Neither exit, nor reform:

For a transitional approach to the EU

by Vladimir Bortun

As the prospect of a fresh Eurozone crisis rears its head, the question of European left solidarity and resistance is once again coming to the fore. Reflecting on the experience of the intervening decade, Vladimir Bortun puts forward the case for adopting a transitional socialist strategy and programme towards the EU.

The new economic crisis facing the European Union requires us to revisit the lessons of the previous one, which exposed the class character and regional cleavages of the EU. It also exposed the dangers for the left in clinging on to the hope of reforming the EU. I argue here that the left needs to overcome the binary choice of reform or exit and develop the disobedient strategy outlined by the ‘Plan B for Europe’ initiative. That strategy has to be linked to a transitional programme pointing towards the need for systemic change along socialist and internationalist lines.

European integration as a class project

Like many other hegemonic projects in history, European integration was dressed in an attractive narrative about peace and prosperity. Thus, in the early stages, the left was relatively cohesive in its perception of integration, as a new hegemonic project meant to serve the economic and geopolitical interests of Euro-Atlantic capitalist classes (see Dunphy, 2004). This came about in a challenging post-war context for the latter: nationally, a new balance of forces in favour of the working class, with increasing mass support for the left; internationally, a loss of access to resources and markets due to Soviet domination over the other half of the continent and to the decolonisation process taking place in the rest of the world. A common market built on free trade would, therefore, facilitate maximisation of profit for big capital in Western Europe, but also for an expansionist US capitalism.     

In the decades that followed the Eurocommunist turn in the late 1960s, much of the left gradually submitted to the narrative of European integration as a project for promoting peace and economic cooperation. Of course, this was not a linear process, with most orthodox communist parties, the Scandinavian red-green left, much of the Trotskyist movement and even sections of social democracy (e.g. the Labour Party in Britain) continuing to oppose the Common Market. This created in time a fundamental cleavage on the European left – perhaps the most salient today – between critical support for and opposition to integration, with its corresponding binary solutions: reform and exit.

By the 1990s, the reform position came to prevail as an expression of the wider reformism that much of the left embraced in its ideological retreat after 1989. This happened, paradoxically, as the neoliberal character of the EU was strengthened with each new integration leap, from the establishment of the Single Market (designed upon the recommendations of the big business lobby) to that of the economic and monetary union (a straitjacket on member states’ public spending capacity). Tokenistic gestures like the European Social Charter were toothless against the cuts, privatisations and social dumping entailed by the EU’s neoliberal architecture. 

Regional cleavages and the Eurozone crisis

The founding myths of the EU were used also draw in countries from the former Eastern Bloc, for which integration was presented – just as in the case of post-dictatorship Southern European countries in the 1980s – as the only possible path to democratisation, modernisation and economic development. In reality, Central and Eastern European member states have served as new markets, fresh sources of raw materials and reservoirs of cheap labour for capital from the core of the EU. Furthermore, the free circulation of capital entails a race to the bottom among these peripheral countries in reducing their taxes and de-regulating their labour markets in order to attract foreign investment. The structural funds offered in return are the whitewash meant to justify this relation of dependency.

On the North-South axis, the introduction of the Euro at the turn of the century meant that, under the terms of the Maastricht Treaty, member states were now unable to make use of monetary tools to improve their trade balances. Southern member states, with structural trade deficits rooted in the late and uneven development of their capitalisms, proved particularly vulnerable to this. The neoliberal paradigm offered them two solutions: cutting public spending, which they did; and getting loans from surplus-based economies of Northern member states, which they also did, thus cementing the North-South unequal relationship.

This laid the conditions for a perfect storm, triggered by the global financial crisis of 2007-08. In what was dressed as ‘pan-European solidarity’, the Eurozone crisis saw peripheral member states take loans that mainly went to banks in the core rather than towards their own economic recovery. The loans came attached with harsh austerity measures, implemented under the close supervision of the Troika. Austerity, however, soon proved to be an economic and social disaster, leading to staggering rates of unemployment, poverty and inequality. Their economies have never fully recovered and the public debt levels are still very high – a ticking bomb that the current pandemic looks to be the trigger of.

At the same time, that economic and social crisis led to a political crisis that saw mainstream parties lose huge chunks of their electoral base, particularly the neoliberalised social democratic parties quick to bandwagon on the new orthodoxy of austerity. Thus, on the background of mass social movements and political disillusionment, new parties of the left emerged, from Greece to Spain, opposing austerity and the underlying neoliberal character of the EU.   

The SYRIZA moment

The most successful of these parties was SYRIZA, which after successive leaps in growth won the Greek general elections in January 2015 on the basis of an anti-austerity programme. It was essentially a social democratic programme – in contrast to the party’s radical left image – that called for the restoration of the welfare state and for a European New Deal. Most importantly, it aimed to reverse previous cuts and renegotiate Greece’s debt with the Troika while excluding from the start the possibility of an exit from the Eurozone. This political choice fundamentally undermined its position in the negotiations. Hence, six months later, despite a referendum reinforcing its anti-austerity and anti-Troika mandate, when faced with the threat from the Troika with expulsion from the Eurozone, the left government accepted a deal entailing more cuts and privatisations.

