>Subject: MAY 1968 GRAFFITI
>
>Translations of over 200 graffiti from the May 1968 revolt in France are now
>online at:
>
>http://www.slip.net/~knabb/CF/graffiti.htm
>B U R E A U O F P U B L I C S E C R E T S
>
>MAY 1968 GRAFFITI
>
>In the decor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things and their prices.
>Commute, work, commute, sleep . . .
>Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can
>and many say, "We will breathe later."
>And most of them don't die because they are already dead.
>Boredom is counterrevolutionary.
>We don't want a world where the guarantee of not dying
>of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.
>We want to live.
>Don't beg for the right to live take it.
>In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure
>the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.
>The liberation of humanity is all or nothing.
>Those who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves.
>No replastering, the structure is rotten.
>Masochism today takes the form of reformism.
>Reform my ass.
>The revolution is incredible because it's really happening.
>I came, I saw, I was won over.
>Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!
>Quick!
>If we only have enough time . . .
>In any case, no regrets!
>Already ten days of happiness.
>Live in the moment.
>Comrades, if everyone did like us . . .
>We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy.
>Down with the state.
>When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theater, all the bourgeois
>theaters should be turned into national assemblies.*
>[*Written above the entrance of the occupied Odon Theater]
>Referendum: whether we vote yes or no, it turns us into suckers.
>It's painful to submit to our bosses;
>it's even more stupid to choose them.
>Let's not change bosses, let's change life.
>Don't liberate me I'll take care of that.
>I'm not a servant of the people (much less of their
>self-appointed leaders). Let the people serve themselves.
>Abolish class society.
>Nature created neither servants nor masters.
>I want neither to rule nor to be ruled.
>We will have good masters as soon as everyone is their own.
>"In revolution there are two types of people:
>those who make it and those who profit from it."
>(Napoleon)
>Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as "progressives."
>Don't be taken in by the politicos and their filthy demagogy.
>We must rely on ourselves.
>Socialism without freedom is a barracks.
>All power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
>We want structures that serve people, not people serving structures.
>The revolution doesn't belong to the committees, it's yours.
>Politics is in the streets.
>Barricades close the streets but open the way.
>Our hope can come only from the hopeless.
>A proletarian is someone who has no power over his life and knows it.
>Never work.
>People who work get bored when they don't work.
>People who don't work never get bored.
>Workers of all countries, enjoy!
>Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases.
>My father before me fought for wage increases.
>Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen.
>Yet my whole life has been a drag.
>Don't negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them.
>The boss needs you, you don't need the boss.
>By stopping our machines together we will demonstrate their weakness.
>Occupy the factories.
>Power to the workers councils.
>(an enrag)
>Power to the enrags councils.
>(a worker)
>Worker: You may be only 25 years old,
>but your union dates from the last century.
>Labor unions are whorehouses.
>Comrades, let's lynch Sguy!*
>[*Georges Sguy, head bureaucrat of the Communist Party-dominated labor
>union]
>Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving
>it as you would like to find it on entering.
>Stalinists, your children are with us!
>Man is neither Rousseau's noble savage nor
>the Church's or La Rochefoucauld's depraved sinner.
>He is violent when oppressed, gentle when free.
>Conflict is the origin of everything.
>(Heraclitus)
>If we have to resort to force, don't sit on the fence.
>Be cruel.
>Humanity won't be happy till the last capitalist is hung
>with the guts of the last bureaucrat.
>When the last sociologist has been hung with the guts of
>the last bureaucrat, will we still have "problems"?
>The passion of destruction is a creative joy.
>(Bakunin)
>A single nonrevolutionary weekend is infinitely more
>bloody than a month of total revolution.
>The tears of philistines are the nectar of the gods.
>This concerns everyone.
>We are all German Jews.
>We refuse to be highrised, diplomaed, licensed,
>inventoried, registered, indoctrinated, suburbanized,
>sermonized, beaten, telemanipulated, gassed, booked.
>We are all "undesirables."
>We must remain "unadapted."
