The NUS conference at Exeter from the 2-6 A pril is taking place during a period of militant student struggle not seen since 1968. The crucial difference this time is the breadth of student involvement and the fact that it is happening inside the NUS and not by-passing it. As might be expected, such a development is finding a reflection in the NUS Conference itself. There are no less than five slates for the elections. At least three of these claim to be revolutionary and even the right winger, John Randall, is masquerading as a socialist. The key questions facing the conference are of course, the perspectives for the grants campaign and the relation of students to the developing workers' struggles against the Tory pay laws and other measures of the ruling class. THE PROBLEMS OF PROTEST As we have explained in previous issues of The Red Mole, the present NUS executive, dominated by the Communist Party, has presented the campaign in such a way as to isolate it from the struggles of the working class. By dragging up atrocity stories of students in distress, they hope to build up the 'special case which students supposedly have. In this way, they hope to shock 'public opinion' and pressurise the Tories into conceding an increase in the grant. Even so, from the point of view of student involvement, this campaign has been the most successful to date. There has been overwhelming support for the NUS initiatives as the national demo and national one day strike indicate. And the bulk of this support has come from the lower half of the system - the Polys and, importantly, the Techs. But this has brought in its wake big problems which flow from the basis on which the campaign is run. The first problem is that within a framework of protest, militant forms of struggle such as rent strikes, mass demonstrations, one-day strikes, etc. are seen not as ways of advancing the struggle of students but as spectacles to attract attention from the bourgeois press. Hence the plaintive cry for "leadership' in the local struggles which have developed out of these actions. The second problem faced by local leaderships is how to unify all students behind the campaign. The main form of struggle which has been chosen, the rent strike, and the orientation to pressurising Vice-Chancellors as a key component of 'public opinion, both mean that most emphasis has been placed by the NUS leadership on the universities, and then only on a section of these.
It is as a result of taking up and expressing this dissatisfaction at the level of tactics that the conference election slate initiated by the International Socialism group and a number of prominent NUS social democrats has begun to win increasing support.
IMG SLATE Insofar as the victory of this slate will signal a determination for a change in the campaign and an increase in the combativity and self-confidence of students in struggle, it should be critically supported.
But there is no solution to be found simply at the level of tactics. By endorsing the basis of the campaign, this slate is incapable of offering anything other than "more militancy" as an alternative. The root problem is the politics of the campaign. The iow level of the student grant is not at all due to the inadvertence of the Tories who don't recognise the apalling material conditions which most students are in. It flows from the pincer movement of inflation on the one hand and the attempt to cut down on unit costs through rationalisation on the other. Only by showing a real determination to struggle against both of these things will the enemy be really under pressure. And by the same token, only by correctly identifying the enemy can the correct unifying tactics be projected.
It is in an attempt to get this message across that the IMG is fielding its own slate for the top four positions. The members of the slate will argue that on this basis it is in the immediate interests of all students to throw their weight behind the struggles of the working class. Solidarity with workers' struggles is a necessary concomitant to an offensive grants THE NEXT STEPS The most immediate question facing students when they return to the colleges next term is the contribution which students can make to the May Ist day of action called by the TUC All colleges must be occupied on that day, and the day used both to demonstrate solidarity with the working class and also to begin to organise in a determined way to utilise all the resources of students in this fight. Conferences | James Clynes of all those in the colleges - college workers, technicians, teachers and students - should be held to plan the way forward.
Secondly, students must extend their action over prices which have been waged through refectory boycotts. A national day of action on prices must be organised with mass pickets of supermarkets and demonstrations against rising prices all over the country.
Finally, the struggle in the colleges will have to be stepped up. Unfortunately, it will not be possible simply to build on the actions of this term. The lack of success so far can only breed demoralisation, especially with the attempted victimisations of rent strikers now being carried out by 'our friends" the Vice-Chancellors. The starting point of any move forward must be the defence of these students and of victimised lecturers like Steve Whitley (see separate article), our real friends in this fight. But this will only really be possible if a balance sheet of the campaign so far is drawn up and its political basis changed. * FULL GRANTS FOR ALL STUDENTS; for the abolition of discretionary awards, discrimination against married women, and the means test. * £100 NOW (1962 level) ON THE GRANT. AUTOMATIC DIRECT INCREASES IN GRANT TIED TO ANY INCREASE IN THE COST OF LIVING. * NO TO LOAN-FINANCING OF RESIDENCE AND SELF-FINANCING OF CATERING.
Twenty four building workers are now facing trial on charges of assault, intimidation, damage to property, and conspiracy, arising from incidents said by the police to have taken place in reasonably hope to pick off individual sections one by one, what could wreck its plans would be if workers in struggle were to popularise and extend the kind of picketing tactics that were Below : OLIVER MacDONALD looks at def