Very recently I was elected by the students at the University of Birmingham to serve as a first-year guild councilor for the University’s guild of students. Unlike most left candidates in student elections, I refused to adopt a reformist agenda. As a Leninist, I perceive elections to be first and foremost an opportunity to agitate ...
Communist Students were out for Wednesday’s Free Education demo, Callum Williamson reports on the event and the need for the left to come up with a strategy for quiet times Considering the betrayal of the NUS bureaucracy (which it is alleged, actually called around Students Unions to discourage mobilising for the event after dropping its initial ...
Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Does capitalism have a future? Oxford University Press, 2013, pp192, £14.99 As its title suggests, Does capitalism have a future? is an attempt on the part of five prominent sociologists to discuss the prospects for the system of capital, and the likelihood of its replacement by a new social ...
The recent spat in the NUS over Islamic State is indicative of the political disorientation of the student movement, writes Charles Gradnitzer In July, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty member Dan Cooper brought a motion headed ‘Iraqi/Kurdish solidarity’ to the National Union of Students national executive council.1 The motion, which sought to “condemn the IS and support the ...
Die Linke is plumbing ever greater opportunist depths, writes Ben Lewis The twists and turns, the international alliances and intrigues in the unfolding human tragedy that is the Islamic State’s barbaric siege of Kobanê pose many challenges to both bourgeois and working class political ideas. Hence we have the spectacle of US bombing in support of ...
Communists on campus are still swimming against the tide, reports Ben Lewis The annual start-of-the-year freshers’ fairs, where students new and old get a glimpse of some of the weird and wonderful societies, clubs and associations they can get involved in at university, provide a decent opportunity for the scattered forces of the far left to ...
As the long process of rebuilding Gaza ‘begins’ once again, it may often seems as though the Palestinian people are doomed to suffer an endless cycle of slaughter and impoverishment. Israeli Antizionist Author and member of Left Unity’s Communist Platform , Moshé Machover has a better grasp of the situation than most. We sent Communist ...
We would like to welcome students to our website, particularly to those who have just begun their time at university and may have come across the publication for the first time at Freshers’ Fayres up and down the country. We find ourselves at a time when – despite the obvious instability of the world, growing social ...
Communist Students were stirring things up at this year's conference of the National Union of Students Members and supporters of Communist Students made a stand for principled Marxist politics at the 2014 conference of the National Union of Students, where CS member Robert Hayes was standing for the ‘block of 15’ individually elected members of the executive. The ...
Natural flood management is part of the solution, not dredging. But if we seriously want to preserve and restore nature, argues Eddie Ford, then we need to challenge capitalism Parts of southern and central England have experienced the wettest January since Met Office statistics began in 1910 and, according to the Radcliffe Meteorological Station in Oxford University, ...
Rease Higgs responds to the AWL’s defence of its behaviour over ‘comrade Alpha’ Predictably, my article highlighting the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s opportunist and hypocritical behaviour in the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts last week,1 triggered an immediate response. Ed Maltby, an executive committee member, was told to talk privately to those who appeared troubled by ...
Communist Students held its annual conference at the University of Westminster at the weekend, with a focus on gathering and galvanising our forces for the year ahead. Following a difficult couple of years for the organisation in the wake of an acrimonious yet largely apolitical split in the Summer of 2012, the organisation has been just ...
After months of infighting the Socialist Party in England and Wales pulled out of the NCAFC. But the fallout exposes the hypocrisy and cynicism of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, writes Rease Higgs Anyone familiar with student politics and the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts will not be surprised that it has descended into turmoil ...