STUDENTS' PROTEST, CLASS-STRUCTURE,

AND IDEOLOGY

..by
Paul Piccone
University of Bridgeport

A French variation of The Communist Manifesto begins by

claiming that: A ghost hounds the world: the ghost of the stu-
dents. To a great degree it is true: one of the characterizing
features' of the 60's has been the sudden growth into socio-polit-
ical importance of student movements all over the world -a
phenomenon limited neither geographically nor to specific issues.
Any account of such a phenomenon must explain why it came
about when it did, while at the same time identifying its con-
crete socio-historical determinants. Previous decades have also
had their young rebels: the beatniks, the bohemians, etc...
But these earliar groups were both small in number and passive
in outlook, more inclined to indulge in narcotic trips than
to directly question the nature of the society in which they lived.
Coming from the middle and upper classes, they expressed their
rejection of the predominant value system by withdrawing from
society and seeking existential meaning in a different context
that, distorted by alcohol and drugs, was ultimately but an hedo-
nistic mixture of mysticism, nihilism and pop-art. Contrary to
their intent, howerer, their activities tended to reinforce rather
than to weaken the very society that they meant to reject. By
dropping out of their categorical and artificial world, they found
themselves in a domain of immediacy expressing in a smaller
scale all of the broader social contradictions -contradictions that
could not be simply ignored out of existence. The beatnik phenom-
enon of the 50's, in fact, not only drained the main sources of
potential opposition to the system, but, by contraposing what in
terms of prevailing ideological categories appeared as a degener-
ate otherness to the ideal clean-cut and healthy bourgeois
-paradigm, complemented and gave logical consistency to the of-
 Students' Protest, Class-structure, and Ideology 107

ficially proper way of living.

The new breed of students of the 60's differs from its pre-
decessors both in quality and in quantity. Whereas earlier stu-
dent movements were essentially apolitical or outright conser-
vatives that uncritically accepted the values that they found
(with the possible exception of, e.g., some American student
groups in the 30' when the Great Depression briefly radicali-
zed certain sections of the privileged university population), the
new students, although still coming largely from the middle
and upper classes, have become politicized, not in the sense of
accepting a junior partnership within the existing political or-
ganizations of the society in which they live, but by rejecting
outright all authoritarian institutions, whether socialist or capi-
talist, that they accuse of having become practically indistin-
guishable in terms of irrationality and disregard for human
values.
The ubiquitous presence of student movements and their
intrinsic similarities indicate that the various established socio-
economic systems are fundamentally equal in some very impor-
tant respects -their claims to the contrary notwithstanding. The
Red Guards' struggle against the new Chinese bureaucracy,
the American students' siege of Berkeley, Columbia, etc., the
French students' May revolt, the Berlin students' agitation
against the Springer organization, have all a common matrix.
Whether one calls the object of their rebellion unidimension-
ality, technistic alienation, or simply bureaucracy, does not
matter: the substance remains the same.. The compulsive need
to attain increasingly higher levels of industrialization in order
to win the economic race set in motion by peaceful coexistence*
between the two super-powers, or Europe's attempts to catch
up with the advanced industrial countries, or even the efforts
to escape sub-human conditions of existence in most of the
Third World, have made technology and the demand for techni-
cally competent personnel a sine qua non conditio in the life
of modern society. Such a precondition can only be met by mas-
sive educational programs which, in the most advanced coun-
tries, have opened to large sections of the population the edu-
cational opportunities that were hitherto the exclusive preroga-
tive of a privileged elite: future working classes will need uni-
versity degrees in order to perform meaningful social roles. But
 108 TELOS