>The forest precedes man, the desert follows him.
>Under the paving stones, the beach.
>Concrete breeds apathy.
>Coming soon to this location: charming ruins.
>Beautiful, maybe not, but O how charming: life versus survival.
>"My aim is to agitate and disturb people.
>I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast."
>(Unamuno)
>Conservatism is a synonym for rottenness and ugliness.
>You are hollow.
>You will end up dying of comfort.
>Hide yourself, object!
>No to coat-and-tie revolution.
>A revolution that requires us to sacrifice
>ourselves for it is Papa's revolution.
>Revolution ceases to be the moment it calls for self-sacrifice.
>The prospect of finding pleasure tomorrow will
>never compensate for today's boredom.
>When people notice they are bored, they stop being bored.
>Happiness is a new idea.
>Live without dead time.
>Those who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring
>to everyday reality have a corpse in their mouth.
>Culture is an inversion of life.
>Poetry is in the streets.
>The most beautiful sculpture is a paving stone thrown at a cop's head.
>Art is dead, don't consume its corpse.
>Art is dead, let's liberate our everyday life.
>Art is dead, Godard can't change that.
>Godard: the supreme Swiss Maoist jerk.
>Permanent cultural vibration.
>We want a wild and ephemeral music.
>We propose a fundamental regeneration:
>concert strikes,
>sound gatherings with collective investigation.
>Abolish copyrights: sound structures belong to everyone.
>Anarchy is me.
>Revolution, I love you.
>Down with the abstract, long live the ephemeral.
>(Marxist-Pessimist Youth)
>Don't consume Marx, live him.
>I'm a Groucho Marxist.
>I take my desires for reality because I believe
>in the reality of my desires.
>Desiring reality is great! Realizing your desires is even better!
>Practice wishful thinking.
>I declare a permanent state of happiness.
>Be realistic, demand the impossible.
>Power to the imagination.
>Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking.
>Imagination is not a gift, it must be conquered.
>(Breton)
>Action must not be a reaction, but a creation.
>Action enables us to overcome divisions and find solutions.
>Exaggeration is the beginning of invention.
>The enemy of movement is skepticism. Everything that has been realized
>comes from dynamism, which comes from spontaneity.
>Here, we spontane.
>"You must bear a chaos in yourself in
>order to bring a dancing star into the world."
>(Nietzsche)
>Chance must be systematically explored.
>Alcohol kills. Take LSD.
>Unbutton your mind as often as your fly.
>"Every view of things that is not strange is false."
>(Valry)
>Life is elsewhere.
>Forget everything you've been taught. Start by dreaming.
>Form dream committees.
>Dare! This word contains all the politics of the present moment. (Saint-Just)
>Arise, ye wretched of the university.
>Students are jerks.
>The student's susceptibility to recruitment as a militant for
>any cause is a sufficient demonstration of his real impotence.
>(enrag women)
>Professors, you make us grow old.
>Terminate the university.
>Rape your Alma Mater.
>What if we burned the Sorbonne?
>Professors, you are as senile as your culture, your modernism
>is nothing but the modernization of the police.
>We refuse the role assigned to us: we will not be trained as police dogs.
>We don't want to be the watchdogs or servants of capitalism.
>Exams = servility, social promotion, hierarchical society.
>When examined, answer with questions.
>Insolence is the new revolutionary weapon.
>Every teacher is taught, everyone taught teaches.
>The Old Mole of history seems to be splendidly
>undermining the Sorbonne.
>(telegram from Marx, 13 May 1968)
>Thought that stagnates rots.
>To call in question the society you "live" in, you must first
>be capable of calling yourself in question.
>Take revolution seriously, but don't take yourself seriously.
>The walls have ears. Your ears have walls.
>Making revolution also means breaking our internal chains.
>A cop sleeps inside each one of us. We must kill him.
>Drive the cop out of your head.
>Religion is the ultimate con.
>Neither God nor master.
>If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.
>Can you believe that some people are still Christians?
>Down with the toad of Nazareth.
>How can you think freely in the shadow of a chapel?
