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ORIGINS The Non-Aligned Left was formed in 1993 as an NUS student faction by the students who had been operating outside of NUS. A key figure in its formation was Jamie Parker , the Chairperson of Macquarie University Students' Council , who had been elected to the NUS National Executive at the 1992 NUS National Conference as an independent. At the 1993 NUS National Conference, the NAL used its leverage to secure the creation of a new National Environment Officer position, which was first held by Parker. By 1994, the NAL was strong in NSW and Victoria, with Parker using the National Environment Officer position to organise the faction nationally. At the end of that year, the NAL won control of the NUS NSW branch from the National Organisation Of Labor Students (Labor Left), with Parker becoming the NUS NSW President. The NAL used the NSW branch as a base to organise community activist campaigns, thus transforming NUS's image and involving a new generation of activists. By the 1995 NUS National Conference, it was the largest faction.(Killion, 1999) The NAL's core support came from environmental activists and from student representatives on small and regional campuses - two areas that had traditionally been neglected by Left Alliance , the previous dominant non-ALP left grouping. Moreover, the NAL caucus was mostly made up of students from working-class families, many of whom were the first in their families to attend university. This contrasted with the middle-class composition of Left Alliance, and their concentration at metropolitan ("sandstone") universities. NAL members often saw this as a defining point of divergence between themselves and Left Alliance, viewing the latter organisation as theoretically arcane and elitist. A key point of difference between the two groupings was the NAL's support for the existence of Small and Regional Officer positions within NUS state and national offices. The NAL's argument for these positions was based on a class-politic analysis that saw small and regional campuses as channels for working-class educational activism and agency. This view was not shared by Left Alliance, which argued - unrealistically in the NAL's view - for campaign-based Officer positions and a requirement that all NUS Officers - not just the Small and Regional Officer - devote attention to small and regional campuses. CAUCUS ASCENDANCY As the NAL's support grew, it recruited widely and by 1995 was clearly the dominant force on the left of the Australian student movement. In 1995 NAL activist Marcus Westbury said, "The NAL has existed for only 2 years. They have grown from a handful of delegates to the second largest NUS faction primarily because of their commitment to participatory decision making, a non hierachial structure, and their non binding nature."(WS, 1996) At the height of its influence, in 1996, NAL activists in the NSW Branch and National Office of NUS used the organisational resources of their leadership to facilitate the mobilisation of the largest student protests in Australia since the Vietnam War, in response to the conservative education, race, environmental and social policies of the recently elected Howard Coalition Government. The growing power of a nationally-organised and avowedly anarchist left movement committed to direct action campaigning resulted in the monitoring of NAL activists by Australian security agencies, and rumours began to circulate that their national caucus had been infiltrated by Australian government security agents (or "spooks"). CAUCUS DECLINE At the 1996 NUS National Conference, the NAL's "open-door" policy of participation had resulted in the massive and recent expansion of its caucus. The power of the NAL's electoral bloc within NUS, which had enabled the caucus to control NUS leadership positions, attracted the participation of activists whose ideological sympathies, and campus backgrounds, were more closely aligned with Left Alliance than the NAL's traditional recruitment base. Tensions arose between state groupings of Victorian activists newly recruited by the NAL leadership in the NUS National Office, and the NSW activists organised around the NAL leadership in the NUS NSW state branch. Although the caucus attempted to resolve internal policy divisions through its commitment to consensus decision-making and non-binding voting, simmering tensions exploded into an actual factional schism when an activist suspected of being a "spook" incited the purging of the NAL's NSW leadership in a meeting that took place outside of the caucus. When several key activists sided with the "purged" participants, the split was complete. Two NAL caucuses existed for the remainder of the 1996 NUS National Conference. Post-conference, in 1997, the majority of the Victorian grouping joined Left Alliance , reinvigorating a caucus whose numbers had been in steady decline since the NAL's emergence. Additionally, some of the Victorian grouping's supporters from South Australia joined the Student Unity (Labor Right) faction. What remained of both sides of the caucus healed the factional rift and re-created the NAL, and numbers were gained by the recuitment of activists from Queensland