Tips for Radicals
To help you searching the blog, I use the following tags to categorise posts:
- theory - ways of structuring the world
- strategy - plans to achieve the theories
- tools - specific ways to (help) achieve the strategy
- tips - advice that could help you in your life and action
- examples and analysis of existing campaigns
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Please send in your own blog posts, links, comments, or article ideas either as a submission or an ask - always welcome.
"if you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy."
– a. toffler
"What can we do today, so that tomorrow we can do what we are unable to do today?"
– Paulo Freire
I also run a more scatter-shot blog full of incoherent rants and tumblr arguments. Sorry about that.
Anti-cuts campaigners, take note. I’ve written a bit about these changes before, but I’m definitely interested to see how this works…
After seeing student rage just peter out in 2010/11, and seeing the massive student movement in force recently in Quebec, there’s been a lot of talk about how to better organise the student movement here in the UK, to make it more democratic and more capable of dealing with upsurges in struggle. On the whole, that’s in the form of national federations.
The wrong sort of organising
Some people think we should put our energy into organising the more radical students’ unions together for resources (not political leadership) e.g. the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts. Some think we should build a big federation of anti-cuts groups alongside students’ unions e.g. Birmingham’s anti-cuts lot. Some think the anti-cuts group structure should sit above and direct the students’ union structure. Some think loads of other confusing things.
There’s a lot of chat about what the balance should be, but I’m not sure that thinking about how to link up anti-cuts groups is the best way to struggle for change.
Winning change
I think the focus is all wrong.
I’d say better questions are: are campaign groups the sites of action against cuts to (higher) education? are students’ unions? should we devote our time to centralised campaign structures with “decision-making conferences”?
What we need
- We need to be fast-moving and adaptable, by making organisations decentralised.
- We need to actually reflect struggles on the ground, by making organisations directly democractic and based in students’ lives.
- We need to be realistic about how much time we have to devote to similar-sounding national organisations.
To me, that means organising in departments and “federating upwards”, so different departments are working together at a university level, different universities are working together at a regional level, etc.
Don’t get me wrong: there’s definitely merit in sharing resources between left students’ unions, and obviously anti-cuts groups networking together is great… I just don’t think it should be our priority right now. Fight local, win, then grow. Without the local base, any national structure is sorta irrelevant.
There were a few unanswered questions in my recent post about NUS disaffiliation. This is my crack at giving the answers a go. Let me know what you think!
This article sets up a well odd dichotomy.
The failure of the NUS leadership to build student protests is a pretty uncontroversial claim. However, I’ve seen very few people calling for disaffilitiation from the NUS. Far more common are people that want a decentralised, bottom-up, combative syndicalist structure that allows people to get shit done without all the centralised bureaucracy.
Worth noting that the disaffiliation stuff relates to work by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) to set up a Fighting Federation of Students (Unions). It raises interesting questions that should be discussed in the future - would a new org abandon NUS liberation campaigns? should existing unions affiliate and disaffiliate from the NUS? is it stretching “the left” too much? A bit of a discussion on that on my friend’s Facebook.
But still… it’s not a choice between “destroy NUS” and “build new institutions. False dichotomy much?
Toward a Student Unionism: Explaining and Imagining Student Unions — a case for syndicalist student unions to “replace out-of-touch Student Governments and actually run the university in cooperation with other organized groups on campus”, along with strategy and tips for how to build them (written with an US focus but still relevant elsewhere)
How To Occupy — an Occupy-affiliated resources website.
Econowhat? — loads of resources to support an online reading group, with the aim of getting to grips with the economics of the financial crisis.
Great network starting up in the UK to create more syndicalist-style students unions.
It’s based on the “combative syndicalism” model that they used in the recent (successful) student movement in Quebec. There’s a few good resources on their site on the whys and hows of organising at a department/faculty level within your uni.
Hit them up!
Some guy on a message board somewhere. Some spot-on guy.
There’ll be more where this came from.
