1968 has been the year of the student revolutionary. In the exploited world students have always been in the vanguard of the fight against imperialism and dictatorship; this year has been no exception and as we go to press students in a score of countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Tunisia, Uruguay, Turkey-are locked in combat with their governments. In the socialist world students in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland have spearheaded the anti-Stalinist struggle.
In the advanced capitalist countries students have also played a leading revolutionary role in the US, Germany, Italy, France and Japan. But not in Britain. We are the only major capitalist country which has not produced a comparable student movement. There have been isolated cases of student insurrection, and students have been dominant in the anti-imperialist struggle, but there has not been a mass student movement.
Two issues confront the revolutionary student left at this moment: What role can a student movement play within a socialist strategy? What can the students do in Britain?
One thing is clear. Students cannot make the revolution by themselves. Occupying buildings and slugging policemen do not in themselves constitute the revolution. The role of the students is crucial, but limited. A university can only be completely liberated by liberating the whole of the society of which it is a part, and that can only be done by the working class, organised in a revolutionary party. France showed what the students can do detonate a proletarian explosion; but it also showed that without a revolutionary organisation of the workers the explosion can be crushed.
The experience of students abroad shows the various revolutionary roles that students can play. They can campaign for student power; they can lead the anti-imperialist struggle; and they can play a crucial auxiliary role in the workers' revolution.
Student power is not a reformist, bourgeois demand: students have a right to control their courses and discipline their sexual and university lives. The undermining of capitalist ideology and control in the universities and their replacement by a socialist imagination receive our fullest support.
In the United States and Britain it has been students and youth who have played the leading role in the anti-imperialist struggle, not the workers. By openly challenging imperialist policies and showing the connection between them and domestic exploitation the students can contribute to the development of a revolutionary movement.
The relation of students to workers is the key to this revolutionary strategy. It would be a mistake to apply some mechanical formula to students-the ways in which they can contribute to the workers movement depend on how strong the students are and what form of workers' movement is already in existence. Students can give material support to strikes; they can act as intellectuals, writers and agitators within a proletarian movement; but they cannot act as substitutes for proletarian, shop-floor militants.
In Britain, students have set up the Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation. The "Black Dwarf" believes that RSSF can play a leading role in building a revolutionary student movement, provided it accepts the fact that students have a diversity of revolutionary functions. It must not tie them down to a complacent isolation from workers' struggles or force them to inore their own struggles within the university.
The major difficulty in Britain is that there is not a mass proletarian movement to which students can ally themselves. They must not only help, they must help to create, and as in France they can, by their example, hein to detonate.
British youth is in ferment, though this ferment is taking a number of more or less apolitical forms: the Labour attack on the working class is gathering momentum. This is the context within which RSSF is working, and to which it must apply its energies. It cannot create a revolution by itself, and limitations of the working class movement in this country will be the limitations of its own revolutionary effectiveness. Realism and imagination must go hand in hand. The liberated university, the defeat of imperialic and the smashing of canitalism will follow.
and to which it must apply its energies. It cannot create a revolution by itself, and limitations of the working class movement in this country be the limitations of its own revolutionary effectiveness. Realism and Imagination must go hand in hand. The liberated universily, the defeat of Imperialism and the smashing of capitalism will follow.
Union (which demands alternatives degree is quite clearly to examinations as voluntary options for all students). against a stadent who they regard as I had originally been provisionally an undesirable member of the Univeraccepted to do an M.A. in Political sity, because of his political views Pete Latarche At Hull University the senior was enlivened, if that is the right enough of a bad thing! At best it the system. The conjunction of two of La loss or the University's official "political" manoeuvre on theis part, blessing, with regard to my future made, if implemented, only have rationalized the process of government itself but would have being TOM FAWTHROP, on this point is that the proposals to precipitate within the university and preparing for would got the type of conficts which can both Your place is with the raise a consciousncas and prevent i your slogan should be their slogan trapped at the level of left untouched every real relation of struggles for minority representation. NOT A PENNY ON THE RENTI