The decade of the 1960s witnessed a tremendous radicalisation of youth in the advanced capitalist countries, and of students in particular. This process, the roots of which are too complex to analyse in a brief article, was reflected most clearly in the appearance in a whole series of countries of mass student and anti-imperialist movements. The first wave of this revolutionary movement of youth reached its height in 1968, and brought a new and immensely positive factor onto the ossified European political scene. The great strength of the movement was its implacable opposition not just to capitalsm and imperialism, but to bureaucracy. both in Eastern Europe and in the apparatuses of the "Communist" and Social Democratic parties in Western Europe.
In this strength of the movement, however, lay concealed a dangerous weakness. In breaking decisively with the old workers' parties who had proved their worthlessness time and time again, large sections of the movement wrote off the entire workers' movement for the last forty years, including those sections who had fought to uphold revolutionary Marxist politics. In revulsion from Stalinist monolitheism, they also rejected the concept of the Leninist party. By thus cutting themselves adrift from the heritage of revolutionary Marxism, they made a fatal mistake. For only through this heritage can the youth movement of today find the means of understanding the dynamics of world revolution today, the nature of Stalinism and the necessity of evolving a revolutionary strategy for overthrowing capitalism in its bastions in Western Europe and North America. Since the youth movement is incapable of overthrowing capitalism on its own, it must either develop such a strategy, and through it a road to the working class, or face stagnation and crisis.
In these weaknesses of the youth movement of the 60s can be found the roots of the collapse of mass movements such as the two SDS's, the American and the German-the one abandoning all ideology and the other seeking to generate a "new one" -and the fragmentation of the movement everywhere in the last two years, bringing with it the development of all sorts of weird sects and terrorist groups. There is, however, another aspect to the movement,