1. Make-up of student population
a) Students come from all social backgrounds and are in College for a wide variety of reasons. There is no underlying political or economic base that unites or could unite all students.
b) Therefore any movement will be limited to a fraction of the Student population.
c) Since students are only in College for a short time (3,4,5 years) they also put up with an incredible amount of poverty, bad housing, low or non-existent grants etc; because of the promise of riches to come.
2. Student Unions
a) Student Unions are mainly concerned with student welfare and services within the College. Very little of what they do is political.
b) Most students see them as being left-wing even though in reality they are just as likely to be right-wing.
c) There is, however, potential to use unions for political struggle, given the limitations of student movements. This largely depends on grass-roots work by political activists who may or may not be in college at the time.
3. Movements
a) Since students are from many social backgrounds, student political movements tend to use the shallowest politics possible to capture the largest amount or students.
b) The movements will eventually collapse due to the political differences that are inherent in such campaigns.
c) Also, since students only stay in College a few years; the experienced activists are always leaving which means starting from the beginning again.
d) Anarchist students should use student movements to argue their political and organisational line. From this it will be possible to recruit any potential anarchists.
4. Commitments
a) As Anarcho-Communists we believe that our politics are the most realistic ones being argued and so for the student movement to succeed it needs our ideas and tactics. Since at the moment we are the only people arguing our ideas, it is fair to say that the movement needs us.
b) Though we feel that the student movement needs our politics, we do not need the student movement. In other words we should not devote all our time to campaigning and putting up posters. Instead we will join campaigns and argue our politics within the campaign, while doing our fair share of the legwork. It must be remembered that our chief priority is the spread of our anarchist ideas. Once it is obvious that nothing productive is going to come from a campaign we should leave it and not waste any more time on it.
c) Given the above, it should be prioritised to recruit one or two new anarchists from a campaign rather than keeping a dying campaign going by ourselves.
d) A proper class-struggle movement must be connected with the working-class. Therefore links with unions at a grass roots level must always be argued for.
January 1991
This paper is out of date - see the new WSM site for the more recent version