LIhe following speech by Ernest Mandel was given at a meeting of the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire (JCR) in the great hall of the Mutualité in Paris on May 9, the eve of the night of the barricades. The meeting was attended by between five and six thousand student militants and revolutionary youth.
[Ernest Mandel is the editor of the Belgian socialist weekly La Gauche and author of the scholarly two-volume Traite d'Economie Marxiste ("Treatise on Marxist Economics") soon to be published in English. Ihe transcript is from a tape recording, and has been edited for minor corrections in style. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Any analysis of the student revolt must start from one basic consideration: the university explosion. A new social grouping has emerged from the very vitals of neocapitalism, from all that it considers its éssential "achievement": the higher standard of living, the advances in technology and the mass media, and the requirements of automation. There are six million university students in the United States, two and a half in West Europe, and over a million in Japan. And it proved impossible to integrate this grouping into the neocapitalist system as it functions in West Europe, the United States, or Japan.
The Weakest Link in the Chain of Neocapitalism
The students have not found the necessary material facilities for their studies in the universities. They have not lound the kind of education they were looking for. And above all when they leave the universities it is getting harder and harder for them to find the kind of jobs they rightly expected when they started their university education.
Here I must reply to a certain person claiming to be a representative of the Jeunesse Socialiste SFIO [the SFIO Young Socialists -- the youth group of the right-wing Social Democratic party]. This individual wrote the other day in a column in the "Libres Opinions" section of Le Monde [this is a guest feature column Ior the expression of differing viewpoints which appears regularly in this Paris daily] describing "our" society as a "society of abundance," a society in which "everyone" is now guaranteed full employment and a steady rise in his standard of living.
He did not put his glasses on when he read the West European unemployment statistics. He did not see that in the last two winters there were three million unemployed in Western Europe. He did not see that the number of unemployed in France itself topped a half million -- and this in the midst of a governmentproclaimed economic expansion. He did not notice the large number of young people in this mass of unemployed -- to say nothing of the still larger number which the statistics don't include. He did not see that the unemployment rate among the youth in the black ghettos of the United States exceeds twenty percent -- which explains a lot of things.
In brief, what he, like innumerable devotees of neocapitalism, failed to see is that this system, far from solving all economic and social problems, has not even remedied the basic evils of nineteenth-century capitalism, while it has added a series of new contradictions that have proved more and more insoluble.
This neocapitalism confronts the student youth with insoluble contradictions not only in the university but also in the economy and in bourgeois society, which is in permanent crisis. [Applause.]
Some people have talked about the inadequacy of the universities and, like good reformists, called for university reform. Therefore, when the students turned their backs on this reform of the bourgeois university, they accused them of rejecting dialogue. But what the students in revolt rejected was in fact dialogue within the preestablished and supposedly immutable framework of the bourgeois state, of the bourgeois governments in West Europe and Japan.
students have been told: "The budget isn't large enough to guarantee all of you the university buildings, prolessors and assistants, restaurants, dormitories, and above all the high quality education you demand right away. You have to be satisfied with gradually changing the existing situation, which we all agree is unsatisfactory." And when the students are told this, they are a thousand times right to answer: "Stop this bilge about the appropriation for education and the resources of the public bodies. Talk in terms of the economic resources available in this society. Admit that while there isn't enough money for the universities, there is more than enough for advertising and superfluous gadgets. Admit that the reason you can't find the billions needed for a university system fit for the twentieth century is because you're squander-
'force de frappe'
ing billions for your [France's nuclear striking force]. Admit that you are stifling in embryo immense productive, technological, cultural, and intellectual forces because you prefer to create destructive forces." [Long applause.]
In this sense, and rightly, the students "reject dialogue" and reject "university reform" in the context of bourgeois society. for, they have understood the nature of this society. And this awareness in combination with their special situation in society has made them the weakest link in the neocapitalist chain today, the first to crack throughout the Western world.
A New Revolutionary Productive Force
What the student revolt represents on a much broader social and historic scale is the colossal transformation of the productive forces which Marx foresaw in his Grundrisse [Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy]: the reintegration •i intellectual labor into productive labor, men's intellectual capacities becoming the prime productive force in society.
