ATTENTION: SCHOOL STUDENTS! Berlin, Monday January 27, 1967.
Throughout Western Europe, students are confronting governments, police and academic authorities. Spain declares a state ol emergency, in italy students capture the trantan embassy and give a press conference on the situation in Tehran; in France the CRS assault the Sorbonne: in London, the LSE lockout raises the British student struggle to a new state of nation-wide combativity. Everywhere there are police, and repression on the campus.
ROVING INSUKGENCY Berlin has been in a state of crisis for over a year. On January 19th 500 students marched on the HO of the Social-Democratic Party, protesting at the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Rosa Luxembrug and Karl Liebknecht, and at the fifty and more years of social treachery which that party has carried out against the German workers. Blocked by police from approaching the SPD building, the students turned on bourgeois property, smashing all the windows of the shops and banks nearby. On January 24, a rnday, 14,000 workers marched on the town hall to protest at the closing down of their lactory as part or the economic withdrawal by German capital from Berlin which has been going on since 196l. In the university the student masses are in permanent movement. On January 23, they sacked the offices or some repressive administrators and burnt their mes arter two stacues were relegated for a term: the student reply "Relegation produces Revolution'. Over the weekend the Berlin authorities tried to expel from the city a Persian militant, Banman Nirumand (32), who had played a leading role in the Berlin movement. The response to this was overwhelming: on this Monday alone, there was a meeung or 4,000 students in une auditorium of the Free University (FU) at which Nirmand spoke, pointing out that nis own victimisation was part of the general academic and authoritarian counter-offensive going on throughout Western Europe, The subsequent debate in which the German equivalents of Crouch. Martin and Fisk made a feeble attempt to mislead the students masses terminated in praxis - the auditorium was deserted, the masses looted the offices of another counter-revolutionary adminstrator and then launched a stone-throwing assault on the Persian consulate. Elsewhere in the city demonstrators attacked the Greek legation and as night fell the Kurfurstendamm was clogged with police cars and trucks rushing from one flash-point to another, vainly attempting to counter the roving insurgency of the Berlin students. Berlin, the city of the Spartakists, which became the capital of Hitler's Reich and the counter-revolutionary symbol of the cold war, has rediscovered its revolutionary destiny.
POLITICAL CRISES Yet, the APO - extra - parliamentary opposition - is in crisis.
The shooting of Dutschke in April 1968 was followed by a fortnight of unparalleled militancy: Springer's buildings and vans were attacked, hundreds were arrested, thousands of students paralysed a score of German cities. But this paroxysm of the APO was followed by a lull: the response of the proletariat was almost nil, it seemed that the attempt by students to implement their stratebym even given the positive example of France, had failed. The crises of the APO now is a result of this history and the attempts now being made to resolve the contradictions of that development.
The movement had remained unified while it concentrated on definite national issues such as Sorineer or Vietnam: the hull led to disunity - geographic disunity in that groups in different towns were confronted with different political perspectives, and political disunity in that the orthodox communists and teur folowers were opposca to the peat-bourgcols anarchism', the lack of 'order and discipline' on the part of the st Sent radicals; at the Sofia Youth Festival these communists aided the Bulgarian police in their repression against the proposed anti-American between the orthodor and the within SDS was played out at the Frankfurt and Hannover anDrathontaran Wing conferences of the SDS. The orthodox are in a minority but they are by no means confined to old communists. Many students follow them: and the communist party has formally refounded itself as the DKD in order to get round the ban of 1956. It has a youth group, the German Socialist Workers Youth, SDAJ, which has a following among apprentices The issues on which the split is based are Czechoslovakia - the German Communists backed the invasion; Parliamentarism - the communists want to take a critical part in the clections of 1969 while the APO wants to combat them altogether, violence — the communists are constatnly reiterating the dangers of a Nazi resurgence while the APO is prepared to use countent gainst police, Springer and other agents of capitalist violence; and (as before 1914) Rev - the relation of students to workers and the relation between economist demands are political strategy. Maoists are rarer than in France or Scandanavia and are concatcat carrying out inem cultural revolution not with stressing anti-imperialism as they are in this country. Trotskyites are also rare and do not play a central role in the divisions within the left.
