This article originally appeared in Social Revolution Volume #1, Issue #2, published in the summer of 2010. It was written as response to fractures developing within the student “movement” at the time. The student “movement” has not remained static since the publication; there have been numerous developments (such as: the almost complete degeneration of the social-democrats at Carleton University, the deepening of tensions between radical and reformist trends within the student “movement”, the establishment of the Marxist Students’ Associations at Carleton and uOttawa, and the founding of the Revolutionary Student Movement) that render much this article obsolete. Despite this, the author feels that the article still consists of a decent appraisal of the class forces at work within the student “movement”, and the developments since this was written have served only to reinforce the predicitions and solutions suggested herein.Whither The Student Movement in Ottawa?
I. Introduction
It was after the University of Ottawa Board of Governor's (BoG) April meeting that I first decided to write something of a brief critique of the status-quo for the student movement. After the adoption of the resource optimisation plan by the BoG, I became increasingly frustrated with the lack of ability of students to both influence university policy and excercise power in relation to the current governing bodies of the university. While we have made progress over the last five years in terms of building our movement we are at risk of stagnating. This is the basis on which this article is being written.
For those of you who exist outside of the immediate uOttawa campus context (which is hopefully quite a few!), the Board of Governors is the primary governing body of our university and is in charge of “the overall governance and management”1 of uOttawa as an institution. Most of its members are appointed by the uOttawa administration and include representatives from organisations such as the Bank of Canada, L'Oréal, The Ottawa Citizen, and other large firms who, in some way or another, feel entitled to make decisions on behalf of the 36000+ students, faculty, and support staff who keep the university running. There is one seat reserved for undergraduates on the BoG, but we have no 'right' to it; the seat is granted, on a person-to-person basis, by the BoG whenever undergraduates elect a new representative. It goes, almost without saying, that one of the primary enemies of the working class at uOttawa is this body.
The scope of this article then will be as follows: I will seek to explain the context and events that led up to this article. I will explain the nature of my frustrations. I will then take a brief aside to talk about the issue of 'demands', and what ours should be (if any) in relation to the student movement. Finally I will suggest a path forward that those serious about pushing our movement to the left should consider in relation to our next actions.
II. Context and History
The student movement at uOttawa has, in conjunction with the Canadian Federation of Students - Ontario (CFS-O), focused primarily on tuition fee increases over the past three years. Through rallies on February 7th 2007, November 5th 2008, and November 5th 2009, thousands of students have voiced their opposition to being powerless in the midst of constant fee increases. Pressure was directed to a certain extent at the University administration, but the primary target was the Ontario provincial government, under whose jurisdiction tuition fees lie. Our yearly rallies condemning the increase of fees have become business as usual.
It was, however, brought to the attention of Student Federation of the University of Ottawa (SFUO) that, supposedly due to the economic crisis, uOttawa's budget would be markedly different for the 2010-2011 school year. What we uncovered was that the University, while increasing tuition fees the maximum allowed amount, would also be asking faculties to cut 5% of their budgets. Cuts included fewer teaching positions being renewed, cuts to the library's selection of books, and increased additional fees in some programs. The administration, having mastered beautifully the art of Newspeak, referred to the changes as “Resource Optimization”.
What followed was several months of mobilising against the budget cuts, primarily through raising awareness as to what the effects of the cuts would be. Meanwhile, the administration allegedly consulted the faculty and students to receive their input; in actual fact almost no consultations took place, and repeated requests for more information on the budget were denied. The mobilisation finally culminated in a free barbeque, put on by the SFUO, on April 27th right before the BoG meeting. Several hundred people showed up to the BBQ which, all things considered, given our current political climate, organisational methods2, and the fact that the event was in the middle of exams, was not a bad turn out. Around 40 students were present at the BoG meeting where we made it incredibly clear that not only were we against the “optimisation”, but were frustrated with the lack of consultation.
It is perhaps best here to make a brief aside and describe the class and political natures of the “student movement”. As of right now, with communists coming out of nearly 70 years of retreats, the “student movement” is a broad coalition of leftists that is led by social democrats (both those associated with the NDP and not) and takes on social democratic demands in relation to the power structures that it confronts. It constantly seeks to align itself with the social democratic unions of the CLC. This is all to say that in class terms, the student movement right now is dominated by bureaucratic collectivists and the political line being issued is one within that class horizon. Communists, through their engagement in the student movement, are in a temporary alliance with the bureacratic collectivist social democrats; while this alliance is, for now at least, both productive and necessary, we should constantly be struggling to change the terms on which this alliance is formed in our favour.
