Youth work counter-report and summary
By Zoe Kenny, on behalf of the LPF
[The general line of the following report and summary was rejected by the national committee. The vote for adopting the report was six full NC members in favour, 20 against, with no abstentions, and three candidate members in favour, 11 against, with no abstentions and one no-vote.]
Due to lack of time, this report will be limited to an assessment of the implementation of the majority’s line in relation to the main areas of contention – Venezuela solidarity and the young workers rights campaign. If the LPF had been allotted equal time there would have been other issues worth touching on, for example a proper assessment of the flag-burning stunt, but that is not possible.
However this report fully supports many of the Resistance-building proposals that were included in Comrade Fred’s report and that have been endorsed at previous DSP and Resistance national bodies such as building for a big Resistance conference with a high emphasis on the Frente Francisco de Miranda speaker, camps in second semester, an ongoing campaign to distribute What Resistance Stands For and so on.
The majority Congress youth line – prioritising Venezuela solidarity?
At the Congress, I noted that there was a discrepancy between the draft youth work report that Stuart M presented at the December 13 DSP national executive that stated that the young workers campaign is the “decisive” campaign whilst downgrading Venezuela solidarity and the report that was presented at the Congress itself.
The majority Congress report changed the formulation around the young workers campaign back to a perspective of continuing to “test out” the campaign and also included a series of good proposals around Venezuela solidarity, most likely as a result of the minority’s criticism that the majority were dropping Venezuela solidarity work. The proposals also seemed to indicate a commitment to building a united front around Venezuela solidarity amongst young people, particularly on campus.
The majority’s real Congress line
However, some formulations in the report indicated a much more lower prioritisation of Venezuela solidarity. For example Stuart wrote “As comrade Sue Bolton put it in her summary, it’s lucky the Chavistas didn’t choose to make Cuban solidarity their main priority, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about a Venezuelan revolution and Venezuela solidarity at all.”
As well as being a simplistic attempt to transpose the Venezuelan experience onto the Australian situation, it also exposes the dismissive attitude towards building an independent Venezuela solidarity campaign in Australia, as being a distraction from the real fight against our own government. This attitude is reflective of a political trend which has the potential to seriously mistrain younger comrades away from our internationalist tradition. To see international solidarity as a distraction from the “real fight” here, meaning the struggle of the Australian working class, fails to recognise the class struggle as an international struggle.
The DSP has had an extremely proud internationalist tradition which has been a cornerstone of building our tendency and which has positively distinguished us from the rest of the left in this country. This was something Comrade Peter Boyle reflected on in his November 2004 NC party-building report which proposed a turn to Venezuela solidarity for our youth work: “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”.
Really, Sue Bolton’s quote should be turned upside down; “It’s lucky that the DSP has not turned its back on international struggles and revolutions or we wouldn’t be talking about a revolutionary party” nor should we turn our backs on those struggles today.
Implementation of the majority line
The experience of the last four months has shown that the minority were right to say that the draft report was the majority’s real line, and unfortunately, also shows that what the majority leadership say and what they do are two different things.
Venezuela solidarity
In the area of Venezuela solidarity many of the proposals included in Stuart’s report have not been implemented, or have been implemented in a half-hearted manner, particularly those proposals in relation to building a united front.
On the one hand there has been some propaganda work being done by Resistance to promote the Venezuelan revolution such as some films and forums, campus magazines etc. There were good turnouts to the two Wimmer campus meetings in Canberra and Brisbane of between 20 and 30 at each. In other cities where the Wimmer meetings were off-campus, Resistance also helped to build these, however, in some cases the flag-burning stunt certainly over-rode a serious effort to make the Wimmer meetings a key priority for O-week recruits.
However, there has been no serious attempt to help build a solidarity campaign and build a united front on campus around this work. For example the proposals to have a systematic campaign of passing solidarity motions and encouraging groups to affiliate to the AVSN, approaching all friendly collectives and asking them if they want to have a brigadista come and speak has generally not happened or has been implemented sporadically.
