Article by Bruce A Dickson, reprinted from Black Agenda Report (USA).

Spoiler alert: we have seen the Bernie Sanders show before, and we know exactly how it ends. Bernie has zero likelihood of winning the Democratic nomination for president over Hillary Clinton. Bernie will lose, Hillary will win. When Bernie folds his tent in the summer of 2016, the money, the hopes and prayers, the year of activist zeal that folks put behind Bernie Sanders’ either vanishes into thin air, or directly benefits the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Don’t believe us? Then believe Bernie himself interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC News “This Week” May 3.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So if you lose in this nomination fight, will you support the Democratic nominee?

SANDERS: Yes. I have in the past.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Not going to run as an independent?

SANDERS: No, absolutely not. I’ve been very clear about that.

Bernie Sanders is this election’s Democratic sheepdog. The sheepdog is a card the Democratic party plays every presidential primary season when there’s no White House Democrat running for re-election. The sheepdog is a presidential candidate running ostensibly to the left of the establishment Democrat to whom the billionaires will award the nomination. Sheepdogs are herders, and the sheepdog candidate is charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party, either staying home or trying to build something outside the two party box.

1984 and 88 the sheepdog candidate was Jesse Jackson. In 92 it was California governor Jerry Brown. In 2000 and 2004 the designated sheepdog was Al Sharpton, and in 2008 it was Dennis Kucinich. This year it’s Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. The function of the sheepdog candidate is to give left activists and voters a reason, however illusory, to believe there’s a place of influence for them inside the Democratic party, if and only if the eventual Democratic nominee can win in November.

Despite casting millions of voters for the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and other sheepdogs, those leftish Democrat voters are always disregarded when Democrats actually win. Bill Clinton gave us NAFTA, a vicious “welfare reform,” no peace dividend or push for DC statehood, lowered unemployment but mostly in part time and low-wage jobs, and mass incarceration of black and brown people. President Obama doubled down on bailouts of banksters and GM, and immunized them from prosecution but failed to address the most catastrophic fall in black household wealth in history. We got health care for some instead of Medicare for All, the Patriot Act renewed instead of repealed, a race to privatize public education, drone wars and still more mass incarceration of black and brown people. And if President Obama gets his way, we may soon have a global job-destroying wage-lowering NAFTA on steroids, with the TTP and TTIP.

The sheepdog’s job is to divert the energy and enthusiasm of activists a year, a year and a half out from a November election away from building an alternative to the Democratic party, and into his doomed effort. When the sheepdog inevitably folds in the late spring or early summer before a November election, there’s no time remaining to win ballot access for alternative parties or candidates, no time to raise money or organize any effective challenge to the two capitalist parties.

At that point, with all the alternatives foreclosed, the narrative shifts to the familiar “lesser of two evils.” Every sheepdog candidate surrenders the shreds of his credibility to the Democratic nominee in time for the November election. This is how the Bernie Sanders show ends, as the left-leaning warm-up act for Hillary Clinton.

Intent on avoiding the two-party “lesser evil” trap this year, about two hundred activists gathered in Chicago last weekend to consider the future of electoral organizing outside the Democratic and Republican parties. Many of the participants were Greens, including former presidential and vice presidential candidates Jill Stein and Rosa Clemente, the former Green mayor of Richmond California, and many others. There were also representatives from Seattle, where Socialist Alternative’s Kshama Sawant won election to Seattle’s city council, as well as Angela Walker, a black socialist who received 67,000 votes for Milwaukee County sheriff in 2014, and many others, including some who took part in the recent Chicago mayoral election.

There was trans-partisan interest in a 50-state ballot access drive to put the Green Party’s Jill Stein on the presidential ballot for 2016 presidential race. Currently the law keeps Greens and others off the ballot in more than half the states. Precise details vary according to state law, but if a third party candidate after obtaining one-time ballot access receives about 2% of total votes, a new ballot line is created, granting ballot access to any potential candidate from school board to sheriff to US congress who wants to run as something other than a Republican or Democrat. That, many participants agreed, would be a significant puncture in the legal thicket that now protects Democrats against competition on the ballot from their left. But a nationwide trans-partisan ballot access campaign to create a national alternative to the two capitalist parties is something left activists must begin serious work a good 18 months before a November election, essentially right now.

