SALT
January 2012
After too many months of preparation, escalate collective’s new text SALT is available to download!
This piece, more extensive than our previous interventions, offers a history of the economic crisis of capitalist deferral particularly with reference to struggles in the United Kingdom
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Marching for Whose Alternative?
April 2011
We are not storming heaven, but being marched precariously close to the precipice. The Trade Union Congress is not our tool for emancipation – and neither can it be. Why are we being so skilfully pacified by ‘our’ institutions? We should see clearly how Brendan Barber, Ed Miliband and friends have steered us so neatly toward the cliff-edge. We might crash onto the rocks below, and in the waters that roil about them the TUC, transfixed, might capture a glimpse of its own continued social relevance. Such a shattering fall will surely tear us from our fond illusions. We would hope, however, that we can awake of our own accord. It is time to throw aside the TUC’s terrifying rattle of ‘jobs, growth and justice’. It is a rattle which never belonged to us in the first place, nor is it something we actually seek.
What happened on March 26? The official answer is clear: hundreds of thousands of ‘people from all walks of life’ marched for an ‘alternative’. Who in fact were they, and what are their interests? And what material recourse do they have against their managed impoverishment? Among all the cloddish asininities emblazoned in grim edible pinks across a million A6 flyers, not once does the TUC mention class. Its current agenda is one of banal inclusivity. It assumes the necessity of this programme (though of course it makes no public argument for it) on the grounds that it must build the largest possible coalition against state-led austerity. The official slogan is “All Together For Public Services”.
The public relations exercise conducted by the TUC and its institutional supporters has been intended to convince us that opposition to the cuts does not entail opposition to the groups who benefit from their implementation. Such opposition is difficult and antagonistic. The TUC urges us to forget it.
The media divides us as ‘trade unionists’ and ‘anarchists’. Some enthusiasts on the left have declared that the ‘political’ task we now face is the active unification of these groups, as if by the passion of our demand for unity we might solder together the broken halves of a mass opposition. But there are not ‘two halves’: the fractions opposed to ‘the cuts’ are more various than that; and they are divided not only by the form of their politics, but also by their content. ‘Unification’ will be useless so long as it involves the subordination of all political fractions to the ‘middle classes’. At bottom, the pre-eminence of middle-class ‘values’ is the pre-eminence of bourgeois property rights.
1. ‘The Demonstrators’
As is well known and lamented, trade union membership has declined in the last three decades. It was at 51% in 1975. At the end of 2006 union membership was 28.4%. Trade unionism hasn’t declined only because the private sector now makes up a larger proportion of the British economy, rather this diminution of membership is common to all sectors. Union culture in the UK is moribund. During the University and College Union strike, workers picketing the doors of university buildings found that their first task was to explain to students what a strike is. Repeatedly those students warmly declared their support as they crossed the lines to buy a Caesar salad or use the wireless internet. Even some of the members of the union seemed puzzled to hear that they ought not to be crossing pickets.
Knowing that the lives of its membership will be mutilated by fiscal tightening, the TUC organises in the knowledge of its own social marginality. The bland pastel colours and sugar-paper lettering of its promotional materials are the livid and desperate register of the organisation’s social insignificance. The abstract entities to which its slogans appeal (“everyone”, “all of us”) are a tacit acknowledgement of the real diminution of trade union membership. All those soothing images and grandly empty pronouns are a kind of self-denial: the more the TUC strains to come across as a division of Mothercare, the more plainly it gives voice to the dissipation of traditional bases of working-class power.
The TUC no doubt believes that it must reach out to the middle-classes if it is to direct a strong anti-austerity campaign. But since it isn’t willing to state this expressly, it instead tries to prove that the effects of austerity are ‘universal’. It therefore (like the Labour party before it) avers to the monumentally pernicious equation of a (partly fictitious) middle-class with the populace as a whole. Class is suppressed in favour of a specious universalism. Under the sign of the unification of trade unionists and the ‘middle classes’, the TUC subscribes to a thoroughly bourgeois hatred of social disruption. The ‘alternative’ – even at the level of rhetoric – becomes comfortable passivity.
