The National Union of Students holds its three-day annual conference starting on Tuesday March 28. Dave Isaacson, a delegate from Leeds Metropolitan University student union, looks at the left, NUS and student politics

Staff and students in universities have in recent years been increasingly proletarianised in a number of ways. Teachers and researchers are experiencing ever greater degrees of insecurity, as they are required to sign casualised contracts. Following the introduction of tuition fees, more students than ever before have to hold down a job and study at the same time. Academic institutions are operating ever increasingly according to the logic of the pseudo-market.

None of this is particularly conducive to learning and education. However, under capitalism, the education system for the masses has never been about the pursuit of knowledge and furtherance of skills in order to enrich our life experiences. Capitalism uses and shapes education provision to suit its own needs. The system requires properly trained workers that are intelligent enough to be productive in a complex economy. It also uses the education system to reproduce class structures and as a form of social control – instilling the sense of discipline necessary for a life of wage-slavery.

However, the knowledge acquired at school and in university does not exclusively serve to increase productivity and bolster capitalism. Through it we can find enjoyment and begin to learn about ourselves and the world around us. It also serves the working class in its historic struggle for the emancipation of humanity from the chains of class society. The worth of knowledge depends upon its application – the unity of theory and practice.

The form and content of education provision are both highly contested. The working class has had to fight hard to achieve the limited gains it has in this sphere. Yet these are constantly under attack and face the threat of being rolled back. Higher education is no longer free and selection is being reintroduced in our schools. More and more aspects of education provision are being handed over to the employing class. The establishment of more faith schools also threatens to trample any notion of secularism in education.

Leadership

Students, alongside lecturers, teachers, pupils and parents, must be at the forefront of opposition to these attacks on our education system. Unfortunately the contrast between the militancy currently being shown by students in France and the levels of resistance in Britain is all too stark. Levels of combativity amongst students are, of course, linked to levels of working class struggle more generally, yet they are not dependent upon them. Students can fight and win – and this in turn can give confidence to the wider workers’ movement.

There has been a crisis of leadership within the student movement for many years now. The NUS has been dominated by Labourite bureaucrats for well over a decade. They have consistently misled, selling out our interests while looking after little more than their own career prospects.

Many students had hoped that this reign of inaction and passivity had come to an end with the election of Kat Fletcher to the post of NUS president in March 2004. She stood on a clear left, anti-Blair ticket as a candidate for the Campaign for Free Education and was a supporter of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. But it was not long before she had changed and she acts no differently now from any other Blairite.

Careerism and the propensity towards bureaucratism together represent one of the greatest dangers in student union politics. Whilst it is important that the left should try to gain positions of influence in the NUS in order to make it fight for the interests of students, we must be vigilant against the dangers of careerism and make sure any representatives we do gain in student unions are held accountable. In this respect NUS NEC member Daniel Randall of Education Not for Sale (ENS), an AWL member, is to be commended for his regular blog which reports on his activities (www.officeronline.co.uk/blogs/danielrandall).

Yet we should be very cautious of fostering illusions in the NUS or even viewing it as a normal trade union. Officially the NUS represents two million students, but it is far from a real union. Students, after all, normally cease to be students after three years and many pass on to managerial or professional employment. They are engaged in student politics usually for at most two and a half years. A new generation follows them.

Since the 1960s student politics has been a principal training ground for professional bourgeois politics: old broad left and Labour student activists become MPs. Through NUS politics they learn to play the game. Since the 1980s former student politicians have also furnished an increasing part of the supply of full-time trade union officials. Careerism is actually the norm, and so are cynical manipulations of procedural rules for the winning of marginal advantage.

In order that it can keep any representatives in check, and so that we can campaign effectively for what we need, it is important that rank and file students are mobilised and politicised. Unfortunately the left is weak not only in the NUS, but also in terms of sustaining rank and file groups on the campuses.

The left in Britain is terribly divided and this is even more apparent in student politics. There are candidates from at least four socialist groups standing for positions to the NUS executive. While this disunity arises from real political differences which should certainly not be skirted around, this does not excuse it. The student left could, and must, achieve unity in action, whilst providing the space and freedom to openly discuss differences if it is to be able to give leadership to students.