Whether or not a national ballot access campaign is undertaken by Greens and others, a Bernie Sanders candidacy is an invitation to do again what’s been done in 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000, 2004 and 2008. Bernie’s candidacy is a blast toward the past, an invitation to herd and be herded like sheep back into the Democratic fold, to fundraise and canvass and recruit and mobilize for Bernie, as he warms up the crowd for Hillary. Bernie is a sheepdog.

The question is, are we sheep?

Class polarisation: 30,000 workers on strike at China’s biggest shoe factory in 2014.

In 20 years, China has gone from the most equal country in Asia in terms of income distribution to the least equal country. While the transformation has proven profitable for a minority, tens of thousands of workers have taken strike action against paltry wages and conditions.

This restructuring has also meant increased vulnerability to fluctuations in the stock market.

In a piece originally published at Green Left Weekly (Australia), John Rainford examines the context of the recent stock market crash in China.

Australia managed its way through the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in better shape than most countries, mostly due to two factors.

The first was $83 billion in Australian government stimulus spending, the third largest in the world as a percentage of GDP, behind the US and South Korea.

The second was resilient demand for iron ore and coal exports to China which came from an initial US$4 trillion in Chinese stimulus spending organised through the country’s banks.

This Keynesian counter-cyclical deficit spending led to China also being relatively unaffected by the GFC from its onset in 2008. But much of the cheap debt available in China was funnelled into property and share market speculation. This created a dual bubble that was always going to burst at some point.

In the year from June 2014, the Chinese stock market value rose by 100%. But in just three weeks from late June, the stock market lost a quarter of this value, wiping out $2.4 trillion of investor’s money and affecting financial markets around the globe.

China’s rise

China’s rise to a leading world economic power has been meteoric. It can be dated from 1978 when the Chinese Communist Party leadership under Deng Xiaoping (referred to by Mao Zedong as a secret “capitalist roader” during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76) announced a program of economic reform. This involved “four modernisations” in agriculture, industry, education, and science and defence.

These were designed to introduce market forces to the Chinese economy.

Fortuitously for China’s leader’s ambition, the turn to neoliberalism in the rich countries from the 1980s opened up the opportunity for China to become incorporated into the global market. This allowed China to develop a peculiar form of market economy that was variously controlled or manipulated by a state still claiming to be socialist. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” remains the official party line.

What it has delivered so far is a mixed bag of environmental degradation, social inequality, state suppression, and rampant corruption. This has come alongside spectacular economic growth, rising living standards for a significant part of the population and a burgeoning middle class who have reportedly pumped more than 10% of their new-found wealth into the Chinese stock market.

China’s largely state-owned banking system, which has financed the boom, grew rapidly after the mid-1980s. In less than a decade, the number of branches of state banks went from 60,000 to 144,000, with the number of employees increasing from 974 thousand to 1.9 million. In this period, their deposits increased from 427.3 billion yuan to 2.3 trillion yuan, while total loans went from 590.5 billion yuan to 2.6 trillion yuan.

Property bubble

This led to a property bubble forcing the Chinese government to spend almost as much to clean up bad loans as the US government did to bail out the savinsg and loans finance sector in 1987 ($124 billion).

When, in 2003, the Chinese government transferred $45 billion in foreign exchange reserves to two large state banks, it was the third largest bailout of the banking system in less than six years.

The Chinese government has responded to the latest stock market rout by organising market brokerages to invest in a blue-chip exchange-traded fund. This will buy shares to stem share price losses. It has also suspended any new stock market listings, raised quotas for foreigners to buy stocks, and the central bank will provide funds to encourage investors to borrow to buy shares. This unorthodox approach which appears to be analogous to throwing petrol on a fire.

The vastly overvalued stock market is a result of China trying to manage a transition from the reliance on exports and infrastructure development that has sustained its phenomenal growth rates, to raising domestic consumption as a driver of growth.

The country responded to the GFC by ramping up infrastructure spending. It raised its contribution to GDP growth from about 25% in the 1990s to 90% in 2009, the year it began the largest infrastructure stimulus spending in history. In the period from 2008-13, new credit available across the economy increased by more than $20 trillion, an amount larger than the size of the entire US commercial banking sector.

