BY NIKKI ULASOWSKI
Universities resume this week and, amongst left-wing student activists at least, there's a mood of enthusiasm, a desire to ignite the campuses with the new anti-corporate mood. But the question student activists face is: how?
The immediate focus is not at issue: the May 1 blockades of stock exchanges and financial districts offer a clear and exciting short-term project, an initiative to fire the imagination of left-thinking students, an S11 for the new year.
The current topic of debate, however, is how exactly this movement, or this anti-corporate sentiment, should be organised.
A case in point was the discussion at the February 2-4 Sydney meeting of the National Broad Left. Most agreed left student activists needed to orient to the new movement against corporate globalisation; most agreed that M1 should be the immediate focus.
Student members of the International Socialist Organisation went further, putting forward a proposal to form a new radical organisation to be called Global Action — which would become the main vehicle through which activists seek to organise anti-corporate activity. (Such an organisation may also be an attempt to save the National Broad Left, which is dying on its feet.)
The ISO's position paper stated, "In the 1960s radical student groupings such as Students for a Democratic Society in the US became the organisational channels through which the movement radicalised. In order to carry the anti-capitalist movement forward on Australian campuses we need our own radical student organisation ... Students for a Democratic Society in the US had over 100,000 members at its height; for a similar group here, the sky is the limit."
The NBL voted to delay the decision on whether or not to form such an organisation until after May 1; an activist conference will be held in the mid-year holidays to further discuss this question.
The ISO have gone ahead and sought to establish these groups on some campuses across the country. In arguing for doing so, ISO members have stated that these new local groups should be based on general anti-capitalist ideas but should not have any defined politics.
They have claimed that deciding Global Action groups' politics first would exclude people from getting involved. They have argued that these groups could bring the left together to coordinate its activity, although nobody would be bound to the tactical decisions made by the group.
Resistance members are also highly motivated and keen to build the May 1 actions and to focus student movement attention on M1 — our activists will be involved in and will initiate M1 campus-based organising collectives across the country. The common goal of these groups will be to build the biggest possible mobilisation on the day.
Resistance is also open to national coordination between and of these collectives — provided, of course, that such coordination is democratic and that it has a clear purpose and goal.
Our focus is on movement-building.
From that standpoint, however, our view is that the ISO proposal to form a general, catch-all anti-capitalist student organisation will prove counter-productive and may damage the left's chances of building a strong student anti-corporate movement.
Such a catch-all is neither fish nor fowl — it is a halfway house between a movement, based on all those who want to do something to stop corporate misrule, and a political party, based on a definite platform and set of ideas.
It suffers from all of the vices of a movement (lack of a common political world view, limited goals and purposes) and none of its virtues. A movement is based on a common agreement for action (in this case, to organise M1) and not much else — that is its strength, that it can unite many diverse groups with many diverse political positions behind a united project. It's therefore open to anyone who backs that particular project.
The ISO's proposed group is something else entirely. Specifying that the group is anti-capitalist also specifies that it's not just an alliance for action. It's therefore narrower than the anti-corporate movement as a whole, which includes many people who as yet are not prepared to identify capitalism as the root source of the social evils they oppose but who are prepared to work with those who do to organise particular protest actions, like M1.
Further, specifying that the group is anti-capitalist but has no common political basis beyond that also specifies that it's likely to become just another ineffective left talkshop, as the National Broad Left itself has become.
Many on the left have argued that there's a need to abandon the divisiveness of the "old left". Resistance agrees that the student left needs to break out of its old forms, particularly its bureaucratic accommodation to the practices of the ALP. But putting left activists into one "anti-capitalist" organisation with no prior common political agreement will not do that — it will do just the opposite.
The historical analogy of the US Students for a Democratic Society, raised by the ISO in its proposal, is very instructive. Throughout its history, SDS suffered from exactly these problems.
On the movement-building side, its relationship with the anti-Vietnam War movement was problematic and, after a certain point, sectarian. After it organised the hugely successful first international day of protest against the war in 1965, SDS largely turned away from involvement in the broad, and booming, anti-war movement, seeing local campus anti-war groups as competition and counterposing a vague concept of "community organising" to the anti-war work of the big movement coalitions. Some sections of SDS even sought to break up conferences of the anti-war movement, on the grounds that they were "politically backward".
On the political organisation side, SDS's lack of any clear ideological position beyond general anti-establishment radicalism condemned it to years of fierce, bitter and even violent factional disputes. In the end, it broke apart into a series of terrorist groups (like the Weathermen), mad Maoist sects (like Progressive Labor) and Democratic Party lobbyists.
In our view, this is not the path to take.
In the 1960s, the Young Socialist Alliance, which was a prime mover in the broad anti-war committees and coalitions, argued in opposition to SDS, "It is far more anti-imperialist and revolutionary to organise against an imperialist war while it is being waged than to oppose imperialism in abstract".
The same can be said now: it would be far better, and far more anti-capitalist, for left groups to throw themselves into building broad coalitions and student collectives for M1, which can involve the widest layers of students, than to form a group which is "anti-capitalist" in abstract and ends up a narrow, factional minefield.
There is no lack of initiatives and actions for M1 student committees to take up: besides planning and building the day itself, there are disorientation day tours of the corporate university, student general meetings, teach-ins, spot actions, the National Union of Students' national day of action.
For such a broad-based anti-corporate student movement, the sky really is the limit. Let's not waste the opportunity by choosing the wrong path.
[Nikki Ulasowski is Resistance's national student coordinator. Visit the Resistance web site at <http://www.resistance.org.au>.]