The impact of SYRIZA’s defeat had a huge impact on the morale of popular classes and credibility of the left in Greece. Furthermore, it was met with very mixed reactions on the European left that ranged from justifications to accusations of betrayal. On the one hand, neither side of the new cleavage (including left parties and trade unions alike) had given in the previous months the kind of international support that would go beyond symbolic declarations of solidarity and put real pressure on their national governments to oppose, or at least not join in with, Troika’s bullying tactics. On the other hand, this new cleavage, further hindering an already underwhelming transnational cooperation of the European left, only reflected a deeper one regarding the question of the EU. While all admitted that the Troika’s contempt for the will of citizens fully exposed the undemocratic character of the EU, some – such as the newly formed DiEM25 – still insisted that it could be reformed from within. Even SYRIZA itself adopted a new strategy of building a broader coalition of MEPs, from different political groups, striving for a progressive EU.

This position, shared by a majority on the left including the Party of the European Left, essentially claims that abandoning the EU would only benefit reactionary, nationalist forces – a false dichotomy (also promoted by the neoliberal establishment) between the EU and nationalism, which effectively implies that international cooperation outside of the EU is somehow impossible. Thus, the argument goes, progressive policies can only be achieved through further integration, like the introduction of EU-level taxes.

However, such interesting ideas come without any realistic strategy to tilt the balance of forces so that the EU, with its entire neoliberal institutional design, can be pushed in a progressive direction. At the other end, the same handful of orthodox communist parties that have always called for an immediate exit from the EU, regardless of people’s consciousness on that matter, continued to do so, with the same lack of popular appeal. But at the same time, a third position also emerged: the strategy of disobedience proposed by the Plan B for Europe initiative.

The Plan B approach  

Plan B was launched in August 2015 as a call for an international summit on the question of the EU, signed by leading members of several left parties including the Bloco de Esquerda (Portugal), Parti de Gauche (France), Die Linke (Germany), De Rød-Grønne (Denmark), and Λαϊκή Ενότητα (Popular Unity, Greece), the left split from SYRIZA that opposed the deal signed with the Troika. The call described the deal as a ‘financial coup’ by which ‘the democratic, elected Greek government of Alexis Tsipras was brought to its knees by the European Union’. The first outing of this new initiative – soon joined by Podemos – took place in early 2016 in Paris and was followed by four other summits in Madrid (2016), Copenhagen (2016), Rome (2017), and Lisbon (2017).

The Plan B’s core argument, as crystallised in its political statements, was that the left and particularly any potential left government would have to adopt a two-fold strategy towards the EU:

1. A Plan A that would aim to renegotiate the European treaties while pursuing ‘a campaign of Civil European disobedience toward arbitrary European practices and irrational “rules” until that renegotiation is achieved’ – in other words, simultaneously try to change the EU’s neoliberal architecture and unilaterally implement progressive policies that would defy and openly clash with that architecture. This statement from the Rome summit offers the most detailed view of what should be changed about the EU:

“A deep reform of the European Central Bank to ensure full employment and to allow for funding public investments and ecologically sustainable economic activity as mandatory goals. … The abolishment of the TSCG/Fiscal Compact and a full stop to the institutions’ interference with national budgets … a European conference on debts with the aim to liberate the European peoples from unpayable debts … The re-orientation of the mercantilist policy agenda dominating the EU and, in particular, the Eurozone toward domestic aggregate demand to balance the current accounts. … The introduction of a principle of social non regression and social and ecological standards for the internal single market and for trade with non-EU partners … the introduction of minimum effective corporate taxation. … The adoption of a social protocol to protect social rights and collective bargaining against internal market freedoms … The preparation and the inclusion in the Treaties of the conditions to grant Member States wishing to do so an orderly exit from the Eurozone while stabilising exchange rates.”

2. Given the strong likelihood for such renegotiations to fail and for the EU establishment to threaten with exclusion from the Eurozone, if not the EU as a whole, a left government would need to already have in place a Plan B in order to avoid the same fate as SYRIZA. Such a plan would entail an ‘amicable divorce’ from the euro and the creation of a new monetary system. Indeed, in contrast to the conventional wisdom of reducing any anti-EU position to a yearning for national autarchy, the Lisbon declaration calls for ‘a new system of European cooperation based on the restoration of economic, fiscal and monetary sovereignty’.

… and its failures

However, such an internationalist alternative has not been further developed; nor is there the kind of programme needed to tackle the economic issues that would likely to stem from exiting the Eurozone, not to mention the EU. Last but not least, Plan B seems to lack a clear idea of how to build mass mobilisation in support of this strategy and a potential exit from the Eurozone. Actually, the whole Plan B initiative seems rather detached from the social groups whose interests it aims to defend, which is rather paradigmatic for the move away from social mobilisation that some of its constituent parties, including Bloco and Podemos, have displayed in their national arenas. This also seems to be the main shortcoming of other transnational initiatives, such as DiEM25 or the most recent Progressive International: founded in a top-down way, with little to no grounding in the labour and social movements, they look like an army with many generals but no soldiers.

