At the last National Committee meeting of the Schools Action Union a few weeks ago, the Spartacus League comrades, together with the IS and LPYS were expelled from the SAU as "Trotskyists". This came as no surprise to the Spartacus League members, who had been observing the development of ultra-left sectarian ideas within the organisation for some time. The meeting itself had more elements of farce than of tragedy; in the morning we were treated to a lengthy outburst on "social fascism" directed at the LPYS by the SAU London Chairman, in the afternoon the National Chairman read out a paper alleging that members of the Spartacus League, International Socialists and LPYS had behaved disloyally Since the abolition of the bourgeois under the SAU's "democratic centralist constitution" (sic) and would therefore be expelled.
The Spartacus League has continually pointed out that the idea of a one-sector organisation being "democratic centralist" is a gross mistake which leads to big political errors, and to use this stupidity to expel genuine revolutionaries marks a further stage in the degeneration of the organisation under Maoist and Stalinist influence. The SL demands that the SAU lift the proscription on Trotskyist organisations and readmits the expelled comrades at once.
The days when the Times Educational Supplement could believe the SAU had 10,000 members are definitely over-even on paper it has less than 400. The big upsurges in the schools in recent months have largely bypassed the SAU and in the Christopher Searle case, the SAU were reduced to merely issuing a press statement, which hardly anyone bothered to print anyway.
At no time has the SAU been organisationally significant in the schools, and it is chiefly noteworthy for its ideas which in their confusion represented a certain primitive stage in the schools movement. The SAU comes from the same roots as RSSF and represents an English caricature of the types of political mass organisation of youth typified by the SDS in Germany, of the peculiarities of the British educaand the CALs in France which led tremendous movements. In Britain however the SAU, stimulated by the May events and the British student upsurge, lacked any kind of radicalised base in the schools. This lack of a base had a serious result for all the autonomous schools organisations, since it meant that upsurges in the schools were not generalised and continuous but isolated and episodic, therefore schools organisations either organised themselves on the crest of an upsurge and then collapsed-like many of the local unions or to survive without a permanent base became bureaucratised with a selfperpetuating leadership and structure into which members could ebb and flow as struggles arose and died away. This last variant represents the SAU and it's easy to see that mere survival as an independent expulsion in which case it will have to schools grouping needs a tightly centralised structure which explains the SAU's seemingly irrational attachment to "democratic centralism".
As regards its political ideas, these are aptly summed up in the slogan "democratic schools in a democratic society", a slogan which is profound in its inanity and in addition means precisely nothing as the class nature of "democracy" is not specified. We intend to take up the question of "democracy The Red Mole 20th October 1971 Page 4 but for the moment it's interesting to it would be correct for revolutionaries to Meetings on Ireland
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in the schools" in a future article, since so many groups seem to find it enchanting the schools which the SAU was leading,