Rebranding exercise flops- RtC conference report

As expected, the Reclaim the Campus conference on May 17 did not cohere the student left around a worthwhile set of principled politics. Instead it was a rebranding exercise for Education Not for Sale, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s student front. Ben Klein reports

Mehdi Kazemi granted ‘leave’ to stay - now fight for open borders!

by Dave Isaacson, Communist Students

It pleases us to announce that Mehdi Kazemi, a gay Iranian asylum seeker who faced the threat of deportation and almost certain death on his return to Iran, has now been granted ‘leave’ to stay in the UK after his appeal. It must be noted that this victory was only won after determined campaigning and media publicity forced the government’s Home Office first to undertake the review of their previous decision to deny asylum, and finally to grant ‘leave’ to stay, as they have done now. Had it not been for the campaigning and demonstrating the Home Office would not have hesitated to send Mehdi back to Iran knowing full well that he would likely end up hanging from the gallows.

Sheffield rebels punished

by Laurie McCauley, Communist Students

The five rebel delegates from Sheffield University who broke a mandate to vote for the NUS governance review were called to a disciplinary hearing on Wednesday 14^th. We were found guilty of breaking the mandate imposed by SRC (Student Representative Council) and have been banned from delegate elections for a year.

At NUS conference the right’s governance review was narrowly defeated, in part thanks to delegates who broke mandates from their Unions forcing them to vote in favour. Even by the petty, bureaucratic constitution of NUS these mandates were illegal; delegates are elected by popular student vote, not by SRC, and can vote however they like. Most of the right-controlled Student Councils who mandated delegates have grudgingly accepted this defeat, and started planning for another attempt. But at Sheffield, where the left as a whole is weak, a clique of rightist officers and SRC members have pursued a campaign to punish us. In the student paper they have been beating us with the stick of ‘democracy’, as the mandate was voted on by SRC. But while it chafes to describe the 10% turnout we Sheffield delegates were elected on as ‘democratic’, it far exceeds any mandate of Student ‘Representative’ Council, most of whom received only a handful of votes, or were elected unopposed!

The governance review is mostly the project of Labour Students, but the dominant grouping at Sheffield is, bizarrely, constituted by members of the Christian Union, who last year went political -though not overtly, of course- and won most of the posts for the year’s executive. These officers had been vociferously attacking the anti-review, left candidates from the off, but did not dare impose a mandate during campaigning lest the review become even more of an issue. Hence the mandate was imposed after the left had been elected on explicitly anti-review platforms! A cowardly and shamelessly anti-democratic farce, in other words. At least the ensuing wrath of some of the Christian officers, after we broke the mandate and defeated the review, has been an amusing contradiction to watch. Does the Bible not enjoin us to ‘Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice’? (Ephesians 4:31).

Our punishment -a year’s ban on delegate elections- is partly aimed at preventing us doing the same next year if the review is put to conference again. It is likely, though, that an extraordinary conference will be called before the year is out. In that case, the procedure is for Sheffield SRC to appoint its own delegates- so our punishment has the definite appearance of politically motivated spite rather than a serious move to shut us up. One officer told me it was intended to show that SRC ‘had teeth’; i.e. as a warning to future left candidates. The small size of the left at Sheffield University has made it hard to build support for us against the rightist Student Council, but the five of us will be going through the bureaucratic motions and trying to overturn this decision. More news on our attempt as it progresses.

Also see the report by Gemma Short, one of the other rebels, on the ENS website

What sort of ‘unity’ does the student movement need?

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.

To read the rest of this article click here.

Wide-ranging: report of CU North

First published in the Weekly Worker May 1st

Around 30 people attended the annual Communist University North - an event jointly sponsored by Communist Students and the CPGB. Ben Klein and Carey Davies report

Comrade Yassamine Mather from Hands Off the People of Iran
kicked off the school with a session on ‘Imperialism and Iran’. Giving a brief sketch of the history of Iran in the 20th century, she underlined how Iran had always been a plaything of the imperialist powers - particularly Britain and Russia. It had never been a colony, but its destiny was dictated by these powers.