This is still embryonic and is unrealizable within the framework of capitalist society but it is already powerful- Iy announcing itself. In speaking of a thira industrial revolution, of a scientific revolution, many bourgeois, pettybourgeois, or Marxist sociologists and economists have had a presentiment of this. But they have not always drawn the obvious social conclusion about the place of intellectual workers in society.
When we hear pseudo-Marxists talking disdainfully about the students as
"bourgeois youth" and "future bourgeois" we see a threefold error.
First of all, they fail to understand the university explosion which has made these "bourgeois Jouth" a small minority today in the student world (as the children of workers are also still a tiny minority today). Next, they do not understand that as a result of profound changes in intellectual employment the majority of university graduates will no longer be bosses, or professionals, or even direct agents of the bosses with strictly superbut white-collar emvisory lunctions, ployees of the state or industry, and thus part of the great mass of salaried workers. Finally, they do not understand the specific character of the student milieu as a special social stratum, into which students from bourgeois backgrounds often assimilate, breaking their ties with their family environment without yet being integrated into the social environment of their professions-to-be.
And underlying this threefold error is their unwillingness to understand, or accept, a fundamental fact -- that man's chief productive force will be his creative intellectual power. [Applause.] This intellectual power is only potentially productive today because capitalist society beats it down and stamps it out as pitilessly as it beats down the personality and creative impulse of the manual workers.
There is then at the base of the student revolt a high consciousness of a new dimension which neocapitalism has added to the classical alienation of labor produced by capitalist society, produced by all societies based on buying and selling. [Applause.]
We can say that this intellectual labor power is doubly revolutionary and productive today. It is so because it is conscious of the enormous wealth it promises, which could lead us rapidly to a society, to abundance. It is so classless because it is conscious of all the contralictions, injustices, and barbarities of contemporary capitalism, and because the results of its becoming conscious are profoundly revolutionary.
Anti-Imperialist Consciousness and Anticapitalist Consciousness
The development of this consciousness occurred first of all among the students for a very simple reason: because the traditional organizations of the workers movement are profoundly bureaucratized and long since coopted into bourgeois society. When the workers movement does not erect multiple barriers against the penetration of bourgeois ideology into the working class, most of the workers succumb, at least in "normal" conditions, to the preponderant influence of bourgeois ideas -- as Marx and Lenin never failed to repeat.
However, in the student milieu, a larger minority, Precisely because they are in a more privileged social and intellectual situation than the workers, can free themselves by individual thought from the constant manipulation and mental conditioning of the great public-opinion molding instruments in the service of bourgeois society and capitalism. [Applause.]
It is an unquestionable fact that the revolt against the dirty imperialist war in Vietnam arose from the students and youth in the United States. It was these American students and Joung people who set in motion a powerful movement against this war, eventually drawing in masses of adult black workers and now beginning to allect the white workers also.
Essentially the same process has also taken place in West Europe and Japan. From among these students and youth emerged the most powerful mass mobilization against the war in Vietnam, which at its outset went beyond the absolutely opportunist and capitulationist phase of movements "for peace in Vietnam" or "for negotiations." We have seen young revolutionists by the tens of thousands go into the streets of Paris, Berlin, London, Copenhagen, Rome, Amsterdam, and Brussels to launch the only valid slogan -- the slogan of full and complete solidarity with the Vietnamese people, the slogan of victory to the Vietnamese revolution.
[Applause.]
In its revolt against the bourgeois university and against the imperialist war, the student vanguard has begun to become conscious of the necessity of rising up against bourgeois society in its entirety. Now it is drawing logical revolutionary socialist conclusions from its development of an anticapitalist consciousness: it is preparing itseli for the socialist revolution. tor, without a proletarian socialist revolution, there will be no overthrow of the capitalist in the ingratsword Applause Mere system, not in west Europe, nor anywhere in the
Another comment must be made on this subject. The "revolutionary" concept, in the proletarian, Marxist sense of the term, has always implied another idea, "internationalism." When -- in the epoch when an Argentinian, Che Guevara, fought in the forefront for the victory of the
Cuban revolution, then went to die for the victory of the Bolivian revolution -- when -- in an epoch when even the technocrats are talking about the need for a united Europe -- a secretary of the French Communist party dares describe our friend Danny_Cohn-Bendit as a "German anarchist," then I say it is Cohn-Bendit who represents proletarian internationalism [long applausel, and the CP secretary who personilles petty-bourgeois nationalism.
