Dave Isaacson replies to Sofie Buckland of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty

It is to be welcomed that Sofie Buckland of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has written a response to my article on student politics and the National Union of Students (Weekly Worker April 6). An essential part of the struggle to win the NUS to revolutionary democratic politics is for the left to get its act together and comrade Buckland’s willingness to openly engage is to be commended. Indeed, I hope that this exchange will continue and deepen.

Sofie writes that though I “made a number of important points”, my article was “marred by abstractness and sectarianism”. She suggests that “the CPGB’s approach seems to be that of a purely propagandist sect” and that in our interventions in student politics have been shaped by the “primary concern” of “recruitment to the CPGB”. This is nonsense. However, I will first concentrate on what is at the heart of our differences with the AWL.

This issue is economism, or rather our implacable opposition to it and polemical assault against its ubiquitous manifestations on the left. Sofie appears to believe that I pulled this charge out of a hat in order to give a theoretical gloss to the CPGB’s decision to favour SWP-Respect candidates over those of the Education Not for Sale network sponsored by the AWL and on whose slate Sofie was elected to the NUS’s leadership. And, of course, she wants our readers to believe that the vote for SWP-Respect candidates was (in some odd way) simply a ruse to recruit. Completely wrong, comrade … and slightly eccentric.

If Sofie checks our website, she will find that this is hardly the first time the CPGB has characterised the AWL’s politics as economic. On April 8 2000, when our organisations were somewhat closer than they are now, the CPGB and AWL held a joint school where the issue of economism was one of the two main topics of discussion (Weekly Worker April 13 2000). The discussion continued for some time and our charge remains the same today.

Unfortunately, the charge is not the only thing that has not changed. It is clear from Sofie’s contribution that AWL comrades still display a complete misunderstanding of the term. Leading member Pete Radcliff has previously written that “economism was the term Lenin used to describe the politics and approach of revolutionaries who exclude themselves from the political struggle … and merely concentrate on trade union agitation” (Weekly Worker January 11 2001).

Similarly in the sentence directly following her rejection of the accusation Sofie writes “it is true that ENS places emphasis on the struggle around ‘economic’ issues like grants and fees; but, as I will explain, this is no more economism than a working class party placing emphasis on workplace struggles over issues like wages, hours and conditions.”

Ironically, this is a perfect example of economism. By placing “emphasis on the struggle around ‘economic’ issues” ENS and the AWL play down questions of democracy and politics. It is this deprioritisng of the centrality of democracy which is key to Lenin’s definition of economism. This is why he identified strands of economism other than its trade unionist variant – imperialist economism, for example.

The practical effect of emphasising “wages, hours and conditions” is to reinforce the position of workers as an slave class with perspectives for struggle that do not point them beyond capitalism itself. Marxists do not denigrate or belittle these economic struggles. We must intervene in them, but how?

Take the specific question of students. The ENS’s main NUS conference bulletin raised six “key demands” for a fighting programme that could apparently turn the NUS around: “Free education for all funded by taxation of the rich and business; living grants for all students in further and higher education; a universal living wage of £7.50 an hour; reverse privatisation on campuses, bring all services in-house; a living wage and full trade union rights for all campus workers and a repeal of the anti-union laws so working students can organise properly for their rights.”

The comrades did manage to call for a “reverse” to “cuts to NUS democracy” in another section of this publication, but said nothing about the radical extension of democracy and accountability in the union or, tellingly, addressed the question of democracy in wider society. It is debatable if the NUS is a ‘union’ or not of course, but the AWL’s purpose in shaping the ENS’s priority demands in this way is clear. It wants NUS activists to adopt an essentially trade union militant-type programme – the self-proclaimed Marxists are advocating trade unionism, by definition a sectional and limited ideology, as a fighting platform for students.

The truth is that it is not the job of Marxists to advocate anything other than Marxism, no matter what arena they work in. Of course, this will naturally include demands on ‘economic’ questions such as grants and fees, funding and privatisation. But these must be given political content as part of a programme that prioritises the fight for extreme democracy in contemporary capitalist society.

Concretely in our conditions, it must mean the abolition of the constitutional monarchical system and the fight for a democratic republic, stamped with the imprint of the working class and defended by a people’s militia. Students – in order to advance their position in today’s Britain – must be won to this perspective of the working class winning the battle for democracy.