Just like its propaganda, the TUC’s announced political programme of ‘universal’ benefit by Keynesian deficit spending is calculated to suppress basic social antagonisms. It does so by synthesising for its audience a vision of ‘jobs, growth and justice’ where ‘we’ all benefit – whether ‘we’ happen to be workers or the capitalists who exploit them. And yet not only does this image of universal harmony through state stimulated growth spirit away the basic antagonism between capital and labour, it also presents the promise of a state-administered recovery. All the masses need do is come out on the streets and mindlessly drool the slogans, and our benevolent fathers in the state and the union bureaucracies will do the rest. The TUC’s propaganda is infantilising; but in this respect it is the mirror image of its political programme, which is paternalist. Both are fetters on the development of an autonomous working-class struggle against capital – one which is for itself, not merely a charade.
For anti-cuts groups, effective politics will be won by refusing to agitate for a void called ‘everyone’. That void will ultimately always be substantiated as a middle-class impassioned only by the slumber of stable exploitation and routinised debasement. Where for working-class activists there is the potential for an intensification and victory in an ongoing social war, the bourgeoisie raises its flag to civil stability. The TUC salutes; the extortion of profit continues unchecked.
2. ‘The Anarchists’
Among those designated ‘anarchists’ by the bourgeois media (or ‘autonomists’ by the Leninist left), we can identify three broad groups. There are middle-class students and recent graduates (many unemployed), from various institutional backgrounds, recently mobilised by the 2010 student demonstrations. This category might be further subdivided to include middle-class students at elite Higher Education institutions, working-class students at ‘post-1992′ ex-polytechnics, liberal activist graduates, anarchist organisers, Trotskyist students, and so on. Second, there are school students, again of multifarious class positions, political dispositions and educations; finally there are committed, ideological anarchists, of various persuasions, all or none of whom may be school and university students, and separately employed, wageless, unionised, or otherwise. This is just to say that the categories are complex, imbricated, and in no sense discrete. For this reason, no one should expect all of these groups to assent to a common programme, and least of all that set out by the TUC.
Yet those engaging in black bloc tactics are no more the vital core of the movement than the small entrepreneurs whom the Labour party and the TUC so incompetently seduce. Thus the separation of the TUC’s march from the more radical direct action reproduced the separation of production and consumption in the economy at large. The black bloc runs up Oxford Street smashing windows screaming “pay your taxes”. It thereby expresses the contradictions of a life lived solely in the ghostly realm of consumption. Anarchism became the negation of shopping. Meanwhile, production plodded towards Hyde Park – and was duly placated by the confirmation from senior politicians that its passivity would be rewarded.
3. Direct Action
Direct action cannot always prefigure harmony. While we would like to have an activism which creates a positive politics directly, more often than not we find ourselves defensively engaged. Even when the palaces of consumerism are temporarily transformed into crèches and health centres (as in the manner of UK Uncut), the ultimate intention is not to force a permanent change of the space. It is to halt the smooth destruction of the welfare state, of pay and working conditions. In other words, direct action can (and often should) be a means – not an end. To expand: the direct action undertaken by anti-cuts groups is of a different character to their modes of self-organisation. When we organise in those groups we try to prefigure the world we want to see in our forms of co-operation – we have consensus-based meetings, we adopt specific vocabulary, we work to avoid accidental subordination of participants. Our direct action, however, is of a different sort: we don’t want to live in a world of smashed glass and burning barricades, but these are necessary means for political advance. The trashing of Soho is our ‘transitional demand’, not our utopic end-goal.
This is the source of a strategic problem which has to be addressed and made relevant to those engaged in the anti-austerity struggle of which we are ‘all’, it would seem, a part. The problem is this: for too long we have been losing, perhaps to the extent that we have forgotten what it would mean to win.
