LENIN'S TOMB

Monday, December 05, 2011

For a people's inquiry into the summer riots posted by Richard Seymour

The Guardian and the LSE have published their findings on the summer riots. There is no doubt that this presents valuable data, which broadly supports the argument of those on the Left who said it was primarily a response to political injustice. The analysis acknowledges that, for some, the riots presented an opportunity to obtain free goods. But it does not support the claim that the riots were predominantly an outburst of criminality, or that gangs played a significant role. The riots were mainly political.

It finds: just under half of those rioters interviewed were students, and a significant component of their anger came from the sense of injustice over the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance and the tripling of tuition fees, cutting off higher education and thus life chances for millions; of those who were not students, 59% were unemployed, in contrast to some misleading coverage claiming that a disproportionate number were in work or even middle class; gang members played at most a peripheral role; while there was a wider perception of social injustice motivating the involvement rioters, the issue of police injustice, horrificially underscored by the murder of Mark Duggan, was the most significant cause of the riots; 73% of those interviewed had been stopped and searched in the previous three months. Now, the issue of the police was always marked by a strange silence in the accounts of those who said that it was primarily a matter of 'looting'. Much of the rioting that took place centred on confrontations with the police rather than theft or vandalism. Such theft as did take place was not always clearly pecuniary in motive - often it appeared to be targeted, as did some of the vandalism. In fact, the main form of 'opportunism' that is apparent is where young people, often on the receiving end of police harrassment and violence, saw an opportunity in the breakdown of police control to exact revenge. Because of this, many of the interviewees express pride, not remorse. They say they felt empowered, and would do it again. This is not new. So, all this data is useful and should be scoured carefully, the findings reviewed in their full complexity. Have a look at this video by Guardian journalist Paul Lewis:

However, as I understand it, this study is a limited review of one aspect of the story, that being the motivations and views of the rioters. The other main reports come from the Metropolitan Police, and the government's 'independent panel'. It is undoubtedly possible, through a reading of all of these reports, against the grain where necessary, to acquire a workable political understanding of what took place, and what is highly likely to take place again. It's important that such an understanding should inform a broad political response. The government, far from retreating on its agenda, is gearing up for major confrontations. The police, far from facing justice, have recently been let off the hook over the death of 'Smiley Culture', and now have more weapons with which to threaten people - as student protesters menaced with the possibility of water cannon and rubber bullets can attest. One would like to think that the dominant response will be in the form of social struggles, protests, strikes and occupations. Indeed, that is more or less what one expects. However, the most implausible scenario is that the riots will be a one off. And that's something that we have to be ready for, especially given how insanely most people reacted.

So, here's a proposal - a bit late, but still worth thinking about. We need a people's inquiry into the issues, the narrative, the outcomes and the appropriate response to the riots. It should be funded by subscription or donations, and it would require the participation of people able to put in a lot of hours interviewing witnesses and reviewing evidence. There is a model for this. Recently, I was directed to a number of reports published in the 1980s concerning riots that had taken place. These were unofficial people's inquiries, conducted in a judicious manner with the aim of establishing a full narrative which would disclose what public authorities were reluctant to acknowledge, and what was occluded in media coverage focused on vandalism and violence: police brutality, official racism, and so on. For example, in response to the events in Southall in April 1979, an Unofficial Committee of Enquiry was set up, chaired by Michael Dummett, to establish the narrative, the causes and failure on the part of the authorites. It heard evidence from eyewitnesses, participants, those directly or indirectly affected in Southall. It collated and scrutinised data published by the authorities. The final report was published by the National Council of Civil Liberties. Among the Committee's members were Stuart Hall, who wrote much of the report, as well as Labour MPs such as Joan Lestor and Patricia Hewitt (uh huh), alongside trade unionists, clerics and a representative of the Asian Resources Centre in Birmingham. This doesn't seem to be available online, but I got what I think is a rare copy from Amazon, and I shall be scanning it and making it publicly available as soon as I can. The idea here isn't to retrospectively endorse every conclusion reached, or to say that we can simply mimic every principle of organisation adopted then. Rather, it is to illustrate how a well-organised inquiry bringing together a relatively broad coalition of elements can form the basis for a political response. Now, I don't know how one would begin to go about materially constructing the coalition necessary to get an inquiry up and running today. I don't know what it would cost or who would supply the personnel. But I bet some of the people reading this have a better idea than I do. So, think about it.

Labels: education maintenance allowance, metropolitan police, neoliberalism, police brutality, police shooting, riots, tories, tottenham, tuition fees

Monday, June 06, 2011

The Great Moving On Up Show posted by Richard Seymour

This piece of privatised parasitism is a predictable outcome of policies designed to de-fund higher education and incentivise profit-making. The New College of Humanities, which will be a private educational faculty established in the University of London, charges £18,000 a year for what parents and students are assured is to be the highest quality critical education. The rationale for this institution is not a complete sham - it is hypocritical, and disingenuous, but there's a rational core in there. This is how it goes: we agree that governments should fund high quality humanities education out of general taxation, but no government will do so to an adequate degree, neither Tory, nor Labour, nor Coalition; nor will the current fee levels support such high quality teaching; we believe that such education is essential to a thriving society, so we have had to seek out the most realistic way of ensuring that this happens; changing policy through protest is so vanishingly unlikely that we have settled on the alternative of embracing the American funding model, based on fees, but mitigated by bursaries and scholarships; the alternative is that we fail to prepare the next generation of lawyers, journalists, judges, writers and historians, and society will be the poorer for it.

It is difficult to take such protestations of humanistic intent entirely at face value since we're talking about a profit-making enterprise which has attracted support from city investors. In all likelihood, it will be one with extremely well-paid professors and lecturers, since the logic of the market says you have to be willing to pay the best to attract the talent. And this institution, as we'll see in a moment, is all about bringing the stars. Further, the policies of marketisation in higher education that produced this scenario have been encouraged by, and greatly enriched, the sorts of high-flying academics, vice-chancellors and such that can be expected to do very nicely out of this. Still, the rationale adduced above is not entirely hollow. The privatization and concentration of educational assets among the rich and the middle classes has been pursued and incentivised by this and previous governments, whose deliberate underfunding of higher education and introduction of the fees system created the stimulus for this development. The Right, and their friends in industry, have been desperate to reproduce elites in education against a background of rising standards. Too many graduates with first class or 2.1 degrees, and too many good A Level results, constitutes a crisis for capital because there just aren't the positions in the jobs market to accomodate all these highly qualified individuals. Thus, access to elite status must be rationed, and they're going to ration it through pricing.

So, now we know what some were thinking when all those conferences entitled 'Whither the humanities?' were being held. The decidedly unglamorous, increasingly dilapidated and proletarianised world of higher education in the future, is not for the intellectual superstars to be trapped in. The luminaries of Channel 4 television, book charts, BBC radio and newspaper columns were never going to fester away in such unrewarding sticks for too long - they would either move to America, where they know how to reward celebrity dons properly, or Americanise the British academy. In this case, they have not only Americanised, not only gone Wall Street - they've gone Hollywood.

Look at the enticing line-up: AC Grayling, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Simon Blackburn, Peter Singer, Niall Ferguson, etc.... all of these are best-selling authors, some of them with television careers. They are unlikely to be directly involved in teaching for the most part, just as you generally won't find Bruce Willis chopping mushrooms in the kitchen of Planet Hollywood. Their names are there mainly for branding. Though couching its pitch in a sort of traditional bourgeois humanism, promising one-to-one attention and all-round education, the college is largely trading on a far less august form of cultural capital - viz. the reputation these celebs enjoy as purveyors of middlebrow 'learning'. Essentially, with this profit-making institution, which leeches from the resources of the public sector in more ways than one, rich parents are offered the option of sending their duller children to a sort of cross between Hogwarts and International Celebrity Mastermind. It's the Waterstones '3 for 2' book deal syndrome: if their money can't get them into Oxbridge for some reason, then in this 'Oxbridge of London' rich students will consort with the people whose books Ma and Pa have picked up in Waterstones from the '3 for the price of 2' (cheapest free) table. Indeed, AC Grayling, the founder of the college, is the author most recently of 'The Good Book', which is advertised as a secular bible. It may at least now be assumed that nothing in this bible rubs against the grain of bourgeois values, or of profiteering (which fact alone, by the way, makes it a pretty useless bible). Indeed, it surely isn't coincidental that the celebrity scholars involved largely tend to converge around a complacent celebration of the virtues of Anglo-American liberalism. And why wouldn't they celebrate, and why wouldn't their students? There has been much for them to cheer about.

