[Peace-discuss] What's going down in London town

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Richard Seymour - he describes himself briefly below - wrote a good book a few 
years ago about 'humanitarian intervention' (The Liberal Defence of Murder) and 
here describes the events in London this week.  Given similar things in France & 
Germany, we can reasonably conclude that the Obama administration is acting to 
prevent the contagion's spread - hence FBI raids, border harassment, etc. 
They're worried.]

...Everyone was surprised by the scale of the turnout,
including the NUS leadership.  It was more than double the 'expected'
turnout, which was based on the number of people who'd registered to
come.  On a bad day, a lot of people who claimed to be coming wouldn't
have bothered, so the fact that the turnout was so high is certainly a
sign of something developing.  The character of the protest was also
surprising.  The kind of imaginative militancy displayed, involving far
more than a few 'extremists' no matter what the papers say, is redolent
of the anticapitalist protests of a decade ago, but with many more
people involved.  It looks like the beginning of a student movement,
which could be the avant-garde of the anti-austerity coalition -
provided the tempo is not dictated by the leadership which is an
auxiliary of, and recruiting ground for, the parliamentary Labour Party.

The background, as I've found from speaking at unis across the country
over the last year, is that the left - which has been on the backfoot in
campuses for a while now - is gradually beginning to rebuild itself,
including in unis where it wasn't even that much in evidence at the
height of Stop the War.  This revival pre-dated the Browne report on
higher education, and even the leaked disclosure of many of its
proposals, so is arguably part of a more general response to the cuts.
Some of the students participating in this movement will have got their
political training while occupying campus buildings over the blitz on
Gaza in 2009, though many of those will have graduated now.  Many of
them have been participants in anti-cuts campaigns such as Right to
Work, which has brought them into contact with people fighting their
employers.  I was surprised by the number of students and young workers
attending a conference of Right to Work last year.  And the majority are
in casual, low-paid work to support their education.  A group of
students I know all work in the same call centre, and have been trying
to get it unionised.  So, they're working class kids with a direct
experience of exploitation and confrontation with their bosses, and who
can no longer afford to look at their student jobs as temporary stopping
points on the way to a better life.  Graduating today doesn't mean a
good job tomorrow.

While the NUS wanted this demonstration be exclusively about fees and
thus a narrowly a sectional affair, the slogans and placards on show
evince a much wider awareness of the situation - in a word, the students
are generalising from their own experiences.  The statement by students
who occupied Tory HQ made it clear: "We stand against the cuts, in
solidarity with all the poor, elderly, disabled and working people
affected. We are against all cuts and the marketisation of education. We
are occupying the roof of Tory HQ to show we are against the Tory system
of attacking the poor and helping the rich."

So, to get to the point, is there a possibility of joint action?
Plainly, yes - but I have a feeling that the most important ways this
will happen will be in spontaneous actions outside of the official
channels of the labour movement.  The TUC rep got a good reception at
the demo, and invited students to join the national demonstration in
March - but it seems so inadequate, such a 'too little too late'
response to the worst attack on the public sector in post-war history,
that I expect students to find other ways of linking up with others well
before then.

-- 
*Richard Seymour*

Writer, blogger and PhD candidate
Email: leninstombblog at googlemail.com
Website: http://www.leninology.blogspot.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/leninology
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Seymour_(writer)
Book 1: http://www.versobooks.com/books/307-the-liberal-defence-of-murder
Book 2:
http://www.zero-books.net/obookssite/book/detail/1107/The-Meaning-of-David-Cameron