ABSTRACT
The characterization of the enemy as "bourgeois" or "capitalist," the notion of class struggle, the glorification of the proletariat as inherently revolutionary--these and other Marxist ideas, reinterpreted to fit the radicals' own situation, were part and parcel of their general world view. Whether conceived of as an inevitable outgrowth of Marxist thought, or merely as a subsequent perversion of it, communism as it actually exists is condemned universally as rampant totalitarianism. While clinging to the anti-"bourgeois" sentiments and political idiom of the French Left, the new philosophers have gone considerably further in detaching Karl Marx and established communism from their leftist attitudes than most of their colleagues at the left end of the French political spectrum. Criticism of the French Communist Party as a bastion of Stalinist authoritarianism was already present in student circles before the May events, but it reached its zenith as the events unfolded.
