This is why we see the flowering in the student movement of a gamut of ideologies that are just so many escape routes from the fundamental task of building the revolutionary organisation.
21. An early variant of these ideological evasions consisted in the dynamics of a group, a phase of introspection in which the student movement searched for the reasons for its political impotence in its own lack of conA subvariant was populism by which the movement endeavoured to efface itself by doing penance in the service of the masses-all under the theoretical aegis of Mao's thought. Introspection and populism 112011S0110 SH02822U2T8 TOYOTCHE.
22. Anarchism and spontaneism are its adolescent deliriums. Incapable of surmounting une coranichon m une stacht movement (between its revolutionary role and its mass character), the anarchists prefer to deny this population is sociologically petty bourgeois; consequently there can be no revolutionary student movement, only anarchist militants intervening in the student milieu by direct action and propaganda of the deed. The objective is, by means of the question of violence, to radicalise this student petty bourgeoisie still tainted with a squeamish humanism. The obiective is to draw the student masses into the wake of an activist minority. But since the "solidarity" of the mass of students is associated more with sentiment than political consciousness, it would be futile to try to give it an organisational form.
23. As incapable of resolving the contradiction as their anarchist cousins, the spontaneists dissolve the student movement in the cultural revolution. For them the students are a natural ally of the proletariat. The only obstacle in the way of revolution is the lingering fascination of decaying bourgeois ideology, the cop everyone carries in his head. Through a spiritual conversion, termea cultural revolution for the occasion, everyone must drive the cop out of his head. In this way he comes directly to the revolutionary movement (without class distinctions) and not to the student movement. In a word, between the student under the spell of bourgeois ideology and learning and the revolutionary militant there is no longer any place for an overly encumbering student movement. The problem is thus resolved but not solved.
24. The common denominator of these student ideologies is an anti-authoritarianism which combines the student movement's awareness of the hoax of the strong state and its resentment of a hated father figure. The student movement blames the bourgeois by seeking a new anti-authoritarian humanism into which it dissolves the class struggle. And since it does not have the means of carrying out a proletarian revolution by itself, it contents itself with a "cultural revolution". It attacks culture by preference because it began by sustaining itself from it. Mao-spontaneism is the most all-inclusive cocktail of student ideologies in which populism, spontaneism, anc olene these ideologies converge on one point and that is to reject the revolutionary organisamon wach inrcatens mnem as teur own nega tion.
25. In the period when new vanguards are emergmg nom tne youn racicansanon, mesc vanguards find a favourable environment for growth in the student milieu. Since they are too weak to confront the bourgeois regime directly or to compete with the recognised working-class leaderships, the student movement offers these organisations shelter and protection. By its mass mobilisation, the student movement compensates for the vanguard groups weakness. During this period these new vanguards are primarily student groups regarding themselves as parricidal offspring of Stalinism or the Social Democracy. It is only through transforming themselves that they can link up with the Fourth International which is the bearer of the strategical acquisitions that constitute the alternative to Stalinism.
revolutionary organisation to raise itself to the level of an overall strategic understanding, and to finish off the student group outlook that perpetuates the social and political characteristics of the student movement. The revolutionary organisation must be virtually torn out of the student movement.
27. The student movement as such has neither memory nor history, it is absorbed in ephemeral actions, in acts of bearing witness, in spectacular demonstrations. In contrast, the intervention of the vanguard is not spectacular. By organising and training militants it weaves the fabric of the political memory of the student movement. It is the mast that bears the sails of the student mobilisation. It is vertical with respect to the horizontal dispersion of student agitation (anarcho-Maoist agitational focuses). Through the improvisations of the student movement it traces the coherence of its own revolutionary design. The balancing of the student movement between reformism and ultraleftism cannot be broken except by the hammering intervention of the revolutionary organisation.
28. The development and reinforcement of the revolutionary organisation does not mean of a revolutionary organisation makes it possible to reconstitute the student movement, which is foun dering in repetitious actions dictated by its contradiction, into a movement of the youth in general. This broadening is a precondition for increasing the mass movement's capacity for struggle. It has been made possible by modifications in the relationship of forces between the vanguard and the state, between the vanguard and the bureaucratic working-class leaderships.
