to the working class does therefore is to help gain the initial footholds which will be vital when political issues emerge. These can be utilised by revolutionaries to completely transform the relation of forces between themselves and the reformist apparatuses within the working class. In order to drive home this point more fully, it is worth looking at what exactly is meant by the hold of reformism over the working class.
THE BASE OF REFORMISM & BUREAUCRACY WITHIN THE WORKING CLASS. Fundamentally the student struggle must be looked at from the point of view of the problems facing revolutionaries in the period since 1945. Between 1923 and 1945 the working class suffered defeat after defeat. Fascism conquered in Italy and in Germany. The General Strike in Britain was defeated. The republican forces in Spain were defeated. The workers were defeated in Greece. In France and Italy power was handed to the bourgeoisie by the Communist parties. Whereas the First World War had been followed by a tremendous revolutionary wave, the end of the Second World War found no such upheaval. This is perfectly understandable. The end of World War One came at the end of a period of rising class struggle throughout Europe. The Second World War came at the end of a period of defeats. In the first case the war acted as a stimulus to revolution. In the second, it found a working class weakened and demoralised.
After 1945 a new process set in. The economic boom lead to a decline in class struggle throughout Europe. Even the old reformist organisations became shells of their former stant. in this situation the *king class m mant underwent a proand political decline. What had fundam ally occurred was the political loss of at east a generation of working class political militants. It took, for example, forty years, and hundreds of thousands of meetings, books, pamphlets, newspapers, etc. to create the millions of politicised workers in and around the German Social Democratic and Communist Parties. The reign of fascism, the war and the bood bed in the disintegration of this whole flesh and blood of a potentional revolutionary political workers movement. Germany is an extreme case but basically the same process occurred throughout Europe. What it means for the task of revolutionary militants is not the task of regrouping an existing politicised layer within the working class, which is for example the problem that faced the Communist Parties when they were formed out of the old Social Democratic Parites, but of creating a political layer within the working class. The relation of students to revolutionary politics can therefore only be understood in relation to the way in which the organisations of the working class have themselves decayed. This means fundamentally that the organisational conservatism produced within the working class by the very need of organising itself against capitalism exerts an enormous pressure on the political development of the working class. The trade union and Labour Party bureaucracies are not corsets imposed on the working class from outside, but are organic products of the political conditons of the working class under capitalism.
Ultimately of course the politicisation of the working class will not be achieved by the individual actions of revolutionaries. It will be transformed by the process of capitalist crises raising the level of activity of the working class to the point where the old factors working towards buraucratisation and reformism are overcome. This is not to believe that this will occur automatically, but that it will be the same process of increasing crises of capitalism that will create the conditions for the overcoming of the reformist bureaucracies within the working class that will increase the possibilities of growth of the revolutionary organisations to the point where they will be able to take advantage of the changing situation.
THE REAL RELATION OF STUDENTS AND THE WORKING-CLASS.
It is when the problem of recreating a Marxist movement within the working class is looked at in these concrete terms that the historical importance of the "student revolt' emerges. At one blow the revolutionary movemnt found itself in contact with thousands of people whom it did not have to break through a long and tortuous process of propaganda from Social Democracy and Stalinism. In the course of two or three years a massive growth of a Marxist cadre occurred. But this phenomenon was so unexpected and so unprece dented that in many cases both the strengths and weaknesses of students as a political layer have not been understood.
It is quite clear that the situation inside the working class described here, which is the real one and not the romantic illusion pedalled by some people, is never going to be transformed by simple individual acts of propaganda and agitation. In this sense students as such have a far greater import ance in the revolutionary process than as mere leaflet fodder. It is precisely this importance as a highly politicisable social group that the government is worred about. In consequence those organisations, such as the SLL and the IS, who in practice attempt to see students merely in terms of potential individual recruits for their organisation-to be used outside the student field-actually play completely into the hands of the ruling class. They fail to understand both the real nature of the problem facing revolutionaries in gaining the leadership of the working class and the real nature of the importance of students as a social group.
This point can be seen clearly in the current struggle against the government's proposals on student unions. Here the situation is that the C.P., which controls NUS, is engaged in an attempt to come to a shady deal with the government. The concrete question therefore is how to evolve a strategy for fighting the government which will simultaneously defeat the plans of the C.P. What, therefore, is involved in practice is the problem of the poincal way in which revolutionaries relate to their student base, This involves first an analysis of what is the political structure of the base.