and Tasmania, but the caucus never recovered the electoral prominence it enjoyed before the split. The NAL's decline was further brought about by factional campaigns waged by both Labor students and Left Alliance, as well as a generational change in its leadership and ongoing internal conflicts within its caucus. Seizing upon the destabilisation of the NAL at the 1996 conference, Labor students organised vigorous campus election campaigns in former NAL strongholds to win NUS delegate positions and grow their vote, while Left Alliance targeted established NAL participants for recruitment to their re-invigorated caucus. Left Alliance propaganda declaimed the activist and left-wing ideological credentials of the NAL leadership and NAL office-bearers in the union were subjected by Left Alliance and NOLS to tactical obstructions in their NUS activist campaigns as well as other forms of political harassment and intimidation. Crucially, the sustained attempts by the rival factions to publicly humiliate NAL office-bearers had the effect of discouraging emerging NAL activists, specifically women, to pursue elections within the NUS hierarchy. With generational regrowth stagnated, the faction was doomed. At the end of 1998, Left Alliance ended its support for an NAL-dominated NUS NSW branch and supported the election of a NOLS member, Amanda Tattersall, to the NUS NSW Presidency. Although NAL members saw this as an abandonment of Left Alliance's traditional position of voting left-to-right, Left Alliance, perhaps believing their own propaganda, supported the idea was that it was no longer accurate to view the NAL as unambiguously to the 'left' of NOLS, despite the intense left-activist commitment demonstrated by the NAL caucus participants and their record of activist campaign leadership in NUS positions. The overall effect of handing control of NUS NSW to NOLS was disastrous for Left participation in NUS, with NOLS quickly re-establishing their numbers on campuses and dealing with Student Unity to re-consolidate Labor control of the union. In 1999, the NAL suffered another major split at its mid-year national conference that included three of its most active leaders - Tim Collins from Queensland, Natasha Verco from NSW, and Mat Hines from Tasmania. This split crippled the NAL, which by the 1999 NUS National Conference was no longer a significant force. Collins, Verco, Hines and others created a short-lived formation called Grassroots Action, and entered the newly-created National Broad Left . Collins and Verco became key leaders within the NBL, but Hines split at the 1999 NUS National Conference, creating a new NAL-style formation called PLANet (Progressive Left Activist Network) and organising his own election as NUS National Environment Officer. Hines kept PLANet going through 2000, but it never grew beyond a few people and had dissolved by the 2001 NUS National Conference. ANALYSIS The intrigue and machinations that led to the NAL's decline and eventual collapse are detailed above. Some argue that equally important to the NAL's decline was a change in political culture on Australian campuses after the election of the federal Coalition government in 1996. This view holds that during the mid-1990s, the dominant political culture on Australian campuses remained on the left, but the lack of intense radicalism that characterised previous student generations meant that there was only a limited audience for the hard (some would say doctrinaire) socialist politics of Left Alliance. At the same time, Labor students were widely discredited on campuses because of the actions of the federal Labor government. The NAL was an ideal vehicle for bringing together left (broadly anarchist and socialist-libertarian) student activists during this period. This view contends that after 1996, the radicalisation of the student movement meant that the more militant politics of Left Alliance acquired a new resonance, while Labor students, freed from the obligation to defend their own party in government, re-involved themselves in student campaigns and began to grow on campuses. Squeezed on both sides by Left Alliance and the Labor students, the NAL's contraction was on one level inevitable. On another level, the speed and finality of its eventual demise was certainly a product of the concerted efforts of the other student groupings described above. The NAL's creation exemplifies a cyclical dynamic in the radical student movement in Australia. Broad left formations tend to be created at high points of struggle (e.g. Left Alliance 1987, National Broad Left 1999), but as campaigns collapse the political basis for the broad left disintegrates. This leads to the formation of counter-groupings comprising activists who feel disenfranchised from the broad left, whether on the basis of their geographical location (e.g. a small and regional campus), their chosen campaign (e.g. the environment) or shared identity (e.g. as women or working class). The NAL was by far the most successful of these counter-groupings, and by 1995-1996 was itself a kind of broad left. During the period of the NBL's existence, however, three counter-groupings in the NAL mould were created - PLANet, formed not long after the