Importance of mass work and various everyday things

[jake williams]

I'll shortly be taking a minor elected office at my university student union and it's gotten me thinking a bit about the importance of time and energy spent by revolutionary leftists in mass organizations, student and labour unions being the obvious examples but some others certainly coming to mind. In particular I'm thinking about the things I'll be getting involved in that are a bit less than exciting or revolutionary.

I'm curious to survey RevLeft's general view of the practical importance of doing work in progressive mass organizations. Work that is not necessarily really radical ideological work, but more along the lines of the pedestrian looking after of ordinary concerns and grievances. The specific thing that got me thinking has to do with responding to an administrative concern raised by a student in a student paper, but other examples are probably obvious, especially to anyone who's ever been in the labour movement.

Thoughts?

[Os Cangaceiros]

If you can make life better for yourself and others like you, that's important.

In fact IMO it's about all we can hope to accomplish at this particular juncture (i.e. try and make/hold gains while trying to resist rollbacks) Unions are one vehicle to accomplish this, although I think that ultimately unions in today's era play a conservative role, not a revolutionary one.

[Bostana]

Of course mass work is important for a revolution because the people who do the mass work are proletariats, and it is the proletariats that carry out the Revolution

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

My experience of Student Unions is that they are full of Labourite students getting paid to take a year out doing not much to help other students.

They are often poor vehicles to 'do work' as you say, because their power is often limited to shouting on the sidelines, and their economic power is often controlled by the University administrative bodies.

Student Unions are an outdated mode of doing pedestrian work, let alone aiding revolutionary leftists, as was shown by the lack of support by many Student Unions during the fees protests, sit ins etc.

[thesadmafioso]

I've only had dispiriting experiences with student unions as well, regretfully enough. From my dealings with them, they are more concerned with planning social activities then they are with actually taking any sort of political stance on most anything. The first community college I went to and now the state school I'm about to go to (I'm not entirely sure how different the situation is outside of the state or if this applies to you) had two student union organizations that were/are perfectly content not to create any sort of issue with the college/university in any way.

I suppose you could give entryism a go, maybe get a few other leftist students into office and from there you could try winning over some additional support from the existing members of the org. You would certainly have to do something to actually get the sort of feckless liberals in these groups to radicalize and from there get involved in some real political agitation.

[jake williams]

My experience of Student Unions is that they are full of Labourite students getting paid to take a year out doing not much to help other students.

They are often poor vehicles to 'do work' as you say, because their power is often limited to shouting on the sidelines, and their economic power is often controlled by the University administrative bodies.

Student Unions are an outdated mode of doing pedestrian work, let alone aiding revolutionary leftists, as was shown by the lack of support by many Student Unions during the fees protests, sit ins etc.
I think the situation actually is significantly different in Québec than it is in Britain, or the US. There is a "right wing" of the student movement with no shortage of careerists and opportunists, but even they are progressive in some capacity. The left of the student movement is a lot more radical. In general the organized student movement is an active part in fairly broad popular struggles, and not simply for education. That's not necessarily true at my own school and it'll be interesting to see what happens this year, but I still think it's fair to say that my experiences have been qualitatively different from what I've heard from England, which seems to be unusually bad. (Although we did do a video conference with some folks at the LSE who seemed to have their shit together pretty well).

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Well, I think it's part of their job to plan social activities, and it's important. It's not their job to be overtly political.

The point is that they normally aren't fit for purpose - in terms of organisation, finance or personnel - for what they are supposed to do, which is to plan social activities, ensure students' welfare, raise money and deal with any other student body queries.

Often at our university, as it's a college system, the college JCR committees are far better in terms of attitude at actually responding to students' concerns.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I'm talking about individual universties' Student Unions, not the NUS which is, admittedly political.