14.05.2008

Left unity not on offer

What sort of 'unity' does the student movement need? Dave Isaacson and Ben Klein reject economism and put forward the case for Marxism

This weekend will, farcically, see two separate gatherings to discuss ‘left unity’ in the student movement. Firstly, the ‘Reclaim the Campus’ event on Saturday May 17, called by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty-run Education Not for Sale campaign, along with Sussex University and London School of Economics student unions. Next day there is a “meeting to discuss the building of a conference of the student left” initiated by the Socialist Workers Party’s Student Respect.

This second meeting, entitled ‘For a democratic, campaigning student movement’, was called in the full knowledge that the ENS event was taking place the day before - indeed Student Respect had been publicly invited at the beginning of April, at the Save NUS Democracy rally during the National Union of Students conference. Clearly the SWP has no wish to tail behind the AWL in student politics - certainly now it has two SR members on the NUS executive, while ENS has none.

Because of our highly critical approach, Communist Students has been accused of failing to take the quest for left unity seriously and of putting our own “sect interests” first. The truth, however, is quite the opposite. Left unity is simply not on the agenda this weekend.

Mind you, none of our critics are clear on what left unity is for - beyond ‘reclaiming our national union’ and building bigger and better campaigns. Neither ENS nor SR has any strategic vision. So most of those involved (leaving aside SWP/AWL sectarianism towards each other) gravitate spontaneously towards a lowest-common-denominator fudge.

SWP, AWL and Workers Power’s Revo youth group - which is intervening in Reclaim the Campus - are all self-professed Marxists, yet none of them fight for unity on the basis of Marxism. Have they such little faith in their ideas that they think left-leaning students cannot be won to them? Or do they see their own sect as ‘the Marxists’ - the revolutionary party in embryo form - and the rest of the left as simply a pool to fish new recruits from?

Marxism

Communist Students says Marxist ideas are powerful because they are true. They best explain where exploitation and oppression come from and why capitalism operates in the way it does. And they show how to kill the system off and usher in the era of human freedom - an aim that can win millions to its banner. Marxism teaches that the working class is the gravedigger of capitalism, the agency that can storm the citadels of power and win genuine democracy, when it is organised into a mass, revolutionary Communist Party.

Marxist ideas are currently held by very few students. But this situation does not have to continue. The biggest obstacles to winning leftwing students to Marxism are the existing ostensibly revolutionary groups who erect bizarre shibboleths to preserve their sect integrity, fighting over the recruitment of ones and twos, while refusing to advocate Marxism in the wider movement. Overcoming this perspective will need a protracted fight.

To this end Communist Students is putting forward its own political platform at Reclaim the Campus. This is a means of raising the level of debate, so that fundamental issues are addressed.

ENS seems terribly confused about what its purpose is. Sometimes it is an “education campaign” or a “united front”. At other times, a vehicle for left unity. The original ENS draft founding statement claimed: “We aim to become an activist network and policy development organisation which helps to rebuild the student movement along these lines from the bottom up.” It also called for “Left unity. 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).

Yet, in the newly updated version coming from AWL comrade Daniel Randall (he was their candidate for NUS president at the spring conference), the ENS seeks “to organise students alongside the workers’ movement to replace capitalism with a society based on collective ownership, social provision for need, ecological sustainability and consistent democracy” (www.free-education.org.uk/?p=517). A bit more than an “education campaign” then!

The rest of comrade Randall’s platform is a veritable shopping list of student economism expressed in the most vague and abstract way, with a sprinkling of Guardian-style concern for ‘human rights’ substituting for its lack of proletarian internationalism.

Revo

What of the Revo group? Luke Cooper, a leading Workers Power and Revo student, recently wrote that his “message to AWL members is - start a fundamental reassessment of your tradition and method” (Workers Power April). But the comrades do nothing to challenge the method of the AWL. Another leading Revo comrade, Jo Casserly, has stated, correctly, that, “Randall’s draft uses such vague formulations like ‘turn outwards towards the anti-war movement’. It is not enough to simply turn towards the anti-war movement - we must call for the immediate end to the war! In fact, the anti-war movement would be in their rights to tell us where to get off, if this is not adopted as a concrete policy at this Saturday’s conference. As a result of sidestepping these vital questions, the draft statement becomes entirely focused on economic demands for students (for grants, against fees, etc)” (worldrevolution.org.uk/index.php?id=24,868,0,0,1,0).

Revo has proposed to change the campaign’s name from ENS to Reclaim the Campus, to reflect a “broader, radical agenda”. We agree that ENS is narrow and is tainted by association with the AWL’s social-imperialism and its economism. But ‘Reclaim the Campus’ is no better. It says nothing about the politics of the group and what kind of future we are struggling for. And when on earth were the campuses ours if we are going to ‘reclaim’ them? There is no future in the past - no ‘golden age’ of free education for all.

Economism

When we charge the AWL and the left in general with economism, we are, of course, met at best with confusion and not infrequently with incredulity. What do Marxists mean by the term? The narrow or common definition of economism is the reduction of Marxism to the level of trade union politics. That is widely known. But there is a broader definition: ie, the denial of the centrality of democracy. Hence imperialist economism, totalitarian economism, atheist economism, student economism, etc.

