Communist Students members Dave Isaacson and Ben Klein reject economism and put forward the case for Marxism:
Left unity not on offer
This weekend will, farcically, see two separate gatherings to discuss ‘left unity’ in the student movement. Firstly, the ‘Reclaim the Campus’ event on Saturday May 17, called by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty-run Education Not for Sale campaign, along with Sussex University and London School of Economics student unions. Next day there is a “meeting to discuss the building of a conference of the student left” initiated by the Socialist Workers Party’s Student Respect.
This second meeting, entitled ‘For a democratic, campaigning student movement’, was called in the full knowledge that the ENS event was taking place the day before – indeed Student Respect had been publicly invited at the beginning of April, at the Save NUS Democracy rally during the National Union of Students conference. Clearly the SWP has no wish to tail behind the AWL in student politics – certainly now it has two SR members on the NUS executive, while ENS has none.
Because of our highly critical approach, Communist Students has been accused of failing to take the quest for left unity seriously and of putting our own “sect interests” first. The truth, however, is quite the opposite. Left unity is simply not on the agenda this weekend.
Mind you, none of our critics are clear on what left unity is for - beyond ‘reclaiming our national union’ and building bigger and better campaigns. Neither ENS nor SR has any strategic vision. So most of those involved (leaving aside SWP/AWL sectarianism towards each other) gravitate spontaneously towards a lowest-common-denominator fudge.
SWP, AWL and Workers Power’s Revo youth group – which is intervening in Reclaim the Campus – are all self-professed Marxists, yet none of them fight for unity on the basis of Marxism. Have they such little faith in their ideas that they think left-leaning students cannot be won to them? Or do they see their own sect as ‘the Marxists’ – the revolutionary party in embryo form – and the rest of the left as simply a pool to fish new recruits from?
Marxism
Communist Students says Marxist ideas are powerful because they are true. They best explain where exploitation and oppression come from and why capitalism operates in the way it does. And they show how to kill the system off and usher in the era of human freedom – an aim that can win millions to its banner. Marxism teaches that the working class is the gravedigger of capitalism, the agency that can storm the citadels of power and win genuine democracy, when it is organised into a mass, revolutionary Communist Party.
Marxist ideas are currently held by very few students. But this situation does not have to continue. The biggest obstacles to winning leftwing students to Marxism are the existing ostensibly revolutionary groups who erect bizarre shibboleths to preserve their sect integrity, fighting over the recruitment of ones and twos, while refusing to advocate Marxism in the wider movement. Overcoming this perspective will need a protracted fight.
