This week on campuses across the country, Resistance members are opening their books and getting back into study. Our “Bachelor of Revolutionary Activism” will be open to anyone who is interested in getting an education in socialist ideas.
Classes will include a discussion on Marxist-feminism. Others will be about how we can save our environment, or how best to support the Palestinian people. It’s a little bit different in each city or campus, but there will be common themes. Everywhere Resistance will be putting forward an alternative vision on how to run the world.
Resistance believes in a world that isn't run for profit. We believe that the working people who generate profit can run this world themselves.
Resistance seeks to educate members on the way the world works, not just to have knowledge for its own sake, but to empower people with the tools to make change.
A central part of the “Bachelor of Revolutionary Activism” is putting knowledge into practice. We invite all participants to not just discuss socialist ideas, but get active in the fight to achieve them.
During Orientation week on campuses around the country, Resistance members have been helping distribute Green Left Weekly and argue for a socialist perspective. As an extension of this we’re also involved in building campaigns on campuses.
In Melbourne, we’re building a contingent to the International Women's Day rally. The campus club at RMIT has held a meeting on the attacks on education, to give people the arguments needed to defend education at that university.
At Sydney University, Resistance spent their time publicising a meeting on Palestine, as well as building student support for a strike of staff in the first week. Resistance encouraged students to boycott classes and attend picket lines in support of the National Tertiary Education Union, which organised the strike. Members were there early to encourage other students to support workers’ rights and say no to attacks on their education.
In Brisbane, the administration at the University of Queensland announced last week that it intends to cut the entire gender and women studies departments. Resistance is already organising to defend these important aspects of the education system.
Resistance’s involvement in these struggles is what drives its politics. It is our involvement in struggles today that underlines the Bachelor of Revolutionary Action. Our study informs our practice, and in practice we test our ideas.
Resistance holds educational meetings and forums because our ideas are a plan for action. We encourage activists to read and learn so they can better understand the world around us, and how we can best organise to change it.
Whatever the itinerary of the Bachelor of Revolutionary Activism in your area, Resistance encourages everyone to come to the meetings to hear what we have to say. More than that, we actively encourage people to use the knowledge they learned at university, from meetings or from the pages of GLW, to critique and challenge the world around them.
This is how socialist ideas were forged in the past. They were not plucked from the air by academics in ivory towers, and they are not the utopian fantasies of idealistic youth. These ideas are a reflection of the state of the world, and are repeatedly affirmed by reality.
Every strike is a reaffirmation of class, every drone attack in Afghanistan is proof of imperialism, and every day without climate action while Gina Rinehart makes billions is a sorry vindication of the necessity of ecosocialism.
The flip side is also true — every rally, strike or sit-in carries the seed of an alternative.
In Resistance, we believe that only through the application of radical ideas can we hope to create lasting change. We invite you all to join us.