Over the past few months the student movement has again been in the news. Only with a difference — this time the heroine of recent press reports has been NUS President and Communist Party Executive Committee member Sue Slipman. Many on the left have, however, been more than a little [illegible] many CP and Labour Party members will have been taken aback, to say the least, by her widely reported attacks on the anti-fascist movement following Lewisham, and the news of an explicit alliance at December's NUS Conference between the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) and the Broad Left (an alliance of CP and Labour Party students).
It is therefore especially timely that the November issue of the CP's theoretical journal, Marxism Today, should carry a major piece on the role of the student movement today by the CPGB's student organiser, Ken Spours.¹
At present the NUS is one of the few national mass organisations led by the Communist Party, so that their policies and strategy amongst students are of no small interest in assessing the future direction of the Party, in particular since the adoption of the new version of The British Road to Socialism. The apparent turn by the Communist Party's student leaders has involved the introduction of a whole new terminology into the student movement: 'corporate politics', 'institutional harmony' and 'public accountability', to name but a few. In attempting to clarify the relationship between the Communist Party's theory and practice, I shall try to demonstrate the content of this new terminology in the student movement today.
'The Present Crisis in the NUS'
The National Union of Students is today approaching its biggest test since the left won the leadership of the union at the end of the 1960s. Within the NUS, the Tories have succeeded in mopping up the motley collection of minor groups previously vying for the allegiance of the right wing. With the help of funds estimated to be of the order of £25,000 per annum from Conservative Central Office, they have managed to grow from virtually nothing three years ago to a level where today they are the single largest political tendency within the NUS, with a claimed individual membership of 20,000 students. The Federation of Conservative Students today stands poised to make an effective challenge for the leadership of the national union.
From without, the major threat to the national union comes from the government and Local Education Authorities (LEAs), in the form of plans to reduce drastically the control by student unions over their funds. The authorities and the courts have been able to base their offensive on the widespread feeling of disillusion with the NUS felt by thousands of students who have been through four years of virtually uninterrupted defeats in their struggles to defend the value of their grant, to hold back the cuts, and to fight for jobs when they leave college.
The aim of the right wing inside NUS, and the government and education authorities outside, is to turn the clock back to the days of the 'welfare student unionism' of the 1950s and '60s. As the Broad Left aptly put it in one of their pamphlets two years ago: "The right basically believes that students unions should concern themselves solely with 'student problems' which they define as separate from the problems of society as a whole."²
Under attack is the very capacity of the NUS to campaign on behalf of its membership and to link up with other sections of society. What is at stake is whether the Tories will take over the NUS, and therefore with which class the majority of students will line up in the major social, economic and political struggles taking shape in British society.
The Student Movement and 'Government of the Left'
The starting point for Spours' argument is the crisis on the student left and its failure to respond adequately to the new conditions prevailing in post-school education as a result of the Government's material, ideological and 'anti-democratic' assault on further and higher education. This failure is, according to Spours, best encapsulated in the phrase "the crisis of corporate politics". He denotes by this the impasse of traditional militant student unionism, with all its concomitant short-sightedness and economism. The roots of this impasse are the objective impossibility, in this period, of defending students' material interests. As Spours puts it: "At present it would require a government of the left to reverse the cutbacks in education on the basis of an alternative economic strategy".³ Furthermore, in its traditional role (since the early '70s) of attempting to defend students' 'sectoral' 'self-interests', the NUS has proved to be incapable of uniting students.
The way out of this impasse for Spours is the development of a new basis for the unity of all students, whether they be scientists or artists, sporting or cultural enthusiasts, politicos or non-politicals. The one factor which all students do have in common is not so much their material interests as their future functions in society as intellectuals of one sort or another. It is their character as 'trainee intellectuals' which determines that the crucial issues around which students can be united are what Spours speaks of as the ideological questions of democracy and control.
According to Spours, such an approach, far from being a step backwards from the fight around material questions, can both tackle the problem of unity at a time when students' material interests cannot be effectively defended, and mark a new step forward in developing a strategy for the transformation of the process of which all students are part. It thus has the advantage of creating a new basis for unity amongst different sections of students around the theme of a 'diverse and critical education', and at the same time organising the defence of 'the democratic fabric of our institutions' in order to prepare the process of their socialist transformation in the future (presumably in the context of the "government of the left" referred to above).
