[The following election talk on the early history of Resistance was given in early August 1998 by John Percy, a founder of Resistance, and is now national secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party and the Democratic Socialist candidate for the seat of Sydney in the October 3, 1998, federal election.]

Resistance, the socialist youth organisation in political solidarity with the Democratic Socialist Party, was the organiser of the impressive high-school walkouts and protests against racism and One Nation that were held around the country in July.

The demonstrations received massive media coverage, focussing on the issues of racism and Aboriginal and Asian migrants’ rights, but also on the “youth” of the protesters. Pauline Hanson and David Oldfield attacked the high-school students as “manipulated” and “brainwashed”. All the right-wing columnists and talk-show hosts weighed in with the usual high standard of red-baiting and abuse – Paddy MacGuiness, Piers Akerman, Michael Duffy, Alan Jones, Stan Zemanuk, Jeremy Cordeaux, and John Laws.

But there was even greater praise and widespread compliments for Resistance and the students.

Sydney’s deputy lord mayor Henry Tsang publicly supported them. Daily Telegraph education columnist Maralyn Parker called the marches “the most encouraging and inspirational educational event we have seen for a long time… All power to our school children.” Resistance has received enthusiastic support from parents, teachers, and the general public.

But Resistance is not a new organisation. It has a long history of organising and providing a framework for high-school activists, campaigning for the rights of young people, against the Vietnam War, for the environment, for access to information on sex for young people, against school closures, against racism, against nuclear testing. And the controversies and right-wing fulminations surrounding Resistance in 1998 were also there at its formation in the late 1960s.

Origins

Resistance was founded in 1967 in the midst of a tremendous youth radicalisation.

Young people emerged from the political apathy and conservatism imposed by the Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s and early ‘60s: McCarthyism and Menzies; red scares and witchhunts; the supposed end of ideology and end of Marxism.

It was a generation of young people rebelling against all the accepted traditions. A popular slogan was coined: “We are the people our parents warned us against.”

This political and cultural rebellion burst out of the old constrictions on sex, dress, music and politics. You read about the “Youth Radicalisation of the 1960s” and you might be inclined to think, “Big deal”. And it’s true, many of the changes in social and cultural mores are taken for granted today. But it was a big turnabout at the time.

The political side of the radicalisation remains a gain for the general mass consciousness as well – attitudes on women, racism, the Third World, the environment, sexual politics etc.

And the methods adopted for pushing these issues was radical too – protests, demonstrations, mass action, direct action, heroic acts by individuals and groups. There was a real flowering of protest and rebellion, a new feeling that “We can change the world.”

The rebellion was deepest on campus, amongst students. In the first half of the ‘60s students in the US were radicalising and mobilising in support of the Civil Rights Movement. One of the campuses in the forefront was Berkeley, San Francisco, which exploded in 1964 with a student strike and mass sit-in over the right to organise politically on campus – the Free Speech Movement.

In Australia also it was students who were the first to radicalise. They began to join and swell the ranks of existing campus organisations or formed new ones. And they were looking at international developments – we even had our own “Freedom Ride” in early 1965, copying the Civil Rights Movement in the US that first mobilised students there in a big way.

The Vietnam War

Our current began in Sydney, on Sydney University. I was one of a number of radicalising students who had joined the Sydney University Labor Club in 1965 and began to play an increasingly active role in the campaign against the Vietnam War. The Vietnam Action Campaign was the main organiser of the protests.

Many political issues concerned us in those days, but the central issue in world politics, and the issue that radicalising young people felt most strongly about, was Vietnam. The US government massively escalated its intervention in Vietnam from 1965, and the Australian Liberal government tagged along behind, soon sending their own contingent of troops, and introducing conscription – the death lottery.

Opposition to the Vietnam War grew. When US President Johnson visited Australia in October 1966 he was met by protests wherever he went. In Sydney 10,000 demonstrated at Hyde Park as his motorcade came into the city from the airport. We broke onto the road, some lay on the road to block the cars. This is when Liberal Premier Askin uttered his infamous words “Ride over the bastards.”

The protesters had a running battle to try to drown out the Mormon Tabernacle Choir who had been allocated the same corner for the official welcome. They were belting out “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Deep in the Heart of Texas” (Johnson was from Texas…) and we were screaming out “Johnson Murderer”, “Hey, Hey LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today” etc. However, they had the advantage of a powerful amplification system rigged up in the park – we only had thousands of unassisted lungs. Nevertheless, someone did manage to dig up a pair of pliers. We cut their power. They repaired it. We cut it in another spot. They repaired it again. We cut it again, and fortunately we were on top at the crucial time when Johnson came into view!

After the motorcade got past our demonstration most of us ran through the park to the Art Gallery, and got there before Johnson. (The press reported two lots of demonstrators – really it was the same crowd, we moved fast.) Johnson’s motorcade also moved fast after his scary confrontation, so fast that the school children who’d been dragooned out of school to line the streets didn’t realise he’d gone past. But the editorials the next day railed at the cold-hearted demonstrators who forced the President to speed through the city, spoiling the day for the school children who had come to see him.

