I admit it; I’m cynical. I’m pessimistic. I’m bitter almost to the point of misanthropy. Trying to be any kind of radical on the NUS NEC (let alone a revolutionary socialist with a specific project of political intervention) is not easy at the best of times, and at the worst it is a thoroughly de-motivating and uninspiring experience. But every so often, something happens that galvanises you, reminds you what you’re doing this all for in the first place and assures you that you’re definitely not just bashing your head against a brick wall. Spending a week with a working-class militant from the occupied factories movement in Argentina and attending packed meetings at which dozens of students listen to him tell the story of how he and his comrades took control of the means of production in their workplaces will usually do the trick.

11-18th of February saw the first ever anti-sweatshop week of action on campuses, co-ordinated by No Sweat and its student wing – Students Against Sweatshops. The National Union of Students was kind enough to lend the whole initiative its official backing, and it’s been a big success.

The week focused around a speaker tour that saw Jose Julian Penenuri (a worker from the occupied Zanon ceramics factory in Argentina) speak to hundreds of students in Oxford, Brighton, Manchester, London, Cambridge, Durham and Sheffield. I will not re-tell his story here, but it is deeply inspiring and anyone who considers themselves a Marxist, a socialist, a class-struggle activist of any kind or just someone interested in social justice should take it upon themselves to learn about it. Check out www.nosweat.org.uk and www.argentinesolidarity.org.uk for more information.

As well as Julian’s tour, students up and down the country organised actions ranging from street-stalls to massive benefit gigs in squatted warehouses. Left-wing and campaigning societies on various campuses organised meetings and film-showings around the issues, and No Sweat launched its campaign for ‘sweat-free campuses’ – check out www.nosweat.org.uk for more.

I’ve always said that taking issues like anti-sweatshop campaigning seriously is vital for the future of NUS. The week of action made me more certain of this forever. It should be clear to anyone who knows anything about student politics that more students are active around international social justice issues than are active in official SU structures. If we want those students to become NUS activists, we have to relate effectively to the issues they’re currently active on.

But the NUS must take up such issues seriously not only in an opportunistic attempt to harvest some fresh activists. A campus-based struggle against sweatshop labour means a struggle against low-pay, against the outsourcing of services and against the purchasing of college merchandise from sweatshop employers. It means fighting the increasing accommodation to the interests of business and the market within education. It is not a giant ideological leap for students to go from fighting for sweat-free campuses to fighting against all corporate influence and privatisation on campus; from the privatisation of services and halls to the privatisation of our education itself.

NUS members are suffering because the New Labour government has a clear project; to aggressively extend the interests of free-market capitalism to every corner of society, ruthlessly smashing the welfare state and public services to pieces as it goes. The fight for a living wage for campus workers, the fight to get sweat-made goods off campus and the fight against fees are part of the same fight; the fight for a society that puts people before profit.

If the activists who organised action during this week make a serious turn towards the official student movement and its structures, then they can turn it into something capable of playing a role in that fight.

The workers at Zanon and hundreds of other factories across Argentina have made real the slogan from revolutionary France in the 1960’s – “the bosses need us, but we don’t need them.”

We don’t need them. We don’t need them to run our workplaces. We don’t need them to carve up our services. We don’t need them to systematically break up and sell off every public service and piece of welfare provision available to us. The fight for a society that responds to human need and not the interests of capital is a fight that can unite student activists in Britain with revolutionary workers in Argentina. It can link something as seemingly low-level as opposing price-hikes in canteens on campus to something as major and international as stamping out sweatshop labour.

Student activists on campuses all over the country are already making those links and building those campaigns. It’s time that NUS took its lead from them instead of from Bill Rammell.

Officially backing this week of action was a good start. Properly responding to the campaigns and issues that came out of it would be an excellent follow-up.

What we’re talking about here is not some bleeding-heart experiment in ethical consumerism or a project to assuage the class guilt of pretentious lifestylists. We’re talking about a struggle to overhaul the whole of society and replace it with something better. The occupied factories movement in Argentina offers a glimpse of what might be possible. Living-wage struggles on American college campuses do the same, as does the radical trade unionism in the face of extreme adversity of workers in Colombia, Iraq, China, Iran and elsewhere. Campaigns for free and accessible education by Palestinian and Colombian students are also part of the same struggle and offer further hope and inspiration.

The NUS needs to say yes – we are part of that struggle too. And why shouldn’t we? As someone once almost put it, we’ve got an education, a welfare state, public services, workers’ rights and indeed, an entire world, to win.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

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