"Counterrevolution is literately revolution in reverse................the counterrevolution enjoys the same presuppositions and the very same (economic, social and cultural) tendencies that the revolution would have been able to engage; it occupies and colonises the territories of the adversary; it gives different responses to the same questions. In other words, it reinterprets in its own way the set of material conditions that would merely make imaginable the abolition of waged labor and reduce these conditions to profitable productive forces. Furthermore, the counterrevolution inverts the very mass practices that seems to refer to the withering of State power and the immanence of radical self-government, transforming them into depoliticised passivity or plebiscitary consensus. This is why a critical historiography, reluctant to worship the authority of the "simple facts", must try to recognise, in every step and aspect of the counterrevolution, the silhouette, the contents, and the qualities of a potential revolution".

If the Coalition government has framed its argument for "voluntary" student unionism in terms of the dichotomy of freedom and compulsion, it has been with the objective of not only to position themselves ideologically as the defenders of choice but -quite purposely and cleverly- to define before hand the lines of the battlefield where the student resistance to VSU could potentially take place. Aware of the level of student militancy an attack of this magnitude on student unionism could generate on campuses, the government has procured to market VSU among students in the most attractive way possible by using the rhetoric of freedom, and appropriating for themselves arguments that the far left have been making for decades about students unions such as the corruption, careerism and bureaucratism of many Office Bearers. Through this approach, the Liberals seek to establish a basis of social support for VSU among students, and this way both pre-empt and reframe the very terms on which the anti-VSU campaign is understood.

The starting point to any successful anti-VSU campaign then is not to fall in the trap of accepting the government's terms of the debate. To do so, it would be to play quite foolishly the game which actually the Liberals want us to play while campaigning, that is, to run an anti-VSU struggle where we became the apologist for compulsion as a strategic argument to defend collective organising. This is not to say that we should not defend the universal membership to student organisations, but rather to firmly put forward in our discussion with activists that the idea of compulsion is the weakest line of argumentation we could make and where we are most vulnerable of attack by the right.

We certainly should not approach the subject from a purely moral and universalistic point of view, of abstract notions of democracy or unionism The contribution of Marxism to libertarian thought is to have a method which allow us to make a concrete analysis of concrete situations, and that method is defined in terms of the struggle of ordinary people to take control of their lives, of their consciousness, of level of their organisation and social conditions.

Therefore, we cannot explain and design an anti-VSU campaign if it is not in the context of an analysis of the course of the struggle in Australia, and how it has impinged on universities and the level of organisation of the student movement. My argument is that in the current political situation, the question of compulsion is the last we need to address in a string of arguments against VSU, and the argument of student representation as real guarantor of student freedoms and choices -through the defence of student conditions- is a far more important and effective response to liberal rhetoric.

From the point of view of our politics, it is quite irresponsible and naive putting the argument for compulsion higher in the lists of political priorities. I can only assume that these arguments are rooted in some nostalgic and romantic desire to revive syndicalist and trade union values without taking into consideration the vast difference in social composition and outlook between two different social sectors; the students and the unionised working class. It is not that slogans such as "united we stand and divided we fall" or "we are stronger together" lack of importance, but their abstractness make it impossible for activists to use them as an analytical framework for dealing with the very complex issue of VSU when campaigning. There is certainly a parallel with the idea of the "closed shop" as a way of deterring capital from using non-unionised labor to undermine conditions and collective action. The problem with this conception, however, is that it assumes that students are already an organised mass as unionised workplaces are, with union delegates elected from the grassroots and sometimes even rank and file groups. Students may have SRCs and student associations as representative bodies, but they differ immensely from trade unions in the sense that there is no organic and intermediate links of contact between students for instance of a class or a faculty and office bearers, which could secure continuity and mass support for students representative bodies in the same way trade unions do. Even from the point of view of the functioning and privileges of their respective bureaucracies, there are considerable differences.

A more useful approach is to understand the anti-VSU campaign from the point of view the struggle and the current objective and subjective composition of the mass of students. If we were to take into consideration these aspects, I think we would come up with a more realistic perspective to VSU, without compromising our revolutionary politics.