Going off campus

Although our origins were at university, we soon recognised the need to go beyond campus politics – an article in 1966 in Left Forum, the Labor Club magazine, argued “The need for an off-campus youth organisation.” We wanted an organisation that would unite not just campus students but all radical youth – high-school students, young workers, unemployed.

In May 1967, about 30-40 young people around the Vietnam Action Campaign and the Sydney University Socialist Club (formerly Labor Club) had some initial meetings to discuss setting up such an organisation.

In August we found premises at 35 Goulburn Street for our new organisation, initially called SCREW. “Society for the Cultivation of Rebellion EveryWhere” was one version of what the initials stood for. A second version was “Sydney Committee for Revolution and Emancipation of the Working Class.”

From its inception, it was an activist organisation. Our heroes were Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, revolutionaries actively engaged in making revolutions. We carried their portraits on demonstrations, and chanted their names, their slogans.

We were involved in a multitude of activities – campaigns, demonstrations, meetings, producing leaflets, silk-screening posters and sticking them up, organising weekly folk nights, weekly film nights, weekly forums.

The new centre had been a disused, dilapidated bootmaker’s shop, but the rent was cheap. We cleaned it up, cleaned up the yard, set up the Third World Bookshop in the front, had a modest sized meeting room at the back, a little room for printing leaflets, and bedrooms and a kitchen upstairs for three or four of us who moved in there to help defray the rent. It became a hive of activity and the organising centre for anti-Vietnam actions and other political campaigns, and soon became a mecca for radicalising young people in Sydney.

In November that year we changed our name to Resistance.

The year 1968

The year that epitomises the ‘60s is 1968 – so much happened, all around the world.

The Tet Offensive in Vietnam at the start of 1968 dealt a huge blow to Washington’s confidence that their military juggernaut could win. Half a million US troops finally repulsed the Vietnamese freedom fighters from the cities, but at huge costs. The offensive demonstrated the lack of support for the puppet regime; it broke the will of sections of the US ruling class; and it gave heart and inspiration to opponents of the war around the world. In 1968 we saw the biggest anti-Vietnam War demonstrations up to that time.

In France, the events of May-June brought the country to a revolutionary crisis. It began with a student upsurge on one campus, spread to all students, tertiary and secondary, and then drew in the working class, with a 10 million strong general strike that brought the government to its knees. It was the closest thing to a revolution in an advanced capitalist country that we’d seen, and might have succeeded but for the treacherous role of the Communist Party and the trade union leadership.

In Mexico, students in Mexico City, the venue for the 1968 Olympics, poured into the streets in their hundreds of thousands. Many were massacred by the government. The eyes of the world were focussed on these events, which prompted students, workers, peasants in other countries into action also.

In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring, the reform movement within the government and Communist Party to bring about a socialism with a human face and eliminate the Stalinist distortion of socialism, was crushed by the intervention of Russian tanks. Not only in Czechoslovakia, but also around the world, people rose up in opposition. Here in Sydney we helped organise a march to the Czech Consulate in protest.

In Sydney, 1968 began with a bang for us and continued at a hectic pace. Orientation Week at Sydney University wasn’t just a matter of setting up our stall and joining people up – we had a comprehensive week-long campaign of attack, a counter-O-week.

• About half a dozen different silk screen posters were produced, some advertising events, others promoting our general theme, which was “Don’t get caught up in the system.”
• We had guerilla theatre on the front lawn, depicting the atrocities being inflicted on the people of Vietnam by US and Australian imperialism, and the people’s fightback.
• We countered the regiment’s pro-war displays.
• We interrupted the vice-chancellor’s address to new students in the great hall. We got a volunteer, a rather fit comrade, to strip, don a gorilla mask, and run down the aisle, up past the stage, and out the side door. On his back we’d painted, “Don’t get caught up in the system.” On the front was “The more I make love, the more I make the revolution.” It had the desired effect of deflating the pomposity and bullshit. Some of the V-C’s flunkeys up the front tried to catch him, but we’d taken the precaution of greasing him thoroughly all over, so he slipped through their grasp, and we had a getaway car at the side door that raced him away off campus.

How not to join the army

A huge furore and national publicity windfall resulted from a little pamphlet we printed, “How Not to Join the Army”, consisting of advice and practical hints on how to avoid conscription, and how to stuff up the system if you got in there. (Sugar in petrol tanks, make a pass at the recruiting officer etc…) It wasn’t a particularly great pamphlet, an anarchist seaman had brought us a copy of it produced in the US, and gave us 20 pounds to print it. It was mostly sitting on our shelves unsold for months until a rabid Liberal MP cottoned on to it and raised it as an issue in Federal Parliament, demanding that the government and police act.

