COMMENTARY box:
Ultra-leftist students in courtyard. Sorbonne 1968. Banner reads: Serving the People.
With the Sorbonne student rebellion in May 1968 numerous socialist and Marxist authors generally came to recognize the need for a form of revolution that would prepare the way for political and socioeconomic changes by influencing everyday life, customs, mentalities, and ways of living. This modality of revolutionary psychological warfare is known as the cultural revolution.
One of the many graffitis displayed during the Sorbonne revolution. This says: “Freedom is the crime that contains all crimes. It is our absolute weapon.”
According to these authors, only this preponderantly psychological and tendential revolution could change the public’s mentality to the point that would permit implementing the egalitarian utopia. Without this mental change, no structural change could last.
One would think this was a recent photo of CHOP/CHAZ in Oregon or Washington, but this was the Sorbonne demonstrations of May 1968 in Bordeaux (Gironde, France) – on Rue Paul-Bert.
This concept of cultural revolution encompasses what the 1959 edition of Revolution and Counter-Revolution termed the “Revolution in the tendencies.”1
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), Part III, Chapter II, pg.142.