in as far as education is also self-development and self-realization,

efforts to prepare large groups of young people to meet the new
industrial requirements have resulted in counterfinalities that
threaten the very foundation of the systems involved.
The educational sword is double-edged. While it produces
the kind of technical experts required by the increasingly more
intricate industrial system, it also produces a large number of
people able and willing to investigate their predictment, and seek
changes in case that such an investigation produces unsatis-
factory conclusion. In terms of the prevailing ideologies, such
an enlightened state of affairs presents no substantial threat
since all systems assume themselves as fundamentally perfect
or roughly so: liberal democracies claim to be self-corrective
and thus automatically receptive to all criticism, while so-
cialist societies see themselves as the bridge to a really rational
kind of social life (communism) and therefore immune from
any type of attack. In fact, however, the situation is quite dif-
ferent. Without indulging here in a much needed analysis of the
internal contradictions of socialist societies, it is important to
reiterate how societies such as the United States turn out to be
self-corrective only in those details whose alteration leaves the
socio-economic structure unaflected. What results from this peri-
pherical self-correction is only a superficially ultra-rational sys-
tem meant to expedite and occlude the fundamentally irrational
structure. Self-correction obtains only if it takes place within
the general institutional context whose sophistication has reach-
ed such a degree that it can use its very critics as apologists for
the system that they criticize. Thus, the existence of such cri-
tics is often adduced as proof that the society is in fact free
although in practice they hardly ever result in more than sensa-
tional acoustical disturbances: what Marcuse calls pure tolerance
is feasible since it never results in consequential changes. An
excellent example of this can be found in the massive and per-
sistent criticism of the Viet-Nam war that has resulted in
exactly nothing notwithstanding its validity and pertinence. But
the students qua students exist in a kind of social limbo where
what is de jure required of them is essentially to learn and
think in order to eventually become active participants in their
society. The result is that when social contradictions become too
blunt as with the systematic exclusion from social life of a
 Students' Protest, Class-structure, and Ideology 109

significant segment of the population (the negroes), or the Uni-

ted States' involvement in a civil war (Viet-Nam) in support of
an incompetent and corrupt government whose only asset is to
favor American economic exploitation of their resources, stu-
dents are the groups most likely to rebel since they have not
yet been integrated into a society so committed, and feel them-
selves free from the direct socio-economic commitments that
prevent other classes from undertaking any kind of sustained
protest.
Present American society, in fact, is such that almost all
classes have been fully integrated into the affluent society thus
making radical criticism of the prevailing state of affairs rare
and ineffective. Even in the case of the previously mentioned
critcism of the Viet-Nam war, its bulk was not radical in char-
acter, but only concerned with inefficiency, unnecessary ex-
penditures, waste of American lives, etc... The ruling bourgeoi-
sie is fundamentally agreed on the acceptance of exsting ir-
rationalities (e.g., production for profits and not for needs), and
its internal disagreements concern only secondary details such
as what is euphemistically called the rate of social integration
of presently underprivileged minorities. The traditional indus-
trial proletariat, on the other hand, instead of performing a re-
volutionary role as predicted by classical marxist theory, is more
concerned with defending their newly acquired affluence than
with class-struggle in the traditional sense, while the negroes
are primarily interested in meaningfully participating in the
society that, at best, relegates them to the role of secondary citi-
zens (a growing number of negro groups, however, are begin-
ning to discover the socio-economic roots of their predictment).
Thus, the students remain de facto the only radical and progres-
sive elements within such a society in the sense of questioning
irrational foundations and demanding a radical restructuring ac-
cording to humanistic criteria, since not only are they best train-
ed to comprehend the society's irrational character, but they
are also the ones whose lives happen to be directly threatened
at this time by having to fight a war which they do not support.
But, as Debray put it in the opening paragraph of Revolu-
tion in the Revolution?, history approaches hidden by a mask,
it comes into the scene with the mask of the preceeding scene
such that the whole drama becomes incomprehensible. Thus the
110 TELOS

