318
ANDRE GORZ
ganization whose apparent technical rationality is both the objectifica–
tion and the mask of a political rationality - of a technique of domina–
tion. This challenge presupposes a practical knowledge of the process
of production and of business organization in order to change it, to
place it under the control of the "associated producers," to replace
hierarchical division with voluntary division of labor.
It
is only on the basis of this effective critique of the division of
labor that the critique of an education which directly (in technical
or professional schools) or indirectly trains the managers, the operators
and those who are left by the wayside in capitalist production, can in
its turn become effective. The destruction of the university and of class–
based education is therefore not the concern exclusively of the students;
it is the concern, especially, of the working class, if capitalist division
of labor, of which school is the matrix, is to be overcome.
The crisis of the university and the workers' revolt against the
despotism of the factory lend to this question an immediate reality. And
if the conjunction of these two aspects of the same crisis - the crisis of
the division of labor - does not issue in an effective alliance of students
and workers and in a reciprocal critique of methods of training and of
domination, the fault does not lie with the student movement; it falls
upon tht! traditional organizations of the working class who are doing
everything possible to maintain students in the university ghetto in order
to better control workers' demands.
If
the necessary violence of the
student struggle then tends to wear itself out in symbolic insurrections
in the isolated arena of the university, it is not because of some perverse
taste for meaningless violence; it is because violence alone is able to
break down, if only temporarily, the encirclement of the university
ghetto and to pose a problem whose existence reformists of every de–
scription prefer to ignore. This problem - the crisis of bourgeois institu–
tions and ideology and of the division of labor - is a political problem
par excellence.
It
is not enough for political parties to reject any signif–
icance and any political translation of student violence for that violence
to become ,an expression of vandalism; it is political violence, politically
necessary, if not sufficient.
Andre Gorz