Thus, Plan B has failed to develop in anything more than a series of party summits. An attempt to pump more life into the initiative came in April 2018, when the leaders of Bloco, Podemos and La France Insoumise met again in Lisbon to announce the creation of a new pan-European movement aiming to ‘break from the straitjacket of EU treaties that impose austerity and promote fiscal and social dumping’ and instead ‘build a new organisational project for Europe’. The new project, awkwardly named ‘Now, the people!’ movement, was subsequently joined by left parties from Denmark, Finland and Sweden. However, this ‘movement’ has not had any visible activity since and – unlike DiEM25, for example – even failed to put forward a common list of candidates in the 2019 European elections.

For a transitional strategy and programme

Despite its obvious political and organisational shortcomings, Plan B provides the embryo of what could be an alternative to both the reform and exit positions. The former is wrong on at least two levels: firstly, for maintaining the illusion in the redeemability of a capitalist project that would rather implode than become something that it was never meant to be; secondly, for failing to understand that siding with the status quo, even if critically, in the name of that illusion will not counter but aid the nationalist right, by allowing it to act as the ‘official’ opposition to the status quo (as illustrated by the case of Brexit, where most of the left abandoned the exit narrative to the right). Indeed, this flawed position on the EU question is of the key reasons for the current weakness of the left across Europe. The other position, which calls for an immediate exit in countries where the popular consciousness is not yet prepared for that, is equally flawed. In other words, if one position misreads the demands of the objective situation, the other one disregards the subjective conditions.

What is needed is a transitional approach that bridges the gap between where people’s consciousness is now with regards to the EU and the need to break away from it and from capitalism more generally – a system in deep crisis whose contradictions are increasingly unmanageable and unsustainable. Such an approach would entail, as proposed by Plan B, a left government, or coalition of left governments, disobeying the neoliberal EU treaties and unilaterally implementing policies aimed at the most pressing issues today: secure jobs, decent wages, quality healthcare and education, affordable housing, a clean environment, equal rights etc.

The inevitable resistance from EU institutions and other governments, their inevitable blackmail and threats, would reveal more clearly than ever the fundamental incompatibility between those policies and the EU’s neoliberal character. In turn, this would allow people – already disillusioned with the EU in large numbers – to draw the conclusion that they need to break with the EU.

Such a transitional strategy though would need a transitional programme, without which an exit from the Eurozone and, even more so, from the EU would likely lead to an economic disaster. Such a programme would include, among other things, the introduction of a new currency, which would initially be devalued but thereby help boost exports; capital controls, to prevent the drain of wealth abroad; nationalisation of banks, to make them work not for shareholders but for society, for example by providing cheap loans to SMEs and farmers; major public works, which would create jobs, build ‘green’ infrastructure etc.

Towards socialist transformation

However, such measures are necessary but not sufficient, as they would be met with relentless hostility from big capital and its representatives. To defend itself, a left government would have to go beyond the rather limited neo-Keynesian agenda that most of the so-called ‘radical left’ has put forward in recent years. The current context of capitalist crisis is qualitatively different from the post-WWII period that favoured (temporary) significant concessions from big capital. ‘Radical’ means to transform society from its roots and not just trim the branches. Shying away from that in the midst of system failure is what fundamentally explains the current weakness of the European left.

Given that weakness, therefore, it is hard to predict where such a transitional approach to the EU and socialist transformation could be put in practice from a position of power. Most likely, it will not come from the parties that capitalised on the previous Eurozone crisis and which have in the meantime lost much of their anti-establishment identity – but from the new left that will emerge from the social struggles and movements that will inevitably develop. This left will have to regain the courage to demand a different kind of society. It should make again the case for public ownership of the key sectors of the economy (including a state monopoly of foreign trade) and for a planned economy in the service of needs rather than profit. The ideological taboos of the 1990s have to be abandoned.

If the Covid-related crisis we’re going through is proving anything, it is that we cannot rely on the intrinsic chaos of the market to deal with the key issues facing humanity. It is also proving that under capitalism a united Europe is impossible, as each state is primarily serving the needs of its national capital. This emerged in the previous Eurozone crisis and is emerging again now, as core countries, particularly Germany and the Netherlands, are resisting the idea of Coronabonds that would see the EU as whole guaranteeing for the debt of any of its member states. That the Southern peripheral states quickly shrunk from the prospect of a major confrontation with the core powers, after initially offering some resistance, demonstrates both the difficulty and necessity of building effective alliances for transforming the economic and political system.