students' movement tends to misunderstand its character and

misplan its role by looking at itself through ideological glasses
of the past no longer applicable to interpret the changed con-
ditions of the present. Notwithstanding the fact that internal
communism had been successfully smothered in the 50's during
the McCarthy era, and anarchism had been eliminated with Sac-
co and Vanzetti in the 20's, when the educational explosion of
the 60's sharply increased the students' population, and the
negro plight and the Viet-Nam war radicalized it, marxism and
anarchism spontaneously appeared again as the two models most
readily available and immediately applicable. Overlooking the
objective conditions of their existence, the American students see
their revolutionary role as, at best, catalytic in nature. To what
an extent does this outlook correspond to reality?
Engaged as it is in an artificial racial war with the negro
subproletariat on one hand, and with galloping automation on
the other, the American industrial proletariat has long since
ceased to be a progressive force. The fact that it responds poli-
tically only when its most immediate interests are at stake, and
then not as they affect it as a class but as they affect those la-
bor-unions that allegedly represent it, most strikingly shows its
involution from the glorious 30's when its telos was still uni-
versal. The restrictive unions' apprentiship rules that have trans-
formed certain occupations into many privileged fiefs in the
hands of a new workers' aristocracy, its quichotic struggle
against the windmills of automation, its silence or outright sup-
port of the Viet-Nam war, its hostility towards the negroes, and
other suchlike characteristics, readily attest to the degeneration
and the integration of organized labor into the existing system.
For example, the AFL-CIO, the largest union in the world, de-
cided to organize some sections of Honk-Kong's working class
not because of any international spirit of solidarity, but only
when it realized that the low cost of their products resulting
from sweat-shop wages was becoming a threat to their corres-
ponding products in the American market. The subsequent
campaign that ensued was carried out by the union in coopera-
tion with both managment who sought to reduce competition
for their products, and the CIA that wanted to prevent a genu-
ine radicalization of Hong-Kong's working class. This is what
has happened to the revolutionary spirit of organibed labor in
 Students' Protest, Class-structure, and Ideology 111

the United States. Considered independently of its alleged re-

presentative organs, the members of the industrial proletariat
as individuals do not present a much more encouraging picture.
Although their authoritarian and de-humanized working condi-
tions occasionally lead them to react strongly to immediate work
situations, this hatred hardly ever develops into any meaningful
political activity and is readly sublimated away through the
various readily available social mechanisms whose latent function
is precisely that of a safety-valve for this kind of aggression (e.g.,
anticommunism, sports, etc.).
But the fundamental social determinations remain capital-
ist in character, and domination and exploitation of man by
man continues to be the basic fact of such a society: thus the
marxist approach, that Lukacs defined as the self-consciousness
of capitalist society, remains essentially valid. But since in
marxist theory the basic categories of analysis are not externally
imposed and must themselves arise from the concrete context,
it is dogmatic and undialectical to hold any previously reached
conclusion as valid independently of a concrete analysis of. ob-
jective conditions. In this sense, that the proletariat is the a-
gency of revolution must be a conclusion of such an analysis
and not an axiom-like premise as it is used in many standard
marxist arguments. Any analysis of this kind readily reveals
that: (1) Psychologically, the proletarians are fully integrated
within the system and, although they are likely to make serious
efforts to secure a managerial or white collar occupation for
their offsprings, they see the present system to be in no need of ra-
dical changes. (2) Their standards of living are far above a level
that would warrant a militant attitude so that they are more
prone to react to the negro revolution than to any talk of
structural exploitation. And (3), the American proletariat is
a rapidly diminishing class that is giving way to what Gal-
braith calls the technostructure, which is coming to assume all
of the proletariat's class-contradictions.
The first point requires little or no argumentation beyond
what has been given by C. W. Mills' White Collar, or most
other analysis of the existing class-structure. This does not
mean that industrial conflict, for instance, has been overcome.
Quite the contrary: given the existing state of affairs, conflict
is inherent in. the very system. The important fact, however, is
112 TELOS