The first level is that of students who are still completely dominated by bourgeois ideology. but who are affected by the deteriorating situation of students. This group obviously will only come into activity on issues directly affecting its own sectional interests. As this group is by far the largest it is the mobilisation. of these students that explains both the size of the campaign against the government's proposals, and its extremely low political level. At the other extreme are the students within the revolutionary organisations or around their immediate periphery. They have more or less completely broken with bourgeois ideology and will campaign on any political issue in a Marxist manner. In between these two extremes is a whole mass of radicalised students who however only assume some political direction either when their sectional interests are involved, when big crises are brewing in society, or when a definite lead is taken by the politicised students in and around the revolutionary groups. It is this group which contends with the right wing for the political lead over the mass of students in student union and other meetings. The relative size of these groups is by no means constant. On the contrary, it is one of the prime necessities of revolutionaries to increase the size of the radicalised layer so that students as a social group can play an important political role in society. It is however the changing nature of the relation between the various groups that determines the political character and impact of the various movements amongst students. Hence, for example, it was the success of the revolutionaries in polarising the campuses around the issue of Vietnam that allowed them to mobilise a mass of students for participation in the VSC. It also explains the relatively high political level of that movement. It is DAR ine inability or many revolutionaries to understand and evolve a strategy for fighting on the question of the government attack on student unions that has meant that the C.P. has been able to carry on its manouverings relatively unhindered and hence to prevent the politicisation of the radicalised student layers. The C.P. is therefore succeeding, by gaining hegemony on this issue, in repolarising the student mass along the political lines of decrepit reformism which it favours. This will have two decisive effects if it were to be successful.
Firstly. It would snap the links between the revolutionaries and the mass of students. For the first time for at least five years it would decisively smash the possibility of revolutionaries determining the framework of the political debates in the colleges. If the C.P. succeeded in this they would ensure that the political role of students as a social group would be channelled into reformism. For example, one of the most important bases of an initial springboard for a solidarity movement on Ireland would be cut from under the feet of revolutionaries. This would be a significant victory for the ruling class.
Secondly. Even at the less significant level of the supply of revolutionaries for systematic long term work directed towards the working class, the C.P. would score a significant victory by politically isolating the revolutionaries. Even at the short-sighted level of newspaper sellers, which is all some organisations can see in students, a significant drying up of the supply of cadres would occur.
For both these reasons, but more importantly for the first, the intervention of revolutionaries ina systematic way in a fight against the CP is a urgent necessity.
TOWARDS A STRATEGY The first necessity for understanding hov construct a strategy for fighting inside the student field is to understand the political significance of students as a group, and not just their significance for recruitment and use in other fields. The fundamental reason why, for example, the I.S. is completely incapable of waging any sort of fight against the CP at all is because its particular economistic brand of politics means it cannot conceive of students as a whole having any political role except that of servicing IS's economistic, and frequently reformist, intervention in the trade union struggle. For this reason not only does it play completely into the hands of the CP by its analysis and treatment of the NUS as a trade union, but it is also compietely unwilling to organise its student members around any political issue, notably Ireland, which would utilise the political role of students to the full.
The second point which must be grasped is the particular tactics imposed upon political activity amongst British students by the structure of the education system. The particular way in which British higher education expanded, through the binary system and not via the growth of massive universities means that revolutionaries have far less social depths to call on in any individual college than has been the case in most countries. For this reason any real upsurge, and in particular any national co-ordination of struggle, has never been possible to achieve by organisational centralisation, but only by political central. isation. In Britain it is far truer to say that VSC created the student movement than it is to say that the student movement crated VSC. Therefore any strategy for i rvention must rest on the ability to a political issue which is widespread and important enough to impinge on the consciousness of all students. Ireland, as the most decisive class struggle going on in which the British ruling class is directly involved at present, is the obvious candidate for such an issue. The organisational task of building any movement which could use the political weight of students to transmit revolutionary ideas into the working class can only be achieved once this political centralisation of focus on one decisive struggle has been decided upon.
Thirdly, the maximum mobilisation and co-ordination of revolutionaries must occur on the issue of the attacks on student unions so as to prevent the CP redrawing the political battle lines within higher, education. The achievement of this task is the fundamental precondition for an ability to use the full political weight of students in the long process of breaking up the hold of reformist ideology and apparatuses over the working class. To sum up. The decisive immediate task of the present period is to prevent the CP reintroducing the mass influence of reformism into the centre of student political debate. This can only be done by intervention in those areas, notably on the students union question, where the CP is trying to establish its credibility. This is a necessary pre-condition for the use of the political role of students on the decisive political issues, notably Ireland, of the day. The theoretical understanding necessary for this fight to be waged successfully is comprehension of the political role of students as such as opposed to their individual role as militants of a revolutionary organisation.
-J. R. Clynes The Red Mole 24th Jan. 1972 Page 7