It was at the April BoG meeting that fractures within the student movement began to show. After the BoG voted in favour in principle of the budget cuts and tuition hikes (in lieu of being given any real budgetary information), the students present caucused to discuss our strategy for the next part of the meeting. It was generally agreed upon that we were too few in number to physically shut the meeting down. What was then suggested was an amendment to the budget motion that would have seen tuition increased by half as much as was suggested by the administration. Whether or not we should support this amendment was the fault-line on which the fracture formed, with the SRP members present coming out strongly against the amendment and many others coming out in favour. Ultimately the amendment was put forward, and was voted down. The tuition hikes were tabled to the next BoG meeting in order to give the administration time to prepare budget information for the Governors.
At the debrief that followed the BoG meeting, the split was discussed further. It was pointed out that this BoG meeting had proven definitively that the students and the administration could not negotiate; even when we retreated from our slogan of “Drop Fees!” to “Raise Fees Less!”, the administration still raised our fees the maximum amount and voted against the amendment. As a matter of political strategy, supporting an incredibly moderate amendment knowing that the administration would vote against it would give us a better argument towards the necessity of building student power. Admittedly I conceded on this point, but critically. I pointed out that past interactions over things such as the Non-Academic Code of Conduct3 and tuition fees showed that we already knew that the administration could not be negotiated with (irrespective of whether we actually should be negotiating, no less!), but that if we were to mobilise and agitate around the administration's non-negotiation on the failed amendment, perhaps it was, after-all, a worthwhile thing to put forward.
Over the next month virtually no agitation took place. The BoG met again on May 31st and adopted the budget in full, including the program cuts and tuition hikes. A town-hall meeting on the budget was held two days after the BoG passed it; a final slap in the face after a wholly undemocratic and ridiculous 'consultation' process. It is as a result of our stagnation in the fight against the administration that I felt compelled to write this article. Now that the context has been explained, it is worthwhile to re-examine the proposed amendment from the April 27th meeting and come to conclusions as to what our demands relative to the administration should be.
III. On Demands and the Amendment
In the January 21, 2010 issue of Weekly Worker, the organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, a fantastic letter was printed dealing with the issue of demands. Here is that letter in full:
James Turley’s use of the term ‘demand’ rather than ‘policy’ is both an anachronism and infantilism (Letters, January 14).
Infants make demands for things that they are unable to get for themselves: they demand an ice-cream, an Xbox or a new Barbie. Adults go out and buy them for themselves. If a leftwing party puts forward a list of ‘demands’, they appear in a similar childish light.
There is also an anachronistic element to them in that they refer back to a time before universal suffrage or the establishment of parliamentary sovereignty - a time in 19th century Bismarckian Germany. In a period when the working class movement aimed to achieve full civil rights that they did not yet have, there appeared no alternative to demanding them.
But more than a century has passed since such formulations. Communist parties that gained power did not have ‘demands’ in their programmes: they had policies that they intended to carry out once in power. Gottwald and the Czech party did not demand the expropriation of the landlord class or the nationalisation of industry: they promised it. Mao and the Chinese party did not demand New Democracy: they organised an army to win it.
When socialists address economic problems, they should formulate policies that, when put into practice, would solve the problems. They have to break with the mentality of small campaigning groups and say what they would do if they had power. If they criticise government policies, it should be in terms of saying exactly what should be done instead.
This point is independent of how you think power is to be won. If you are an old Attlee or Benn-style social democrat, you are talking of what an elected government will do. If you are an advocate of direct democracy, you are talking about what policies you hope to put forward and argue for in citizens’ initiatives. But in either case concrete policies are needed.
As communists we are trying to build a world without classes or the state. In order to do this, we need to begin thinking like the new proletarian state as opposed to levying demands at the old bourgeois state. In relation to the university and tuition fees then, what does this mean?
Without getting too deeply into the pedagogy of liberation, or critical theory in relation to the university, we must imagine a new type of institution that first and foremost does away with the power dynamic between student and teacher. In doing away with alienation and the commodity (this includes both the commodification of education and the labour that goes into producing it), people will be free to learn what they want on their own terms, without fear of future gain or employment. The division of labour that forces one to be a student and only a student for a set amount of time will be done away with in exchange for a continual learning process that takes place at ones leisure over the course of one's life. In short, we are imagining the freest possible educational experience free of any external constraints and coercion; this is the university, or more aptly education, under communism.