AC Grayling's lecture at Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road, which is to take place at 6pm tomorrow, would be an ideal opportunity to register your disapprobation.

Labels: capitalism, coalition, education, education maintenance allowance, ruling class, tories, vanity

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Aaron Porter: what counts as the last straw? posted by Richard Seymour

Is it possible that Porter could go too far for his narrow layer of supporters? Is there a principle by which they would recognise that he has done too much damage to students to be worth defending? What counts as the last straw? Not when he advocated cutting maintenance grants for the poorest students. Not when he joined in media denunciations of protesters. Not when he backtracked on promises to support occupations. Not when he refused to back the student protests in London last month. Not when he misled people over allegations of antisemitic abuse toward him in Manchester. Not when he basically waved a white flag to the government, declaring that the NUS should re-direct its campaigning to lobby universities not to raise fees too high. What about when a memo, circulated to NUS officers, declares government reforms 'progressive' and opposes campaigning against high fees - especially with respect to those universities most likely to apply the maximum, among the Russell Group, Britain's ivy league of universities? Is that enough? Will that do? Will you now, please, stop pretending that the widespread contempt for Porter is anything other than justified? Will you stop claiming that protests against this despicable creep amount to 'bullying'? Pwetty pweeeeshe?

Labels: aaron porter, education, education maintenance allowance, nus, students, tories, tuition fees, universities

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Aaron Porter is running out of excuses posted by Richard Seymour

NUS president Aaron Porter can't go anywhere without being faced by angry protesters, it seems. He's faced no confidence motions, vocal public criticism, and angry meeting halls since he responded so spinelessly, as he put it, to the wave of student protests. Recently, he was pelted with foodstuffs (eggs and custards) after refusing to debate the subject of tuition fees with students at Oxford University. The reply of Porter and his supporters when something like this happens is usually to blame the hard left, the Trots, the SWP, or whomever. They say it's left-wing sectarianism which is undermining a broad movement, just because a few troublemakers disagree with Porter's nuanced position on this highly complex matter. (Lately, that position has included complete surrender on the issue of fees.) In the run up to yesterday's protest, he wrote an article for The Guardian which some have characterised as sectarian, but which I would say was standard red-baiting.

Yesterday, having refused to back the main students protest in London, he turned up at the protest in Manchester and was literally chased off the protest by what I hear was about half of those who had thus far gathered. He was escorted by police into the NUS building, where he remained holed up. Later the NUS Vice-President was pelted with oranges and eggs (another variation on the foodstuffs theme). This resulted in a refinement of the usual script. With the help of the Daily Mail, Aaron Porter's supporters have put it about that he was physically intimidated, threatened and subject to antisemitic abuse. Porter himself said: "Just before the march started, I was surrounded by a particularly vicious minority of protesters more intent on shouting threatening and racist abuse at me rather than focusing on the issues. Instead of standing together and fighting the cuts, they instead chose to pursue me along Manchester’s Oxford Road and drive me away from the start of the march. As a result, under the strong advice of the police, I had to withdraw myself from the rally." It is alleged by the newspapers that Porter was called a "Tory Jew", or even "Tory Jew scum".

A few things, then. If this happened, then it's a hate crime, and it would be appropriate for Porter to report it to the police. As members of the public and police officers were present, they can bear witness on his behalf if the allegations are correct. However. The extraordinary thing is that so far there is absolutely no evidence for it. The sole source quoted in any article on this is an unnamed photographer. You will search in vain through the raw footage for any evidence that such a thing was said. This does not mean that it wasn't. There can always be one or two idiots. But I have waited a day since first seeing the first, sometimes contradictory and nebulous allegations, and no evidence has been produced. On the contrary, most of those who were in fact there assert that what was chanted was "Aaron Porter, we know you/We know you're a Tory too". Another extraordinary thing is that the NUS Black Students campaign has apparently felt compelled to issue a statement denouncing something that may not have happened. This is, to my mind, an unwarranted capitulation to what may well be a dirty tricks campaign to spin what was clearly otherwise a very bad headline for a very unpopular Aaron Porter. Labour apparatchiks have a long history of this. Luciana Berger famously resigned from the NUS national executive alleging that the NUS was tolerating antisemitism in its ranks. This was later debunked by an independent inquiry, but she established a reputation on the basis of this and was later parachuted into a safe Labour seat. Similarly, Oona King used accusations of antisemitism against her opponents in Bethnal Green & Bow, though witnesses like Jonathan Freedland disputed her version of events. So, a dirty tricks campaign is hardly out of form.

Alex Andrews recommends that students go to the Press Complaints Commission if this is proven to be a lie, as Climate Camp activists were able to do when they were smeared by the Evening Standard. So, can I just say that this recommendation looks like a safer bet to me than issuing knee-jerk statements denouncing something that may not have taken place?

Labels: antisemitism, austerity, blairites, cuts, dirty tricks, education maintenance allowance, labour, media, nus, protest, students, tuition fees

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

We will resist posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, capitalist crisis, class, class struggle, cuts, education, education maintenance allowance, students, tories

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

In defence of the old hierarchies posted by Richard Seymour

The student protests blew open the question of resisting the Tories' austerity agenda, so it is natural that the tactics deployed therein should be the subject of inquiry. How was it done, what can we learn from it, and how can we repeat its successes under changing circumstances? Especially as the authorities adapt and tool up to cope with the current protests - a process that might thankfully be impeded a little bit by Liberty suing the cops over the kettling of children.

In this vein, Laurie Penny's recent articles, following on from her reporting of the student protests, have highlighted what she takes to be the novelty of the protests and thus the increasing irrelevance of "the old left" with its "traditional hierarchies" and "strategic factionalism". It's a pity that this came with condescending swipes about my party, the SWP. As one Twitter sage put it, writing on CiF about how awful those Trots are may not be as revolutionary as Laurie thinks it is. I don't intend to get bogged down in that subject, however, as I don't think this is fundamentally about the SWP. It's about the secular decline of mainstream institutions of the Left, most notably the Labour Party - it was Labour's offer to be the 'voice' of students that inspired Penny's disdain. The fall-out from that decline, and how we respond to it, is the issue. It's also a shame that Laurie has indulged in this tendency to speak as if she does so on behalf of a whole "generation" of protesters. I'm not accusing Laurie of actually believing this - it's a journalistic cliche, a USP. But it's also bloody annoying - worse, it plays into a destructive myth of inter-generational conflict. (There's a critique of this sort of cliche here). Still, if the aim was to provoke a conversation, it has certainly done that - see here, here, here and here, for example. In addition to the blogs, Alex Callinicos of the SWP responded here.

The SWP's newspaper, Socialist Worker, is totemic of a broader set of issues that Laurie raises. Thus, she says: "Stunningly, the paper is still being peddled at every demonstration to young cyber-activists for whom the very concept of a newspaper is almost as outdated as the notion of ideological unity as a basis for action." Setting aside all defensiveness, let's concede that the far left has been rather slower than its competitors to embrace the internet and harness its latent promise. In fact, as far as the UK goes, fascists were actually quicker to see the opportunity than most others. Even so, the traditional use of paper sales in high streets, at protests and at workplaces is now complemented by the full repertoire of websites, Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo and Youtube, as well as blogs and various link-sharing devices. So this is only incidentally about technology, and more fundamentally about the forms of organisation that they engender.