China is also shifting from the foreign direct investment (FDI) that it relied on to sustain its rapid economic growth, to outbound direct investment (ODI). This grew at an average 19% each year between 2009-14. In 2014, ODI was $116 billion, almost on a par with FDI of $120 billion.

The envious view of China’s economy held by many countries takes on a different hue when seen from the perspective of a large number of Chinese citizens. In 20 years, it has gone from the most equal country in Asia in terms of income distribution to the least equal country. According to some reports, a third of its people live on less than $2 a day.

A significant amount of the capital accumulated by companies operating in China has come from not just low-paid labour but from unpaid labour.

Labour surplus

This has led to another major problem that China has to contend with — huge labour surpluses that it must either absorb or be ready to repress. This will be much more difficult in a slowing economy, and the extent of the problem can be gauged by the official figures which recorded more than 184,000 occurrences of mass unrest in 2013.

The Maoist notion of the masses being made up of “workers, the peasantry, the intelligentsia and the national bourgeoisie whose interests are harmonious with each other and the state” is certainly not the case now, if it ever was.

China has long been funding US debt so the US can continue to consume China’s surplus production. Should the Chinese economy fall into recession, or even enter a long period of stagnation like Japan, the fragile, jobless and anaemic recovery from the GFC in the rich world would come to a halt.

The US would likely be the first country affected as it is the largest destination for Chinese investment. As to how Australia might fare: leaving aside the obvious further contraction of iron ore and coal exports, last year China became the biggest foreign investor in Australia, with $64.5 billion coming into the country in 2014.

The Abbott government will be hoping that the Chinese Communist Party gets its response right.

NZDF in Iraq.

Guest article by Val Morse for upcoming Fightback international issue.

In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth is responsible for the continual updating of historical records so that they always accord with the official party line. Original documents are incinerated in a “memory hole” and disgraced people are “unpersoned,” all traces of them erased. A state of perpetual war exists, and the enemy is being constantly redefined.
I’ve been thinking a lot about remembering and forgetting in terms of war and trauma. I’ve been thinking about it because New Zealand has gone back to war in Iraq, and I feel so full of anger with the memory of all that has happened there for the past 14 years alive in my mind. And I feel full of rage at the deliberate forgetting that is going on now.

I think it is easy to forget about the horror of war, about bodies being ripped apart by the millions, about the torture, about the summary executions, the nighttime raids, the drone strikes. It’s easy to forget the transparent power grabs and the blatant lies. It is easy, not because we willfully try to forget, but rather, because our forgetting serves power.

Power needs us to forget. It needs us to forget in order that we will consent to do it again. It simply needs to erase enough of the truth and enough of the horror, enough of the time, to make the desired course of action tenable in the minds of many, if not most, people.

This is the point at which we have arrived. New Zealand has now been in a state of perpetual war for 14 years. It started on 8 October 2001 when NZ joined Operation Enduring Freedom, and it has never stopped.

For 14 years, New Zealand has been fighting illegitimate wars of aggression in the Middle East and Central Asia resulting in the deaths of millions of people. It has committed grave human rights violations and has contributed to the massive destabilisation of the entire region that may ultimately engulf the entire world. It has done so for empire, for the continued triumphal march of western neo-liberal capitalism across the globe.

But lest we imagine that this war is simply about money, let us consider a comment from Edward Said’s Orientalism:

“…without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand that enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, socially, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively…European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (2003, p3)

Waging this war is not simply about economic exploitation of the Middle East (defined as part of the Orient by Said), but rather about a very long project of European (and later American) empire to own, by way of produced knowledge, the very idea of what that place is and who those people are. It is the “other” against which the West is measured and understood. The “war on terrorism” should, then, also be understood as part of a continual exercise in re/establishing cultural superiority and promulgating white supremacy.

Lest we forget – or rather, lest some remember, New Zealand has been a regular contributor to this discourse of Orientalism for 100 years. Its invasions of the lands of Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran in the First World War produced enduring constructions of ‘the Turk,’ ‘the Gippo’ and the ‘nigger.’