Where does such an approach leave our student unions? Well, it is, for Spours, the essential step in breaking them from the impasse of 'corporate politics'. For the first time student unions can take on a new and wider role within the education system, reintegrating themselves into the colleges locally and the deliberations of the educational establishment at a national level. The NUS can begin to play the role of a responsible partner within the institutions of further and higher education, thereby exerting an influence for change in a progressive direction. The main hallmarks of the NUS's phase of 'corporate politics' — the concept of the mass campaigning union and the defence of autonomy — can thus be transcended in the direction of 'hegemonic politics'. Thus the new phrases about 'institutional consensus' and 'public accountability' take on flesh and blood as part of a strategy of democratisation of post-school education. Student unions, reintegrated into the institutions of further and higher education, can wage a struggle within these institutions around points of ideology. The establishment of such an ideological consensus is made all the more easy by the bourgeoisie's abandonment of the ethic of the liberal education system. Such a consensus will then be crucial at a later date in winning these institutions, as a whole, to the propositions of a government of the left, which will thus be able to set about tackling the problems at present beyond the NUS's sphere of influence, viz. those of economic decision-making with respect to post-school education.
Corporate Politics and the Unity of the Student Movement
In examining Spours' arguments, it would be totally unserious to deny that there has been a crisis of strategy on the student left in recent years. Those like the student [illegible] the Socialist Workers Party, whose prescription for all of [illegible] ills of the NUS is a new and bigger dose of militancy, close their eyes to the real changes which the student movement has undergone over the past couple of years.
In fact, Spours is correct to point to the failure of the left to deal adequately with the Government's offensive and the new situation in the student movement. Nevertheless, [illegible] does not even attempt to analyse why this situation [illegible] a significant base within the NUS. Insofar as [illegible] upon these questions, all ills are put at the door of [illegible], incredibly during the period of the Tories' fastest ever growth, the FCS doesn't even merit a mention. Sue Slipman summed up this approach to the problems of the student movement most succinctly in a recent edition of the Broad Left Journal: 'Students, abused by the Left, turned to the Right'.⁴
A less superficial analysis of the crisis of the student movement has to start from the fact that students have experienced a serious decline in their standards of living and education (in terms of books per student, student-staff ratios, etc.) in recent years. The results of the Government's policies of holding back income, cutting social expenditure, and allowing unemployment to rocket to levels unprecedented since the '30s have hit students as hard as any other section of society. Not only that, but they have hit students themselves in an uneven way, accentuating the divisions institutionalised in the binary system and the inequalities of the grants system, so that those worst hit in both their pockets and facilities have been those in the 'poor relation' sectors of post-school education — the further education and teacher training sectors. It is students from these sectors who also face the highest levels of unemployment if they do manage to get through college.
More generally it is clearly the case that both the increased competition for places at college and the increased competition for jobs have profound effects on the consciousness and activities of the majority of students. Furthermore, the repeated defeats the student movement has suffered on grants, on jobs (especially for trainee teachers), on the cuts, and on tuition fee levels have lent credence to the idea that the student movement is incapable of defending its members. (Spours' answer to this problem seems to be to say: 'Yes, that's true, let's all unite around something different and forget our grants and future jobs till better times'!) In society as a whole, students have witnessed those same trade union leaders who led the struggle against similar policies from a Tory Government now knuckling under without very much more than a whimper to Wilson and Callaghan. Given this situation of labour movement passivity in the face of right-wing government policies and repeated defeats of the student movement, a polarisation around different class solutions to the crisis is virtually inevitable. As students become disillusioned with collective action and begin to seek individual solutions to their problems, the ideological basis is rapidly being laid for a resurgence of the right. Not only does academic competition between individuals hot up in these circumstances, but racist and sexist solutions also gain new credibility — the idea that women and overseas students have less right to post-school education than white, middle class males. Thus it should be no surprise that in many colleges strip shows have resurfaced — and with them, riding on the broad shoulders of the men of the rugby club, come the new student ideologues of the Tory right.
The polarisation which we have seen amongst students over the past year itself takes place in an uneven way, with the universities being the main centres of Tory growth whilst the FCS has negligible influence in the further education sector. In other words, the most proletarianised sections of students, who will lose most if the NUS loses its campaigning character, and who in the main are or will be members of trade unions, are proving the most resistant to the growth of the right wing.
