Mike's points below are important. There are, incidentally, other formulations of the same point. Andre Gorz observed that the workers will never go to the barricades to obtain 5000 new housing flats. Rosa Luxemburg pointed out that current activity was relevant only from the future perspective of state power. And almost everyone who know anything know that you don't start negotiations by offering a compromise position. In the U.S. of the '60s this basic practical knowledge was best expressed in the frequent putting forth of "Non-Negotiable" demands. The demands _always _ were "extreme" from "reasonable" perspective. But, echoing Gorz, students are not going to occupy a building and risk their future for a 10 page detailed "reasonable" proposal!
In other word, the French slogan merely expresses in catchy style what _anyone_ working to build a mass movement has to take for granted, a given principle, not merely a shocking slogan.
Remember the way even discussion of an anti-war movement in 2001 was cluttered with arguments about recognizing that "something had to be done," that it was too simple to just say "bring the troops home." But any 'line' other than "Bring the Troops Home," REGARDLESS of circumstances, is to give up before one begins.
Carrol
------- Mike Ballard:
Remember, it's France in '68 from which this graffiti erupts. The French CP, the unions and of course the SP and the rest of the official left are ever being realistic and demanding reforms and never demanding say, the abolition of wage labour. The practice of liberalism recreates capitalism. The idea among Situationsts and Enrages was to turn this 'realism' on its head and demand a classless communist society be lived now, in the moment, not as something way off, 800 years in the future.