In a Dispatch from 11 May 2026, Fin Deane makes five proposals for how a hypothetical student organisation should be organised. Before I make any remarks about the comrade’s article, I have to acknowledge first that Deane is more likely correct than not about the shape a future student organisation will take. However, it is certainly jumping the gun to prescribe this or that principle for any future organisation. 

I want you to consider if you thoroughly understand the student as a class force. What are their characteristics? What relation does the student have to capital? What is the class past of the student? And then, what is their class future? I am saying all this without an adequate answer, but I ultimately ask this: Who is the student? Until we know this, we cannot begin to understand the new forms of student organisation that lie outside student unions. 

I hope that it is uncontroversial to say that all organisations have a class character and a social function. The social function of student unions is, as it now stands, the dissipation of student radicalism rather than genuine representation. This leaves something in doubt about the political capacity of any student organisation; who is to say that our new student organisation won’t be taken in just as easily? If an organised expression of the student as a class can be subverted even more thoroughly than the trade unions, then the capacity of any future organisation is brought into doubt. The student population is so fleeting that perhaps there is no consistent class character of the student that can give rise to a consistent, revolutionary form of organisation. If one student can use their education to rise from the status of proletarian to petty bourgeois but another remains petty bourgeois throughout, what do we make of that time in between when they were almost one and the same?

Communists in Britain have yet to come to grips with the student, to conduct any investigation, and understand how the student works either internally or externally. What we certainly cannot do, as Deane does, is prescribe principles and, as TWT did, plan out silly conferences without understanding why, or even if, and how it would be beneficial for students to be organised in the first place.

At the risk of sounding like I am copying Mao’s homework: no investigation, no right to speak. We must understand the force that gave the world the so-called Student Intifada, understand the event itself, then rally the students and give new form to the content of their rage. Investigation is the only thing we can prescribe at this stage. We cannot plan conferences or make political prescriptions without a broad base in and understanding of the subject we are seeking to organise.