It wasn’t difficult to sense this on March 26th. Certainly the property destruction was on the whole politically well-targeted: we will never mourn for shattered glass in The Ritz. What is nevertheless clear is that the scale of what faces us will not be overcome by 100 or 100,000 well-intentioned individuals, or by forever pretending that our ultimate objective is a ‘just’ and well-functioning taxation policy. Inspired heroes cannot save us; ‘jobs, growth and justice’ by the abolition of tax loopholes is fatuous. Capital’s supremacy will not be dented by the symbolism of giant-puppets, or the fetishization of other struggles’ sites of resistance, whether Petrograd or Tahrir Square.
We talk not only of overcoming austerity, but of overcoming capital altogether. Capital is social and exists on a mass scale: our resistance must be likewise. Our strategies must be for total generalization. This is in no way an argument against radical action: it is an attempt to open a discussion about the exact form it is to take, and to understand the extent to which is can be taken. This means reconfiguring our categories of peace and disruption, and being prepared not to mourn the welfare state, but to physically resist the attempts made to privatise it.
4. Media and Liberalism
Mainstream media or web-based social media, the message is almost always the same: damn the violent, praise the peaceful. In the bourgeois press, blame takes on a domino effect: the reactionaries say that the TUC are a minority; then the TUC say the activists are a minority; then the liberal non-violent protesters say that the black bloc are a minority. Some in the black bloc condemn throwing paint at McDonalds while children were inside. Are these lines in the sand, or tiresomely voluble attempts at self-exculpation from a collective failure?
Meanwhile, everyone from Ed Miliband to UK Uncut name drops the Civil Rights movement as a bastion of perfect protest – despite the history of these movements being a history of armed struggle, in which hundreds of bombings took place in and around government officers, corporations and campuses. The sit-down tactics which supposedly won the fight are raised on a wave of foam to a decorative plinth. The memory of Martin Luther King is sanitised. Malcolm X is politely ignored. The suffragettes and anti-Apartheid struggles are also mentioned as great victories: but all these three movements have an eerie commonality: they all ended in registering the vote for women and black citizens, while underlying structural inequality perdured. Hypnotised by the mantras of New Labour politicians, who would even recall that the anti-Apartheid and Civil Rights movements were about black resistance? Or that the Suffragettes fought for women? As the movement stands, the tactics of both the TUC and the more militant protesters are less egalitarian, radical, disruptive or violent than any of the historical movements praised.
In the days after a protest, the arguments are worn thin; there is a constant back and forth over definitions of property, violence, thuggery, intimidation and tactics. The story-line is static. But what really lies thin on the ground is strategy. This is because the liberal discourse is not concerned with strategies for change but with spectacles of increase. A hundred thousand mooning op-eds pass for a political culture. True strategies for change are uninterested in contributing to the range of intellectual consumer goods vended from a rack. We all know the correct strategies of resistance: the disruption of the economy either by attack or withdrawal. But these strategies are unsurprisingly not endorsed by the bourgeois media, which, as it smears its blood and soil over its news and comment pages, does more than any other social institution to promote the kind of authoritarian personality upon which fascism has historically relied.
Opening the Sunday papers, “ordinary people” were informed that their moment to be heard had been usurped. Whose fault was this? It was due to the actions of a ‘tiny fraction’ of violent protesters. A small group of individuals, many of them already facing charges, are singled out and declared to be culpable for the continued suppression of the exploited majority. Thus spake liberalism, with all the reciprocity of the master baker kneading his dough into the tray.