Venezuela solidarity week, which was a priority in the Congress report and which should have served as a focus for building broader support for Venezuela, was not properly implemented. Several branches did not hold any campus events during the solidarity week or had events that were not adequately built. In Sydney, comrades did lecture-bashes for the April 12 NUS-called National Day of Action (which was one fifth smaller than last year and lacked political demands) rather than build the solidarity week. On the day, Resistance comrades were handing out the Resistance leaflet with the call for a strike on June 1, which did not have any actual details on it, rather than build a Venezuela film screening that afternoon on Sydney University or the picket the next day in the city.
By not properly prioritising this important work Resistance is not only failing our revolutionary duty to support this first break in the global struggle against imperialism since the so-called “end of history” but we are also missing great opportunities to introduce a new generation to a real living revolution and bring them closer to our revolutionary politics. This year, there is clearly increased interest globally and in Australia in the developments unfolding in Venezuela and Latin America; as the stakes get higher with Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba making further inroads against the capitalist’s interests and the imperialist powers upping the pressure, a global solidarity movement is starting to cohere with internationally co-ordinated days of action such as May 20; there is also far more mainstream media attention; in Australia the Wimmer tour was our most successful initiative this year, with 800 people attending around the country including the very successful campus forums; other groups are taking an active interest in Venezuelan solidarity such as the ACTU which has passed a motion in solidarity with Venezuela, Greens MLC Lee Rhiannon has made a speech in the NSW parliament about supporting Venezuela and now Sylvia Hale has agreed to be a patron of the AVSN and even NUS endorsed the May 20 action. In order to make the gains that we know are possible, this work has to be treated more seriously and be politically motivated.
Young workers campaign
The majority report included a number of proposals with which to continue to “test out” the IR/young workers campaign, however, the majority of these have also remained on paper.
The proposal to help build up and participate in an “emergency response network” has not happened, the production of young workers zines has only happened in one or two branches, many of the proposals in Comrade Brianna Pike’s PCD have not been implemented although Stuart mentions the PCD and there have only been a handful of actual pickets and speak-outs organised this year with which to test the sentiment amongst young people for action on this issue.
There is a Young Workers Conference in Geelong, which is a good initiative, although it was initially conceived as a national priority but is now mainly being built as a Victorian conference. The conference is mainly concerned with the organisation of young people in their workplace – a perspective that both the minority and majority agreed is impossible for Resistance to do more generally. In fact the only proposal that has been nationally implemented is the national student strike.
The June 1 student strike
In Stuart’s report the proposal for a national student strike is directly tied to a broader union mobilisation. However, this was premised on there being a national union mobilisation/strike in March when campus and high school would have been in term. However, despite illusions that the Socialist Alliance petition could force the ACTU’s hand, the March mobilisation did not eventuate. Now we have June 1, which is well before and separate from June 28.
Confusion between propaganda and agitation
The proposal for June 1 was not taken through any DSP bodies but was discussed and adopted by the April 2 Resistance NC (this meant that there was no real chance for concerns or questions to be raised about the strike in DSP bodies, as the constitution specifies that differences in the DSP cannot be raised in Resistance bodies).
The main argument put forward as evidence of the political basis and sentiment for a student strike were the international events (student walk-outs in NZ, US and in particular the French struggle) and the influence these events were having on youth consciousness as evidenced by the success of a series of forums on the French struggle that Resistance organised on campuses around the country, in particular the Sydney University forum which attracted 18 people. However, if this is the logic, then why not call a national student strike in solidarity with Venezuela, as we got at least 30 to two Wimmer campus forums?
To conclude from the France forums that there is the political basis to call a national student strike is to thoroughly confuse propaganda opportunities with agitation opportunities, at least on such a grand scale as a national student strike. There certainly existed, and probably still does exist, a significant opportunity to exploit the propaganda value of the French victory which we should certainly take full advantage of. However, preparations for the June 1 strike have absorbed most of Resistance’s time resulting in a failure to follow through on the original success of the initial forums. In the meantime, Socialist Alternative, who competed with Resistance on the first round of forums during the revolt, had the space all to themselves when they organised a round of forums on the French victory. And whilst now the DSP masquerading as the Socialist Alliance has called a round of forums (at least one has been called in Sydney) on the victory, these are too little, too late and are not primarily being built on campus, which is where we needed to do them to compete with Socialist Alternative.
