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Phil Hearse
This article appears in the current issue of Transform! Magazine.
The year 1968 was one of turmoil, in which crisis piled upon crisis, and which was very difficult for the Left to navigate. Not only was there the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the Black uprising following the assassination of Martin Luther King, but also the May-June events in France, rumblings in the labour movement against Barbara Castle’s In Place of Strife anti-union plan, the militant March 17 Vietnam demo followed up by the massive October 27 sequel, Enoch Powel’s ‘rivers of blood’ anti-immigrant speech - and at the same time student sit-ins all over the country. How to orientate to student struggles was discussed throughout the Left.
Coinciding with the events in France, which were ‘detonated’ by mass student struggles before the launching of the general strike, in June 1968 the Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation (RSSF) was launched at the London School of Economics. Many subsequently well-known figures on the Left were present, together with several hundred students including myself. It was a turbulent affair, with some sharply contending political perspectives leading to stormy debate. Perry Anderson, now perhaps the best-known Marxist scholar in the Anglophone world, had to be told to sit down and stop being disruptive by the chair, Richard Kuper (then of the International Socialists, subsequently of Red Pepper and Pluto Press).
The inspiration for RSSF came from the large radical or socialist student organisations that had grown up internationally – in Germany, the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), in Japan the Zengakuren and in the United States, Students for a Democratic Society (also SDS) respectively. It was, among some of its founders, a more or less conscious attempt to repeat the ‘mass left wing student front’ tactic in the UK. But there were two main problems with this. In the first place the student ‘movement’ in Britain was much smaller than in the three countries named above; and second the timing was all wrong. The high point of student radicalism was passing, and in Germany and the United States, for example, the mass student fronts were on the road to oblivion, and would suffer fatal splits and decline in the next two years. But as Martin Shaw points out (1) while student struggles in Britain were pretty mild, even insipid, by international standards, seen close up they seemed dramatic and overwhelming.
Another aspect of the context is this. The 1964 election of the Harold Wilson Labour government, after 13 years of Tory rule, created much enthusiasm on the Left. By 1967-8 this had all but gone, with the anti-immigration1965 White Paper, Wilson’s savage attack on the 1966 seafarers strike, the wage freeze and British support for the war in Vietnam (although Wilson was sensible enough to refuse to send troops). Opposition inside Labour seemed mild, industrial struggle was generally at a localised low ebb, but the anti- Vietnam war movement and student struggles were on the up and up. There was much debate about working class ‘apathy’ which would eventually be codified in Barry Hindess’ book, The Decline of Working Class Politics (2).
Without doubt the editorial board of New Left Review played a crucial role at the beginning of the RSSF; in addition to Perry Anderson, other board members like Robin Blackburn, Anthony Barnett and the late Fred Halliday (3), were much in evidence. Also present were the International Marxist Group (IMG), International Socialists (IS – later SWP) and a grouping from Sussex University that included people like Roger Silverman, who would later play an important role in the Militant tendency. But also from Sussex was a localised Maoist tendency whose American leadership imported tactical ideas directly from California and anarchists who were very hostile to all the Leninist groups. Perry Anderson had a discussion with Gerry Healy, leader of the Socialist Labour League, about whether they would come into RSSF. Healy said the SLL was not opposed in principle but would rather wait and see if the RSSF had any traction.
In truth, while most of the left groups felt they had to be there, not all of them supported the RSSF idea. As far as I could make out, most IS students did not join or form RSSF groups. When I went to York University in October 1968 I found one other RSSF supporter, a postgraduate from Sheffield, to organise an RSSF group with. The local IS was not involved, indeed our group – which grew rapidly – within a year or so became dominated by the IMG and in sharp competition with the IS. In Hull, Sheffield and a few other universities there were RSSF supporters not linked to any of the left groups, but they dwindled fairly rapidly. RSSF held one other conference, in March 1969 in Manchester. But gradually it faded away.
Key to the political debates in RSSF were the general notion of ‘student power’ and the more particular debate about ‘red bases’. The idea of red bases was that universities were a ‘weak link’ in capitalism that could be temporarily captured by radical students and turned into centers of opposition to the capitalist system as such. Ideas about this were elaborated in a special January 1969 edition of New Left Review, with keynote articles by Barnett (4) and James Wilcox, a transparent pseudonym for Robin Blackburn (5).
Barnett’s article on strategy claimed:
“In the universities the question of power is being posed. Revolutionary students must have the determination to resolve it—to help all students free themselves from the hegemony of the authorities by establishing red bases which will detach the student body from the institution’s controls, set up dual power on the campus, and create the permanent possibility of revolutionary action at the highest level. Red bases must be built on democratic centres in the faculties, departments, halls of residence, flats, societies, clubs, study groups, newspapers and magazines, and on the physical liberation of student existence from external controls.”
Of course with 50-year hindsight this sounds like a long shot. It is probable that something like this happened in Italy for a couple of years after the ‘long hot autumn’ of 1969. But that happened in a context where the student movement was much more powerful and in combination with a prolonged an explosive series of workers’ struggles that saw ‘dual power’ at the level of the factory with prolonged occupations, in addition to many community struggles.