The TUC, meanwhile, colluded in this narrative, not only blaming the ‘violent minority’ but lamenting the loss of media attention on the demonstration. As if it weren’t enough that those who wished to march were to do so under such meaningless slogans, and that they were obliged to accept the platitudes thrown down at them by politicians so far removed from the twin horrors of wage labour and capitalist unemployment, the greatest insult was yet to come: the TUC’s admission that 500,000 trade unionists on the streets was merely a media spectacle. On their command, workers perform some perverse waggledance to the buzzing B-flats of a vuvuzela, and genuflect before the queen bee, Brendan Barber. When protest is so instrumentalised, marching becomes servitude.
5. Political Freedom, Rights and Liberalism
The TUC, the media and our political rulers are the retailers of particular conceptions of what political resistance and freedom are. The TUC knows it cannot upset too many consumers of the bourgeois media; and the bourgeois media knows exactly how far this march can and should go before it crosses the line of appropriateness for justified grievances. Protest is permitted so long as does not precipitate change. We are allowed our ‘right to protest’ only to the extent that it doesn’t infringe those other, more pressing civil rights: first of which is the right of capital to accumulate.
A snapshot is in order. The rights of people in central London not to have their day disturbed; the rights of shops in Oxford Street to remain open every minute of the yearly 364 day trading cycle, according to the interests of their shareholders; the rights of consumers to continue consuming unhindered; the rights of motorists not to be discomfited on their journey through town; the rights of businesses to keep their glass fronts pristinely intact; and the rights of everyone looking on from the street or their armchair not to be too unnerved or disturbed by what they see. ‘Of course we recognise their right to protest, but…’. The qualification is a catechism. Protest must be limited so that other and more important rights might be preserved.
We are unnerved and disturbed by 364 day trading cycles, perpetual shopping, streams of traffic that go nowhere, and the brightly lit shop façades that line every street. Those smashing the windows know that the social basis is at bottom two things: exploitation in perpetuity, and the construction of the homo consumer whose ‘demand’ does so much to fuel it.
And yet this is the world of truly inalienable rights – here dissenters must be kindly accommodated, but the desire to change that social basis is legally proscribed. The demarcated route from Embankment to Hyde Park can be interpreted as a tantrum zone, where we all safely cry and scream ourselves to exhaustion. If our anguish and sorrow expresses itself too clearly, if we totter away from the designated route – we are all contained. The police know we will calm down; but they wrongly assume we will accept that mummy and daddy may have been right all along.
Increasingly, those in anti-cuts groups are viewing political protest and resistance as a matter of freedom, not rights. Our freedom to protest through the streets cannot be curtailed, and will not be bartered away in meetings at Congress House between the Metropolitan Police and a TUC stewarding operation. We won’t seek permission to protest in the ways we wish to. The rights that curtail our freedom of protest are exactly those we wish to abolish, because they are the natural accompaniment and support to the institutions we protest against.
Others have recently, and encouragingly, demonstrated their consciousness of inherent political freedom. At Town Halls across the country the mark of the institutionalised liberal philosophy that the TUC exhibits has been on show. Councillors, when passing cuts budgets, have set out small seating areas, limited questions, and allotted time for people to appear before them and petition their mercy. Many residents however have recognised this fraudulent view of their freedom and have refused to play along, in the same way that the black bloc did not play along on March 26th.
When, at town halls, people have found their way blocked by nervous-looking officials, or more frequently by the police, there has not been talk of local people’s ‘rights’: there has been action. Doors are banged and council chambers occupied. Whether storming council chambers is effective as a tactic is not the salient point. What is important is that people come collectively to define their entitlements, in direct refutation of the dissuasive invocation of economic rights. On Saturday thousands of people, who deliberately broke away from the agreed route of the march, became conscious of their own freedom and did exactly the same.
6. Criminality
When the inestimable Commander Bob Broadhurst says of the black bloc and other hoards of malefactors that he “wouldn’t call them protesters… [because they]… are engaging in criminal activities for their own ends” he provides for us a summary definition. Politics is articulated as action that occurs within the parameters defined by a state’s system of jurisprudence. According to Bob Broadhurst and his functional equivalents and media outlets, criminals may only act ‘for their own ends,’ because otherwise we might be forced to accept that criminality is often enough a political reflex to social conditions of extraordinary depravity.
