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NORMAN BIRNBAUM
In France, the student movement (aided by other intellectuals and
the left university teachers' organization) led the movement against the
war in Algeria in a period in which the unions and the French Com–
munist Party were far from prominent in their opposition. In Germany,
the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutsche Studentenbund) was expelled from the
Social Democratic Party and ever since has had at best ambiguous and
at worst hostile relationships to the German trade unions. The alliance
of students and younger workers in the French May events, as exciting
and portentous as it was, has not proven durable: the majority of the
French working class has remained, after the initial wave of enthusiasm
for the general strike in ' .fay, quite loyal to the established and bu–
reaucratic leadership of th :: traditional French left. The choice of allies
by the student movements, then, reflects their awareness of their isola–
tion from the traditional socialist and reformist forces. The student
movement as a self-designated socialist vanguard has quite abandoned
(and been abandoned by) the organization of the working class.
But despite their relative isolation, the students seem to have re–
vivified everywhere some of the most profound critical traditions. In the
United States, everyone talks of "pragmatism" and means by this a
resolution
not
to experiment, to support the bureaucratic centralization
characteristic of a society dominated by giant corporate enterprise. The
American student movement, however (and some of its adult mentors),
takes "pragmatism" quite seriously: it intends to experiment with new
forms of communal association and control, and manifests a curiously
Yankee faith in the possibilities of a humanity living on a different
scale. Like the German and French students, the American students
see bureaucratization as the incarnation of the forces against which they
are struggling; they therefore refuse political solutions which would
entail the utilization of bureaucracy for different or newer ends. And
they justify their refusal by citing the sociological principle that large–
scale organizations tend to dictate societal ends as well as means.
The French and German student movements, which confront stag–
nant yet formidable working-class movements, have had the advantage
of working with a socialist tradition, if a desiccated one. Not surprisingly,
they have turned to neglected aspects of those traditions. In France, the
vocabulary and program of the student revolt constituted a rebirth of
the anarcho-syndicalist tradition, once so prominent in French socialism–
much to the astonishment and dismay of that most Leninist of parties,
the French Communist Party. In Germany, the student movement's
efforts to mobilize working-class support have followed from theories of
mass action derived from Rosa Luxemburg's critique of German Social
Democracy's rigidity. Both the German and French student movements,
