when this happened, the students and the workers uniting, that really spurred the movement on and made it so much stronger. So we no longer just have a minority, these students fighting for what they want, but you have the majority of society fighting against the establishment. And before this point, the trade union leadership had mostly ignored the movement. They issued a few statements being like, always support the students, but not really done anything. But there was mounting pressure because the normal members wanted the trade unions to do something, they wanted to support the students. They knew what side they were on. And especially after the riot on the 10th of May, there was more and more pressure mounting on the union leadership. So on May 11th, all the main unions called for a one day strike for the 13th of May. Now, they didn't do this because they kind of wanted to create a revolutionary movement at all, they wanted to overthrow capitalism. No, they just kind of hoped it would blow off steam that it would kind of, you know, we have a one day strike, go back to work, you know, feel that we've done something, that kind of idea. But unfortunately for them, it didn't work out like that at all. So the 13th of May was a general strike. There's about a million people marching through the centre of Paris. There's a wave of occupations at factories, schools, workplaces. And it does the opposite of blow off steam. It doesn't blow off steam at all. And said, people are on the streets together. People occupy their workplaces and they start to become aware of their power. And the movement is not a one day general strike. The next day, everyone stays on strike and more people join. The Renault car factories, these huge big car factories all go into occupation on the 14th. The printing presses, all shut down. Not a single newspaper went to print on the 14th of May in France. By the 15th, over 50 factories have been occupied and much, much more of that are on strike. And it just keeps building. By the 18th, you've got the coal miners, you've got the bus drivers, the shipyard workers. All of them railways completely shut down. All the public transport in Paris, especially the lorry drivers stopped driving. And the country is basically paralysed. And even professionals start to go on strike, like writers, architects, actors. So the movement is building and building. And the French state of this boy tries to bring in German and French workers to end the strike. They just bring in these workers to scab. But the German and the Belgian workers showed huge solidarity and refused to come in. They just refused to scab. Especially the lorry drivers because this was really, this was paralysing the country. But there's all different kinds of people striking. What is also quite amazing, what starts to happen in the kind of later days in May, is like the workers and the strikers start to take the first steps to organise society for themselves. And you get like strike committees emerging, workers councils in some places even emerging, the kind of embryo of workers rule. And this isn't being led by anyone. This is just the workers coming together and doing things and organising society for themselves. One thing that happened, that was quite widespread was prices were fixed in shops. So usually, all the transport is shut down. It's harder to get goods to places. Usually what would happen, supply and demand, all the prices would go up and only the rich people would be able to afford goods. So to stop this happening, the strikers and shop owners fixed all the prices to make sure that striking families and everyone could still eat and could still get food. Picket lines were organised on petrol stations because obviously no lorries are driving. There's much less petrol. So there's pickets on the petrol station and only doctors and ambulances. And people who've got permission from the union can get petrol. Another thing, loads of strikers organised with peasant organisations in the really rural areas to make sure that food could still get up to them and that no one would starve, basically. Schools, loads of schools were occupied and taken over and used as free nurseries. Throughout the day, people all came together in schools and universities and other buildings and cooked meals together and provided food for striking families. And women in particular played a really leading role in this organisation of society that started to happen. And I think this is really important. It provides us with such an inspiring example of the capabilities of ordinary people of the working class to organise and to run society spontaneously by ourselves and in the interests of everyone. And I guess it also shows such a rapid change of consciousness that can occur in a revolutionary moment, in a revolutionary situation. You've got all these people who usually just go to work, come home, they aren't involved in the running of society and suddenly they're out with picket lines on the petrol stations, making sure people can get food in this area, providing free childcare. So, yeah, it's a really inspiring example, that's what I think anyway. So by May the 20th, the ruling class had lost control of the situation. Like I said, strikers had already started to organise society for themselves taking the first steps to doing that. The National Assembly was in complete chaos, didn't really know what to do and 10 million workers by this point are on strike, which is two thirds of the French workforce, like of the entire French workforce, officially on strike. But I guess on paper, the state still has quite a lot of power. It has the police, has the army, has the media, has all the institutions, the ruling class uses to maintain its power. But I think what's important to remember is that the ruling class is a tiny minority of society. And so even though they have all these tools, the army, the police, whatever, they need the cooperation of the workers, of soldiers, of policemen, of journalists to exercise this power. And in a revolutionary situation, they can completely lose