Anthony Barnett

A Revolutionary Student
Movement
What are the objectives of the student movement? This principal
question of strategy can now be posed.

Until this year the English debate on the student movement was con-
cerned with two problems: whether students can be revolutionaries,
and whether struggle in the universities can be revolutionary struggle.
It is now widely accepted that the answer to both these questions is yes.
Yes, students in student struggle can be revolutionaries; yes, the
universities are strategic and vulnerable elements of late bourgeois
society.

These questions of strategy and their answers remain incomplete.

Practice has established that students can strike against the hierarchy of
authority and the prestige of knowledge—the twin pillars of academic
power; that students in a student milieu can engage in many-sided
revolutionary struggle; that a strategic majority of students can be
won to revolution. For the most part without prospect of entering the
ruling class, without capital, suspended in time between the terrors of
examinations, students can strike out en masse against bourgeois order,
especially that represented by their own authorities.

It is not inevitable that students will act in a revolutionary way, but the
possibility has been clearly shown. The student movement must
become the realization of this possibility.

THE STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE

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. In bourgeois society red bases could be Latin Quarters
with an internal life that is open and militant, and a majority ready to
switch the offensive overnight. To achieve this free area of action means
acquiring space where the cultural and material pre-conditions of

43
revolution can be accumulated. Creating such pre-conditions does not
just mean ‘raising the consciousness’ of the mass of students—it is also
necessary to anchor that heightened consciousness in real encroach-
ments on bourgeois power.
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.
For the student movement there are two pitfalls to be avoided: the
reformist interpretation of the demand for student power that
imagines that socialism can be built on one campus, and the defeatist
notion that nothing can be changed until everything is changed and
that the work of revolutionaries is therefore solely to make propaganda
for revolution—never actually to start making the revolution in the
situation where they find themselves.
Many students, though eager to strike out against capitalism, are
reluctant to consolidate their freedom and build revolutionary
centres for the future. Stunted and deprived by their homes and
schools, they still retain the familiar compromise of radical anti-
authoritarianism and adolescent dependency, both of which serve to
excuse them from work, from the effort of creating independent situa-
tions of their own. To consolidate red bases demands such effort; in
particular two co-ordinates of capitalist society, its legality and its
ideology, must be thrown back and replaced by counter-legality and
revolutionary culture.
When students take over buildings, they refuse the bourgeois game of
rules and regulations; they place judgement, and therefore legality, in
the hands of the general meeting. Similarly, red bases do not aim at
reform, or at constitutional take-over of a university or college: on the
contrary, they use the position of the institutions in society to create
their own counter-centres—counter-centres based on mass democratic
self-organization, which is in turn sustained by groups in all the
different areas of student life, not by individuals running a bureau-
cratic machine. The widespread detestation of bureaucracy, which is
one of the most positive aspects of the present situation, will cut the
ground from under its own feet if it evolves, as it sometimes does, into a
nihilistic attack on organization as such, instead of developing
alternative forms of decision-making.
Revolutionary theory and culture also demand sustained effort,
including considerable individual intellectual labour as well as the
creation of study and discussion groups, the setting up of newspapers
44
and magazines. The oppressive force of bourgeois ideology has to be
criticized concretely; its division of knowledge, its serialization of
people, and its fetishization of commodities must be understood and
rejected in practice. And there is no pre-constituted revolutionary
theory which provides all the answers. To achieve uninhibited know-
ledge students must interrogate everything, draw on all the schools of
Marxism and on advanced bourgeois knowledge, and utilize every
means of communication available.

The internal life ef a red base must be vigorous enough to sustain the
contradiction between it and the rest of society. With determined
militants playing a leading role in the work involved, neither isolating
themselves nor losing contact with each other within the mass of
students, students as a whole will succeed in creating mass democratic
counter-organization, and revolutionary theory and culture on the
campus.

Turning the universities into red bases now means:—First and fore-
most the mass of students liberated from the clutches of the authorities; from
the controls of the administration, from the hegemony of bourgeois
ideology, from the safety catch of their Unions, from the mystique of
the institution, from the strait-jacket of institutionalization and from
the sugar-coated bullets of participation.

