REPORT 51 latter regretfully tends to be hostile to the co-ops and tries to break them up by legal harassment. There are also a few co-ops of people with radical political programmes. The members of a co-op are likely to keep changing frequently due to the transient nature of students. Further, unlike the joint family in a precapitalist era, such a mode of life lacks economic rationality for the general public so that its diffusion on any significant scale into the society at large is improbable. It is thus unlikely that enduring communes will emerge from this life style or that it will be popular outside the universities. Containment of Dissent The American state and the bulk of society have generally regarded the radical movements as a threat to the social order. Accordingly they have consciously or otherwise reacted in a multiplicity of ways to contain them or divert them to harmless tasks. The ecology movement provides an example of such a containment by the fraternal embrace of the established interests. A few years ago, it began to attract the idealist youth as a means of protest against the wanton destruction of nature by the economy and the society. Then the movement often implied a criticism of the social order. Ecology has since become a function of the state and private enterprise as Well: even oil companies run advertisements on the subject. The policies of the Nixon government towards the military draft gives yet another instance of this sort. A principal cause for the unrest among the students was the draft and the damage it inflicted on their lives. The automation of the Indochinesc war and the reduction in the volume of the draft were apparently in part designed to neutralize this cause. The student militancy did indeed subside when the draft became less of a threat. Benign accommodation has not been the only response of the ruling interests to the growth of radicalism. Several of the Black Panthers were shot dead in Chicago and elsewhere. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were assassinated. Militant groups of any consequence have been ceaselessly harassed by the state and reactionary forces. Such techniques of repression have been quite successful. The SDS is no longer significant in the universities. ^ The Black Panthers have become so weak that even the press does not bother to castigate them to the extent common a few years ago. The country was once resonant with the strident voice of black militancy; that voice is now but a whisper. During the last two years or so, the American Indians have begun to act against their oppression. We may anticipate that their voice too will be stilled in time by the power of the state. Now, in 1974, the campus is quiet and peaceful. The student who was active in the sixties is either a student no longer or is relatively isolated and devoid of any bright hope for the future. The recruits to the universities in the seventies arc by and large socially passive. Those who experience alienation and a lack of identity tend to seek meaning in