King’s College, London

Our stall at King’s College was, alongside SOAS, one of the most successful ones yet, with around 30 people expressing their interest in Hands Off The Peoples Of Iran and a number of those looking to set up a Communist Student society in the university itself. Nicely located on the Strand, we encountered people above and beyond the usual array of students, with many of London’s financial workers and tourists speaking to us too. Books were sold, papers were distributed and people had a chance to engage with our politics, especially on the question of Iran and the Middle East. During the course of the day we spoke to quite a few Iranians living in Britain, one expressing his disgust at the state of the British anti-war movement for not talking a stance on a “regime that I almost hate as much as Bush’s war plans.” At this point of course, it had not yet become clear that those opposing both the war and the regime in Tehran would be excluded from taking part in the British anti-war movement, making the positive articulation of principled, proletarian internationalism more important than ever…

Goldsmiths, London

Our intervention at Golsmith’s, as we did not have a stall there, revolved around collecting signatures for the Hands Off The People Of Iran campaign and distributing copies of CS 3. Highlights included George Woods, a leading young Socialist Action member in Student Broad Left, taking a copy of CS 3 and commenting on the “fiction” that James Turley had written about his slimy organisation, and discussing the crisis in Respect with leading student member Jen Jones, who holds a sabbatical position at the university. In spite of the heated polemical exchange, she was very friendly and willing to debate with me – a rare thing amongst SWPers nowadays. Unfortunately though, after about an hour of working inside I was ejected from the building by some bureaucrat who said I wasn’t entitled to stand collecting signatures, although I was doing no harm. Unfortunately though, Jen neither used her position of (relative) power to come to my rescue, nor did she wish to distribute any HOPI leaflets inside.

To make matters worse, another bureaucrat then insisted that I couldn’t do this directly outside the building either, effectively forcing me and a guy selling Socialist Appeal to stand out in the pouring rain (i.e. go home!) A clever trick, so it would seem. Despite these shenanigans though, there was a fairly good response both to CS and HOPI – Student Broad Left and Student Respect aside, of course……

SOAS, London

SOAS has become an extremely progressive university over the last few years. Indeed, in terms of the huge smattering of left groups organising there and the extremely positive response that our comrades in CS received, there are definitely signs that student politics, despite the general political apathy, is exhibiting signs of fluidity. People were snapping up our materials and also keen to learn more about the publicity we were distributing on the extremely important Hands Off the People of Iran! Campaign.

Student Respect is the politically dominant force on campus, with SWP member Clare Soloman holding the influential position of Co-President in the Student Union. Yet it seems that the SWP were more keen on promoting Stop the War and SWSS than using this dominant position to consolidate the strength of Student Respect, which had a stall, but very little else in terms of a political presence. There are certainly rivals to this dominance – the presence of numerous groups such as Socialist Students, No Sweat, Socialist Appeal, the IBT, the Sparts and the Autonomists reflects both the political strength of the SOAS Freshers Fair and the weakness and fragility of the left that seeks to utilise the political mood of the university in order to bring about lasting change.

Leeds

Communist Students had a presence at both of the Higher Education institutions in Leeds (Leeds University and Leeds Metropolitan University) over the freshers weeks. We have been patiently working to build a communist presence at ‘the Met’ for two years now – amongst other activities we have organised public meetings and a study group, distributed numerous leaflets and other literature, taken part in local protests, and stood a candidate in students union elections. This year we have extended ourselves to try and build a group across both universities. This has proved to have been a wise move and we already had a comrade from Leeds University getting involved from the start to help us with our freshers stall at that university. Unfortunately, not being an official society, we were disgracefully forced to take our stall off university property by campus security after our first half hour. Of course this didn’t stop us, as the bulk of our comrades continued leafleting (and signed up enough people to launch our own society) where they were, while we moved the stall to one of the campus entrances with a skeleton staff. As well as keeping up and expanding the work we have done in past years we now plan to help organise revolutionary film showings and build an active Hands Off the People of Iran group.

Sheffield

The CS branch at Sheffield University is our largest, and comrades were out in force with a stall every day of the week and a public meeting on the Thursday. Despite a mistake by the Union in allotting our stall which resulted in us being placed among the religious societies rather than the political ones, we had lots of students come and talk to us. Many were simply interested to know what we stood for, in an era when communism appears to be a spent political force. And some seemed keen to get involved on the left, and the facts that our stall was manned entirely by students and that we were openly arguing for real, radical communism rather than taxing the rich a bit more certainly made us stand out from the other socialist societies. By the end of the week we had about 40 people signed up to our mailing list.

Unfortunately not many of these people turned out for the public meeting, but fresher’s week is a very busy time. We are planning another public meeting on Iran soon which we can publicise over a longer period. At last Thursday’s meeting, Mark Fischer, national organiser of the CPGB, spoke on the subject of ‘Why be a communist?’ Though we stress our political autonomy from the CPGB, it was felt necessary for an experienced and well-read comrade to give the talk, and Mark fit the bill. After some interesting debate, David Sabbagh of Sheffield CS spoke on the progress Communist Students have made so far, highlighting where we have made mistakes and need to do better. This was followed, again, by questions and debate, and several good ideas relating to Sheffield CS’s future work were raised.

The task now in Sheffield is to get interested students along to some meetings and get them involved as critical marxist thinkers and activists. As well as a weekly mail-out to our contacts in Sheffield, we plan to do stalls throughout the year so we have a constant presence on campus.

Manchester

There is no CS branch in Manchester yet, but two comrades leafleted outside the Union for two days and the new issue of Communist Student was being snapped up. The lack of a stall, though, meant we were less visible and people were more reluctant to come up and talk to us. It is interesting to note that while Student Respect are strong on the Union Executive, there was no Respect stall in evidence, only one for the SWP Student Society. Perhaps orders have been given to start winding down support for Respect already. Also interesting to note is the number of students who came up and asked ‘Are you the lot who support Galloway?’. What a sad indictment of the Respect Coalition; before people even get to the crap politics, the embarrassing reputation of it’s leading public figure makes them run a mile. After being reassured that we find the Gorgeous One as repellent as they do, many such questioners were keen to talk politics or at least took a paper.

Cardiff University

The launch of Cardiff Communist Students hasn’t really begun yet in earnest. Due in part to the course commitments of one important comrade – a grown-up (and very busy) postgraduate now – we missed a lot of opportunities during fresher’s week to build contacts and distribute literature etc. Unfortunately this comrade’s course is not going to get any less demanding, so perhaps comrades could come down to Cardiff to lend a hand? Hold a stall or two? There is plenty of scope to build here – we already have contacts and a promising amount of interest despite us not having much of a public presence yet. More importantly the left is practically invisible – a poor situation. Help would be much appreciated.