—Second, the militant students won over to the revolution: creating on the
campus a theory and culture capable of understanding the university
and its position in society; linking different struggles, combating the
bourgeois reification of their own lives, politically surviving their
transition out of the university or college; finally and most important,
posing the question of political power everywhere and at all times.
Which means—

—Third, the vanguard organically linking itself with the mass of students,
learning from them continuously: arguing its case in discussion and
debate; seizing back the leadership that social-democrats exercise over
the students through their control of unions, newspapers, debates;
abolishing the chains that students cling to, and liberating them from
fear by situating and expressing their hopes and grievances.

Red bases for the future overthrow of the ruling class and the immediate
liberation of the students—that is the goal of the student movement.

THE NATURE OF THE ENEMY

‘Every revolutionary movement is organized as a function of two

principal criteria:
1. The nature of the enemy
2. The goal of the movement (the kind of revolution it aims to achieve)
The nature of the enemy defines the form of repression that a revolu-
tionary movement must be able to outwit.’1

1
André Glucksmann: Strategy and Revolution, NLR 52, p. 109.

45
On June 15th and 16th 1968, at the same time that the Revolutionary
Socialist Students’ Federation held its founding conference at the
LSE, more than forty vice-chancellors and principals met in secret at
Downing College, Cambridge and exclusively discussed the student
movement. For the first time in a quarter of a century, a struggle
opened in Britain over the political allegiance of an entire social bloc.

A much needed revolutionary organization was born in painful con-

fusion. At that very moment a powerful, well-polished and experienced
opposition planned how best to emasculate it.

What is the enemy hoping to do? Essentially to demobilize the students;

by absorbing their leadership and sterilizing it with futile labour, by
conceding consultations and social reform, by isolating the militants,
victimizing and expelling them. They will attempt to out-manoeuvre
the students, buy them off, fragment them and then contain them.

What are the vice-chancellors afraid of? Certainly not revolutionary

slogans without a mass of students, educational reforms within their
institutions, ideological denunciation unbacked by coherent theory.
All these will play into the hands of the authorities. What is this enemy
afraid of?—a red majority.

The pivotal struggle over student power will be the organization of the
student masses.

The vice-chancellors and principals have decided to try the well-oiled

English strategy of concession, integration and ruthlessly wielding the
big stick against an isolated and fragmented leadership of those articu-
late enough to oppose them. Their specific strategy in relation to the
English student movement is quite clear. First, they are backing the
National Union of Students as hard as they can. They will attribute
advances in university organization to the NUS, they will encourage
‘leading’ students to participate actively in this massive and leaden
organization. They understand its union function perfectly. But the
NUS is very far from the students, indeed it works very hard to remain so.
And this makes its intervention in an actual student struggle very
difficult, and its ability to contain an insurgence almost negligible. On
one occasion, NUS did successfully intervene; at Leicester, Geoffrey
Martin NUS President, who happened to be a personal friend of both
the vice-chancellor and the Union President, skilfully cooled out both
sides and dissolved the confrontation into fruitless negotiations. But
this mode is too haphazard for the vice-chancellors to rely on. Their
first weapon in the struggle to contain the students will be the Union
presidents and their councils. In each institution the vice-chancellors
and presidents will attempt to paralyse the students through the power
of the student unions wielded by their para-police of bureaucratic
careerists.