Now that we have identified what it is that we want in relation to education (in very loose terms of course), we can look at our goal more concretely in relation to the demands of the student movement. While I did not go into detail about the fate of the university after the revolution (this is the topic for another article), it becomes immediately clear that the power structures that currently exist internally to the institution must be smashed. It would therefore be ridiculous to suggest that we formulate a “demand” for the current power structures to carry out; they can not abolish themselves, nor do they have any desire to. For communists then the answer is clear: for us to accomplish what we want, we can not issue demands, but rather we must put forward a program that says what we are going to do when we seize power.
As communists we know the way forward, but the direction is less clear for our social-democratic allies. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place: on one hand, the demands that they raise are proving to be impossible to realise within the current epoch we find ourselves in. On the other hand, they are unwilling or unable to attack the power-structures that define the university under capitalism in order to help transcend it. Therefore the demands raised become incredibly fluid and opportunistic based on the situation: we go from “Stop the Hikes!” in 2007 to “Drop Fees!” in 2008, to attacking split-fees in early 2009, to “Drop Fees!” again for November of 2009 to abandoning that demand altogether for 2010. In so doing, by cow-towing to the waverings of social-democrats, the student movement loses legitimacy in the eyes of the masses and becomes internally confused.
What then happened on April 27th? Instead of sticking to the demand we had been campaigning around, as soon as the administration showed resistance the student movement retreated and adopted a demand far to the right of our original one. This is problematic on three counts. First, it is dishonest; regardless of how we feel about the demand “Drop Fees!”, “Raise Fees Less!” was not the demand that we campaigned on. Second, adopting a demand to the right of our original one moves the general discourse to the right; we are no longer debating as to whether or not education should be a commodity, but rather how expensive a commodity it should be. Third, it isn't what we actually want; for communists, anything short of reinventing education is a retreat, and even for social-democrats tuition increases represent a retreat from the slogan of “Stop the Hikes!” issued three years ago.
For communists, two glaring questions are then raised: First, how do we push the student movement to the left? Second, how do we achieve success in our current struggles? The following section will seek to provide a brief outline of how to accomplish both.
IV. The Way Forward
1. Begin agitating on and spreading the news that the university administration is both unwilling and unable to negotiate. Despite the fact that we did not support the amendment, we should take advantage of it having been passed.
2. Increase the level of agitation against the administration as an institution, rather than certain policies of the administration. This should include an analysis of the power relations involved.
3. We need to begin to conceive of the university under communism. Even the best agitation doesn't matter unless we have a solution to offer. A program is necessary.
4. Advertise the program. Show students, staff, and support workers how a democratic institution can run. Engage in discussions that force our alternative to the fore-front.
5. Build alliances with revolutionary workers on campus. Any movement that seeks to challenge the administration can not succeed with students alone.
6. Begin organising our alternative power structures. If we do this along SRP lines/democratic mass line, the basic unit should be groups of between 8 and 13 people (see The Manual). This should be organised at the very least into some sort of an over-arching institution, be it the SFUO or a revolutionary student union (RSU) existing alongside our current one. This step largely depends on the size of the SRP; this is impossible to do, due to the energies required, when we have 10 people active within the student movement. We would need closer to 30 for this to be feasible even to start.
7. Use the newly formed RSU to win small victories. If there is a service not being performed, have the RSU do it. If there are supplies not available, have the RSU acquire them. Strive to show to both members and non-members that the university administration is not needed, and that due to the democratic nature of the RSU, it can respond better to problems that students, support staff, and faculty are facing.
8. At this point, even if the RSU is not directly confronting the administration, the administration will surely be directly confronting the RSU. The state may even begin confront the RSU. This will take both passive and aggressive forms: the passive will involve reforms that were agitated for earlier as we saw in the wake of May 1968, and the aggressive will involve direct confrontation with the RSU in the form of expulsions, possible banning, and other actions. Be prepared for a fight, perhaps even physically, to save the RSU.
9. From this stage on, what happens next depends on the mood of society as a whole. The RSU can not win anything beyond reforms if the rest of society is not ready to move beyond capitalism. If, on the other hand, we have built mass organisations of the working class capable of seizing state power, the RSU should join in the radical transformation of society and build institutions of free education out of the old bourgeois university.
V. Conclusion
The path forward is not an easy one. Even if tomorrow everyone involved in the student movement were to adopt our recommendations, it would still take years to actualise our plan. But it is necessary. In order for us to push the student movement beyond piece-meal reforms and towards gaining what we actually want, we need to embrace a new politic with new styles of organisation and tactics of confrontation. Social democrats are leading the movement to stagnation; as communists we need to agitate internally to the student movement, reach out to those disillusioned with it, and begin building a better world. Onwards!