Thus the resurgence of the Tories in NUS is not an [illegible] dealt with as part of a global [illegible].
The major distinctive feature of the NUS which emerged out of the youth radicalisation of the '60s was its independent character and [illegible] membership in mass action campaigns around such [illegible]. For the first time the [illegible] movement could organise its members independently of the institutions of post-school education, and for [illegible] could link the student movement with the tremendous social struggles of the early '70s. This was shown in no uncertain fashion in the support given by students to the miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974. It was this national campaigning character of NUS which also made it possible for the least well-organised sectors of students to be integrated into the national union for the first time. This was above all the case with the further education sector, where the sorts of concessions won by students in the big universities on a college by college basis were inconceivable outside a framework of national campaigns, where the full force of the entire student movement could be focused around specific objectives.
The Barber budget of December 1973 marked the beginning of the end of the ability of such purely student activity to win major gains for the student movement. The initial response to this situation from the leadership of the NUS was to seek out alliances with the 'left' leaders in the trade unions, through joint protest action locally and nationally against the cuts. But following the massive cuts lobby of Parliament in November 1976, these lefts took fright lest such movements spill over into an overall struggle against the central pillar of the Labour Government's policies — the Social Contract, to which these 'leaders' were and remain firmly wedded.
It was the development of this situation, characterised by increasingly sharp government attacks and inaction on the part of the trade union lefts, which posed the left in the NUS with its current crisis of strategy. The options are very clear. On the one hand, to develop a strategy which aims to mobilise students against the Government's policies through both systematically seeking out alliances with all sections of the labour movement and confronting those labour leaders who sacrifice on the altar of the Social Contract not only their own members but also the gains of the working class in the spheres of education, jobs and the whole of the social services since the Second World War. Or, alternatively, to turn the student movement back into the educational institutions, integrating student unions, locally and nationally, into the decision-making bodies of these institutions, with a view to gaining what concessions are possible within the framework of consensus with the local and national education authorities.
'Broad Left Policies — Tory Tunes'
If we now turn to the practice of the Communist Party in the student movement, I believe it is remarkably simple to demonstrate that the activities of Sue Slipman — so lauded in the press — are not temporary individual aberrations, but rather a brutally coherent application of the theoretical and strategic conceptions of the CPGB, as outlined in Spours' article and sanctioned by the new British Road.
The Government's attacks on post-school education have taken the form not simply of cuts, but also a whole ideological offensive aimed at pinning the blame for youth unemployment on the inadequacies of the education system itself, thereby providing an alibi for recent moves to give private industry a much greater say in the goals and content of education. The hardest hit by this project of restructuring higher and further education have been those sectors most clearly orientated towards vocational training, and not having the same lobbying power as the big universities in the corridors of power within the educational establishment. Thus, for example, within the teacher training sector it is planned to cut teacher supply from 114,000 places in 1974 to 46,670 places in 1981, involving the closure of 39 education departments and colleges of education by 1981.
At the same time the Government has sought to divide students along racist lines through differential fees and quotas for overseas students, and, de facto, along sexist lines by cutting those sectors of further and higher education containing the highest proportion of women students (teacher training, social studies, arts courses, etc.).
Clearly a socialist response to these attacks would have to put a premium on the unity of the student movement by uniting all students behind those facing the most vicious attacks and, at the same time, seek to direct student action towards explaining the anti-working class nature of the Government's projects to the labour movement. Thus the cornerstone of a strategy in post-school education would have to be the eradication of its present inequalities in terms of access, qualification and content, and its socialist transformation. Any other approach would fail to win labour movement backing as it would imply support for an institution which fundamentally discriminates against working class people in the first place.
The CP's strategy in the student field has, however, been remarkable in that it has involved no attempt to develop such an alliance and, in the recent past, has accepted each major step in the Government's project. That this has been the case is best demonstrated by a few examples.
