No class today, no ruling class tomorrow. Lessons of the student strike

Oliver Twister:

This is an analysis of the 1970 US-wide, spontaneous student strike by council communist group Root and Branch. As the current situation in California ripens the strategic lessons that Root and Branch attempted to outline could be useful.
The student upheaval of May, 1970 marks a decisive change in the development of American social forces. It is essential to understand what happened, so that when the movement opens up again, tens of thousands of people will know how to push it still further.
The May movement was no mere protest against the invasion of Cambodia. The Cambodian action was the pre-text for action because it embodies everything that the students have learned to hate: the making of life-and-death decisions by a handful of men at the top; deceit; imperialism; racism; violence. The students’ instinctive reaction was to seize the only locus of power available to them, their universities, and to fight — with force if necessary — against the police, National Guard, and other instruments of state violence which tried to break them.
In the midst of the strike, a U.S. Congressman said that there must be a conspiracy behind the student actions, for how else could hundreds of thousands of students conduct the same kinds of struggle around the same basic demands on hundreds of different campuse