that this conflict can and has been effectively neutralized by

means of a multiplicity of mediating agencies to the point where
it can only result in demands and changes that the system can
readily meet with little or no internal disarray. Such a state of
affairs leads to the acceptance of the existing system as inherently
stable, and to the proletarians' concentration of their efforts
for self-improvement within it according to the myth of social
mobility that, in transforming succeding generations of prole-
tarians into technicians, or into membres of the thecnostructure,
simply reproduces in new terms the old irrational conditions of
existence. The integrated character of the traditional proletariat
is not only a passing psychological fact, but one that is likely to
persist in the foreseeable future.
Economic-conditions have also improved considerably and
it is now possible for the affluent society to eliminate poverty
if it were so decided. This economic stabilization, however,
besides condemning to a moronic and passive existence a signi-
ficant segment of the population (the negro subproletariat), can
only take place within an international context that retains un-
changed the present economic conditions of exploitaion thus re-
sulting in further under development of the Third World. Con-
sequently, the immediate interests of the American proletariat,
as construed according to the prevailing labor-union ideology,
are contrary to those of the majority of the world's population.
However, the Third Wolrd's growing turmoil and the resulting
restructuring of prevailing international economic relations will
necessitate internal changes within the United States to the ef-
fect that, in addition to further accelerating present techno-
logical developments as Outles for the economic surplus no longer
employable to extract superprofits from abroad, the present way
of disposing of the growing surplus will become inadequate
thus leaving basic structural changes as the only alternative to
economic chaos (and a possible turn to fascism). It is highly
improbable that the industrial proletariat will play a progressive
and active role in these circumstances, unlike the students and
the intelligentsia that will be vitally involved in any such chan-
ges. Since the price of integration of labor-unions into the sy-
stem has been an economic guarantee to its membership (with
the exception of peripherical elements such as old people and
minority groups), even in a period of crisis the conditions
 Students' Protest, Class-structure, and Ideology 113

of the official proletariat are unlikely to reach the level of po-

verty. Its direct involvment is therefore likely to remain only
marginal or altogether negative.
The third point, i.e., that the traditional industrial prole-
tariat is gradually diminishing to the point of approaching poli-
tical insignificance as a class in the near future, is a logical con-
sequence of the introduction of automation and cybertation.
Manual labor is increasingly becoming a thing of the past in the
modern industrial establishment, and it is likely to disappear
altogether in a few decades from now. If present trends contin-
ue, the armies of industrial workers will soon be displaced by
armies of technicians. Yet, existing relations of production will
remain essentially unchanged and the technicians will function-
ally replace the proletariat in the class-struggle as well. Their
interest in radical changes of the system will not be the result
of sheer economic needs since they will be citizens of the af-
fluent society (even the Johnson administration was seriously
considering the possibility of a guaranteed income). Rather, they
will be necessitated by the quality of life that such a society will
allow. These projections are, of course, largely conjectural: in
history, because of the teleological character of human agents,
predictions become themselves additional initial conditions
such as to occasionally cause their own self-invalidation (a sort
of negative version of Merton's self-fulfilling prophecy). Thev are
useful, however, to indicate the reason for the increasing ob-.
solescence and irrelevancy of the traditional proletariat and the
growing progressive character of the student movement in terms
of the shifting trends of the economic base. As the vanguard of
what will replace the proletariat (i.e., the technostructure), the
student movement represents the rejection of computer exploi-
tation and the level upon which the new class-struggle will have
to be waged: economic strikes will have to give way to political
strikes, representation will have to be checked continually to
guard against bureaucratization, and class emancipation will no
longer mean a fuller stomach or a shiny automobile, but the de-
mand for a freer life within an horizon of reason.
It is important to emphasize the shift .in the American
class-structure which, among other things, has been a significant
factor in the genesis of the student movement" i.e., the drasti-
cally increased rate of mechanization and of automation in in-
114 TELOS

