BY NIKKI ULASOWSKI
Thousands of students participated in the September 11-13 blockade of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne, thousands more participated in the May 1 stock exchange blockades. The S11 and M1 protests have rejuvenated student interest in left-wing political ideas.
This has contributed to significant membership growth in the largest revolutionary socialist organisations on campus — Resistance, the International Socialist Organisation and Socialist Alternative. These three groups are now the most significant left-of-Labor forces on campus.
Increased opportunities have raised two questions for the left. Firstly, how do we best mobilise the anti-corporate sentiment on campus, and use it to deepen the political understanding of students? Secondly, how do we relate to political formations such as the four-month-old Socialist Alliance?
These questions were the subject of considerable debate at the recent Globalise This: Student Anti-Capitalist Conference held in Sydney on June 29-30.
Anti-corporate movement
The next big mobilisations of anti-corporate demonstrators will be in October, first at the Commonwealth Business Forum (CBF) in Melbourne and then at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Brisbane. Convincing students to protest at these meetings requires a major campaign on the campuses.
But by themselves, these mobilisations will not be enough to convince more students to join the struggle for fundamental social change.
The anti-corporate movement has phenomenally wide sympathy. Naomi Klein's book, No Logo, is one of the best-selling non-fiction titles of 2001, and anecdotal evidence suggests that it is shoplifted more often than it is sold. But this has not translated into either spontaneous anti-corporate campaigning on the campuses, or a significant growth in the collectives organising the mobilisations against corporate globalisation.
There are reasons for this. Although the out-worker industry is growing, sweatshops based upon illegal labour are not yet as central to the Australian economy as they are in the United States. Australian campuses do not have the same obvious links to illegal labour based sweatshops as United States' campuses do.
At the moment, the anti-corporate movement in Australia is based on strong sympathy with the plight of the poor in the Third World, it mobilises significant forces for large, "Seattle"-type blockades and demonstrations, and is led by the revolutionary left.
This was clear at S11, where anarchist-influenced forces split from the S11 Alliance arguing that it was too "socialist", and then proceeded to talk a lot but do very little. It was even clearer at M1, where the bulk of the organising work was carried out by members of the revolutionary socialist organisations — the Democratic Socialist Party, Resistance, Socialist Alternative and the International Socialist Organisation in particular.
These conditions — high receptivity to anti-corporate ideas, strongly pro-Third World solidarity sentiment and socialist leadership of the movement — also provide unprecedented opportunities to win a new layer of radicalising students to socialist ideas.
The Socialist Alliance is the perfect vehicle for this. The radical left could not have chosen a better time to launch a united political project to campaign for socialism.
Socialist Alliance tickets
By running tickets in student union elections based around the politics of the Socialist Alliance, the radical left can reach out to all those students who have read Klein's book and who believe that Third World debt should be cancelled and corporate' power curtailed. The Socialist Alliance could provide a vehicle to help convince some to go further and work for the abolition of the capitalist system as a whole.
That's one advantage of the Socialist Alliance — both on and off campus. It gives the left another way to politically lead the anti-corporate movement and to explain socialist ideas to those who identify with this movement. We now need to convince them that there is an alternative to corporate tyranny. We can't do that without raising overtly socialist ideas.
That's why those who argued at the Globalise This conference that building the Socialist Alliance on campus will cut across the anti-corporate movement were wrong.
It is common on the left to refer to the anti-corporate movement as the "anti-capitalist" movement. But while this movement has an objective anti-capitalist dynamic to it (its demands can only be permanently won under a very different kind of socio-economic system), the majority of those participating in the mass anti-corporate mobilisations have not yet reached socialist (or anti-capitalist) conclusions. The Socialist Alliance is a vehicle for the left to bring more of these people to those conclusions.
The anti-corporate movement represents a major break from the traditional stranglehold the ALP has had on the social movements. We need to consolidate this. Taking the Socialist Alliance onto the campuses will put the socialist student left on the political offensive and help to pose an alternative to the ALP's domination of student organisations.
Another argument raised against the idea of Socialist Alliance-type tickets in this year's student union elections is that they would prevent the left from raising solutions to the immediate problems facing student organisations. But this reveals a narrow conception of what the Socialist Alliance is capable of.
While the Socialist Alliance is an electoral alliance, it is not narrowly electoralist. It seeks to help build campaigns that mobilise workers and students in political action outside the framework of elections — the only effective means to bring about social change. Resistance believes that on campuses the Socialist Alliance should campaign around four main issues:
- support for the anti-corporate movement;
- building international solidarity with the workers and farmers of the Third World;
- fighting for free education; and
- campaigning for the ending of mandatory detention of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.
To be successful, these Socialist Alliance-type student union election tickets would need to do more than just present socialist solutions. They would also need to raise demands that relate directly to the needs of students, including democratising student organisations, organising real free education campaigning and increased funding and support for progressive campaigns.
Such a campaign approach would be a breath of fresh air after the anti-politics and cynicism that has plagued student politics for so long.
Another objection raised is that these tickets would exclude left activists who are not members of the Socialist Alliance. Resistance proposes that the tickets should be open to everyone who agrees with the platform of the Socialist Alliance, and not exclude students who are not Socialist Alliance members.
Although these tickets would involve the nine constituent organisations of the Socialist Alliance, they could also draw in those who sympathise with socialist ideas. For those who are unsure, Socialist Alliance-type tickets provide a good starting point for the discussion.
Some participants in the Globalise This conference argued that these sorts of tickets would not work because students are not interested in parliamentary politics. We think that Socialist Alliance-type tickets for student union elections should be openly connected to the Socialist Alliance parliamentary election campaign and would therefore raise issues beyond campus-based proposals. But surely this is a good thing. It could be a break from simply "playing the student politics game" and attempting to reform the National Union of Students kindergarten (which students are not much interested in either).
Next mobilisations
Running Socialist Alliance-type tickets, of course, will not substitute for organising the next mobilisations of the anti-corporate movement. The demonstrations outside CHOGM and the CBF will be important in raising the demand that the proposed new trade round of the World Trade Organisation in Qatar be abandoned. They will also build support for the cancellation of Third World debt, a treaty for indigenous people and real environmental preservation, at the expense of corporate super-profits. Mobilising thousands of people to converge on Melbourne and Brisbane will be a step forward and a show of strength for the movement.
It is also important that the anti-corporate movement develop closer links with both the FairWear anti-sweatshop campaign — these links are facilitated by the weekly Nike pickets in Melbourne — and the growing solidarity movement with refugees.
Resistance has initiated a national day of action on August 16 in solidarity with the struggle for democracy in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Such actions help to strengthen internationalist sympathy, and understanding of imperialism, among students.
The Globalise This conference showed one thing clearly: the organisations making up the Socialist Alliance are now potentially the biggest bloc within the student left on campus. A bold new step is needed in campus politics, one that brings the student left together in support of a project to involve students in activism, resistance and the anti-corporate struggle. What better way is there to do this than to be united in our approach and to put forward an aggressive, bold and confident project that can only further strengthen socialist politics on campus?
[Nikki Ulasowski is the national coordinator of the socialist youth group, Resistance.]