Movement House in Camden where Pakistani, West Indian and English people overwhelmingly declared that these attacks must be stopped and the streets of London made safe. Patrols were formed to provide self-defence for the people in the area.
The national and local press, present at this meeting, splashed stories of "black extremists" advocating the use of knives and dynamite.
A well-known reporter on a large circulation Sunday paper refused to touch the story when he heard that "white English" people would be patrolling with their black brothers. Apparently it would only be news if it were black against white, instead of the people against the thugs The BBC nibbled at the story but eventually Talea to pubncise une Tacts wien uney were refused permission to televise the actual patrols and individuals patrolling. It seemed that the BBC was out only to sensationalise rather than to help mobilise decent public opinion.
An Arrest On June 2nd 1968 a street patrol arrested two white thugs who had just attacked Mr. Nazir Uddin, beaten him and robbed him of £10 and his rent book and personal papers. One thug escaped but the other was handed over to police officers from Tottenham Court Road Police Station. Members of the public came forward as witnesses of the whole incident and about half a dozen such witnesses gave their names and addresses to the police.
The CID at Tottenham Court Road were "unable" to trace the other thug who had the money and rent book. In September the case against the arrested thug was dismissed at the Old Bailey "for lack of evidence". Although the olice were "prosecuting", they had not othered even to contact any of the witnesses let alone call on them to give evidence This whole enisode was a bitter but useful reminder about "justice" in our present society.
A Turning Point However, this arrest had proved a turning point and immediately thereafter the police from Tottenham Court Road and Albany Street Stations had massive patrols every weekend in themselves in the next two months, Before the arrest by the defence patrol the police had made no arrests in over inree vears or such attacks.
The June 2nd arrest by our own patrol also had a good effect on the morale of the Pakistani community. On June 9th, when an African schoo -teacher and a Pakistani worker were attacked near the Middlesex Hospital by a score of white hooligans chanting "Enoch! Enoch! some local Pakistanis and an Englishman went to their assistance and helped drive the thugs OTT The police were fairly quickly on the scene and picked up nine of these young thugs but only charged three of them. Then they also arrested two Pakistani workers several streets away who had not even seen the fight, let alone taken part in it. These two men were then The Uxford sit-in was the first important direct action following the revelations at Warwick and the distribution of the files. It ended on 2nd March having lasted a week, well before the national movement had fully developed. No important concessions were gained on the central issue of the action-from beginning to end the university authorities said "no inspection", "no inquiry". The action gave no example to students elsewhere of a successful struggle that could win its demands. Unable to sustain itself through extending the movement of direct action, the sit-in was eventually demobilised by an alliance of social democrats, CP students and other defeatist elements. The ending of the occupation of Clarendon without any gains represented a defeat which enabled the authorities to go on to the offensive and led to the prosecution of a handful of militants.
The defeat was of course by no means decisive. The authorities were able to inflict only minor penalties against the eleven students (although the verdict in one case has still to come). Furthermore, they were forced to postpone the promulgation of new disciplinary statutes, the effect of which would have been to place a permanent injunction on political activity aimed at challenging the university's power. The files issue emerged at the same time as the plan to implement these statutes was announced, and, as in other universities, the Warwick events catalysed local discontents over attempts and preparations for repression. And so even if the university could score a minor victory in containing the upsurge of February/ March, the authorities were given notice for the the myth of Oxford as an autonomous academy within capitalist society by challenging the very institutional and ideological structure upon which British university education is founded. The university remains very conscious of the explosive situation that will be created by any attempt to force the statutes through. The Clarendon action showed for the first time in Oxford that large numbers of militant students can be effectively mobilised on issues within the university: while a hard core of perhaps 200 maintained the occupation, over 1,000 attended mass meetings and demonstrations. For the most part these were people with little previous political experience, though many are acutely aware of the class nature of the university, and were beginning to see the possibility of challenging it as the crisis in higher education develops. The attitude of the authorities, who continually refused to discuss or to examine the files question reinforced this new.found from all sections of the university, and beyond it: student leaders from local colleges, and even a group of young workers who manned the doors of the occupied room for one night.
On this occasion the potential of such a mobilisation was not realised. It suffered from all the restraints on mass action peculiar to Oxford: the collegiate system both fragments the students and enables timorous dons to cower behind the common-room line. Real power is not always easy to locate and attack because it lies in the hands of a few influential men operating through a network of informal centacts. It is easy to pass the buck about files within this system. There were tactical difficulties in this case, too: the diffusion of responsibility in the university is retlected in the absence of any central building which can easily be captured and held; the one room taken in the Clarendon could hold only 200 people at most, and the occupiers were subjected to the continual vigilance of the police. The student movement has no established base of its own from which to plan campaigns: the absence of a central student union and meeting-place since the passing of ORSS, of even a socialist society around which the left could organise itself But the most important weaknesses were ones common to the student left as a whole: a lack of understanding of the meaning of student revolt and a consequent lack or stacegy. no organisation of student revolutionary militants able to put forward a nationally coordinated strategy for the universities.