The memory machine that geared up in anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing (and will continue for another 4 years) does not prefer that we remember the racism, both institutional and individual, that was a daily, intimate part of New Zealand life. Nor is power served by too many people thinking too much about the boots of New Zealand soldiers tramping through the same lands as “our” soldiers from 100 years ago did for much the same reasons. This is most certainly why the prime minister pulled back from his childish suggestion of deploying an “Anzac-badged” unit, caught up as he must have been in some deluded poppy-induced patriotic fervor, and instead, remembered that he was trying to make us all forget.

In one way, forgetting the reality of war is a good idea. It is good for the actual people who fought the battles, or who lost their friends, families, communities, and livelihoods. When I contemplate the extreme trauma that bearing witness to the execution of your family might entail, I imagine that some forgetting might well be necessary to enduring the crushing weight of the pain. How can a person go on living knowing that everyone they ever loved was brutally murdered? Similarly, it would seem that to some extent, those who are doing the murdering might also need to do a bit of forgetting – the First World War was where the first experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder were recorded. Young men, if they survived the trenches, were destroyed human beings haunted by memories of piles of bodies and body parts everywhere, the stench of rotting flesh and explosions all around them. Today, thousands of returned soldiers wander the streets in the United States, homeless and suffering from deep psychological disorders as a result of the war; they are expected to return to “normal life” after years of combat.

One of my favourite quotes is a line from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” I think it says a lot about what the role of the radical left should be in this age of perpetual war. I think that the left can and should be remembering. We should remember George Bush and Tony Blair’s lies. We should remember Fallujah. We should remember Abu Ghraib. We should remember Guantanamo. We should remember Band-E-Timur. We should remember Labour’s deployment of NZSAS for “long range reconnaissance and direct action missions” in Afghanistan. We should remember NZ’s special trade status for joining the 2003 occupation of Iraq. We should remember Ahmed Zaoui. We should remember Daryl Jones. We should remember war is peacekeeping. We should remember the horror. We should remember the dead.

We should also remember our history – a history of resistance – to this perpetual war. We should remember February 15, 2003 when we joined the world to march against war. We should remember picketing the Labour Party and calling its war supporters “Scabs.” We should remember the “Citizens Weapons Inspection” of the US embassy. We should remember Father Peter Murnane pouring blood on the carpet of the US ambassador. We should remember hounding Australian prime minister John Howard as he toured Wellington. We should remember burning the flags of empires. We should remember shutting down the weapons conference. We should remember the Ploughshares popping the Waihopai spy dome. We should remember Chelsea Manning. We should remember the dreams of peace with justice and self-determination for all of the world’s people.

For if we ever hope to escape this Ministry of Truth – the so-called “war on terrorism” – we must wage a ceaseless war on forgetting.

Session from Fightback Conference 2015.

With the housing bubble set to burst (when rather than if), the National government selling state housing, and homelessness on the rise, housing and homelessness are key concerns for anyone concerned with social and economic justice. A discussion facilitated by Fightback.

Joel Cosgrove (Fightback) spoke on the political economy of the housing crisis.

Steve Flude from The Soup Kitchen provided an outline of the Te Mahana, Wellingtons collaborative approach to homelessness and the prevention of homelessness.

Audio:

Session from Fightback Conference 2015.

A look at tertiary education, capitalism and resistance. What is the purpose of education? What needs to change? How can we get there?

Speakers:
Sandra Grey, Tertiary Education Union President
Ian Anderson, VUW student and communist

Trigger warning: Contains mentions of depression and suicidal ideation.

Audio:

Text of Ian’s contribution:

Since Sandra’s speaking as a unionist and a professor, I thought it might be useful to focus on the role of students, in the university and society more broadly.

Just to give a bit of background, I’ve studied on and off at Victoria University since 2006. I joined Fightback on campus, the socialist group which is hosting this conference. Also over that time, one of my majors was threatened with closure, and another was cut entirely, under the neoliberal funding model introduced by the last Labour government. I’ve completed a BA Honours, and I’m moving onto Masters.

So, I am one of the dreaded long-term Humanities students, all going according to plan I’ll be at university til death do us part. This talk will draw from my experiences on and off campus, aswell as wider research and analysis.