It is necessary to consider more seriously the current levels of student radicalisation on campuses -including their level of organisation and the balance of forces among revolutionaries, reformist bureaucrats and the right. The reality is if today we have a referendum and students have the option between compulsory membership of student organisations the choice of opting out from membership, there is no doubt that in the present state of affairs, specially students' lack of confidence in their forces, students would choose VSU. This is not necessarily the result of the "middle class" or "transitional" class nature of the student population, as some old Marxist would argue, but direct result of a political situation affecting the confidence of the general population in radical social change.

Politics is the continuation of war by other means. The strategy for implementing VSU has been carefully worked out ideologically, and carefully timed politically. Not accidentally did it came when the federal government has relatively consolidated its program of neo-liberal reforms across vast sections of society -including industrial relations- and after gaining a space of political legitimacy by defeating labor once again in the last federal elections. Building upon the right-wing backlash since 80s led by the ALP, the Liberal's rampage on the poor has doubled through the progressive dismantling of the collective institutions of society such as trade unions, legal aid, welfare, community groups and free education. This "structural" shift to the right has had a considerable cultural impact on campuses, with the ideology of individualism taking hold of people's consciousness.

Here we should not consider individualism simply as the result of an individual's selfishness and false perception of him or herself as having actual control of his or her own life under capitalism. Individualism is the ideological result of a market and competitive social system, yet it is also calibrated by feelings of vulnerability and alienation resulting from a situation where the dismantling of collective safeguards and projects force individuals into relying only on themselves, and not the collective, in order to survive. An increasingly expensive higher education, unemployment plus the end of Austudy/Abstudy meant that students are compelled to go through uni as fast as possible without exposing themselves to activities which, in their eyes, would make their financial situation even more precarious. So while individualism may appear ideologically as an illusive sense of personal autonomy and control, it is in real life caused by the loss of that autonomy and increasing poverty of student life, which is combined psychologically by the fear to expose the self to the responsibility of belonging to a collective which is under constant attack by capital and the State.

The Liberals are pretty aware of this subjective shift to conservatism among students as a backdrop of years of social restructuring, impoverishment and coorporatisation of uni life. The Liberals, therefore, have developed a discourse that is adequate to that level of political consciousness in the design of policies for higher education. This is what makes VSU so complex to address and dangerous politically. Behind their rhetoric of freedom lies strategic coercion. Their message to students is very simple: "Look, the situation is already bad enough, we are winning. We are making things easier for you by giving you the choice of minimising costs of your education by renouncing to the political representation provided by SRCs".

The point of anti-VSU campaign then is not to address collective rights as against individual ones. In the current political climate, students have a genuine fear about their lives in the present and the future, which unfortunately take the form of individualism. The issues for activists then is campaigning in such a way that they are able to establish the link between these individual feelings of vulnerability and the need to stress universal membership as the best and more effective way of defending individual rights. The idea of choice and freedom must be reclaimed from the liberals by saying that SRCs and students' associations are the only organisms that fight for the issues that affect students in their everyday lives as individuals such as living and working conditions on campuses; from dealing with despotic lectures to the defence of students' income and the right to a public education.

VSU must not only be understood as an attack on the right to organise in the abstract, but a continuation of the neo-liberal attack on conditions. As against the Liberals' argument of freedom, we must pose -with as many examples as possible- the idea that if student representation is undermined politically and financially, it would make it a lot harder for students to defend themselves from arbitrary decisions taken by staff and administration as well as to have decent conditions of study and living while at uni.

I think these are the best arguments we could make to establish a transitional link between students current level of consciousness (individualism) and the objective goals and needs of the anti-VSU campaign. Of course, we would have to confront the argument that students organisation are made of bureaucrats not caring about students, putting forward their own political agendas and using the student organisations as springboard to get good job and so on. In this case, I think it is necessary to come up with concrete examples about the concrete gains of students organisation on campus over the years in each specific campus. More importantly, as revolutionaries, we should not present themselves as defending the status quo, that is to take for granted the bureaucratic and careerist politics of student unionism, which in fact opened the door for VSU. We can not fight VSU without putting forward at least in general our own left-wing vision of how a really democratic student unionism would look like. This left-wing vision is the only real solution to the problems student representation suffers today.