to inspire defence of the ideals of the rising bourgeoisie ("liberty" and "equality") but conformity to the robot image of the average consumer, the mediocre bourgeois of the period of decadence. No young generation can identify with this ideology. And more than any other young people-since they are the heir apparent and the appointed continuers of this tradition-the students experience the crisis of bourgeois ideology very in tensely.
3. As future "professionals", the students are haunted by the problems of employment. In those branches where the professional perspectives are precisely defined, to be a future specialist is frequently synonymous with future unemployment as a consequence of the imperatives of continual economic reorganisation. In the liberal professions, long years of study often culminate in beginning a slow climb in the restricted hierarchies.
4. More specifically, the students find themselves in the centre of a contradiction which they may strive to surmount but which they can never resolve because it involves the fundamental contradiction in the capitalist mode of production-the contradiction between developing the productive forces and maintaining the relations of production. This same contradiction bears on the universities which are compelled to respond simultaneously to two contradictory demands-(1) advancing the productive forces through a general increase in the level of skills at the price of an increase in the social costs of training; and (2) retaining the productive relationships through fragmentation of knowledge, discriminatory recruitment, and respecting the private profits of the capitalists as individuals.
The bourgeoisie everywhere tries to deal with this contradiction by measures and reforms which themselves are hybrid and contradictory and which perpetuate me insult tional crisis and instability of the university.
5. The increasing needs for skilled manpower are bringing about a diversification of university recruitment and its extension to the middie strata. These strata, attracted by the prospects or assimilation into the upper classes.
do not bring rebelon into tne universities with them. But everywhere they are an element of instability. Caught between an insecure family background and an uncertain professional future, the children of the petty bourgeoise on occasion are ready to make the authorities pay for the insecurity and anguish which is their lot.
6. The student population, rooted in the contradiction of the university, lacks both social and political homogeneity. Even if the time spent in school has been extended, even if the concentration of university complexes has reached immense proportions, even if the diversification of university recruitment and the protessionai careers open to-students create stronger ties than ever between them and the rest of their generation in the high schools and factories, for all that the contradiction in the university system does not constitute an objective foundation for bringing the students as such over to the side of the proletariat and does not make the students natural allies of the workers. There are no poles are outside the university, in the class confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the working class on the national and international scale. A part of the students have aligned themselves with the established order, whose benefits they are destined to share; another part have gone over to the proletariat. But there is nothing natural and spontaneous about this lineup-especially when the workers-deprived of revolutionary leadership-fumble and mark time.
8. This is why in the advanced capitalist countries the politicalisation of the students. has generally taken the path of anti-imperialist struggle. The students have not found the least perspective in the Social Democratic or Stalinist workers organisations in their own country, which have submitted to the status quo. As a result, the Vietnamese revolution provided a symbol and an example of the proletariat in which a part of the student population recognised what it was waiting for and which restored its hope.
9. Moreover, mobile, unstable, and continually renewed, the student milieu provides few openings for the working class bureaucracies, above all at a time when the crisis of Stalin: ism and its ideology echoes that of the bourgeoisie. Thus the student movement represents the weakest link in the chain of political integration forged and maintained by the bourgeoisie and ine social Democrauc anu Stalinist leaders to preserve the international status quo.
10. Shaken by the interplay of contradictions a or walen come to a rocus on tac canous the university population produced a powerful student movement. Impelled by the crisis of bourgeois ideology and of the educational structures, and inspired by the example of the colonial revolution, this student movement escaped the control of the working-class bureaucracies. The extreme contradiction in the universities has given the student movement an energy which has enabled it, alone and in spite of its isolation, to wage vanguard struggles distinguished by a revival of violent forms of combat, of direct action, in defiance of the political rules of the game accepted by the working-class leaderships.
11. However, the student movement by itself cannot deal with the contradiction of the university, which rests on the very foundations of capitalism. It is incapable of political and programmatic independence from the working class.
12. As a result, the student movement is torn between its revolutionary vocation and the objective limits of the university community, between its mass character and its role as a substitute vanguard, at a time when, as the weakest link in the political system, it finds be analysed as a distinct entity; one could only describe its fluctuations, often irrational and unpredictable. In order to understand it and give it political direction, it must be analysed in connection with the variations of the coordinates that condition its existence and its development, for in itself the student movement has no history or memory. These coordinates are on the one hand the workers movement (the extent of its mobilisation, the political forces which compose it) and on the other the development of the revolutionary vanguard, which is suu in too emoryome form to really play a leadership role.
