THIS week's anti-war fast is a fruitless exercise in political impotence. At a time when effective direct action is needed most and when opportunities for it are close at hand, 400 students have been sidetracked into participating in a useless mystic exorcism.

Clearly, no one who conscientiously participates in any form of anti-war protest should be discouraged from doing so. He should, however, realize that his energies and attention have been diverted from a more productive course of action.

Right now things can be done, whatever the protestor's depth of feeling against the war: draft resistance, obstructionist demonstrations, planning a reception for Dow at Harvard, working for McCarthy, canvassing neighborhoods. The fast, according to its leaders, is meant to prepare the fasters to act. This focus is inappropriate and anachronistic.

The fast leaders believe they are giving a group of uncommitted students a shove onto a conveyer belt, where, at the end they will be radicalized and politicized so that they will be able to participate in effective action.

This is a gross underestimation of the depth of anti-war feeling at Harvard and a revealing portrait of the lack of anti-war leadership here. Students can be mobilized into effective action when they are presented with effective means of protest. The Dow demonstration showed that students do not need the artificial hardship of a fast to arouse their political awareness.

The educational value of the fast to those participating may be important, but the exclusionist nature of the protest effectively shuts out many others who could be sharing in that education. The black armbands and the pompous ads may unnecessarily alienate a large number of non-participant students from constructive forms of protest.

The tragedy of the fast is that it expresses the extent to which oppressive war and a restrictive society can push a large group of intelligent and well-meaning students into an unproductive gesture.