The University of Cambridge Left Society: On Student Activism

The history of revolutionary movements has shown that the student body is not a neutral or inert social stratum, but a force of generative contradiction: poised between the world of theory and the realm of praxis, between the production of knowledge and its negation in class struggle. Vladimir Lenin himself emerged as a student agitator in Kazan, expelled first for his involvement in protests against the Tsarist regime. The leader of the Bolsheviks and future architect of the October revolution in 1919, leading to the creation of the first ever socialist state, cut his teeth not in the factory or barracks, but in the crucible of the university, where young intellectuals, exposed to both the suffocating weight of Tsarist repression and the expanding horizon of radical thought, translated their discontent into tangible demands for material change and political organisation seeking state power.

Nor was Lenin unique: Marx, though not primarily a ‘student activist’ in the narrow sense, was radicalised in the university ferment of Berlin; Che Guevara’s first steps into revolutionary consciousness began as a medical student observing exploitation across Latin America; in China, the May Fourth Movement of 1919, led overwhelmingly by students, ignited scores of cultural and political upheavals that foregrounded the imminent rise of the partisans in the Communist Party of China. From the Narodniks of Russia to the global protests of 1968, the role of students has indubitably exceeded the campus; the university has acted as a dual testing ground, at once an incubator of militancy, a site where ideas ferment and crystallise into collective resolve, but also one where radical potential is neutralised through the sublimation of radicalism into academic discourse. As Louis Althusser warned, the university is an ideological state apparatus: while it can breed revolutionaries, it is designed to reproduce the cultural hegemony of capital. Thus, the same energies that propel students into radical politics can, if misdirected, be corralled back into the machinic assemblage of the system, wherein radical ideas turn into fodder for tenure, dissent metabolised into a new branch of radical liberal critique, passion deflected into aesthetic lifestyle politics rather than class struggle. The student movement is therefore uniquely volatile insofar as, on the one hand, the radicalisation of youth, armed with theory and unencumbered by the conservatisms of age, has historically struck terror into ruling classes, but, on the other hand, the institution within which students are embedded constantly works to absorb and placate this energy.

Alexandre Kojeve, in his reading of Hegel, understands history as propelled by a struggle for recognition (la lutte pour la reconnaissance), the paradigmatic contest in which human beings refuse to be reduced to mere objects and insist on their recognition as Subjects. Student activism, in its essence, is a form of this demand: students reject their status as passive recipients of knowledge, as docile material for a bureaucratic-managerial strata, and insist on their recognition as political actors, not content with bare life, capable of materially shaping the world. Then what is student activism if not the raw surplus energy of a social stratum whose existence is suspended between two worlds, one of theory, the other of praxis? Yet, the tragedy, repeated cycle after cycle, is that this energy, if it does not break beyond the walls of academia, if it does not fuse with the struggles of the working class, will simply implode back into the cloisters that birthed it. Within the university halls, political opposition is tolerated precisely so long as it does not seep into the world; critique is valorised insofar as it is contained within the seminar, the journal or, ironically, the article. Student radicalism, if kept within its bounds, thus performs the useful function of decorating the present system with the appearance of intellectual vibrancy and political pluralism, while materially changing nothing. This is why so many ‘radical’ student leaders of one decade become mandarins of the establishment in the next. Their militancy, never anchored in the material struggles of the working class generally, was always destined to be transmuted into the assemblage of managerial competence.

The point is this: without movement outward, without the act of plugging into the wider social reality, is doomed to fizzle into abstraction. Students are not a class in themselves, but a force with a contingent social existence that must decide whether to attach itself to reaction or progression. To be ‘proletarian’ is not simply to be born into wage-labour, but to achieve a partisan consciousness of one’s place in the totality of production; to recognise the necessity of aligning oneself with the struggle of one class against the other.

Without knowing who it fights, what it fights for and why it fights, the student movement drifts into pure performativity, rallies and statements that decorate the appearance of struggle but shift nothing of substance.

The University of Cambridge Left Society is different because it refuses to fade into the background hum of student life. We are not another debating club, nor a society for the performance of radical aesthetics. We are a formation with teeth, forged out of necessity, conscious of the enemy and unashamed to name it. UCLS is a reminder that even here, in the belly of the country’s oldest university, students can be partisans of a different future.