Comment by Ray Fulcher and Marcel Cameron
MELBOURNE — Around 5000 students and staff took to the streets here on April 1. It was the largest student mobilisation in Melbourne for some time and shows the potential for organised opposition to the Coalition government's attacks.
The action ended, however, in a futile stunt. A few ultraleft organisations hijacked a sit-in at the Qantas head office and led a small group of students to occupy Kay House at RMIT. The sit-in rapidly dispersed, and within hours, security guards broke through the barricades at Kay House and removed the occupiers.
Storming Kay House was a diversion from building a mass campaign for free education, a sectarian attempt by Left Alliance, Workers Power, the International Socialists and Socialist Alternative to build their own organisations through "militant" posturing.
The action also displayed contempt for movement democracy: the sit-in at Qantas had been approved by the campaign organising group, but the occupation of an RMIT building had been explicitly rejected.
At the Qantas building, the speaking list was stacked and cut short so that only those in favour of an occupation spoke. The chair then moved to stifle any debate.
Resistance opposes such undemocratic manoeuvres. You can't involve and empower large numbers of students by stacking speaking lists and preventing different opinions from being heard.
In the weeks preceding the national day of action, the ultraleft groups concentrated on promoting an occupation, at the expense of building the strike. At RMIT, efforts to publicise the strike and rally were too little, too late; only 200 students were mobilised.
In contrast, Resistance activists and others at Melbourne University, who made mass agitation among students and staff the priority, mobilised around 2000 students.
Making a fetish of occupations has become a trademark of ultraleftists in the education campaign. According to their schema, workers win struggles by occupying the centres of profit-making (factories and offices) and students win struggles by occupying the centres of profit-oriented education.
In fact, workers win by taking combined industrial (strikes and occupations) and political (mass protest) action. Students must do likewise.
Students and staff will not be radicalised by storming buildings or throwing themselves at the cops. Such actions appeal to some of those who have already radicalised. Most participants in the RMIT occupation were members of left organisations.
We cannot indulge in stunts for the gratification of a minority when our task is to mobilise the majority of students and staff. Reversing the privatisation of education will require a sustained public campaign of mass student and staff action.
Every action must aim to draw more students into the campaign, since its strength lies in its ability to convince, organise and mobilise the largest number of people.
Occupations can be useful in expanding the activist base of the campaign. But this is true only when the occupation is a focal point for mobilising large numbers of students and staff in support of achievable demands (such as the RMIT occupation against up-front fees in 1997) or when it involves the majority of students.
The occupations by tens of thousands of students during the French uprising in May-June 1968, or the occupation of a government building in Sydney by thousands of students in 1987, are not comparable to the sectarian stunt at RMIT.