-- can start a prairie fire. the bourgeois press into a paroxysm of bluster and rage.
What are the political lessons of these events?
The basis of any successful political struggle is a correct assessment of the strength of the forces against which one is pitted. The revolutionary left in Britain is engaged in a long-term and as yet unclear struggle against centuries of bourgeois rule, and against the ideas and manners which result from it; these ideas ("common sense") are a cohesive force that ties society together and even on the left it is difficult to reject them completely.
must expect the capitalist university to attack ideological Fighting this enemy we vast numbers of students, products of authoritarian families and of bapitalist education, to hesitate before understanding the process to which they are being submitted and joining the revolutionary movement.
of LSE was the natural response of a ruling class threatened by a left-wing movement, but so confident of its power and of the loyalty of the media that it could accuse The closure the students of violence when it was Adams who put up the gates and the students who voted democratically to take them down; and who could call student protesters "thugs" when Wilson, Short and other gangstets have backed the US in Vietnam, humoured Smith in mob of howling bigots round Belfast on a Saturday afternoon and in the anti-worker legislation that Castle has brought in.
These are the who shut the LSE because they were afraid of discussion MYTH AND REALITY La system of mystification as well as exploitation. Under capitalism all institutions have two faces; the official face, - and the reality, something quite different, but which is hidden a long way under the surface, and takes a lot of work to extract.
The university myth is the myth of the academic community. We're all here together to learn. Some of us have been learning a bit longer (the teachers). Every community has to have rules that govern the behaviour of its members; the rules of the university are in everybody's interest. They protect academic freedom.
LSE also shares in the social science myth. Kids come to LSE to study sociology, economics, politics, because they're worried by the society they see around them. They hope to learn to understand the problems and even to help solve some of them. But instead they're taught a lot of crap which is just the same old justifications for inequality and exploitation, dressed up in academic jargon. No discussion of real social problems. No discussion of Vietnam, of racialism, no mention of revolution.
Prof. Day gives the Ist. year economics lectures. Unemployment is good, he says. It's necessary. It's the cure for inflation, and inflation is the worst thing that can happen. This makes lots of the kids very sore. Some of them ask questions; they want an explanation. But Prof. Day reminds them that interruptions aren't allowed in lectures. They can discuss it with their class teachers, but his lectures are the gospel, and not to be questioned. Prof. Day also sets the exams at the end of the year.
the Fabian tradition. The school LASK were its red" professors. The myth of Red LSE is still trotted out by the more out-of-touch of the gutter press. The truth about LSE and the Fabian tradition is buried a long way under the surface. We had to do a lot of research to find out what these people really were and what they did. And the truth really stinks From 1900 onwards the Fabians consistently supported British imperialism explicitly in the bece of gette a few sods to socid to the tim and sociati idea heal centre, LSE ecame a breeding-ground of social-imperialism and social-fascism. School's first director wrote his Autobiography of an Imperialist The Director of LSE up to 1956, Carr-Saunders, was active in the Eugenics Society and believed that the black people and the white-working-class were innately inferior. (Therefore, they must be ruled by the paternalist despotism that Carr-Saunders was taught to wield in the colonial administration.)
As the universities were brought increasingly into line with the needs of monopoly capitalism, the governing board of LSE became ever more top-heavy with company directors a complete cross-section or une brusn runng class. nese peopie make sure, vi the reature the Director, that the courses, syllabi, exams at LSE turn out the personnel to administer their corporations without questioning the capitalist system, and also system's ideologists who explain in the mass media that capitalism is the best of all possible worlds.
LSE is particularly tied up with the corporations with heavy investments in Rhodesia and South Africa, which reap vast profits out of employing slave labour under apartheid. So it was no surprise that in Oct. 67 the appointment was announced of Walter Adams, as LSE's new Director.
UPSURGE The student movement at LSE was born when we questioned the right of the Governors to appoint whoever they like as Director, especially when this person had played a shabby role as Director of University College Rhodesia after UDI. A meeing to discuss Adams suitability as Director of LSE was banned. We held the meeting. Adelstein and Bloom, our elected representatives, were victimised. We held the first sit-in, in March 67, and we won.
Out of the sit-in came all our discoveries about LSE and what it stood for. We realised that a few reforms werent enoug the question was power! If the Governors controlled LSE then it would serve the needs of Capital. If it was controlled by the students, teachers, and everyone else who works there, then LSE could serve the needs of the people, could become a centre of free social enquirv and criticism. and reallv he of use in changing societv. ("hooliganism") and tried to turn the school into a fortified camp ("academic community"). The aim of all students is to keep the university open - so that the allegedly liberal rulers have to accuse the students of "trespass" when they try to stay in the university. The rulers have to shut the school to protect themselves.
resolutely oppose - as the mass meeting of 1,700 LSE students did oppose on February 3 -all forms of repression and victimisation.
