PARTISAN!

Max J opines on the state and direction of the student movement in Newcastle and beyond.

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The last few months of student activity centered around Palestine has taught us a few things. Mainly, it’s that these protests are led by diffuse forces, primarily non-affiliated and disorganized activists (the “swamp”). The enemies of the protests have been not only Zionists, the State, and the universities, but paradoxically, the protesters themselves.

As many RCO comrades have reported and discussed internally, certain cliques of activists formed a solid barrier to the democratic and transparent organization of the encampments. This has particularly been an issue at the University of Melbourne, where the encampment is governed by a hostile clique of professional activists. It appears that these encampments are repeating the worst mistakes of Occupy.

Many of these encampments are run by professional activists who are eager to be co-opted by Australia’s biggest left reformist blob, being the Greens. Their leftwing verbiage belies their foundational hostility to the left itself, demonstrated by their constant red baiting, paired with rank sectarianism against those to the left of the Greens and their adventurist cliques (CRYM, Blockade Australia, Rising Tide, Extinction Rebellion, &c).

These issues highlight a few problems with the campus strategy. Primarily, the issue appears to be that students are only engaged politically on campus for as long as there is a semester. During semester breaks, when students are no longer on campus, student politics winds down. This is what is going to very swiftly kill most of the encampments across the country (the ones that aren’t already dead). Another issue is that students are transient, they are not students forever. It is for this reason that approaching students as students, and recruiting them on that basis, is not a viable long term strategy. Socialist Alternative has something of this issue, where the transient nature of students produces a high turnover, as graduating students tend to break off from a primarily student-focused political orientation. The existence of an off-campus organization avoids this problem, but it does not seem that Socialist Alternative is able to retain a large amount of these graduates.

This is reminiscent of the issue faced by Resistance. Resistance was formed in the 1960s, by dissident leftwing students who found themselves drawn toward Trotskyism. They were based at the University of Sydney, and organized against the Vietnam War. As many of them drew close to graduating, the issue of retention was solved by establishing an off campus organization: Resistance. Resistance would eventually form the Socialist Workers Party, which later became the Democratic Socialist Party, which would then liquidate into Socialist Alliance.

What should our orientation toward students and campuses be? Communists should not shun students and student organizing in spite of their inherent issues (Marxist-Leninist sects such as the CPA do this and they are worse off for it, not that campus organizing would save that dinosaur from the asteroid!), but instead should recruit them into primarily off-campus organizations that are not reliant on student unions or university admins for funding or organizational legitimacy. Approaching students as students can only go so far, and has not led to any sustainable, long-term viability for Communist projects. Instead, we should approach students as workers, and aim to integrate them into the broader workers movement.

Young workers in particular are desperately needed to breathe new life into a decaying movement. They are also some of the most mistreated workers in the country, second only to immigrant and incarcerated labour. Young workers are paid miserable wages (fractions of the national minimum wage), and employers exploit their lack of knowledge to make them work in abysmal conditions, copping harsh abuse not only from employers themselves, but also customers (for those who work in retail).

Therefore, it is clear that a new strategy needs to be taken toward students, and that the future of the student movement lies in the ability to regroup them with the workers movement.