The October 29 student mobilisation against attacks on the right to education should be just the beginning of the campaign to beat off the government. More of the same sort of timid gestures from the NUS leadership will be worse than useless. Unless the fight against fees is won to a fundamentally different political approach, it simply will not win.

The narrowness and lack of vision of the NUS apparatchiks is revealed in the main slogan they used to mobilise for October 29 – ‘Keep the cap’. Of course, the fact that government ministers and university bureaucrats are pushing for scrapping of the cap on tuition fees is worrying – it would signal the entrenchment of market forces in the higher education system and allow universities to charge fees only the rich and privileged could afford. And, yes, the situation is already dire, with 15,000 less university applicants this academic year, a situation the abolition of the cap would inevitably exacerbate.

However, we must be clear that the cap was always going to be ditched if the government got its way: transparently, it was temporary, a sop to allow spineless Labour Party backbenchers to vote for the Higher Education Bill back in 2004. The main political battle has to be fought and won by engaging with the ideology that lies behind the concept of fees – and by providing students with a fighting programme that can inspire and draw in the allies we need to win.

At present, the NUS bureaucrats are talking tough about “free education and access for all”, condemning the “soaring levels of debt” and “any attempt to lift the £3,000 cap”. But for them, the “main battlefield” is the pseudo-democratic institution of parliament – a hopeless project. NUS president Gemma Tumelty demands that the government “rethink” its policy and that we “keep up pressure” on parties like the Liberal Democrats.

A successful fight against top-up fees is – according to her – dependent on the party that introduced them in the first place ‘rethinking’ or a party that will never be in power and whose opposition to fees is weak and opportunistic. We need a different approach.

Fight for a real ‘living grant’!

The call by Education Not For Sale to unite in a bloc around the demands ‘Tax the rich’ and ‘For a living grant’ is good. This bloc should also look to campaign, run meetings, organise sit-ins, occupations and so on across British universities and colleges in the struggle against fees.

But any united campaign must also openly debate what exactly is meant by a “living grant”. Communist Students say that everyone in study over the age of 16 should receive grants set at the level of the minimum wage. And not the slave labour rate the current minimum wage is set at by New Labour.

We say that a minimum wage – or “living grant” – must be based on the social category of human need. This is not what the government tells us the system can afford: it is the amount of money students actually need to live full lives in contemporary society, to have time to study, discuss and enjoy themselves to the full in this important formative period. Under present conditions, this would be set at a minimum of £300 per week.

The current situation – where students are forced into run-down accommodation and many are burdened with exploitative ‘McJobs’ in order to keep their heads above water – is an affront to human dignity.

We say that any society that treats its youth in this way does not deserve to continue. If capitalism cannot afford to give us “living grants”, then we can’t ‘afford’ capitalism any more!

For genuine democracy

One reason why students appear apathetic and uninterested in politics is the highly bureaucratise nature of the NUS. How can we expect students to take seriously the notion of challenging and beating the government when their own organisation is so remote, unaccountable and is clearly little more than a career ladder for wannabe establishment politicians?

So, let’s start with our own union. Abolish the direct election of the NUS president, elect national officers from the executive. All officers to be recallable by those who elect them. Salaried officials should receive no more than an average skilled worker. There must be full transparency especially in all dealings with government ministers and commercial concerns.

No wonder the NUS leaders tell us that the real fight is to be fought in parliament and we should leave our fate in the greasy hands of career politicians. They want to be those career politicians in years to come!

Democracy must extend wider and go deeper. We argue that the students, staff and all university workers are the people who should democratically run educational institution, not the vice chancellors, state bureaucracy or pseudo-market imperatives.

And what about that hallowed institution, so beloved of the NUS leadership – parliament? What about fighting for some more democracy there?

We argue for a democratic republic in Britain – a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales. That not only means abolishing the monarchy but the whole system of checks and balances against democracy; ie, the presidential prime minister, the House of Lords, the standing army, the MI5 and MI6 securocracy, the privileging of the Church of England, etc. We fight for MPs on a workers’ wage; for recallability of all elected representatives; for annual parliaments and PR.

Education is not an ‘investment’ in ‘speaking tools’ in order to reap profits a few years down the line. We need a programme for a free education system that doesn’t aim at making us white-collar office dolts, but rather aids the full development of each individual as a rounded social being. Necessarily, that will mean making inroads into the logic of capitalism itself, a system that exists only to expand and exploit.

The fight for free education – genuine education – is necessarily wrapped up in changing the world from one dominated by the needs of profit to one where the needs of humanity take priority and where everybody can develop their respective individual talents.

We demand:

• Students over the age of 16 should receive grants set at the level of the minimum wage.
• Compulsory education up until the age of 16 and from then on within a fully democratic system. Education should be free and of a polytechnical nature: that is, rounded to include technical, as well as academic, skills.
• No religious schools, no private schools.
• The right of every young person on leaving education to either a job, proper training or full benefits.