Bob M writes from the far north (actually just the middle if you look at
the map, he lives near Umeå) of Sweden:
Buy the way the school principle yesterday announced at a mass gathering
of students that Bob will be employed another year at school. This only
after being confronted with all the students threatening a strike or riot
in school on Friday which would have been my last day.. Two minutes later
in my office she screamed at me. "Bob, we don't like having a gun pointed
at our heads!"
Now this is not "communism" ala Mezaro. But the kids did take a great step
showing there social power against a horde of bureaucrats and politicians
who are constantly trying to screw them. But this is only one small
battle and not winning the war.
And it will take a vanguard party at the head of the working class to win
the war.
This is a concrete sign of the upsurge taking us along with it. Popular
social pressure forcing the oppressors to cave in -- however unwillingly or
temporarily. Now what we need is for the growing numbers of militants being
carried on the wave in various places to link up and join forces to create
the vanguard party that is needed to win the war -- in other words needed
to make sure this upsurge doesn't ebb away again and leave us high and dry
like the last few times (postwar and 1968 for instance).
This is also linked to a wave of mass student strikes that have broken out
this week up here in the north with the attempts to fire all kurators,
school nurses and school phycologists. Interestingly enough it happens to
be people claiming to be "Trotskyists" that are being blamed for all this
stuff. However not the ICL unfortunately.
Of course Bob's individual fate in the school is linked to the mass
experience in the schools in his region.
This is important stuff. Chile under Allende was full of student
mobilizations, as was 1968 a little earlier, and as France has been for
many years now. Ten years ago a Swedish government was brought down by a
secondary students' mobilization.
And Bob should give honour where honour's due -- it's the CWI, Militant,
that have put in the organizing spadework and are getting spat on by the
reactionaries. Now, they are very sectarian and monopolistic, so their
chances of handling this well and succeeding to mobilize nationwide and
among the broad working masses are very slim. We've seen the failures they
ran into in Britain, in Liverpool and in the Poll Tax mobilization, for
instance, which have lost them a very strong vanguard position in that
country. But in Sweden at the moment they're the most vigorous force for
socialist action.
Cheers,
Hugh
PS Mezsaros's heart's in the right place, but like many academics (and not
just academics) he's hanging around the sidelines till he feels more
confident that there's something really there to join in with. Those of us
who are trying to get the bandwagon rolling shouldn't condemn this so much
as see it for what it is, use the good stuff that such observers produce
(as opposed to stifling passivizing crap a la Henwood Observatory) and get
those who are willing to build the bandwagon now to do a damn good job so
it gets moving quicker.
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