(The following article has been translated from the March 9 issue of the French communist action weekly Rouge.]
Since May 1968 and the peak of the March 22 Movement, the gap has steadily widened between the campus movement and the mass of students.
On the one hand, there has been a desperate student movement caught up in the dreams of May and a paralytic UNEF [Union Nationale des Etudiants de France- National Union of Students of France], where any political debate has been replaced by fights over accreditation of delegates between opposing sets of lawyers.
On the other hand, there has been the mass of students trapped in scholastic routine by the Faure reform. * It has been an atomized mass, dispersed to suit the new university installations (Clignancourt, Dauphine, Vincennes, St-Maur, Asnière), fragmented by increases in academic credit requirements and multiplication of UERs (academic governing bodies], without any unity or organizational centers. It has been a milieu held on a leash by continual examinations, a milieu exasperated by the incantatory mobilizations of the veterans of May, whom it has not recognized as its own.
And now this milieu is stirring. The regime's policy for higher education - whose aspiration has been to meet simultaneously the needs of order, elitist selection, and austerity - has pushed the students too far.
The government has not been cautious as to the means used to implement this overambitious policy. It has used systematic repression against the teaching staffs, who have been made vulnerable by the introduction of the contract system throughout higher education and the different levels of the faculty. Weeding out of students has been organized and planned by the various departmental orders of Guichard and Boulin in medicine and Guichard in languages.
The university freedoms have been destroyed with the end of autonomy on the Nanterre campus. There has increasing collaboration been ever and collusion between the university administrations and the bourgeois regime, as shown by the Schwaetzer* affair in the science department, where Zamansky is a perfect embodiment of the teacher-cop.
This is a policy of making the universities profitable and establishing disciplinary institutions of higher learning. Peyrefitte made the logic of this explicit on his return from the USA. And his explanation confirms the analmade by the revolutionists. yses "Without competition," he said, "university autonomy leads to ossification and isolation!"
In plain language-hurrah for the competitive autonomy heralded by the devaluation of the philosophy, mathematics, and political economy diplomas at Vincennes! Furthermore, "free education produces irresponsibility." By "pricing education at cost," they will get responsible students ... and profitable ones, at the rate of 5,000 francs [about US$1,000] a year. Remember the little feeler they sent out at the beginning of the year by increasing fees!
Confronted with this overly greedy government policy, the new student
Schwaetzer in September
1968. He was informed of it in January 1969 and finally expelled in October 1969. A candidate for an advanced degree at the University of Paris, Schwaetzer came to Paris to defend his thesis on February 25 of this year but was not allowed to stay to do so. Zamansky, the dean of the science faculty, was accused by students of collusion with the police in victimizing Schwaetzer.
milieu finds itself catapulted into struggle. The first stage of its mobilization has been on immediate, or even special-group interests-against this or that aspect of the government policy. But from the outset this struggle has had a mass character, it is a mobilization of a mass of students suffering the same fate and who have long been reduced to silence.
Finally, inasmuch as it directly confronts the regime, and a regime which is unwilling to give an inch, this mobilization has a dynamie of very rapid radicalization and politicalization, as the struggles of the language and psychology students attest.
As a reminder, I can cite the following struggles that have taken place just in the last few days: mass demonstrations of language students in Grenoble, Clermont, and Montpellier, and strikes in the lycées lacademic high schools]; and the convergence in Bordeaux of the struggle against the Guichard order and against the invasion of the office of the AGEB [Association Générale des Etudiants de Bourdeaux-General Association of Bourdeaux Students] by police looking for Molotov cocktails which turned out to be only paintpots! In Le Mans there was a demonstration by 1,000 students against the arrest of activists belonging to the PCMLF [Parti Communiste Marxiste-Léniniste de France]. In Marseilles there was an assembly on Palestine of 500 persons. And this is without going back to the strikes in the medical schools.
The mobilization of this new milieu must be paralleled by the development of a new movement. UNEF, structurally outmoded and politically ossified and bureaucratic, does not express it.
Against the policy of the regime it is possible to create a united front of struggle which can give confidence to the students and rally the vanguard in opposition to the government.
By abolishing the autonomy of Nanterre, the regime sought a test of strength on the campus. It succeeded only in spotlighting the failure of participation, already undermined by austerity. This move succeeded only in consolidating the revolutionary opposition.
It is now possible to win certain limited victories on the campus. No matter how limited, these will be the first victories since May 1968, and by this fact alone have the potential of reviving the mobilization. In order to achieve this, we must reinforce the unity of the struggle:
• against the abolition of university autonomy at Nanterre, for the withdrawal of the police from the campus, for the resignation of the Conseil de Gestion [Administrative Council];
• against the weeding-out decrees;
• against the contract system in hiring teaching staffs;
• against the disciplinary university and for Schwaetzer's right to defend his thesis;
•against the violations of political rights: searches, arrests of activists, and expulsions of foreign nationals and immigrants.
