Western Europe: The Revolution Gap

Classic Communist dogma makes revolution the private preserve of those with nothing to lose but their chains: the workers. In this revolutionary spring of 1968, however, it is the students—most of them from comfortable middle-class backgrounds—who have proclaimed themselves the vanguard of a new order. Quite apart from their political impact in the streets, youthful activists are putting the theology of orthodox Communism in a curious pinch: they are revolutionaries from the wrong side of the tracks.

From the barricaded buildings of Rome University to Britain's Porton Down Microbiological Research Center, the protests of those revolutionaries continued to agitate Western Europe last week. British students held a lie-in demonstration at the chemical center, also shoved their way past campus "bulldog" proctors to demand, and win, the right to distribute freely pamphlets at Oxford. In Rome, where they began their protest by setting fire to an effigy of Charles de Gaulle, some 2,000 students held the campus until moderate students, anxious to finish exams, and armed police stormed it. The Italian Communist Party, through Theoretician Giorgio Amendola, did its best to explain the workers' failure to support student power. Reproving the students' "anarchism" and "old barricade spirit," Amendola urged young rebels to channel their energy toward the workers and noted that Lenin himself had warned "not to play with insurrection."

Poster Prose. Nowhere is the student-worker rift so potentially embarrassing as in Communist "worker states" themselves, and last week, in Yugoslavia, the revolution gap appeared. It began in the now familiar Paris pattern, when police used water cannons and clubs to turn back Belgrade university students from an overcrowded pop concert; next day, some 2,000 students occupied the campus in downtown Belgrade. Also as usual, they advertised their grievances on signs and banners.

The poster prose of revolution, alarming to a Western chief executive, is a particularly cutting indictment of a Communist leader, and students were in no mood to spare Yugoslav Party Boss Josip Broz Tito. They renamed their school "the Red University of Karl Marx" and demanded an "end to socialist princes." Across town, where students had also occupied the Institute of Technology, posters urged that "workers and students unite against bureaucracy," and—the greatest slap of all—pictured the silken top hat of plutocracy with the party's red star on it.