To avoid the failed experiences of the past century, it is also important to stress that socialist transformation would not be feasible without bottom-up democratic control of both the economy and the state. Equally, it would not be feasible on a national basis alone, since a left government without international allies would be quickly isolated and undermined. Hence, it would have to appeal to the popular classes from the rest of Europe, and beyond, for solidarity and support, summoning them to a joint struggle against the EU and national establishments. The alternative to the EU is not sovereignism, as some on the left are tempted to argue, but an international united front. Otherwise, the populist and far right will continue to benefit from the EU’s blatant failures and the left will continue to lose. Another Europe is not only possible but also necessary – and it cannot be the EU. 

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Vladimir Bortun is a Romanian political scientist and activist based in Barcelona. In 2019 he obtained his PhD with a project about the transnational cooperation of left parties in Southern Europe. Comments on this article are welcome: bortunv@yahoo.com

A perfect storm

UK universities, COVID-19 and the edtech peril

by Mariya P Ivancheva

The current crisis and its proposed solution via online emergency teaching has accelerated systemic processes already underway for UK universities under Brexit. While online education has radical and egalitarian potentials, emergency online teaching under present conditions threatens to invite in edtech corporations to dictate priorities as a contingency becomes a norm. Mariya Ivancheva warns that without serious rethinking and resistance, the UK higher education sector faces little option but to remain a tool of extraction and redistribution of public money to the private sector.

With the global spread of coronavirus and declaration by the World Health Organization of a COVID-19 pandemic on 11 March, universities in many countries have been pushed into fully digital modes of class delivery. As of 12 March, in the US alone over 100 universities had moved their teaching online. Since then, there is barely a country that has not seen the conversion of at least part of their courses to remote learning. Private education firms have since been inundated with requests from universities to step in and aid with online education delivery. And while the UK government and some senior managers of HEIs were initially reluctant to impose measures of social distancing and close their institutions, individual universities started taking the initiative themselves.

By 23 March, when lockdown and social distancing rules were finally introduced, most universities had shifted their classes online and closed most of their campus facilities, with exception of services facilitating essential labour. Since then, there has been a discussion around the lack of access to devices, secure internet connection and calm space and time for study for students coming from poorer families, living in volatile environments, and those with caring responsibilities, or with disabilities. Yet, the question of how going online will impact on academic labour in the long term, has still not been fully considered.

Not letting a good crisis go to waste

Given the criminal response of the government, that has by now cost Britain over 50,000 lives, these measures taken by universities are commendable. Yet, going online has also accelerated processes already underway in a sector which has for long been struggling with marketisation, austerity and casualisation especially since the 2008 crisis, and over which the threat of Brexit reducing EU research funding and students was throwing a shadow. Now, with the impending and unprecedented new economic crisis, fears of drastic drop in the intake of fee-paying overseas students for next academic year, and the government’s refusal to commit to £2 billion ‘bailout’ of the sector, the prospects for speedy recovery are at best bleak.

While the push to move online has meant that many students will be able to finish the academic semester and year, the assurances for staff have been much less generous. Reliant on over 50% precarious workers in teaching-only, often hourly paid and zero-hour contracts, universities have offered some furlough schemes, but a growing number are now discussing scenarios of disposing of the services of those most vulnerable. Meanwhile, edtech corporations, previously approaching individual universities through the backdoor, are now seen as ‘first aid’ or even ‘palliative’ care providers. In the current context, it is pivotal to understand how engaging with such schemes would mean further casualisation and outsourcing of academic labour, and be absolutely detrimental to the public university.

The troubled waters of marketised HE

The last decades have seen a huge redistribution of public monies to private providers. The public now bears the triple burden of education through taxation (research budgets and university running costs), paying toward study costs (student tuition, living costs and student loan repayment), and by bearing the risk of student loans (repackaged as debt and sold on to private investors). Entering public-private partnerships on terms favourable to the private side, university management teams have claimed that they benefit the ‘public good’ by investing in infrastructure and services, creating jobs and growth: a smokescreen for unsustainable exponential expansion, financialisation, and infringement on workers’ rights through even less securities and protections.

For example, academic pensions were privatised through the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), part of a leaked offshore registered tax scheme. UK universities, rated highly by rating agencies with the premise the state would bail them out, were also allowed to borrow hundreds of millions to invest in the construction of private dorms, committing to an exponential increase in student numbers and often feeding off-shore registered private corporations in a market as big as £45 billion in 2017 already. Soulless dormitories, leisure services and facilities welcome the students, while counselling services and face-to-face contact with faculty in crammed lecture halls are a scarce commodity for students experiencing a mental health epidemic.

With fees capped at £9,000 per year for undergraduate studies, and some MA-level degrees charging foreign students over £20,000 per year – not counting food, accommodation or leisure – student debt has risen to £121 billion in student loans.  These loans are of course becoming increasingly difficult to pay due to the prevalence of precarious, low-paid jobs in the post-graduation labour market.

Last but not least, research funding still comes predominantly from public sources as the EU or national research councils. Human and financial resource investment into cyclical competitive applications with low success rates, is encouraged as ‘industry-academia collaboration’ that often benefits the private side through patents, cheap research labour and the right of private companies to veto publications.