The substance of Laurie's argument is that the student movement works best by following anarchic, leaderless principles, by emphasising spontaneity and unity in action over specific grievances, and by de-emphasising grand narratives. The old left can be useful inasmuch as it participates in this mode of organising, but obstructive when it cleaves to older, hierarchical methods, based on "deference" to the decisions of a conference or a collective leadership. The issue of the print newspaper is raised as a symptom of this wider question. A political party which communicates by selling newspapers isn't engaging in the kind of open-ended dialogue that is facilitated by social media, for example. Instead, working within a closed ideological terrain, it produces a univocal message devised for one way communication. By means of this imposition, it seeks to "control" the resistance. This is a hierarchical way of organising drawn from a pre-internet paradigm.

But, says Laurie, the means of oppression have been "deregulated". Thatcher, Reagan, Blair et al undercut traditional working class forms of organisation by decentralising and deregulating capitalism, while keeping the working class atomised and divided into traditional communities of mutual suspicion. Overcoming this means "deregulating" the resistance, making it anarchic and "inclusive". In a word, the paper and its embedded principle of leadership should be - is being - superceded by cybernetics, the wiki, and its embedded principle of spontaneous, leaderless, non-hierarchical engagement. This is nothing less than a complete "re-imagining" of the Left.

This is a sweeping, dramatic set of claims, but it glosses over some important facts and problems. Worse, I fear that, for all the limitations of the 'old left', the call to 'deregulate' resistance may be more of a symptom of neoliberalism than a solution to the problems it poses. Among the facts that are glossed over is the role of leading cadres of experienced activists in bringing direction to the movement. The Daily Mail, the Tories and the police have a tendency to reduce such protests to nefarious 'ringleaders', and such ideas form the basis of 'intelligence-led' policing which is resulting in raids and young people being intimidated by coppers. So it's important not to reduce the movement to a few tightly knit groups of revolutionaries, 'professional demonstrators' and 'troublemakers'. But the fact that leadership doesn't work that way doesn't mean that there has been no leadership. Left-wingers, student union members and trade unionists from various political backgrounds, including the far left, have put their repertoire of knowledge and experience at the service of the students movement. This knowledge was accumulated as a result of their affiliations and unglamorous groundwork in the trade unions, past protests, leafletting and even high street paper sales. Without this, the recent occupations and protests would have been the poorer.

Still, even setting this to one side, with the student protests we have had a situation where the first nationally significant response to the Tories' cuts came from students, especially the poorest students - from the 'banlieues' of Britain as Paul Mason put it. They were not necessarily affiliated to political parties, or to the National Union of Students, or to any trade unions. Due to the weakness of the labour movement and the Left, they were largely not called to action by leafleting campaigns or billboard advertisements. Rather, they relied on Facebook groups and social media to coordinate their actions. Insofar as tens of thousands of people are willing to spontaneously sign up for protests and turn out, this is all very well. But what if that ceases to be the case? What if, as could happen very quickly, large numbers of people stop showing up, out of fear of police intimidation, out of frustration with diminishing returns, or out of demoralisation? Then the hard work will once more fall to that small number of committed activists who are embedded in existing structures - trade unions, socialist parties, Labour, student unions.

I think it is a weakness, rather than a strength, if an atomised populace without the support of large institutions becomes overly dependent on social media. The neoliberal solution to capitalism's problems could not have been imposed if the institutions of the labour movement and the organised left had not first been hammered by a combination of concerted employers' offensives and especially a centralised state apparatus. The fruit of that ruling class offensive, the erosion of trade unionism, left-wing community organisation and parties, is one reason why it has fallen to small groups (often drawn from the far left, by the way) using social media to coordinate protest dates etc., while the role of the mass of protesters has been merely to turn up and join in. Far from actively participating in the organising of these events, the majority have actually been excluded by their dependence on social media. The means of their inclusion must now be the subject of urgent negotiation and collaboration.

This raises hard problems. One of Laurie's objections is to grand ideologies. As she puts it, it doesn't matter if you're a socialist, a Blairite, a liberal, an anarchist, etc. What matters is whether you're ready to be be on the frontline, in the struggle. That's fine as long as the only issue is, how do we stop this cut, this fee rise, this 'reform'? As long as it's something as simple as that, then unity in action is assured. But as soon as things become more complicated, as soon as we have to think about whether we need unity with firefighters, tube workers, immigrant groups, etc., and as soon as the issue of more far-reaching social change comes up, there are going to be real, obstinate differences of principle which emerge. Then decisions have to be made. Can we still work together, and if so on what basis? Can we suppress certain differences to achieve a common goal? At what stage does the suppression of real differences become counter-productive, or even unprincipled? If these matters are to be resolved democratically, then we can't avoid traditional means of organising.

And here, it is worth defending the old hierarchies to some extent. Hierarchy, as Terry Eagleton once pointed out in his polemic against 'postmodernism', is not identical with elitism. It is, as much as anything else, an ordering of priorities and tasks, a division of labour, which is indispensable for radical political organisation. This is not to say that there hasn't been elitism on the Left. This isn't to say that all the old hierarchies are defensible. Sexism, racism and imperialism have been among the flaws of large parts of the European Left in the 20th Century, and I would be the last to claim that these have been completely overcome despite the civilizing effects that past struggles have had. But there is nothing about hierarchy per se that is objectionable. On the other hand, there is such a thing as the tyranny of structurelessness. In the absence of hierarchies structuring priorities, ordering tasks, and giving democratic expression to political differences, there is a danger that the sole structuring principle is that 'might makes right'. That is, whoever is best organised, has the most resources and is best equipped to usurp the cultural capital of protest can end up effectively dictating terms and taking it over, without being accountable to anyone. And if others don't like it, well, they know what they can do - precisely nothing. As slow and cumbersome as the formal structures of trade unionism and party conferences can be, they also have the advantage of that in principle elected officials can be fired, leaders deposed, policies overturned, misbehaviour investigated, and so on.

Lastly, and speaking from experience, I would like to assure Laurie that the role of newspapers is not quite what she thinks it is. Parties don't sell papers expecting that the dissemination of ideas in hard copy will by itself change the world. The newspaper is there when the internet isn't. The newspaper is a way of overcoming atomisation, giving complete strangers the occasion to stop and talk to one another about political ideas. You stand in a street, or in a workplace, asking people to stop and buy a copy of the newspaper not so that they will take it home and passively absorbe its contents, but so that a minority will stop and talk to you about what's wrong with the world and where we can go from here. It's a way of building up a network of real life relationships in a way that the internet can't yet replicate, much less replace. Those networks, built up through unglamorous daily toil, are the rock on which much larger movements are built. And that's only possible because of durable party and trade union hierarchies which have survived the locust years and come out ready for a fight.

Labels: austerity, cuts, education, education maintenance allowance, journalist, socialism, students, swp, tories, trade unions, tuition fees

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Imaginationland posted by Richard Seymour

Imagine it was North Korea, says China. Imagine it was Iran or Zimbabwe or Burma. Among scenes of 'violence', with police lashing out at protesters landing one in hospital with a serious brain injury, there is some shocking footage:

The scene: a mass demonstration in Tehran/Harare/Rangoon/Pyongyang/&c. The police are filmed shoving a 20-yr-old demonstrator with cerebral palsy from her/his wheelchair & dragging her/him across the pavement, to the horror of onlookers. Footage of this event is sneaked out & publicised. Accordingly, Iranian/Zimbabwean/Burmese/North Korean/&c state broadcasters cannot ignore it. Forced to report it, they stress, however, that there ‘is a suggestion’ that said demonstrator was ‘rolling towards the police’.

