The Incomparable Fanny The fact of a women's rock group is rare enough to deserve mention. When the group is as excellent as Fanny, even the revolutionary left should take notice.
Until very recently female singers have been persuaded to sing songs which reinforce ideas of female passivity and subordination. Almost all their lyrics present women as mere sex objects.
BLUES Only within the Blues and in Gospel music has there been any resistance by women. Although very few women have been able to break the musical sex bar (Memphis Minnie, Georgia White), women blues singers, while accepting the general sexual reference of most blues have asserted their own independence ("T've got a man upstairs, one downstairs, one across the street -you've got your eyes wide open, daddy, but you're sound asleep"); or observed supposed male sexual prowess with a cynical eye ("You're like an old ship that has sprung a leak: you ain't young no more and your lovin' is weak. Now I'm through with you and I hope you don't feel hurt. ") Women's gospel groups have indicated the potential of female small group singing, on a very restricted set of mystified themes. Many of the songs of the more recent female singers — Joni Mitchell, Melanie and Janis Joplin, for instance - take up similar themes to the blues, suggesting women's sexual and personal independence, They combine them with the other incessant theme of modern pop music - an exploration of the impermanence of relationships, helping to undermine the romantic idea of permanent love which is one of the ways of sanctifying the family.
BREAKTHROUGH Fanny's music contains both these the mes in its lyrics (*Oh, baby, I can make you come to me; oh, baby, I can make you run - I'm cold as ice and hot as the sun". *Once 1 thought that love was magic, I'd grow up, my Prince would come... But the world doesn't end, you were only a friend, that 1 loved "cause I needed to"). But they have done more than this. Modern group music depends on an intricate blend of group vocal and instrumental sound - thus the significance of the guitar, an instrument very responsive to the voice. The subordination in music of women has meant that these combinations have always involved male voices for the vocal parts, and that a whole musical area involving female voices has been denied. Fanny have broken this bar, and that is why their music is so important. To make such a breakthrough is equivalent to that which the Beatles themselves made some years ago.
Fanny's music is superb. It is also a blow in the struggle against the oppression of women.
They have two L. P.s released here so far, Charity Ball and Fanny Hill.
ANTI-INTERNMENT LEAGUE NOVEMBER DEMONSTRATION Sunday, 12 November - assemble Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park, at 2.00 p.m. Students and the Struggle for Socialism Colin Sparks (I.S. pamphlet, 15p.) This is a well produced and well argued pamphlet and should raise the level of debate on the left about the role of students in the class struggle. Clearly the International Socialism group has learned something from its sojourn in the LCDSU, and a number of this pamphlet's ideas first saw the light of day in the pages of The Red Mole. The first part, an analysis of the developments and function of higher education under capitalism, is, apart from the genuflection at the altar of the permanent arms economy, quite unexceptionable. It is in the second part, more particularly in the elaboration of the underlying theme that things begin to go wrong.
BASIC ARGUMENT Their basic argument is that students are an intermediate group which "may be capable of spontaneous revolts or of acting as agents of the ruling class; they are not themselves capable of resolving historical problems. In the last analysis the intermediate classes are forced to choose between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Their consciousness is determined by the balance of forces between the two classes who are capable of forming an independent consciousness" (p20) "The key task for socialist students therefore is to win the student movement to an understanding of its objective nature - 10 WIn wide layers of students to the recognition of the need for a political alliance with the working class. " (p34) So far so good. But what is the content of this "political alliance? The authors of the pamphlet put it this way:
"Student-worker solidarity means more than either passing resolutions or being drafted onto picket lines. The synthesis of these two aspects, through an understanding of the political perspectives on which they are based, is the essence of the concept." (p38) It is a big step forward that the IS begin to pose the question in this way. As they themselves now admit, an alliance between whole social groups cannot be forged through mere recruitment to the revolutionary organisation, such a course is not an immediate alternative for the mass of students (or workers) and in no way amounts to any kind of perspective for struggle. Unfortunately, this still leaves the most basic questions unresolved.
COMMON POLITICAL AIMS Clearly an alliance between different social groups cannot be based on an appeal to immediate common interests. It can only be understood on the basis of common political aims. Such an alliance can clearly only be forged in struggle. Now, the content of the British class struggle today is not that of a conscious fight for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. No, the struggle of the working class, although occurring outside the organisational control of social democracy, is by and large within and under its ideological control. On the other side, however, we have students, who, because they are a focus of a whole number of specific contradictions, at the level of the college as well as at the generalised ideological level, because of the weakness of the student bureaucracies, etc., can respond to and fight behind revolutionary slogans and organisations. In other words, the consciousness and struggle of students develops unevenly in relation to that of the working class. It is only in the last analysis that student struggles are determined by the balance of forces. Between now and the last analysis, the problem is to seize on the deep going radicalisation of students and develop the potential of a politicisation outside the hold of the reformist bureaucracies. In this way, the struggles of students may in themselves contribute to the final balance ORIOTEES.