On the question of college closures, the position advocated by Slipman was for the 'retention of colleges due for closure within the education sector'. In other words, the massive cut in teacher supply was accepted; and following the abandonment of the wave of occupations in summer 1976 by the NUS executive, there were no further attempts to mobilise students against it. Given the fact that it would actually require an additional 88,000 teachers to meet the objective of maximum class sizes of 30 put forward in the Labour Party's manifesto, the basis for labour movement sympathy and support for such a campaign was obviously there. Nevertheless, because such a mass campaign would have run slap-bang up against the National Union of Teachers' leadership, who were themselves in the process of disciplining union members taking unofficial action on class sizes, no activity was organised beyond tea parties with Shirley Williams.⁵
A further example is the fee increases of up to 300 per cent proposed by the Government last year and now being implemented. Students' initial response to this blatantly racist attack (they had to alter the Race Relations Act to make it legal!) was a wave of occupations. The official NUS response was to accept the fee increases and to advise unions to cooperate with college authorities in lobbying for hardship funds. It was around this issue that the term 'institutional harmony' first made its appearance. The idea was that NUS should make a long term bloc with college authorities who opposed fee increases (for their own reasons) in order to lobby for the long-term abolition of fees. It was therefore out of the question for unions to organise mass action aimed at forcing these authorities not to implement fee increases. The result was that no national action was organised against the increases and unions found themselves isolated from one another and college workers, arguing a 'special case' to their college authorities. The real losers were, once again, the least well-organised sectors who found, not unsurprisingly, that their authorities were not particularly interested in institutional consensus.
Finally, at last December's NUS Conference, the CP leadership sponsored a series of policies together with the Tories which began to turn the clock back to the days of welfare unionism:
Racism: 'The objective of the campaign must be to pledge all educational institutions and all the forces within them to opposing the growth of racist ideas...'⁶ But in order to achieve institutional harmony on this question all efforts to develop independent mobilisations against fascists had to be dropped and no efforts spared to avoid confrontation with these same authorities implementing racist measures against overseas students.
Workers' Struggles: 'We cannot avoid the conclusion that payments for coaches to support industrial disputes are ''ultra vires'' and where the student body wishes to express its support for such a dispute (such as the Grunwick workers' strike) this is properly expressed through individual contributions from the students' own pockets.'⁷
Autonomy: This was undoubtedly the main issue debated by conference and traditionally the touchstone of the right/left divide within the NUS. Here a bloc of Broad Left and Tory leaders fought for, and won (by 13 votes), the principle of 'public accountability' whereby student union funds and activities can be vetted by college authorities, LEAs and the Government to ensure that unions only engage in properly student activities.⁸ Such a position is a far cry from that advocated by the Broad Left just two years ago: 'The fight for the left (to take over the union in 1969) was to transform what had been debating and sports clubs, set up by the colleges with the intention of controlling students, into active democratic self-governing bodies answerable only to their members.'⁹
Spours' theoretical framework provides the coherence which these practical positions seem to lack. The central point is that no further progress can be made in defending students' material interests until the arrival of a government of the left. In this situation, unions have to reorientate their activities away from the narrow 'corporate' framework of economic struggles and begin to take on 'universal functions' of waging an ideological battle within the educational institutions. The principal allies of the student movement around questions of ideology and democracy will be sections of the educational establishment and the college authorities themselves. Therefore any independent student action which might tend to polarise these institutions has to be discouraged.
The contradictions in these positions stand out clearly in their practical application. The college authorities are [illegible] attacks, not only on students but also on the workers within the colleges. They are the people who most vigorously defend the elitist status quo within post-school education. To [illegible] involves refusing to fight in any effective way the current attacks on students and workers within post-school education, and de facto divides students from their potential allies in the trade unions.
At the level of politics in the national union, the CPGB's positions on institutional consensus and 'public accountability' result in programmatic convergence with the Tories. The FCS have been advocating the positions quoted above on racism, autonomy and the role of the national union for years. The shift in the strategy of the CPGB, strictly in line with the British Road, makes an alliance between the two unavoidable — where programmatic agreement exists it would be sectarian to do otherwise!
The Alternative
An article such as this can do little more than touch on some of the themes of a socialist strategy within the student movement. I shall therefore limit myself to simply dealing with what I see as the central theoretical and political problems raised by the orientation of the CPGB in NUS.
