Though Cowards Flinch

In my last article attempting to grapple with some of the deficiencies in activist campaigns over the last few years, one of my points was that the ‘carnivalesque’ element had cut free from the staid campaigns of CLPs and other groups about local issues. This disconnect between the sexy campaigns, which attract a hurriedly disillusioned youth, is something I see as a problem in the establishment of a wider-based and more effective socialist campaigning array.

A month into the academic year for universities, it seems appropriate to refine some of the points I made and to apply them to the student campaigns being undertaken. All this is lent an air of urgency by the fact that the government is about to raise the cap on top up fees, or will lose an election only to the see the Conservatives do exactly the same – possibly in an even more destructive manner. If, like me, one thinks that victory in such a campaign now hangs by a thread, read on.

Anyone will admit that the National Union of Students and its affiliate in Ireland, NUS-USI, has fumbled the ball on top-up fees. Largely activists on the Left suspect that the opposition of people like Mandy Telford and her successors to top-up fees was essentially dishonest on their part. As most of them sought to be integrated into the political establishment, there were lines they weren’t willing to cross in the campaign to fight top-up fees.

I doubt whether the dissemblance was conscious, or at least it need not have been. The political attitudes of such people, even if those include an honest opposition to fee-based education, prevents a strategy which would necessarily engage broad layers of the working class in a struggle for free higher education. That much is confirmed by the nature of relations between NUS and the TUC: they are very much clogged by bureaucracy rather than built from the ground up.

As a result, one cannot help but feel that we socialists are shooting the moon in our demand for free education. It is a demand which seems to come from nowhere, being enunciated by an ambivalent bureaucracy which survives on the moribund democracy of the NUS, unconnected to other similar social demands which we might place on the government. With popular participation stiffled even at campus level, it’s no wonder defeat looms on the horizon.

The carnivalesque, in the form of dressing up for protests etc, appears as the natural reverse of an obscenely bureaucratic coin. Unable to genuinely challenge the policy of the government, which even the universities themselves – especially the Russell Group – anticipate being ramrodded through, Left-intellectuals who might otherwise be profitably engaged in a socialist campaign are free to walk around campus protesting in their funny if rather alienating garb.

To those involved with student politics, theorizing such a disconnect might seem odd. For example, Labour Clubs, Socialist Students, Socialist Worker Students, Communist Students and so on are all independent organisations. What are they doing to fight the tide? The answer, so far as I can see, is “nothing productive”. Genuine anger to issues gets squandered on paroxysms of protest marching. Of course they should feel free to reply herein and argue their case.

I see the benefit of maintaining a presence in NUS – which recently by a very few votes blocked the required 2/3rds majority NUS leadership had sought to completely dissolve NUS democracy – therefore my arguments as to the problematics of student politics don’t amount to a call to leave NUS. Such a thing has been done by universities all over the country: it doesn’t achieve anything. Indeed it is often the recourse of the more reactionary student executives.

On the part of groups like the Labour Club, as often as not the Party Right dominate and thus the Labour Club becomes an extension of SU bureaucracy, or worse still, Labour Students bureaucracy. Communist Students fights vigorous campaigns but I am not well informed as to their internal mechanisms. It is to Socialist Students as among the biggest groups (particularly outside of London) which I turn for a survey of the blockage existing between conceiving a campaign and executing it.

Socialist Students (known as Socialist Societies in Ulster) are ostensibly a broad Left formation within universities. They put people up for election to Student Councils and they campaign both on local issues and on the bigger issues such as top-up fees. They have the potential to be the nerve centres of a national campaign on any issue that concerns students. They also have the ideological consistency to link up with trades unions such as UCU among university staff.

Some of the problems as I see them exist as follows:

They are an extension of the Socialist Party and are effectively controlled by what one might be tempted to call apparatchiks with a long history in that group. For example, the Socialist Society organiser in Belfast who deals with QUB and Ulster Uni is currently Daniel Waldron – a former full-timer for the Party. Before that it was Gary Mulcahy who never attended either university but who was content to order things through the younger members of Party who did.

I’ve been informed of other places where something similar is the case. Some of the bad practices of the SP get carried over too – such as inventing quotes from activists who never said anything of the kind. I can actually link to things attributed to me which I never said nor gave authorisation to be put out in my name. Obviously not all cities have the same level of access to a youth full-timer as Belfast did so I don’t doubt that was the SP at its worst.

