Youth work of the DSP report to October 2005 DSP NC
By Zoe Kenny
This report is aimed at outlining the steps that Resistance has already taken and is planning to take, in the process of “rebuilding Resistance”. It will attempt to outline the key priorities and perspectives that Resistance has set at its national conference, and spell out the ways that the DSP, in particular branch leaderships, should be relating to Resistance, and concretely what these leaderships can do to accelerate the process of turning Resistance back into a “youth cadre force”.
The term “rebuilding” has been used a lot lately to describe where Resistance is at. I don’t think anybody would challenge that notion, we all know that Resistance is weaker than in the past and that we don’t want Resistance to stay that way. However, I think that this term needs to be clarified; when did we start this process? How long do we need before Resistance is “rebuilt”? What will Resistance look like?
When we began ‘rebuilding’ Resistance
Essentially, the process of “rebuilding” Resistance was started from the November DSP national council meeting last year. We realized the impact that the decline of Resistance’s strength, in the loss of several branches and the decline in actual numbers of members, was having on the rest of the party. “As the party ages, the ageing layers look over their shoulders to who may replace them at the political battlefront. And when the numbers of younger comrades coming forward look thin they get worried, some get disheartened. But if there are healthy contingents of spritely young Bolshies charging up, jostling for a spot on the frontline then the mood lifts and the battle is rejoined with greater vigour”.
But one of the problems facing us in this projection was how to build Resistance up in the current climate of Australian politics and the low ebb of the social movements. Obviously this has an impact on high school students and campus students. For several years now the campus movement has been at a low ebb (although this year’s anti-VSU campaign and some recent events may be changing this – I’ll go into this a bit later in the report), and there has been almost no movement on high schools.
This is not to say that young people are becoming more conservative, rather that there is a contradiction between the largely progressive views of majority of young people and the lack of action to project those views. As the Australian political situation report at the Resistance Conference put it; “Young people today have progressive views on many issues. The main problem is that there hasn’t yet been a campaign with the capacity or leadership to extend this progressive consciousness into the willingness to get active en masse. Corporations and the government are more and more exposed, their masks have been stripped away. In general, there is a growing mistrust of corporations and of the government. A youth poll from 2005 aimed at 15-20 year olds showed that over 70% believed that the government should enter into a treaty with Indigenous Australians, 55% wholly support same-sex marriage and 60% do not support the mandatory detention of asylum seekers (42% in 2004)”. This indicates that there is potential for future movements.
The Books Not Bombs student strikes proved that when there is a broad mass movement, this gives impetus and momentum to young people to get involved. In the last few years there has also been the “Michael Moore phenomenon”, as we put it, where large numbers of young people lapped up Moore’s critical views on George Bush and the Iraq War, also a couple of years ago a poll showed that 60% of university students voted for the Greens. One of the things that sticks in my mind is the response that Resistance gets every time we do stalls at the big youth festivals like Big Day Out, we’re basically mobbed for the entire day with young people wanting anti-war badges, GLWs, T-shirts, and our stalls are by far the most popular. However, it’s very difficult for young people to develop strong, sustained movements around their own particular issues, or broader issues, if there is not much movement in the rest of society. This situation is unlikely to change until there is a upturn in the class struggle or social movements as a whole.
‘Turn’ to Venezuela
So the question of how to draw in a new generation of youth cadre when the social movements are at a low ebb was answered with an ambitious plan to draw in a new generation of youth cadre through the inspiration of the Bolivarian revolution currently taking place in Venezuela. This is essentially the centerpiece of the strategy for rebuilding Resistance. This is not the first time that our tendency has used the inspiration of far-away revolutions to draw people towards revolutionary politics here. As the party-building report put it: “Australia is one of the most stable, wealthy and conservative capitalist countries in the world. At this stage, only a small minority in our country are won to revolutionary consciousness and usually they begin understanding the necessity for and dynamics of revolutionary politics by studying and actively supporting revolutionary mass movements in other countries. Revolutionary example is all the more important when the prevailing working class mood is one of accommodation, retreat or defeat.”
We projected to launch a campaign in solidarity with the Venezuelan revolution. We knew that this revolution would capture people’s imagination as the first revolution of the 21st century, one which has decisively put to rest the idea of “the end of history” and challenges the hegemony of the US empire, and because it has a concrete answer to the popular slogan “another world is possible”, which Venezuela has answered “if it’s socialist”, which has the potential to re-inspire the thousands of particularly young people who took part in S11 and the anti-war movement and draw them closer to us. We also knew that the other left groups’ sectarian position will eventually leave them in the cold. But it was not only because we knew it would attract people but also because it is the duty of revolutionaries to do all in their power to give a new revolution as much chance as possible to survive. In Australia this means building up a solidarity movement which inspired by the gains of the revolution will come to its defence if it enters troubled waters.