Kelatons between students and workers are almost non-existent untl 1906. Une prodiem 1s that the kind of connection that can exist in England between students and workers who are members of a left grouping is not possible in Germany where there is not a proliferation of sects. Relations between workers and students in the communist party did go on, but on a cladestine level. The anti-communism and reformism of the unions Impeded contact on that level; and the equivalents of shop-stewards, the Vertrauensleute, were much more integrated into the union bureaucracy than their British counterparts. Problems of making contact with the workers, problems of the level of communication once this contact was made - these problems have been attacked over the last year. A movement of base-groups has spread to a number of towns: centred on particular factories, or on districts of a town, they have consisted of students and workers united on a programme of revolutionary factory work. In some cases they have organised factory newspapers; a lot of leafleting has been done and many of the problems which abstract leafleting has encountered in England are being gradually contronted in Berlin as well. The response to the impasse of last soring has been to try to go outside the university into the factory: but the political obstacles to this excursion have prevented it from becoming so far more than a sporadic and at times naively populist development. The absence above all of a revolutionary party in which workers and students could meet and co-operate has meant that the only mediation has been one of individual contact. The base-group movement has only a year of history; and the experience of British socialists with factorygate activity and other forms of worker-student contact, and that of me UJe-ML in trance, could be or importance in this respect.
SEXUAL EMANCIPATION Taranel with tnis movement into the lactores there has also been a movement into the university and into schools. A group of red guards, aged between eight and thirteen. have taken the revolutionary road in Berlin, demanding an end to repressive school discipline. In the secondary schools students have taken and increasing role in demonstrations and have organised a high-school movement, AUSS; AUSS has campaigned on the platform of sexual emancipation and the availability of contraceptives for all German school children; and has denounced religous instruction in schools The situation in the universities is complex. On the one hand the authorities have made a token concession to the students of one-third representation on the syllabus committees in some universities; on the other hand they have taken stronger disciplinary action against progressive students and have threatened to stop student grants. The students and left-wing staff have tried to put forward a programme of internal transformation, involving the use of the intellectual productive forces of the university for critical purposes. In Berlin's political science Utto-sunr-insitute stdents in June launched a campaign for a critical social science after professors there had taken no stand at all on the introduction of emergency legislation into West Germany. The students were granted one-third representation on syllabus committees, and there are now official seminars on the Marxist theory of imperialism. In the chemistry department in Berlin, revolutionary students have devoloped a programme of revolutionary chemistry - involving researchch into ways of neutralising American gasses and chemicals in Vietnam. The film institue has been using its facilities to make left-wing documentaries on students and worker movements.
The general slogan has been one for the 'autonomous zone' - an area of free research where students can use a certain % of the institution's research funds for their own anti-capitalist ends. The success of this slogan among the students has led to some industrial concerns moving their funds out of the university and setting up their own private research centres. Another problem that has arisen is that in some places the students have not had the capability to use their newly-won opportunities, and this given authoritarian professors the occasion to anounce the intellectual validity of student power. The great influx of new support into SDS after the June 67" shooting and the Dutschke attack have created problems of the political maturity of students, and while the ideological strength of the leadership is very high and that of the mass of students much higher that in Britain, there have been problems of educating the new forces.
ANTI PARLIAMENTARISM As demands are radicalised, and as political confrontation on and off the campus continues the leaders of the APO are trying to reform their forces for a new campaign in 1969: in March, the Federal President will be elected and in the autumn there will be Parliamentary elections. Various concrete issues are being highlighted in several main cities - on Greece, Spain and Portugal students and foregn workers from these countries have been in constant battle with police over the past few months; but the central theme of 1969 will be Parliamentarism. On March 1-4 the Berlin SDS is organising a European Conference on parliamentarism and the need for extra-parliamentary oppositions; they want as many foreign comrades to come in order to plan an internation struggle against bourgeois democratic charades. (Anyone interested should write to the Republikanischer Klub; 27 Wielandstr. 1 Berlin 15.)
We demand 1) Freedom of speech and assembly, and the right to organise inside schools; no censorship of school magazines, clubs and societies. 2) Effective democratic control of th school by an elected School Council subject to instant recall, made up of representatives of students and staff. 3) The abolition of all exams in their present form. 4). The abolition of corporal and all arbitrary forms of punishment and of the prefect system. 5) A free, non-segregated (by class, race, sex), comprehensive education system. 6) Educational establishments to become local evening centres of educational and cultueal activity and discussion. 7) Full maintenance grants to all receiving rull-time education over school leaving age.
This Action Programme will be revised at the next National Conference.
All interested School Students should write to:
School Section, The Black Dwarf, 7, Carlisle St, London W.. A 4PZ
generations, and they are skillful at ruling with out seeming to oppress, Membership in the ruling group has altered sightly with the development of an industrial elite