We, the International Socialist Organisation of Aotearoa (ISO), do not believe students are inherently radical or agitational, or that their education automatically makes them critical of capitalist society and therefore open to socialism. Academic institutions are generally closed off from the people who have the most to gain and the least to lose from a socialist transformation of society. Many studies show the poorer your background, the less likely it is that you will attend university. Why are we primarily organising students on campuses across Aotearoa, rather than in workplaces or unions? It’s because campuses are enormous institutions which are more politically open than workplaces. It is objectively easier to intervene in people’s lives before they go into workplaces and into a life where they have been stripped of their agency. Students who know how to fight back become workers who know how to fight back. Those workers can then transform their coworkers to help build a conscious movement of the majority for socialism. For a small socialist organisation like ours, we have to find the most opportune place to invest our time to create socialists; we currently believe that place is on campus.
Concentration of People
The concentration of people is a central feature of capitalist society. To accumulate wealth and beat their competitors, capitalists must coordinate production and maximise efficiency. This means workers are concentrated into increasingly large workplaces, housing units, cities, etc., allowing labour to be supervised and standardised. In Aotearoa today, half of all workers are employed in an enterprise with over 100 employees, and half of all profit created comes from enterprises with over 50 employees. Evidently capitalism in Aotearoa is driven to concentrate workers, which is impossible without organising society’s labour into a tightly interconnected system of production, distribution, and consumption.
University campuses bring both students and workers together regularly for long periods and engage them in socialised production of commodities or socialised reproduction of the workforce. The university reproduces ideology, trains and credentials workers, and produces vital research for the state to manage society, and for capital to profit. Due to its sheer size, many sections of the working class are represented on a campus. Take two universities where the ISO has a strong presence. The overwhelming majority of these people study or work from the local campuses, so will encounter the ISO at some point. Some are radical, some aren’t, but all are forced into daily collaborative work with each other. Compared to self-selecting formations like social movements, campuses force socialist organisers to engage people who may begin with little or no initial interest in radical politics. Strong organisations are born from shared daily experiences of oppression and shared interests in resisting that oppression, and due to its size, it is not difficult to cohere a group who have an interest in fighting back.
Favourable Conditions for Organising Students and Workers, Joining Struggles Together
The ISO is a small organisation. People who join the ISO do so because they are convinced of the socialist politics, not because the ISO can immediately materially transform their life. What do I mean by this? The daily oppression people face as workers, people of colour, women, poor, and unemployed, is rooted in class society. If one person objects to wage labour or to sexism, even if others concur and change their actions by joining a union or combating misogyny, there remains a whole society whose essential social relationship is oppressor and subjugated. While we can transform our branch at an interpersonal level to create revolutionary subjects, it is not possible with our small numbers to significantly alleviate, nor abolish, the foundation of oppression and the immediate violence people experience every day.
Workplaces are challenging to build a socialist organisation in directly because we cannot address workers’ immediate conditions. The political environment is also often closed or hostile; frequently, workers’ every moment is tightly restricted and measured, their toilet breaks timed and their conversations monitored. Campuses are unique for their open political environment. University does not strictly regiment students’ lives. Students’ work is often individually produced and assessed, and they have more flexible schedules. Therefore, their liberty to get involved with a socialist organisation is much higher. Their greater freedom means students are able to get a coffee and talk about socialist theory for an hour or organise a demonstration and mobilise students. The bar for entry into political self-activity is lower, so theory and action can be joined more easily.
Students’ low threshold for political engagement has incredible utility for the class struggle on campuses, and for building an organisation which extends beyond campuses. When the university cuts or merges departments, or the Tertiary Education Union mobilises, the ISO should be lending its support and resources to the union and getting other students and workers involved in agitation. Students’ relative freedom means they can lend significantly more time and energy to advertising and education. Similarly, when students mobilise, university workers in the ISO should advertise in their workplace and bring the mobilisation to the union branch meetings. Breaking down “professional” barriers and helping organise self-activity between students and workers shows how an injury to the faculty or students is an injury to all on campus.
Students as Future Workers
Most people in university come straight from high school, where secondary school has tried to mould them into compliant, rule-abiding workers. Secondary schools have a clear hierarchy between teacher and students, where students are disciplined for breaking rules. Students attend from 9am to 3pm, taking timed lunch breaks which mirror a work place. The whole structure aims to replicate and normalise employee-employer relations. For the very wealthy, simply working hard and not breaking the rules leads to elevation in your social position. For everyone else, indoctrination is not so one-sided. The more the school system enforces the ideology of capitalism, the more the student will find contradictions in real life which are totally incongruent with this ideology. Capitalism’s constant self-destruction and reconstitution throws young people’s lives into disarray; so when students leave the highly structured, paternalistic, and railroaded school environment and enter unemployment, work, or study, it inevitably leads to ruptures in one’s capitalist ideology and a search for an alternative.
Students are trying to elevate their social position beyond being lifelong “unskilled,” low-paid workers. They are not petite bourgeois, nor disconnected from the working class; rather, the majority are economically dependent on working-class households and will go on to become workers themselves – and not particularly wealthy workers either. But graduates aren’t entering a flourishing job market where they will become highly-paid technicians alienated from the working class. It is the opposite: most become overqualified, underpaid, and massively in-debt middle-income workers.
Students have a vested interest in fighting for their conditions today, but also for their conditions tomorrow. Campus organising prepares the ground for long-term party-building. Targeting specific degrees or careers where existing experienced, working members already work could ensure the members and the graduates are not isolated in their workplace, and the union work they undertake is collective. Students studying teaching, nursing, or computer science for example, could be targeted with public talks, rallies against attacks on those industries, panels of workers who connect the specific conditions within industries to the structures of those industries today and how capitalism attacks them, or reading groups which tackle specific problems in those industries. When the cohort of students graduate and begin working, they can join the appropriate union and ideally the same workplace as the existing members, laying the foundation for union or workplace branches of the ISO.
Conclusion
Contrary to popular belief, students are not a special, very radical layer of society. Our campuses, like our workplaces and unions, have been beaten and battered, with sporadic resistance from students. Our student “unions” are mostly just services the university pays for, rather than unions which coordinate student resistance. What makes campuses central to the ISO’s strategy is they are the one place in society where large bodies of workers and workers-in-lieu still have the right to be political. Campus is currently the only place where we can advertise a public talk on Marxism, occupy space, and have 50 people show up. It’s where people are often first confronting the crisis in capitalist hegemony and looking for liberation from the bleak future which awaits them. Campus is the only workplace where hundreds or thousands of people can march, disrupt, and occupy without having to jump through the hoops of union bureaucracy. For the ISO today, the university campus remains the best place to train up a generation of workers who can begin digging the trenches to turn the current one-sided class war against workplaces, unions, and communities into a class war against profit, exploitation, and oppression.
Banner Image: An ISO Clubs Expo campus stall in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, shared with Student Justice for Palestine, at the start of the 2026 academic year. Photo credit: Serah Allison.
