ENS must break with AWL’s social-imperialism

James Turley looks at the prospects for Education Not for Sale’s ‘Reclaim the Campus’ event:

Unlike the forced good cheer emanating from the Socialist Workers Party, the response of Education Not for Sale to the narrow defeat of the National Union of Students governance review has at least had a touch of sobriety: “The left should not kid itself,” reads an unsigned statement issued by ENS, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty-run student group: “We won 35% of the vote, and the right wing totally dominated the rest of the conference.”¹

Now that the “real fight” is to begin, ENS has called an open conference (supposedly) of the student left for May 17, under the stirringly generic title, ‘Reclaim the Campus!’ Exactly what its goals are is something of an unknown quantity. A look at the draft agenda drawn up at a planning meeting on April 25 reveals a great deal of time allocated to discussions on what actions are required to proceed, but nothing on matters of programme.

There is to be a discussion on what has been contracted to “name/structure/statement of position”, and then an election to a new committee of ENS or some putative post-ENS organisation.  Although there was no time allocated for motions in that draft² (beyond 500-word “name/structure/statement of position” proposals, the mischievous implications of which will be discussed below), the ENS website now quietly concedes that motions are to be allowed.³

A bigger ENS?

So what are we looking at here? Most signs point towards an attempt to refound ENS on a ‘broader’ basis, attracting in ‘new layers’ of disorganised but angry students to fight the NUS right on its anti-democratic measures and abject cowardice in the face of the government/business squeeze on students’ living conditions. All those ‘workshops’ and the like could have come straight out of the laughably anti-democratic first conference of the SWP’s Student Respect.⁴

This is what the AWL would like to happen - we shall see how even the democratic sections of the agenda for Reclaim the Campus point towards this intention. Indeed, its purpose in setting up ENS in the first place was to organise the rump of the old anti-fees movement after the SWP and others had moved on to other priorities.

To read the rest of this article click here.

National Union of Students LGBT conference report

Vicky Thompson of Hands Off the People of Iran and Chris Strafford of Communist Students report..

‘Socialists’ and the lies they tell

They never fail to surprise. Every time you think the ‘Socialist’ Workers Party cannot sink any lower into the depths of blatant hypocrisy and opportunism, they somehow manage to dive a little deeper.

Last week, we were treated to the Left List’s London assembly election broadcast, which may even win it a handful of votes, so, realistically speaking, who cares if it neglected a few tiny points, such as capitalism, class and that little thing called socialism? Well, actually, we care … Not because we have much respect for that rag-tag bunch of apologists that the SWP calls its leadership, but because there are more than a few good comrades with their heads still screwed on in the organisation. Sadly, however, such comrades were absent from the NUS annual LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans) conference, which took place April 25-27.

Before conference, Student Respect boasted of 19 delegates, making the rest of us query just why so many LGBT students were willing to remain in an organisation with a less than stellar record on sexual liberation. At conference, however, I spotted only six people who could be described as Respect/Left List supporters, of whom only four actually spoke.

The ‘Socialist when it suits them’ Workers Party has always been keen on hiding its politics. At LGBT conference, SWP comrades talked of the Left List a lot, perhaps because it stopped too many people from mentioning the G word (Galloway). However, when someone actually did mention it, in the context of his playing down of gay rights, Adam Lambert (SWP) pointed out that there had been a split in Respect and that George Galloway could not be used as ammunition against Respect-SWP, since he had now gone off with Respect Renewal.

To read the rest of this report click here.

Return of the governance review

As Communist Students predicted in our report of NUS conference, ‘NUS: Right prepares for fresh assault‘, rather than the right being “demoralised and reeling” as the SWP’s Rob Owen told us, they have been plotting further attacks on the already very limited democracy of NUS. This can now be clearly seen in the email sent out on April 24 by the new Blairite NUS President - elect, Wes Streeting. We post this email below for comrades’ information:

Dear all,

The Way Forward for NUS Reform

Further to recent letter from Gemma Tumelty and I earlier this month, I am writing to update you on developments following yesterday’s meeting of the National Executive Committee to set out our view on the way forward. This is based on the wide-ranging feedback we have received from many of you since Annual Conference.

Firstly, I would like to thank all those officers, delegates and students who took the time to write to us with feedback on everything from detailed suggestions and questions on the specifics of the proposed reform package, to the process we have followed throughout the year. This feedback has directly informed the NEC’s position on the way forward and enabled us to learn some valuable - if sometimes difficult - lessons to ensure that we get both the reform process and the reform package right going forward.

Debating NUS conference

After posting links to our reports of NUS conference to the education.net message boards comrades from Communist Students have been engaged in a debate with the AWL’s Sacha Ismail (’left opposition boy’) over a number of important questions. To read the debate so far (and get involved) click here.

The campus and the state

In this article James Turley responds to a letter from Eben Marks criticising Communist Students in the Weekly Worker. James goes on to argue that students have an antagonistic relationship with college authorities…

The campus and the state

Making overtures to the student population has been a standard feature of leftwing activism for many decades - while not every group has been doing it, there are very few points in the history of British Marxism when nobody was. The Socialist Workers Party has relied, on and off, on a regular turnover of student members to keep itself alive since the end of its ‘turn to the class’ in the 1970s; and it is well known that many of the current generation of Blairite and Brownite MPs came to political consciousness in the ‘official’ Communist Party while students.

What is less frequent is for communists to actually theorise their work on campuses. It is not at all obvious why a small group, such as the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, can obtain such a disproportionate influence at particular universities and colleges, when it is so much more difficult for it to do so in, say, a particular electoral constituency, or even a trade union branch.

The result has generally been that, however ‘broad’ and ‘inclusive’ a given party’s student front is intended to be, they have nevertheless simply formed an ‘SWP juniors’, or ‘AWL juniors’, etc - and transferred the political method for constituencies, workplaces, unions and the like onto the campus. Socialist Students, set up by the Socialist Party in England and Wales, inherits the parent body’s total fixation on cuts and privatisation to the exclusion of virtually all other considerations; the Socialist Worker Student Society (and Student Respect) replicates the SWP’s minimal-demands-hysterically-phrased approach; and the AWL’s Education Not for Sale does not mention the war.

To read the rest of this article click here.