In the late 1990s, when I began thinking about May ’68, the prevailing interpretation of the movement in France went something like this: Modern capitalism, far from representing the betrayal of May, instead represented its deepest wishes. The political reasons why hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life had descended into the streets and shut down the country in a general strike could not be named. The three political targets that had animated these demonstrators—Gaullism, capitalism, and imperialism—had been forgotten. The most important workers’ strike in the history of the French labor movement had been reduced to a banal family affair; the largest mass movement in modern French history had become a story of failed panty raids by boys denied access to girls’ dormitories. And, as Immanuel Wallerstein never tires of pointing out, a set of insurrections of international proportions so far-flung that they defined a conjuncture—the international opposition to American imperialism and the U.S. war in Vietnam—had been replaced by a kind of ersatz internationalism attributable to hormones or biology, a class of age: “the planetary generation of libertarian revolt.”

How did a moment of such widespread political upheaval become flattened and corralled into nothing more than a simple phase in the ineluctable process of capitalist modernization? My books are intended as interventions into particular situations, and my objective, at that time, was not so much to try to disentangle the true from the false about those years, to try to establish some “value-free” or objective truth, as it was to seize what motivates certain descriptions and to write the history of those motivations. For it is the case that any analysis, any evocation, any depiction of the 1960s conveys a judgment about—or an engagement with—the present situation. This is what gave and continues to give what we call “the sixties” their force. When we are presented with any framing, any set of images, any even passing allusion to the sixties we have to ask this question: what is being fought for in the present, what is being defended now?

The doxa about ’68 I was confronted with in the late 1990s, complete with a set of images and phrases that reinforced it, had been put into place, mostly during the 1980s and in time for the twentieth anniversary, by a confluence of forces. Foremost among these were the mainstream media, aided by the very French institution of the commemoration—in full overdrive again, by the way, as I write—and by ex-gauchistes converted to the imperatives of the market. The presence of these latter, the media-anointed spokesmen who could each be counted on to re-enact, at the drop of a hat, a renunciation of the errors of their youth in a tone that veered dizzyingly between self-congratulation and abject apology, was still very much in evidence during the thirtieth anniversary as well. What I now see that was not clear to me then, is how much the vast amount of ideological labor performed in those years to put the official memory into place added up to a kind of Americanization of the memory of French ’68. France, after all, was busy in those years accommodating itself to the ascendancy of an American neo-liberal orthodoxy in which equality is seen as a body of principles that can be interpreted by a court rather than what it is—a profoundly political problem. In the United States, a generalized offensive against equality under the cover of a critique of egalitarianism had begun to make of equality a synonym for uniformity, for the constraint or alienation of liberty or for an assault on the free-functioning of the market. In such a political climate, the vast political aspiration to equality that was the May movement—the union of intellectual contestation with the workers’ struggle— had to be forgotten or drowned in a sea of “counter-cultural” images more reminiscent of Haight-Asbury than of the occupied factory at Sud-Aviation.

But there were chinks then in the armor of the official story as well—glimpses of a different ’68 that could not be contained by the clichés so carefully mobilized to keep politics at bay. The labor strikes that paralyzed the entire country for weeks in the winter of 1995, followed by the anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle and Genoa, had dislodged the sentiment of oblivion that had settled over the ’68 years by reawakening a vigorous anti-capitalism that had been lost in a deep slumber throughout the 1980s. What this meant, quite literally, is that there was a change in what could be seen, what could be heard, and what could be said about the recent past. The labor strikes not only forced the government to crawl back on its attempt to tamper with pensions for transportation workers; they altered the degree and scale to which the sixties could inhabit peoples’ imaginations and reminiscences; they transformed what could actually be perceived, and gave what could now be perceived anew different names.¹

I believe that something quite similar is afoot today—a reconfiguration on a similar scale of the political memory of the 1960s that makes certain familiar figures recede and others, less well known perhaps, come into focus. Rereading my book, I was surprised to see that I had made a kind of prophecy to that effect; I had written, then, that the day would come when an auto-didact farmer like Bernard Lambert would seem to us to be a more fitting figure for the aspirations and accomplishments of French May than Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and that what occurred off stage in Nantes would resonate more meaningfully and directly with contemporary political desires than what occurred center-stage in Paris. This day, I think, has indeed arrived. And it has nothing to do with any decadal commemoration. It has far more to do with the recent proliferation, throughout the world, of territorial, land-based struggles, movements defending the land and those who work it, movements whose particularity lies in being anchored in one place.