Edtech moving in

Meanwhile, edtech corporations have taken a bigger role within universities, instrumentalising two paradigm shifts of the neoliberal free-market ideology applied to higher education as well as other public services. ‘User-’ (or in education ‘learner’-) centredness has technically meant increased burdens on the public for the development of the private sector and the individualisation of risk and debt. For instance, job training has shifted from employers to universities with a continuous shaming of academics for not being ready to train workers in the skills needed for the future job market: a task never before expected from universities.

The second paradigm used by edtech companies to make themselves relevant to universities is that of ‘solution-centredness’. The same solution is invariably offered: ‘digital disruption’: the disruption of the university institution as we know it. In response to the demand of egalitarian educators for democratisation or for revolutionising the exclusive university now subservient to power elites, edtech corporations worth $billions are presenting themselves as the solution via digital technologies. They step into a long tradition. Distance learning through technological advancements – letters, radio, audiocassette and video recordings – have been used historically to reach ‘atypical’ student populations: workers, women, people in remote locations, with disabilities or caring responsibilities. Open education – free webinars, mega open online courses (MOOCs), freely available education resources and open code software etc. – were initially part of a radical paradigm of widening access.

Yet, under the current scenario of going online in a highly marketised university sector, technology is mostly used to opposite ends. Before the COVID-19 pandemic some universities were already engaged in MOOCs, free and credit-bearing short courses, and full online degrees involving public-private partnerships with online program management (OPM) companies. OPMs represent a sector of around 60 providers worldwide within the broader edtech market estimated at $3 billion, but expected to reach $7.7 billion by 2025 – which might even increase with the effects of the pandemic. The business model usually entails OPMs getting 50-70% of course fee revenue and access to profitable big data, in return for giving back some start-up capital, risk absorption, platform, marketing and recruitment aid. A difference between OPMs and other players in the edtech sector offering digital devices or services, is that OPMs offer partly what is considered the ‘core business’ of universities: curriculum design, teaching and student support. A second difference is that unlike other private education providers, OPMs use brands of existing universities in order to sell their product without being too apparent.

Normalising casualisation and inequality

The OPM sector is particularly important to observe in the UK as this model relies on heavy academic workloads and precarious outsourced labour, and has potential to circumvent organised resistance. Many MOOCs, short courses and full online degrees in partnership with OPMs are designed and offered as part of universities’ usual offer: soaring academic workloads are intensified through online teaching without extra remuneration, despite it being pedagogically different and practically more time-consuming than classroom teaching. With COVID-19 turning emergency remote teaching into ‘online education’ this process could be further normalised.

Durham University has tried to set a dangerous precedent which will very probably not remain alone. It entered an agreement with Cambridge Education Digital (CED) to offer fully online degrees from autumn 2020 without staff consultation, but under assurances from CED that staff only needed six hours of training to design and deliver such degrees. At the same time, OPMs have already absorbed many third-level educated workers, often out of PhD and in precarious employment, to offer student support as deprofessionalised insecure poorly paid ‘gigs’, similar to Deliveroo or TaskRabbit. Not unionised under the same union as other academics, COVID-19 will ensure that these workers – often women and academics from black or minority ethnic background who are at a disadvantage when it comes to hiring and promotion –will become ever easier victims of cuts. It also means that they will be used – as temp agency academics have been in the past – to break the picket lines of protesting academics. This system feeds directly on the polarisation of academics benefitting those eligible for research grants, and who extract research from precarious researchers and replacement teaching from teaching-only staff: practices legitimised under EU and national research council funding, and research-based rankings and audits.

With COVID-19 the OPM model of outsourcing core activities and labour to the private sector, could be accelerated even further through a bigger structural change anticipated by harbingers of the death of public higher education. The huge cost of going online – recently estimated at £10 million per 5-6 online courses for a single university and £1 billion across the sector – means many universities will not be able to afford to offer online courses. Furthermore, OPMs do not work with just any university: they prefer to work with already established brands. In this conjuncture, and under the current peril of students not willing to move to the UK fearing the pandemic, many smaller and less globally visible universities might lose a significant amount of students and the funding that comes with it.

Yet, the cry for regulation and a cap on numbers that would allow redistribution throughout the sector might fall on deaf ears. A blog post by Jo Johnson, former Minister of Education and brother of the UK Prime Minister, expresses a cynical view of the future of UK universities. His formula is simple: the government should refuse the call of lower ranked teaching-heavy former polytechnics, which rarely have partnerships with OPMs or offer online courses. According to Johnson, they are to die a natural death or offer vocational courses, which they did offer before being turned into universities in 1992. Research-intensive Russell Group universities, already offering online courses in partnership with OPMs, would expand, through their globally known brands, absorbing all students and revenue. What such a vision does not spell out is what would happen with laying off teaching staff. It is not difficult to speculate that the new mega-universities will increasingly depend on ‘student support’ and teaching from OPM-hired outsourced academics in the form of deprofessionalised precarious ‘gigs’.