The first stage of this campaign was to initiate Australia’s first ever international solidarity brigade to Venezuela earlier this year which coincided with the World Festival of Democratic Youth and Students. This was a bold initiative which gave the fledgling solidarity campaign a concrete focus and it was soon clear that we were onto a winner, with the numbers of people expressing interest far surpassing our original estimates. It ended up being 58 people, a huge number, and there are still loads of people wanting to go on future brigades, in fact it seems we’re probably the only group in the world today organizing such tours, as comrades are constantly getting emails from people from other countries to take part! Although we initially hoped to draw in more independent young people, it was still a hugely successful initiative. The Resistance comrades who went on the Brigade have had quite a life-changing experience. And we can look forward to the three brigades projected from yesterday’s report, that will no doubt have similar impacts.
Impact of the Brigade
We are now starting to actually see the results from the Brigade. We now have a whole section of the Resistance membership who have seen a revolution first-hand and are having a massively increased confidence to talk about Venezuela, as has been evidenced by many of the report-back sessions and the Latin American Solidarity Conference. Although we definitely need to be looking for more opportunities to do more report-backs. It also has to be noted the role that Melbourne Resistance members played in helping to organize the conference and promoting it; comrades were systematically doing lecture bashes on various campuses, and we know for certain that four students from RMIT who attended came directly from those lecture-bashes and who are all interested in going on one of the Brigades next year and went along to the first Brigade organizing meeting in Melbourne. In fact I have heard that RMIT is setting up an exchange program with a Bolivarian university in Caracas; this is something we should find out more about and publicise, and attempt to get other universities to do as well.
I think it’s clear that comrades who went on the Brigade have taken Chavez’s famous speech to heart: “Each one of you needs to be an importer of this idea; repeat it on the street corner and on the street, write it on the murals of the cities…Go and repeat that imperialism is not invincible. Go and repeat that we are in a time of offensive…Go and fill them with hope and strength, the peoples you represent. That is one of the big tasks of every man and woman at this festival.” I think we need to put another challenge to the Brigadistas; which is “are you prepared to take on the challenge of organizing Resistance?”. We need to be much more upfront about the role of the Brigades as organizer training grounds. We know that a layer of comrades around the country, in the absence of the organizers, stepped up to organize their branches in the organiser’s absence, this gives us more of an opportunity to transfer people, and possibly relaunch some of the branches we have lost in the recent past which would be a huge step forward for Resistance.
Resistance national conference 2005
The Resistance Conference was also further evidence of the Brigadista effect kicking in. It was a great conference in many ways. While we have to recognize that it was a small conference, probably the smallest conference since the ‘70s, which was the result of quite a few factors which I am not going to analyse here, it simply brought home the point that we are definitely still in a “rebuilding” stage. It also did show up a need for DSP branch leaderships to consciously build the Resistance Conference, by assigning members to attend the whole conference, not just leaving it to comrades’ whims. Although there were 50 registrations of DSP members, it didn’t seem that many, in particular, Melbourne DSP comrades actually stayed for more than one session. However, facing the reality does not discount from the strengths of the conference which there were many. It showed that Resistance is up to the task of directing the enthusiasm and inspiration from Venezuela into the challenge of building the revolutionary movement back home. This was evidenced by the lively and optimistic tone of the discussion around the Australian political situation report. The whole conference was marked by a high level of political discussion and a new confidence. It showed clearly that most branches are making real gains and rebuilding. Even the very new members of Resistance had a certain seriousness and focus on politics. It confirmed the role of Resistance conferences in the yearly cycle of building Resistance, it obviously had a huge impact on all Resistance members but particularly new members; several Resistance members from Sydney attended the very next DSP meeting and some are seriously considering joining. I think it also showed that there are real national and branch leaderships emerging.
Watershed conference
The conference was a watershed which laid the basis for an outward focus and further growth. It is this strong basis that we now need to build on to guide Resistance forwards. It was very clear that in the aftermath of the conference there is a real buzz around Resistance. I received calls and emails from comrades around the country asking for the conference reports, so that these could be studied further and used for conference report-back meetings. There have been more emails about ambitious branch plans circulating between Resistance comrades on the email loops that we’ve set up. It’s this confidence and optimism that we want to develop, and the onus is upon the leadership of Resistance and the DSP to make sure that the projections set by the conference are fulfilled; it’s the conviction that Resistance can set goals collectively and then achieve them that will further fuel the confidence of Resistance.
