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vancement for everyone) led the movement to antihierarchical and
egalitarian positions: in order for everyone to have the right to an
education, that education, no longer a class privilege, must no longer
confer the right to any kind of privilege. Holders of higher degrees
would have to accept working with their hands, which led to the ques–
tioning and rejection of the social division of labor, of the technical
division of labor which is modeled on it and of any hierarchical struc–
ture of work.
But it was impossible to stop there, for from the moment one
accepts the proposition that education does not lead to a career, one
has to redefine the nature of education, its content and its meaning:
since it does not confer a "useful culture," it must confer a "rebel
culture"; since it does not correspond to a demand of society, it must
respond to the demand of the students who intend to destroy that so–
ciety and its division of labor.
Now, the university is by nature incapable of responding to that
demand: it is functional neither in relation to the demands of the
capitalist economy nor in relation to the demands of those who want
to overthrow capitalism; it dispenses neither a "useful culture" nor a
"rebel culture" (which, by definition, is not dispensed ) ; it dispenses a
university culture,
that it to say, knowledge
separated
from any produc–
tive 'Or militant practice. In short, it is a place where one can pass one's
time in neither a useful nor an interesting way. No type of reform can
change this situation. There can therefore be no question of reforming
the university, but only of destroying it to destroy both the culture sep–
arated from the people that it incarnates (mandarin culture) and the
social stratification whose instrument, in spite of everything, it remains.
5. Such are the facts that guerrilla warfare in the university il–
luminates; it shortens the agony of a moribund institution and reveals
the hyprocrisy of the bodies that defend it. Do you object that the left–
ist students will be able neither to put something else in its place nor to
change society so that that something else may be viable? That's ob–
vious: the students can, by themselves, neither produce another culture
nor make the revolution. What they can do, however, is to prevent
the acute crisis of bourgeois institutions, of the division of labor and
of the selection of "elites," from being masked. That is what they are
doing (and it is what all partisans of order - of this order or another,
just as authoritarian and hierarchical- criticize them for) . Alone they
can go no further: destruction and even challenge that are
effective
(and no longer only ideological) against the division of labor cannot
be carried on in universities; they can only be carried on in factories
and businesses. They presuppose the critical analysis of a productive or-
