PARTISAN!

Brunhilda Olding critiques the moralistic impulses of the student left.

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“In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects, ten degrees to the left of centre in good times, ten degrees to the right of centre if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.” – Phil Ochs

As the mid year break begins and the camps scattered across the campuses of Australia are pulled down, a reflection on the role of students in the revolutionary struggle emerges as a major arena for analysis. The brief flourish of excitement that emerged during the initial encampments saw rhetoric calling to remember Vietnam and South Africa, an attempt to directly draw on the previous brief outburst of student militancy as a mechanism to fight against the naked genocidal face of Zionism. Yet, the Vietnamese solidarity campaign coincided at its height with an upsurge of worker militancy, and in the United States the imperialists shovelled conscripts into a meatgrinder. In the current situation wherein only the youth of Israel are being thrown into the slaughter, it is impossible for this brief highlight of militancy to be reached again.

Furthermore, the question that Communists must ask is, do we desire for this militancy to be reached again? Are students a revolutionary class, or even a potential revolutionary force?

Fundamentally, no. The idea of the student activist and radical is accurate, but these forces are not revolutionary. The student is a transitory body, they will inevitably graduate, move away from the campus and higher education, and in the collective understanding look back on their revolutionary days as a brief period of wasted youth. A common saying in liberal circles is “if you’re not a socialist when you’re young you don’t have a heart, and if you’re a socialist when you’re old you don’t have a brain.”

For all its rabid anti-communism this provides a vital insight to the makeup of students as a political force. Students are motivated by moralism, the great upswings in student militancy come during periods of mass offensives against the moral framework of the world liberal order. May 68 came during the height of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, and the broader post-war social realignment. The occupations of campuses across the world comes during Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians. This moralistic response to crises leaves students open to bourgeois moralizing, winning them over to the left side of capital, at least for their period as students.

The current crisis in Gaza has been the most blatant example of the fundamentally moralist understanding of politics mobilizing students. Let us use the example of the University of Melbourne’s encampment. University of Melbourne for Palestine (UM4P) founded the camp, a group dominated by the fetishization of the ‘activist’ as the height of all political actions. The unelected steering committee based their legitimacy from their position as either being members of the Palestinian diaspora, or from being in UM4P early on.

From this legitimacy stemmed their right to run the encampment as the natural endpoint of all student politics. A fetish for the ‘correct’ kind of nationalism (at the expense of the internationalism they claimed to support), a focus on building a façade of diversity without really attempting to build a mass coalition, an alliance with reactionaries (so long as they held the ‘correct’ opinion), and ultimately immense anti-communism. UM4P was not unique in this, rather they were only unique by the open-faced nature of their moralistic ideology. Whilst this ties into the shifting ideological nature of the overarching Free Palestine Melbourne’s shift to the right (the June 2nd rally was a particularly shocking example of this) it rests on the fickle nature of students.

Students as stated earlier are a transitory force, the high school senior of today is the first year of tomorrow, the first year of today is the newly graduated mess of tomorrow, and the newly graduated mess of today becomes the white-collar worker. This fundamental shift in their societal role means that students cannot be relied upon as anything other than an auxiliary force. When looking back throughout the heydays of student radicalism (that many student and campus oriented activists point toward) we find that these great triumphs only came about through an alliance with, and the fundamental leadership of, the working class.

While students may have played a key role in, for example, Russia’s 1905 revolution, it was the working class that played the most crucial role in its unfolding. The formation of Soviets revealed the iron law of history, that revolutionary forces will form councils as the basis for the new era they herald, whilst students faded into the background. Most of the Bolsheviks were of the working class for their entire lives, the few class traitors that sided with the proletariat were a tiny fraction of the party, and in 1917 we see it revealed that the working class will take power into their own hands.

No student protest toppled the Tsar, it was not students who stormed the Winter Palace and toppled Kerensky’s corrupt liberal government. It was the working class, united under the aegis of the Communist party. When looking at the students who led the way in 1905 however, we find most of them had graduated, matured, and settled down in the Kadets, Octoberists or Black Hundreds. We see the same with May 68 or student opposition to the Brazilian dictatorship for instance.

And we shall see the same with the activists of 2024. A heyday of radicalism and the fetish of revolutionary agitation, before settling down in the sensible centre-left parties. The trajectory of a student radical throughout life apes the arc of Kautsky, from revolutionary to reformist. Yet in an ancient echoing of Louis Napoléon and his illustrious uncle, the student radical rarely is a revolutionary.

They are moralist, nationalist, rabid defenders of the left-wing of capital as being ‘truly transformative’.

In Australia they agitate for the Greens or the Left of Labor because that is the end point of moralist politics. The love of the lesser evil, the allegiance to the idea of moderate concessions, the framework of diversity, is the fundamental endpoint of the student political activist. They are not connected to the broader population, they live within a bubble of a bubble reinforcing their rhetoric, and beliefs.

The question which now emerges is how should communists interact with students as a force?

The answer is that we must agitate amongst them in their position as workers. Students are increasingly a part of the proletariat, and we must agitate amongst them as such. Communists should not rule out on campus organising as mechanism to build up experience but fundamentally we must push for students to go beyond campuses. Students must transform into workers, and from there into Communists. This in turn should be met with the redevelopment of and reinforcement of struggle amongst the working class, transforming the worker-student alliance into the Communist party reforged as a mechanism of struggle.

Students should build ties with staff at their institutions. Not only teaching stuff, but janitorial, and administrative staff. During pickets they should provide bodies, resources, and unity under the banner of the Communist Party. By transforming the fetish of radicalism or ‘activism’ into practical and organised work moving revolutionary forces forward, we rebuild the militancy, and power of the working class.

Revolutionary upheavals will never be seen ahead of time or called by the party. They will emerge organically from the contradictions which drive capitalism, it is the duty of the Communist party to seize the chance and push forward, with the masses of the working class, and shatter the capitalist state. The Communist party can only send capitalism into the dustbin of history if it has won over the proletariat. To achieve that we must integrate students into the revolutionary body of the proletariat.

Our own liberation awaits us. We need only reach out and take it.