From the opposition to the building of a dam on the Xingu River in Brazil in the 1980s, through Chiapas, all the way to the recent Standing Rock Sioux defense of their land against an oil pipeline in the Dakotas, situated movements of this kind in the Americas have tended to be characterized by an indigenous base and leadership. In Europe, however, in the case of the occupation (“zad”) blocking the building of an international airport in farmland near Notre-Dame-des‑ -Landes in France, or the attempt in northern Italy to block the construction of a high-speed train line through the Alps, these movements hold together and are held together by people of vastly different cultures and practices, with no one social or ethnic group in charge. Taken together, however, these semi-‑secessionary movements of defense of the territory seem to me to signal the birth of a new political sensibility. But they also raise questions about some of our received ideas and images of the long 1960s—the years of insurrection that stretch from the Cuban Revolution in the late 1950s all the way through the mid-‑1970s. They wreak havoc with the idea that 60s events transpired solely or even primarily on the streets of Paris, New York, Mexico City and other large cities, for example, or that the poetic graffiti of students best expressed peoples’ desire for systemic change. ’68 was a movement that may well have begun in the cities, but its intelligence and future tended toward the earth/Earth.

A few months ago, an historic victory was celebrated in a small bocage on the outskirts of Nantes that casts new light on what remains of the ’68 years. The motley and improbable coalition of farmers, occupiers, elected officials, naturalists and townspeople who had come together to block the construction of an international airport in a few hundred acres of farmland had actually won. They had forced the state to back down on a project that had been in the works since 1967. The astounding duration of the struggle, which began when farmers in the region that had been designated for the airport refused to sell their land, and expanded as farmers were joined by townspeople and, after 2008, by squatters, made the Notre-Dame-des-Landes movement the longest lasting battle in modern French history. The violent encounters between residents of the zad (“zone à défendre”), as it came to be called, and police sent in to evacuate the zone, especially in 2012, made it easy to forget the long history of the movement, and the fact that some of the initial farmer-activists had their political formation in the Paysans-Travailleurs movement active in the Loire-Atlantique region in the 1960s and 70s—a movement co-founded by the farmer I mentioned earlier, Bernard Lambert. This group, which came together in response to the very direct and directed influx of industrial and finance capital into French agriculture after 1965, viewed farmers as occupying the same structural position as urban workers vis-à-vis capitalist modernity. Committed to answering Lambert’s call to “decolonize the provinces” and to create a “real regional power,” Paysans-Travailleurs was also notable for its creation of new disruptive practices outside the confines of the existing, nationally led unions. In the words of Lambert, “We had lost the habit of asking our spiritual fathers in Paris how we were supposed to think about the actions we were taking.”²

We can point, then, to a distinct “sixties” genealogy to the zad movement; it grew quite organically out of the radical agrarian left peculiar to the Loire-‑Atlantique region of western France in those years. Additionally, the zad’s victory caused another movement from the long 1960s to attain a new visibility: namely, the ten-year battle of sheep farmers in the Larzac region in central France against the state’s attempt to expropriate their land to serve as an army training ground.

In 1971 the French government decided to expand a military camp in another relatively poor, isolated, and depopulated agricultural region, the Larzac in the Sud-Aveyron département, on the grounds that it would both contribute to commercial activity in the region and contribute to the defense of Europe. The farmers of the plateau revolted and a confrontation between farmers—including both the extremely poor, traditional farmers who operated subsistence farms and the larger land-holding “modernist” farmers—and the army began. Soon a third group, “paysans installés” or rural établis of sorts, began to arrive to support the movement by occupying—often illegally, by squatting—the land the army wished to annex for its purposes and by moving into buildings owned by the army. In 1973 the first of several immense gatherings of supporters of the movement convened; as one participant observed, this was probably the first time ever that more than 100,000 people from all over France got up and came to a precise place, for whatever reason. At one such gathering in the early 1970s, Bernard Lambert, addressing the crowds, hearkened back to the Paris Commune of 1871 and proclaimed: “Never again will country people be on the side of the Versaillais!” Ten years of obstinate and inventive legal battles designed to throw a wrench into the army’s projects ensued. At one point, in 1978, a group of farmers made their way by foot from the Larzac to Paris along with sheep, which they brought with them into the courtroom. When François Mitterrand was elected in 1981, he felt called upon to make a gesture toward the radical left who had worked so hard to save the Larzac and kept the promise he himself had made standing on the Larzac plateau in 1974: the army was obliged to abandon the extension project.

