By the end of semester it will be one year since the unilateral declaration of autonomy by students now known as the Student Environment Action Collective (SEAC). Some reading this zine may have seen our declaration and the response. This declaration of autonomy was seen by some as completely illegitimate. Despite this widely held claim of illegitimacy, it is neither the first nor the last time that groups have bifurcated (I just didn’t want to use the word split, for reasons which I will explain soon-ish). Some say the environment collective was ‘lost’ to an external group uninvested in the long term health of campus environment collectives, but I think we gained a lot more than was lost, this is why.
Articulating what you need in a space is important. We could all do a bit better at calling out consistent destructive behaviour, even when it is our own. But when we do, lessons need to be learned, people need to change and take these concerns seriously, not merely rely on the false assumptions that these concerns relate to politics. My interpretation of the ASEN way has been to favour decision making processes that create pathways of involvment for the many different ideas, this has allowed campus collectives to be diverse and member driven, and genuinely ‘bottom-up’. This can be uncomfortable and has drawn opposition from the left (Solidarity) and the right (NUS), mostly because this means they can’t control students. What if people who get involved don’t have our same commitments or priorities? ASEN affiliated collectives are characterised by their openness to accomodate people’s interests if other people share them. If we want student movements that are defined and shaped by students we need to preserve this feature.
When people intervene in a group in order to steer it in a direction that they think is a more correct one overall, it necessarily involves coercion. When coercion enters the political pratice of a group in a collective space, it is time to act. Coercion necessarily means subordinating other priorities for your own, it necessarily means ending the idea of a group that is inclusive. Sometimes, this gets characterised in other ways, like ‘quality over quantity’, ‘what we really need is a smaller group of activists that have the “right” politics’. For example, at Sydney University this political practice has involved often difficult discussions about forcing collective to take positions on x and y, rather than genuinely forming affinity or consensus about actions groups that can happen, instead trying to create situations of mutual exclusivity that suit their group’s priorities:
“Spending our resources and time campaigning to get the university to ‘buy green power’ will actually take us a step backwards and fighting for what really needs to be done.”
It really means defeating and demoralising competing currents until they leave… but what if they refuse to be demoralised and defeated for not sharing their narrow view?
We don’t maintain pluralism in our movements by walking away, tail between legs, hoping that eventually those involved in coercive political practice might stop. We maintain pluralism by declaring it, asserting the autonomy of the plural over the loud voices. This has been the SEAC experience. We decided not to drop out, but to start again, to create a space where we did what we came to do, to act. We tried to reconcile, but that brought only more pain, people thought that maybe after being so strong, we could negotiate on equal footing, but really, if you reject the pluralist idea, you will always reject autonomy, so why bother.
Sydney University now has two functioning autonomous environment collectives. There was no split. Conventional wisdom says that splits sap away all our power as a group in the things that we did and that all of a sudden we would all be useless. Well, both collectives have organised effectively, both have engaged new students. Everyone has got to work in a supportive space on things they want to work on, and the environment movement benefits from that. We can only define our success by what we actually do, not what happens in meetings. And if you have to bifurcate to do it, don’t be scared, the only scary thing you have to lose, are your chains.
Facing Entryism From Socialist Organisations 