Martin Shaw’s letter is very welcome, as, by questioning the concrete role of the rsa in the lse affair and the possible role of the rsa in British politics, it raises general issues of strategy in the student sphere only touched on in the articles we published in nlr 43. The discussion of the rsa in the article by Stedman Jones, Barnett and Wengraf was only a paragraph in length and this undue compression may have made it somewhat too voluntarist. The rsa is as yet a young organization with few achievements to its name and an unpredictable future: all the more reason for socialists to support it and by their active participation ensure that its progressive promise is realized, unless, of course, it can be proved a priori that such efforts would be wasted as it is bound to be impotent or even reactionary. This would seem to be the position Martin Shaw adopts.
There are two possible justifications for this position, both of which he puts forward: