What Is To Be Done?

THERE ARE few better instances of Harvard's intellectual stupidity than that which evidenced itself at Tuesday night's mass meeting. We, the "Harvard community"--whatever that means--have again voted to "Strike"--whatever that means. Unfortunately, we have overlooked the technical detail: specific strategies and actions by which we can enforce our demands against the government and the corporate structure of the United States.

Lest we forget what brought us into this entire situation, there were two reasons for which this campus momentarily erupted into protest: the drastic and brutal escalation of American air strikes inside North Vietnam, which seemed to foreshadow the possibility of a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, and the existence of a gruesome colonial war in Portugese Africa, financed by American corporations in which this University holds large amounts of stock. Yet now, as if the wars against the Vietnamese and the Africans have faded into thin air, our original concerns seem to have lost their meaning. What else could one have concluded from watching the Tuesday meeting, in which all of the central issues gave way to a largely academic discussion about whether Harvard was, or should be, "on strike"?

Yet it was no wonder that the mass meeting degenerated into a useless verbal brawl, because the word "strike" has automatically, and unjustifiably become the central word in our vocabulary. And it is a word that lacks any form of definition in its current context. Under most circumstances, a "strike" is a stoppage of work undertaken for the purpose of winning a concrete concession. Built into the word is a strong implication that the protest is directed against a single target. Most importantly, "strike" means that in order to win our demands, we intend to deprive our opponent of something which he finds indispensable. The trouble is that so far, we at Harvard have used the word "strike" in a knee-jerk and fetishistic manner, without really asking ourselves whom the target is, how long our action must take to be effective, and what we must take from our opponent before he realizes that his current course of action will backfire against him.

In Spring 1970, there was a widely-held feeling that if only America's universities could be shut down, then students, once free from academic obligations, would throw themselves into political activity--against the government, in favor of anti-war candidates, against the universities, the targets scarcely mattered, the targets would evidence themselves--and the war would be brought to an end. This approach, of course, failed; it failed because student attendance at class was not an essential factor in the operations of the universities or the war machine, it failed because even universities, no matter how strongly attacked, are not the primary agents of the war and cannot bring it to a close, and it failed because the students "liberated" from their classes did not have a strategy in mind--aside from closing universities--that could stop the war.

When the struggle in Portuguese Africa was brought to our attention by the Pan-African Liberation Committee, and the existence of the Southeast Asian war was revived in our consciousness by the bombings against Hanoi and Haiphong, there was a large group of students interested in effective protest who were determined not to be undermined by the mistakes of 1970. They understood that neo-colonial warfare did not grow primarily from the universities, but from Washington and the giant corporations which uphold it. Even PALC, whose action was directed against Harvard, did not really have an attack on the University primarily in mind: during their campaign of seven months' duration, they seriously hoped that a confrontation with Harvard would not be necessary because their foremost concern was not university complicity with the war in Angola but rather the war in Angola itself. They believed that Harvard's divestiture, if ratified by the Corporation and announced forcefully by President Bok, would publicize the war outside Harvard and would perhaps contribute to a massive, popular movement in this country which could then cripple the Portuguese war effort by halting America's support of it. To move Harvard from its intransigent position, they felt that militant action was necessary.

BUT A LARGELY different situation existed with the Vietnamese war. There was no need to bring that war to public attention; the need was rather to mobilize the public--including that large but usually forgotten segment of the public which happens not to be situated on university campuses--against the government. To men like Nixon, Kissinger, and the President of Gulf Oil, the level of domestic disruption which they cannot afford to risk is not be found in a boycott of classes; it is rather to be found in massive public disorder which threatens their ability to rule. Our function should not be to prevent ideologists like Kissinger and Banfield from delivering lectures, but to make it impossible for them to operate or exert influence on an official level.

Yet even those who held to this position before the first mass meeting of Thursday were mistakenly reluctant to confront the issue of what it means to "strike." In view of the chaos of the initial surge of protest, and the calamity which characterizes mass meetings, they decided not to confront the issue of "strike" in a direct fashion, assuming that everyone would ultimately see the wisdom of their position. In so abdicating, they repeated a central mistake of 1970; they assumed that the correct political road would inevitably point its own way. The result was almost pre-ordained; the crucial proposal passed at the Thursday night meeting contained the fatal passage about "encouraging" everyone to stay away from class. And then, the Tuesday night meeting was consumed with theological disputes about whether we should all continue the "strike." The absurdity of the meeting reached high pitch when the sponsor of a proposal "to end the boycott of classes" announced that his motion could be considered a "friendly amendment" to another proposal which asked "that all University students continue to strike." With overlapping definitions, it was possible for someone to maintain that we could abandon the strike while we remained on strike, and few people raised a whimper.

IT WOULD indeed be miraculous if this nonsensical debate has not already convinced many students that all of our protest has now become silly and useless. But if we are ever to build a successful movement against neo-colonial wars, we must take this idea of "strike" and put it back on the shelf, where it belongs. If people wish to attend class, we should not waste time preventing them from doing so. We should instead concentrate on proposals for concrete, politically sensible courses of direct action. And if our actions are logical and appealing, more and more people will join us and we will have accomplished far more than those who insisted that before building a mass movement, they must first utter the word "strike."