dustry resulting from the compulsive need to both increase pro-

fits and reinvest the surplus within the American system rather
than abroad where liberation movements are rapidly curtailing
markets and making foreign investments increasingly more risky.
Although as students they do not constitute a new class, the
growing army of technicians and white collar workers that they
are to eventually join are a class which is likely to become pre-
dominant both numerically and functionally in the near future.
Within such a context it is futile for the American students
to seek a role as a catalyst for the radicalization of the tradition-
al proletariat -a role ordinarily fulfilled by the party in terms
of Lenin's formulation. As previously indicated, the proletariat
is not only unlikely to respond but, even if did, the changing
class-structure will render it less significant in the future as
a result of numerical decline and of functional obsolescence.
Without at all renouncing direct involvement in the major issues
that are presently tearing American society apart, the most press-
ing task is to seek to expand the students' radical base in the
universities and prevent them from becoming increasingly more
of what they have been up to now: institutions whose latent
function is to integrate the intelligentsia and the technostructure
within the existing system (via military contracts and government-
sponsored research into social problems whose very formula-
tion presupposes that they are not the result of structural de-
ficiencies, but peripheral matters solvable by means of poverty
programs and similar measures acceptable to the system and
to its ideology). If the university can be forced through direct
student involvement to perform its manifest, role of educating
rather than indoctrinating and training, then the future remains
open for the possible formation of the massive political move-
ment without which no revolutionary changes are possible.
The relationship of students to Black Power and similar
negro organizations is also problematic. Although the negroes
need to organize themselves politically arid militarily for self-
defence against institutionalized repression are urgent tasks, it
it highly doubtful that the present separatist direction taken
by Black Power advocates is likely to yield the desired results,
even if variations of this formula have been historically suc-
cessfull for the emancipation of national minority groups such
as the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, etc.. The ordinary justifica-
 Students' Protest, Class-structure, and Ideology 115

tion given for the exclusiveness is that this is the only way to
attain a negro identity which is to permit the negro to assert
himself in American society, forcibly or otherwise. But this way
of posing the problem betrays idealistic assumptions inadvertently
borrowed from white bourgeois culture. The problem is not to
attain identity, since social groups always have an identity both
in the objective as well as in the subjective sense. What is need-
ed is a change of the present identity of the negro which re-
flects objective reality and depicts him as servile, racially inferior,
and culturally backward. The Black Power movement is fully
warranted in seeking such a change. This process, however, is
not simply psychological, but socio-economic as well, since it
involves replacing present negro reality with a different one that
will subsequently create an identity reflecting the new state of
affairs. This new identity cannot be created through a mere psy-
chological reorientation, nor by closing a negro society within its
color boundary, but only by seeking group emancipation in terms
of the determining economic factors that are at the base of the
race issue. This, incidently, is what some of the most progressive
negro groups are doing. Racial issues are almost always ideological
mystifications that occlude their real economic causes by trans-
orming them into psychological and cultural prejudices. Even
when used solely as a tactic, the racial issue, as racial, is likely to
fail since it attacks the effects and not the real causes of the
.problem. Although it can secure immediate and astonishing re-
sults (precisely because it aims at the effects and it approaches
the problem in terms of the ideology of the system), in the long
run it does more damage than good by preventing a genuine
solution and the negro's emancipation. When all the piecemeal
programs will fail, the net result will be simply that the ideologi-
cal fraud whereby a socio-historical phenomenon, the negro
subproletariat, is seen as a' result of the natural inferiority of
the negroes as a race, will boast additional pseudo-evidence for
its support. The only genuine solution lies in the destruction
of the foundations of racism, i.e., the economic svstem that gener-
ates it, and not in the perpetuation and intensification of an
already'impossible situation (the physical separation, of white
and black society) which would simply reproduce present con-
ditions of oppression or,^at best, relegate negroes to the perma-
116 TELOS

