During these days, films, reports, compilations of songs of the time, surrealist round tables are being taken from all sides as “if it had been and would have been done” on May 1968. They'll serve the same sauce until the end of the month. Then it's over.

From time to time, the melancholy of the past is imposed, the dream of a revolution that had not been achieved, some good hopes, here and there, as something so far away and impossible. Other times, more than sentimentalism, the left and a generation are criticized, every desire for change of order is disregarded. And sometimes, yes, the desire feels strong and secret for it to happen again.

May of 68, at home, little was mentioned, the truth, and we often recognize it with rather negative notes, compared to the clutter of attacks that were not channeled. Unfortunately, if that generation had been concerned with picking up leftist ideas, the fear of revolutionary change had bound them up. Despite the fact that some have told us today, after all, everything was boiling, it is at that time that we owe some progress: Grenelle's achievements for workers, expansion of trade unionism, education reform, Larzac farmers' project and revision of the lines of cultivation, contraception, feminism emergence, individual and creative valuation, self-managed companies, ecology. If we look towards the Basque Country, here left us the syndicalist Pitrau and his enthusiasm, Enbata, the first brushes of the unified Basque in Baiona, ikastolas, Iparretarrak (IK), later the magazine Maiatz. The red thread of all these novelties was to share, share claims and even achievements. Brutal, but necessary.

Then, for two decades, the magistrates would endeavour to bury everything, especially the desire for freedom. Fifty years have passed and we can say that in 2018 we are in a similar climate, in our corners and beyond. What does the month of May this year bring? Laws of false rumours and affective secrets, reform Vidal of the universities, strikes of transport personnel, health, mobilizations in favor of immigrants, deplorable invention of the crime of solidarity, emptying of the ZAD, complaints of the accused, unions unable to converge and smiling managers of always in the higher spheres. Today, too, we have every reason to extol the strike, to attack culturally, socially and politically, to rise up against selfishness, oppression and suffocating power and to shake off the side of the big managers. In fact, you could hear some questions and provide answers. We have a thousand reasons to rise up, to act collectively, to wake up and fall down on the street, to win the short but strong life, to lose ourselves in dreams, especially what we don't like to throw back and risk something better with subversive denial.

Five decades away, circumstances are so far away and so close around the world. We want the people of Notre Dame des Landes to move forward as in Millau, for the elderly to arrive at the end of the month, for CIMADE not to be prosecuted for a crime of solidarity, yet the machine goes on, because we are not “nothing”, but useless and cynical: for five decades capitalism has been set in motion so that it does not get good.