As you amble around your freshers’ fair, you may well come across a handful of excitable young leftists pushing an organisation called Education Not for Sale. They will be against a lot of bad things (but, for reasons we’ll get to later, sheepish on the subject of war). They will be very ‘inclusive’, and keen to snap you up should you come out as an anarchist, or a green, or just in a bad mood.

Of course, you may well also come across other crews calling themselves Respect, Socialist Students and the rest, on almost exactly the same politics. ENS is similar indeed to these other groups, fronts for the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party respectively. But it has its own distinguishing features, which in the end put it a rung below its competitors in terms of principled politics.

ENS’s ostensible roots are in the Campaign for Free Education, an umbrella group that genuinely did bring together disparate activists in the fight against the introduction of tuition fees in the late 90s. It eventually succeeded in getting Kat Fletcher elected as National Union of Students president in 2004, who morphed remarkably quickly into a sterling bureaucrat. That was really the last straw for the dwindling campaign, and it was relaunched as ENS the next year.

The ‘hidden hand’ in all this is the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, a small ersatz-Trotskyist organisation whose demographics are atypically skewed towards student activists. It became increasingly influential in the CFE as the years went on. Fletcher was a member of theirs, and although she had left by the time she grabbed the presidency, AWL comrades bust a gut campaigning for her, and were delirious with happiness when she won. The founding of ENS was almost entirely the AWL’s work, and so it has remained, with a politically inert rump of anarchists and leftish greens, of the sort that, in this writer’s anarchist days, we used to deride as ‘activist types’.

The result is obvious enough – the political line of ENS is determined by the AWL. It is motivated by the needs of the AWL. So … why is it so weak?

And weak it is. On page 7, we have identified two types of student economism – one that sticks to ‘economic’ struggles that mimic those of trade unions, and one that tails bourgeois forces on democratic issues (pacifism against war, ‘multiculturalism’ against racism, etc). ENS, to put it one way, straddles both variants; to put it another, it lurches schizophrenically between them.

Since the Reclaim the Campus relaunch conference in May this year, there has at least been one unambiguous and non-economistic position formally in place – the demand for “the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan”. This was effectively forced on the AWL at that conference by an ad hoc alliance of Communist Students, Revolution (another Trotskyist-run youth group) and – to be fair – the majority of the floating population of ‘activist types’. (Actually having conferences that, you know, decide on stuff is also an ENS novelty – previously, they preferred action-oriented ‘gatherings’.)

Hang on – they had to be forced to adopt a concrete anti-war position, and one that evidently alienates none of their precious anarchists?

Unfortunately, it’s true. The AWL as an organisation has consistently refused not just to call for troops out now, but for troops out at all, ever. The arguments for this are fragile in the extreme, ranging from the sectarian (to call for troop withdrawal is to side with reactionary islamist ‘clerical fascists’) to the Marxisant (in the current era, imperialism functions primarily through regimes of free trade, and America is only a ‘globocop’ that keeps things running; therefore it is capable of actions that may, on balance, be progressive), to the plain delusional (the occupation provides some ‘breathing space’ for the nascent Iraqi workers’ movement, which would otherwise be slaughtered by the aforementioned ‘clerical fascists’).

It is barely necessary to knock down these justifications, but anyway:

1. ‘Troops out now’ no more implies support to reactionary forces than – for example – support for a union in a pay dispute implies support for the bureaucrats who run that union.

2. The islamist militias are in no way being contained by the US-UK forces. In fact, the latter have actively built the most powerful ones up, such as the Badr brigade, and act as a ‘recruiting sergeant’ for the rest through their very presence. It is also clear that the US-UK forces have been themselves directly repressing the workers’ movement in various ways. So much for ‘breathing space’.

3. Capitalism is sustained on the international level by the ability of a hegemonic state to deploy overwhelming military force. The notion that the aim of this is the establishment of local states in the image of western bourgeois democracy misunderstands the nature of imperialist power. Rather it is to ensure compliance. The only ‘new’ thing about the present period in this regard is that the US is only able to fulfil this rule by wanton destruction and total pulverisation.

Since the line is false, we have to ask: what does the AWL majority’s dogged insistence on it say about them? Nothing less than that they provide ‘left cover’ for imperialist actions that are lethal to our comrades in struggle around the world. Would that Iraq was the only example – their leader, Sean Matgamna, has disgracefully indicated that he will support Israel if it attacks Iran. Lenin would have called Matgamna a ‘social-chauvinist’ or a ‘social-imperialist’, but there’s a more punctual way of putting it – scab.

The majority of the ENS leading committee are AWL members, and though they are mostly critical to some degree or another of the AWL line, they are nonetheless loyal to the organisation and committed to carrying out its policies, should the leadership decide to hold them to account. The two ‘convenors’, with ill-defined executive powers, are AWL members, including ‘troops in’ supporter Sofie Buckland. And indeed all attempts to actually force some activity on the basis of ‘troops out now’ have been squished in various ways. On one memorable occasion, AWL student organiser Sacha Ismail (who is not even on the committee) simply didn’t take the ‘troops out now’ banner along to a demonstration. Apparently it had an SWP-style fist icon on it and was thus unsuitable. Really, Sacha?

This is what ‘democracy’ means in ENS. Yes, you’re allowed to have whatever weird and wonderful ideology you want – anarchism, greenism, pacifism – and can expect to be more or less left alone. Should you want ENS to undertake activity according to your beliefs, however, you’d better hope it doesn’t clash with the AWL’s political priorities. If it does, they’ll move mountains to get around it.

Democracy is about struggle and power. The ENS set-up guts it of its purpose. The fragile egos of isolated anarchists are preserved, and the AWL can be content with skimming a few recruits off the top. It is no way to work out correct politics, let alone turn them into effective action, and so it is that after three years of existence ENS – despite its pretensions to breadth – can still only get 60 people to a conference (including seven hostile leftists and a handful of apolitical campaigners) and has lost the last of its NUS positions (partly due to its social-imperialism, gratifyingly enough). Compared to the height of the CFE, it has dwindled to nothing. Time for a rethink, comrades.

LP Espinosa