Well, the police raided our headquarters, grabbed the offending pamphlets, our battered typewriter, and the duplicator on which it was printed. But the weird thing was, we received a tip-off half an hour before the raid. So we had phoned the TV stations, tidied up the headquarters, made sure posters advertising an upcoming teach-in on Vietnam were very prominently displayed, stashed away the bulk of the pamphlets, and waited for the cops.

It was great drama. There we were on TV, there was our printing machine getting carted out of the Third World Bookshop, there were the posters advertising the teach-in. Bookshop sales went right up. (Especially of a “Jesus Christ – Wanted for Sedition” poster that the TV cameras focussed on.) It was front-page news in papers around Australia.

We had to print tens of thousands more copies of the pamphlet. Pirate editions appeared in other states. Speaking engagements for myself, as the authoriser of the pamphlet, came thick and fast. The police eventually returned all our equipment, even the pamphlets, without any charges being laid.

High schools

Even back in the ‘60s Resistance’s biggest success stories were in high schools. Resistance members in high schools established High School Students Against the War in Vietnam, HSSAWV. The high schools Vietnam teach-in that received publicity during the raid was attended by about 500 people, and received extensive coverage in the media. The Sunday Telegraph red-baited us, but didn’t understand that their lurid descriptions of our activities only made us sound even more attractive to radicalising young people.

“Viet group woos school children” was the headline. “A well-organised youth movement” (we could have been better organised) “is recruiting schoolchildren in New South Wales with slogans like “US imperialists and ‘Support the NLF’.”

“The organisation, Resistance, openly supports the opposing forces in Vietnam, the National Liberation Front, and holds leaders like Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro as its heroes.

“As reported in the Sunday Telegraph last week, Resistance is very active in promoting student demonstrations and riots…”

They went on to describe the teach-in, the literature sold there, mentioned the Third World Bookshop in Goulburn Street, the Vietnam Action Campaign headquarters there, and quoted from a Resistance brochure.

After the teach-in, we started publishing a news-sheet, Student Underground. The number of schools where it was distributed steadily rose as word spread. Soon we were red-baited again. Our subversive undermining of the official brainwashing that takes place in schools was denounced in parliament, and our circulation skyrocketed. Demand outstripped supply. Eventually it was getting distributed in 100 Sydney high schools. Students would ring up and complain, they’d heard about it on TV, or read the papers, and why was their school being discriminated against, they hadn’t seen it yet! We rectified the matter as soon as we could.

Principals and politicians called for the banning of Student Underground, but of course that only increased demand.

As well as the Sydney-wide Student Underground, students began producing news-sheets for individual high schools, with names like The Spark, Super Rat, The Yellow Submarine, Out of Apathy, Bleah, The Sydney Line. Student Underground graduated to a 4-page printed tabloid format for its last two editions in 1969.

We used to hold the occasional educational and recreational camp in the bush over a long weekend, in the Blue Mountains or on the coast in the National Park. And amongst the many t-shirts with political slogans on them or the portraits of our political heroes that we silk-screened, we thought, why not a memento, “Resistance Guerrilla Training Camp, 1968”. Well, the Daily Telegraph got onto it again, and phoned us up – could they have an interview and a photograph? Well, we scratched our heads, the camp was over, we weren’t planning to go back to the Blue Mountains for a while, but we had better oblige them, we thought. So we called them back, gathered together all the comrades in the headquarters at the time into the back yard under the banana tree, stuck up a portrait of Che Guevara and a map of Latin America, and hey presto – instant uproar, shock horror, scandal.

“Viet Cong are their heroes.” “Sydney children at guerrilla classes.” The story advertised the Third World Bookshop, advertised Resistance starting “a drive in Sydney high schools, signing up more than 500 students…” gave a big plug to High School Students Against the War in Vietnam, mentioned our film nights, interviewed members. Ignoring the sensationalism, all in all a very useful article.

Going national

Resistance had expanded to Canberra and Adelaide in the course of 1970, and in August that year held its first national conference, at the University of NSW, attended by 45 young people. The conference adopted a range of documents and reports on Aims, on The need for a Socialist Youth Organisation, on A Socialist Strategy for the Anti-War Movement.

The conference also launched the newspaper Direct Action, borrowing the old IWW name from the time of WWI. The first issue appeared in September 1970, as a monthly 12 page newspaper, published by Resistance. Direct Action ceased publication in 1990, making way for Green Left Weekly.

In those early years of Resistance we were learning as we went. There was no experienced party, like the Democratic Socialist Party today, which was founded in January 1972.

These highlights give a flavour of the times, but also illustrate how much is still the same. There’s the same idealism and enthusiasm among young people. There’s the same right-wing hysteria at the very thought of young people having political ideas and engaging in politics. Some of the Resistance activists of the ‘60s are still active, now members of the DSP. And many of the sons and daughters of other ‘60s activists are now taking up the struggle.

Is a new round of youth radicalisation taking place? Yes, these high school demonstrations are the largest seen in Australia. The next round of demonstrations on August 28 could be even bigger. Youth are in the forefront of rebellion in countries like Indonesia also. But today’s radicals are building on the gains of those struggles in the ‘60s.