The student and youth left – a guided tour
First published in Communist Student no.3- click on pics to go to group’s website
Student Respect/Socialist Worker Student Society:
In all probability the largest student group (although that’s not saying much), you will find them everywhere telling you that things such as war and islamophobia are – get this – really bad.
Secretly run by: The Socialist Workers Party.
Iron fist rating: 5/5. Their ‘conference’ consists of a bunch of workshops about why war and stuff are – yes – really bad. Policy emanates mysteriously from SWP headquarters.
Socialist Students:
Smaller than SR/SWSS, but with a few strong campus groups and a good campaigning ethos. While SWSS is obsessed with a few carefully selected ‘big’ issues, SS focuses on the bread and butter – privatisation this, cuts that, debt the other.
Secretly run by: The Socialist Party in England and Wales.
Iron fist rating: 3/5. While power is formally devolved somewhat, they will never give you a leaflet that doesn’t feel like it was clipped from SPEW’s dull paper, The Socialist.
Education Not For Sale:
Officially the rump of an old anti-fees campaign, it has developed into one of those ‘left unity’ projects based around a list of relatively banal demands that anybody could sign up to. Leftists for “international working class solidarity”? You could knock me down with a feather.
Secretly run by: The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, whose idiosyncratic approach to “international working class solidarity” involves American troops staying in Iraq.
Iron fist rating: 2/5. Seemingly democratic on student activist stuff … but don’t mention the war!
Revolution, aka Revo:
Ostensibly set up to bring the unwashed anarchoid youth movements of the 90s into organised revolutionary (natch) politics. In reality, a recruitment umbilical cord between said people and …
Secretly run by: …Workers Power.
Iron fist rating: 4/5. While conferences do have formal power over various matters, policy is cooked up by leading WPers, and enforced with their block vote. Dissenters are swiftly expelled.
Student Broad Left:
The left face of the NUS bureaucracy, and vocational school for Ken Livingstone’s personal staff.
Secretly run by: Socialist Action.
Iron fist rating: 5/5. Masters in the black arts of sectarian manoeuvring, careerism and opportunism, SA’s political hit-men move in the shadows and make the Stasi look like rank amateurs. Avoid.