nent condition of increasing underdevelopment as is the case

with the Third World.
Carmichael and Hamilton are essentially correct in identi-
fying the plight of the negro as that of the subproletariat kept
out of the system and> through various poverty and welfare
programs, prevented from eventually emancipating from such a
hopeless position. But their analysis falls short when it fails to
give a full account both of the new class-structure and of the
dynamic forces that are presently changing it. The fact that the
negroes are outside of organized labor, and the civil rights move-
ment was partially an attempt to integrate the two, is one
of the most fundamental factors that have contributed to the
political developments of the last few years and have resulted in
the success of Wallace, the ambiguity and de facto split of the
Democratic party and, ultimately, Nixon's victory. Black Power
came about after the civil rights movement, through a misunder-
standing of history and of the dynamics of the system, had po-
larized the integrated industrial proletariat and the uprooted
negro subproletariat into two warring camps. But its very rise
is already a step behind the shifts of objective conditions pro-
duced by the situation of which Black Power is an expression.
Like Hegel's owl of Minerva, political movements have a way
of coming post festum thus capturing the essence of a reality
that has already been displaced. In seeking isolation, Black
Power comes to perform a role that, at best, was appropriate
only for previous stages of the struggle, when polarization was
yet to take place. In the new state of affairs, what is needed is
a.revolutionary coalition of all the progressive elements to form
a political force capable of negating the present system of op-
pression.
The negroes as such are not a class. They are mainly the
great majority of the subproletariat created by the giant steps
made recently by automation and cybernation in modernizing
agriculture and displacing the southern negroes from their rural
abode. Whereas earlier manifestations of the phenomenon such
as Steinbeck's Okies found integration within the industrial
proletariat thanks chiefly to the great artificial demand for man-
power created by the Second World War, the same solution is
no longer feasible since there is no major conflict in progress or
in sight, and the unskilled rural masses cannot be integrated
 Students' Protest, Class-structure, and Ideology 117

within the urban industrial proletariat, which is itself rapidly

dwindling in number as a consequence of the urban version of
the same phenomenon. The negro problem, therefore, is funda-
mentally an expression of the present American system's in-
trinsic inability to cope with the technological advances that it
has itself generated. Any solution outside of this broader con-
text will only intensify the basic problem and possibly create
others.
Given existing objective conditions and the predominant
ideological divisions, the most likely means to bring this about
lies in the creation of a new political party whose immediate
goal is the disocclusion of the crisis of capitalism and of the cri-
sis of man which, on the ultimate analysis, are opposite faces
of the same coin. The crisis of capitalism regards the system's
failure to cope with the conditions that it has generated, while
the crisis of man is his inability to control the sciences and the
technology that he created and which are now turned against him.
The answer lies in the changing of the capitalist system with
one which will allow man to deal with science and with social
institutions as the objects of his own creation and as necessarily
connected with his praxis, unlike under capitalism where the
objectified sciences face man as the structure of an external and
separate world where he is but one object among other objects,
subject to natural laws that completely determine his life and
destiny. What is fatally occluded in such an account is man
as a subject who, although conditioned by his world, can also
change the conditions that condition him. This disocclusion is
itself first and foremost a praxis since it creates the objective
conditions and the class-consciousness necessary for the radical
alteration of the system which could never come about other-
wise. History cannot be consciously done by simply reacting to
our conditions of existence. This would amount to remaining
constantly entrapped in the past and, as in the case of
Achilles' tortoise, to remain always a step behind: as soon as
we react to certain given conditions, we produce others that
necessitate an additional reaction, etc... It is tantamount being
perennial objects and never the subjects of history. What is need-
ed is the suspension of all ideological structures and suchlike
mystifications and, by beginning anew from the living present
118 TELOS

in which we always live, seek their foundation and/or lack there-

of. Such a seemingly ideological preamble is not an idealistic
pseudo-solution, but a necessary moment of every genuine re-
volutionary praxis without which we constantly remain prison-
ers of abstractions whose corresponding reality has long since
gone and whose application often results in consequences com-
pletely different from those initially intended.
The formation of a new party in the United States is neces-
sitated by the total absence of an agency which could represent
the objective interests of the new revolutionary classes: the
technicians of the booming technostructure, and the subprole-
tariat -both recent products of what might be called the cyber-
natic revolution. While the existing Republican party un-
abashedly represents the interest of the small property owners and
of the monopoly capitalists -a class that has given way to the
technostructure only in administrative matters and not in terms
of indirect financial ownership and political control (and this is
where Galbraith's account breaks down: in collapsing the lat-
ter to the former he presents the technostructure as a control-
ling class while it is only an administrative class); and the De-
mocratic party finds its base a flimsy alliance between organ-
ized labor and the upcoming progressive Eastern capitalists,
there is nothing to represent the intellectuals, the new army of
technicians and the subproletariat. While the interests of the Re-
publican party are to retain unchanged the structure on the as-
sumption that it is intrinsically self-correcting (pre-Keynesian
economics), and the Democratic party's progressivism stems
only from the fact that it sees the existing structure as saveable
through the neutralization and integration of new social forces
via state invention Keynesian economics), the new party's goal
will be to radically change the system in the class-interest of
the technicians, the subproletariat, and the intellectuals (Marxist
economics).
Within such a political context the student movement
and the negroes can fully coalesce -unlike in the case of Black
Power where the racial definition a priori rules out such an al-
liance and permits student support only in an external and inef-
ficient way. Such a party will face many obstacles at its inception,
first and foremost from the many existing microscopic but vo-
 Students' Protest, Class-structure, and Ideology 119