>We want a place to piss, not a place to pray.
>I suspect God of being a leftist intellectual.
>The bourgeoisie has no other pleasure than to degrade all pleasures.
>Going through the motions kills the emotions.
>Struggle against the emotional fixations that paralyze our potentials.
>(Committee of Women on the Path of Liberation)
>Constraints imposed on pleasure incite the
>pleasure of living without constraints.
>The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution.
>The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.
>SEX: It's okay, says Mao, as long as you don't do it too often.
>Comrades, 5 hours of sleep a day is indispensable:
>we need you for the revolution.
>Embrace your love without dropping your guard.
>I love you!!! Oh, say it with paving stones!!!
>I"m coming in the paving stones.
>Total orgasm.
>Comrades, people are making love in the Poli Sci
>classrooms, not only in the fields.
>Revolutionary women are more beautiful.
>Zelda, I love you! Down with work!
>The young make love, the old make obscene gestures.
>Make love, not war.
>Love one another.
>Whoever speaks of love destroys love.
>Down with consumer society.
>The more you consume, the less you live.
>Commodities are the opium of the people.
>Burn commodities.
>You can't buy happiness. Steal it.
>See Nanterre and live. Die in Naples with Club Med.
>Are you a consumer or a participant?
>To be free in 1968 means to participate.
>I participate.
>You participate.
>He participates.
>We participate.
>They profit.
>The golden age was the age when gold didn't reign.
>"The cause of all wars, riots and injustices is the existence of property."
>(St. Augustine)
>Happiness is hanging your landlord.
>Millionaires of the world unite. The wind is turning.
>The economy is wounded I hope it dies!
>How sad to love money.
>You too can steal.
>"Amnesty: An act in which the rulers
>pardon the injustices they have committed."
>(Ambrose Bierce)*
>[*The definition in Bierce"s Devil's Dictionary is actually: "Amnesty: The
>state's
>magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish."]
>Abolish alienation.
>Obedience begins with consciousness;
>consciousness begins with disobedience.
>First, disobey; then write on the walls.
>(Law of 10 May 1968)
>I don't like to write on walls.
>Write everywhere.
>Before writing, learn to think.
>I don't know how to write but I would like to say
>beautiful things and I don't know how.
>I don't have time to write!!!
>I have something to say but I don't know what.
>Freedom is the right to silence.
>Long live communication, down with telecommunication.
>You, my comrade, you who I was unaware of amid the tumult, you who
>are throttled, afraid, suffocated come, talk to us.
>Talk to your neighbors.
>Yell.
>Create.
>Look in front of you!!!
>Help with cleanup, there are no maids here.
>Revolution is an INITIATIVE.
>Speechmaking is counterrevolutionary.
>Comrades, stop applauding, the spectacle is everywhere.
>Don't get caught up in the spectacle of opposition. Oppose the spectacle.
>Down with spectacle-commodity society.
>Down with journalists and those who cater to them.
>Only the truth is revolutionary.
>No forbidding allowed.
>Freedom is the crime that contains all crimes. It is our ultimate weapon.
>The freedom of others extends mine infinitely.
>No freedom for the enemies of freedom.
>Free our comrades.
>Open the gates of the asylums, prisons and other faculties.
>Open the windows of your heart.
>To hell with boundaries.
>You can no longer sleep quietly once you've suddenly opened your eyes.
>The future will only contain what we put into it now.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>These graffiti are drawn primarily from Julien Besanon's Les murs ont la
>parole (Tchou, 1968), Walter Lewino's L'imagination au pouvoir (Losfeld,
>1968), Marc Rohan's Paris '68 (Impact, 1968), Ren Vinet's Enrags et
>situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations (Gallimard, 1968), and
>Grard Lambert's Mai 1968: brlante nostalgie (Pied de nez, 1988).
>Translated by Ken Knabb, March 1999.
>No copyright.
>BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS, PO BOX 1044, BERKELEY CA 94701, USA
>knabb@slip.net http://www.slip.net/~knabb
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