The most important questions for socialists in the NUS to get right are those of politics and strategy within the national union. Today the number one threat to an independent student movement is posed by the growth of the FCS. If you like, they are the main enemy and the key task of revolutionary socialists in the union is to unify the left around a programmatic alternative to the Tory/Broad Left bloc. That also means systematically campaigning for the Broad Left to break with the Tories. The Broad Left itself is rent with contradictions; in particular, the last conference of the National Organisation of Labour Students voted to campaign for left unity against the Tories and to stand separately from the Broad Left in the coming elections for the NUS National Executive.
In fact all the political tendencies within the student movement are being forced to define their attitude to the Tories and the sort of programme they represent for students. What [illegible] for the potential for unity on a principled political basis to be broken up by organisations putting their own sectarian interests above the urgent necessity of building a socialist tendency capable of winning the majority of students to class struggle politics and a rejection of all that the FCS stands for.
The programmatic questions are crystal clear today in the student movement: for or against student union autonomy; for or against 'institutional harmony'; for or against no platform for fascists; for or against a systematic fight against all aspects of racism and sexism in the student movement; for or against practical support for workers' struggles; for or against a fighting student union allied in action to all sections of the labour movement opposing government policy.
The Socialist Students Alliance stands for building such a political tendency amongst students, and its success at recent NUS conferences (winning the crucial votes at many of the sector conferences and gaining up to 45 per cent at December's NUS Conference) is a clear indication of the feasibility of such [illegible] project. The divisions within NOLS further confirm this perspective. The IMG is confident that a firm orientation for united action with those sections of NOLS breaking with the Broad Left/Tory alliance could result in the emergence of a [illegible] organised left wing in the student movement. But the orientation of the student supporters of the Socialist Workers Party, organised in the National Organisation of IS Societies (NOISS), is highly unfortunate in this respect. Whilst these comrades agree on all of the major programmatic questions in NUS, and have played an important role in many student struggles over the past three years, they continue to adopt an extremely sectarian attitude to the rest of the student left, [illegible] Left. The absurdity of this self-proclamation has been amply demonstrated by their declining support within NUS conferences. Nevertheless their sectarian stand at a national [illegible] developing serious alternatives to the Broad Left leaders' policies is an important factor in repelling many genuine student militants from the far left as a whole.
Secondly, there is the question of our response to the Government's attacks on post-school education. There is a kernel of truth in the CPGB's assertion that we have reached the limits of 'corporate politics' within NUS. However, the conclusions we draw from this are exactly opposite to those of Slipman and Spours. For us the central question raised by the defeats of recent years is that of building an effective alliance between students and the labour movement.
It is because students cannot independently defend either post-school education or their own living standards that such an alliance is all the more urgent. The problem the left has to tackle is that such an alliance can only be based on a fundamental critique of the role of educational institutions in capitalist society and the objective of their socialist transformation. Any other approach involves the impossible [illegible] of trying to persuade workers to defend a system of education designed to discriminate against themselves and their children. It is in this direction, and that of overcoming the racist and sexist divisions within its own ranks, that the left has to develop its positions. Furthermore, in that framework the key objective must be to break the organisations of the labour movement from their corporate economist outlook and to win them to struggle around far broader solutions to the problems of society as a whole.
Far from implying the impotence of specifically student struggles around the material attacks on education, such an approach gives student action a clear strategic objective: to take the issues into the organisations of the working class and there force debate and action both around immediate questions and to begin to lay the basis for a genuine socialist transformation of the education system. Thus the framework for formulating demands and tactics becomes not so much what can be agreed with the authorities as what will cut across sectoral, racist and sexist divisions within the student movement and win the active support of the labour [illegible] qualms at all about taking on those trade union and Labour Party leaders who themselves refuse to organise or support any effective action in defence of the social services.
In terms of our overall strategy, I think we must first of all take our distance from the CPGB in relation to their attitude to the bourgeois state in general and institutions like education in particular. For the CP the state is to be democratised, and a crucial factor in this gradual process will be the winning of hegemony within such potentially 'neutral' institutions as the education system. For revolutionary socialists the state is, as Marx put it, 'the executive committee of the bourgeoisie', and is to be destroyed — all other paths have resulted in the destruction of the workers movement by the core of that same state, i.e. the army and police. For us the role of institutions like education is not simply a technical one, potentially neutral, but rather that they play a central role in organising capitalist society and ensuring the fragmentation and atomisation of all sections of the oppressed within it. Thus the education system gives ideological cover for and masks the class basis of the social division of labour in capitalist society, because it perpetuates the myth that all start off equal and are assigned their respective places in the social hierarchy according to the 'neutral' criterion of 'academic merit'. The real, class divisions in society are obscured and given ideological sanction. Our approach to such an institution has to recognise both that it cannot simply be destroyed, because in the absence of alternatives children still have to learn to read and write, but that at the same time it cannot be won in its entirety to serve the interests of working people. As with health or the family, our orientation is rather to recognise that it can only be democratic insofar as its functions are taken back into the community and the work-place and are socialised so that the institution itself begins to wither away, within a democratically planned socialist society.
