Students against Rudi
CZECHOSLOVAKIA STEPHEN MORRISON
Stephen Morrison, editor of the Edinburgh University newspaper Student, has just re- turned from an exchange visit to Prague.
A week before he was shot in Berlin, Rudi Dutschke, leading member of the West Ger- man Social Students Organisation, was being attacked rather less physically at a students' meeting in the Philosophical Faculty of the Charles University in Prague. On that occasion it was Dutschke's ideas that were the targets for the assault. Czech students dismissed his marxist-leninist theories as 'comic,' absurd' and 'worthy of rejection by a fifteen-year-old.' The system had been tried, they said, and had ended in abject failure. Any theory which managed to combine both inefficiency and slavery deserved to be aban- doned.
Dutschke welcomed the attack and retali- ated by insisting that every situation had to be looked at within its specific historical per- spective. He sympathised with the Czech predicament but emphasised that his ideas fol- lowed from a different point of departure: the West Berlin brand of capitalism.
It is this difference in point of departure which is so striking. Dutschke is no fellow traveller of present communist regimes, least of all the neo-stalinist East German one. Indeed, he left East Berlin for the Western sector two days before the wall went up in 1961. His thoughts are a reaction, sometimes a very quick one, to his new, frayed, brittle environment. For Czech students, on the other hand, the point of departure is the failure of stalinism. They consider that any move away from the concept of totalitarianism is a move in the right direction.
Yet there is more to it than that. I talked for four hours with Dutschke after the meeting and thoroughly enjoyed his exciting, if some- what dogmatic, style of ideology. In all dis- cussions with Czech students, however, there was a consistent lack of any ideology what- soever. Certainly they were united in the hope that censorship and other infringements on freedom would not be reimposed and all ex- pressed a lukewarm belief that the Czech system would stay socialist. But students, uni- versity economists and professors alike all talked in pragmatic terms. Efficiency was in, socialist theory was out. Statements like 'We don't want communism based on poverty' or 'I am less concerned with equality than I am with affluence' cropped up time and again.
When questions like the abolition of com- modity values and money in a communist society were asked, one economist answered, 'No one really believes that sort of thing. In an extended welfare state there will always be commodity values,' and a professor of politics added, 'All theorists have their fantasies.'
The lack of ideology among students runs parallel with their total lack of organisation. When they all had something explicit to fight against they did so with one will, but when the split in the Politburo eased the progress of democratisation and everyone was allowed to say what he wished, student unity fell apart: students knew what they did not want but not what they wanted. Perhaps the ab- sence of political information and freedom of expression for twenty years left them com- pletely unprepared. Indeed, most students seem to agree with the current desire of politicians to slow down the process, to preserve stability and not to antagonise Soviet Russia.
Ironically the most impressive organised demonstration I saw was on the steps of the musical faculty of Charles University in Prague. Banners, flags and shouts went up in unison at regular intervals with intermittent periods of docile calm. On this oecasion. a Czech 'film, Freedom for Selvyn, was being shot. The scene depicted was a protest by students in favour of the fictional banned poet
Selvyn. Students, well paid for shouting, meekly obeyed the megaphone of the film director.
Another possible explanation for the lack of student organisation is their general agree- ment with what has become the progressive establishment alliance of intelligentsia and liberal politicians. The word 'intelligentsia' covers a great deal more ground in Czecho- slovakia than it does in western countries. Nurses, teachers, academics, scientists, man- agement—all come within the category. For twenty years this class of people has been dis- enfranchised and impotent, watching men of much less ability and imagination stagnate the country's economy and attempt to do the same with its culture. In the former they suc- ceeded, in the latter they failed. They have in many cases suffered lower wages than factory workers and little freedom of ex- pression.
Of course this analysis, highly over- simplified as it is, suggests a crude class war which has not yet reached the surface in Czechoslovakia. At present such a develop- ment is not evident as factory workers, swept along on the wave of newfound freedoms, have accepted, tacitly at least, the economic reforms proposed by Ota Sik and his team of econo- mists. But there are signs that in the new economic system workers may not take too kindly—as well they might not—to stagnating wages while managers' salaries are raised. With a twenty-year tradition of equality, in- centive and its attendant inequalities may be too high a price to pay for newfound freedom.
Students are faced with two choices. On the one hand, they could organise themselves as a homogeneous pressure group. There are signs of this in the attempt to get a student into the national assembly and if, as proposed, other sectional interests are represented there and the assembly becomes less of an illusion, then this may be a profitable course of action. This could be called the political method. - Alternatively, students as individuals could endeavour to influence society. This could be called the religious approach. In February this method proved very effective when students spent the day in a factory discussing the political changes with a notoriously conserva- tive Communist party. They succeeded in con- vincing them. So for the moment at least it seems that public resentment of students is not quite as hysterical as in West Germany.
Internally students have not yet set about agitating for the spread of democratisation to the university. They have, though, broken away from csm (the Czech Youth Movement run by elderly teenagers from the Communist party) and formed their own students' asso- ciations- in each faculty. Disputes about cur- ricula will take second place to more urgent problems such as accommodation, which is impossible to get in Prague. Grants, of course, are a basic problem as also is the scarcity of foreign exchange.
Before going to Czechoslovakia, I would have thought such problems would have paled into obscurity beside the new destiny facing the nation, but it took me two weeks to find anyone who would seriously consider any theories of class in the present situation, and he was not a student but a sociologist.
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