this. And that's what happened in France. They lost all of this power. So while on paper, De Gaulle and the French government, the ruling class had power, is the balance of class forces that really count. So the media, for example, right? Usually the media is a tool for the ruling class to get certain views across. But by May 25, all the TV and radio workers were on strike. So instead of the 8pm news being like, this movement's terrible, they're all just like crazy students, there was no 8pm news. So people had to learn things from themselves on the streets instead of being fed to kind of propaganda from the government. Papers, newspapers, they had to submit their editorials to representatives from the strikers and they had to approve it. And if they thought, you know, this is slagging off the movement, they wouldn't be published. Because the majority of society had the power in their hands, they could just be like, no, we're not, we're not having this. And then they also, the newspapers also had to publish calls that the strikers wrote saying, come join us in the streets, don't go back to work, these are our demands, they have to publish those in the bourgeois papers because people were saying when we're not printing it unless this is going in. The army is another example. So the government had 261,000 soldiers. So you think, oh, well surely they could just crush the movement. But most of them were working class conscripts who would not fire on the strikers. There was reports of mutinies and the president, Ndegol made a secret visit to Germany to meet General Masau who was the guy in charge of the French troops to check. If we send the army in, are they going to turn sides? Are they going to go and join the strikers? And it was quite likely that that's what would have happened. This is a leaflet that I found which some soldiers in one regiment actually wrote in May 1968. And they printed this leaflet and it says, like all conscripts, we are confined to the barracks. We are being prepared to intervene as repressive forces. The workers and youth must know that the soldiers of this contingent will never shoot on workers. We action committees are opposed at all costs to the surrounding of factories by soldiers. Tomorrow or the day after, we are expected to surround an armaments factory which 300 workers who work there want to occupy, we shall fraternise. So, even if the army had been sent in, it wouldn't have been able to crush the movement. They probably would have gone and joined the strikers. And this is quite similar to the October revolution in Russia where there was very, very little fighting in the actual revolution because the soldiers wouldn't fight them. They were like, no, we're on your side. And also in 1968 in Czechoslovakia in the Prague Spring, there was fear of this happening when Russian soldiers were sent into Prague. Some of them actually had to be taken back out because of fears of mutinies and fears of them switching sides. And it would have been really easy for the Czech workers to have won the Russian soldiers over. They were also really disillusioned with the bureaucracy. But instead of calling out for, you know, for tyranny, for solidarity, asking the Russian soldiers to come onto their side, the leadership of the movement in Prague made leaflets of material that instead was just nationalist, you know, stuff like Ivan go home, you know, we don't want Russians here, which is an absolutely terrible mistake and cost the movement really, really dearly. They could have had these soldiers on their side, but they chose instead of calling out in solidarity to just be nationalist and that cost them really dearly. And I guess another example of the kind of army and turning sites is in the Vietnam War. Soldiers refusing to fight was one of the reasons that the Vietnam War came to an end. And although the anti-war movement had started out with the students, it had grown really strong within the army itself. And there was this practice of fragging, which is where soldiers like kill their commanding officers. And official statistics estimate there was at least 600 cases of this. And then there was another 1,400 cases of officers dying under really suspicious circumstances that they think might have been the same. So I guess that's another example of although the army might be really strong and have power, it's workers who make up the army and they can easily turn sites. So back to France, the French state also had 144,000 armed police. But again, there was loads of discontent in the police. Loads of them refused to leave their stations, they would just sit in, they wouldn't go out and patrol, they would just sit in the station. And even the intelligence branch, like the Secret Service refused to pass on information to the government about the students, they'd just let them know, which is kind of crazy. But I guess you can see because of the class balance of forces, the state had completely lost control. And I guess it's important for us as revolutionaries to remember that even though right now the state and all of its different institutions might seem really strong and this huge power we have to fight against, in a revolutionary situation, class consciousness changes and the state's kind of normal tools of oppression are quite useless. So I guess that's quite something to remember. By May 25th, the presidential palace had been evacuated. The government was like completely in chaos. The president, De Gaulle, is reported to have said to the US ambassador, the game is up in a few days, the communists will be in power. So what would the next step have been? How could French, and how should have French capitalism been overthrown in France? Well, like I said, there was already strike committees and in some places these had actually become workers councils. And workers were already organising society on a local level, providing food, providing childcare, stuff like that. And so this has already all been done by the workers. So next, what should have happened was these should have been linked up. Each workplace and each strike