14. The evolution of the French student movement illustrates the relationship between the student movement and the workers movement in a very complete way. After the Algerian war, in a period of relative quiescence in working-class struggles, the student movement became the guilty conscience of the workers movement. Against the spurious rationality of the bourgeoisie, it counterposed its own programmatic rationality -it relied on the power of reason and the word to unmask the contradictions of capitalism and demonstrate the validity of the socialist view without having to take into account a relationship of social forces caused by lack of mobilisation of class. 15. In the period of reviving workers' struggles, the student movement, inspired by the revolutionary groups that had broken away from the Social Democracy or the Stalinist movement, rediscovered the possibility of the workers' movement and the possibility of linking up with it. In this period, the student movement constituted itself either as pressure groups acting on the workers' movement or as supporters of the workers' movement. As a pressure group, the student movement icted through liaisons with the unions on common problems (training, employment); as a supporting force through populist groups inspired by Maoist groups. During this period, the developing student movement slipped into the pre-existing structures of academic vocational associations where it found an ideological forum and a vaguely unionist rubric that legitimised its attempt at hybrid union1511 16. The student movement could not remain forever on this tight leash, drawn behind a workers' movement under Stalinist or Social Democratic domination. It had to either submit and return to the bosom of the "democratic" forces or rely on the resources of the student population and alone, or at the risk of isolating itself, take the initiative and try to upset the status quo in the class struggle.
The student movement was driven to this choice. Economic struggles that were halted or diverted as they ran up against a state speaking in the name of the "national interest" seemed increasinelv futile. Thus. the movement at its birth was typical. Along with this movement, the vanguard groups took the initiative of combining the fragmented political activities of the student movement into an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and anti-bureaucratic movement. After this turn, the student movement ceased to follow its natural channels; it was organised by the vanguard groups which defined its role and its objectives, no longer in accordance with campus criteria but in accordance with the general relation of forces, an overall evaluation of the class struggle. In this altered form, the student movement acquired the means to play the role of a temporary substitute vanguard, of accelerator or detonator of the class more by its exemplary forms of struggle than by its programmatic content.
17. Once the workers' movement began to struggle, the student movement could not continue to play its role of substitute vanguard by giving an example of determination and courage. The workers cannot limit themselves to moving through the tactical breaches opened up by the students. They need strate gic perspectives and slogans which the student movement, incapable by itself of going beyond a certain level of political compre hension- that of petty-bourgeois radicalismcannot provide. In the face of this problem the student movement yields to the revolutionary vanguard. 18. The temporary vanguard role played by the student movement is not a novelty requiring any revision of Marxism. Already Engels, Trotsky, Mao Tse-tung hailed the vanguard role played by students in Austria in 1850, in China in 1919. This role merely tes tified to the fact that the bourgeoisie was no longer vigorous enough to make its revolution and the proletariat was not yet mature enough to lead its own. Today, the vanguard role of the student movement is no longer a sign of the insufficient objective maturity of the proletariat but of the bankruptcy of its Social Democratic or Stalinist leaderships.
19. It is no less true that the student move ment can only play this role with the perspective of a linkup very shortly with the wor kers movement. Without this perspective, the student movement is condemned to maintain an impossible balance between its revolution ary function and its mass character, continu ally pulled by reformism on the one side and ultraleftism on the other. This contradiction can be resolved only by constructing and de veloping a revolutionary organisation capable of transcending the student "point of view and offering a strategic design, an organisa tion capable of playing a vanguard role in the workers movement as well as in the student movement 20. Building such an organisation demand: qualities of doggedness, of perseverance, of
The Black Dwarf 20th February 1970 35. The Red University is not a slogan. Like workers' control, it is a general theme of struggle which should be filled out by con crete slogans in specific situations. The Red University is not an institution that can be counterposed to the bourgeois university; it is a movement of struggle by which the vanguard seeks to direct the student movement as a permanent sunkung force agamist the system. The Red University is not a line for the universities but the tactic of the vanguard m tue unaverstues, a subordinale part of its overall strategy.
36. The university slogans of the organisation may attack une problems or proressional training by demanding flexible training and a guarantee oi employment at the level of skill required. But the implementation these slogans requires the mobilisation of the workers' movement, in which the embryonic vanguard does not hold the initiative. That is why the slogans centring around the theme of workers control of education retain a propagandistic character.
37. Incapable of an overall strategic programme, the student movement can meet the bourgeoisie's university policy only by organisational resistance (maintaining the independence of the movement and opposing participation in collaborationist structures) and tactical political initiatives laid out by the vanguard in accordance with its evaluation of the political conjuncture as a whole.
These initiatives revolve around three major axes-support of workers" struggles, sup-