Then there is the Political Discussion that starts off every meeting. The capital lettering clangs into place like jailbars separating participants from the freedom of the outside world. It’s chosen at the meeting before and the pamphlets advertising it are printed up and put around the place and people turn up expecting to see debate. What they most often get is a tired lead off with the same ‘perspectives’ regurgitated – often by an outside speaker from the Socialist Party itself.

This sort of thing puts people off. Don’t get me wrong, I think that political discussions are vitally important and I appreciate the value of a democratic, centralist political model. I just think it could be better handled. Perhaps lead-offs like that of Phil BC at Keele Socialist Students group proved to be more interesting and stimulated more discussion than the ones that I saw; all I ever saw was nodding heads and SP members coming along to try and ensure dead silence didn’t follow.

The first things that should be considered are campaign matters – finances, liaising with local unions and community centres and the other basic building blocks of any socialist campaign should be considered first. Bearing in mind that most local areas overwhelmingly resent their local student populations, it might build up the credibility of such groups to be involved outside the sexy issues which we think students will be interested in.

Bringing this back to the ‘carnivalesque’ element, representing the greatest detachment from serious campaign work, a persistent attachment to the Political Discussion will simply serve to drive students into the arms of those who have no deeper critique but are willing to put on a show. That is not to say that socialists should smoothe themselves out – they absolutely shouldn’t. A rigorous education in political philosophy is absolutely vital to creating independent socialists.

However such an education is not formed independently of activism; it is the natural obverse of it and will be sought by any individual in the right company, the deeper they go into that activism. This is the nature of Marxist praxis. Political discussion should thus be a friendly activity which people enjoy, not the enforced precondition of participating in the activism of the Socialist Students. I have always resented it, but now I think it could just as easily take place in the pub afterwards.

Meeting up to hear the same perspectives on the inherent sexual discrimination of capitalism, or the rise of the far right and so forth is not educating people. It might be said that correcting the viewpoints of those who show up believing that Lib-Dem is a viable electoral choice for ‘socialism’ is a necessary precondition of correctly orienting activist work – but then such people can just as easily learn by doing. A better route to theoretical awareness might instead be a voluntary reading group.

It might be argued that such an approach could result in Socialist Students or their NI counterparts taking on something of the careerist element of the Labour Clubs by tolerating wide chasms between the ideology of members. However, it is genuine socialists who are prefiguring the nature of such societies, by setting them up in the first place. This allows for a predisposition towards issues of workers’ rights, the needs of students and wider critiques of that which their realisation.

As they don’t aim at control of the SU bureaucracies, but often run election campaigns designed to highlight the inconsistency and corruption of such bodies (see the comment by the second Daniel Waldron here for example), this wards off careerist elements.

The weakness of the student movement also stems from the same source as the weakness in the workers’ movement: how divided it is. One of the advantages which Labour Clubs have as campaigning organisations is their attachment to local CLPs, delivering activists to knock on doors and thus educating them in community issues. This is often stagnant work because the means for democratically reigning in local representatives don’t exist – nor does any system of representation for workers – e.g. trades councils.

These avenues aren’t pursued by most of the Socialist Students groups that I know – attempting to set up trades councils or appealing to local workers. The most that QUB Socialist Society ever did was protest the wage cuts of a local creche with NIPSA, the local public service union. There was no regularised connection with NIPSA or UCU and no combined campaigns that might actually have delivered on their objectives. Even today it seems the same tactics are being pursued.

Lip-service is paid to the idea of a united staff-and-student campaign against top-up fees but I would bet good money that in Belfast, outside of Paddy Meehan and Daniel Waldron, most of the members of the Socialist Society haven’t a clue who to talk to among the university teaching staff at QUB or University of Ulster. Yet having members involved even in the day-to-day work is important because it has a chance of staving off disillusionment when the government refuses to capitulate.

A student campaign has no chance of being victorious without taking large swathes of local communities and university staff with it. This isn’t being done. A reinvigorated, democratic NUS would make the whole job much easier by being able to oversee a campaign to win over such people both nationally and at the site of every NUS-affiliated university. Having an executive which moved outside the Westminster bubble would probably pick up a few more NUS affiliations too.

In the absence of that, however, it will be down to whatever other groups can link up campaigns between different universities. It will, in essence, be down to the fringe Left parties and their student groups to re-unite the carnivalesque, the staid and the working people with whom they share a common interest, to fuse them into a campaign and to add their weight to the ‘official’ NUS movement without agreeing to be bound by the limited campaign objectives of that movement.

It can be done: France, Chile and Greece all fought back against it. However it requires changes in practice on the part of those well-meaning people who are currently at the forefront of the fight.