How the DSP can help Resistance
The purpose of the next section is to outline the major perspectives and proposals coming out of the Resistance Conference and how the DSP can help Resistance to achieve these goals. I just wanted to elaborate on this point of DSP back-up. I think the turn back to building the DSP is going to have a huge and positive impact on Resistance. The move to more frequent DSP branch meetings with more educational content, is going to have a direct effect on the political education and confidence of Resistance-assigned DSP members (which the vast majority of the 70 active members we have are), and this will be fed back into the Resistance branches to increase the political level of Resistance. Having joint forums will not only take pressure off Resistance having to take the full load of organizing a schedule of interesting meetings for new Resistance members, and will increase the identification that Resistance members have with the DSP. A renewed focus on education, and freeing up more DSP comrades time to take a class series, or organize a weekend educational (like the women’s liberation school and the revolutions school) will increase Resistance’s understanding of Marxism much more rapidly. Strengthening existing committees; such as sales and finances, and inviting Resistance members responsible for these areas in Resistance will increase the level of organization in Resistance, and will actually be an effective vehicle for training up Resistance members. Increasing the number of DSP fractions related to particular movement interventions, will again increase the political confidence of Resistance members. When planning events DSP executives have to plan clearly with Resistance in mind, and consciously make room for these events; this has to be worked out in collaboration, but Resistance events need much more attention.
We have to make much more use of the headquarters and bookshops as means of increasing the attractiveness of Resistance to young people; we really need to have a much more open approach to our headquarters. Our headquarters have the potential to be a “drop-in” centre of the best kind, which facilitates the organization and politicization of new Resistance members. If we could more systematically staff the bookshop, rather than leaving it to full-timer comrades who already have far too much on their plate, with these comrades also playing the role of helping new Resistance members to get acquainted with the headquarters and answering any political questions, this would take the pressure of the principal organizers to not only think through the whole branch and organize exec members, but to also facilitate these kinds of drop-ins – it’s a huge load. Can we build on the Sydney example of rostering people on to staff the bookshop and helping this process of facilitation? This is the kind of thing we can do now that more time will be freed up for rebuilding the DSP and Resistance.
Campaign priorities
The conference adopted a series of campaign priorities. Most of these are not new. Obviously continue with the Venezuela solidarity, anti-war, campus campaigns, refugee rights where we can. But we also voted to launch a young workers’ rights campaign and to be conscious of defending civil liberties, particularly on campus. The young workers’ rights campaign definitely has the potential to mobilize young people. There is a huge cross-over between young workers and students, as the majority of students, even in high school now work. It also helps to connect the issue of students and workers’ rights as interconnected, and makes it easier to make the argument for solidarity between the two groups. Being conscious of the need to defend civil liberties is important, because we don’t want to end up with our own comrades demoralized and fearful about the new powers of the police and their offensive against protesters (see the arrests of students from Sydney Uni), we need a position of uncompromising defence of our basic rights. We also need to defend other activists, to help build up solidarity between groups, and to ensure that we’re not seen as neutral on the issue. However, these campaign priorities should not stop Resistance from relating to movement when we see it. It’s not up to socialists to sit in a room and decide which issues are important and then ignore people when they mobilize on something else. The very act of moving into struggle is a vital step forwards that we need to relate to, these are the people who are radicalizing and are ready to act on their beliefs. This is particularly relevant on campus where these days there’s usually only one main campaign on campus. Earlier this year, the Melbourne branch decided to run on the issue of refugee rights, which was not a top campaign priority for us, but it was probably one of the most successful initiatives they took all year, because young people were angry about the issue. We need to be constantly assessing the political situation, looking for new campaign openings, nationally and locally, so as not to miss out on opportunities when they arise. This takes a bold and flexible approach.
Venezuela solidarity
Obviously Resistance will continue to build the campaign in solidarity with Venezuela. We support the moves to “diversify” the campaign, of committing to build real committees out of the currently loose Venezuela solidarity network and to assign someone in the DSP nationally to co-ordinate this work. I think this will give the campaign a much-needed boost. Resistance will be a big part of these committees, we still want to be in the lead of them, particularly in terms of the public face of the campaign, which will help to attract more young people to the campaign but also to Resistance and the DSP. We should look at assigning particular comrades to these committees, particularly as a way to increase collaboration and training of Resistance members by the DSP. However Resistance really needs to hone in on the best ways to use Venezuela as a means of attracting more young people to us. The conference set some perspectives for this.
We need to find the ways to use Resistance’s resolution on Venezuela which was adopted at the conference. We also need to use Venezuela more in our general education. We can use Venezuela to introduce the idea of revolution to a whole new generation because it brings to life our Marxist ideas. It’s through using Venezuela to not only convince young people that there is an alternative to capitalism and also to understand the dynamics of a revolution that we will make the most gains. Our ITSs and ITMs and many of our educationals should incorporate Venezuela very strongly as living examples of the theory we are explaining. But can we possibly start up a class series on Venezuela? We should also invite Nelson Davila, the Venezuelan charge d’affaires, to speak at our events and help launch the committees, as well as take up his offer to give in-depth educationals to Resistance meetings about the Bolivarian revolution. We need to continue with the film screenings and forums, however we do need to diversify the kinds of forums that we do on Venezuela as well; looking for particular angles which relate to the specific interests of people we’re working with, for example a forum on health care in Venezuela aimed at nursing students.
