On the morning of 7 October, I tuned in to hear comrade Anton Parocki on the radio. He was being grilled about the rally we were holding later that day – with the interviewers highlighting Starmer’s statement that any pro-Palestine protest on this date was ‘un-British’.
Naturally, Anton called this out for the blatant hypocrisy and rubbish that it was.
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We decided to organise this rally because we realised that no one else would.
For the past year, the left at Sheffield University has been fairly moribund. Despite our modest size, we are the dominant political force on campus.
This has led to pressures on us to join a treadmill of empty activist projects, by those who believe you can conjure a movement out of thin air – or with a critical mass of leaflets.
Instead, we decided to focus on building our own forces. Above all, we concentrated on education: ‘back-to-basics’ reading groups, and using our activity to train and consolidate a base of communist cadres.
We also ran in the student union (SU) election and intervened in the labour movement – at the Veolia bin worker pickets and UCU strikes, for example.
Throughout, we connected comrades’ theoretical training to the practical tasks involved in this activity, and encouraged new comrades to get out of their comfort zone by giving speeches in their lectures and at rallies.
This set us up well for our most recent campaign.
Recent events have shown that we will not be cowed by moral pressures and slander, only emboldened.
SU officials, for example, aping Starmer’s government, attempted to shut down our rally using false claims of antisemitism.
In response, we rapidly mobilised for a four-day campaign to call out all this nonsense. We must have spoken to thousands of students through our leafleting, stalls, and lecture shout-outs.
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Our campaign was filled with radical content, thanks to our focus on education. Our comrades have an understanding of what we are fighting for, and how we can achieve this.
This clarity has attracted the most serious fighters towards us.
The success of the rally – and the political discussion on Palestine the next day – would not have been possible without the training of our new student recruits over the past year.
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Without this, we would not have been able to organise the rally; we would not have been able to withstand the university’s threats; and we wouldn’t have been able to deal with the media coverage.
We have refused to back down, proving ourselves to be the most dedicated and consistent fighters for a free Palestine; raising our profile on campus; and leading several new people to join the RCP in Sheffield.
There has never been a more desperate need for a political force to channel the huge amount of anger that exists on campuses everywhere. It is therefore vital that we prepare for the huge movements to come.