ciferous socialist and neo-communist parties that consider them-

selves as performing precisely the function of the new party.
However, these extremist microparties are themselves trapped
in ideological mystifications that have prevented growth in the
past, drain their energies in peripherical quibbles in the present,
and are unlikely to allow a disoccluded understanding of what
is now happening so to offer a meaningful alternative for the fu-
ture. The new party's main function will not be to simply enter
the parliamentary arena and play the ordinary political game,
but to mediate the class-struggle through the generation of a
new class-consciousness.
This programmatic feature is what distinguishes in practice
the American from the European students' movements. In
France and in Italy where the laboring classes allegedly have
more than sufficient representation through officially established
working-classes parties, the American program would lead to
duplications and chaos. Given the nature of international eco-
nomic relationships, Western Europe finds itself in a subordin-
ate position with respect to the United States, and this subordin-
ation cannot be remedied within the existing situation, for the
trend is toward widening rather than closing the gap. The over-
whelming predominance of American capital makes American in-
dustries most receptive to technological innovations thus ren-
dering it internationally non-competitive. American industries'
ability to outproduce any other national industry within its po-
litical sphere of influence (NATO, SEATO, Latin America, etc.)
confines Italian and French, along with many other national in-
dustries, to second-rate status that is likely to continue to deter-
iorate. Thus, whereas the United States can plan and implement
a massive educational program to both man its future industries
and conduct the scientific researches necessary for a planned
rapid growth, the same cannot be done in Western Europe where,
significantly enough, the student movement partly arose as a
reaction to medieval physical facilities in higher education.
Such an international economic context completely alters
the structure of the predominant class-structure and the possi-
bilities for radical changes. The Italian proletarian, for example,
is considerably less integrated than its American counterpart and,
to that extent, much more prone to concretely consider radical so-
 120 TELOS

cial changes. This state of affairs conditions even those few in-
dustries where wages and working conditions are considerably
above average, in so far as the privileged workers are more ex-
posed to working-class ideology -unlike the United States
where the total absence of a political left with a broad follow-
ing intensifies the ideological integration of all sectors of the in-
dustrial proletariat. I'he revolutionary potentials of the working
class, however, is social-democratized and mediated into political
insignificance by the gradualist ideology of the official working-
class parties that, in order to attain respectability and enter into
the parliamentary game, have had to temporarily shelve revolution
ary plans for some future occasion when political majority will
eventually be attained. The de facto integration of the working-
class parties, unfortunately, has itself become a significant factor
preventing the attainment of such a popular majority considered
as a precondition for radical changes, since the game of formal
democracy involves the watering down of precisely that revolutio-
nary discourse that could attract and homogenize the working-
class into a radical movement. Class-struggle and class-conscious-
ness, therefore, attain a new form.
The student movements in Western Europe, particularly in
Italy and France, originated not primarily from the intensifica-
tion of social contradictions and massive growth of higher educa-
tion as in the United States; on the vontrary, as a reaction to the
increased demand for technically competent manpower and the
backwardness of old educational programs. As in the United
States, however, the whole thing immediately took a political
turn since the roots of the problems were found to be political in
nature: the hope for a meaningful change were discovered to be
bound up with the restructuring of society as a whole. The imme-
diate answer was to look at the proletariat as the agency of chan-
ge thus bypassing the official parties that had obviously degener-
ated beyond any hope. But, again unlike in the United States
where massive Federal and State aids to higher education had
made it possible for working-class youth to begin to attend uni-
versities, in Italy and in France the university population still
reflected the more rigid class-structure and the radical students
were overwhelmingly of middle and upper-class origins. The dia-
logue with the proletariat was thus stalemated not primarily by
the degree of embourgeoisization of the proletariat, but by the
 Students' Protest, Class-structure, and Ideology 121

class differences existing between the two.