We have projected to organize another Venezuela solidarity week next year on the anniversary of defeat of the April coup. Obviously this can be organized through the committees as well, however Resistance should have a specific focus on campus and high schools. We have also projected a tour of a youth leader from the Frente Francisco de Miranda to be organized in the name of the Resistance and the committees. This has already been confirmed and they are also willing to pay the airfare, we just have to look after the costs within Australia. There is a discussion about whether this should be in the lead-up to the conference or invite them as a speaker to the conference.
There is also more potential for Resistance to do fundraising around Venezuela events; Sydney Resistance has now almost single-handedly organised two Viva Venezuela fiestas which have raised over $1000 each. There is also the proposal for a December 4 action around the national assembly elections in Venezuela. I think next year we also need to be calling more speak-outs and solidarity actions around Venezuela, upping the ante of the campaign and making it more agitational.
Cuba
We also projected to increase the amount of Cuba solidarity work that we do. I think we can do this by using Cuba more in our propaganda, highlighting the gains of their revolution, but also the impact that Venezuela is having on Cuba. I think we should also definitely start having more educationals about Cuba run mainly by the DSP, or as joint forums, which would help to clarify some of the questions that newer Resistance members have about Cuba. There was also an idea for the DSP to increase our collaboration with Australia Cuba Friendship Society which Resistance could be involved with as well.
Vietnam
In other international solidarity work, Resistance has projected to learn more about Vietnam, and hopefully at some point be able to write up a document which outlines our position on the class nature of the leadership and the balance of class forces in the country. I think there is clearly a need here for the DSP to lead the process of an internal discussion on Vietnam; which is where Resistance comrades can gain the confidence to then convince the rest of the membership and be able to defend our line in public. We will also support the campaign for justice for victims of Agent Orange, as well as attempting to make contact with some of the several thousand Vietnamese students studying in Australia, some of whom are also members of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union, who are in fact holding two events in early November in Sydney and Wollongong. An added bonus of learning more about Vietnam will be that Resistance will learn more about the country which inspired the formation of our tendency, and probably learn more about our early history as a result. We can definitely motivate the book on Resistance’s history and possible have some more educationals organised around this book at DSP meetings, as it is probably still being under-utilised.
Anti-war
We also need to continue on with our strategic orientation to the anti-war movement. One of the key things that we need to keep in mind is the APEC conference in 2007 (which will also coincide with the next APISC conference which Resistance will also be playing a leading role in), which is going to involve a visit by none other than George W Bush. This event, if they go ahead with it (the Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld visit to Adelaide was recently cancelled, possibly because of the campaign against them that was initiated), will be quite a massive event on the calendars of activists around the country. The fact that George Bush will be there, as well as government leaders from around the region, could have a catalyzing effect. It definitely has the potential to be a national rallying point, similar in significance to S11. Although quite far in the future we need to formulate a battle-plan for how Resistance is going to be seen as leaders of this protest. This won’t come through setting up a committee a year and a half before the event, in the style of the ISO’s attempt to gain hegemony over the Forbes protest. It means being the ones who are out there consistently with GLW, exposing the truth about the occupation of Iraq and taking the campaign initiatives when we can. It means helping with the upkeep of the city-wide anti-war coalitions where we can, but more importantly keeping up a regular schedule of forums and films throughout the year on campus and high schools, calling speak-outs, initiating the kind of street-heat actions and stunts which we know we can do well, and being involved or setting up anti-war groups when there is some potential for ongoing activity. Being seen to be the leaders of this protest for Resistance is inextricably tied up with the rebuilding of Resistance; even if we do everything right, we can still give ground to other groups if we are too small to be seen to be a force to be reckoned with and to actually provide organizational as well as political leadership to the protest. These events should build directly into Resistance’s 2007 conference which we should project to be at least two or three times the size (in terms of Resistance members who attend) as this year’s conference.
In the somewhat nearer future we are obviously going to be building for the November 5 anti-war protest, and in Perth Resistance is actually heading up the whole tendency’s intervention into the protest. Maybe this is something that other Resistance branches can do, or something that we can experiment with the March 20 anti-war protests next year; it could certainly provide Resistance with far more skills and confidence in being able to organize ourselves seriously into protests.
Young workers’ rights
Resistance should be involved in the fight-back against the Howard government’s attacks on workers’ rights. We should be attending the big rallies, extending our solidarity to unions and workers under attack by visiting picket lines, helping to raise money, raise the issue on campus and link the issue to students’ rights. A key priority will be continuing to test out the ‘young workers’ rights’ campaign. The potential will vary from city to city, where possible we can get the backing of militant unionists and get formal endorsement from progressive unions, Melbourne and Perth have obviously got the biggest advantage in this sense .If we had a Resistance branch in Geelong, where Tim Gooden, Socialist Alliance and DSP member is the secretary of the Trades Hall and Craig Johnston, former AMWU state secretary and political prisoner is a delegate for the CFMEU, there would be many more possibilities.
