On California Campus Protests

(Young Spartacus pages)

(Letter)

25 January 2010

Dear Editor,

The otherwise fine California budget cuts article in the current WV/Young Spartacus ([“Protests Against Education Cuts and Fee Hikes Sweep California”] No. 950, 15 January) contains a political misstatement. After pointing out that workers have the social power that students do not have, the article states:

“Students must therefore ally with the working class, not the other way around.”

The above statement implies that the workers have no need to ally with protesting students since they have no social power. The relation of workers to protesting students is contextual and not categorical precisely because students represent a sometimes volatile petty-bourgeois layer. In the last days of the Weimar Republic a mobilized working class needed to crush a student movement that in its overwhelming majority were fascist shock troops. But in today’s context, when students and labor are protesting against the racist state government and its draconian cuts, the second part of the above statement is wrong.

In early 20th century Russia, students were overwhelmingly children of the privileged elite. Nevertheless, though their protests were over purely academic issues, when 183 student activists were drafted into the army, Lenin demanded:

“All conscious elements among all strata of the people must take up this challenge, if they do not desire to fall to the level of dumb slaves bearing their insults in silence. At the head of these conscious elements stand the advanced workers and the Social-Democratic organisations inseparably linked with them. The working class constantly suffers immeasurably greater injuries and insults from the police lawlessness with which the students have now come into such sharp conflict. The working class has already begun the struggle for its emancipation. It must remember that this great struggle imposes great obligations upon it, that it cannot emancipate itself without emancipating the whole people from despotism, that it is its duty first and foremost to respond to every political protest and render every support to that protest.”

—“The Drafting of 183 Students into the Army” (February 1901)

Lenin mandated that the workers’ vanguard be a “Tribune of the People,” itself a motivating force for persuading students to ally with the proletariat.

With best comradely regards,
Reuben S.