The point to understand is, how the mass of students can come to such a political consciousness. This is not likely to happen on the picket line. It is not going to be resolved by reading books, nor even by listening to the revolutionaries put up motions at Union meetings. Revolutionary consciousness is not reducible to the ideas that are acknowledged, but refers most importantly to actual practice - how people struggle and in general relate to the world. It is how the contradictions which arise in the colleges are dealt with which is of the essence in this respect. It is here that our authors most badly fall down. STUDENT STRUGGLES As the IS pamphlet documents quite well, the changes in higher education are produced by the needs of capitalist industry on one side and from the inability to solve the problem of social expenditure on the other Unfortunately, this analysis is nowhere linked to a strategy for struggle in the colleges. For instance, on the question of "comprehensiv sation", they make a withering attack on the CP's advocacy of this as a solution to problems in higher education. Then instead of offering a strategy against this solution of the big bourgeoisie they conclude weakly with the absurdity that "In so far as the demand for comprehensive higher education is a reform in the interests of the working class, and is fought for as a real reform, we give it our support." (p45) What does this position actually amount to?
Are we being asked to work out a blue-print for a reform of higher education which is actually in the interests of the working class, i.e. raises its technical competence, cultural standards, etc., and eradicates the segregation and divisions which disunite and demoralise the working class? This would only be an immediate policy if the working class was actually struggling on the issue. In the present situation, prioritised as it is by the IS, it would actually be a diversion from the actual struggles in the colleges. But not only that, it becomes a cover for the present day reformist currents in higher education, the big bourgeoisie itself.
The technocratic reforms of these latter, as Maggie Thatcher made plain at the NUT conference, do indeed include a policy of comprehensivisation. It is not our concern to put trivial conditions on this policy, whether it be the "democracy, participation and egalitarianism" of the CP or the "in the interests of the working class" of the IS (both these policies being in the correct sense of the word 'petty bourgeois"). This project is as utopian as those which would transform the colleges into "free' or "anti" institutions. What we have to say is that we are not necessarily opposed to changes and reforms, that we don't uphold the reactionary past of higher education. But what we do have to argue is that none of these changes should be at the expense of workers or students. But, of course, this latter condition is precisely what the bourgeoisie would not be prepared to accept. They have always sought to develop education at the minimum possible cost - hence the binary and other divisions which justity on the basis that students (or for that matter workers who might be affected) should not take any responsibility for the problems of capitalism. It is this line which is the content of the veto, which the IS give verbal support to. It is through such struggles that the real contradictions in the colleges can be deepened and extended; that students can be brought to an understanding of the way that capitalism worke and reproduces its social relations - precisely through struggling against the effects of these social relations in the colleges. In this way students will come to see the practical necessity both of solidarising with workers struggles and of winning the support of the trade union movement for their own struggles in the colleges.
Clearly, students cannot defeat the policy of the bourgeoisie as a whole. Although it might be possible to effect this or that victory, the bourgeoisie can raise the stakes in such a way as to defeat even the most militant and politically conscious students, so long as these struggles remain isolated from the support of the working class. But that isolation needs to be broken in struggle. The alliance with the working class in a genuine struggle against capitalism can only be forged against the reformist leaderships of the class. It is the high level of student struggle, its combativity and clear slogans which can effect this. Such was the case at the university of Kent in the struggle against the 10 per cent rent rises and 50 per cent redundancies at the end of last term. This kind of juncture is the real content of a political alliance with the working class forged against the reformist leaderships and, by consequence, a real contribution to the development of the consciousness and struggle of the class itself.
SEE-SAWING But the IS don't ever come near such a perspective as this. For all their abundant and tricky use of marxist phrases, a closer look shows them to have meaning only at the most general, historical level. They provide us with an understanding of the fact that those who wish to make a revolution must base their strategy on the social force of the proletariat rather than students. But they don't tell us the tasks of socialists who work amongst the mass of students. On the one hand we have revolutionary socialists with their integrated programme for transforming the whole of society. And on the other we have the mass of students with their day to day concerns. If the general historical statement that students "consciousness is determined by the balance of forces between the two classes who are capable of forming an independent consciousness" is taken as an immediate guide to action, it can only mean one thing. That is that socialist students should work amongst the workers since their action alone can change the consciousness of the mass of students. If the logic of that position is then abandoned in practice and the immediate concerns of students taken up, willy nilly these immediate concerns become an end in themselves. This latter is the practical meaning of student trade unionism.
This is all quite ironic because one whole section is devoted to a very good knock-down of the "Theory of Student Trade Unionism'.
But, as a matter of fact student trade unionism is separable from a story about students being some sort of worker and NUS being a trade union. Student trade unionism is a political practice which approaches student issues in a sectoral way. In as much as this pamphlet says anything about student issues which isn't