Arenas of struggle and resistance

This scenario is ripe for resistance, but resistance is ever more difficult. Over the last six months members of the University and College Union spent 22 days striking. One of the two disputes of this longest sustained industrial action in the sector focused on pensions, while the second one united four demands: for lowering workloads, a sector-wide salary increase (decreased 20% over the last decade), against casualisation, and for the abolition of the 21% gender- and 26% racial pay gaps. Employers, represented by Universities UK and the Universities and Colleges Employers Association, have so far not made significant concessions to strike demands. The COVID-19 crisis made strike action redundant, and higher workloads, pay cuts and casualisation are now presented as the only sector-wide solution to the pandemic and economic crises.

In this conjuncture, the new push online has to become yet another central arena of struggle for the unions. Yet, research – a key tool for academic and other unions – might be challenging: a lot of contracts between universities and OPMs are made without staff consultation and are not available to the public. Besides, research results can be considered harmful for the brand of OPMs. Still, now more than ever a sector-level audit and regulation of university-OPM contracts and edtech procurement is due, paying particular attention to academic labour and student data use by edtech corporations. While trying to stop layoffs, UCU would also need to make itself available to academic workers in the outsourced programs, with the fight to insource teaching staff as a possible horizon. And while all this might look like a very British problem, the perfect storm happening in the UK higher education sector is bound to soon spread to other contexts.

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Mariya Ivancheva (University of Liverpool) is an anthropologist and sociologist of higher education and labour. Her academic work and research-driven advocacy focus on the casualisation and digitalisation of academic labour, the re/production of intersectional inequalities at universities and labour markets, and on the role of academic communities in processes of social change, especially transitions to/from socialism. Mariya is a member of the LeftEast editorial board and the LevFem and PrecAnthro collectives. Follow her @mivanche.

The politicisation of young people and fight for socialism

by Alex Homits

The past fifty years have witnessed successive waves of popular protest and social unrest largely inspired by the conditions facing young people. For Alex Homits of the Connolly Youth Movement, the possibilities presented by current period of youth politicisation can only be harnessed through organising in the ‘community, workplace and homeplace’.

A startling poll, conducted in 2017 among people aged 18-34, found that more than half would participate in an uprising ‘against the generation in power if it happened in the next days or months’. If this is not indicative of the condition of how young people feel about their environment, social and economic conditions, and their view of politics, then I am not sure what else could indicate as incisively the atmosphere in Ireland.

The immediate question that must be posed is why do young people in Ireland feel this way? In statistics, we can find a variety of answers and in statistics a summary of those answers will be presented. According to figures from the EU, IMF and ECB 10% of all Irish young people in the South emigrated during the last recession. Statistics for the North are equally stark, cited at 3,000 young people a year leaving and never coming back. The result is that approximately one in six people born in Ireland are still living abroad, their destinations the same as those generations who went before them – Britain, Australia, North America and, to a lesser extent, Continental Europe.

This is not a new phenomenon in Irish history, and therefore carries with it a certain emotive weight. For me, as someone who was part of the ‘New Irish’ it was a bit more confusing in the immediate post-crash period to see people I had gone to school with essentially pack up and leave the country in droves to anywhere but here. I did not entirely understand what was happening and more importantly, I had no intention of leaving – we had already migrated once and as far as I was concerned, that was enough.

The departures from 08-11 were done differently but the reasons that underpinned them were the same as every generation before. The reason they were different is as a result of the work put in by American and European capital. One of the primary means of rehabilitating the ideas around emigration has been the J1 Visa to America. This programme is well advertised on every university campus in Ireland and pushed extensively. It is essentially a summer work visa. It paints out the American experience as a magnificent adventure for a young person, full of new friends and new memories and the like. The actual purpose of visas and programmes like this is to rehabilitate and normalise emigration, historically the safety valve deployed by the political class in times of economic difficulty. It’s OK to leave your friends and family is the message behind this visa and to some degree, that’s why the 08-11 mass emigrations of young people were different.

The Irish youth today

As the economy continues to shift to one that focuses on management of finance capital and services, opportunities for the majority of young people continue to diminish. A more recent article by an Irish Times columnist paints the picture perfectly. There is no place for the young, creative or the homeless, and becoming homeless is not as difficult a task as you might imagine.

Many young people get sucked into working and giving their lives to the hospitality industry – which seems like a great place when you’re studying or doing something part-time, but quickly becomes something you invest yourself in to live, settle and start a family. The hospitality industry is fully aware of this hyper-exploitative relationship and often deliberately maintains a mostly student body of workers in their workplaces. Easier to control, manipulate for hours and ensure that they remain dependent on the manager doing the roster. From our perspective, it’s one of the few jobs available, and if it isn’t, the alternatives are not great. Low paid, precarious work dominates and prevails among the youth.

