14.02.2008

Student unions must be won to communism

Ted North tells of spreading the message in Sheffield

For the third time in three years Communist Students will be contesting student union elections at Sheffield University.

Last year our five candidates picked up between 5% and 11% of the vote. Not a bad result, especially as they all stood on an openly revolutionary platform during what has been a period of defeat for the left and a general downturn in the class struggle. No positions were won, but we were in any case primarily concerned with propagating our ideas.

Nominations are now open for 2008 and voting will take place over March 4-6. An important aspect of our campaign is the need for the principled unity of those who call themselves Marxists - in opposition to the halfway house projects of virtually all the rest of the left, which have failed again and again.

The current sabbatical officers elected last year in Sheffield essentially fall into three categories. Christian bureaucrats, left opportunists and naked careerists.

Christian Unions across the country have ‘gone political’. As a result, students at Sheffield are at present misrepresented by several CU members, who did not feel it necessary to make public either their religious agenda or their affiliation when they stood last year. But, then again, neither did current women’s officer Bryony Shanks of Student Broad Left (and, presumably, the shadow Socialist Action). In fact, the whole ballot suffered from a lack of transparency - there were even allegations of fraud.

Sheffield student union can be viewed in many ways as a microcosm of the National Union of Students. Elementary democratic structures are under threat, but opposition is painfully weak and lacks any worthwhile sense of political direction. Preserving the status quo is often enough for some on the left. Meanwhile the bureaucracy - right, centre and ‘left’ - have the initiative and pull most of the strings. The failure of Education Not for Sale (sponsored by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty) and the Socialist Workers Party/Student Respect to agree nationally even on a pathetically lowest-common-denominator bloc for the NUS elections reveals the current state of sectarian disunity.

The sitting officers in Sheffield are trying to push through a variety of changes this year. For a start, the initial part of the election will feature voting on just three positions - president, plus the education and international officers. A referendum will then decide on how to proceed - but more on this later. The separation of the election into different sections is in itself an affront to basic democratic procedure. Moreover, considering that only overseas students can stand for international officer, and they are unfortunately rather thin on the ground in the Sheffield organised left, there are in effect only two positions for us to fight for.

On February 6 a meeting was held initiated by women’s officer Bryony Shanks. The 30 comrades present effectively represented the entire spectrum of left political opinion at the university - from the Labour Party (who seem rightwing even by New Labour standards), various shades of feminism, SWP, AWL/ENS, and, of course, Communist Students. The stated aim was to discuss ways of opposing the proposal put forward by some of the rightwing Christian Union-affiliated incumbents to abolish the women’s officer post, as well as a number of other constitutional ‘innovations’.

There was unity against these proposals, but differences about how to fight them. A ‘simple no’ group coalesced around the Labour Party members. They argued that, as a two-thirds majority is needed to pass such a proposal, and therefore a mere one third to defeat it, the best way is a straightforward campaign to reject the change without proposing anything else. Others, however, supported the ‘positive alternative’ proposal of Bryony Shanks, and those around her in Student Broad Left and the women’s committee. They are calling for yet another set of officers.

However, the obvious problem for the left is not what exact set of officer posts we have. Rather it is the left itself and the overall level of consciousness amongst students and therefore their involvement in student politics.

As a general principle Communist Students favours not the election of individual officers, whether that be a president or a women’s officer. Instead there should be the election - on the basis of proportional representation - of a student union executive. This body - which must be recallable - should then elect whomsoever it sees fit to whatever positions are deemed necessary - again with the power of recall.

But there is a much more important question than structures. As long as the student union remains the preserve of trainee bureaucrats and self-serving careerists, we shall continue going round in small circles. Whilst the abolition of the women’s officer, presumably based on crude male chauvinism, is clearly retrogressive, should the answer coming from the left be no more than staying as we are or proposing an alternative set of positions? What is needed is Marxist politics, not squabbles over which set of sabbatical positions best suits the needs of this or that careerist, opportunist or bureaucrat.

Communist Students favours democratic structures and procedures. The revolutionary left must be seen as the most consistent and extreme democrats. Hence we demand the democratic transformation of student unions, the NUS and the whole university administration. But we are concerned with content as well as form.

Our main role must be to spread the ideas of Marxism and to do that most effectively we must educate ourselves in them. Part and parcel of that is training communist politicians by winning student unions to fight around big questions - republican democracy, European unity, the occupation of Iraq, the war danger against Iran, the danger of runaway climate change ...

Communists Students stands for a society based on the principle of need, not profit, a society of general freedom that does away with armies, the police and prisons, a society which will see the fullest development of each individual. That is the vision with which we want to inspire students - and that is the message we shall take to them during Sheffield’s student union elections.