The sad state of student politics

This week saw the start of the university second semester and, with it, the bi-annual circus that is University Clubs Day.  While helping to man the Workers Party stall at Canterbury University on Tuesday I cast my eye around to see how many of our political rivals had turned up and to answer the burning perennial question  – would the campus political clubs be once again outnumbered by the 57 varieties of fundamentalist Christianity on offer? (sadly once again the answer was yes)

In these days of widespread student apathy Clubs Day affords one of the few opportunities to verify the existence of many of the campus branches of the mainstream political parties, most of whom are completely invisible for the other 363 days of the year (except on those rare occasions when the local MP or party leader deigns to set foot on campus).  So at UC Clubs Day this semester it was interesting to note that the parties with the strongest presence there were WP, the Greens and Act (and of these, WP is the only one that organises weekly public events on campus!).  We also had a small coterie of Young Labourites who arrived late with the Labour Party carpetbagger candidate for Christchurch Central, PR-man Brendan Burns in tow and a lone Young Nat who turned up to plan the party banner, chuck some leaflets on the table and then promptly cleared off.  Finally a mad Libertararianz supporter also turned up to berate one our comrades for wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of the “mass murderer” Che Guevara (apparently he was more bloodthirsty than Hitler!).

It may seem a little surreal that a parties like National and Labour which between them command the support of some 85% of the electorate should be so lacking in terms of student foot-soldiers, but then as Bryce Edwards has shown in his recent excellent series on political party membership in NZ, one of the most notable phenomena in NZ politics in recent years has been the shift from the old paradigm of class-based mass membership parties to small professional electoral-focused parties which rely very little on donations of time or money from their own members.

But what about the similar decline in numbers of the extra-parliamentary student left?

As I sat at the stall on Clubs Day I was reflecting on the steady downward trajectory in student involvement in radical left politics since I first got involved down at Otago University during the final year of the Shipley National government in 1999.  Prior to that I had (it pains me to admit!) been active during my final two years at high school in Young Labour, which at least back then had the advantage of having been in opposition for 8 years and therefore was better able to sustain the illusions of its more naïve left-wing adherents (I struggle to imagine what motivates the people who sign up for it now!).  However I was swiftly disabused of any notion of the left “recapturing” Labour as a vehicle for socialism after attending the 1998 conference as a delegate and watching the ruthless bureaucratic party machine ruthlessly shut down any dissent from the floor.

When I arrived at Otago I immediately signed up to the main radical left group on campus, the International Socialists (IS), whose politics were (and still are) a peculiar mixture of Marxism and angry liberalism.  In many ways the political contradiction inherent in the International Socialists symbolised the problem that has bedevilled the NZ left as a whole over the decade since – how to come up with a political alternative to the failed policies of Keynesianism and Neo-Liberalism.

The IS was very clear on what was *against* – I vividly remember the recruitment posters around varsity: “Sick of the market and Neo-Liberal bullshit? Join the International Socialists!” yet beyond building “bigger, more militant” protests against things such as tuition fee increases, the IS had very little to differentiate itself from other left-wing parties such as the Alliance.  Thus on demonstrations we would launch into classic Keynesian-reformist chants such as “What do we want? Free education! How are going to get it? Progressive taxation!” and when election-time came around the mantra was always the same – “Vote Labour/Alliance without illusions!”

The period from 1999 to 2002 was in many ways the twilight era for much of the student radical left – in 99 we were still drawing hundreds of students to marches and occupations of government offices and university registries, but after Labour’s victory at the polls in November of that year the protests grew smaller and smaller and by the time of the Socialist Worker-initiated “Fightback” campaign of 2000 had become only so much street theatre.

By imposing a temporary moratorium on tuition fee increases the Labour-led government neatly killed two birds with one stone – on the one hand it deprived the left of an obvious point around which to mobilise students, on the other hand it effectively consolidated the tertiary reforms that had already been implemented during the “roll-out” phase of Neo-Liberalism and made it less likely that they would be dismantled.

The fruits of this policy are becoming apparent today, as we now have an entire generation of students who have grown-up knowing nothing except the user-pays market model of education and for whom slogans such as “free education” seem utterly quaint and unrealistic.

Meanwhile despite the frenetic efforts of those of us who were running around organising occupations and getting arrested during the late 90s and early 2000s, the student radical left is now smaller than it has probably been in NZ since the 1920s.  Not only that but some of the major forces that were active within it, such as the Alliance Party, are now virtually extinct.

How to explain this?  The answer, as I have said, I believe lies in the failure of the student left to develop a coherent alternative political project which does not fall into the trap of pretending that the answer to all our problems is simply a return to the status quo ante of social-democratic Keynesianism.

Instead of mindless activism and Labour-loyalism, a lot more attention needs to be paid to developing a serious understanding among student activists that 21st century capitalism is *fundamentally incapable* of delivering reforms such as free education and that such demands can only be won through the course of revolutionary struggle, acting in coalition with and under the leadership of the working class – which is the only group in society that actually creates wealth.

Tags: Alliance Party, Free Education, International Socalists, Young Labour