05.02.2009

Where now for student left?

The left's sub-minimum programmes have led to a bureaucrats' victory, writes Boz Cirrik

After protracted birth pangs, the National Union of Students has finally passed its governance review under the inspirational presidency of Wes Streeting.

The package achieved infamy among student left activists for the comprehensive manner in which it routed what remained of NUS democracy. Conference is replaced by a bi-annual congress, which is to be more a ‘celebration’ of the NUS’s work than an actual decision-making body. Delegates to congress will not have to be elected. The executive will be rearranged such that it will be all but impossible for the existing left to get a foothold on it.

The NUS was never a particularly democratic organisation. Once it was dominated by Labourites and Stalinists - now there are only Labourites, and generally of the most rightwing, post-Blairite type. The fact that the GR has taken so long to pass (over a year now, and four separate extraordinary or regular conferences) is ironically due to anti-democratic checks on the power of conference - qualified majority voting, and the need for two consecutive conferences to ratify it. The fact that the qualified majority has only once been denied to the GR hints at the depth of bureaucratisation in the NUS, and the wholehearted commitment of its functionaries to its actual role - not to organise students in a quasi-trade union defence of their immediate interests, but to provide a training ground for labour bureaucrats.

Many of today’s New Labour ministers cut their teeth in the malicious factional struggles of the NUS - including former Eurocommunists (the hard right wing of the ‘official’ Communist Party) active in the Broad Left/Labour/Liberal/communist front, and the anti-Trotskyist goon squad that was so eloquently named Operation Icepick. Scores more bureaucrats in the trade unions have the same training.

NUS frequently makes airy remarks about political affairs, national and international. It rather less frequently organises serious political campaigns in the interests of students. The stunts it has put on have tended to be politically dismal; this trend reached its apogee at last year’s conference, when even the (empty) commitment to fight for free education was explicitly abandoned, in favour of ‘realistically’ lobbying to ‘keep the cap’ on university fees. (Of course, actual ‘realists’ have noted that vice-chancellors are already acting as if the cap has been lifted - indeed, it is almost definitely a done deal. Looks like you might need to do more than lobby, comrade bureaucrats ...)

Along with the ‘official’ bureaucrats, the life of the NUS is livened up by the presence of the organised radical left. Its approach has been of a piece with its approach to the trade unions - try to claw your way up to the top by being ‘the best fighters’. The thing is that the purpose of the NUS was even less to ‘fight’ than the most craven trade union. The endless calls for a ‘democratic, campaigning NUS’ were no more meaningful than calls for a ‘democratic, campaigning Commission for Racial Equality’, or any other state-funded, state-monopolised bureaucracy. So in reality, they clawed their way to the top the same way everybody else did - by frantic wheeler-dealing with sundry forces for second-preference votes and support for motions at conference.

The holy second pref was the saviour of the left bureaucrat - the single transferable voting system for the ‘block of 12’ part-time executive members meant that usually the Socialist Workers Party’s student front of the day, or Education Not for Sale (the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s front), or what remains of Broad Left (soft-left Labour dissidents dominated by the ultra-sectarian Socialist Action) could scrabble together enough leftover ballots to get a member or two on board. Now, the block of 12 is gone. It is no coincidence that only now do these opportunists see the NUS as defunct - for their purposes, it probably is.

ENS - or rather, the “AWL student and youth committee”: there goes that pretence! - has written to Socialist Students proposing a “new organising centre”. The “NUS is going to be definitively shut down as a source of political leadership for the student movement” (as if it ever provided political leadership to anyone!). This means that, “objectively”, no less, there is a space for some phantom organisation that will, among other things, “hegemonis[e] the fight for free education” and “revers[e] the haemorrhage of sane, non-careerist students from students’ unions” (perhaps the AWL should be worried more about the haemorrhage of sanity from their own organisation).

They are not the only group left without even an excuse for a strategy in the wake of the GR (although one assumes that SBL will take its chance within the new order), and the SWP has plans for stepping up different aspects of student work - but that will likely result in little more than an enlarged (or not) version of the old Socialist Worker Student Society, much as Student Respect was for a couple of years.

Instead of trying to magic up a new NUS out of thin air - only this time it’ll work! - the comrades would do better to take account of how completely they were paralysed, how they were outmanoeuvred by the bureaucracy, how endless ‘broad’ mom-’n’-apple-pie demands for free education and so forth failed to build broad organisations at all; and, when enough time has passed for it to become unavoidably obvious, how reliant they became on the bureaucratic structures they claimed to oppose.

The exclusion of the existing left from any serious influence in the NUS was certainly the work of the bureaucracy - but dogs’ tails wag, classes struggle, and bureaucrats block leftwing influence. The measure of strategy is how well it deals with those events, obstacles and antagonisms which are broadly predictable. We have been fed various sub-minimum programmes which fail to deal convincingly with the big questions in order to ‘get a hearing’, and we have got nothing to show for it - simply defeat after defeat after defeat.

The failure of the existing left is a political question, and only when it fully comes to use its most powerful tool - Marxism - will the failure be overcome.