NBL itself; the Small & Regional faction, between 2002 and 2004; and Grassroots Left , which catalysed the NBL's demise in 2005. An oppositional view explaining the Non-Aligned Left's demise is one that takes into consideration the ideology and internal culture of Anarchist organisations. As a caucus that encouraged free participation, publicly disavowed binding its participants to group decisions, was hostile to admitting the existence of caucus leadership and attempted to reconcile electoral politics with consensus decision-making, the NAL's functionality as a grouping was compromised by the conflict of the group's organisational ideology with the pragmatics of factional operation within NUS. NAL was seriously disadvantaged by the time-consuming nature of consensus processes, especially in times of inter-factional deal-making for NUS office-bearer elections. Compared to other caucuses who either empowered their leadership to make decisions on behalf of the caucus, or who were able to resolve factional decisions through vote-taking, the NAL couldn't always keep pace with factional manoevring. Additionally, the caucus' own identity as an "anti-faction" collective of independent left activists encouraged the participation of individuals who were ideologically hostile to practicing recruitment or factional administration, disowned the notion of "membership" and refused to establish processes to either formally admit or expel other participants. This porous nature of the NAL identity made the group particularly vulnerable to the attacking tactics of NOLS and Left Alliance. Organisationally, too, the group was hampered by its activist priorities. An oft-repeated group motto was "recruit by example", and the internal culture of the NAL demanded that work on activist campaigns be consistently prioritised over factional activities, which were seen to be a waste of activist time. NAL NUS office-bearers like Jamie Parker, Elizabeth Humphreys, Sarah Lantz, Dave Taylor and John Nolan-Neylan, whose activist commitment was beyond question, presided over the creation and boom of the caucus because they were able to combine successful activist campaigning with factional activity. When their generation graduated from the student movement, at the time of the first NAL split, the anti-faction NAL began to preselect NUS office-bearer candidates who were respected radical left activists but uninterested in factional politics. Disdain for factionalism was, suicidally, an ideological virtue within the NAL caucus and in any analysis should be considered as a key factor in its implosion. LEGACY The activists who participated in the NAL in its 1993-1999 heyday have transitioned to occupy various roles in political and public life. Notably, many of the old Non-Aligned Left leadership are now activists in the Australian Greens. NSW Greens Senator Kerry Nettle is a former NAL participant, while many NAL have worked as parliamentary staffers or contested public office for that party. Some former NAL participants have also contested positions for the Australian Labor Party. The majority of former caucus participants are active in public life as activists and organisers for feminist, queer, social justice, welfare, indigenous and environment organisations. Many are now academics, public servants, legal activists and journalists or work for trade unions. Some are involved in business, some in the arts. POLITICAL COMPOSITION Marcus Westbury made contact in 1995 with the Workers Solidarity Movement in order to publicise their success at that year's conference (WS, 1996). Van Badham , 1998 NUS NSW State Branch President sent Noam Chomsky congratulations on his 70th birthday through the Anarchist Zmag , where she claimed that the Non-Aligned Left was a specifically anarchist faction.(Badham, 1998) The NAL's anarchist outlook was for a generally socially progressive grassroots student union, rather than a coherent programmatic ideology. Bookchinist, anarcho-syndicalist, anarcho-socialist, deep ecologist, Trotskyist, libertarian socialist and other Marxist-socialist tendencies were all expressed within the NAL caucus. NAL TRIVIA - the NAL produced two ongoing publications: "Faction X", first produced in 1994, was an external publication intended to promote the faction to potential participants. "Paradox Sustained" was an internal publication, largely comprised of contending policy position statements. - the first NAL factional t-shirt bore the quote "The reason why student politics is so nasty is because it matters so little - Henry Kissinger". - the NAL slogan was "Doing Numbers for the Revolution" - the NAL symbol was a sun - the NAL was funded by a 5% tithed contribution of paid NAL NUS office-bearers REFERENCES :Erin Killion "NUS, students and the left" in ''Resistance Magazine'' 1999; electronically published by yap.com.au, currently unavailable; available by google cache {Link without Title} :"Anarchist students win in Australian NUS election" in ''Workers Solidarity'' ( Workers Solidarity Movement ) No.47 Spring 1996 {Link without Title} :Van Badham (NUS NSW President). correspondance to Noam Chomsky in ''zmag'' 1998 {Link without Title} |
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