That implies a transitional orientation of opening up such institutions to the local community and their democratic running under workers control exercised by all sections of users and workers in the institutions according to the needs of the community.
Such an orientation corresponds far more closely to the real development of the class struggle within such institutions than the schemas of the CP. Every social revolution, and Portugal most recently, has demonstrated [illegible] the winning over of the [illegible] side of the [illegible] class but rather a social polarisation of these institutions, with the workers and sections of the users [illegible] developing their own self-organisation, independently of and against the institutional hierarchy, and opening up the facilities for health-care or education to local working people.
With the greater development of the 'welfare state' in Western Europe, we can expect such a pattern of social struggles to penetrate that much more deeply into the institutions, and we can expect to be able to win the vast majority of students to the perspectives of workers control and the socialist transformation of society.
In an embryonic way we can see the seeds of these types of struggles, moving in the direction of dual power within the institutions themselves, in every major conflict over the past few years — from the anti-war university in the United States to the opening up of occupations as centres for teach-ins, alternative seminars, etc., in the recent struggles in Britain and France. In every case the pattern has not been one of 'institutional harmony' but rather 'institutional polarisation', with the majority of students and workers on one side and the college administration, higher grades of staff and the most right-wing section of students on the other. The tragedy has all too often been that students have given insufficient attention to patiently explaining the issues and building up mutual respect so as to win the college workers to support them.
Nevertheless, what has been unequivocally demonstrated is that every major struggle blows apart any 'harmony' or 'consensus' which might exist in the college. It is for this reason that the keynotes of our strategy, vis-a-vis that of the CP, are the self-organisation and total independence of the student movement from the educational institutions, and the systematic promotion of a fighting alliance between the student movement and the organisations of the working class. General ideological questions have to be dealt with in that framework and not separated off from the real material attacks on the education system.
The CP's strategy, as outlined by Spours, denies that independence to the student movement and ties it hand and foot to the institutions of the capitalist state. The artificial separation of ideology and material interests, the long wait for the 'government of the left', and their opposition to the development of students' self-organisation all have their roots in a strategy based on class collaboration as opposed to class struggle. The CP's current agreement with the FCS is based on the same immediate programme for students, and in that sense they stand on the wrong side of the class divide amongst students. The kind of alternative the Socialist Students Alliance is trying to build in NUS will seek to unite all of those breaking with the main themes of this programme in the direction of class struggle politics, in a united democratic socialist tendency fighting for the leadership of NUS.
Finally, it needs to be said that while the CPGB's students may be at present the only section of the party involved in an explicit alliance with the Tories, their evolution from the more traditional CP 'left alliance' to their current system of alliances [illegible] is a serious warning to CP militants [illegible] the politics of class collaboration have their own logic — up to and including collaboration with the main party of the bourgeoisie against [illegible].
Of course, the IMG does not claim to have a monopoly of the truth in dealing with many of the new problems being raised in the student movement today. We are, however, confident that the problems of the student left can only be resolved in the framework of a constructive debate around class struggle solutions to students' problems and a non-sectarian approach to all those breaking from the new stage to which the Broad Left leaders' policies of class collaboration have taken them in NUS.
1. [illegible] November 1977.
2. 'The Broad Left — Left Unity in the Student Movement'.
3. Spours, op. cit., p. 345.
4. Sue Slipman in Broad Left Journal, October 1977.
5. See NUS Strategy Paper: 'Teacher Supply, College Closures and Educational Expansion', September 1977.
6. [illegible]
7. [illegible] 'Ultra Vires and Student Unions'.
8. See Conference Document 10, November 1977; 'The Payment of Student Union Fees — NUS Strategy Paper'.
9. 'The Broad Left...', op. cit.