Oh yes, imagine. Hold your breath. Make a wish. Count to three. And enter a world of pure imagination. And now imagine if the chief of police in the capital city of any of those countries, having claimed that the protesters were fortunate not to have been shot dead, announced that it was planning to ban all marches against the government on the spurious pretext of ‘violence’ by protesters. Imagine this isn’t the normal response of capitalist states to dissent outside of anomalously stable periods of class compromise. Imagine that the already impoverished political democracy is about to take a nasty turn to the methods of the police state. Imagine… imagine… imagine…

Labels: education, education maintenance allowance, liberal democrats, metropolitian police, police, police brutality, police state, students, tories, tuition fees, universities

No confidence. posted by Richard Seymour

The Tories never had the confidence of many students. Labour lost the confidence of students by introducing tuition fees, and now has a job rebuilding it. The Liberal Democrats have just spent the last few months gleefully burning their bridges with students. Now it's fair to say that the NUS leadership has probably lost the confidence of the majority of students. Those who are leading the campaign against the fee rises and the dropping of EMA are now also pushing forward a 'no confidence' motion against NUS president Aaron Porter, which seeks to have Porter ousted at an extraordinary conference of the NUS. The motion cites: "His failure to call or even back another National Demonstration, his refusal to back up his promises of support for occupations, his weak stance on police brutality and his collusion with the Government in identifying cuts". It goes on to note that Porter proposed, and the NUS executive accepted, that the union would not back the main march from ULU; that Porter later stated that he was "not at all proud" of the main march; and that the NUS instead organised a separate, poorly attended candlelit vigil away from the main march.

These are obviously no small matters, and not the sort of thing over which one should remain obediently silent in the guise of 'unity'. To take one example, colluding with the government to identify cuts involved the NUS leadership recommending cuts grants and loans to poorer students as an alternative to fee rises. That is actively undermining the chances of the poorest students whom we are in the business of trying to support. Or take the decision of the NUS executive to organise a separate protest away from the main march on 9th December, and the refusal to organise for the main demonstration. NUS support could have guaranteed an even bigger turnout, providing resources and institutional clout. But instead it sought to undermine the protest. Or, backtracking on his promises to support the occupations. The occupiers are taking the lead in a movement to defend students, but their position is all too often precarious. They need legal support when they're threatened with eviction, back-up when they're arguing with university management, and so on. The NUS is capable of providing that sort of support, but declines to do so despite Porter's promises. Such dishonest, 'dithering', 'spineless', and undermining behaviour does not deserve to be called 'leadership'. So Porter should not be the NUS leader. We need a leadership that will throw its considerable resources and clout behind the mainstream of the student movement.

***

More broadly speaking, the strategy of the NUS leadership for more than a decade has been a complete failure. Let's recall the context. New Labour was unwilling to fund the expansion of higher education out of general taxation, because it was unwilling to raise taxes on the higher incomes, on profits and on other unearned sources of income such as capital gains and inheritance. This was a question of political will, as the total funding required to pay for the system's expansion over 20 years amounted to only £2bn, which sum could easily have been found. Nonetheless, New Labour retained the taxation model established by Thatcher, and thus had to find other ways to fund long-term public sector expansion. It relied on its faith in market delivery mechanisms, thus bringing in PFI schemes in health, education and transport (though these actually cost far more in the long run than standard public sector projects). In the education sector, it picked up a civil service policy of introducing fees, and replacing maintenance grants with loans.

The 'progressive' sell behind the fees was that they would be means tested, and only repaid by graduates on income. Further reforms were accompanied by an insistence that universities expand their repertoire of bursaries, so that working class students could get up to £4,000 a year if they were seen as being promising enough. However, as Ed Miliband has pointed out, it is actually regressive in the sense that more interest accumulates to those lower down the income scale, who thus tend to take longer to pay off their loans. It is also regressive in the sense that those paying off the loans on the lower end of the income scale will be paying more as a proportion of their total income than those on higher incomes. This is the quality that makes the highly unpopular VAT regressive, and which made the poll tax politically suicidal. And of course the bursaries system introduces a deliberate element of divisiveness, exclusivity and elitism into higher education funding, as only a minority can ultimately 'merit' that funding. It is socially engineering elitism, about which more in a moment.

There is an obvious progressive way to pay for higher education, and that's to tax higher incomes. And the level of increased taxation required to do so would have been negligible. So, to repeat, this was a question of political will, and specifically of the desire of most of the political establishment, as well as the managerial caste within the higher education establishment, to move in a more pro-market, neoliberal direction. Contrast with Scotland, where the fees system was eroded for years, replaced with a graduate endowment scheme, and finally abolished in 2008.

In 1998 legislation, fees were initially set at £1000 per annum, with the promise that they would not be increased. Then legislation was passed in 2004 to produce a 'variable' fees system, wherein fees could increase to £3000 per annum. The cap has subsequently been raised to £3225. In practise, most universities have charged the maximum. Vice Chancellors of universities adored this system of fees. Why wouldn't they? As the system became more marketised, their salaries increased commensurately, and all the horrible funding dilemmas that come with waiting for a reluctant central government to pay up disappeared. The tuition fees system has paid for a dramatic expansion of higher education - though in fact, the introduction of variable fees coincided with a decline in the numbers of school leavers entering higher education, first as a proportion of the total, then in absolute terms. So that, for example, in 2005-6, the number of students entering higher education fell by 15,000. Pressure from the managers of leading universities, notably the Russell Group, led to calls for a review of funding to increase fees even further.

The Browne review, written by a BP boss with no experience of the education sector, was initiated by Labour for this purpose. Its recommendations are the basis of the current reforms, which scrap the Education Maintenance Allowance for A Level students and treble the fees cap to £9,000. That will just be the start. Just as with previous reforms, the new system will incentivise Vice Chancellors to demand the right to charge higher fees. Fees will have to rise in most universities to at least £8000 a year just to maintain them at their current position, and a coming study will show that most universities intend to charge the maximum. If they want to expand, as well as covering the costs of the bloated managerial, PR and advertising departments that have already taken root in the neoliberalised higher education sector, and which will now expand dramatically, they will have to insist on more 'investment' which means higher fees.

***

Allow to insist once more that these reforms have nothing to do with fiscal imperatives. They reflect political priorities and convictions, which are simply assumed to be the common sense, and their products retailed as necessity - an example of what Mark Fisher calls "capitalist realism". These founding convictions are profoundly elitist, and are worth looking at. In the past, the education system was much more openly segregated at the secondary level, and the university system was reserved for a very small minority of people - 6%. But the higher education system has been compelled to expand to meet the demands of a changing capitalism. For British capitalism to be competitive in the global economy, it demands a more skilled workforce. A more skilled workforce increases productivity and adds more value, and thus potentially more surplus value and more profit. However, this was to be bought on the cheap, as funding per student dropped by 36% between 1989 and 1997. Thatcher had tried to deal with this by rapidly marketising the system, and abolishing maintenance grants - thus, education would not longer be a public good, guaranteed by the state, but a commodity traded between students and universities. The first successful abridgment of the maintenance grant came into being with the Education (Student Loans) Act of 1990, which introduced 'top up' loans to make up for the shortfall of grant funding. This was part of a wider series of reforms, taking schools and further education colleges out of Local Education Authority control, thus replacing democratic control with quango-based funding system, and introducing competition between different institutions for funding. New Labour took this logic to a new level.

But expansion also constantly conflicted with the other remit of the education system, which is to divide people into superiors and inferiors. It was a mainstay of Thatcherism that we should "let our children grow tall, and some taller than others if they have the ability to do so" - the 'meritocratic' justification for inequality. But if too many children should grow tall, that is taken is evidence of failure. We have constantly heard over the last decade or so that more kids getting A B and C grades, more getting A Levels, and more going to university, means that 'standards' must be falling. The employers constantly complained that this was making recruitment harder, because they couldn't distinguish between a surfeit of students getting top marks. The Association of Graduate Recruiters, which represents 750 top employers on this issue, is calling for an end to the target of 50% university attendance for this reason, while supporting the fees. They conclude that the government's measures constitute "the best way to drive up standards in higher education". The British Chambers of Commerce and the CBI have long articulated the same position.