In mid-January 2018 when the government announced its abandonment of the airport project in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, suddenly the Larzac movement of the 1970s loomed large in the memory of those who lived it and in the research agenda of journalists too young to remember it. The Larzac re-emerged as the zad’s most immediate predecessor, as a victory on a similar scale, and as a possible model, of sorts, for how the residents of the zad who had been farming the land there communally could continue to do so now that there would be no airport. Suddenly the Larzac appeared as not just an afterthought or waning moment to the long 1960s but as a political sequence whose deepest aspirations could only be fully realized in the present, in the form of the communist experiments on the zad. And together with the Larzac, it became possible to also perceive the decade of highly exemplary, even Homeric, battles that began in 1966 as farmers outside of Tokyo, nimbly supported by the far-left Zengakuren (members of the National Student Union), fought the state expropriation of their farmland, to be used for the building of the Narita airport. These battles had become the most defining combats of the worldwide 1960s.

The Larzac and Sanrizuka struggles could now be seen as the battles of the second half of the twentieth century that reconfigure the lines of conflict of an era. Another way of saying this is that the 1960s, whatever else they were, are another name for the moment when people throughout the world began to realize that the tension between the logic of development and that of the ecological bases of life had become the primary contradiction of their lives. What these movements helped initiate and what the zad confirms is that defending the conditions for life on the planet had become the new and incontrovertible horizon of meaning of all political struggle.

Sanrizuka and the Larzac share with the zad a number of practices and characteristics above and beyond their use of occupation as a form of direct action, and above and beyond their direct involvement with the means of subsistence. One such practice is the act of defending per se, embodied in the ancient figure of the “paysan” whose name, etymologically, means “someone who defends a territory.” The idea of defense is, of course, prominent as well in a word that only entered the French dictionary two years ago, namely zad, or “zone à défendre.” Japanese farmers in Sanrizuka, taking a tip from North Vietnamese peasants in their war with the United States, went so far as to bury themselves in underground tunnels and trenches to prevent the entry of large-scale construction machinery into the zone. At a moment when the state-led modernization effort had made accelerated industrialization the sole national value in Japan, farmers countered with their conviction that the airport would destroy values essential to life itself. In Notre-Dame-des-Landes, farmers who refused to sell their land were joined by nearby townspeople and a new group after 2008: squatters and soon-to-be occupiers. With the arrival of the first squatters, the ZAD (zone d’aménagement différé) became a zad (zone à défendre)—the acronym had been given a new combative meaning by the opponents to the project, the administrative perimeter of the zone now designated a set of porous battle lines, and the act of defending had replaced the action we are much more frequently called upon to do these days, namely, resist. The history of these movements shows us that defending is more generative of solidarity than resisting. Resistance means that the battle, if there ever was one, has already been lost and we can only try helplessly to resist the overwhelming power the other side now wields. Defending, on the other hand, means that there is already something on our side that we possess, that we value, that we cherish, and that is thereby worth fighting for. African-Americans in Oakland and Chicago in the 1960s knew this well when the Black Panther Party of Self-Defense designated black neighborhoods and blackness itself as of value and worth defending. What makes a designation of this kind interesting and powerful is that it enacts a kind of transvaluation of values: something is being given value according to a measurement that is different from market-value or the state’s list of imperatives, or existing social hierarchies. In the case of the Larzac, a spokesman for the then Minister of Defense, Michel Debré characterized the zone chosen for army camp expansion as a desolate limestone plateau, populated, in his words, by “a few peasants, not many, who vaguely raise a few sheep, and who are still more or less living in the Middle Ages.”³ As for the land designated for the airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, it was regularly described in initial state documents as “almost a desert.”

So the gesture of defense begins frequently by proclaiming value, especially a kind of excessive value, where it hadn’t been thought to exist before, in a manner I’ve discussed elsewhere that the Parisian Communards of 1871 called “communal luxury.”⁴ By designating something that had no value before in the existing hierarchy of value to be of value and worth defending one is not calling for equivalence or justice within an existing system like the market (as in the demand for fairer distribution). One is not calling for one’s fair share in the existing division of the pie. Communal luxury means that everyone has a right not just to his or her share, but to his or her share of the best. The designation calls into question the very ways in which prosperity is measured, what it is that a society recognizes and appreciates, what it considers wealth.

