Launching a new student left

Submitted by AWL on 31 October, 2018 - 10:33
Student left

Bradley Allsop, from Lincoln Labour Students, A K Gurung, co-chair of Surrey Labour Students, and Steff Farley, Loughborough People and Planet and UCU Rank and File, spoke to Maisie Sanders about the Student Left Network and the Socialist Feminist Campus Collective, which will be launched on 17-18 November.

Bradley: At the Student Activist Weekender [on 8-9 September, sponsored by a number of groups] we decided we wanted to explore setting up a more permanent organisation. There is a meeting on 18 November to flesh out what our main focus will be, how we’ll be constituted and how we’ll operate. I think it’s exciting! There have been discussions about what we do in Labour Students, about acting as a network for rent strikes, and around mobilising for NUS elections.

A K: The Socialist Feminist Campus Collective was set up after the Socialist Feminist Campaign Day [8 September], where we had workshops on the decriminalisation of sex work and the Goldsmiths Justice for Cleaners campaign. We are pushing for socialist feminist campaigns like this which highlight that workers’ rights are a feminist concern and that huge oppression issues are often intersectional.

After our gathering we created a Facebook group and since then we went public with a Facebook page and a statement at the start of October. We’re also organising a launch meeting on 17 November and we published the first issue of our zine.

The next campaign we’re doing is a student bloc at the Shut Down Yarl’s Wood demo on 1 December. The SFCC has links with other national feminist and campaigning groups like Women’s Strike, Decrim Now, the UVW and UCU. People are involved from all over the country. It’s really a group of student feminist activists working towards collective action.

Steff: I’m super excited about the Socialist Feminist Campus Collective. It’s great to see leftist groups set their stall out from the start and say “this is exactly what we’re about” — it’s great to see there’s a group that really cares about trans liberation, and that the whole movement is rooted in class struggle. It’s for the working class women who need this movement the most, rather than the liberal politics you get with a lot of groups that don’t materially help a lot of people.

It would be fantastic to have a visible presence at events like the Yarl’s Wood demo. We need to force the mainstream feminist movement to focus more on issues like that.

Steff: Being able to regularly mobilise students across the country at short notice to fight on a range of issues would have massive benefits. Especially if the network is rooted in class struggle and can raise the class consciousness of groups of students we’re mobilising.

A lot of what we talked about at the Student Activist Weekender was putting pressure on the NUS and Labour Students from within. NUS is quite a bureaucratic system where members aren’t listened to as much as they could be and the democratic process isn’t as strong as it should be. If we can come together as students and force our voices to be heard then the leaders of the NUS have no choice but to listen to its members.

I’m involved in UCU Rank and File. I think UCU and NUS would benefit in similar ways from being more member-led and democratic, in that maybe the more marginalised and left-wing views of members will be heard over the more vocal, weak centrist views.

The leadership of both unions are somewhat failing their members — but UCU failed its members at an incredibly important moment during its biggest strike action in many years, whereas that moment is maybe still to come for NUS. We need to make it a more democratic union for the members before that happens.

The Student Left Network is quite politically diverse. At the Student Activist Weekender I heard about lots of different campaigns I hadn’t heard about before. Personally I’m very interested in tackling climate change.

There’s a lot of urgency on that issue at the moment with the release of the IPCC report. We need to hit fossil fuel companies hard by removing their funding. Students can demand their universities don’t invest in fossil fuels. Last year in Loughborough our direct action on this got results and we won.

We can also call on our universities to cut their ties with banks that are funding billions into fossil fuels. Almost half of UK universities have now divested from fossil fuels. There’s a national day of action on 21 November, when groups across the country will be doing actions calling for their universities to divest.

NUS seems to be fairly quiet on the issue.

Bradley: For me really it’s about trying to provide a place for grassroots student actions.

Our national union is not providing anything in that sense and local student unions won’t either for most students. It’s about providing that place where students find advice and get involved in action on climate change, rent strikes, racism.

Rent strikes are a big area to look at this year. Lots of groups are involved in that on their campus. Postgraduate employment conditions are also a big thing for me — we need to have a coordinated response.

It’s important we intervene in NUS and Labour Students because they’re the biggest players in town. NUS has massive resources and structures. Labour Students is embedded in the Labour Party. Lots of people feel an affinity and gravitate towards them — we can’t replace them so we have to work within them. Democratising their structures is key because if you don’t give power to grassroots members then the campaigns we want to see won’t happen.

AK: We have working groups within the SLN who are actively working towards intervening in NUS and Labour Students, for example at the upcoming Labour Students Political Weekend [10-11 November]. It’s important to have more of a left wing presence because then we can push the agenda to be oriented around workers’ rights, student-staff solidarity, the campaigns and occupations that happened last year around the UCU strike.

We ran a campaign within the SLN around student support for a yes vote in the HE pay ballot. We made flyers and posters for students to print and distribute, and we shared around an open letter.

In terms of the SFCC I’d like us to campaign around combatting “boss feminism”, which is basically the mainstream rhetoric around feminism right now. Feminism has become mainstream — and although that’s good in some ways because it means that feminism is less of a taboo and more people call themselves feminists, we wanted this group to push forward a more socialist and more radical feminist agenda in opposition to the more trendy liberal feminism that is happening right now.

A lot of students are generally left-leaning. We want to push that socialist feminist agenda, so it’s useful to have this network.

Bradley: I think we’re starting to see a higher level of politicisation of young people. Young people have never been apathetic. That’s rubbish. We can see this in the Corbyn surge, in Brexit. Now is the perfect time to set something up that’s radical and national and democratic. On the bigger issues like Brexit and climate change, we’re at a point now where we can’t afford not to have that national action.

Steff: Students are a passionate and political force that are capable of creating political change — we’ve seen that this year with students supporting the UCU strike with actions and occupations across universities and the march demanding free education last November. It shows that students in general feel very strongly about these issues and that’s one of the reasons we are setting up the Student Left Network. It will allow us to harness all that political energy from students and direct it more effectively.

AK: From what I assess from it there is a lot of faction fighting and disorientation of the student left. There’s NCAFC [National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, founded in 2010], Labour Students Left, now the Student Left Network, and there’s the centrists. The centrists have a stronger presence in NUS.

Careerism is a big problem. Labour Students traditionally has been a breeding ground for future MPs and high-up jobs in the party. NCAFC and now the SLN are working more towards raising student issues on campuses and running campaigns around free education, workers’ rights, etc. For us it’s about campaigns, not careers.

Uniting the left is a big question. We can unite students to campaign collectively against our universities and against the government, and through educating people. We need open forums, open debates, open conversations. Of course there are going to be factions but there needs to be debate.

There are lots of problems with Labour Students. Surrey Labour Students was disaffiliated in 2017 because it affiliated to NCAFC. Labour Students do little to fight against this right wing government or to push a radical agenda on higher education issues.

There is an explicit clique within the group. It’s a breeding ground for careerists. The way their events are run is that the same types of people with the same views are always elected and they dominate elections and events. This disenfranchises, excludes, and isolates people with different views.

Very little is done to run collective action with students across the country. There’s massive dissatisfaction.

Steff: I left the Student Activist Weekender feeling super-motivated. One of the things I’ve taken away is the role morale has for student left wing politics. Student politics sometimes feels like you’re banging your head against a brick wall, and activists get burnt out. Meeting other activists does a great job at improving that.

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