The reality is that direct action has always been criminal. When in the 1960s radical historians re-evaluated the Luddite movement, they had to overturn an enormous weight of reactionary historical dogma. According to that dogma, the Luddites were not ‘doing politics’; they were acting in defence of their next meal. Because in capitalist societies politics is done by very well fed men who obey the laws that have always redounded to their current accounts, the idea that actions performed either illegally or out of desperate need are political is imperiously refuted.
Dominant classes will continue to dismiss as ‘crime’ the occupation of their buildings, the expropriation of their goods, and the disruption of the productive relations from which they benefit, and from which dominated classes suffer, until such time as they are overthrown by those who ‘engage in criminal activities for their own ends.’ Then the tables turn and the criminals become romantic rebels, fit to be reverently invoked in the speeches of Ed Miliband. The actions of the black bloc aren’t so different from the criminal acts of the Algerian teenagers who rioted in the Paris banlieues in 2005; but that’s because both groups understand that, in the face of capitalist institutions designed to legitimate near universal impoverishment, crime is the only means of redress.
Many of the political acts in which the militant protesters have engaged are simply the renaming of everyday, petty crimes. Tagging becomes political sloganeering, trespass becomes an occupation, vandalism becomes economic disruption. This is why the right-wing press so easily brands them as acts of hooligans, yobs and vandals. But we should have no need to legitimise our actions within the state-approved categories of politics or disorder.
Crime so defined will not on its own bring an end to the wage relation, but it is already political, because wherever it is performed, it opens our eyes to the institutional lineaments of capitalism. Close those eyes and the dream of ‘jobs, growth and justice’ continues. If we are forced to choose between associating ourselves with hooligans or politics then, so long as Ed Milliband represents politics, we should firmly choose hooliganism.
7. Policing
As the glass was cracked on Oxford Street, the state stepped in, in a blaze of violent glory, ready to save our national pride, our royal grocers and (our hearts swell with gratitude) our Olympic Clock. With tactics devised in the heat of colonial oppression, the police coerce, bruise, break, lie, taunt and corner. When they cannot, they coax, wheedle and arrest.
But of the 200 odd who were arrested, almost three-quarters were taken for an occupation where no windows were broken, and where little stock was stolen. Why? The strategy of the police is determined principally by the interests of capital. The protesters at Fortnum and Masons required heavy treatment because the economic damage done to that shop was greater than a smashed window (even if it took 100 people instead of one or two). The mass arrest shows that it is not the protest tactic of violence or non-violence that matters to capital, but the contours of economic damage.
The idea that businesses lose out significantly from a day of lost trade only confirms what we already suspect about the structures of capitalist production: that these glossy shop-fronts do no more than force-feed passers-by with commodities the demand for which is itself manufactured. It is not only the high-end outlets such as Fortnum and Mason that we can do without (the rich can, of course, drive up the road to Harrods to buy their bread.) The fear of proprietors and managers unfortunate enough to be ‘in’ retail is an unusual one: that if we restrict the sales of their trinkets they are left with a surplus. For the capitalist, a surplus is equivalent to a loss. But what does the consumer (whose sovereignty we are expected to respect) gain through the purchase of that surplus? For all of the complaints against black bloc, no-one has moaned about not being able to buy a phone that Saturday.
The TUC march, meanwhile, did no economic damage — rather, it perhaps contributed to London’s economy, with an influx of revellers and day-trippers flooding through the city’s supermarkets and bistros. The March for the Alternative was a carnival like any other, ready to be wrung for profit.
