Note: The thoughts first articulated here some 50+ years ago, in inimitable style, appear to have defined David North's political trajectory, particularly in the most recent decades. The observation - formally correct - that the universities and the educated middle classes are the source of the ideological diseases attacking the working class, lead to the conclusion that the struggles amongst this sector were the "frontline" of the fight for a working class perspective, and the idea of a "student intelligentsia" with "the responsibilities of leadership." The conclusion, properly drawn, is the need to fight to build a cadre of worker-intellectuals capable of serving as an alternative pole of attraction to the middle class intelligentsia, into which the "student intelligentsia" will enter as a subordinate part.
Why Tyler Attacked The Workers League
By David North
At first glance, I was somewhat surprised to find myself the object of a polemical attack that appeared in the March 2nd edition of the [Paper]. I simply shrugged my shoulders and assumed that there lives on this campus someone named after this country's tenth president who hates me. But after some though I decided that John Tyler's article could not be dismissed so lightly. His attitude toward me had not developed out of personal contact; I have not met the boy, and until his article was published did not even know that he existed. The campus directory states that John Tyler is a sophomore; therefore I hope to find a copy of last year's freshmen handbook so that I may at least know what this lilliputian looks like. As neither of us know each other, it became clear to me that his attack against me was essentially political. The fact that it was phrased with the language of insults can be attributed to vulgar manners.
The fact that his article was written to settle political - as opposed to personal - accounts can be gleaned from a consideration of its contents. The setting for Tyler's assault was a little piece on apathy: the common theme of ageing adolescents who in their days of high school glory tirelessly promoted football games, cheerleading, assembly programs, sophomore hops, junior proms, senior balls, honor systems, traffic squads, and all other activities recommended in eighth grade civics textbooks. Such sanctimonious bores remain forever anxious to organize indifference under Roberts' Rules; for they never doubt the world-historical role played by student councils in forging those Democratic virtues found in successful insurance salesmen.
Traditionally, such types found their comfortable niches at college. Richard Nixon - we are assured by Life Magazine - was the pride of Whittier. But our times are somewhat more difficult: the indifferent are reluctant to submit to organization. John Tyler consequently feels estranged from his contemporaries. Not only have they failed to appreciate his splendid qualifications for the position undergraduate secretary-treasurer, but also have gone so far as to abolish the position altogether.
Tyler attributes the apathy of the undergraduates to their grave character faults. He accuses them of "hypocrisy," "egocentrism," "cynicism," etc. Entirely preoccupied with the problem of organization, he defines apathy as a problem of inertia rather than consciousness. Therefore, Tyler feels that apathy can be overcome by compelling students to move rather than think. He has not the slightest interest in what he is organizing. Guided by his belief in activity as a fine way to pass the day, it is likely that Tyler would most enjoy supervising a watertreading marathon in which questions relating to purpose and goal would be of no consequence.
A natural companion to Tyler's devotion to organizational activism is his hostility to the raising of political issues before the student body. Throughout his article Tyler associates apathy with political diversity and suggests that the function of organization is to smash independent political thought. Above all, Tyler wishes to organize the campus against politics. For example, he asserts in the seventh paragraph that "The absence of any institutional structure of college governance has led to an anarchy where the power of special interest groups holds away (sic). Widespread apathy has all to frequently allowed a small radical directorate to speak for the entire student body."
It must be understood that in posing the issue of apathy, Tyler does not hope to encourage political awareness and social action. It is his intention to destroy whatever tendencies students may have in that direction.
Having exposed the nature of Tyler's concern with apathy and its profoundly reactionary implications, it is possible to comprehend the significance of the attack launched against me in his article.
The careful reader should not make the mistake of assuming that Tyler haphazardly inserted a paragraph which laments the continued presence of my "tired face" in the midst of an article ostensibly concerned with apathy. Similarly, Tyler did not denounce my "radical chic" efforts in behalf of the "greening of Trinity" merely to playfully regurgitate the titles or bestsellers that he hopes to read. Within the rickety framework of his essay, it is quite natural that there be found a slander against my recent activities as a representative of the Workers League.
Tyler recognizes instinctively that the Workers League, a revolutionary Trotskyist party, threatens to turn students toward the question of a theoretical and political struggle against the bourgeois state. It is not my tired face that offends Tyler. Rather, it is the fact that the distribution of the Workers League Bulletin is part of an effort to raise the political consciousness of American students to the level at which they will be able to understand the political tasks required by the class struggle, the Workers League is not merely a new political organization that draws its motivation from the need to regiment apathy. The Workers League promises to combat the lethargy of students by having them confront the historical roots of their current - and temporary - dysfunction.
The immediate task of the Workers League is the development of a revolutionary working class party. It does not attribute to the students of this country a revolutionary role disconnected from that of the American proletariat. Nevertheless, the Workers league must bring the struggle for consciousness into the nation's campuses, for it understands that students - the heirs of a bankrupt society - are wavering in their allegiance to the state. At the same time, in the course of their struggle to liberate themselves from their ossified and strangled political development, students are susceptible to the most vagrant political tendencies. It is on the campuses that reformism, communalism, stalinism, and other forms of revisionism are most flagrantly exhibited. Once infected, students do not linger quietly, but carry their plague-bacillus into the working class. And it is there that the revisionist disease has its most virulent consequences.
The Workers League is not attempting to organize students as volunteers for the class struggle; for this conflict history has automatically recruited them. Nor is the Workers League interested merely in winning the passive support of students for the cause of the proletariat. A revolutionary movement thrusts upon the student intelligentsia the responsibilities of leadership. In posing the theoretical and political issues of the class struggle before students, the Workers League is drawing them into the fight for a revolutionary consciousness within the proletariat itself.
At some point in his article, Tyler spoke of my contempt for the "working classes of Middle America." Marxists do not consider the proletariat to be citizens of that geographical figment of the bourgeois imagination. And even if they once were, the intensification of the class struggle - as expressed in the actions of the Newark teachers, the Des Moines construction workers, the New York police - has forced the workers to embark for more revolutionary shores.