In fact, standards constantly increase. If you'll accept a physical analogy, with all its pitfalls, just look through the records for 100 yard sprints, or one mile runs through the last century. You'll see that the time it has taken people to run these distances has constantly diminished. The distances didn't get shorter, ie standards didn't fall to enable more people to run the distance in a shorter time. Ability improved as technique, training and resources improved. The fact that intelligence is not a fixed quality like physical strength or endurance, means that is far easier for knowledge and skills, even those narrow testable forms of learning that examiners focus on, to improve rapidly over a period of time.

Smaller family sizes, better nutrition and a more secure environment meant that for children in advanced capitalist societies, potential for learning increased. On the negative side, more constant exposure to the sorts of competitive testing that serves examiners well, would tend to improve exam results without necessarily developing one's critical intelligence. Still, the evidence suggests that standards have increased and that this is the predictable result of long-term social developments, not of any ruse. It makes sense that as this process takes place, there would be some degree of equalisation in outcomes as more people get the higher grades that were previously reserved for the top 10%. As Danny Dorling writes, in his seminal Injustice, the evidence shows that "people are remarkably equal in ability". You have to work to produce social divisions, which means constructing and measuring intelligence in such a way as to produce the sought after bell curve effect.

The current reforms advance the trend of marketisation in higher education, but are also partially about redividing the educated to reproduce the old elitism. First, the major beneficiaries of these changes will be the 'ivy league' institutions. The Browne reforms are specifically designed to advance 'competition' within universities so that some will inevitably fail to attract funding and students. Thus we'll have a two-tiered, or multi-tiered system, and an elite will be created within the university system. Second, it makes higher education a much more welcoming opportunity for the rich than for the poor, having already deprived working class kids of the financial support needed to take the intermediary step between secondary school and higher education, that being A Levels. Third, it introduces a certain amount of segregation, making certain that those of the working class who do opt for higher education will be compelled to select a subject designed to maximise value and improve their returns, which will probably mean a 'STEM' subject, while the wealthy will continue to choose subjects that motivate them, and that engage their intelligence, at leisure. If you turn higher education into a commodity, whereby you have to calculate whether your degree is worth incurring £40,000 of debt for, that means you have to be sure to pick a subject that guarantees the most remuneration in a situation where the premium on a degree is falling rapidly, not necessarily the one that is best. There is more, but the cumulative result of all this will be to confirm the richest, who perform best in such systems, in their belief that they are uniquely, supremely talented, and the majority of the working class that they lack the intelligence and motivation required to get to the top.

This is a form of social engineering, deliberately producing elitism for the benefit of capital, supported by a prejudice that this is natural, efficient, and will ultimately benefit the majority by harnessing and rewarding the talents of the minority. If it is allowed to continue, then it will sustain a much more savagely unequal social order built on wealth for the few and austerity for the many. To respond as if this was anything other than a class conscious attack on the life chances of the majority, part of a wider attack that aims to obliterate a fifth of the vital public sector, is to miss the point. To connive in 'fiscal' solutions, as if that was the problem, or to lobby as if it was a question of evidence and perceptions, is delinquent.

***

Throughout this abysmal process, the NUS has systematically declined to inflict any serious political cost on the government. It has relied on a low key method of lobbying, interspersed by occasional demonstrations. It committed a number of MPs to support for its position prior to the last election, but this hasn't stopped the juggernaut, much less reversed previous damage. The tendency has been to accept the reforms once implemented, and engage in muted damage limitation. If anything, the only real countervailing pressure to the reforms was the limited wave of occupations and protests that forced university Vice Chancellors to oppose top-up fees, or prevented some reforms based on commercial logic, such as the merger between Imperial College and UCL.

The problem is that Porter, and people like him, are trained in a different way of doing politics from over a decade of failure. They came up in a period where neoliberalism dominated and shaped all politics. The assumptions of neoliberalism are embedded in the NUS leadership's way of doing things. We are told that markets work and militancy doesn't; that politics is about consumer choice and thus public relations and the media are paramount; that politicians respond to special interests, and thus lobbying and conniving is the way to make them listen; that elitism is both natural and efficient, and that the idea of a socialised, egalitarian system of free education is 'utopian'. And it's patently obvious from their actions that NUS officials have completely internalised all of these assumptions.

So, it's not just Aaron Porter as a president that is being rejected here. Students from across the spectrum are rejecting a way of doing things that has only led us to this miserable nadir. The NUS as the national organ that represents students must reflect this, or it becomes irrelevant. Given Porter's previous apology for 'spineless dithering', which I venture might have been an early attempt to save his skin, it's fair to say that he understands this. I also think it's a specific form of neoliberal politics that is being rejected. The students' slogans say it all: history is not over, there is an alternative. This protest movement stands as a self-conscious negation of neoliberal orthodoxy and the new forms of elitism and hierarchy that it has produced. It is a declaration of no confidence in the system, in the established parliamentary parties, and in the authorities. Given how little time there is to make an impact on this issue, we urgently need to establish a new set of protocols for student activism, and that needs to be reflected in the NUS. Hence, no confidence in fees, no confidence in the government, and no confidence in the police means no confidence in Aaron Porter's leadership.

Labels: aaron porter, austerity, cuts, education, education maintenance allowance, nus, students, tories, tuition fees, universities

Monday, December 13, 2010

Agents provocateurs posted by Richard Seymour

Interesting. Press TV reports the presence of potential agents provocateurs at the Day X protest on 9th December 2010:

[Flash 10 is required to watch video]

Labels: agent provocateur, cops, education, education maintenance allowance, metropolitian police, protests, students, tuition fees

Patrick Mercer vs Bat on student protests posted by Richard Seymour

There was good, frequently funny, debate between bat020 and Tory MP Patrick Mercer on Radio 5 Live over the weekend. It was predictably about whether 'violence' was justifiable in the service of protests. The government has just cleared the way for the use of water cannons, using the excuse of the mysterious 'contact' between Camilla and an unknown prole. But Mercer's moronic blithering suggests that the government's ideological position is weak, and they know it. It's worth listening to the whole thing - you know the Tory's in trouble when he strolls blithely into the minefield of the Northern Ireland civil rights struggle. Listen here.

Labels: austerity, capitalist crisis, cuts, education, education maintenance allowance, liberals, metropolitian police, protest, recession, repression, students, tories

Thursday, December 09, 2010

Mounted police charged at protesters (again) posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: cuts, education, education maintenance allowance, police, protest, students, tories, tuition fees

Can the government lose? posted by Richard Seymour

Okay, I'm working very hard to dampen expectations about tomorrow's vote in parliament. So in that spirit, let's look briefly at why the government could lose, then explain why it won't. So far, the signs are that Labour, and all of the smaller parties, will oppose the rise in fees. It also looks as if twelve Tories, and maybe three others, are ready to either abstain or vote against, or don't know. If all twelve were to vote against the government, then we would need thirteen Liberal rebels to defeat the tuition fees policy. Now, there's a number of Liberals whom we can be fairly sure will oppose the government. Simon Hughes has now said he may be among them, but will "definitely" either abstain or vote against. In one light, it doesn't seem altogether implausible that just over a fifth of Liberal MPs will stick to their pre-election promises, and therefore the prospect of the government being defeated hoves tantalisingly into view.

However. Bear in mind that the number of Tory rebels will not be a dozen. Bear in mind also that any Liberal or Tory who votes against the government is effectively voting against the coalition. Because if the coalition can't agree and pass policies when it has a parliamentary majority, what is the point of it? To defeat the government at this early stage could be to force the issue of ongoing Liberal participation and lead to an early election. And how many Liberals will want to do that, and face the electorate at this miserable nadir? The line from party bosses in both the blue and yellow camps will be to hold the line, wait for the heat to die down, and watch the polls get better. They'll say the economy will turn around in the next five years, people will start to feel wealthier, and the coalition will get the credit for taking the tough decisions. They'll say the vote on AV is on its way, and if AV is passed then coalition politics becomes a permanent reality in Britain - thus potentially making the Liberals kingmakers, even if they are reduced to 10% of the vote. But if the coalition is defeated now, the bosses will say, there will be an election and the wipe-out will not spare the rebels. And I bet you the majority of undecideds in the Liberal camp, all the potential rebels and even abstainers, will be whipped into line by that prospect.