If Barnett’s basic idea was far-fetched and a huge over-estimation of the relationship of forces, then the following was even more so:
“Any democratic mass challenge in higher education challenges oppression in the society as a whole. However the repressive power of capitalism is not everywhere the same. If the right methods of struggle are found, and if revolutionary action is firmly based on the aspirations of the masses, capitalist power can be thrown back in particular limited contexts. All such territory gained will only be held precariously, and can be lost or ‘contained’ unless the general force of the revolutionary movement develops. The peasants of Vietnam are breaking one particular link of the chain of international capitalist power, even though their liberation will not be complete until imperialism as a whole is destroyed.”
The analogy here with Vietnam, where liberated zones had been seized by armed guerrillas, is telling, as is the later injunction to abolish the student unions and set up popular assemblies. Hegel said that all analogies are invidious, but some are clearly more invidious than others. Deepening the liberated zone argument, Barnet claimed:
“Protracted people’s war develops a flexible relationship to territory; liberating local populations where it can, it combines people and terrain to create a geographical immunity that sustains an absolute and imminent threat of revolution. Revolutionary students can also develop a flexible relationship to the occupation of buildings, and by assisting the liberation of students they can create a ‘sociological immunity’ that allows them, at the same time that they are taking part in bourgeois society, to be ready and capable as in Germany and France of striking against it en bloc.”
It should be said that some of the NLR board were at this time going through a short-lived form of ersatz Maoism. This was illustrated by the ‘James Wilcox’ article in the same issue of NLR. ‘Wilcox’ argued:
“It should not be thought that the call to make the creation of Red Bases a strategic goal of our struggle is merely a flight of rhetoric. The time has come to take seriously the images we use, to explore the limits of the analogies we invoke to the boundary of the possible. We must learn to penetrate the disguises in which history advances. Red Bases first appeared in China disguised as Soviets—perhaps Soviets will re-emerge in Europe disguised as Red Bases.”
This article raised the considerations explained by Anthony Barnett to a more generalised level of the strategic approach to all revolutionary struggles. It criticised the Left for being obsessed with making demands but failing to institutionally conquer areas of influence, through which the daily life of the masses could be changed in practice, which is where the ‘red bases’ idea comes in. Actually the idea of institutionally conquering zones of influence came back, much more realistically, in ideas about municipal socialism ion the UK, of the participatory budget in Porto Alegre, of ‘red’ Bologna etc.
Despite the role of students in detonating the May events, the ideological effect of the events on the British and international Left was to stress the revolutionary role of the working class, not the importance of student struggles. Above all was a key ‘lesson’ from France, that students can in some circumstances detonate a political crisis, but only when the working class moves into action can there be any chance of a progressive or revolutionary outcome. Within a year of the founding of RSSF, one of the leaders of the student movement in France, Daniel Bensaid, wrote a very sober assessment of what could achieved through student action.
“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 strategic perspectives and slogans which the student movement, incapable by itself of going beyond a certain level of political comprehension – that of petty-bourgeois radicalism – cannot provide” (6).
Moreover: “The attempts to define a strategy for the student movement as such have generally ended in failure. The strategists of the Critical and the Negative Universities, as these terms indicate, reduce the student struggle to an essentially ideological struggle against the bourgeois university. As soon as the student movement moves on ‘from the criticism of society,’ it is faced with problems of revolutionary strategy that only a revolutionary party can resolve...
But, “Building such an organization demands qualities of doggedness, of perseverance, of firmness, which are far from inherent in the fickle, unstable, and unremembering student population”.
Those people in the UK, sometimes influenced by Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt school, who doubted the revolutionary role of the working class, and instead pointed to students, third world peasants and different liberation movements as the revolutionary subjects, were pushed to one side by the reception of the French events in the UK. From then on, the need to build an organisation capable of intervening among workers became a primary concern among revolutionary and socialist-minded students. This often took a crude ‘workerist’ form, ignoring or downplaying the struggles of the specially oppressed, particularly among supporters of the International Socialists. Nonetheless it was the dominant mood among students.
In truth, there never was a mass student movement in Britain on a scale comparable to Germany, Japan, the United States and Italy. In fact, student radicalism was always a minority and never dominant on the campuses overal, although by its organisation and energy it could politically dominate key universities and colleges.
For the RSSF the real meaning of the German, Japanese and American mass student fronts had been lost in translation. Outside of a particular conjuncture, those organisations could not hold together because of the major ideological divergences within them, which meant no agreement could be found about what to do outside the student milieu. For that, different types of organisation were necessary.
Notes
1. Martin Shaw, The Making of a Party?, Socialist Register volume 15: http://www.socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5423/2322#.WreqeojwbIU
2. Barry Hindess, The Decline of Working Class Politics, MacGibbon and Key 1971.This book was published on the eve of massive working class upsurges in the 1970s.
3. Robin Blackburn teaches sociology at the University of Essex and remains of the NLR editorial board; Anthony Barnett was a founderof Charter 88 and now plays a major role in Open Democracy; Fred Halliday (1946-2010), like Barnett, left the NLR editorial board in 1983. Distancing himself from the Marxist left, he wrote insightful studies in international relations until his death.
4. Anthony Barnett, A Revolutionary Student Movement, NLR 52, January-February 1969.
5. James Wilcox, Two Tactics, NLR 52, January-February 1969. The founding RSSF manifesto is in the same issue.
6. This text was published in Black Dwarf in 1969. See online at http://danielbensaid.org/Balance-Sheet-of-the-Student-Movement?lang=fr