8. Where Next?
The 26th fades from view. In its place there looms the Royal Wedding: a new extravaganza for imbeciles, prepped for journalistic cathexis. Those journalists tremble with pleasure at the prospect of ‘anarchists’ crashing the vows. For militants who detest the creation of wretched, saleable spectacle, dates like this are irrelevant: the task is unification. But for most militants this just means that the grassroots mobilisation continues. Pace the bourgeois media, black bloc did not drop out of the sky and straight through the windows of Topshop; nor did labour militancy end in 1985.
Effective political action against the cuts (rather than against their decorative reduction) is and will be criminal, because at the global level the economic administrators have made their decisions, and will brook no dissent from career-minded state politicians elected on populist platforms. Within the structural constraints of transnational capital, there is no good alternative. Reduction of the structural deficit should be ‘spread over a number of years’, writes Larry Eliot in his TUC-endorsed pamphlet. This is surely not the political aim of those engaged in struggle against the government. If the anti-cuts movement becomes a supplication before state and union bureaucracies, then its progress will be like extracting communism from a stone.
For those consciously involved in the anti-cuts struggle, rejecting the greyscale ‘vision’ of the socially concerned bourgeoisie means participating in grassroots organisation and arguing for militant and illegal direct action (though, given the extremely repressive nature of current trade union law, illegality will not equal militancy). This means arguing for strategic blockading, occupations, shut-downs, and tactical destruction of private property. That base-organising trade unionists and local ‘service users’ are not yet ‘ready to hear’ all this is an order dressed up as a psychological insight, grunted by patronizing bureaucrats from the pinnacle of their stepladders. The tacit paternalism of their claim is the natural complement to the TUC’s argument that the ‘correct’ and Keynesian alternative to the cuts shall be administered by experts from above, and like that claim, it is fatal for an active and effective class politics. A better society will only be durably achieved by the creation of a mass class acting for itself, ready to commit to mass direct action, no longer confined to high-street stores on Saturday afternoons but spreading like a fire throughout workplaces and across national borders.
Alternatively, we, ‘all of us’, can capitulate to the charade of opposition conducted by the Labour Party and the TUC, as they plot to oust the ‘Con-Dems’ as chief executors of capitalist decline.
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This is Actually Happening
January 2011
Introduction
The delusional cries in the media that our protests are hijacked by trouble-makers are indicative of how complete our alienation is. The unspoken belief is that all disorder and disobedience must originate outside of normal society, as though trouble-makers are not themselves products of this same civilisation. We witness from within as the system blames its own gradual destruction on imagined external saboteurs.
Our seeds were sown well before November 10th and the timely destruction of 30 Millbank’s ground floor windows. We said at the time and we continue to say now: that was just the beginning. It was not where our genealogy stops, but where we begin to record it.
We are not a necessarily even a movement, as is so often put forward, but rather a manifestation of continuing acts of resistance. But what do we resist? If the recent renaissance in radicalism was not at root caused by deliberate, long-term alienation, then it was caused by nothing at all.
That radical agenda which the system of capital has forced us to learn is masked by the defensive nature of our fight. But let us be clear – this fight is but one grain of sand on the beach. We see clearly the blueprint for the whole array of attacks set in front of us. And how could we miss the signs? In protest virtually every publicly justifiable apparatus of the state is brought out to attack us. We are brutalised by police fists, truncheons, horses. Our ribs are broken to spare panes of glass. Our brains bleed to spare the lifeblood of the system – capital.
Meanwhile, our future is slain: public services abolished, prospects of subsistence decimated, and our friends, relatives and selves sold to the market completely, like packets of meat. On both fronts the media embeds itself with the troops of the market, rallying behind police lines, cheer-leading the violence against us. It is not about bad reporting. It is about a media which, by its very nature, serves to protect privilege.
We are fighting more than just the commodification and privatisation of education. Sure enough, the sound of doors slamming shut behind us reminds us of the doors which are being slammed shut in our faces: trapped while a privileged few pocket the keys and glue the locks. Trapped people get angry. Trapped people smash their way out. Anyone who isn’t smashing yet doesn’t yet realise how trapped they are.