Their National Organization

The authorities continuously co-ordinate their efforts and share their

experience, both among themselves and with the State authorities.
46
When dealing with their own petty kingdoms, vice-chancellors and
principals cry ‘autonomy’ and ‘academic freedom’. But when their
arbitrary rule is challenged by the members of a university, when they
are faced with an effective demand for critical as opposed to institutional
autonomy, the administrators of ideology scuttle back to the protec-
tion of their class, the minor contradictions of intra-bourgeois power
struggles instantly forgotten.
This is what Walter Adams, director of the London School of Econo-
mics, wrote in his Report on the events of the weekend October
26th–27th 1968, after his provocative attempt to prevent the School’s
occupation had been successfully thwarted:
‘In addition to calling a special meeting of the standing Committee on
October 22, I sought the advice throughout the developing situation
of the Chairman of the Court, the pro-director, the five governors
elected by the academic board and the dean of Undergraduate Studies. I
was acutely conscious that their was inadequate communication or
consultation with many other members of the academic staff, particu-
larly after the closure on Friday and the suspension of telephone
services. At various times contact was made with the Minister for
Higher Education Mrs Shirley Williams, the Chairman of the Univer-
sities Grants Committee, the Chairman of the Vice-Chancellors’
Committee, the Principal of the University, the School’s solicitors, the
Assistant Commissioner of Police, and various other persons, in order
to obtain or give information.’
The conference at Downing, the discussions between Commonwealth
vice-chancellors in Australia over the Summer, the select seminar at
Nuffield at the beginning of this academic year, the long negotiations
with the NUS have all been used to build up a body of experience. In
each single conflict all the vice-chancellors and principals are at risk;
during and after confrontations they therefore consult, discuss with and
report back to their colleagues. This process is hidden, the articulated
forces behind a vice-chancellor are not evident to the students, his phone
calls go untapped. He, and the university or college administration,
will redouble the mystification, emphasizing the irrational, individual
aspects of his actions, personalizing power, to mask its structured
reality and to allow themselves more room for manoeuvres.2
The vice-chancellors and principals are individuals, but their power is
not merely an individual power. Whatever the local differences between
them and other elements of the bourgeois order may be, their national
organization informally but effectively enforces its political leadership.
The autonomy of vice-chancellor’s and principals from the ruling class
is only marginally greater than the autonomy of the Thieu-Ky-Huong
clique from the US Government. Just as the Thieu-Ky-Huong clique
represents the disagreements of the US Army in the field with the US State
Department in Washington, so the vice-chancellors with their Senates
2 A typical ploy of the authorities during a sit-in is to launch a rumour that the vice-

chancellor is under strain, is over-anxious, has a weakness in some vital organ or is

finding difficulty breathing. This sort of blackmail is a sure sign that the students are
winning.

47
and administrations only represent the more reactionary and short-
sighted arm of national educational policy and organization.3 A thorough
comprehension of the enemy’s national strategy is essential to the defeat
of the forces of hierarchy on the campus.
Their Objective

The national political objective of the authorities is: to preserve the class
basis of English education, through hiding its mechanisms from the
effective political criticism of those who are subjugated by it. Firstly by
isolating students from each other institutionally—between the different
universities and colleges, between faculties and departments, between
colleges and halls, turning the horizons of students inwards towards
their geographical location so that the particularity of their existence
dominates their real social situation as students. And secondly by
dividing them organizationally, through unions, sports clubs, the NUS, etc,
assisted of course by the media.
Oxbridge with its fetishized college system is the apotheosis of these
two processes and a special object of preservation, its entrance exams
the vertex of social division and inequality in English education.
The vice-chancellors, principals, Ministry of Education, etc, will
above all attempt to prevent the formation of a self-conscious, nation-
wide, student movement. Because precisely by being both national and
democratic such a movement will inevitably confront the educational
system as a whole.
Co-ordinated national occupations are still for the future: even now,
the solidarity that is essential to prise off the stranglehold of
parochialism is patchy.4 The isolation of students in the colleges and
universities is a real social structure which concretely affects their
situation. As a result the front line of the national struggle in England at
the present moment is to be found, always with local differences, in
each institution. Whether the students will become a free and active
bloc or be passified into an obedient group—that is what is at stake in
every struggle. It is not a question of unity, but of self-determination.
Their present organizations already unify them into seriality and inertia.
The authorities would like to keep things that way.5
3 General Van Tien Dung, V.P.A. Chief of Staff, exemplifies the strategic importance