And what it is that is being defended, of course, changes over time. To return to the Larzac, Sanrizuka, and the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, these are what the Maoists used to call “protracted wars”—struggles that keep changing while enduring and whose strikingly long duration has everything to do with the non-negotiability of the issue. An airport is either built or it is not. Farmland is either farmland or it has become something else: housing developments, say, or an army training ground. But where once what was being defended might have been an unpolluted environment or farmland or even a way of life, what is defended as the struggle deepens comes to include all the new social links, solidarities, affective ties, and new physical relations to the territory and other lived entanglements that the struggle produced.And what it is that is being defended, of course, changes over time. To return to the Larzac, Sanrizuka, and the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, these are what the Maoists used to call “protracted wars”—struggles that keep changing while enduring and whose strikingly long duration has everything to do with the non-negotiability of the issue. An airport is either built or it is not. Farmland is either farmland or it has become something else: housing developments, say, or an army training ground. But where once what was being defended might have been an unpolluted environment or farmland or even a way of life, what is defended as the struggle deepens comes to include all the new social links, solidarities, affective ties, and new physical relations to the territory and other lived entanglements that the struggle produced.And what it is that is being defended, of course, changes over time. To return to the Larzac, Sanrizuka, and the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, these are what the Maoists used to call “protracted wars”—struggles that keep changing while enduring and whose strikingly long duration has everything to do with the non-negotiability of the issue. An airport is either built or it is not. Farmland is either farmland or it has become something else: housing developments, say, or an army training ground. But where once what was being defended might have been an unpolluted environment or farmland or even a way of life, what is defended as the struggle deepens comes to include all the new social links, solidarities, affective ties, and new physical relations to the territory and other lived entanglements that the struggle produced.And what it is that is being defended, of course, changes over time. To return to the Larzac, Sanrizuka, and the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, these are what the Maoists used to call “protracted wars”—struggles that keep changing while enduring and whose strikingly long duration has everything to do with the non-negotiability of the issue. An airport is either built or it is not. Farmland is either farmland or it has become something else: housing developments, say, or an army training ground. But where once what was being defended might have been an unpolluted environment or farmland or even a way of life, what is defended as the struggle deepens comes to include all the new social links, solidarities, affective ties, and new physical relations to the territory and other lived entanglements that the struggle produced.

And it is those solidarities, the soldering together of what are often the most diverse of groups and individuals, that characterize movements like these. In Sanrizuka, an improbable coalition came into being through the encounter between farmers, who began by defending their way of life but learned in the process the true violence of which the state was capable, and radical urban students and workers who had never before given a thought to where and how the food they ate was produced. The force of the Larzac movement lay in the diversity of people and the disparate ideologies it brought together: anti-military activists and pacifists (conscientious objectors), regional Occitan separatists, supporters of non-violence, revolutionaries aiming to overthrow the bourgeois state, anti-capitalists, anarchists and other gauchistes, as well as ecologists. But while the Larzac movement indeed gathered together a diversity of social groups and political tendencies under its umbrella, at no time was the fundamental leadership of the farmer families who had spearheaded the movement ever in question. Sympathizers who supported the farmers politically and financially, usually from afar but sporadically in vast demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people who had traveled to the plateau, were supporting the visceral attachment of the farmers to the same land and the same métier. At the zad, however, no such group was or is in a leadership position, and this has created, in the end, a very different and highly interesting kind of movement, one that in its desire to hold together the diverse but equal components that make it up, requires, as one zad dweller put it, “more tact than tactics.”⁵ An authorial collective at the zad, the Mauvaise Troupe, has given the name of “composition” to this art of creating and maintaining solidarity, over long stretches of time and innumerable challenges, out of the improbable encounters between people of disparate ideologies, identities and beliefs. Nothing in the way that these people come together and stay together over time adds up to a final orthodoxy—instead, the continuing internal eclecticism remains. Composition is just another word for the unexpected meeting of two very different worlds and the becoming-commune of those worlds. An ephemeral version of such “composition” occurred not only in Nantes but in the more familiar ’68 landscape of Nanterre as well. Henri Lefebvre used to say that May ’68 happened because Nanterre students were forced to walk through Algerian bidonvilles to get to their classes. The lived proximity of those two worlds—functionalist campus and immigrant slums—and the trajectories that brought students to organize in the bidonvilles and Algerian workers to worksites on campus, these precarious and ephemeral meetings (beset with all the incertitude, desire, empathy, ignorance and deception that mark such encounters) are at the heart of the political subjectivity that emerged in ’68. They are the laboratory of a new political consciousness.