The growth of the women's movement, challenging women's subordinate role as mediated by the family, can in this sense promote struggles that have a clear anti- capitalist logic. Ever - wider layers, fighting for rights seen as important to them, can begin to understand through experience that the roots of their oppression lie in class society itself and can only be uprooted with destruction of class rule.
Fear of this thrust explains the mass campaign launched from Tory 'back - benchers' to Church dignitaries against the limited rights won by women under the 1957 Abortion Act. Such a campaign represents, beneath the 'emotionally' deceiving propaganda about 'protecting life!, a major efiort to re-establish the stability of the family which is seen as particularly important at a time oi social unrest.
Identifying with & helping to build a mass wom.ens' movement - capable of drawing ever-wider layers into struggle ior their rights - is a key task for socialists. The fact that such a movement does not yet exist, that it is fragmented and polis mainly due to a default in leadership by the marxist left which has consistently shown an economist and sectarian attitude.
moverent - particularly, at this stage, around the issue oi defending abortion rights - socialists are also confronted with the task of 'breaking down! sexist prejudice within the broader labour movement which can be played on (like race prejudice) to divide and weaken working people.
The only way the government has been able to get away with its offensive against jobs and living standards is because this offensive tends to fall heaviest upon women who are not considered 'integral' to the labour movement. Unemployment affects women at twice the rate of men; 'wage restraint! reduces womens' chances of equal pay; social service cut - backs pull women out of the labour force as child-care facilities Building a mass women's movement - and carrying the demands of that movement into the labour force - is key in ensuring that the working class is united in its response to government attacks & that the most oppressed are not allowed to 'go to' the wall' in the interests of the more privileged Mass action essential to win women's rights Students have, over the past decade, been to the fore of almost all social struggles. The main force in support of the Vietnamese revolution in the middle Isixties; they played a vital role in building the Civil Rights movement in N. Ireland; in promoting the womens' movement and have been active - as during the 1974 miners' strike - in supporting and identifying with the struggles of the labour movement.
The roots of this radicalisation can be traced to the changed social role of students in the postwar years. Since the war, the student population has expanded dramatically in almost every major capitalist country. Such an expansion, reflected in Britain in a rise from a mere 39, 000 in 1939 to a projected 405, 000 in 1980, has been dictated by an increasingly technological industry requiring a much more highly-skilled workforce.
Though conditioned by social background, the majority of students are no longer destined, as in the pre-war years, to become a 'managerial elitel but a highly skilled component of the labour movement; i. e. teachers, engineers & technicians. This fact - coupled with the intellectual stimuli & relative freedom of student life - means that they can be radicalised by and respond in large numbers to major developments in the class struggle.
The subordination of education to the needs of industry had already promoted, by the late 'sixt -ies, a deepening alienation of the student body from the university structure and course content as well as from the wider social values that university was seen to represent. This alienation was reflected in both specifically student action - e.g. the 'files' issue in 1970 - and attempts to link up their struggles with broader social forces challenging class society.
In the late 'sixties, at a time when the labour movement was relatively passive, the focal point oi this alienation was the colonial struggles in Vietnam and No Ireland where students were the backbone of the rising solidarity movements. As the labour movement has increasingly swung into action over the past decade - and as students have begun to share 'common' problems with it such as 'cut-backs' and inflation-ridden grants -they have increasingly identified with its rhythm of struggle.
Such identification has not eliminated the need for specific student action such as, for example, the fight over student union autonomy against the Heath government in 1972 or, more recently, the 'grants campaigni of 1974-5. What it does mean is that, increasingly recognising the common interests shared by students and workers in the fight against social expenditure cuts and unemp|oyment, there has been a growing identity in struggle as on the November 1975 demonstration against the cuts where students were heavily represented.
The radicalisation over the past decade or so indicates that the campuses have become permanent centres of dissatisfaction and protest. This is not, of course, to deny that there cannot be temporary lulls in activity as has happened over the past few years. Such 'downturns! should not
be mistaken, however, either with a basic shift to the 'right' (mirrored in the growth of Tory societies) or a long phase of political apathy. That would be to misunderstand the fact that the causes of the student upsurge are rooted in objective factors, which will continue in the period ahead, and are not mere protests of a moral nature.
The reasons for the temporary downturn over the past few years are a combination of a) the relative passivity of the labour movement with which students increasingly identify; and b) the IGHT CUTS TEACHER UNEMPLOYMEN CHILD ILLITERACY
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