Yet, given the objective conditions of Western European
capitalism, it is obvious that in the immediate future, due to the
existence of much smaller markets and to the concomitant lack
of the capital required, it will be unable to either introduce auto-
mation and cybernation nearly as rapidly as its American counter-
part thus liquidating the proletariat as the numerically and
functionally predominant class, or to invest the huge amounts of
capital needed to revitalize and update the system of higher edu-
cation. With the possible exception of occasional integration of
markets as it happened with the Common Market, the prospect
for the future is increased stagnation as a consequence of the
inability to compete with the industrial might of the United
States, and as a result of the invasion of European industries by
American capital.
This state of affairs creates a highly explosive situation, for
the new developments of mass communications produce rising
expections, since the standards of living of the most advanced
societies are immediately known all over the world and create
a ubiquitous demand. Since revolutions do not take place as a re-
sult of poverty and privation per se, but are the result of the di-
vergence between objective possibilities and reality, when the
new expectations will be systematically frustrated because of the
structure of international monopoly capital -as it is already hap-
pening now- the winds of revolution will become considerably
stronger. Within such a context, the student movement, limited
by its class-character will have to seek a catalytic role as a media-
ting agency between the bureaucratized party structure and the
alienated working-class in the effort to create a dynamic revolu-
tionary movement for the eventual overthrowing of the present
system.
The experience of May in France indicates the fragility of
the predominant political consensus and how easily it can preci-
pitate into a major crisis. It also indicates the bankruptcy of the
bureaucratic structure of the alleged working-class parties and
the negative social-democratic role which they have come to per-
form. What is needed is precisely that kind of dynamic infrastruc-
ture that not only radicalizes the working classes out of the pre-
dominant petty bourgeois Weltanschauung according to which
the telos is participation in the affluent society, but that can pre-
.122 TELOS

sent itself as a constant alternative to the party's bureaucratic

structure in case the latter fails, as it did in France, to carry out
its manifest role. The student movement, by cooperating with the
working-class' base, must organize itself into a potential alter-
native to the party's and the labor-unions' bureaucratized leader-
ship -a role both difficult and demanding which requires a high
degree of theoretical preparation as well as a persistence that goes
well beyond the neo-romantic involvement of some of the stu-
dents who find in protest a suitable substitute and sublimation
for the sexual and other more mundane frustations generated by
the affluent society.
These tactical and organizational differences of the various
student movements do not entail forfeiting the universal telos of
a rational global society or, in marxist terminology, the rejection
of internationalism. Rather, it means taking into full account ex-
isting objective conditions which, although all inextricably inter-
connected, necessitate different revolutionary' activities in order
to eventually attain the same goal. Thus, the American industrial
and financial infiltration of Western European economics is a
significant factor, among other things, in the creation of an effi-
cient and modern system of higher education in the United
States, and in the retention of an inadequate one in Europe. And
Western Europe's reliance on the new electronic and para-mili-
tary American industries for the most advanced technological
products (computers, precision machine tools, etc.) reinforces the
same phenomenon. Yet, the destruction of the system of mono-
poly capitalism that permits and requires these and other much
more disastrous relationships (i.e., the underdevelopment of the
Third World, and the persistence of a war economy) necessitates
different projects and activities of the various student movements
in the two different contexts. The universal character of these stu-
dent movements requires this specificity precisely in order to at-
tain a universal goal, for to seek to apply the same methods and
tactics universally amounts to reproduce precisely the kind of
mystification that was one of the major causal factors in the crea-
tion of the present critical situation.