No political basis
The fact is there was extremely flimsy evidence put forward to justify the strike. Whilst there was increased media coverage of youth exploitation, again this only points to a propaganda opportunity, which we can do and have done in GLW and also through forums, which we haven’t done.
What about the level of independent organising and sentiment for action amongst young people? The only evidence that has been presented is the cropping up of groups called ‘Students@Work’ on some campuses, which sound like they are internal caucuses of the ALP’s student wing, which have no intention to mobilise the broader student body into action. There is the Young Unionists Network in Melbourne, but this group’s main purpose is to train up-and-coming Laborite union bureaucrats. The Christian Young Workers groups are not keen to play a mobilising role; in Perth they have not endorsed the strike being wary of its legalities. Then there is the “Young Workers Solidarity Movement” on Sydney Uni that was set up by ex-Resistance members Karol Florek (who is now a Solidarity member) and Steph Mawson, and seems to function more as a Solidarity front group.
In comparison, in the lead up to the Books not Bombs student strikes, there were young people calling Resistance asking what we were planning. No such mass sentiment exists today in relation to Work Choices.
Collecting endorsements for the strike has been a high priority, and whilst this is a useful exercise for networking with other groups, there hasn’t been much attempt to assess how much or little this means in terms of terms of mobilising young people. There are not many real partners in this project – in Melbourne Socialist Alternative have endorsed the strike but have stated that it is not a priority for them, on Sydney University the strike was endorsed by the EAG, but the EAG is now politically dominated by Solidarity, who seem to be our main partner for the strike in Sydney. Solidarity are extremely ultra-left, and were the main group behind the recent sit-in on April 12 which resulted in more than 20 students arrested and more than $10,000 in fines. The Congress report also proposed that we try and win support for the strike through “student general meetings”, however there was no talk of organising these.
What are we aiming to achieve with the strike?
Our past experience has shown that the issue does not have great mobilising potential particularly when an action is called separate from a large union mobilisation. For example, a young workers rights protest before the Resistance national conference last year only mobilised a handful of youth outside Resistance members, a Sydney picket last year only mobilised 5 or 6 high school students and a Melbourne picket mobilised zero. Even the student contingents for November 15 (“the biggest ever demonstration for workers rights”), only mobilised modest numbers of young people with the largest contingent being Perth’s 80-100.
I think we need some way to measure the success of this action – do we expect to mobilise thousands or a thousand? A few hundred or less? Do we expect to recruit 100 or 20? Is it to launch an ongoing campaign or just to profile Resistance or a gimmick to inspire workers to come out on June 28?
Cost of the over-projection
The fact is Resistance is not strong enough to carry the full load of organising a national student strike and carry out Venezuela solidarity work seriously, and probably other tasks will be neglected.
Whilst there has been some positive developments this year in terms of the overall growth of Resistance and the re-launch of Newcastle branch (although it would be interesting to assess how much space and resources have been freed up for Resistance given the almost total collapse of the Socialist Alliance, for example the fact that there is no Socialist Alliance national conference this year) this has not and will not automatically translate into increased cadre strength of Resistance, for example this year the average number of GLW sellers is only 45 per week which is a modest improvement from last year where the average was about 40 per week.
Leading comrades in Sydney have already said that June 1 will be the over-whelming priority for Resistance far above the May 20 global day of action in solidarity with Venezuela and Cuba; a tactically flexible approach would work out a balance between the two.
The strike’s success has been hooked on mobilising high school students, however in most branches Res does not have well-developed high-school networks, this will divert resources from campus, which the Resistance national conference voted last year to be our first priority.
The way the strike has been politically justified, called and organised is a break from our past methods; there was no scientific analysis of forces moving into motion, sentiment, real partners etc. It confuses the desire for there to be a mass youth mobilisation against Work Choices with the reality of the declining campus student movement and the lack of independent organising and a sharp sentiment for action.
The single-minded push on the strike is reflective of the drive to make the young workers issue into the overwhelming priority for Resistance. It is tied to the drive to turn Resistance into the youth-wing of SA which reflects an economistic drift towards elevating agitation around immediate demands, almost as if Resistance has a moral obligation to do this and the downgrading of revolutionary socialist propaganda, of promoting solidarity with the Third World struggles and revolutions something so vital for privileged revolutionaries living in an imperialist country.