We want to project ourselves as an organisation that is willing to stand up and fight for the rights of young workers. Most of these are high school and university students working part-time, and we need to find the ways to involve them in the union fightback. There are difficulties that we are going to face, especially as the extreme level of exploitation of young workers means that many have never even heard of unions, or are members of the SDA, a rightwing union. In the lead up to the recent young workers’ action in Sydney, comrades talked to workers at fast food outlets about the changes. A couple of cities have tested out actions now, and others should consider speakouts or street theatre actions where it is useful. Obviously, Resistance cannot substitute for a trade union, but we will be seeking to attract the best who come around the campaign to be radicalised around broader socialist politics. The inspiration of the Venezuelan revolution will be very important for this – as a living example of socialism in practice.
We need to test out the openings that present themselves. In the lead up to the November 15 action Resistance has projected to combine the Blitz with street-heat actions around young workers’ rights, that will be particularly targeted at high school students, as campus is almost over. We have also called for student contingents to these rallies – I think we should definitely also consider the potential for calling actual high school walk-outs in cities where this is possible, particularly if the teachers’ unions are planning on taking strike action. We should also produce nationally a pamphlet put together by comrades in Melbourne which outlines the effects that the IR reforms will have on young workers. Next year we need to be thinking about the ways to take this campaign onto campus as well.
Anti-VSU campaign
The campaign against VSU has been quite interesting in some ways. The rally on April 28 was actually the largest student mobilization since the last attempt at passing VSU in 1999. This was largely due to a massive campaign effort by the ALP, and a conscious effort to mobilize the clubs and societies, sometimes through bribery…(did this happen?). However the rallies throughout the year were much smaller, with the NDA on August 10 mobilising less than half the numbers and then smaller rallies on the 25th mobilizing hundreds rather than thousands. This was due to the misleadership of the ALP, who did not have a perspective of building a sustained movement through strengthening the committees, which basically had no say over the political direction of the campaign. Rather the mobilizations were to strengthen the lobbying power of the ALP students and fed into a strategy for reelection of ALP.
As the Australian political situation report put it, “Thus, despite VSU campaign, there have been no MAJOR breakthrough on campus this year. There is still a relatively small activist base, although there is evidence that a new layer of activists, small as it is, has been generated by the campaign. There also may be a growing recognition of the negative role of the ALP. Witness the chant at some rallies “Labor Party, fuck your lies, we wont buy your compromise”, (however, difficult to know if this is going to translate into anything). The way to show the importance of student unions is through political activity. It is important to consider the anti-VSU campaign in the broader context of the last 20 years, where massive attacks have resulted in students being forced to work as well as study, and many activists on the left cannot remember winning any significant gains for some time”.
There has actually been a change since the conference which is that the VSU legislation is not actually going to be put up for a vote this year. Basically at the moment, I haven’t had time to look through the actual circumstances leading to this decision; but essentially it has been delayed because it took too long and now they are trying to push through the IR “reforms” which are far more important for them. This is definitely going to change our projections about campus next year. But one thing is clear, this is a victory for students, and many students will interpret that as a victory of students. This conclusion has the potential to inject some confidence into the student movement. We will want to highlight the role of students in helping delay VSU, however, we also need a balanced assessment of why this has happened, so as to avoid over-estimating the strength of the student movement.
Civil liberties
As the Australian political situation put it, “The domestic impact of the so-called “war on terror” is being felt here very strongly. The Howard government has used racism as a divide and rule strategy to help quell opposition to its neoliberal policies (eg. In 2001 elections, used Tampa). As Howard gets more desperate, he will keep lashing out with attacks on Muslims and on civil liberties. The racist propaganda from the government and media has also created space for some fascist groups and ideas (eg. Attacks on Sudanese community in Newcastle at beginning of the year – a really good campaign). On Macquarie Uni there was the racist lecturer who was met with a very good anti-racism campaign. US peace activist Scott Parkin had his visa revoked. Some attacks on the right to distribute GLW in Sydney, which has resulted in the creation of the ‘Sydney free speech alliance’.”
These laws are feeding into a more intense level of police harassment and climate of fear. On Sydney Uni, police were escorted onto campus by security guards to arrest a student for alleged actions at an off-campus anti-VSU rally several weeks beforehand. Altogether three students have been charged, and there is now a campaign to “defend the VSU 3”, which Resistance should be involved in. There have also been students arrested at the Forbes protest who are now facing charges, and who are running their own (separate!) campaign. Resistance has to be involved in helping build these campaigns, not only to educate our own members about the need to defend our basic rights, and increase the understanding that the more the police can get away with harassment scott-free the more they will repeat it. But we also need to building up solidarity with anyone under attack, because we may need that solidarity ourselves at some point. We should produce some propaganda around this issue, maybe a “know your rights” pamphlet. We should also seek to link the terror laws to the fight for work place rights – they will use these laws against anyone who is considered to be “subversive” – and it’s no surprise that Howard want to shift attention away from their unpopular moves to dismantle rights at work to concentrate on whipping up fear.
