The Revolutionary Communist Party ran in Student Union (SU) elections at three universities: Sheffield, Cardiff, and Lancaster.
We ran with demands to abolish tuition fees, introduce full maintenance grants and free housing, and kick arms companies off campus.
These are certainly bold demands, compared to the snoozefest on offer from the careerist student politicians. A handful of people we spoke to thought that our demands went “a bit too far”, or branded our communist programme as “unrealistic”.
We would like to flip that question around. Is the status quo any more ‘realistic’?
The current Sheffield SU president has scandalously overseen £400k of cuts to the SU itself. This is the practical result of stale ‘pragmatism’ – the same pragmatism that Starmer and Reeves espouse when they brutally cut disability benefits.
10,000 job losses, millions of pounds of cuts, and department closures are underway across Britain. Yet not a single student union body has even attempted to organise students and staff on a common programme to wage a serious battle against these attacks.
We are communists, we are not ‘student politicians’. We tell the truth. Not a single reform can be pushed through by these careerists. It is their programmes that are unrealistic.
Whilst they make false promises, things are only set to get worse, due to the deep capitalist crisis we are in.
During our campaigns, we fought for student unions that truly represent – and fight for – the interests of students and staff.
Starmer is preparing for further attacks – not just on students, but on the entire working class. Student unions cannot just sit there and accept this.
The only way we can ‘realistically’ defend our interests is by linking together student movements with local workers’ strikes, adopting bold class-based demands, and organising a serious fightback.
We aren’t interested in sitting quietly in meetings with the university bosses, like would-be Starmers and Reeves, eagerly eying-up future positions in Westminster or Whitehall.
We would fight for complete transparency, exposing all of the secret meetings and deals that the uni bosses have with the SU – which is, in reality, the student wing of the university management.
If the managers say that there is no money left, we think it’s ‘common sense’ that they prove it. Why isn’t it ‘realistic’ that we should be able to look at their accounts? We want a democratic say in where the funding should go.
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What would be ‘unrealistic’ would be to expect a single SU president to be able to stem the coming tsunami of attacks.
That’s why we have a much more ‘practical’ approach: we would turn SUs into weapons in the hands of students and staff; and we would use our position to link up with students and staff in other universities, aiming towards a national campaign against cuts and capitalism.
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Our demands are based not on what can be done within the limits of this system, but what needs to be done so that thousands of workers don’t lose their jobs, and students no longer have to go to food banks.
The wealth exists to solve all these issues, but is currently nestled in the pockets of the bankers and billionaires. We just have to seize it!
That might go against the ‘common sense’ of capitalism. But to that, we say: to hell with capitalism!
Do you have a question that you’d like ‘The Communist’ to answer? Whether it’s a question that you have, or one that someone’s asked you on campus or at an RCP stall – write to us using our online form, and we may answer it in a future issue of ‘The Communist’!
