Communist Students – Connecting with new layers

Writing in the Weekly Worker Ben Lewis detects the beginnings of a new sentiment among students

Communist Students has certainly stepped up our game in the last couple of weeks, having a presence at freshers fairs in 17 universities, where we distributed around 4,000 copies of the latest issue of our paper, Communist Student (see communiststudents.org.uk). This was specifically designed to introduce our organisation and to provide a broad outline of our politics on themes such as capitalism in decline, the threat of war on Iran and the environment.

As you would expect, we had some very interesting discussions with students from all sorts of backgrounds and political outlooks, and were able to get a snapshot of political opinion and sentiment amongst the campus population. We established numerous contacts and drew a new layer of interested and sympathetic comrades around us – particularly in Manchester, where there was a lot of interest in our work.

I am sure my experience was similar to that of other comrades (and indeed most of the left) in that I found the response from students warmer than in previous years. The reasons for this are obvious. The financial crisis, combined with the fact that the words ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ are currently being thrown around in the bourgeois media every day, certainly gave us more of a pitch. As one open Tory supporter in Kingston put it to me, as she took a copy of CS almost in spite of herself, “I would say communism doesn’t work, but then again I can hardly claim that capitalism is working, can I?”

Numerous other anecdotal examples from the fairs underline how the political atmosphere has changed. Yet we should not get over-excited about this and fall into the trap that a looming recession and the prospect of millions of people being forced into austere living conditions will immediately and automatically favour the left. Class-consciousness is still at an extremely low level – something quite clearly highlighted by the apolitical, commercialised and tightly regulated affairs that freshers fairs still are. And unfortunately most students are out to get freebies and discount vouchers, as opposed to new political ideas.

Nevertheless, there is the beginnings of a new sentiment amongst students which communists can tap into. With a growing minority starting to question the rationality of the current economic system, it is clear that we in CS should be confident about our ideas and our ability to influence and win new layers.