The low union density within the industry is one of the main factors sustaining these horrible conditions. This feeds into a wider issue in Ireland – the new industries which young people are drawn into are not unionised. Union culture, tradition and history is lost on them. New members of unions who have matured and entered the workforce in the last few years, particularly in Mandate and Unite, have pioneered more radical measures and should be commended. But it isn’t enough and much more will need to be done to reverse the pattern of declining union density in Ireland.

In summary, the Irish youth are pissed off and increasingly vocal. We see this in how they vote, how they become active in referendums  and how they respond to disruptions of Fine Gael meetings. Young people are more politically engaged in the 2011-2020 period than they have been since the Vietnam War and 1968. The capitalist class and its political agents have activated them by depriving them of opportunities and dignity. 

The climate strikes

One of the most important and key features in the radicalisation of the youth are the global climate strikes, which occurred several times last year and brought secondary and primary school students out. The premise of the strike was simple: students withdraw themselves from school in order to protest, similar to a withdrawal of labour. My organisation, the Connolly Youth Movement (CYM), attended several of these protests. I managed to get in at three. What I saw there was beautiful.

Thousands upon thousands of radicalised and empowered young people marching together. Many of them brought pieces of art they made in school or at home. Some brought anti-capitalists slogans, I saw someone walking down the road with a flag of the Soviet Union. In Cork, when members of the CYM joined the march, we got a huge cheer: “The Communists are here!” This was an insightful little event. What did it demonstrate?

Unlike the mobilisations surrounding the Iraq War in 2003, the spreading of easily accessible internet via smartphones has helped reframe how young people engage in discussions. Memes, gifs, and so on form a central plank in introducing the youth to political ideas. What little anecdotal snippets like mine and of other comrades suggest, is that young people understand, at least on surface level the link between capitalism and climate change. As a result of this, they draw conclusions and those conclusions lead them to begin to scrutinize the world as they see it.

Campus politics

In parallel to this growing politicisation we have seen how political youth organisations have been slow to keep up the pace. They exist largely on campuses and function as social clubs for young people looking to pursue a career in politics. Performative acts such as sleep outs for homelessness done by Young Fine Gael or watching movies and eating pizzas dominate their activities. Campus political organisations have also failed to materialise outside of their own campuses, rarely engaging people not in third level education or concerning themselves with class issues.

The result of this is that the largest youth organisations numerically which are student based are politically ineffectual on bread and butter issues. Rising tuition fees, rent increases, the privatisation of university and a rapid slide in work conditions, while in third level education and out of it, have created an incredibly difficult environment for young people and the response from the student movement has been virtually non-existent.

For the most part, Student Union positions and Union of Students of Ireland (USI) positions are interlinked with the career climb of ‘activism’. You pursue election, then you either stand again or you grade up a little higher to another position and finally you either look for work in the Trade Union movement or as a political candidate. This is common, and unfortunate, but ultimately leaves the youth rudderless to combat austerity.

The limits of parliamentarism

Many political youth organisations are completely entrapped within campus politics, rarely having the creativity or innovation to break that mould. This is linked to electoralism and parliamentarianism as being the only methods of expressing one’s desire for change. I would go as far to say that political parties which rely exclusively on parliamentary means, have the strongest representation on campus and reproduce a presence on campus. These organisations are the graveyard of the radicalism that the youth possess.

We see right now, youth sections of various center-left organisations competing with one another on Twitter as to whose policies on x,y and z are better. These youth organisations have many people in them as a result of their immediate conditions, but remain gridlocked structurally and institutionally by their organisations.

Our organisation, the CYM, has attempted to circumvent this gridlock and is composed of mostly members who are working, renting and experiencing capitalist realism. Their material conditions significantly inform their politics and our ability to present a coherent, scientific analysis of how society functions has provided us with a cutting edge that all other youth organisations do not possess. We place an emphasis on community, on workplace and on homeplace. We are not afraid to explore the limitations of the law and if necessary, go beyond them. In many ways, we have assumed the role and are beginning to assume the role of what Ógra Shinn Fein might have been before the Good Friday Agreement and what Na Fianna were before the Irish War of Independence: a radical youth organisation committed to one objective.

Trade unions and the youth

The youth committees/representative bodies of most trade unions are completely inactive and function as talking shops.  This is the result of two major phenomena.

Firstly, it is the decline of the trade union in general. Since 1973 the number of workers in a trade union has declined, so has union militancy. Large sections of Irish trade union movement, like their counterparts in Britain, are ironically anti-Communist, anti-political education and in favour of class collaboration. What is meant by this is rather straightforward: the legislation that devolves industrial relations into negotiations and endless arbitration has diluted militancy and undermined the ability of unions to act. As a result, their decline has continued. This pattern is seen equally in the United States and Britain.

Secondly, as a product of the above events, young people have not joined, as they might have before. Young people are not educated about the merits of the trade union movement and rarely engage with it. Often when cold calling to various businesses or speaking to my peers you get a blank face when mentioning the word ‘union’.