Refugees
Need to keep looking out for opportunities for refugee rights work. The rallies throughout the year are good opportunities for Resistance, even if they are smaller, we know we can recruit from these. In some places we should continue to assign Resistance comrades to the city-wide coalitions mainly as training grounds to learn our approach to movement interventions, which will be aided by more joint fractions. We should also look for opportunities to launch initiatives similar to the Melbourne shut-down the Maribyrnong detention centre, which helped build the branch.
Resistance building
The Resistance-building report had a real emphasis on the re-cadreisation of Resistance. Emphasising that although Resistance is a youth organization and not a cadre organization, that we are actually aiming to train people up as cadre through Resistance so that joining the DSP is not a huge leap, where the financial and time commitments, are not something imposed bureaucratically, but where Resistance members who join the DSP politically understand the need for these commitments and have the desire to concretize these commitments and want a higher level of politics. So the report attempted to outline a methodical process of how we not only recruit people through our interventions into campaigns, and through our ideas, but then systematically go through the process of convincing them about all of our informal “norms”, I think there is a tendency in Resistance for comrades to assume that new members will pick up the kind of commitments and pace that we set, through osmosis. This is a recipe for integrating those who already understand the need for activism, whilst those who don’t automatically understand will fall by the sidelines. I agree with some comments Sue Bolton has made about a general approach to recruitment, which she described as “passive” recruitment, where we think that the strength of GLW, of our politics, will speak for themselves, and this results in a lack of active engagement to really convince new people of our politics, but also a certain slap-dash approach to the organizational questions.
I think there are some things we learned from this year which will help us. For example, our O-Week efforts are always fantastic, but then often that highly organized and commitment to put in long hours, slips off, and we just go into a lack-lustre campus routine. I think the post-O-week camps which we initiated this year were an excellent way to make sure that doesn’t happen, it gives branches a focus to integrate all the new people we joined through O-Week. We found this year that the camps were an incredibly effective way to integrate those people into Resistance and gives us room to talk to them about the DSP. The only thing we need to do is actually make these camps closer to O-Weeks, some of the camps happened up to three months after O-Week. Obviously, the DSP can play an excellent role at these camps, working with new people on workshops, participating in discussions and having the informal chats. I think that the Resistance Conference is also going to be much better in the mid-year break. This will give us an excellent focus, building up to this from the start of the year and then using the conference as a means to fully consolidate the periphery we’ve brought around us and make plans to take us to the end of the year, uniting the whole membership, new and old, in our tasks and perspectives, and giving new members a real sense of ownership over Resistance.
We adopted quite a few proposals to actually increase Resistance’s profile. We do need to increase this at rallies; having better organized interventions, flags, placards. We are fixing up the website; and we want to produce a new postcard which is a clip-off, highlights Venezuela, but most of all, highlight that we have a NEW website, and that it is worth checking out again.
Campus
One of the key initiatives that we took is to focus on the need to get our campus work right. Obviously Resistance is incredibly weak on campus right now; a few years ago at the beginning of 2002 we had 70 activists on campus, now we have about 25. Sure the general state of the social movements, and the impact that this has had on the student movement has played a role in reducing our size. However, we can’t allow ourselves to fall into a mechanical mind-set, that when the student movement is low, therefore Resistance can’t grow. It is harder, but looking at Socialist Alternative (for all their problems) we know that it is possible to grow. For example, in Melbourne, in one of Brianna’s PCDs she says “Socialist Alternative are in a very strong position here. Its active membership is around 100, which is equivalent to Resistance, DSP and active SA members combined”. And in Sydney, despite suffering a debilitating split at the end of last year, where their best and most political leading members left leaving them with a tiny club of about 5-7 members, have now grown back up to approximately 20-odd (this is a guestimation). This proves that an openly socialist youth-oriented organization can make gains quickly, even in this political climate”.
What Resistance urgently needs to do is work out how we are going to rebuild our campus interventions. There are several things that we can say. I think a key part in making this perspective real is to work out at the start of the year our campus priority or priorities in each city. So instead of being spread out thinly over four campuses, we can concentrate our resources to try and have real interventions into the key campus or campuses in one city.
However, we can still have an intervention if we have one member studying on a campus which we haven’t prioritized. We should investigate if there are any DSP members, who are not crucial to our intervention into our main campus, who can back them on stalls. If not we can still do poster runs on that campus, keep an ear to the ground for any political developments and report-these back to the branch, that person can still network and create alliances, and we can even do the odd forum or film screening as well as O-Weeks.
However this doesn’t mean we become campus-bound, we need a balanced intervention.
We do want to build campus Resistance clubs, but rather than these being built as an end in themselves, they need to be seen as “funnels” directed back to the branch, as the central organ of all our work. These clubs should hold regular (though not unrealistically frequent) political forums, as well as have the capacity for making some decisions about what to do next on campus, although, ultimately the club’s work needs to be democratically controlled by the branch as a whole.
