by Laurie Smith

Daniel Randall does not like to let the facts get in the way of a good hack job, in his reply to Mohsen Sabbagh. While it is tiresome to retread old ground, the discussions we had and the subsequent reports provide a good opportunity to explore differences on the student left. Unfortunately Dan’s article shies away from political critique in favour of slandering CS and distorting the slate discussions. So before I critique the politics of the AWL (Alliance for Worker’s Liberty), I will have to correct some ‘wilful mischaracterisations’ of events in Sheffield that Dan himself has brought to the table.

Firstly, the assertion that “anyone interested in cobbling together broad or united left initiatives must deal with CS’s idiosyncratic brand of Marxist politics” implies that some other group suggested a left slate. In fact it was CS who initiated the discussions. If we hadn’t, absolutely nothing would have happened. Secondly, “the unexpressed dynamic … was that any resultant slate would essentially be based on CS politics, tempered by whatever concessions they were prepared to make to the SWP and ourselves”. As Dan has pointed out, we are the largest group on campus, so this is otherwise known as… democracy! Of course we were going to fight for our views. If all you do is whinge about us being bigger without attacking our actual politics, comrade, it doesn’t look very good for your own ideas. Of course, Dan does insinuate that we are closet Stalinists – but as this is a straw man, it doesn’t really count as critique. Snide suggestions like this may make AWL members nod sagely into their cocoa, but it isn’t going to convince anyone else with half a brain. Dan states he prefers the label ‘revolutionary socialist’, to distance himself from the USSR’s ‘communism’. Well comrade, we stand in the proud tradition of democratic communism dating back to 1848 and Marx and Engels. ‘Socialism’ has also picked up a bad rep – maybe you should ditch that too!

Dan writes: “the original CS platform included nothing on students’ rights at work … campus workers’ rights … the demand for taxation of the rich and business in the section on ‘free education'”. Absolutely correct – the original platform we presented at the slate meetings did not feature these. What Dan neglects to mention is that when he brought this up at the meeting, CS members happily included sections on trade unionism and taxing the rich, and not just as a sop to Dan, but because we agreed these additions strengthened the platform! Even when the slate discussions fell apart and we stood as Communist Students, these additions were kept. Why does Dan not want to take credit for this influence? Perhaps because he is less keen on left unity than he is on sectarian stereotyping? Finally, Dan blames us for the failure of the slate, rather than the SWP for withdrawing at the 11^th hour: “the ultimate failure [of the slate] is presented straightforwardly “as a result” of the SWP’s eventual withdrawal from discussions”.

Well – yes. Because two Communist Students comrades do not a slate make. If Dan really believes that “…if the slate was explicitly run as an initiative that sought to draw in wider forces I believe we still might be able to cohere a new layer of activists interested in anti-capitalist campaigning”, he needs to get his eyes tested. At Sheffield, there was no way that even the SWP students would have backed a CS ‘slate’, let alone People and Planet. It is easy to come out with this stuff about cohering activists or whatever, but sadly reality does not correspond; the ‘new layers’ are always just over the horizon. We would have come across as dishonest sectarians, calling ourselves a slate to try and get a few more members. Of course Communist Students wants to engage with groups like P&P and win them to Marxism (see article in CS4) but we are not going to do that by lowering our politics to their level, or to a vague ‘anti-capitalism’.

Frankly, calling our Marxism ‘idiosyncratic’ when most of your own tiny organisation is pro-imperialist is rather strange. Using vague assertions and weasel words such as these Dan attempts to caricature Communist Students as ivory tower pseudo-Stalinists in what is simply a piece of lazy journalism. Nowhere does he grapple with our actual programme, which is very far from ‘abstract’ and, we hope, very close to what students and the working class actually need. Instead Dan prefers to focus on issues of our local branch’s organisation, and in particular CS’s absence from a public meeting on trade unionism. To an extent, this does reflect differences of political perspective, which I will discuss. But it is also simply because we were busy – with our election campaign! It is strange how Dan omits to mention that despite the “abstract ‘Marxist propagandism'” of Communist Students, I was elected as a delegate to NUS conference whereas he…was not. Not that it will do much good – of course we agree with Dan that a mass, radical student movement is necessary. Where we differ is on how to achieve that goal.