Conclusion
This NC needs to set some benchmarks for June 1 (as I outlined in the section on what we are expecting from the strike) so as to give comrades some way to assess the success or otherwise of this action and avoid demoralisation. After June 1 we need to make an honest analysis of the costs and benefits of throwing so many resources into this one initiative. This report supports the majority report’s assessment that the key task in the next period is to build the Resistance conference, primarily through the FFM tour but this needs to be motivated politically and built properly. There also needs to be a real commitment to Venezuela solidarity, on the ground not just on paper.
Summary
Firstly, in response to Stuart’s question as to the LPF’s position on June 1; I believe that was made clear in the report. We don’t think that enough evidence was presented to show that there was the political basis for a national student strike. Obviously comrades in Newcastle and Canberra didn’t think there was the basis either, as they have only committed to doing after-school actions. Do the majority think these branches have made a mistake? The LPF supports those decisions because they are more realistic – those branches will get the benefit of testing out the sentiment, doing networking with other groups, building high school contacts, but without over-stretching limited resources.
During discussion comrades continued to say that the strike is testing out the campaign, but really the testing out should have happened earlier in the year and should have happened in order to then make a decision about such a huge under-taking as a national student strike. However it’s clear that the majority were not really interested in continuing to test out the sentiment. The proposal for a national student strike was included in the Congress report (and in the NE draft) and it seems that the majority leadership were determined to implement this proposal whether there was a basis or not.
Some of the discussion also went through some of our past experiences in calling student strikes. The decision to call a national student strike has been based on the assessment that students have been influenced by mass movements, for example against French nuclear testing in the Pacific, anti-Hanson, East Timor and the Iraq invasion. These were movements characterised by growing and frequent mobilisations and spontaneous mass activity in the community and self-organisation on high schools, nothing like the bureaucratically controlled “tap-on, tap-off” ACTU campaign. We called strikes because we believed that there was the potential to mobilise large numbers, in the thousands and tens of thousands. For example, the anti-nuclear walkouts in 1995-96, a walkout that we called in Brisbane first resulted in a 10,000-strong demonstration, the biggest since the anti-Vietnam War movement. Only after the overwhelming success of the Brisbane action did we then call a national student protest. This is the kind of mass action that we have traditionally associated with national walk-outs/strikes.
I think many aspects of the June 1 strike are really going against our past experiences and our general approach to campaign work. The temptation to try and agitate on every issue is always present (because there are so many terrible things happening) and at every Resistance national meeting (conference or committee) there are always more things that we want to be able to do than we actually can do. However in the past this desire to substitute for real movement has always been answered by pointing out that as a small revolutionary youth organisation we can’t agitate around every issue, we have to strengthen our forces so that when the opportunity to play that mass action role arises we can take it and grow out of it. We can mobilise the sentiment when we have assessed that it does exist, but we can’t create that sentiment. But now it seems that all those lessons are being forgotten.
There were some comments that LPF comrades have been undermining the strike. Firstly, comrades need to make the distinction between unity in action (something which is required in the DSP) and unity in thought (something which is not required in the DSP) – i.e. we are entitled to our disagreements with the strike but we are bound to implement it, which we are committed to do. Also, it must be remembered that DSP comrades assigned to Resistance are constitutionally bound not to raise disagreements within Resistance bodies (which LPF comrades assigned to Resistance have loyally abided by) but this is the first opportunity we’ve had to actually raise differences within the DSP which we are doing but that cannot be equated with undermining the initiative. Finally, now that the strike has been called the LPF is committed to implementing it. If comrades have genuine complaints about the LPF not building the strike then examples should be given, but it’s not fair to simply accuse the LPF of “undermining” this action without backing that serious allegation with evidence.
Finally on Venezuela. Currently we’re not doing Venezuela solidarity work in the way that we should be in order to train and recruit a new generation of revolutionary cadre. This area of work needs to be implemented fully in practice not just on paper; the FFM tour is a great opportunity for that. Finally, we need to make a thorough assessment of June 1 afterwards in order to draw out any lessons.