Youth, Class & Party

Section II. The Social Character of Students and the Radical Student Movement

Most of the major factional struggles within the radical student movement have turned on two interrelated questions-whether students are a revolutionary social group and the relationship of the radical student movement to the working class.

The student population constitutes the younger elements of the American, non-property-owning petty bourgeoisie. The universities are the training ground for the administrative, technical and cultural personnel needed by the capitalist system. To maintain that students are revolutionary is to maintain that students are the vanguard of the entire petty bourgeoisie, which is considered a revolutionary class. This is obvious nonsense. The petty bourgeoisie is the most heterogeneous class in capitalist society, which in periods of great social crisis will split, one section going over to the working-class movement and the other consciously identifying with the bourgeoisie. We can see the public school teachers and others who hold government jobs which require college degrees being integrated into the labor movement and proletarianized while the corporate executive bureaucracy remain a pillar of the bourgeois order. The Marxist attitude toward the petty-bourgeois population is not one of hostility. Rather, we seek to win as large a section of the petty bourgeoisie as possible to identify their interests with those of the proletariat. Likewise, our attitude toward petty-bourgeois protest movements, where these objectively represent the interests of the oppressed (e.g., opposition to the Vietnam war), is not one of hostility, but one of critical support. We intervene in petty-bourgeois protest movements to win them over to the view that the fight against all forms of. capitalist oppression must be led by the working-class movement. Marxist are implacably hostile to petty-bourgeois protest movements insofar as they reflect the view that petty-bourgeois radica1ism is the vanguard of the struggle against capitalist oppression.

“Student power” tactics or such notions as the “antiwar university” (of the SWP/YSA and IS) reflect the theory that students can be a revolutionary social group. Since most students are training for the corporate, state or academic bureaucracies, the only social power they might conceivably have as a group would be to refuse training and deprive society of needed trained personnel. But students do not. want to refuse training. They are students because they want to enter the working elite and desire that the university train them for this entry. They do not want to divert the university, for very long, from this purpose. Most student strikes peter out when loss of a semester’s credit looms ahead, and the most successful strikes (e.g., Kent-Cambodia) occur when automatic pass grades are granted. In the improbable event that most students did decide to abandon their careers and subvert the universities, the armed state would simply clear away the rebels (with or without resistance) and replace them with new trainees. Thus, the ability of students to disrupt the educational system is sharply circumscribed by the tolerance of the ruling class and the future interests of students as a trained elite.

Theories which hold that the radical student movement represents a “new working class” phenomenon or a “revolt of white-collar apprentices are proven false by the fact that the main issues generating student protest (e.g., racial oppression, the Vietnam war) have little to do with the future economic interests of the student population.

If the radical student movement does not represent the social interests of the student population, what does it represent? The leadership core of the radical student movement represents what Marx and Engels called that “portion of bourgeois ideologists who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending, theoretically the historical movement as a whole.” The leadership core of the radical student movement consists of the American revolutionary intelligentsia, a group whose numerical size expands and contracts, in response to the intensity of social conflict in the national and international plane. The American revolutionary intelligentsia is largely campus-based because intellectual activities are centered on the universities. Under other conditions such as those of 19th-century Russia, today’s campus agitators would be in exile or underground.

Under certain circumstances, campus-based revolutionary intellectuals can lead the student population as a whole. These circumstances occur when the ruling class, and therefore the petty bourgeoisie, is deeply split as it is over Vietnam and the black question. In periods of relative social quiescence such as the ‘50's, revolutionary intellectuals will be a small, isolated minority on campus. It is essential to distinguish the minority of radical intellectuals, the best of whom become professional revolutionaries, from the student population as a whole.

Looking at the current student movement, it is generally believed that student activism is necessarily left of center. This is absolutely untrue. Though left-wing student activism has dominated the American campus over the past decade, right-wing student activity has also been important. Conservative students played a significant role in Goldwater’s victory within the Republican Party and the right-wing Jewish Defense League consists largely of college students. In the early ‘30's the Nazis were vastly stronger in German universities than the Communists or Social Democrats. Moslem students butchered thousands of Communist workers and peasants (in Indonesia in1965]. Even nominally left-wing student groups, such as the Ceylonese J..V.P. (the ”Guevarists”), are often imbued with national chauvinism and other reactionary characteristics. Students are the. most volatile section of the petty bourgeoisie and will play an active role in all “radical” movements, whether of the left or of the right.

While the RCY rejects the theory that students are a revolutionary social group and that campuses can be turned into revolutionary institutions, we recognize that the educational system is an important pillar of bourgeois society. Therefore, it is particularly important for a socialist youth group to present a revolutionary transitional program for the educational system. The guiding principles for such a program are obstructing the schools from being instruments of class rule and class discrimination and establishing the socialist principle of self-government. We demand the nationalization of the university system under teacher-student-Campus worker control and with a complete open admissions policy made economically meaningful by providing all students with a stipend. To prevent university education from being a basis for class discrimination, we demand the abolition of the degree system, with an end to “flunkouts.” To prevent the universities from being direct agents of U.S. imperialism we call for an end to ROTC and other forms of military research.

In the high schools we demand an end to all forms of the tracking system, which perpetuates the special oppression of working-class and minority youth and of women. All students should be allowed to take any course given. We further demand a radical reduction in the legal age of adulthood, which, combined with a government stipend, will enable most high school students to free themselves from parental authority and lead full social lives. In high school, as in col1ege, we seek to establish teacher-student- worker control of the schools and demand that the armed force of the state–the cops–be kept out of the schools.

We believe in the value of education and professional training as it reflects the development of man’s productive capacity. Therefore, our focus of attack is not on grading systems and technical standards in themselves--indeed, the future socialist society will require some means of measuring competence. Rather, our target is the class divisions which are institutionalized through the educational process.

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