The YCL has seen much growth in membership over the past couple of years. While by no means a student dominated organisation, our growth has been reflected in an increased organising capacity in universities. With the establishment of communist societies from Cardiff to Liverpool to Glasgow, it is clear that young communists are ready and able to play a leading role in shaping a more organised, more militant, and more class-conscious student movement.
Young Marxist-Leninists must be at the forefront of building student campaigns across Britain, extending the longevity of student organisations and learning from the mistakes of the past. Perhaps the primary obstacle to achieving this strong, class-based movement, is the impermanence of being a student. Most of us will attend university for only 3 or 4 years, and few of us for more than 5. As a result, the student body will change massively every couple of years. Younger comrades face much the same issue in sixth form and college.
This provides us some key challenges to contend with:
- The tendency for short-term, single-issue campaigns
- The failure to learn from past movements
- A myopic focus on campus politics
Starting with short-term campaigns, the current lack of effective, longstanding student organisations leaves most students to form transient campaigns around single issues. Dedicated single-issue campaigns can do a world of good if they succeed. But due to their nature, even a successful campaign of this kind is limited in what it can achieve.
Short-term campaigns can certainly be great uniters on campus. Any number of student groups can work together on single issues like gender neutral bathrooms and the lack of non-western sources on a curriculum. But a thousand of these broadly spontaneous campaigns cannot hold a candle to a dedicated programme for the working class.
Communists must therefore look to how we can further a revolutionary political programme that is rooted in class, and those of us in the student movement are no different. This means that just intervening in the varied reformist campaigns is insufficient.
The myopic focus on campus politics mentioned earlier is a weakness of the student movement. It is also a key area where we can distinguish ourselves as Marxist-Leninists, and set about building a long-standing movement. This is highly dependent on the conditions of each university or college, especially whether it is an isolated or city campus.
But we must ensure we do not get too lost in the student politics of the campus bubble. Communist societies must open up the student movement to the local communities, identify what campaigns and organisations to get involved in – and what issues to create new campaigns around.
Of course, involvement with the local trade union movements on campus is a must. Many students are also workers, and either way, building a campaign around solidarity with the UCU provides a great way to start linking up campus struggles with the wider class struggle.
So what should we, as communists, look out for as we try to establish a broad, class-based programme on campus? Firstly, despite the reformist nature of single-issue campaigns, we should still be asking, in our societies and branches, how we can best engage with these campaigns and organisations.
This doesn’t mean we should compromise our political line for the sake of unity. Our societies should certainly be clear in their line. It is about looking at what campaigns already align with Party positions on a given issue and working together there. And if there are no existing campaigns in accordance with our line – then that only means more opportunities for us to develop new campaigns, united by the programme of our Party.
While we don’t all have a communist society on our campuses quite yet, the priority in building a longstanding movement is to recruit and develop a group of communists to do so. In such a situation, branches should be supporting student members in building a communist presence. There’s nothing wrong with bringing comrades in from the wider community to help get things going.
Another key issue in student organising is the failure to learn from past mistakes. Many students getting properly involved with politics for the first time won’t be aware of Britain’s existing traditions of radical student organising. A big challenge with a rapidly changing student body is campaigns trying things that, maybe only 4 years before, another group of students tried and failed with.
For members of the Young Communist League and Communist Party, this should not be so much of an issue. We have comrades who were organising as students in the 2010s, noughties, and in the case of older Party comrades, many decades prior. So we can absolutely turn to past students to learn from their failures and successes. As well as this, current students can take the lessons from our efforts forwards to the next lot of YCL students.
We must be on the look-out for developments in student organising across the country, and abroad too. Our societies and branches could host educationals on the past of our student movement, as well as present developments in other universities and colleges. This includes comrades abroad, where movements have reached different levels of strength and militancy – and where young communists may have achieved greater influence in their student movements.
There is still a lot of work to be done. The communist societies we do have are relatively new, and this will undoubtedly see us make many mistakes. As long as we properly reflect on and learn from the setbacks, sharing these lessons with other branches and societies, our movement will only be strengthened in the long run.
We have the opportunity to break with the current impotence of student politics, to show what distinguishes us as Marxist-Leninists, and to shape the student movement of the future into a powerful fighting force.
Mia English, is the Challenge News Editor