Resistance has adopted the idea of drafting a campus resolution which will be adopted at our next NC meeting. The resolution will be an attempt to assess the impact of the raft of regressive changes to universities, the actual state of the student movement, the other groups that we encounter on Uni (who they are and what they stand for) and finally a section on Resistance; a short rundown of our history on campus (position towards NUS etc), where we are at now, where we want to go and how to get there, thus providing a longer term view for comrades.
I just wanted to make some final comments about our campus work in relation to the role that we should be trying to play on campus. I think our job is to actually play a broader political role, where we’re not afraid to be the ones that initiate a speak-out against the latest refugee scandal, or the decision to send more troops to Iraq or Afghanistan. When we’re trying to work out the kind of role we don’t want to play, we shouldn’t have to look any further than SAlt, whose narrow and opportunistic outlook, leads them to solely focus on the most student-oriented campaign, ie VSU, but without any attempt to actually deepen the politics of that campaign. We on the other hand want to actually raise the political consciousness of students on campus and this means intervening into the main campus campaigns but attempting to raise the political level of those campaigns as well as taking initiatives around other issues as well.
Finances
Finances realized that our finances have been de-politicised to a basic idea of “selling badges”. While merchandise and fundraisers are vital to our organization and can be strengthened, we realized that we need to embark upon a campaign to raise financial consciousness by going on a dues and pledges campaign. We pledged to attempt to double every branch’s financial membership by the end of the year in order to reach 100 financial members – Sydney already thinks they can increase membership to 40, and Melbourne has set a target of six more financial members. There was also the proposal raised in Peter’s report which puts forward the idea of Resistance making regular yearly pledges to the FF. However, this really needs to be worked out through a real discussion about Resistance’s finances; currently most branches are in debt to the Res NO, and this will make it incredibly hard for the NO to pay our bills to the DSP. The idea is good, but the actual amounts need to be worked out in a concrete way. I think a part of this will be helped by the Resistance finances officer not only getting more political direction from the Resistance leadership, but also from the DSP finances office. Resistance needs a national budget, which can include pledges to FF but this has to be worked out in relation to the political needs of Resistance, to have enough money for us to not only “stay in the black” but also to take bold political initiatives throughout the year; like a new post-card, like getting international guests, like helping comrades travel to NCs more often; all of these things have to be a priority.
GLW
Resistance’s sales have been low all year, averaging about 35-40 sellers and between 300 and 400 sales a week. We have had numerous discussions on NEs and NCs about this; and have concluded that although there is room to increase the rate of Resistance sellers, through more educationals on the role of the paper and sales skills workshops, ultimately we need to increase the number of Resistance sellers. So again this is inextricably tied up with rebuilding Resistance. Often in the sales sheets we receive from branches there is either none or maybe one or two Resistance-only sellers; this is not because branches are not drawing in new people, but probably comes down to a lack of confidence to actually ask people to sell, and a lack of organizational muscle to make this happen. This lack of organizational capacity is directly related to the weakness of the DSP’s organization. In many cities there is no DSP-led sales committee, or if there is, it’s not actually functioning effectively. This means that sales will be organized as another thing on the list of tasks, rather than having a Resistance member or two plugged into a weekly political meeting which is actually driving on sales, not just maintaining them or acting as a stop-gap. The lack of sales committees is severely curtailing the training of Resistance comrades and does need to be turned around on a tendency-wide level.
Resistance took a decision to actually begin production of a new insert into GLW, as a means to closing the gap between Resistance and GLW. The insert will be produced on a 6-8 week or as needs basis, ie O-Week, first big NDA, Resistance Conference etc. It will give Resistance members the opportunity to learn the skills of propagandizing, and also possibly lay-out. Maybe what we need to do is have a Resistance member and DSP member in each branch assigned to copy, and it will be their job to organize DSP members to back up Resistance members on particular articles.
Branch meetings
Resistance has returned to a more regular branch meeting framework than what we started out with earlier this year. The idea of the branch meetings is to be the central organ of Resistance’s work which bring together all of our different areas of work into the one meeting, where the work being done in those areas is shared with, and discussed by, the whole branch, making that work accountable and directed democratically by the branch. These branch meetings have the potential to be much more political, engaging and dynamic, as all members will be given the chance to actually discuss what to do next, which will surely accelerate the development of new members. However, tied to this will be the need for there to actually be work undertaken between branch meetings; to have the campus and high school fractions, to have the finances and fundraising committee. It’s these formations which will provide the bread and butter of branch meeting content. But these committees and fractions will only happen if exec members actually begin to take responsibility for areas of work, rather than simply being given tasks on a week-to-week basis by the organizer. Leading Resistance members have to be given responsibility to head up an area of work, draw a team around them, take initiatives and learn from their mistakes; this will increase the sense of ownership of the organization. We need to re-emphasise the role of team leadership in Resistance.
Resistance needs to do more joint forums with the DSP and weekend forums. We should ask DSP members to give talks to Resistance meetings, this will not only increase the identification with the DSP by Resistance members and also take off a huge organizational load of Resistance members.