Today I’d like to talk about how we might view students in relation to radical transformation more broadly. To start with, ‘student’ is quite a generalised term. It doesn’t specify gender, race, class, or even educational attainment. For the purposes of this talk, ‘student’ will refer largely to university students in Aotearoa / New Zealand, though sometimes to a more general archetype of the university student in modern history.

So if we’re talking about university students, it might first help to outline what purpose the university serves. First of all I’d like to address one common myth. The notion of the university as the critic and conscience of society, a sanctified space, a ring-fence around critical thought. Although I understand the tactic of using powerful myths against the powerful, left-wing sanctification of universities is also misleading and dangerous in some respects.

If we seek radical social transformation, that means there are no sanctified spaces for critical thought. A shoe factory, a McDonald’s outlet, a corporate office, a WINZ branch must all be spaces for critical thought and action, there are no special sanctified spaces.

That said, for radicals on campus, it’s worth investigating what leeway does exist, and how we might use that leeway in supporting wider transformation. In a way the advantages of universities for radical organising are more straightforward; they’re large worksites with lots of young people. So in Wellington, VUW and the hospital are two of the largest single worksites.

Universities have been described as knowledge factories. So if universities are factories, should we consider students as workers? I’d like to discuss four main accounts of studenthood; students as workers, students as bludgers, students as future managers, and at the risk of tautology, students as students. I’ll then discuss possibilities for radical student action.

Students as workers

This account has some appeal for marxists, partly because the majority of students are workers. A 2014 NZUSA survey found that:

• 63% of students are in some form of regular paid work (down from 90% in 2007).

• The average number of weeks a fulltime student works has increased from 21 to 25 weeks since 2010.

• The average number of hours worked has increased from 12 to 14.

• The hourly rate students are receiving has increased just 50 cents in four years.

So in summary, less students are working then before, but students are working longer hours, for poverty wages. In my own experience, the longest paid job I’ve ever had was frying chicken, and this experience of short-term service work anecdotally seems like a pretty common student experience.

If we think of students as workers, in relation to the rest of the workforce, it probably makes the most sense to see us an underemployed reserve army. Like reserves in a sports team, a reserve army of labour can be deployed when needed. The capitalist class uses this threat of replacement to drive down conditions.

Low wage casualised jobs and poorly maintained flats are often described as transitional steps for students. Whether or not this justifies students’ living conditions, it ignores that most people living in these conditions are not students.

So, because students in principle will take any job and any flat, we become an excuse for poor conditions generally. One way to address this is to organise students as workers, through workers’ organisations, but it’s probably also worth dealing with the student dimension atleast ideologically, since it’s used to undermine the class as a whole.

Students as bludgers

Like any reserve army, students are cast as bludgers. Although the demonisation isn’t remotely as sharp as that faced by beneficiaries, particularly brown beneficiaries and solo mothers, students still catch some flak for being unproductive and wasteful. Discussing expat graduates who refuse to pay their Student Loans, Herald columnist Kerre McIvor argued:

“Those who are refusing to repay their loans are bludgers, pure and simple, and I see no reason why they shouldn’t be treated the same as any other bludger.”

So, just as those on welfare must be rigorously assessed and punished, students should face the same treatment. These attitudes concerning productivity and laziness, reward and punishment, are often internalised, so to quote a piece posted on US website Ritual Mag:

“University life becomes a daily stream of anxiety, depression, suicidal feelings, alienation, and other forms of discontent. However, often this discontent is not recognized as a symptom of being a student but instead is viewed masochistically as not “studying” or “working” enough. A student is simply supposed to appreciate the privilege of studying in a University.”

In keeping with a reductive view of class politics, some marxists join in on this student-bashing. One view holds that, because study is paid through working-class exploitation, in other words through taxes on income, students must earn the right to free education by supporting workers’ struggles.

This argument contains some interesting assumptions. Hospitals are also paid for through working-class exploitation. Benefits are paid through working-class exploitation. None of the above take up as much taxes as pensions, at around 50% of social spending. Not many marxists would argue that beneficiaries, hospital patients, or even pensioners should only be supported if they actively fight for the rest of the class. The assumption then is that, unlike beneficiaries, hospital patients, and pensioners, students are not part of the working class.

Though it’s definitely true that students must stand with all oppressed and exploited, this critique leads us back to asking what university education is for. We may, for example, see university as a training ground for future managers.