29. The basis for such a youth movement lies in the struggle against the regimentation of youth. This regimentation begins with vocational training in all it, forms (high schools, universities, apprenticeship, technical education). It includes the housing, transportation, and working conditions imposed on youth; the organisation of amusements, culture, competitive sports, all the repressive recreational structures offered to the youth (scouting. camps, athletic clubs); and sexual oppression. Finally this regimentation culminates in the army, the last stage of integration into bourgeois society.
30. The youth, not having gone through the great dereats or me working class, does not bear the burden of this dead past. It is a profoundly powerful element of political renewal and is shaking the bureaucratic yokes.
31. The mass youth movement we have to strive to develop must be distinguished, however, from the youth affiliate of a revolutionary organisation. Such a youth affiliate assumes the existence of an already strong revolutionary organisation.
32. The attempts to define a strategy for the student movement as such have generally ended in failure. The strategists of the Critical and Negative Universities, as these terms indicate, reduce the student struggle to an essentially ideological struggle against the bourgeois university. Assoon as the student movement moves on "from the criticism of the university to the criticism of society", it is faced with problems of revolutionary strategy that only a vanguard can resolve.
33. In a parallel way, revolutionary trade unionism in the student milieu leads into reformism. You cannot restrict yourself to applying in limited areas an all-encompassing design which you have the means to carry through only in the universities. This way you end up with the slogans of student control, even student management, in the universities and high schools, which, in isolation from the overall situation in the class struggle, are thoroughly reformist.
34. Any attempt at a student strategy is thus hable to a double trap. On the one hand, port of anti-imperialist struggles, and the struggle against regimentation. It is under this last heading that struggles for freedom of expression, political organisation, and against the bourgeois educational policy fall.
38. A student trade union as a means of struggle is a scheme that could have reality only in a consciously defined framework of student self-management. The reformist workers organisations, anxious to humour their allies, have maintained this myth of the autonomy of student demands. The student tradeunion structures fly into bits as soon as political struggles revive. Moreover, united mass political organisations of the student movement, such as the FUA and the March 22 Movement were in France, can have only a temporary existence. Based on specific tactical agreements, they must disappear or fossilise once strategic problems come to the fore. Caught between the slow attrition of the student-interest organisations and a nostalgia for united political organisations, the student movement runs the risk of fragmentation into fields (Italy) or atomisation.
39. The most favourable organisational outlet for the student movement presupposes already quite powerful revolutionary organisations. In this case, à process of cartelisation develops. The breakup of Zengakuren provided an example of this which will not prove an exception. The revolutionary organisations, which alone are capable of resolving certain strategic and practical problems (like demonstrations which at a certain threshold of confrontation require a degree of discipline and organisation that does not come naturally to the student movement), will reorganise the mass movement around their own political initiatives.
40. The student movement and the youth radicalisation cannot be considered simply as a windfall for the vanguard, which can win the youth involved over to its programme and recruit new elements among them. This youth radicalisation, in which the student movement occupies a prime position, enables the vanguard to alter the relationship of forces between it and the bourgeois state and the working-class bureaucracies. The specific role of the student movement offers the still weak vanguard a margin for manoeuvre, an opening to-get a foothold in the political arena, to carry out its initial experiments without being under the double fire of the bourgeois and bureaucratic repression. In this sense, the student movement is playing a precise and specific historical role.
41. But this opportunity for the vanguard is also a test. It cannot be satisfied to profit from the student movement. In order to pla its role, the vanguard must grapple with. the student movement, organise it en masse, engage in a continual polemic against its spontaneously generated ideologies. Ceaselessly threatened by opportunism of the left and right, the vanguard must have enough theoretical firmness to resist the ideolog al pressure of the movement and enoup political understanding of the conditions left by the breakup of Stalinism to et in step with the movement without diss ring itself
lysis still holds good today. He saw the bureauThe Black Dwarf 20th February 1970 Page 8 We ask you to take notice of all that is writ-