Protest

However, other interests intervene. Most left groups see their student sections as membership conveyor belts providing their organisation with a malleable supply of raw recruits. It is petty sectarian interests that allow differing positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, to prevent unity on other issues.

The left needs a united and autonomous student and youth organisation along the lines of that called for by ENS: “The activists and organisations of the student left should unite – maximum unity in action, free and open debate about our differences and disagreements” (www.free-education.org.uk/?page_id=43). It was therefore disappointing to see the Socialist Party voting down a motion at the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party conference which called for a united and independent youth organisation. The proposers of this motion, the Revolution youth group (set up by Workers Power), should link up with others to push more widely for this aim.

Despite the failure of both the NUS and the left to provide effective leadership, students have shown, albeit on a small scale, that they are prepared to fight. The threats against and invasion of Iraq saw school and college students across the country walking out and striking against the government’s imperialist war. Many of those at university now will have been involved in those protests. More recently we have seen tens of thousands of young people protesting at the G8 and world poverty.

Protests over the right to free speech have taken place, most notably with the George Fox Six in Lancaster. Six students who protested at a corporate event on their campus were prosecuted by their own university for aggravated trespass. Sadly they have just lost their appeal, though the case generated a great deal of publicity and widespread outrage – not least among the academic staff at Lancaster University, who have shown solidarity with these students.

One AUT member at Lancaster told me how, following a picket for the AUT/Natfhe strike, he went round the university putting up posters in support of the George Fox Six. Linking up students and workers in struggle is of vital importance to the success of either. It was great to see students and staff rallying in support of the AUT/Natfhe strike demands.

The left must now make sure that the support of student unions and students themselves remains solid throughout the marking boycott. Some individual student unions have come out in opposition to the AUT/Natfhe action and students in these universities and the NUS nationally should fight hard to overcome this opposition.

It is clear that students will fight if given the correct leadership. It is also clear that student protest cannot simply be limited to narrow sectional issues like fees and departmental cuts, however important these are. For students questions of democracy and internationalism are of huge concern. The left must jettison its economism and take these issues seriously if it is to provide effective leadership.

Conference

At NUS conference delegates will be faced with seemingly incomprehensible factional battles and frustrating bureaucratic manoeuvres which are enough to shock even the most hardened cynic. There are three main left groups that will be standing candidates for full-time positions on the executive. These are Student Respect, ENS and Student Broad Left. The Communist Party of Great Britain will be giving critical support to their candidates in the order above.

Student Respect is mostly made up of members of the Socialist Workers Party’s Socialist Worker Student Society and they are certainly organisationally dominant within it. Just as with Respect itself, Student Respects politics are thoroughly popular frontist. Indeed they are no different from that of their parent organisation, as Student Respect is not an independent group.

Student Respect has no democratic structures of its own; there have been no national meetings or any kind of discussion about who Respect candidates should be or what strategy Student Respect groups should be adopting on the campuses. All of these things are decided behind closed doors without the democratic involvement of the membership of Student Respect. The CPGB will be raising this issue with Student Respect and demanding full democratic structures.

ENS on the other hand does allow some space for democratic discussion and CPGB students are involved in both this group and Student Respect. To the extent that the CNWP becomes a feature in student politics we will also be involved in this. Like Student Respect, ENS’s platform is mired in economism and fails to break the bounds of reformism.

The largest organised group within ENS is the AWL. Whilst the AWL have taken a much better approach than Respect on a number of questions, its big weakness has been shown up by its failure to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. It seems to think, wrongly, that the occupying forces are providing some kind of cover or protection for the Iraqi workers’ and women’s movements. They subsequently find themselves in the first camp siding with imperialism on this issue.

Then we have Student Broad Left (SBL), which is run by the secretive, Stalinoid and highly bureaucratic Socialist Action sect. This group is devoid of democracy and deeply reformist. If there is a group that has a knack for careerism then this is it. If you want to get a job in Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Authority bureaucracy then joining it would probably be a good career move. At least two SA leaders receive salaries in excess of £100,000 working as Livingstone’s apparatchiks.

The fight for communist politics in the student movement has never been more relevant.