Students as future managers

The current National government has a view in line with neoliberal logic; education is at worst a needless expense, at best a commodity, which tertiary consumers buy to gain competitive advantage in the job market. This allows for all sorts of firm quantitative measures, and I’m going to focus on one in particular.

In 2013, the National government released a study entitled Moving on up: What young people earn after their tertiary education. This compared the earning potential of a number of tertiary degrees. Minister of Education Stephen Joyce explained:

“What I think it will do is you will see a move away from fine arts and performing arts in to a stronger demand for more career-oriented areas.”

So this is a fairly explicit articulation of why students supposedly study; to further their careers. The study found that five years after finishing study, the median annual earning of young people who complete a bachelors degree is 53% above the national median earning. Of course, as mentioned by VUWSA and others at the time, the report doesn’t mention the debt students face.

Ranking courses individually, a bachelors degree in Health was the highest earning, with a median annual earning of over $60k five years after study. The top five also included Engineering, Information Technology, Management and Commerce, and Architecture, all earning an average of more than $50k per year.

Unsurprisingly, at the bottom of the spectrum were Arts graduates, earning around $42k a year. This is still over the national average, which is around $35k.

While it’s not surprising, based on stereotypes, that Arts students are at the bottom of the graduate earnings list, it may help explain the apparent correlation between Arts students and involvement in radical politics. You could argue it’s more in the interests of Arts students, who expect to earn less, to see a society in which people generally earn more. You could also say that this is a crude economist argument and correlation is not causality. I imagine some Arts students would say their decisions have nothing to do with economic incentives, and we can take or leave that claim.

Income doesn’t tell you everything about class, so the numbers don’t necessarily confirm the ‘students as future managers’ thesis. Comfortable earnings might be a sign you’re an electrician, an IT worker, a middle-tier civil servant, or a business owner. These figures also mask further disparities, for example between men and women who graduate, or Maori, Pacific and Pakeha graduates.

However, the figures do indicate that overall, universities remain a space of social mobility. This is both more and less true under neoliberalism, which has seen an expansion of access to university, and a generation likely to earn less than our parents. For some, universities may operate as a space of upward social mobility, for others they may operate as a space of downward social mobility, or class tourism.

Students as students

I suggest that rather than trying to fix students in relation to production – as capitalists, as workers, as unemployed workers – we should see students as students. This might sound like a needless tautology, ‘a rose is a rose is a rose,’ but I think it allows us to break from polarised, dichotomous class conceptions of studenthood. Students are often workers, often unemployed, often potential capitalists, and in general studenthood is a transitional space, a space between class positions, enabled largely by the state.

If we see studenthood as a transitory space, something contingent rather than fixed, we might stop asking “what are students,” and instead we might ask, “What do they stand for? What do they stand against? Who do they stand with?”

Radical minority

If we ask what students stand for, we can immediately see internal contradictions. Students are generally socially liberal. My own students’ association VUWSA recently endorsed both marriage equality and the right to abortion by popular vote at General Meetings. When it comes to fundamental socio-economic transformation, or militant tactics, the outlook is more divided.

Any attempt to apply critical thinking outside the confines of a classroom or an essay is not only punished by the university administration and the state, but scorned by more conservative or liberal students. This is particularly obvious in the current period, however there was never a heyday when all students were radical. A Salient poll during the 1981 Springbok tour, which saw the student movement taking a leading role against apartheid tours, found students split about 50-50 on the anti-tour movement.

Organisational form

So if a radical student minority – with emphasis on the minority – emerges historically, what organisational form might this radical minority take? Looking over recent years at Vic, after the introduction of Voluntary Student Membership (VSM), there’s a few formal groups for politically engaged students.

There are the Students’ Associations, which are often compared with workers’ unions. This comparison is true to a point, and I’d say any radical on campus should join their Students Association. But there’s a fundamental difference between most contemporary workers’ unions and Students Associations under VSM; whereas Students Associations are financially dependant on the university, unions are financially dependant on their members.

Although many unions are conservative and bureaucratic, there is more capacity for independent class action in a workers’ union than a Students Association. There are a lot of sincere people doing good work in Students Associations, but under VSM, they’re basically the equivalent of a bosses’ union. Any attempt to develop transformative politics on campus requires independent organising, that isn’t beholden to university funding.