of both levels of struggle in: ‘After political failure the US Imperialists are facing
military defeat in South Vietnam,’ Hanoi 1966.
4 The Art students are the only sector to have spontaneously acted in any sort of

unison (summer 1968); the universities showed little solidarity with their fellow
students in the colleges, and on the whole ignored their lead.
5 In the occupations that have taken place so far, many militants have surrendered

their political position to calls for unity, and have colluded with liberal appeals to
community consciousness. Almost inevitably this passive attitude towards the mass
of students—understandable after the long years of isolation from mass actions—
leads to parasitism, and worse, to the fetishizing of political allegiance at the expense
of actual politics. It encourages socialists to develop a narcissistic concern with
their own socialism while failing to politicize the situation; at a time when students
have to find a way to sustain continual mass opposition to the authorities, these
militants retreat to defensive propaganda to ensure their own survival.
Liberated areas require decisive popular support for the liberators, but not neces-

48
THE PRECONDITIONS

The vice-chancellors have launched a nation-wide pacification

programme. They are promising, laughably via the NUS, university
reform and student participation. Revolutionary students will have to
confront this initiative, which for all its apparent feebleness may prove to
be adroit and difficult to handle, and combat it with vigorous counter-
attacks. It follows that they must develop in practice a general ability
to mobilize large or small numbers of students at all levels of action. If
this work takes place within an accurate strategic perspective, it can
establish the pre-conditions for the positive task of creating red bases
and developing the practical theory of their organization.

For the national initiative to pass to the students, the local struggles
will need to be situated consciously within the structures of education
and should exploit the advantages of decentralisation. The Bristol
occupation was an outstanding example of such a correct strategy. Its
demand that the university union be opened to all students in the city
united the students at their strongest in inter-college and university
solidarity, and assaulted the authorites at their weakest, forcing them to
call in the State to suppress a manifestly just demand.

Bristol also illustrates that to confront the enemy is a specific task which
demands understanding the strategic positions of the enemy as well as his
fire-power and mobility. This is difficult to grasp in a non-military class
struggle such as that beginning in Britain at the moment. For the ruling
class uses institutions as one of its main agencies of domination. In-
stitutions are both weapons, instruments of repression and demobiliza-
tion, and at the same time they are also areas, strategic sociological
space.

The Bristol sit-in, as the joint action of students from more than a
dozen colleges in addition to the university, by-passed the student’s
unions and removed from the university, whose Senate building they
were occupying, its internal power of expulsion. The political power of
institutions primarily resides in the positions they occupy, the co-
ordinates of action that they establish, which have usually forced
students to a confrontation on unfavourable ground, and only second-
arily in their net power of rejection and expulsion. The strength of the
Bristol sit-in was that it refused the co-ordinates, avoided fighting on
the vice-chancellor’s territory at the same time that it occupied his
building, and thus forced him to call in the State.

The first objective then is to change the terms of the game. With that as
the perspective, it is possible to start to identify the factors which have
so far contained the student movement; and those which have shifted

sarily a majority of revolutionaries. By polarizing the situation and successfully posing

a choice, militants can structurally liberate the majority in action. The mass of
students, still politically mute, are revolutionary with their feet rather than their
minds. Amongst themselves revolutionary students must continually speak the
revolution, learn its language and theory; amongst the mass of students they must
above all act the revolution, finding the acts that speak as well as the words that act.

49
the co-ordinates, and created new relations between the forces on the
campus.

Abolish the Unions

The first weapon the vice-chancellors and principals use are the
student unions. These, with their pseudo-democratic voting pro-
cedures, function directly to contain the students—the unions are the
invisible occupation of the student body by the authorities.

Sometimes called Guilds, which exactly characterizes their pretense at

providing facilities for an apprenticeship subordinated to a master,
the unions are a banal yet effective transplant from the Oxbridge
tradition into a more utilitarian milieu. They generate between students
the tyranny of unwritten prestige that dominates all university life.

