About the SEU.
The Syndicalist Education Union was formed on 18 March 2000 by members of
the Melbourne ASF (Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation) studying at the Bundoora campus of La Trobe University,
in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. At a meeting of the Melbourne ASF
local soon after it was sponsored as a provisional affiliate to the ASF,
to be ratified at the congress in June.
The purpose of the SEU, as it has been discussed so far, is to bring
education workers and students together to practise solidarity, direct
action and cooperative decision-making according to the principles of
anarcho-syndicalism. Unionism as practised on campus at La Trobe appears
to be dominated by reformism, party-politicking and individual
career-building of aspiring politicians and bureaucrats, to the expense of
the interests of students and workers. This is, of course, despite the
rheoric to the contrary.
The 2001 Student's Representative Council, dominated by an unholy (but
somehow unsuprising) coalition of Liberal and Labor Unity students is
particularly bad in this respect. When they do actually turn up for work,
the student bureaucrats in the SRC do nothing, or they are harmful to the
interests of students, as when they closed down the secondhand bookshop,
for no other apparent reason than that maintaining it meant that they
would have to actually do something. The NTEU does not seem to be quite so
bad, insofar as they do not seem to be proactively harmful (rather than
ineffective and unwilling to take action), although the poor morale of
education workers is patently obvious to anyone who talks to their tutor
or lecturer, and is rumoured to be the lowest of any university in
Australia, according to internal university reports.
In recent years La Trobe has seen significant cutbacks in staff and
classes, most notorious of which has been the closure of the music
department in 1998. At the same time a Japanese garden costing in the
region of half a million dollars was installed in the grounds of the
university, and a house costing a million dollars procured for the
vice-chancellor. As far as we can tell, there has been little to no
response to activities of this sort from the NTEU. In 2000 a "tent city"
was organised by the SRC, although this exercise ended in farce, betrayed
by so-called leaders. The response of the Left to this general malaise,
not very long ago a powerful force at La Trobe and the catalyst of several
occupations, seems to have been to sell newspapers.
Recently the President of the SRC, Chris Mouratidis, a Young Liberal,
attempted to suspend the editors of the student newspaper, one of whom was
a founding member of the SEU, over accusations, of all things, of racism.
This was a politically-motivated attack on the independence of Rabelais,
and transperantly so.
Mouratidis cited two cases. The first were lines from the article 'A
Flight Against the Blockade' by Gregory Elich. The article concerned the
nature of the blockade against Iraq and was taken from the indymedia.org
website. The lines judged to be racist were "American and British leaders,
so eager to act as self-appointed judges in regard to others, have shown
that no-one poses a greater threat to peace than they" and "...Western
leaders demonstrate a contempt for the lives of others." He did not
provide any evidence to demonstrate that this was a racist statement.
The second concerned a review for a zine called Nuances. The review itself
was not called racist, but the cover of the zine was reproduced. On the
cover that was shown next to the article, was the headline of one of the
articles entitled 'Silly things the French do and say.' This was also seen
to be racist. After a short skirmish involving the threat of legal action
in the high court and some direct action on the part of SEU and Melbourne
ASF members, amongst others, Mouratidis backed off faster than you could say "student
politicians have shit for brains."
The creation of the SEU at La Trobe has thus far met with an extremely
positive and friendly response. When our posters and stickers go up, for
example, they have stayed up. Without doing more than one or two posters
runs and talking to fellow students (who more often than not have seen the
posters and have been pro-active in asking us about the ASF), it appears
that a fully-fleged branch is in the offing. To add to the bright picture,
the creation of a second SEU branch at the Clayton campus of Monash
University seems likely to take place in the not too distant future.
Activities that the La Trobe branch of the SEU plans for the near future
include the publication of a newsletter, the creation of a dossier
containing information relating to the current state of the education
sector, and affilation to Clubs and Societies, an offshoot of the SRC.
With affiliation to Clubs and Societies, the SEU will gain access to
resources such as photocopying and SRC grants, some of which is planned to
be used in the production of literature related to the Free Schooling
ideas developed by the Spanish free educationalist, Fransisco Ferrer Y
Guardia.