Our job will be to sustain this momentum, prove that there's no magical turnabout waiting if they just hold the line, and ultimately to make them fear us more than they fear the knuckle-crunchers and whip-crackers in the party machines.

By the way, if you haven't already worked this out by now, you should be following me on Twitter on a day like this, for regular pictures and snippets from the day's adventures. I will, of course, try to update the blog.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, cuts, education, education maintenance allowance, liberals, militancy, neoliberalism, protest, students, tories, tuition fees

Monday, December 06, 2010

Student movement is prising apart the coalition... but it will take time. posted by Richard Seymour

This weak and nasty government is looking flimsier by the day. The opportunism of the Liberal Democrats has been much commented on. But it has also been pointed out that such opportunism is advantageous to us if we are the ones applying pressure. The Liberals are fragmenting. Charles Kennedy, Menzies Campbell and others are voting against fee increases. The Lib Dem president is voting against. Norman Baker may resign from the cabinet rather than vote for the trebling of fees. Simon Hughes has rather pathetically been pushing the idea that the Liberals collectively abstain, in one giant gesture of unanimous redundancy. It seems he will only manage to persuade a minority to do that, but that will further weaken the 'yes' vote.

Still, I would expect there to be enough outright Liberal support to push the policy through. There would have to be at least 25 Liberal rebels to defeat the fees motion given current parliamentary arithmetic, and that assumes that smaller parties take an anti-fees stance, which some - like the DUP - may not. There probably aren't 40% of Liberal MPs prepared to rebel, even over a suicide pact like this. It's extremely important to grasp why this is. Ruling classes across Europe, the Americas and beyond are determined to force through a general decline in living standards in order to resolve the crisis of capitalism. It's a calculated attempt to repeat the 'austerity' policies following from the Volcker shock, which - by redistributing wealth from labour and the poor to capital - stimulated a new wave of investment and growth. This transformation of the higher education system is one part of that attack, and this government cannot allow the precedent to be set that such policies can actually be reversed. Their mantra is that these policies are forced on them by necessity - which to an extent they actually believe. The pressure to force such policies through is coming on a global level, and the most powerful institutions in the land - including, as we recently learned to no one's surprise, the Bank of England - have been directing the pressure at all the major political parties. (Parenthetically, this pressure will only be increased as China's unsustainable public investment boom crunches against the barrier of soaring inflation, with the result that China, having added to global overcapacity, must now join in global de-leveraging and spending cutbacks.) States and governing parties have incredible powers of persuasion and patronage at their disposal, as well as ways of disciplining those who prove insusceptible to flattery and bribes. Every last resource of cajolery and coercion, seduction and instruction, will be being deployed over this policy. Given that, and given the calibre of most of our representatives, the education vandals will get their votes.

However, it won't be enough for Clegg to just about pull through. I reckon Clegg wants the Liberals' role in supporting the policy to be substantial enough for the party's ongoing participation in the coalition to be credible. This is the first of potentially many crises for this coalition, and my guess is that he is determined to prove himself a reliable ally who can continue to deliver his party, especially his parliamentary party, whenever it is needed. This is why Vince Cable has been scrabbling to find some sort of bribe to win over the dissidents within his shabby crew, including a fund to pay the fees of 18,000 of the poorest students each year (out of a total annual intake of just under half a million). Another encouraging possibility is that even a number of Tory MPs may come out of the woodwork and oppose the fee rises, as they've spent more than a decade making political capital out of Labour's imposition of fees. David Davis MP has been the first Tory to say he will oppose the increases. Another three made explicit pledges to oppose the fees before the 2010 election. The Liberals remain the weak link in this coalition, however, so it continues to make tactical sense to apply special pressure to them - without, of course, losing sight of the fact that this is a Tory administration and it is the Tories we are mainly up against. We shouldn't expect instant gratification. The coalition is already shaken, but it isn't going to collapse yet - and that's what it would mean if it couldn't force this policy through parliament. The struggle before this Thursday will be about how much we weaken the coalition, shake them up, blunt their future attacks, and soften them up for future fights. Bringing down the government is the right aim, and a realistic goal, but it will require a much longer war of attrition, and the intervention of much larger social forces on our side - to wit, the organised labour movement and those combined forces of the left and civil society which stand opposed to these cuts.

Meanwhile, we have another task: to reclaim the NUS machinery for the student rank and file. The NUS leadership has announced that it will not be supporting the march on the day of the tuition fees vote, but will instead be organising a separate candlelit vigil on the banks of the Thames. I haven't spoken to any student or teacher who doesn't find this completely laughable. Aaron Porter's apology to students for his spineless dithering, itself an example of the upside of opportunism, evidently didn't imply a promise to stop his spineless dithering. No wonder occupying students are calling for Porter to go. But it's not just Porter - it's the whole rotten executive, who need to be ousted at the earliest convenience. The NUS is a potentially powerful machinery, when it's not being used as a careers service for future politicos. It has to have its democracy restored after last year's stitch-up, and it has to be put back in the hands of a participatory student body. This is not to say that all our organisational efforts should be expended on 'taking back' the NUS. I think it's far more important to build up grassroots alliances at the moment, to unite all those militant layers of students who are occupying, protesting, and so on - as I'm writing, I've heard that student protesters took over the Tate Awards, and occupations began in Goldsmiths, Camberwell and Bradford. A durable grassroots alliance can provide an alternative locus to the NUS bureaucracy when it fails to speak up for students, as it will tend to do. But that still doesn't mean we can put up with an executive that wants to put the resources of the national student body anywhere apart from where students are actually going to be next Thursday.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, cuts, education, education maintenance allowance, liberals, neoliberalism, nus, students, tories, tuition fees

Sunday, December 05, 2010

Statement from UEL occupation posted by Richard Seymour

Public service announcement:

Friends

On the afternoon of Wednesday December 8th 2010 an Emergency General Assembly will take place at the University of East London (details below)

On the same day an important seminar on the politics of 'pain' in an age of austerity will be held at the same site (details below)

The following morning, a public seminar and discussion on the crisis in higher education and the politics and practicalities of protest will be held at 10:00, allowing time for all participants to convene with the occupation afterwards and to travel to central London to join the major demonstration at 1:00pm (details below)

for any further information contact J.Gilbert@uel.ac.uk
------------------------------------------------------------------

Occupying Students at the University of East London have called an Emergency General Assembly at 13:00 in the main lecture theatre (next to the library - Docklands Campus, Cyprus DLR) on Wednesday December 8th to address the crisis facing the university, as management threatens to roll out redundancies without consulting staff unions and continues to deny students democratic representation, as the voided elections to the students' union, declared illegitimate last Spring, have STILL not been re-run. UEL is in many ways a test case for the next wave of anti-democratic neoliberal managerialism across the public sector - so this issue affects all of us. All staff and students are asked to attend the meeting; sympathetic observers are unlikely to be turned away.

------------------------------------------------------------------
UEL Centre for Cultural Studies Research
presents
A Public Symposium: The Politics of Pain

8 December 2010, 15:00 to 17:00

'Pain' has become central to the discourse of the coalition government as it embarks on its cuts programme. The cuts are inevitable, we are told, and the pain must be shared in the interests of fairness. But is the pain necessary, should it be shared, is it really being shared, how will the pain affect the social fabric, and what are the psychosocial consequences of the crisis? This is the second seminar in the Centre for Cultural Studies Research’s three-part “Debt, Pain, Work” series that interrogates the discourses and policies of the coalition government. (NB: A full audio recording of our last seminar, 'The Politics of Debt', is now available at http://culturalstudiesresearch.org/)

Speakers:
Kate Pickett, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of York, co-author of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
Mike Rustin, Professor of Sociology in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UEL and author of The Good Society and the Inner World
Jeremy Gilbert Reader in Cultural Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UEL and author of Anti-Capitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics

For more Information and for a full audio recording of the last event in this series see http://culturalstudiesresearch.org/

UEL Docklands Campus
Transport: Cyprus DLR station is located right next to the campus (just follow signs out of the station)

Room EB.G.14
(Ground Floor, East Building, which is to the left on entering the main square from Cyprus station)

All Welcome - no booking required

AS SOON AS THIS SYMPOSIUM HAS FINISHED THE ORGANISERS WILL INVITE ALL PARTICIPANTS TO VISIT THE UEL OCCUPATION FOR FURTHER DISCUSSION OF THE ISSUES FACING THOSE IN STRUGGLE AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT'S CURRENT WAVE OF CUTS, AT UEL AND FURTHER AFIELD
------------------------------------------------------------------

Thursday December 9th 2010

10:00-11:00 (possibly carrying on a bit longer...)

