The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Australia has initiated petitions to the student representative bodies at two universities to hold Special General Meetings (SGMs) to discuss the way forward in the fight against Israel’s imperialist-backed genocide in Gaza and the eruption of militarism globally.
IYSSE clubs launched the petitions at the working-class campuses of Western Sydney University (WSU) and Victoria University (VU) in Melbourne. Both universities have high proportions of students from migrant backgrounds, including large numbers from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.
Zach, president of the IYSSE at WSU, explained the political basis of the IYSSE’s campaign, stating: “We’ve initiated the campaign for an SGM, not to pressure the pro-genocide Labor government or to appeal to university management. That has been tried and it has failed. The big issue is what political perspective students fight for to stop the genocide. Outside our meeting, there is no other forum for students to deal with these questions.
“We say there is a force that can end the slaughter. That force is not to be found in government offices or university boardrooms, but in the factories and workplaces. Workers have the power to halt the genocide and imperialist war. The IYSSE is fighting to turn youth and students out to campaigns at workplaces to mobilise workers’ strength, in opposition to Labor and the unions which have suppressed working-class action against the genocide.”
The IYSSE’s campaigns have been met with enthusiasm from students.
WSU’s Student Representative Council (SRC) requires the submission of more than 200 signatures in order to organise an SGM. The IYSSE reached this quota within two days of initiating the campaign. At VU, 50 signatures are required, with the IYSSE about to fulfill this number in a similar span of time as at WSU.
Dates and locations for the SGMs will be announced soon.
The response to the IYSSE’s campaign for SGMs reveals the deep hostility of students and youth to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, which has claimed as many as 186,000 lives. For nearly 11 months, millions of young people globally have joined in the largest mass anti-war protests since the Vietnam War, calling for an end to the bombardment.
SGMs at several other Australian universities in recent weeks have attracted a combined attendance of thousands of students.
The IYSSE has supported these gatherings, which highlight a significant radicalisation of young people. But politically, those SGMs have been dominated by appeals to the Labor government to change course and to university managements to end their ties with Israel.
That perspective of protest politics has been an abject failure. Labor has continued its support for the genocide, while witch-hunting opponents. The university administrations have responded to protests by initiating disciplinary actions against students and cracking down on the right to demonstrate.
The promotion of protest politics, by the Greens and fake-left parties such as Socialist Alternative, serves to subordinate students to the very government that is complicit in the genocide, and to block a real fight against the war crimes.
The IYSSE is advancing a diametrically opposed perspective. We explain that the Gaza genocide is a crime of capitalism. The support for it by all the imperialist powers, including Australia, is inseparable from a broader drive to war, including the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the preparations for a catastrophic conflict against China.
This program threatens nuclear world war. The alternative is the fight to build an international anti-war movement, uniting workers around the world on a socialist program directed against the source of war, the capitalism system itself.
That perspective is outlined in the motions the IYSSE will move at the WSU and VU SGMs. We urge students at both universities to attend, promote the meeting among your friends and take part in this critical discussion.
Motion:
That this meeting condemns the support for the genocide by imperialist governments internationally, including the Albanese Labor government in Australia. Attempts to pressure these governments have proven futile. We condemn the fact that not one union in this country has taken any measures to block the shipment of goods to Israel as called for by the Palestinian unions 10 months ago.
We endorse the call of the Palestinian trade unions and urge that workers in the MUA and other transport unions demand that it be implemented. But recognising that they have failed to do so after ten months, we urge that workers immediately take matters into their own hands and undertake independent action and impose bans. Students and youth must mobilise and fight for this perspective among workers at the docks, factories, warehouses, hospitals, schools, in transport, logistics and other workplaces.
The war crimes in Gaza are inseparable from the eruption of militarism globally, which threatens world war. Students must turn to the building of a socialist movement of the working class internationally, against the outmoded capitalist system, which offers only a future of barbarism and nuclear catastrophe.
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