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POLITICISING THE STUDENTS UNIONS
Student unionism was conceived and developed by the Communist Party of Great Britain in the late 1960s and the early 1970s for a purpose. This purpose was not to defend and advance the interests of students. In this fundamental respect there was no analogy with trade unionism, which in Britain has always had a existence independent of the CPGB's plans for it.
Whatever secondary or ulterior purposes may have been attached to trade unionism by the CPGB or other political groups, the fundamental rationale of trade unions has always been evident to all and beyond question – the vital need of workers to unite in effective organisations to defend their interests against employers, to negotiate with employers from a position of collective strength. The business of trade unions is therefore to establish a monopoly or a near monopoly of the type of labour in question and then use this – whether at local or at national level – to drive as hard a bargain as possible with the employers on pay and conditions of employment. All attempts by political organizations to graft other purposes onto the trade unions have been obliged to take account of this fundamental purpose and to present these other purposes as necessary extensions to or corollaries of this fundamental purpose, or at least consistent with it.
The fundamental purpose of student unions is entirely trivial in comparison. It is to provide and administer recreational and catering facilities for students on campus, to allocate small grants and rooms to student societies and clubs, and to express students' views on such matters as university or college rules, discipline, curriculum content and, latterly, assessment procedures. Only in the latter function may a student union be said to represent a student interest opposed to the interest of the university or college faculty. But this conflict of interest is entirely insubstantial by comparison with the conflict of interest between employee and employer, because the average student's stake in it is minimal.
An employee has a clear, material and enduring interest in the firm or institution by which he or she is employed, in its ability to employ him or her and so in its long term viability, and in the pay it offers and the conditions it provides. A student has no long run interest in the university or college. Students do not have a stake in their conditions of existence as students in the same way that employees have a stake in their conditions of existence as employees. The student's interest is a purely transient interest, which lasts for three years in most cases, four years in some cases and more than four years only in the case of post-graduates. And the relationship between students and faculty is quite unlike that between employee and employer. There is no element of exploitation in it (except occasionally when a research student finds that his or her work is surreptitiously exploited by the member of faculty supervising it). There is an element of a power relationship in respect of assessment, but faculty do not have an interest in marking students down or failing them; they have a general interest in students doing well, and in my own experience as a university lecturer I have found faculty far more inclined to connive at poor students passing their exams than to maintain standards at their expense.
Because the fundamental purpose of a student union is trivial, it was entirely natural that, before 1969, student unions should have been very largely apolitical. The politicisation of student unions was the work of the CPGB. It politicised them by grafting onto them a purpose that had nothing to do with them, and which it was possible to graft onto them only in the very peculiar circumstances of the early 1970s.
The CPGB politicised student unions by developing the politics of student unionism. The immediate purpose of student unionism was not to serve students' interests, but to do something else altogether, namely to develop the 'student movement'. The 'student movement' did not have a purpose of its own. It was quite unlike the labour movement in that respect. But it was quite like what the phrase 'the labor movement' actually meant when uttered by [leading CPGB figures] Bert Ramelson and Mick Costello and Johnny Gollan.