Disruptive Subjects

Operaismo and Radical Feminism in Italy and the United States

On 24 May 1968, a 100,000-strong crowd of French students and workers, chanting “your struggle is ours,” began their march to Place de la Bastille. This conjoining of university and factory uprisings, no less through a symbolic reenactment of the events of 14 July 1789, sent chills down the spine of De Gaulle’s government. The French state, faced with the terrifying prospect of workers and students uniting to form a new revolutionary subject, sprang to action, creating a wall of police to drive the demonstrators back to the Latin Quarter. In the days that followed, the careful and tactical policing of the streets was matched by an even more calculated media operation to segregate the masses of revolting French into their constituent parts.