steel. Marcuse's advice ("Burn them down") goes unheeded. The revo's are still there as well, but then politics is not. A full year's action leaves the socialists icking their wounds and learning their lessons. In one year 1968/69 LSE saw a three day occupation over the weekend October 27th; a well conducted exposure of the school's support of Rhodesia and South Africa; a partial take-over of the Oration Day Lecture given by the apologist for Greek Facism, Trevor Roper; the violent removal of internal security gates; the closure of the school by the police and a counter offensive including arbitrary arrests, trials and injunctions; an all party parliamentary smear •campaign orchestrated by Edward Short; counter demonstrations; nation-wide solidarity students; the dismissal of a shop-steward and two lecturers; a student strike during the beginning of the final term which ended with a one year suspension of two students.
The aim of the socialist society at the LSE this past year was to transform the politics of morality, practised by most English students, into revolutionary socialist politics. Most students are morally opposed to U.S. agression in Vietnam, fascism in Greece, and apartheid. However, they make no between apartheid and those institutions in England, including, inevitably, the university, which support apartheid. Therefore, their politics are isolated from their daily lives and revolution remains for them an abstract concept, perhaps meaningful for South Africa, but with no relevance socialists sought to involve students in struggles with the institutions which control their lives by showing the true nature of those institutions.
The strategy of the first three confrontations at the LSE was basically the same: an event was chosen which would focus attention onto an issue over which the left held moral and political hegemony (Oct. 27 for Vietnam, Trevor-Roper's oration for Greece, th Commonwealth P.M.'s Conference for Rhodesia.) Research was carried out into the connections between Invariably, the connections were there. Lts ourt and the issue in of Governors is virtually a Who's Who of the imperialist, monopoly capitalist ruling class; LSE has investments in everything from South African companies. to I.C.I.; LSE offers recruiting facilities to the same type of companies that it invests in (and that its Governors control); and LSE's professors, in general, teach the kind of shit that makes apartheid possible. These connections were published and debated. Then the demand was put forward either that the connec tions be severed, or that they be compensated for e.g. the demand that no firms operating in Sout frica be allowed to use LSE facilities for recruitin or that the school be made available to the Oct. 27 demonstrations.) On each of the occasions the demands put forward by the socialists were adopted by the mass of students, and were then backed up by some form of direct action (no direct action took place over Rhodesia; the gates came down before that could happen).
This strategy of interlocking a political moral issue with a direct mass action against the authorities for their class role, was very successful. On each of these issues, we were able to show students that they could not enjoy the luxury of moral indignation over Vietnam or Greece while continuing with business as usual at the LSE. Students came to see that they could not oppose the war in Vietnam without also opposing, at least temnorarilv the ISE. actions by connection oppresses the many for the sake of the few.
England. LSE mobilise students, they also help to educate them. However, in and of themselves, they do not organise isolated confrontations which temporarily activated a large number of students but which failed to integrate them into any permanent and serious socialist move ment (see Tom Fawthorp's article in Solidarity Vol 5 No. 10).
Without such a movement students can "pop" socialists, because they're trendy or fun, but disappearing into the library in time to save their careers and avoid the hard political work that needs to be done. Because there was no sustained attempt at agitation, became, if not counter-productive, then at least much less productive than they could have been. This was the case attempts to prevent the victimisation which resulted from that action. fundamentally correct - we were acting to control our environment against the wishes of those who normally control it for us and it was clearly an important action for those who took part - when the first sledge-hammer was swung all sorts of inhibitions were smashed along with the gate. However, we were neither prepared to• take the next logical step, to extend our control over our own environment, nor capable of defending administration's retribution. Therefore, the relevance of and the reasons for the violent removal of the gates were never clear to most students. removal of the gates enabled the administration to take the offensive, and forced us to devote all of our energy to a campaign to prevent victimisation Solidarity is fairly strong sentiment among students However; it is not strong enough to defeat the fear of losing one's place in the university or of jeopardising one's career. LSE Socialist society students no way of fighting victimisation without and he An integration that is only achieved on action (almost no-one at the LSE will support apartheid IN THE ABSTRACT). Direct action also made our demands on these issues credible and confronted the administration with an insoluble dilemma: either to meet our socialist, demands, whereupon we would have proven to ourselves our power to change things; or to refuse our demands and repress our efforts to achieve them, in the process further educating us to the need to struggle against the LSE. We raised the issue of student power but not in a reformist campaign to improve our already privileged position. Instead we while sought power over our own institution in order to prevent that institution from servicing a system which But very serious mistakes were made at the LSE this year. Fundamental was our lack of any perspective beyond the above strategy. Confrontations serve to students. This last year at the LSE saw a series of that become participating in confrontations education, and organisation, confrontations soon occasions.)
with the removal of the gates and the The removal of the gates was Union meetings ourselves against the The violent encourage could offer.
correct tactic misfiring because it was not done properly; i.e., in the context of and following from a • long campaign to expose the concept of "academic freedom".) By the final term, students were simply tired of repeated confrontations, and pessimistic about the chances of success. In this situation, and in the absence of a feasible socialist society strategy, victimisation could not be prevented.
we lacked a commonly-held long range political perspective, LSE socialists made at least two other major errors. The first concerned the way in which we failed to relate struggles within LSE to struggles outside. We never succeeded in resolving the contradiction between the need to secure support from large numbers of non-socialist LSE students (which meant we had to take into account nonalthough sympathetic, sensibilities in planning any action); and the importance of widening the struggle beyond the LSE to involve the left throughout the country (which meant taking the kind militant action which would inspire other revolutionaries to support us). Almost invariably, whatever action we took would alienate one group winning support from another (the best example being the ULU occupation and retreat; the* exception being the Oct. 27 occupation.) In retrospect, it seems clear that ISE socialists were overly, concerned with winning immediate and complete support from so-called moderate students, and therefore came to act like moderates themselves. Support from moderate students is crucial, but it must be support for socialist programs and actions, and such support can only be won by taking principled socialist positions. On the other hand, it is also clear revolutionary students elsewhere were not sufficiently sensitive to the need for a mass base within the university (both LSE and their own school). Thus, they repeatedly flocked to LSE revolationary happenings, criticised them for not being revolutionary enough to suit them, and at the same time neglected the crucial work of waging the struggle within their own university. (This criticism of course does not apply to all those who came to LSE and rendered socialists there invaluable support on several Finally, LSE socialist society adopted a fundamen tally incorrect policy in relation to student union politics. We placed primary importance on winnin Union mandates for our actions, failing to realise tha it is involvement in, not support for, actions that is important. By the end of the year, we could win almost any vote in the Union, but could not involve the students who voted for our resolutions. We had encouraged students to think that they were working for the revolution if they voted for it. They did vote for it, but did nothing else. We should have gone into to argue the correctness of our actions, but should have seen our actions as being basically independent of Union mandates. This would have forced us to take more responsibility for, and to involve more people in, our actions.
We were also mistaken in our policy towards the students Union in deciding to run for bureaucratic positions in order to occupy them. Union elections can, in some circumstances, provide a platform for socialist propaganda. Union office however, can only bureaucratic tendencies among those elected, and passivism on the part of the mass. Our aim should have been to destroy Union bureaucracies, not to staff them as we ended up doing.
The Black Dwarf October 1st 1969 Page 3