In the confrontations at the LSE, at Leicester, at Leeds and at Hull,

where there were already established unions, the power of initiative
held by the president and the institutional majority represented by the
unions played decisive roles in the development of the struggles.
Union presidents and their minions exercise powerful control during
mobilizations. As the threat of negotiations looms, as chairmen are
elected, telephones and offices used, time and again the legal if illegiti-
mate representative of the students will play a crucial role. Time plays
into the hands of the authorities, and this has proved to be as true of
the union bureaucrats as it is of the university ones. Moreover, outside
confrontations and occupations, the union apparatus will again and
again play a decisive role on the issues on which confrontation can take
place, by compromising the majority of the students with the authorities,
by colluding with victimisation—as at Sussex over the red paint
throwing—and by funnelling the students into the established hierarchy.
Abolish the union.

The recent occupation at Birmingham exemplified the contradiction

between red and bourgeois democracy, and illustrated the crippling
effect of division within the student body. Two crucial days
highlighted the relationship between the student Guild and the
General Assembly of the sit-in. On Monday December 2nd, a General
Assembly of 2,500 students debated whether or not to withdraw with-
out any concessions from the authorities. The full case for occupation
was argued: 1,800 voted to stay in, and only 300 voted against. Tuesday
saw a Guild meeting: the Guild was officially supporting the sit-in.
Wednesday’s Redbrick, the University newspaper, described a caucus
meeting of the Right that took place beforehand.

Several of the science and engineering departments had cancelled

lectures to allow students to attend.

Professor Davies, Ian Nelson, Sue Jackson and Dr Mike Hayes had
met before the meeting to discuss tactics. They decided that if dis-
cussion was curtailed they would win, in contrast to Monday evening’s
meeting. This in fact happened and the motion (to withdraw, AB) was
passed.’
50
A meeting of 4,000, the biggest ever held by students from one
institution in England, was manipulated by the Right, including
reactionary staff, and treated to the familiar techniques of imprisoning
people in their own ignorance. On the most important issue the Guild
had ever had to decide, 2,300 voted for unconditional withdrawal after
a twenty minute debate with four speakers. The speaker who proposed
continuing the occupation was himself subjectively against it: as a
member of Guild Executive, however, he paid lip-service to their
official line of support for the sit-in. The Guild captured the effective
leadership of the occupation through its powers to control the
assembly of all the students. Bureaucratically absorbing the challenge of
the sit-in, the Guild destroyed the democratic basis of the occupation,
and compromised its demands. Subjected to trickery and deprived of
principled discussion, the mass of students voted for their own
subordination whilst the careerists looked on.
Before such confrontation can succeed, unions must be abolished and
their assemblies brought into the hands of the students. Victory is
impossible when the students’ organization is an ossified remnant of
parliamentary balloting. Collective struggle appears to engulf the
union; experience shows that, as time passes, it is contained by it.
Set Up Popular Assemblies
To assure victories in confrontation, to test and experiment with
socialist democracy, to guarantee future generations of students non-
institutionalized self-government, the students’ unions must be trans-
formed into popular assemblies with all power in the general meeting.
Chairman elected from the floor meeting by meeting. A sabbatical
secretary. Special task committees for particular jobs. No secret or
informal negotiations.
Will such an organization work? This is the first question that has
been posed by the practical. Have they ever seen the present union
bureaucracies at work, permeated with laziness, jealousy, petty
squabbles, rank inefficiency, minor corruption and vanity? The
amount of mundane organizational work involved in an ordinary
union can be swiftly executed with the minimum of money and time
where there is will and determination. If students cannot organize their
own unions, what hope is there for worker’s control? These minor
executive functions are peripheral to the present social role of the
union, which, we repeat, is to organize and contain the mass of students.
Contestation
Once a base of popular support exists, revolutionary students should
not baulk at taking popular leadership. It is the problem of achieving
that base of support, however, which is at present the key one, and
which, for the many institutions which have still to break out of their
prehistory, is imperative.
Where there has already been an occupation, future sit-ins are a tactical
potential: where there has not, a sit-in is the first strategic objective.