The Crisis in the Universities and the Politics of Protest

Debra Benita Shaw (UEL), Jeremy Gilbert (UEL), Stephen Maddison (UEL) will lead an open seminar on the issues, and offer some practical guidelines on safe and legal protest
Room EB.3.19 (Third floor, main building, turn left on entering main square from Cyprus DLR)

Suggested Readings:

Raymond Williams
'Why Do I Demonstrate?'
http://www.culturalstudies.org.uk/WhydoIdemonstrate.PDF

Jeremy Gilbert
'Elitism, Philistinism and Populism: the sorry tale of British Higher Education Policy'
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jeremy-gilbert/elitism-philistinism-and-populism-sorry-tale-of-british-higher-education-p

Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey
'New Labour’s neoliberal Gleichschaltung: the case of higher education'
http://www.commoner.org.uk/07robinson&tormey.pdf

Paul Bowman
'The ConDemned'
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/blog_comments/the_ConDemned/

-----------------------------------------------------
Advice for protestors:

Comprehensive 'bust card' - info to carry with you in case of unwelcome police attention - here:
https://london.indymedia.org/system/file_upload/2010/11/21/303/bust_card.pdf
Useful anti-'kettling' tactics discussed here:
http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/3208
How not to get kettled...:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0jKvgS7olo

Labels: austerity, cuts, education, education maintenance allowance, occupation, protests, public sector workers, students, tories, trade unions, uel

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Day X 2 posted by Richard Seymour

I was just walking down to Aldwych to get the bus, thinking I might drop in on the protest in Trafalgar square and see how it was going, when suddenly I heard a loud roar and saw a stream of protesters coming down from Kingsway. That's Britain for you these days. You can't go anywhere without walking into a protest. Police were forming a line to try to gently guide the protesters back down the Strand and toward Trafalgar Square, but they were having none of it. They pushed through the cordon and suddenly thousands of protesters were dashing toward Fleet Street, laughing and cheering. I caught up with some of them and asked what was happening.

They told me that marches from a number of different universities had congregated near Oxford Street, proceeded toward Trafalgar Square and parliament, then - noticing the vast numbers of police vans and riot squad gathered in anticipation like a big neon spider's web - had decided to go off on an ad hoc tour across the city to escape being kettled. So I joined them. We first made our way to the City, marching and dashing, blocking roads and roundabouts, up to St Paul's cathedral, then to the Barbican, and beyond. Police were stretched thin, and only a small number kept up with us to keep an eye on the situation. Cries went up, formless hollering, cheering, whistling, slogans: "Students and workers, unite and fight!", "Tory scum!", "Nick Clegg, shame on you, shame on you for turning blue!" And so on. Bus drivers tooted, and office workers cheered. A lot of them were amazed to see us dashing helter skelter around their office buildings, as we deliberately took the march through some of the more obscure back streets as well as the main roads. We got a few taxi drivers cheering us on, and a few others driving a bit too aggressively into the rear end of the protest. As a rule, the more expensive the car, the more eager they were to be getting a bloody move on, and the more frustrated they were that they couldn't simply drive over this proletarian scum.

We marched back toward Bank with the intention of going to Trafalgar Square. I had received a few messages warning of the pre-emptive 'kettle' set up at Trafalgar Square, as I'm sure others had. Some of the protesters discussed what to do about this. I think the decision was to see what was happening, so we marched back in that direction anyway, not completely sure of our intentions. There was the possibility of dropping in on the occupation at KCL. On the way to Trafalgar Square, though, City police blocked the road suddenly with armoured vehicles. Christ knows what they were doing. Anxious to retain our liberty, we took evasive measures, running down a side-street toward Embankment. Police were rather put out by this simple tactic, having failed to anticipate that protesters could move in three dimensions. More tooting horns and yells of support came our way as we surged onto the Victoria Embankment and charged back toward the Strand. A cabbie with a wealthy couple sitting uncomfortably in the back applauded enthusiastically and pounded his fist in the air. There's a surprising number of people who like nothing more than the site of a good protest.

The set up as we got to Trafalgar Square was glaringly apparent. Police vans blocked off Whitehall, Pall Mall, and Charing Cross road, and a fleet of vehicles - including the aforementioned armoured vans - started to move in behind us. Row upon row of riot cops stood with a curious mixture of boredom and tension etched on their faces, expectantly fingering their riot helmets. They were waiting for something to happen, to justify the kettle, to start . But they had missed the point. The protesters had been marching across the capital for hours - cheerfully blocking roads, touring byways, bringing the message to workplaces and shops, and basically avoiding all attempts to shut down, kettle and freeze the protest into frightened timidity. There was nothing more for the police to do, as they had already been completely out-witted, out-paced and out-manouevred. And yet... well, wouldn't you know it? Hundreds of students are being kettled in Trafalgar Square even now in freezing temperatures. There's no reason for this. They haven't done anything illegal, hurt anyone or damaged anything. They certainly didn't 'riot'. But the police are exacting revenge, punishing the protesters. This is what kettling is for.

Across the country, though, the same combination of militancy and spontaneity has prevailed. In Cardiff, protesters occupied Lloyds TSB, then Vodafone, then staged a sit-down at a main junction. Thousands have marched through Brighton and Bristol, and school students occupied Oxford County hall. In Aberdeen, protesters took over the Conservative Association's headquarters. In Birmingham, they turned up at the council chamber and a number of students got in and occupied. In Belfast, Queen's University went into occupation. In Cambridge, school pupils and sixth formers staged a sit-down in the shopping centre. In Leeds, hundreds of students occupied again, although police have turned up to evict them again. In York, hundreds of protesters tried to storm the council chamber but, blocked by police, blockaded the main bridge instead. And so on, and on. More protests, more occupations, and the momentum behind this anti-cuts movement refuses to die down, even in the freezing cold and the miserable snow and sleet. And no one who has anything to do with these cuts can relax and think the movement won't bother them. If you're a town hall, a Vodafone outlet, a bank, a Tory HQ, a Lib Dem HQ, anywhere in the country, there's a protest, a sit-down strike, or an occupation with your name on it.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, cuts, education, education maintenance allowance, poverty, public sector workers, tories, tuition fees

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Students lead, NUS follows posted by Richard Seymour

As the occupations continue across the country, we've started to see a shift in the political leadership of the labour movement in this country in response to student militancy. Trade unionists have openly endorsed direct action, and Ed Miliband has already felt the need to declare that he was 'tempted' to speak at the student protests - which, lame as it is, makes a change from the 'invisible man' act he's being doing amid all this. But far more notably NUS president Aaron Porter has apologised to students at the UCL occupation for being "too spineless", supported occupations, and pledged the NUS' support for this Tuesday's action:

Don't underestimate this. When a Labour leader of the NUS, which is traditionally not given to militancy, comes out and endorses occupations (in however qualified a fashion), and feels compelled to support actions that it has previously 'distanced' itself from, and then apologises for being spineless, that means the most militant students are setting the pace. They are leading, and the official leadership is trying to catch up. Of course, there's no guarantee that the NUS will put resources behind Tuesday, but even their supporting it makes a difference. Aside from all this, I see that the Lib Dems are talking about 'abstaining' on the vote on tuition fees, thus remarkably finding a cowardly way to sell out. If Tuesday will be big, I'm confident. Maybe not as big as last week, maybe bigger, but it will show that the momentum is continuing. But because things are moving so fast, it now becomes imperative to act hastily.

