The Warwick revelations have brought a tremendous, angry response from masses of students around the country. But the revolutionaries have in some places been divided on how to counter-attack, in a situation where the possibility exists as never before of aunching a unified national assault of students against a number of points in the system. Where and how should we strike?
Spocific targets have been thrown up in particular localities: in Oxford proposed new disciplinary statutes, in Swansca regimentation in the halls of residence; in Warwick a studentstaff social building; in Essex the banning of students on bail from the university; all these battles must be fought and won. But running through all these issues is the network of small caucratic diques linked to industrial bosses, the local pl licts and to the judiciary using to protect her "academic communities" from court injunctions and the cops the mischief of staff and students. The Warwick students happened to catch one of these cliques at work reflected through the Vice-Chancellor's files. Some comrades have been arguing that because the issue of the files is equally relevant in the factories (witness the sharp response of the Rootes stewards to the Warwick disclosures) and because the workers are a thousand times more important for us than students, we should therefore be trying to persuade students to go to the factories to explain the whole issue 1o the workers.
It is of course important to explain to worken what has been happening in Warwick and elsewhere. But most industrial militants I enclose P.O./cheque /casis for E1 / £2.
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Address Telephone: 01-837 6954, 01-278 2616 year (airmail): 13 per year (ordinary). W. Europe: e3 per year. don't need students to remind them of the existence of files and blacklists. What they may very well need to be reminded of is the tact. that it is possible to fight such blocklists and wot. And to bring those facts to the workers requires that the students first create them, forcing their own bosses to publicly reject such methods and concede safeguards against their UNIC A second argument being put forward by some militants is that the issues of files and injunctions are liberal issues and therefore not the concern of revolutionaries. Such a view betrays a total failure to understand what processes are at work in British capitalist society and in its ducation system today. The problem that university administrators and monopoly capitalists face is not simply that the idea of die liberal university no longer fools students, but that the liberal myth of the free enquiring critical autonomous university has become in this period of crisis subversive of their whole strategy of integrating the higher education system into the economic and technical structures of monopoly capitalism. They cannot afford to guarantee teaching staff security of tenure to allow students to engage freely in political activity inside and outside the universities. At Warwick, Butterworth was bemoaning the fact that he was unable to expel staff and students under the present legal framework. But at the same time he was unable to launch open attacks on the liberal myth in fact he had to resort desperately to court Injunctions to try to prevent his anti-liberal schemes from being revealed. At the present time to call for university autonomy, for control of the university to be in the hands not of a handful of faceless administrators and "Please send me THE RED MOLE for the next 6/12 months. THE RED MOLE, 182 Pentonville Road, London N1.
Foreign subs: Asia /Africa/Australia/N. & S. America: 45 per TD: industrialists but of staff and students, for university committees to work openly, and for an end to secret files, ete. is to put forward demands that cannot be granted by the ruling dass without sabotaging the plans for It is procisely because such previously reformist demands have in the cra of advanced capitalism acquired a revolutionary content that we find the struggle against files and injunctions being led not by liberals but by revolutionary socialists. And it is because these matters are no longer open to anicuble solutions through negotiations with students" union officials that masses of students are ready to put their trast in the leadership of revolutionaries with whose general goals they have as yet no sympathy. But we will chango the consciousness of students not simply through our ability to explain their situation to them when the liberals have no credible solution, but above all be showing that we can Jead them to victories of however limited a kind. It is on this point that the vice-chancellors are pinning their hopes: they can offer no rustification which will convince students that they are right. However they calculate that they can, through the use of the courts and the police, convince staff and students that they cannot win. What is demanded therefore of revolutionaries is not simply good speeches and sophisticated theorists of even dramatic agiressive actions, but militants who can precisely analyse the political relationship of forces, not to decide whether they can win but See had ent the le i the sources of how they can win, then the left, butside as well as inside the university.
What we need at this lie are revolutsonary SPRING & GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET March 2nd late afternoon: Grostenor Square. About 150 black and white comrudes gathered to demonstrate against the imprisonment of comrode Bobby Seale. The fuzz feeling even more confident with Seisdon Man's support for law and order moved in with the oteousness they usually reserve for black comrades in dark alleys. It is fitting that these cybernauts of Seldon shotld have numbers not names: D 339 in reported to have said, "Animals do what they are told" as he obstructed the peaceful movement of the demonstrators, while D 407 is said to have remarked, as he lumbered in idiot jeshion through the streets of W.I,, "I came here to pich blach people up.
Morch 3rd early morning (ie. 20.50 jus time): Great Mariborough Street. Black brothers and sisters and white heads all talking and laughing forelher while the Stephen Morris politicians and organisers superior to thost supplied by the ruling class. That means that since the vice-chancellors and capitalists are organised nationally, so must we be.
But our perspective must go beyond the immediate issues of files und injunctions. Short is well aware that the educational wat he n engaged in exlends far beyond matters of university discipline and lie may at this momor be trying to persuade the hot headed vicechancollors to make a tuctical retrout in order to hull the students into passivity in preparation for the programme of savage attack on higher education which he is hoping to introduce in the near future. We should therefore also be preparing to extend our counter-attack beyond fles and injunctions to Short's proposals for educational reforms. These include the follow ing: a massive reduction in the number of overseus students in higher education, loans instead of grants, the possibility of making students agree to take up a specific job on leaving collego, greally increasing the rutio of students to suff, Introducing extra grades o degrees, trying to push as mony students as possible through college in two years, ete To force through such an attack on higher education the Governmont will need all the injunctions and police it can lay its hands on. If the student movement can stash the equivalent in the cducation system of the wage freeze in the factories, if the revolutionaries in the univorsities can forge links, not simply between handfuls of students and working-clas militants, but between mass movements of students and workers against the strutegic plan of the raling class, then revolutionary socialists will be in a position to determine the course o British politics.
for court number one to open the scen was made happier by the presence of Ed Berman and his Chrisimes troupe also De being "tried" Victims and their friend were all happy and for one good revolttionary moment the law. for all its bour geor menace, wus made to seem nresome, irrelevant and idiotic.
But the idiocy has its own potency t the person of that notorious raelst Tor St. John Harmsworth his comments on the "lower classes" and people of other races are such as to make us seriorny doubt the possibility of even bourgeo fustice in his court. The defendants wer black ond even though the fuzz did not oppose bail most of them were remande in cuntody until March 10th and March 25th. Comrades should mahe sure of be ing in court on those two doys to give our brothers support. It is alweys ponsi ble that St. John Harmsworth, making the way plain for the lord, confused the men with the brothers when he remarie that they were involved in what he calle