51
‘Contestation is, in itself, constructive, because it creates the pre-
conditions for a political life. The multiple centres it provides—action
committees, strike committees, faculty committees, student meetings,
etc,—are so many political foci: they were not set up as a result of a
programme, but by virtue of the need to decide on a programme; they
did not result from an agreement between leaders but from the right to
hear the ‘leaders’ and be heard by them. . . .

The Sorbonne became a public place. Since Greece, the public place
has been the permanent birth-place of democracy.’6

Demands are revolutionary in the way they are made. Contestation

illuminates and challenges the social relations of power, whatever its
demands may be. The issue of ‘no secrecy’ for example. First clearly
formulated by Tom Fawthrop7, the demand for no secrecy in Senate or
its committees is a basic democratic principle, quite distinct from
demands for participation. Participation is an abject co-operation of
students in the projects of their overseers. Without a transformation
in the basis of power in the university, participation means participating
in their decisions and their decision making. ‘No secrecy’ bypasses the
irrelevant question of bureaucratic representation, and confronts the
relationship between the administration and the university. By
questioning their whole mode of organization, ‘no secrecy’ reveals the
authoritarianism of senate and administration. But the way in which
even this clearcut issue is posed is more important than the demand
itself. Everybody will ‘in principle’ concede no secrecy, ‘with certain
exceptions, etc.’ It is posing the issue sharply in practice which clarifies
everything. Once this clarification has been achieved, there is no need
to press for concessions. It is to play into the hands of the authorities to
squander energy and determination in futile combat; once strong
enough, students can just as well reverse the demand and insist that
Senate promises never to publish its boring and futile discussions. The
object of contestation is not just the reform of the university or the
liberation of facilities for use; it also establishes the independent
ability of students to reach a self-conscious autonomy.

CONCLUSIONS
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 im-
munity’ 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.

In Britain anything like this is still for the future. For the present Van
Tien Dung’s analysis of the military field holds good for the field of
6
André Glucksmann; Strategy and Revolution, NLR 52, p. 103.
7
Tom Fawthorp: Hull, NLR 50, p. 59.

52
revolution in the West. ‘ . . . in the military field, position is the decisive
factor. It reflects in a definite situation the possibilities and trend of the
force in action. It also reflects the outcome of the competition of the
subjective efforts of each belligerent in the utilization and deployment
of his forces to create a position advantageous for himself and dis-
advantageous for his opponent. With an advantageous position a small
force can change into a powerful force, inferiority into superiority, and
weakness into strength.’ The next year or so will see the deployment of
forces through the vertical sociological space of urbanised British
society. Organisationally through its institutions and ideologically
through the structured absences of its thought, bourgeois society will
take-up its positions and try to build the fire-breaks and impose the
constraints that could demobilize students. The authorities in education
already occupy positions designed to hide the overall class nature of
the struggle: they must be forced to reveal it.

Some students, intuitively grasping their containment, try to resolve it,

to spring the trap, by changing their class allegiance. But revolutions
depend on an alliance of classes around a strategy, not on a strategy of
alliance to a class. For students to play a revolutionary role they must
earn their place in such an alliance. A political university—where, for
example, facilities are used to open revolutionary courses for workers,
young and old, white-collar and manual, secretaries and housewives—
offers more to the working class than cadres alone. Political self-deter-
mination is the precondition for effective alliance. The immediate objective re-
mains; students must achieve ‘sociological’ freedom, fighting their
local battles with a firm grasp of the political war now being waged to
subdue students nationally.

English reaction will try to absorb and defuse democratic organisation

—it must be thrown back. It will attempt to divide students, in particu-
lar through exploiting the demobilizing field of the Unions and Guilds
—they must be abolished and replaced by popular assemblies. For the
authorities the objective is dual power within the student body and a
monopoly of effective control. For the students the objective is dual
power on the campus and freedom to use the institutions as they
decide. From such a position of advantage, their small force can change
into a powerful force, inferiority into superiority and weakness into
strength. January 1 1969

53