We have been kidnapped by the privileged few. To re-appropriate the post-Millbank lexicon, it is society that has been hijacked by a violent minority. Recently we have simply lashing out, but the real way forward is to look for escape routes.
We will not sit in place while we are beaten. Crises do not follow scripts, orders, or statute books. We hence begin to fulfil the role that is created for us by the very system: we are the crisis.
1. Misrepresentations
Rather than being judged on its own merits and flaws, it is more common for our resistance to be understood by previous ideas and clichés. More often than not, these are constructed by ideas dominant in society. Such misrepresentations are not only inaccurate, but also dangerous for the ongoing vitality of that resistance itself.
Binary oppositions dominate: social media and horizontality, youth and insurrection on the one hand, are opposed to leadership, bureaucracy, unity and revolution on the other. We reject such misrepresentations.
1.1 One generation against the other
Of all the students who have taken part in the protests, very few will personally feel the effects of the fee policy they oppose. Our objection is political. We are less concerned with remuneration than the future of education in our society.
The press has insisted that this is a battle of the young, of a generation beating back structures that oppress them. Such an analysis portrays our struggle as individualistic monetary self-interest. Our arguments for free education are reduced to arguments for our so-called success, as if our aim is to live cheaply rather than to transform the means by which we are allowed to live.
We reject the terms “young”, “generation”, and take up the cause of collective politicization. We fight because we see our society being taken apart. We defend the collective for the collective, not as a generation for a generation or as an individual for herself. Many of “our generation” are not on our side and many from older generations are. Our enemy is class – a political enemy – not those who we will be forced to compete with in the job market.
1.2 Social media as panacea
The praise Twitter and Facebook have received is matched only by the compliments showered on a mythical young generation who have supposedly expropriated the potentials within this technology for radical means. We are made to believe that new technology is somehow linked to new life, despite clear signposts in the other direction: the prevalence over two decades of the internet in co-ordinating alter-globalisation struggles; the prominence of middle-aged men in the computing industry; the age diversity of those using web-based media.
For the press, youth is regarded as containing inevitable rebellion, with an inevitable shelf-life. Associating the student movement with social media is the same as associating the 1968-1974 movement with tie-dye t-shirts: the only victory can be further consumption, this time of web-based goods. For the press, an ambivalent success – for the movement: resounding failure.
Political organisations, which so often revert to centrism whether intentionally or not, frequently laud web-based media as embodying a non-hierarchical spirit. However, such supposedly non-hierarchical media turns out to have centres. Many organisations enjoy the perceived leaderlessness of Twitter and Facebook because of how clearly this myth masks the mechanisms of privilege and capital power which allow leadership to emerge when any network is left unchecked. Software corporations and PR agencies have entire departments devoted to astro-turfing and the countering of malevolent online publicity. Professional journalists and salaried unionists have the advantage of time and often resources to invest in their Twitterfeeds and Facebook friends.
All this is to say that the movement is not leaderless in the way that these proponents of web-based media would like to suggest. Those championing these apparent tools of horizontality are often, intentionally or otherwise, obstacles to creating a horizontal politics.
1.3 Illegitimate protesters
Time and again we hear pundits and activists question the motivations and backgrounds of those involved in the movement not to ascertain its direction, but to judge the participants’ legitimacy. Non-students are the most frequent pariahs of the journalistic fervour. While it is true that different social backgrounds and situations alter motivations, this does not preclude participation. Any attempt to divide the movement on this basis is a tactic of our opponents.
Asked how we deal with those who turn up to ’cause trouble’ at the demonstrations, the non-students, our unequivocal answer is: we are those troublemakers. We do not attend protests as students, but as parts of a politicised collective. For all the attention in recent years to identity politics, the identity that is most often overlooked is that of the activist, the protester, the politicised being. When we consider ourselves as such, it is not to create a clique or an underground, but to confess that legitimacy stems from shared forms of dissent, and not from a common economic or cultural ancestry, including that of studentship.
