With each fresh influx of students, the same tired rhetoric was wheeled out by the student leaders and radical outfits. Protests and occupations were organised, only to be progressively wound down, with the help of the trade unions and Labor parties. Sooner or later, the students involved withdrew to join the ranks of the politically demoralised. The more thoughtful students need to begin considering the causes of such repeated failures. Yet an analysis of the politics presented in his letter proves the opposite.
Nothing further is elaborated.
But this is false to the core. Any examination of the past century reveals that whatever gains were made were byproducts of major political and social struggles of the working class, struggles that were led by socialists against the existing opportunist leaderships. The very success of the ruling classes in prosecuting their offensive during the past 20 years, including the assault on public education, has been directly bound up with the absence of any politically conscious movement in the working class. It is instructive to review what actually happened in the 60s and 70s. First and foremost, the student protest movement against the Vietnam War did not emerge in a vacuum.