There is an old saying on the left, about sudden upsurges of militancy - "up like the rocket, down like the stick". It's a warning not to assume that these explosions will sustain themselves indefinitely, and to work as fast as possible to build an infrastructure to keep the movement going. We have a profuse array of networks, we have anti-cuts coalitions (too goddam many of them), and we have political anger over the cuts that can generalise very quickly into a wider critique of society. But what is urgently needed is the material involvement of the organised labour movement. I know that there will be motions passed in union branches calling for support for the students, and the new leader of Britain's biggest union has declared his support for a wide campaign against cuts involving strikes. But really, the best chance this movement has is if the student strike becomes a general strike.

I know. That's asking an awful lot. But there could at least be a start in that direction. Think about what's happening to council workers, with section 188 notices being handed out everywhere. Think about the threat to teachers, with 40,000 jobs on the way out (meanwhile, Gove wants to bring bankers and ex-squaddies into the classroom). Think about the fate of lecturers under this hyper-neoliberalised higher education sector, with 80% of teaching funding cut. Think about the civil servants, whose jobs are already being shredded. The firefighters and rail workers are also facing cuts, which is one reason why the fights with Johnson and the Tories in London are so important. Even the supposedly protected NHS is shedding staff. There isn't actually any part of the public sector that isn't threatened by these cuts, and strike action isn't avoidable for most of them. They have an interest in finding and uniting with allies in this fight. If any one of these groups of workers were to step out with the students, they would get tremendous support. And the whole created by a combined student-worker campaign would be much greater than the sum of its parts.

Labels: austerity, cuts, education, education maintenance allowance, labour, nus, students, tories, trade unions, tuition fees

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Spontaneous, massive and militant posted by Richard Seymour

This is the striking thing. Yesterday's protest had almost no significant institutional backing whatsoever. It's been said, not quite accurately, that there was no left-wing organisation involved. I did see socialists, trade unionists and trade union banners present. To wit, I saw a Unison banner, I saw Billy Hayes of the CWU (looking a bit worried), I saw Right to Work and SWSS placards and stickers, and a few Socialist Worker paper sellers. I saw Socialist Students (that'll be the Socialist Party), and a few 'Revolution' flags. I saw people with loudspeakers who I'd seen at protests before, leading chants and so on. However, the majority of these protesters weren't actually mobilised by any union or party.

Most of the basic work of making people aware and getting them there happened through social media sites, and across the country it is estimated that 130,000 people turned out. I also heard a statistic which suggested that one in ten students were actually participating in the protests, but I can't vouch for its accuracy, and I don't know what its implications would be. In addition, 18 universities went into occupation yesterday. The point is that it was an almost spontaneous eruption of anger against the government. Watch this video to get a sense of the vibrancy, the joyful energy, the sense of purpose - all those qualities that normally seem redundant or perhaps over-stated when ascribed to a protest, but which capture yesterday perfectly.

"But surely," you're saying, "the NUS supported this?" No, it didn't. I regret to say that the NUS played no part in yesterday's action. Indeed, I understand that they had 'distanced' themselves from it. Aaron Porter's response when asked for his view was apparently to reflexively denounce "violence", blaming a handful of "professional troublemakers", while saying absolutely nothing about the police's violence. This latter included, for example, kicking a fifteen year old girl - that was Officer UC2128's contribution to state-sponsored child abuse, if you want to complain - and kneeing a boy in the groin before dragging him along by his hair. The police repeatedly baton-charged the young people, showing little concern for their age and vulnerability. This sort of thing happened all over the country.

And the kettling, clearly planned by the Metropolitan Police in order to make nice to the Tory bosses after their little embarrassment last time, involved keeping thousands of people, mainly young people, in the freezing cold for hours and hours without food, without toilets and largely without water. In fairness to the Met's PR department, they did give out a few bottles of water at the perimeter toward Parliament Square, but most people didn't see a drop. Finally, in the late evening (I was released at close to 10pm), people were filtered out in ones and twos, very slowly, and with prolonged pauses in between. Every now and again, as the pauses built up, the temperature dropped another degree, and the music got just a little bit shitter, the chant went up again: "Let us out! Let us out! Let us out!" People tried to debate the rows of jutting jawlines holding back the crowd, tried to engage them, make them see how irrational and cruel they were being. No dice. The cops have their schtick worked out for situations like this. They calmly explain that you're being held to prevent a breach of the peace, and then they go back to sniggering with the other filth. There's really nothing to debate with such people. The police also arbitrarily switched the exit point several times, adding to the frustration. Two teenage blokes were talking next to me as this was going on. One said, "there'll be a lot of fucking hatred of the police after this." The other, "I've never had a reason to hate the police until now". Similar sentiments were expressed over and over. And there was a particular passion when people sang along with NWA's "Fuck the police", and Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the name". The chorus building up to "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!" was vented with real gusto and vim.

So if people want to talk about 'violence', by which they mean vandalism, it's worth saying that most such small-scale acts took place inside a kettle, which the police controlled like an experiment with fucking lab rats. We expect the media to be hostile, but the NUS is supposed to represent students, present and future. Porter's crawlingly servile attitude doesn't reflect this mandate. It just shows that he's another careerist creep, probably the next Phil Woolas. But given the scale of what happened yesterday outwith the NUS' organisation, the latter now have to make themselves relevant to the fightback against the cuts. It's obvious that hacks like Aaron Porter have nothing sensible to say or do on this front.

Speaking of 'violence', the Daily Mail is leading the chorus of execration (I think they'll know the phrase and like it) regarding young girls being the new face of 'violent' protest. Now, of course there were loads and loads of young girls out there yesterday. They make up at least half the population of school students after all - the smarter half according to those tests the Mail is so fond of. But they weren't remotely 'violent', and the majority were too clued up to attack the 'bait van' - the police van left unattended in the middle of the crowd, apparently to get people to attack it and provide a pretext for the police's kettling operation. Most people knew perfectly well why the van was left there. And among these secondary school and higher education students, there was a serious, open air debate about how to handle situations like this. There were arguments about strategy, and most people concluded that the police had deliberately created a situation designed to provoke petty vandalism and then cite that as justification for kettling. The impromptu speeches, the small debating circles, the gathered crowds, all more or less repeated this verbatim.

I mention this because the news has focused on one young student who they say 'fearlessly' faced down the 'angry mob' and protected police property from vandalism. I suppose this sort of thing feeds their fantasy of good breeding facing down the oiks, and in fairness I don't suppose the student in question will be happy to have been used that way. What they don't say is that the vast majority of students were making similar arguments. The majority of people therefore deliberately neglected to break glass or even spray paint buildings. They sat down and strummed out songs by The Libertines, or danced to Rage Against the Machine, or argued politics, or rationed out rolling tobacco and bottles of water. Some couples engaged in longing embraces and snogged. Some kids had apparently heated arguments, shoved one another. Some were a bit silly. And since the media is depicting these kids as mindless hooligans, it's worth saying that the political arguments were wide-ranging and sophisticated. It wasn't just about fees, it was about the future - war, global warming, everything that concerns us as a species. It's not that everyone sounded off like a right-on socialist. No such thing. Some of the arguments were baffling, some naive, some perverse, but most of it was thoughtful, sensible, and streets ahead of what is offered as serious discussion in the news.

And that's what yesterday was mostly about - thoughtful, intelligent people, pushed to the brink, forced to take some sort of militant action, and by doing so providing an example to the rest of us. It's obviously time to make haste with the student-worker coalition that was vaunted at the last protest. The energy behind this will be squandered if the protesters are left alone to the tender mercies of the police.

Labels: capitalism, education, education maintenance allowance, recession, socialism, students, tories, tuition fees