LLong applause.]
Unity of Action in the Vanguard and Relations with the Broad Masses
The description that Comrade Bensaid has given us of the way in which the March 22 Movement was organized should remind the comrades present here of a striking parallel -- the way in which Fidel Castro and Che Guevara began to organize the armed struggle in Cuba. They also began by saying: "We are going to put aside the tactical differences which divide the different tendencies in the revolutionary movement. Once we agree on the essential thing, on the action to be initiated, on the way to break from the stagnation and backwardness of the traditional movement, on the way to initiate struggle against imperialism and the oligarchy in Cuba by the armed road, we will little by little create a process which will gradually accelerate by its own internal logic, which will make It possible to classify and reclassify the different tendencies by experience." [Applause.]
This attitude is a completely healthy one for all who want to free themselves from the empty verbalism which has done so much harm. After a certain point, the movement can only progress through action, and the absence of action condemns it to sterility and permanent division.
As all the comrades who have spoken before me have said, there is an urgent task to be done of reintegrating the student movement into the workers movement. Yes, the workers movement must win back the student movement, most of all inasmuch as the students are workers. But this reconquest of the students cannot be accomplished through the ossified and bureaucratized structures of the traditional workers organizations. It is within the working class, rising up in spontaneous struggle against the capitalist system, creating its own new leadership, its own committees, that this reconquest will take place, through action and in action, in their mutual interest and in the interest, the supreme interest, of the revolution.
It will not take place in the traditional organizations, in view of the spirit which today inspires this magnificent new rising young revolutionary vanguard. And il we fight for this reunion -- if we fight for this alliance and this convergence between the student revolt the struggle for the proletarian revolution in Western Europe, it is because we ow very well that neither by virtue of their numbers nor by virtue of the place which they hold today in society, can the students alone overthrow bourgeois society in the West.
They can and they must play a powerful role as a detonator. By playing this role within the working class, above all through the intermediary of the young workers, they can free in the working class itself enormous forces for challenging capitalist society and the bourgeois state. [Applause.]
A Worldwide Movement of Revolutionary Challenge
Today we see on a world scale the rise of anti-imperialist and anticapitalist forces, an authentic new world revolutionary ascent.
The heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people against American imperialism, the Cuban revolution, the struggle of the courageous guerrillas in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and the struggle of the black masses of the United States for their racial and social liberation are all basically one and the same struggle.
And this struggle of the most oppressed masses, of the masses of the countries of the third world and of the black masses in the United States is beginning today to get a significant response in the imperialist countries. Ihis is the mass mobilization in these countries against the dirty war in Vietnam; it is the mass mobilization of the student movement; it is the mass mobilization of the young workers in very arduous strikes and demonstrations in Le Mans, Caen, Iurin, and in Bremen and Essen against springer.
An integral part of this struggle is the struggle of the student and intellectual vanguard in the so-called socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the USSR. Here we send particularly warm greetings to the students and workers in the vanguard of this struggle.
for, as much as we are on the side of the Soviet Union and the "socialist camp" in any confrontation with imperialism or the bourgeoisie, we are on the side of our comrades Kuron and Modzelewski, we are on the side of the courageous vanguard workers and students of Warsaw and Poland in their fight against bureaucracy and for real soviet democracy, which can only be a democracy of councils [long applause], a democracy based on workers, students, and poor peasant _councils as
Lenin taught us. LApplause.]
When this worldwide struggle that is already in progress makes it possible to draw in the adult workers against the incomes policy, against the économie concertée [union-government agreement to hold down wages], against the revival of unemployment, against job insecurity, against the integration of the unions into the bourgeois state, against the more and more marked evolution everywhere in Western Europe toward authoritarian, "strong states," against NATO and the Atlantic Pact, for a revival of the workers movement going over into workers struggles challenging the capitalist system itself, then we can transform today's vanguard into a mighty revolutionary party, marching at the head of the masses.
Then, all together, we will be invincible. Then, all together, we will complete the great work begun fifty years ago by the October Revolution, the victory of the world socialist revolution! [long applause.]