Students' Protest, Class Structure, and Ideology

In: Telos, Band 2, Heft 1, S. 106-122

Abstract

The sudden growth of the student movements around the world in the 1960's & their intrinsic similarities indicate that the established SE systems share a fundamentally parallel matrix that is the source & target of protest. The object of student rebellion has been described as unidimensionality, technistic alienation or simply the pervasiveness of bur'ization in societies that engage in peripheral self-correction & superficial rationalization of a basically irrational whole. Students are in a favorable position to question the foundations of the soc order because they are not fully integrated & committed structurally, they are the best trained to comprehend the system's actual workings, & they are confronting its irrationalities in their everyday life. In the US, the industr proletariat has been largely integrated into the system, so that its conflicts are expressed as drives for self-improvement & SM within the existing framework. The protests of the student movement against indoctrination & training, & the demands for a critical educ within the U reflect the needs of the rising class of technical workers for a freer life with greater options within the horizon of reason. However, the student movements of Western Europe have not originated from the massive growth of higher educ demanded by a structural need for technically competent manpower, but rather from the backwardness of the old educ'al programs. Whereas a new party linking students & the oppressed minorities in the sub-proletariat is lacking in the US, in Western Europe the student movement has to seek a catalytic role as a mediating agency between the bur'ized leftist party & the alienated Wc. The 2 diff projects confronting the student movements in the 2 correspondingly distinct contexts are in pursuit of the universal goal of ultimately permitting people to shape sci, technology & soc instit's as objects of their own creation, necessarily connected with their praxis so that people as subjects are not only conditioned by their world, but can also consciously alter their environment. A. Karmen.