Education
We need to make more use of the resources of the national education and recruitment committee. There should be more collaboration with Resistance in planning out serious Marxist education throughout the year, similar to the type of school that was done in Perth. We also need to ramp up the amount of classes that are being conducted that the DSP is running, and involve more comrades in these. Whilst I think there has been moves on this, I don’t think there is coherent idea of the way we do education, on the one hand each branch needs to address the needs of its own branch, however, I would say that there is weaknesses to the sort of “mass education style classes” that we do, where ITMs involve seven or eight new members. I know that when I first joined, I went through an ITM, which took a couple of months, where all my questions were discussed in detail. We need to draw on the broader DSP membership to actually help with this process; it will give them more of a stake in the development of new members, and will give new members a sense that they are important enough to have time actually devoted to them.
Another thing, is the WSSF, which unfortunately has been a lot harder to complete than we initially thought. A big stalling of this process was the Brigade to Venezuela, and then the Resistance Conference and compounded by the lack of resource in the Resistance national office. However, I think that if it is understood as a priority, we can get back onto this task and actually finish it by the end of the year.
Election of the NC
Just finally, the election of the NC at the Resistance Conference was a step forward for re-asserting the idea of actually electing the real leadership of Resistance rather than just the active membership, which was basically what the last NC was, composed of 44 members, which is more than we usually get selling every week. I think it will make the NC an actual viable body which can meet more regularly than what it has been this year; twice and on the back of DSP national events; ie the summer school and APISC. However, I think it also confirmed that we really need to go back to the nomination commission system. I think the result of this process this year was fine as a one-off measure, however, it is a matter of educating the membership and also being confident to say this is the most democratic method possible given constraints such as time and money.
Conclusion
I think the Resistance national conference has given Resistance a real boost and some much-needed clarity on what to do next. If we can build on the enthusiasm from the Venezuela Brigade and the Resistance Conference than we will be in a good position to re-launch Resistance next year with a clear perspective on the importance of relating to real movements as well as solid Resistance building initiatives. If we are successful in implementing the perspectives and tasks from the conference I think we can look forward to the 2006 Resistance national conference being at least twice the size of this year’s and signal a real turn-around for Resistance.
Summary
Katie mentioned the need to take on Socialist Alternative. I think we can look forward to building Resistance up again on campus and we certainly don’t need to expect that SAlt’s current dominance on some campuses is set in stone. But we do need to work out how we are going to build Resistance up again which is where the campus resolution will come into it. One aspect that we need to emphasize is our approach to campus politics; we do want to introduce the big issues onto campus, like responding to the calling speak-outs over the latest refugee scandal, like the young workers’ campaign etc. We don’t want to get caught up in the SAlt/ALP approach to campus politics which is that you can only build the campaigns which directly affect students which means that at the end of the year there has been no significant politicization of the student population. However, we do want to be engaged in these campaigns and this means going along to the committee meetings, particularly when the campaign is on an upturn. I think Stuart’s question of whether we need to go and “bash our heads against a wall” at these meetings is a relevant one. I think we need to be going to those meetings, because we have to know who the activists are on campus and be familiar with the latest discussions happening in those committees so we can engage with students who are just getting involved. Although, we know we can’t lead these campaigns organizationally, ie being on the campaign stalls every day etc, but rather we need to attempt to win political leadership of that campaign, making the arguments about what to do next and injecting our socialist politics into the campaign, helping to shape the ideas and demands of the campaign. This doesn’t mean that when that campaign is on a downturn we still go to every committee meeting, but we need to understand the importance of being a part of campus politics, and not as one of Brianna’s PCDs put it, “outsiders looking in”. We need to address the issues of confidence that some organizers have had, where because they are not students there is an immense pressure from the rest of the left and the ALP, that we have no right to be there. This is bullshit and we need to counter that attitude.
Brianna proposed doing two GLW inserts before the end of the year. I think this is probably too ambitious. I think we should see if it’s possible to do one in the lead-up to November 15 rally, and if we get some articles but not enough than we can use them for another one later. However, comrades have to remember that we have also set ourselves the perspective of organising a Blitz week, street-heat actions in the lead-up to the November 15 rally, a dues and pledges campaign, fixing up the website and finishing the What Socialists Stand For; and that this all has to be done with one person in the Resistance national office! I think we need to work out the ways to make sure there are two people in the NO next year, but also take up Brianna’s suggestion of actually broadening out the responsibility for NO tasks to other organizers, or willing Resistance members around the country. For example, James Pyke in Brisbane and Trent Hawkins in Perth are willing to help the upkeep of the website once it’s set up, are there other people who are willing to take on some of the above assignment? This approach will take a stronger team to pull together, and this is starting to happen now.
Emma Clancy mentioned a leadership/cadre school for Resistance organisers, maybe this is something the DSP national education and recruitment committee could work on, with proposals from comrades such as Emma about the content.