During their recent visit to Ukraine Workers’ Liberty members met with some members of the student organisation Direct Action (Priama Diia) in Lviv.
The Direct Action organisation of today, they explained, is the latest version of a succession of student organisations which have periodically existed under that name since the 1990s. Today’s Direct Action has existed for just over a year.
It aims to be a broad organisation, bringing together Marxist socialists, anarchists and students with a more “liberal” outlook (i.e. anti-discrimination and pro-equalities), with a focus on:
• Opposition to the ongoing commercialisation of higher education, such as the introduction of fees for exam resits and the transformation of education into a commodity. Direct Action members were active, for example in last year’s campaign against the closure of the Ukraine Academy of Printing attached to the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv
• Opposition to all forms of discrimination and harassment in education and in society in general, including support for trans rights. A leaflet produced by Direct Action, for example, provides advice to women who are victims of bullying and emotional abuse.
• Promotion of a pro-environment consciousness and the adoption of environment-friendly policies by educational institutions.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of last year has created new challenges for students — and seems to have acted as the trigger for the relaunch of Direct Action — in terms of physical attacks on education institutions by the Russians, the flight of students from Russian-occupied Ukraine, and further cuts in education spending by Ukraine’s neo-liberal government.
Direct Action remains a small organisation. But campaigning around the new issues for students triggered by Russian aggression, alongside of ongoing campaigning around more “traditional” student issues, has enabled Direct Action to grow over the past twelve months.
Direct Action members have been active in the Students UA campaign, which defends the right of Ukrainian students to study abroad even under wartime conditions.
A leaflet produced by Direct Action — “Students Against All Forms of Fascism” — poses opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a form of anti-fascist struggle (it is unclear if the leaflet’s images of Putin as Hitler are intended as a form of agitation or as a “scientific” definition of Putin’s regime).
More recently Direct Action has launched a petition for the (former) Russian Embassy in Kyiv to be transformed into a community centre where “students can conduct courses, workshops, lectures and other events. Once established, active students will have the opportunity to create cooperatives, mutual aid organizations and any joint initiatives.”
One issue that came up in the course of the discussion with the Direct Action comrades was their attitude to the Ukrainian Association of Students (UAS).
The Stalinist states had fake trade unions which were trade unions in name only but functioned as part of the state apparatus, and fake “student unions” too. Some of those fake “unions” have mutated into (weak) real unions since 1989-91, some haven’t. The UAS is the Stalinist-legacy “student union” in Ukraine.
Direct Action members argued — convincingly, I think — that there is no point in trying to organise within the UAS. The UAS is not the Ukrainian equivalent of the British National Union of Students (NUS).
The NUS of today is a (weak) bureaucracy which presides over a moribund mass student organisation, and helps keep it moribund.
By contrast, the UAS is effectively a bureaucracy without a union. Winning leadership of the UAS, even if there were a mechanism for doing so, would be the equivalent of taking over the driving seat of a car with no engine, and not much by way of a chassis either.
The UAS functions as an extension of university administrations. Some Student Unions in British Further Education colleges function similarly, but as the result of weakness; in Ukraine, it’s the result of design.
When Direct Action members campaigned against the closure of the Ukraine Academy of Printing in Lviv, for example, the UAS backed plans for its closure, thereby enabling the administration to falsely claim that closure was backed by the real “representative” student body at the institution.
Some Direct Action students in Lviv are now at risk of expulsion from their institution, after running a Direct Action stall at the equivalent of a freshers’ fair, with claims that given the existence of the UAS, Direct Action supposedly has no right to present itself as a student union and encourage students to join it.
Direct Action is at @PriamaDiia and Facebook Priama.Diia; email priama.diia@gmail.com