In this article James Turley responds to a letter from Eben Marks criticising Communist Students in the Weekly Worker. James goes on to argue that students have an antagonistic relationship with college authorities…

The campus and the state

Making overtures to the student population has been a standard feature of leftwing activism for many decades – while not every group has been doing it, there are very few points in the history of British Marxism when nobody was. The Socialist Workers Party has relied, on and off, on a regular turnover of student members to keep itself alive since the end of its ‘turn to the class’ in the 1970s; and it is well known that many of the current generation of Blairite and Brownite MPs came to political consciousness in the ‘official’ Communist Party while students.

What is less frequent is for communists to actually theorise their work on campuses. It is not at all obvious why a small group, such as the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, can obtain such a disproportionate influence at particular universities and colleges, when it is so much more difficult for it to do so in, say, a particular electoral constituency, or even a trade union branch.

The result has generally been that, however ‘broad’ and ‘inclusive’ a given party’s student front is intended to be, they have nevertheless simply formed an ‘SWP juniors’, or ‘AWL juniors’, etc – and transferred the political method for constituencies, workplaces, unions and the like onto the campus. Socialist Students, set up by the Socialist Party in England and Wales, inherits the parent body’s total fixation on cuts and privatisation to the exclusion of virtually all other considerations; the Socialist Worker Student Society (and Student Respect) replicates the SWP’s minimal-demands-hysterically-phrased approach; and the AWL’s Education Not for Sale does not mention the war.

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