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From Socialist Worker, No. 96, 9 November 1968, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
There has been an upsurge of student movements in almost all the advanced countries in the last year or so. Two main reasons provide the key to this development.
1. Modern capitalism needs to gear the educational system ever more closely to the needs of industry to keep ahead of international competition. In the rat race, the necessity is for a skilled and docile labour force to introduce and operate new technical innovations.
The educational system tries to perform all three functions. In its research units it initiates technical discoveries. Through its teaching it provides a skilled labour force. And with its ideological manipulation it attempts to provide the essential docility.
In order to fulfil all these functions however, the old liberal institutions have to be transformed into educational factories. This places enormous strains on the student population and, to a lesser extent, on some academics.
2. The student movement is the most obvious expression of a general crisis of capitalism East and West. Students, because they are all young and grouped together in college units, have a mobility of action that other members of society do not have.
But the ideological basis for the student revolt is a general reaction against the stagnation of our society, a general questioning of the legitimacy of our institutions and a refusal to accept a power structure simply because it is there.
The breakdown of the ‘divine’ right’ of the rulers to rule is the real source of what is normally called anti-authoritarianism.
Last year student struggles erupted on the British scene with unforeseen violence. Occupation followed occupation in closer and closer succession.
Outside the colleges, the growth of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign was a direct result of the new mood of militancy among students.
But one of the results of these struggles was to pinpoint the isolation of militants in individual colleges. The weakness of an exclusively student movement was clearly shown by the French events.
The necessity of co-ordinating action of exchanging information and formulating a common policy after a collective analysis became crucial. The need to form an organisation which could nationally try to forge links with the working class was more and more obvious.
It was as a result of genuine pressure from below that the Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation was founded at the end of last term. The fact that well over 1,000 people attended the founding conference at the London School of Economics was proof of it.
The RSSF was from the outset an umbrella organisation of militants from various factions in the socialist camp and of many activists outside any of the ‘groups’. In a sense its perspective was to absorb, in time, the students, pupils and young workers that turn up for Vietnam demos, grouping them around a minimum political programme in a fighting organisation.
Now on the eve of the second RSSF conference it is time to take some kind of stock of its progress to date in order to formulate a policy for the future.
The most obvious problem of the RSSF’s growth is its unevenness. Recruitment in the universities has been steady but in the schools and technical colleges the inroads, if hopeful, have been very limited.
Identification of the members with the organisation also varies tremendously from place to place. Nationally it has been unable to respond to events.
Demonstrations against Russia’s intervention in Czechoslovakia have taken place only in a few places. Even on a subject closer to home, the conference of university chancellors and the not so veiled threats to student militants that have ensued have not provoked a national response.
In some places there have been attempts by factional groups to take over the organisation.
Yet if all these are gloomy signs there is still a great potential. The assumption that the student movement would continue to grow has been borne out by the recent occupation of the LSE, the extremely successful demonstration of October 27, by the perspective of a continued struggle at Hornsey and by the springing up of new socialist societies in all kinds of colleges.
The movement from below is still present, stronger in fact than before. The need for an organisation to coordinate and to become the national interpreter of this movement is still pressing.
The RSSF can be this organisation to the extent that it retains maximum flexibility of structure, that it eagerly incorporates new groups (such as the secondary schools, apprentices, youth) that it is democratically controlled from below and most important, that it does not develop a power structure.
The new desire of students to control their own lives – together with the general rebirth of libertarian socialism – should ensure that at the conference this will be the direction RSSF will take.
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