The pattern of unionisation is likely to continue to change in the coming years – whether for better or worse depends on to extent to which the institutional left responds effectively to, and shapes, changes in the economic base. In the Connolly Youth Movement, our members receive political education on the merits and importance of the union movement before being aware of it and then joining, but join them. A part of our strategy is to reverse the stagnant approach and encourage young people to join with a more militant and combative attitude to dealing with problems. Minor successes have occurred, but none worth yet mentioning.

Needless to say, however, the methods the CYM has adopted have proven to be popular among our peers. Occupations of businesses, airing their nasty businesses practices or protesting relentlessly on their doorstep have yielded better results than many months of negotiations and even shocked some union officials whose entire raison d’etre is to ‘negotiate’.  We are in the middle of one of the greatest shifts of wealth in Irish society; the time to negotiate ended a long time ago.

Internationally, this is following the same trend

As more people are drawn to the unorthodox and creative ways of challenging institutional power structures in Ireland, this follows a similar trend all across Europe. The festivals that the KNE (Greek Communist Youth) and JCP (Portugese Communist Youth) organise are drawn in hundreds of thousands of people, while the resurgent Communist Party in Italy is once more inspiring a generation of very angry and disenfranchised young people. The trends of growth in our fraternal organisations suggest that crisis has precipitated a polarisation of society and we are seeing it firsthand.

Piece-meal solutions to systemic problems are no longer acceptable and the widespread use of memes, the internet and an immediate access to all knowledge and communication has radicalised young people in a way that was impossible before. In the US, 7/10 millennials say they would vote for a socialist. While my idea of socialism is dramatically different to the average American’s idea, this is nevertheless a huge leap and development of ideas represented in polling.

Complacency is the very opposite of what young radical minded activists should be doing. Now is the time for us to engage, estate by estate, community by community, workplace by workplace and build a coherent understanding of and challenge to capital.

The Connolly Youth Movement

The organisation that I have had the privilege of being General Secretary of has continued to blossom into a well-established youth organisation on the left. There are many hurdles for us to cross before we reach the number 1,000 members, but we are well on the way there. We have observed the failings and successes of other youth structures and synthesised them into our strategy. We have also drawn greatly from our fraternal comrades in the Leninist Komsomol in Russia and the Greek Communist Youth, who both boast membership in the hundreds of thousands.

It might have been thought impossible for an explicit communist youth organisation ever to take off in Ireland. In the past, Catholicism and the hegemony of right-wing politics proved to be obstacles that could not really be overcome on one hand, and on the other hand, the most militant elements of the working class and youth filled the ranks of the republican movement and its many offshoots.

Today, the political landscape is very different.  There is no armed conflict that is drawing on huge portions of the working-class youth. You could say there is virtually no struggle at all, no opposition to the powerful and mighty of Irish society.  What exists is a struggle for identity.  The youth organisations of today style themselves as representatives of a long historical lineage, one riddled with violence and struggle. This is not an exclusive phenomenon, and is even more acute in the loyalist community, where the question of unification has intensified discussion of Unionism’s future.

Big house Unionism is splintering at the seams, but this does not seem to ultimately translate to changes in the political landscape or a sort of ‘thawing’ among young people from loyalist working-class communities. But what has occurred is the transformation of Belfast City Centre and the wider economy into one focused on service and hospitality. All young people are now pooled together in the same workforce. The practical benefit of this miserable arrangement of employment is that as trade unionists, we can now seek to organise young people across communities along class lines and penetrate the insular nature that sometimes accompanies staunch communities.

Class interest above all else

I like to think that this is where the Connolly Youth excels. Our small organisation has captured national headlines six or seven times in the last 24 months, and each time precipitated a wave of applications. People join us because they want to pick a fight with those oppressing them. They want to improve their workplace conditions, don’t want to pay extortionate rent and don’t want to be evicted. It’s not complicated – but organising around these issues can be. We place our class interest above all else, and intersect that class interest with other underlying issues that capitalism reproduces or exaggerates for its own benefit.

CYM members are involved in their communities, in their trade unions and in local housing action groups. Locally and nationally we try to strengthen the aforementioned groups and inject much needed political education. We believe that if our peers are politically educated, then their ability to fight their enemy – the capitalist – is improved.  We believe this on the basis of the collective experience of the working class since there has been one. We believe it and articulate our slogan: AGITATE, EDUCATE, ORGANISE!

Two quotes, articulate the atmosphere of our membership and how they understand their own reality. One is from Bobby Sands, an IRA hunger striker whose anniversary of 39 years is marked as I write this; another is from Huey P. Newton, who was one of the founders and leaders of the Black Panther Party. Our organisation strives to stand in the tradition of Connolly and many revolutionaries who have become before us, politically and culturally.

“I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto, but it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom. I shall not settle until I achieve liberation of my country, until Ireland becomes a sovereign, independent socialist republic.” – Bobby Sands

“Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick.” –Huey P. Newton

Only by imbuing this strong sense of self among the youth of Europe, will the dramatic systemic change that we all strive and desire come.

Alex Homits is a Dublin-based trade union activist and organiser, and General Secretary of the Connolly Youth Movement.