In your issue of May 3rd there is a rave review of Harry Goode's Oxford C.S.E. pamphlet "The Faceless Ones". I agree with a lot in the pamphlet and the review, but: I want to adda big pinch of salt. First about this 'facelessness'.’ What is it? It is easy, not difficult, to find out who runs the colleges. When the press talks about faceless agitators on building sites, they man that the general public doesn't know much about these men because they, the press, have more important things to tald about - George Brown and the Royal Family, It's not all that different with dons. The main point in Harry Goode's pamphlet is that the colleges are property owners, and among the least enlightened of property owneres at that. I think this is broadly true. They have in some ways been bad for the town, they employ cheap non-union labour, they don't for the most part come out well on the issue of racial discrimination in employment. This is all part and parcel of the fact that Oxford and C Cambridge are the furthest from being Ivory Towers of all the British Universities. As the traditional universities of the property-owning class they are the most intimately involved in its hegemony. Bat there are traps here. It is easy to get diverted from an attack on the ruling class to an attack on the mandarin ‘establishment'. Then the institutional independence which the mandarins enjoy becomes your target, instead of their predictable "failure" to use their independence to be really independent of the class to which most of them belong. And then the stream of Socialist criticism flows into the muddy river of gutterpress propaganda, which expresses the desire of some sections of the ruling class to do away with the mandarins'’ independence altogether. It is also easy to fall into the Liberal fallacy, that you can change a society ‘by just changing the educational institutions which reflect it. As for the idea that progressive scholars and teachers are not really scholars and teache rs (see Harry Goode's last paragraph) or not really progressive (see your review) because they can't help being on the governing body of a cewllege whose bursarial policies they disagree with don't be daft.
*Tutor in philosophy, Worcester College, Oxford.
Common Market: A Reply to Stan Newens (contirmed) tarnished image of the "German Economic Miracle" is attributed by some to their industrious working class. This is not unrelated, however, to the German Industrialists having access to refugees requiring work at any price and one million temporary Italian workers with no permanent status. They are being sent back home now that unemployment is sufficiently high. The main people to benefit from entry into the Common Market will be the capitalist class who have the resources and facilities to rationalize their enterprises of exploitation. It is an attempt to obtain a uniformly strong chain, and to eliminate those weak points at which the system could be attacked and perhaps destroyed. It is vitally necessary then, that the real motives behind our entry should be exposed and a United Socialist States of Europe, owning the means of roduction, posed as its antithesis.