This perspective has already started to become a reality: the LSE closure has created a national student movement. Protests, sit-ins and strikes have spread across the country. More than 30 universities sent delegations to the RSSF demo. The LSE gates were part of the nation-wide strategy by vice-chancellors to isolate the left just as the trade union legislation is an attempt to quell the militants; LSE was the test case, but the response of the student body throughout the country has shattered this plot.
This development has shown that students now have a consciousness of themseives as a national social group in a struggle for power; students no longer think of themselves as scarf-wearing members of a single institution, they are members of a social group. This new student consciousness can find its expression in a militant national student movement, in RSSF: the RSSF manifesto called for the establishment of red bases in the universities, as a means of combatting capitalism and radicalsing a significant sector of youth. The aim of all students must be to generalise the struggle of LSE, to challenge the bourgeois domination of the university and to call for a transformation of the university so that it is run on democratic and critical lines.
Faced with the concerted onslaught of the bourgeois state, the students have stood firm. Their university has been closed in an attempt to smash them. It must be re-opened: the struggle must become nation-wide. We must create two, three, many LSEs, - two, three, many centres of citical knowledge and study where capitalism can be undermined and a revolutionary intelligentsia created. of their own lives. In October, the week-end of Vietnam demonstration, we felt strong enough to take over LSE for three days and make it, temporarily, into the sort of institution we would like to see. Adams felt too weak to call the police to evict us, but he began getting these gates put up all around. Even the students who'd been against the Vietnam occupation began to see what we were on about when the gates went up When the issue of racialism and LSE's connections with Southern Africa came up again in December, we had gone full circle. But the students were far stronger and far more sure of their ideas than two years before. The Fearless talks made it clear that Wilson was hand in glove with the Smith regime. Sanctions were meaningless because the monopolies who supplied the Rhodesian economy's essential needs found an open road through South Africa. The men who controlled these monopolies were Governors of LSE, and they were planning to send teams to the School after Christmas to recruit personnél to manage their firms. We came back after Xmas to find the complete set of 9 gates, (*to protec valuable property at the School".
We decided to attack on all fronts. The Governors - not to be allowed on the premises, those with business interests in Southern Africa to resign. LSE's own holdings in S. Africa to go immediately. Recruitment no firms involved in the Vietnam war or in Southern Africa to be allowed to recruit on the campus. An end to the gates.
Mass meetings were held at which the Director was given ultimata about the gates and the Schools' investments is S. Africa. His response was the new set of regulations for teachers. They must be prepared to spy on their students and denounce trouble-makers' to the Director. He said he would negotiate about the gates, but negotiations were exposed as a trick to gain time. Finally, after the decision of a mass Union meeting on Friday Jan. 24th. came the glorious moment when, with sledgehammers, pickaxes and crowbars, we went from one gate to another and removed them painlessly, efficiently and by mass action.
Three hours later the Director used the pretext of 'uncontrollable violence' to call in the fuzz. The School was closed, 40 comrades were arrested, (mainly for obstruction outside LSE and outside Bow Street) but only on two comrades, denounced by their teachers, did they even attempt to pin charges of malicious damage.
But the next week victimisation began in earnest. 13 students received high court writs -not for taking down the gates, but for the views they expressed at Union meetings and ever nore circumstantial evidence. 3 teachers received summonses to appear before a disciplinary committee. Clearly the administration are attempting to crush the LSE students by silencing spokeman. But in vain! At the largest ever meeting of LSE students union (Friends our main House, Feb 3rd.), 1500 students voted their determination to resist victimisation and to continue the campaign against all repressive measures at LSE.
Meanwhile, 100 cops are permanently on guard to keep us out of LSE and protect academic freedom.
SOLIDARITY Adams" move to turn LSE into a police university isn't the isolated act of a maniac. The ruling class have shown their preparedness to crush the student movement when it threatens their vital interests. The new authoritarian policy the universities is parallel with the attacks on the working-class movement put forward in Barbara Castle's White Paper. Education Minister Edward Short attacked LSE students as academic thugs in the most vicious McCarthyite smear campaign since the seamen's strike.
LSE students can't win in isolation. But they are not isolated. Solidarity actions have taken place in more than 20 universities. Student pressure on any Vice-Chancellor means VC pressure on Adams to open LSE and drop victimisation. For the first time this last week Britain has a national student movement, fighting together for a common demand been fused by cheLSE semiggle. The pressive measures on the campus that has Revolutionary Student Federation, which some was a paper
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The students at LSE wanted to discuss and criticise the ideas they were learning: they wanted to run the school democratically. These two very simple demands presented such a threat to the bourgeois state that is had to close down the school, call in the fuzz and whip
contestation and democratic forms that would weaken capitalist control. We must expect the bourgeois press to vilify the left, and reproduce the lies of Adams and Short. We must expect there to be no significant response from other sectors of British life. We must expect
Rhodesia and introduced ligislation attacking the working class. This confidence can also be seen in Ulster, where the fascist Paisley is sentenced to gaol and then allowed out to lead a
This struggle of LSE students to liberate the university and to keep it open must become the struggle of all students.: to challenge bourgeois ideology, campaign for democracy and