Syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalism and education: The application of unionisation to education

With four hours a week of lectures on a drastically reduced timetable (thus making my undergraduate course seem more like a postgraduate course, limited communication and shortened office hours for lectures, spending cut on resources, 60% of cleaning staff fired, and disability support for students being painfully low at the University of Portsmouth, we realise cuts quickly arriving and controlling every aspect of our educational lives, something which even the university's clever marketing strategies and attempts to obscure systemic corruption for fear of their reputation (about which they could do with learning a thing or two from Joan Jett) fail to obscure. As such, student action and active on campus mobilisation is paramount. It is in this post that I will observe the sheer breadth of unionisation its many forms, its evolution, and how this can effectively be linked back to our ever expanding revolutionary movements on campus, becoming increasingly important in this current economic and political climate.

When one thinks of class struggle, they would generally think of revolutionary permanence and an ongoing fight to collectively continue the development of a constant internationally led upheaval of the exploitative capitalist systems dividing us, uniting all proletarians globally of all positions within our society, using whatever means necessary. As such, unionisation and cooperativism can very much have their place in facilitation the transition to society through uniting collectives. However, advocating for anarcho-syndicalism with these methods being regarded as a permanent strategy for maintaining a constant revolutionary struggle would appear to be somewhat counterintuitive in that this would appear to present some degree of bureaucratic organiser centred vanguardism reminiscent of what Robert Owens advocated for with the Fabian movement, and the sort of concept that would remind them of the failed attempts taken at using and abusing vanguardism. As such, there is nothing especially communitarian and truly worker-led about anarcho-syndicalism, and the anarcho-part can be seen to be mildly contradictory, in that a state of some form (however loosely one considers this) is there requiring hierarchy and changing dynamics of power so as to maintain democracy within a bureaucratic system. As a result, I struggle to see how this anarcho-syndicalist ideology can appear to be anything other than poorly planned undemocratic organisation with no attempt to rid society of the forces repressing it. A similar mentality can be seen within the organisation and leadership within our university, in that the success of the opearation of the specific unions centred around education is heavily regionally dependent and dependent on the ability of certain influential leadership with basis on the varying degrees of success of the relevant structures and institutions in place locally to support them, as well as their arguably highly bureaucratic approach led by rank file systems in place to effectively alienate workers further through individual members determining the direction by which union organisation takes, as opposed to the general people affected by failing organisation, or the union staff themselves. As such, it can appear to reflect poorly managed and failed vanguardism reminiscent of the aristocratically organised Fabian society of the past, led by desires to preserve provisions for the overruling aspirations of the elites. As a result, it can be seen that a far more sustainable and effective approach to unionisation on campus can be through reducing sectarianism and division between unions and their staff and members with ties being more closely brought about through mutual relations with institutions themselves and their multiple organising bodies, and through agreements with those of all positions of power operating from within.

Equally, efforts to suppress student-led activism on campus in relation to the failures of the current economic system thriving on austerity and interest in appealing to the elites' private interests have been apparent (these having been mainly observed with the NUS and, to a lesser degree, the UCU). This can thus prove to further substantiate these arguments in that, alongside our collective loss of lecture time, our rising rents and often poorer conditions for living and studying, money still continues to be squeezed out by our university to fund research and set up degree apprenticeships with BAE systems, Raytheon, Siemens, and many other companies profiting of off the production of equipment used to engage in an apartheid. This can prove to represent the common lie that war is good for the economy and maintains a stable functioning system, yet all it does is put many lives at risk to kill off the poorest and most vulnerable, and to preserve the elites' own individual vested interests in preserving their own imperial and ethnonationalist aims as leaders, and to support their close allies that are the already wealthy and influential arms companies. As such, society can be seen to be divided further and further exemplifying the selfish human rat race built upon greed and corruption, and ultimately elimination of all other societies that challenge or go beyond the influence of the ultimates in imperial power. As such, more than ever before, this should act as the crucial turning point in inspiring revolutionary action on campus, and the point of intersection by which we begin to realise how closely interlinked all these struggles, both here with our university and globally, are. Now upon realising where our tuition fees are going and noticing that they rarely properly meet our actual educational, wellbeing and safety needs that they are meant to fund, we can see that the conflicts going on thousands of miles across the continents and beyond our seas are actually closer to home than we think. And that this should be our cue to not replicate this ongoing corruption on a smaller scale within our organisation.