committee should elect delegates for regional and national groups. And these kind of committees, these regional national committees would have taken the place of the state. The workers were already organising on this local level and they just kind of needed to bring them together to take power on a national level. And this would have completely swept away the bourgeois state, which was already in turmoil at this point. And instead, the country would have been run by the people and for the people. You would have had the beginnings of workers control and then you would take the next steps of nationalising industry and stuff like that. So that's what should have happened and that's what could have happened. And the workers were aware of this. By May 27th, a popular chant was government popular, popular government, people's government. People were chanting this in the street. People wanted this. But unfortunately, that's not what the leaders of the Communist Party or the leaders of the trade unions did. Instead of linking up these strike committees and creating a new workers state, they reached out to the ruling class. They were quite happy to leave the old state intact, to leave the ruling class in power and instead just get some concessions. I think it's important when the ruling class is threatened with losing absolutely everything, it will be prepared to give away really, really big concessions. And it was. They offered to raise the minimum wage, to cut working hours with no loss of pay, reduce the age of retirement, restore the right to organise. The Minister of Education was going to resign. But this is obviously nothing in comparison to what socialism would have offered. And the thing about concessions is they can always be taken right back. And this is what happened by November. The same year in 1968, an austerity package was passed. And loads of these concessions were taken right back. I.S. Mexico in 1968 is an even more violent example of what the ruling class can do. It promised concessions there as well. And then on the same day, after people agreed, snipers open fire on protesters. And there's no consensus on how many people were killed. But estimates are around 500 people. But there was no death certificates. There was no official announcements. They were just kind of killed and no one knows how many. But I.S. has more extreme example. But history has taught us that we should never trust the capitalist class when they promise concessions. We need to push them and push them and push them further until the workers take power. And we should never just be happy to leave the old state intact and leave the ruling class intact in a revolutionary situation. In France, people weren't happy with the deal. By this time, they'd been on strike for almost a month, people had really gotten a sense of their own power. They'd started organizing things for themselves. And they were ready and wanted to take power. But unfortunately, the Communist Party and the leaders of the trade unions completely betrayed the movement and sold it out. The workers were told return to work, the strike is over. But a lot of them refused. Half a million people marched through Paris against the deal the trade union leaders made. And occupations continued, people stayed on strike. But there was no final push to power. There was no alternative solutions being offered. And so people were kind of left at an impasse. And gradually workers kind of drifted back to work. Occupations ended throughout June. Despite this, we shouldn't be demoralised. In France, the workers had power right within their grasp. And had it not been for the Stalinist and the trade union leadership, French capitalism would have been overthrown in 1968. So I guess that's still really inspiring. I guess the summer of 1968 shows us what is achievable when students and workers unite. All of the movements across the world in 1968 started with the students. So the Mexico movement, in Czechoslovakia, it was the students and intellectuals, the civil rights movement in America, anti-war movement in America, and in France it all started with the students. And young people are often the most radical. And this is why in schools and unions offer us a place where we can come, discuss ideas, learn things. But like I said before, alone, we're pretty powerless. We aren't the ones who keep society moving. And if students strike, it doesn't really make a difference, right? I mean, it might annoy some people, but it's not a big deal. If workers strike, the whole country can grind to a stop. So when we as students unite with workers, really, really powerful revolutionary movements can be built, like happened in France and all across the world in 1968. And this is what scares the ruling class. Because when students and workers come together, we're going to be in the middle of the world. So when students and workers come together, we have the power to overthrow them and to overthrow capitalism and build a new society that's in the interests of everyone instead of just a tiny minority of people. So I think we should learn the lessons of 1968 for when the revolutionary movement next comes about, and it will come about again. We need to be ready. We need to be ready with a revolutionary organisation that has looked at history, has learned the lessons of history and can offer solutions and leadership that can say, look, we need these strike committees to join up on a national, regional level. We need to take power away. We need to push that final push. And this was crucially what was missing in a lot of the movements. In Czechoslovakia and the USA as well, there was no kind of revolutionary leadership at all, saying actually we need to link up with the workers more. Actually, we need to do this. So, yeah, all across that was kind of what was missing. And like I said, we need to be ready to do power in France, the Communist Party. Stop the workers, stop the movement and this betrayal left capitalism intact. So, yeah, next time we need to be ready to take power to overthrow capitalism and to build a new society.