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EYE WITNESS ACCOUNT
I was a member of the CPGB from 1971 to 1975, and an active member of its Oxford Student Branch from May 1971 to July 1973. From late 1972 to July 1973 I was also a member of the CP's South Midlands District Committee and of the latter's Secretariat, as well as a peripheral member of the CP-led Left Caucus in the NUS. In all the Party meetings I attended, I never once heard the CP's fundamental strategy for the student movement so much as discussed. It was an unspoken premise of what was discussed. But that is not to say that everyone actually knew what it was. It would be more accurate to say that most student Communists assumed that there was a coherent strategy and assumed that they knew roughly what it was, while the actual business of discussing strategy was very carefully confined to a tiny circle of initiates. All I ever heard discussed were tactical and organisational questions, and questions of doctrine (but doctrine – the Line – was a matter of tactics rather than strategy).
I knew very well what I was about, in the particular context of Oxford student politics at that time. I set out, in mid-1970, long before joining the CP, to establish a proper Student Union at Oxford University, and by mid-1973 I had established it. And from July 1972 onwards I had got the Oxford Student Branch of the CP to back me in this purpose. But I cannot honestly say that I knew what the CP as a whole was about in student politics at the national level. I was not very interested in the national level of student politics and I operated on vague assumptions rather than an intimately informed understanding with respect to it. And it has since taken me many years to develop an understanding of what the CP was really up to in those days that satisfies my sense of truth.
It would not be entirely accurate to say that the student movement was merely a figment of the CP's imagination. It achieved a kind of existence for a while. But, in so far as it actually existed, it was certainly a creation of the CP's will. It was the CP's alternative to the New Left's notion of the 'student revolt'. The New Left was into revolts. The CP was into movements.
The New Left was not into leading revolts. It was merely into getting excited about the revolts that somehow or other contrived to occur, here and there, from time to time, and putting pretentious literary glosses on them in the name of 'theory'. The CP was not into organising movements. It was into manipulating existing organisations and institutions in the name of 'movements' which existed primarily in the realm of its own wishful thinking. But it invested enough energy in this activity to endow the postulated movements with an intermittent semblance of life.
The student movement was not only an alternative to the student revolt. It was also, and above all, an alternative to what the various Trotskyist groups were up to in the student sphere.
Because the New Left, once Perry Anderson & Co. had seized control of the New Left Review, was oriented exclusively towards academia and had no ambitions of its own in the sphere of practical politics, it posed no real threat to the CP, and the CP contrived to establish a comfortable relationship it. NLR kept its lines open to the CP by having a Communist don at Cambridge, Bob Rowthorne, on its editorial board, by publishing whatever Eric Hobsbawm offered to write for it, and by taking up the Marxist fashion pioneered by the French Communist Louis Althusser. The vaguely Trostkyist outlook of Anderson himself was of no political significance.
The organised Trotskyism of Tony Cliff's International Socialists (now the Socialist Workers' Party), the International Marxist Group, and Ted Grant's Revolutionary Socialist League (aka the Militant Tendency) was another matter, because these groups were interested in politicising students for non-academic purposes. The CP had a very definite interest in ensuring that its conception of how students should be politicised prevailed over alternative conceptions. This interest was a function of the CP's pre-existing stake in 'the labour movement'.