This is the real meaning of the phrase “independent working class politics” – one that is so frequently mangled by the AWL economists to mean a cramped emphasis on sectional economic concerns rather that a fight for the objective interests of our class, the democratic republic.

According to Sofie “when ENS advocates an end to fees, a living grant, a living wage etc, it advocates them not purely as ‘economic’ demands, but as economic demands which spill over into political ones”. Our AWL comrades really should (re?)embark on a study of Lenin’s What is to be done? This expression appears an example of what Lenin dubbed a sin of his contemporary economists – ie, lending the economic struggle itself a political character.

He writes that “the idea preached by our economists, that the economic struggle is the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into the political movement, is so extremely harmful and extremely reactionary in practice” (VI Lenin Essential works of Lenin New York 1987, pp104-105). Opportunism seems to have a constantly reoccurring template, no matter when it appears.

Sofie is right to say that I have criticised the AWL’s position over Iraq on ENS’s internal discussion list, though she is clearly wrong to state that I failed to explain this in my article. AWL comrades have repeatedly attempted to belittle this controversy by suggesting it revolves around the CPGB’s obsession with the slogan “troops out now” – as if slogans do not encapsulate political programmes.

What is central is not the slogan’s pithy ‘neatness’, but the attitude to democracy that support or opposition to it betrays. The AWL’s refusal to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops effectively means that the AWL is in favour of the denial of the right of Iraqis to self determination, a crime against democracy. This is a clear – and politically noxious – example of what Lenin blasted as ‘imperialist economism’, I would suggest.

In hustings speeches at NUS conference, ENS candidates completely failed to mention the occupation of Iraq, despite the massive involvement of students and young people in general in the anti-war movement. The only time an ENSer came close was when all presidential candidates were asked a direct question on their attitude to any attack on Iran.

Daniel Randell (AWL and ENS) stated that he opposed any attack on Iran but was at the same time an opponent of the current regime. Yet he pointedly failed to use the opportunity to attack the presence of US/UK troops in Iraq. SWP-Respect speakers, on the other hand, mentioned the anti-war movement in almost every speech they made at conference.

We are not saying that the SWP is not itself economist, of course. In contrast to Pete Radcliffe’s foolish suggestion, economists are perfectly capable of raising political demands; however, they fail to pose independent working class political answers when they do, effectively adopting other, alien forms of politics.

In the SWP’s anti-war activity, we see that tailing the spontaneously generated ideas of the movement has led SWPers to peddle pacifism. In this sense, Sofie is right to criticise some of the “liberal/populist fluff” that also comes out of the mouths of these comrades. However, the alternative choice she and her organisation offers us on this pivotal question – meanly-mouthed first campism – is actually even more unpalatable.

Our understanding that the working class is the only consistently democratic class in contemporary society and that its struggle is the key to liberation for all oppressed sections raises the question of organisation, of course.

In contrast to the AWL’s call for a Labour Party mark two, communists believe that an essential plank of a general platform for students should be the call for what is needed, a genuine working class party – a Communist Party. Now comrade Buckland may well accuse us of “abstractness” for raising this question: certainly, AWLers have previously dubbed our call for a reforged Communist Party, as an immediate demand for advanced workers to unite around, a ludicrous ‘ultimatum’ that takes no account of objective reality.

In truth, such opposition tells us much about the political meltdown of the ostensibly Marxist left. Sofie hints that she at least is aware of the problem when she writes “a policy to unite the student left should not include every dot and comma of the revolutionary programme: what it should do is pose the question of a political framework in which immediate demands can be won, retained and extended – not only in terms of reorganising the student movement, but in terms of a broader alliance for social change and the kind of society we want to see. In that sense ENS is unambiguously working class in its orientation.”

In fact, the student left should be united on the basis of the politics that the bulk of it professes to believe in – Marxism. Certainly it would be foolish to insist on adherence to “every dot and comma” of a particular revolutionary programme as an ultimatum to an organisation that does not yet exist.

However, left unity on any other basis than Marxism is … what exactly, comrade Buckland? Is the comrade promising us the same sort of ‘communism on account’ as the SWP and Socialist Party are guilt of in Respect and the Campaign for a New Workers Party? Of course, we are prepared to enter into all sorts of fronts with limited platforms, aspects of which we may have disagreements with. But if Marxists do not fight for a united student left on the basis of communism, and propagate those politics as an answer to the problems facing students, what sort exactly of politics are they recommending to the mass of students?