On this basis, we must create a united front of struggle against the disciplinary university! The united mobilization Friday, March 6, must be a first step in this direction. We must link up with the teachers of Rénovation Syndicale [Trade-Union Renewal], l'Ecole Emancipée the Free School], SNCS [Syndicat National des Chercheurs Scientifiques - National Union of Scientific Researchers], and the minority faction of SNESup [Syndicat National de l'Enseignement Supérieur - National Union of College Teachers], who are the organizers of the March 6 meeting.
March 5.
'Struggle Against the Barbaric Family Situation'
Trotsky on Women's Liberation
[Printed here for the first time in English is a message by Leon Trotsky to a rally of women workers in Moscow in 1923. The text appeared in the November 28, 1923, issue of Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist party of the Soviet Union.
(Trotsky's views are of particular interest today with the rise of the women's liberation movement in the United States and similar expressions of the fight for women's emancipation in Canada,
Britain, and elsewhere.
Speaking for the Soviet government, during Lenin's lifetime, Trotsky expressed the commitment of the Russian revolution to uprooting the oppression of women. This was no mere verbal promise. The early Soviet government instituted a series of deepgoing reforms, including the liberalization of divorce laws, legalization of abortions, and the institution of community kitchens and nurseries.
[Under Stalin most of these reforms were abolished and the family on the bourgeois model was again sanctified. This great leap backward in social relations was summed up by one pro- Moscow observer in the Stalinist quarterly New World Review in its last issue in 1969. Pat Sloan, a former editor of British-Soviet Friendship, wrote: "From the permissiveness of the first 15 years, marriage and divorce laws were tightened up, so that divorce was made progressively more difficult. Abortion was again made illegal. ... The Order of Heroine of March 30, 1970
Motherhood was created for mothers of large families."
(Trotsky's brief message is a refreshing reminder that the retrograde attitude of the Soviet bureaucrats of today on the question of women's rights has nothing in common with Marxism. The translation from the Russian is by Intercontinental Press. This article will be included in a pamphlet entitled Leon Trotsky on Women and the Family to be published by Pathfinder Press, Inc., 873 Broadway, New York, New York 10003]
I am greatly aggrieved that a lingering cold prevents me from taking part in your rally celebrating the fiftieth year of the party's correct and extensive work among women. Allow me to send greetings in written form to the participants in the rally and, through them, to the women workers and peasants whom the party's work has already awakened and those whom it will awaken tomorrow.
The problem of women's emancipation, both material and spiritual, is closely tied to that of the transformation of family life. It is necessary to remove the bars from those confining and suffocating cages into which the present family structure drives woman, turning her into a slave, if not a beast of burden. This can be accomplished only through the organization of communal methods of feeding and child-rearing.
The road to this is not a short one: material resources are necessary; strength of will, knowledge, and effort are necessary.
There are two paths leading to the transformation of everyday family life: from below and from above. "From below" denotes the path of combining the resources and efforts of individual families, the path of building enlarged family units with kitchens, laundries, etc., in common. "From above" denotes the path of initiative by the state or by local Soviets in building group workers' quarters, communal restaurants, laundries, nurseries, etc. Between these two paths, in a workers and peasants state, there can be no contradiction; one ought to supplement the other. The efforts of the state would come to naught without the independent striving toward a new way of life by the workers' families themselves; but even the most energetic display of initiative by individual workers' families, without guidance and aid by the local Soviets and state authorities, could not bring great success either. The work must be carried on simultaneously both from above and from below.
An obstacle in this path, as well as in others, is presented by the scarcity of material resources. But this only means that actual success will not be as rapid as we would have wished. It would be totally inadmissible, however, if on the grounds of poverty we began to brush aside the question of building a new kind of life.
Inertia and blind habit, unfortunately, constitute a great force. And nowhere does blind, dumb habit hold sway with such force as in the dark and secluded inner life of the family. And who is called upon first of all to struggle against the barbaric family situation if not the woman revolutionist? By this I do not mean to say at all that conscious workers are relieved of the responsibility to labor
Peru toward the transformation of the economic forms of family life, above all the forms of feeding, child-rearing, and education. But those who fight most energetically and persistently for the new are those who suffer most from the old. And in the present family situation the one that suffers most is the woman -the wife and the mother.
That is why the proletarian Communist woman - and in her footsteps, every awakened woman-should devote a major part of her strength and attention to the task of transforming our everyday life. If our economic and cultural backwardness creates many difficulties and only permits us to move slowly along this path, still it is necessary that the collective public opinion of all women workers be applied as pressure so that everything that can be done, given our present forces and resources, will be done.
Only in this way will we open up for the most backward and beclouded working woman, and after her the peasant woman, the door to the kingdom of socialism.
I wish you every success in your work.
Yours with Communist greetings,
L. Trotsky.
Notes
* De Gaulle chose Edgar Faure as his minister of education after the May-June days. Faure instituted a reform of education designed to pacify the campuses. 276
* Thomas Schwaetzer, an American citizen resident in France for about fifteen years and an activist in the movement against the Vietnam war. An expulsion order was issued against