At Warwick the direct connection between the big industrial bosses and the administration showed the way in which the universities are being turned into centres of research for capitalist industry and institutions for the production of intellectually skilled labour crucial to neo-capitalist production. Such precise links are not so easy to detail in Oxford, where the ideological function of the university assumes a greater relative importance The students know anyway that there is not a ruling-class position waiting for each of the 10,000 of them. Here as elsewhere the revolt of the students reflects the increasing contradiction between the destiny of the increasing majority of them as skilled workers and the ideology the university attempts to impose on them. This permanent contradiction will inevitably sharpen as centralisation and specialisation accelerate and subjects such as industrial relations and sociology become Those militants who grasped the potentia the situation were a tiny number in the left a exhausted themselves in day-to-day tactics to maintain the action. They never managed to develop a clear enough strategy to win the fu leadership of the students, and after a bitter struggle were unable to prevent the CP and t allies from diverting the movement into reformist channels. Having arrived late in the action, the CP immediately took up the cry f withdrawal (a line to which a tendency in IS also allied themselves). On the day of the withdrawal they put out a leaflet "Towards a Clearer Perspective" which proclaimed negotiation as a "truly Leninist [sic] strategy and warning of an "adventure that would cripple the growth of the movement". The fi demand of these "Revolutionists" for "immediate action" was that the sit-in be abandoned. Their proposed alternative to dir action and the contestation of the university authority was "constant" leafletting, "incessant" lobbying of dons, and. "in depth organisation of the colleges. The only alternative to propaganda was "tota confrontation . Thus they posed the problen just as the Stalinist Waldeck Rochet did in France in May 1968, that is, either we work reform or we immediately struggle for power With an ominous warning in bold letters at th bottom of the leaflet-"Comrades, We Must Beware" (of adventurism, of course)-the political methods of Stalinism and the politic of reformism came together to locate the CP the far right of the Oxford Left. The CP's national aim to capture NUS positions was reflected here. They headed off the sit-in int the sterile negotiating channels of the SRC, t presidency of which they were busy capturir at the same time.
Such reformist elements, whether or not they masquerade under the name of "communists", will always be an obstacle to advance of the revolutionary movement. Wh is important is that revolutionary militants le the lessons of the February/March struggles, lessons not only for theory but for practice. That means breaking through the organisatio chaos in the universities and creating a natior movement of revolutionaries capable of analysing the political balance of forces, and organising to combat the centrally-organised Vice-Chancellors, and providing effective national leadership for the great number of students who will be radicalised through coming struggles
worker in our country is in a trade union. If you control the trade unions, and the political groups control the trade unions, and if the trad unions are part of the mass movement, you they directed traffic, and they went away. Of course they had to fight afterwards, there were three killed and 20 went to jail: but they showed that they could take a city. I think the Tupamaros don't take over Uruguay because they know that insurrection is, well, for s example, it's a one-shot gun: if you fire it, then you cannot do it again-and also because thev now that the military regimes in Argentina and Brazil would intervene.
BEFORE don't need specifically to build Soviets or workers' councils. The link comes automatically. In Uruguay for example the Tupamaros are very strongly linked with the trade unions. Why? Because the Tupamaros are leaders of the trade unions. -But trade unions can exist and are even legal under capitalism. Even in Argentina. Which means they are not really posing the question of dual power. —Do you carry out political work and the armed struggle separately, with separate No, we think that armed struggle is part of political struggle. For example in our organisation we say that political cadres will become military cadres, and they will be thel same people. There is no separation between the two forms of struggle. organisations? We can a people's congress, or workers' councils, when we have the means to defend them, the military means. For the moment the trade unions, some of which we control, the mass movement around Ongaro and the CGT, is enough for us, because we can link ourselves, quite well, with the masses. On the question of dual power: in 1964, 4,000 factories were occupied by about 3 million workers That It's a matter of time and development; people start by being political cadres, doing political work. to build the basis on which to make armed struggle later. —Is that how you work in the countryside? They start by struggling politically: for example occupying lands. The development of our Small operatives be small Farmers man of other country, and very isolated. But most of us are very influenced by Mao's thinking: 1 for example studied for a year in China, and many meant that the factories were occupied and put into production-by the workers. -They were actually run by the workers? There is a film called The Hour of the Furnaces in which there are interviews with the workers who ran the factories for one week; and the . Cubans, when they saw this film, said that the Argentinian workers had more class and landowners, or rural workers; after that, when those cooperatives failed, they built trade unions; when that failed, they occupied the land: and after that they said, well, there's no more legal way in which we can struggle, so we must have armed struggle. Of course then it's much easier to start armed strugele, because there have been mass movements, with thousands of people, and the leaders of that political struggle are well-known. they have the most of its strength in Tucuman, among sugar- political force: they have done very good work very well represented in some trade unions and
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reinforces the parochialism of college-based political life. To this must be added the absence,