Affiliated to Students Associations, you also have political clubs – parliamentary party wings, so Young National has been pretty active in recent years, Young Labour in previous years. You have non-parliamentary political or activist groups – socialist groups, NGOs like Amnesty International. You have sectoral groups affiliated to the Students Association – the Women’s Group, UniQ which provides a space for queers on campus. There are what might be called non-political clubs; games clubs or sports clubs. These various groups may cycle through people, but generally remain relatively continuous. Most of these groups contain currents that would be significant in any radical upsurge.

In contrast, recent years have seen short-term, fluctuating student groups organised on a broadly anti-neoliberal platform; historically the Education Action Group, or more recently We Are The University (or WATU) which sprung up in 2011, and last year Reclaim Vic. These short-term formations are often more willing to take militant action for students’ interests, for example occupying management buildings.

I’d suggest a large part of getting radical politics right is mediating this tension between short-term outbursts of struggle, which in a healthy moment exceed formally existing groups, and longer-term organisation, so you don’t just have valiant losses. Marxist groups like Fightback aim to act as a kind of memory of the class.

Students are generally more able to take risks than tertiary staff, and this is a strength. I’ll give an example from my own experience, apologies to anyone implicated in the story. The university planned to slash a department. Students circulated a statement with prominent names supporting the department, and escalated to occupying a management building. This attention temporarily averted the closure of the department, however management gradually whittled away at the department over the next couple of years, intimidating staff and cutting resources. To be frank, when I heard a leading student organiser say that they were talking to staff and had decided to keep opposition to submissions, I knew we were fucked. Submissions on their own would not stop management’s plans. The department was finally killed that year.

This is a negative example, and I’ve certainly seen more positive examples of staff coming in behind student organising. It’s actually my impression that in a period where the Students Associations are becoming more conservative, the Tertiary Education Union is heading to the left, with its move to represent General Staff not just academic staff, taking up the Living Wage campaign – which again is more relevant to General Staff, and actively supporting what little remains of a radical student movement.

At the same time, I think we need to be very conscious that university staff are under constant scrutiny, and micro-management of resistance can often be more effective than direct repression. It makes sense for students and staff to organise independently, taking joint action and separate action as necessary.

Programme

The most powerful student upsurges – Paris in May ’68, Tiananmen Square in 1989 – were powerful partly because the most militant sections of the workers’ and students movements joined forces. The role of workers’ organisations in these struggles is often forgotten.

As radical students then, we aim to join a broader historic bloc. We aim to forge alliances on the basis of common goals, not just our identity as students. We might say that all struggles are student struggles, atleast in principle.

At the same time, radical students need to kill the missionary in our heads. An underlying missionary logic – the notion of radical students and intellectuals ‘saving’ the oppressed – was used in the past to justify failed ‘turns to industry,’ where graduates who might normally go into white collar work went to organise in factories.

There’s an old Marx line that it’s “essential to educate the educator,” and Mandel added that this line means exactly what it says. This applies as much to students as paid teachers, often when students discover radical ideas for the first time they can become arrogant and alienating. This heady moment can be valuable, but needs to be brought back to earth. Rather than acting on behalf of the oppressed, acting for others, students need to emancipate ourselves, so we can effectively stand in solidarity with others.

So, some kind of programme for the university is needed. I don’t think radical students should have any misconceptions about representing all students, but we need a broad accessible programme that addresses people’s needs. You shouldn’t need to read Marx to gain admission, but it’s also not a politics-free or value-neutral zone.

Last year Reclaim Vic endorsed the following programme. We demanded:

• Fully funded public education

• A Universal Student Allowance, cancellation of all existing student debt

• Bridging courses and support for people entering tertiary education

• A Living Wage for all staff

• Student and staff representation in planning education policy, education run by students and staff

• A move away from funding purely targeted towards marketable research, towards funding all socially valuable forms of education and research.

I don’t think demands should be limited to just these, however I think a commitment to fighting for public, democratically run education should be the minimum basis for political unity on campus. I’d like to open the floor to discussion of what might be the next be next steps in executing these sorts of ideas.