The AWL just does not get it. Ed Maltby tries to address the issue head on: “I think that the CPGB’s attack against our ‘student economism’ is simply daft. Yes, in 2003 the anti-war movement was massive, despite not being related to a day-to-day student issue. But look at every other mass student movement in Europe recently! Can we find one which the CPGB would not accuse of rank ‘student economism’?”

And Sacha Ismail, the AWL’s student organiser, tells us: “What the CPGB calls economism is a focus on basic class-struggle issues - ie, the ideas that trade unions should organise and fight over wages, working hours, conditions; and that these struggles in the workplace are the cell of the future communist reorganisation of society.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong, comrades! Economism is not a charge we would attach to a mass movement of any kind. It concerns those who profess to be Marxists. So, Ed Maltby will search in vain for an example of where we have characterised a movement (as opposed to the actions of a left group) as economistic. Search away, and tell us how you get on.

Sacha characterises “class-struggle issues” as wages, hours and conditions. This is certainly economism in its narrow trade union form. This crude rejection of the centrality of the Marxist programme for democracy is loyally repeated by Daniel Randall. He writes that, “as long as the abstract ‘call’ for immediate withdrawal of troops is made, everything else - like, I dunno, class politics - is irrelevant.” What idiocy is it that leads self-professed socialists to believe that calling for the defeat of ‘our own’ imperialist state’s occupation of another country is not “class politics”?

Comrade Randall then accuses us of a “lack of any orientation whatsoever to any real class struggle”. We find his organisation’s response to the recent strike by 25,000 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the US against the Iraq war interesting. Communist Students sent a message of solidarity and publicised our action on our blog.

Did the AWL send them a message? If so, did you have the courage of your convictions to tell them that it is their ‘kitsch’ outlook and low-level consciousness that brings them to struggle for the immediate withdrawal of imperialist troops? We also note that it took the AWL until May 7 to put online the May 1 statement from Iraqi trade unionists calling, amongst other things, for the immediate withdrawal of imperialist troops; and even then it prefaced the statement by saying how misguided it thought that demand was. And yet the AWL claims it is the CPGB that has a “ridiculously dogmatic position on Iraq”.

Marx and Engels

An important amendment to the Reclaim the Campus statement from Vicky Thompson of Hands Off the People Of Iran calls for the “immediate and unconditional withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan”. This is crucial. There can be no compromise on this basic issue. That it is missing from Daniel’s initial draft speaks volumes.

It appears that the AWL student fraction is not going to move from the scabby position of the AWL majority on Iraq. Sacha Ismail claims that this is not because they “don’t think ENS should take positions on big political questions”, but because “at a given stage in the development of an alliance or campaign, you have to weigh up what is gained by taking a majority position and what is lost”.

Apparently “relatively little” would be gained from this “slogan”. “General opposition to US imperialism and the occupation of Iraq” (despite the AWL majority’s refusal to call for the end of the occupation) is apparently sufficient. It is, though, unsurprising that the comrades are ashamed about the AWL majority view that imperialist troops can provide a “space” (albeit a “very limited” one) for Iraqi workers to organise in, and that to call for their withdrawal would therefore be wrong. But maybe there is a more practical consideration though - only a minority of AWL students still cling to this social-imperialist garbage.

Comrade Ismail admits that the AWL will almost definitely lose this vote, but says it will “continue to build ENS” if it does. This is typical of the historic malpractice of the trend the AWL comes from - allowing certain political positions to exist formally, but through control of leadership committees doing little or nothing to effectively fight for those politics.

Desperately attempting to theoretically justify the opportunistic limitation of his politics, he claims his practice is broadly analogous to that of Marx and Engels in the International Working Men’s Association, deemed by sage Ismail to be a “broad alliance between all sorts of anti-capitalist and at first not even anti-capitalist working-class currents”. “Only gradually” did it move to “a more explicitly revolutionary socialist direction, and right to the end it was broad enough to accommodate all kinds of different tendencies other than Marxists”.

What ahistorical twaddle. Firstly, Marx and Engels (ie, the revolutionary socialist Marxists) did not set up that organisation. They were not in the driving seat when it was formed. They entered it and fought for communist politics.

According to August Nimtz, “Marx had turned down apparently similar invitations” in the preceding years. What made this one different, and made it worth entering despite the awful politics of many who were involved, was that it contained real working class forces. As Marx wrote to Engels, “I knew on this occasion ‘people who really count’ were appearing, both from London and from Paris” (A Nimtz Marx and Engels: their contribution to the democratic breakthrough New York 2000, p179).

Where, by the way, are the “people who really count” flooding into ENS? The AWL is setting up this organisation - it supplies the bulk of the organised activists and has political control of ENS. Instead of looking to establishing something guided and informed by the politics of Marxism, the AWL comrades are, in the name of unity with largely imaginary forces, consciously limiting their politics. Wanting to be the revolutionary minority in a larger organisation it can recruit from, the AWL is using the same method as John Rees and Lindsey German - with a few more pretensions.