Owen Potter, Sheffield Socialist Students
I had limited experience of participating in freshers fairs with Socialist Students. So I was initially unsure of where student political consciousness would stand.
However, after extremely busy daily stalls, and then tirelessly driving our advantage home in the following weeks with more campaign activity, this become clear.
The struggle for Palestine liberation remained the biggest issue among students. Consciousness on the issue has not at all dwindled.
The capitalist class simply cannot hide its complicity in an ongoing genocide, which is being livestreamed. Many of our discussions with students reflected that.
Climate change also ranked high on the list of student concerns. Many are fearful of increasingly violent weather patterns and natural disasters, such as Nepal, where over 10,000 people lost their lives to flash flooding. Students see that capitalism is destroying the world that they live in.
We’re actively and directly squeezed by an unprecedented youth unemployment crisis, which, when piled on top of ever-increasing tuition fees, puts us in a desperately untenable position. We’ve heard this all too often from students, further driving the need for them to get involved.
It was up to us to listen to students, and put our programme across. We did so by highlighting that the link between all of these issues was capitalism. And that we can only tackle these problems collectively via organised working-class struggle.
Many students who approached us already seemed aware of the link. It was simply a case of reinforcing that fact, and explaining how we can organise as student activists to drive real societal change.
We met 140 people interested in Socialist Students. We now have a solid base consistently attending our student meetings each week.
Key to this was putting the time and effort into reaching out to these people, which we did via phone banking. But also getting to know them individually after our meetings, having informal political discussions, where we could further address their individual concerns.
This Socialist Students success also relies on the growing visceral hatred of capitalism, which is in abundance.
A significant number of students have had enough. Capitalism is pushing youth to the edge. They are rejecting capitalist politics, and they are rejecting the neoliberal capitalist regimes, which are destroying the world we live in.
