The sheer viciousness of the attacks in the latest New Left book "Student Power" from the respectable reviews columns should please the editors almost as much as the large sales they have achieved. It demonstrates that they are on target when they receive the accolade of such a torrent of bourgeois spite and malice. This book is, however, being taken seriously by the student revolutionaries as well as reactionary academics. A measure of this seriousness will be the extent to which the book is rigorously and critically analysed in the continuing debate about the future of the student movement.
Any collection of essays is bound to be uneven; this book is no exception and includes in uneasy proximity the perceptive with the mediocre. Even the better articles sometimes have a discontinuous flavour and occasionally become precious. The big words and the pitter-patter of dropping names are distractions from the central purpose of the book, as is the superfluous inclusion of such inexact and unhelpful concepts as "the spectacle" and the McLuhanite electronic village.
None of these criticisms detract from the outstanding merit of the major essays. Steadman-Jones has attempted to construct a comprehensive explanation of "why the student revolt" and has sketched in a suggested strategy for the militants. Set, Anderson and Blackburn have done much to destroy the deference that students might hold towards official ideology and its paid apologists. Carl Davidson has contributed an exceptionally useful piece on campus tactics; a genuine hand-book of rebellion.
The book fails to adequately answer the tactical and strategic problems in front of the student left. This flows in part from the failure of the editors to evolve a consistent political line. There is a tendency to retreat, at crucial areas of the argument, into a non-gelled eclectic iconography in which Gramsci, Althusser, Trotsky and Mao are conjured forth. A serious appreciation of just where the movement is, where it has to go and how it will get there is lacking. It is significant that it is an American, Carl Davidson, whose article will be of the most immediate use to the British militant.
The avoidance of seriously answering these questions can only be explained by the fact that the book has been filleted of a necessary and central concept; the formation of a revolutionary vanguard. It is this that knits together the disparate aspects of the student revolt and enables them to be seen within the concept of a total strategy against capitalism.
The student radicalisation in Britain is still in its initial phases. It is weak organisationally, and uneven in development. In consequence it either makes concessions to spontaneity theories or puts off attempting to form the basis for a revolutionary vanguard to a distant future. The student "detonator" initiated the explosion in France. The May Events also showed that the struggle could not be completed in the absence of a revolutionary party. The detonator effect might be a product of conjunctural forces. If this were the case, then the real significance of the student revolt would be that it constitutes a training ground for a new generation of revolutionary cadres. The only sectors who could then intervene meaningfully would be those who wish to build the revolutionary party. The absence of an awareness of this key problem detracts from the long-term usefulness of this volume, but it remains still the best book on the student movement yet published in Britain.
* Published by Penguin : Price 7/-.