That NUS and the trade unions are in a mess, continuing the great British tradition of the labour bureaucracy and class collaborationism, is only a reflection of the collapse of the organised socialist movement. The trade unions are not going to become radicalised by a left that is tiny, divided, and incapable of offering a realistic programme for the working class. Like the SWP, the AWL’s economistic politics betrays an appalling disdain for the mental faculties of students and workers. They downplay questions of democracy and political strategy, and fetishise ‘activist’ work in the trade unions and battles over pay and conditions. Of course CS support immediate demands and militant unions, but we do so as communists, not as slightly more militant trade unionists – which is the AWL’s method in Education Not for Sale and No Sweat. One of the greatest contributions of Marxism to the working class is pointing out the need to go beyond trade union consciousness -which is a natural result of capitalist society – and putting forth the universal political demand: for freedom, democracy and socialism. The AWL’s method, despite claiming to be inclusive and non-sectarian, is in fact all about recruiting to the AWL. The stuff about leading worker’s struggles is bluster – the AWL is a relatively large group on the Marxist left but is tiny in absolute terms. ENS and No Sweat are not worker’s struggles – they are AWL fronts. Of course Marxists should participate in popular fronts and campaigns, be they reformist, bourgeois, whatever, with the aim of exposing their inherent inadequacy and arguing for Marxism. What Marxists do not do is go around setting them up! Even on the basis of their own ostensible aims, these AWL fronts have failed. They have not brought ‘new layers of activists’ and catalysed huge struggles. What they have done is provide a steady top-up of the AWL’s membership. While it is a relatively open group on the left, the leadership of the AWL is interested not in Marxist unity but on plugging away at their own little version of ‘Trotskyist’ dogma.

The at once naïve and arrogant view of people which economism engenders was much in evidence at our slate meetings, Dan and an AWL supporter arguing that ‘no-one becomes a Marxist overnight’ and ‘people go through stages’, citing themselves as examples. I don’t think Trotsky meant for the transitional programme to apply to human psychology. I myself became a Marxist with no intermediary steps, and there are numerous examples from times and places when it was normal in working class communities to grow up so. But we could have traded case studies all day – should we really be basing our politics on what is acceptable to a few people right now, or what got a few new people into our orbit for a while (e.g. Respect and muslims)? Or should we ask the real question: what sort of programme does the working class need to move to socialism, and what sort of party does it need to enforce this programme while maintaining internal democracy?

Go on the AWL website, and it is hard to find a political platform or the organisation’s constitution. Under the ‘Who we are’ section there are numerous articles, including ‘Where we stand’ but it is not clear if any, one, or all of these are the actual platform of the organisation. It is even harder to find the constitution – eventually I downloaded the membership pack and was confronted with a dense four-page document. The AWL is a relatively tolerant group on the left, with minorities having the freedom to publish. But only if you keep it in the family: “Activists should not pretend to hold beliefs contrary to their real ones. Minority comrades have a right to state that they hold a minority position, and to give a brief explanation, but without making propaganda outside the AWL against the majority line”. In other words, activists should pretend to hold beliefs different to their own if they are talking to a non-AWLer! CS, in contrast, does not force comrades in a minority to gag themselves in public.

And while AWL comrades have the notional freedom of arguing for minority positions, when there is, to my knowledge, no political platform of the organisation, this diffuses debate and leads to domination of the leadership by default. Communist Students has a 14-point platform and a 350-word constitution. Both platform and constitution can, of course, be changed by annual conference – minorities know exactly what they have to do to change our political strategy. I should also point out that CS members do not have to agree with our platform and constitution, but accept it, ‘as a framework within which to fight for communism’. This is a small but politically significant difference. Of course there is never going to be complete agreement on a platform – it would be ludicrous to expect this.

We do not criticise other left groups or big up our own democratic credentials on the narrow basis of recruiting to Communist Students. We recognise that in present conditions not one of the left student groups in existence are going to steadily recruit until they lead the glorious revolution. How the SWP and AWL maintain members on this basis is beyond me (though actually they don’t; many leave, burned out, when they realise the revolution isn’t just round the corner). CS refuses to play up reality in order to maintain discipline in our ranks. The working class is divided, without leadership, and in a very weak position. The left is a sectarian mess and the objective task we face is to regroup. The dogmatic, narcissistic delusions of Rees and Matgamna do nothing to override this fact – and their refusal to countenance unity and freedom of debate is harming the left. The success of Communist Students in uniting comrades from a variety of tendencies (Trotskyist, council communist etc) shows that Marxists can have different ideas and still work together successfully. Imagine if even the few Marxists left in Britain were united in a democratic party with a vibrant intellectual culture. The prospects of the working class in Britain would increase a hundredfold. This regrouping will require ruthless self-criticism and readiness to abandon ideas that have proved wrong. Communist Students will continue to argue for Marxist unity on the basis of Marxism; on the basis of what we actually need to escape the overripe and miserable capitalism system.