1.4 Reclaiming the Big Society
Much has been said about reclaiming the big society. That we really are “all in this together.” We reject these terms. We are not proud to work together for free in protest, and this is not a form of good volunteering; instead it is a fight for us to live with dignity in the future, to be paid for future work, and to stop current workers being undermined by people being forced to work for free. We know we are not all in it together. The financial crisis and the politics of austerity are not abstract and transcendent forces, but rather the concrete results of the politics of people within our society. For them to say “we are in this together” makes us all complicit. Our reaction is to say, “we, as a political collective, are against them.”
It is this act of collective politicisation which transforms the nature of those who go through such experiences. An individual may make a conscious decision, spurred on by the horrific betrayals of liberal democracy, to join a protest – but soon that gesture drives beyond mere reaction. What once seemed a conscious political choice becomes narrativised, and arguments for legitimacy fade into nothing short of the living act of democracy.
The common perception that our movement is legitimated by youth, young technology, self-interest or a form of radical lobbying is deeply misrepresentative. Rather, it is this process of continuous aspiration to become more than ourselves not in ‘real capital terms’, but through a process of emancipation from domination. In other words, it is a process of education beyond the boundaries which lies at the heart of occupation as a tactic, and the movement as a whole.
2. This is Actually Happening
2.1 Boundaries
Boundaries are permeable. We reach out beyond the police containment zone, our attempt to escape is our attempt to spread the movement into society at large. Journalists are let out just before they hold us for two hours on Westminster Bridge. We are reminded of the futility of tweeting from our smartphones when all the professional reporters have gone home. But instead of silence, we listen to our own chants.
In protest our biggest opposition is the boundary. We reject the boundaries of the lecture theatre, the separation of students from society, the institutions of privilege, the binding of subjects to disciplines, the lines on the timetables that tell us where to be and when. Boundaries are how we are controlled, and in occupying we aim to take control of them and to negate them. The metaphors abound, and our movement is attracted to them: we engage in modes of protest that lend themselves to poetic interpretation.
Virtual boundaries manifest themselves in the physical world. Receiving the legal notice of a possession order against an occupation, we find ourselves presented with deeds and blueprints. The perimeters of the occupied rooms are outlined in coloured felt-tip. The symbolism of the boundaries marked on these documents at that moment becomes a spectre of physical violence: the threat of removal by bailiffs.
This mutation from virtual to physical does not only go in one direction. The police line in front of Parliament or the Treasury becomes an integral part of a whole architecture worthy of destruction. The line becomes a boundary of the spectacle, and then itself becomes subsumed into the spectacle. We form our own line and so the process continues back and forth, between the spectacle of the boundary and the boundary of the spectacle.
The mass incarceration of protesters in Parliament is counter-posed by the fences put up to stop people getting in. Boundaries become confused. Are they to pen us in, or keep us out? It is not the particular boundary against which we rebel, but the idea of boundary itself.
For while it might seem that the police containment zone and the occupation are separated fundamentally – by the first being an act of unwanted incarceration and the latter an actively willed space of liberation – this divide is superficial. The spaces are different, but the boundaries remain the same. In essence, both rely on a dynamic of authority and protest. Our practice of disruption physically manifests the continuing assault of daily life upon free-thinking and the practice of resistance.
2.2 Police
We are constantly questioned as to why we do not use the democratic ‘methods’ already in place to ‘cope’ and ‘deal’ with dissent in a ‘democracy’. The question is ridiculous. We do not want our dissent coped with. We know the futility of letter writing to MPs, of marches from A to B, of lobbying politicians who all think the same thing; we want our dissent to smash through all this. We want to express our political selves, not be co-opted into a spectacle of protest designed to dim and blunt our free thinking. The state authorities are fully aware of this – this is why they seek to suppress us so forcefully.
Insofar as we express ourselves politically, the police are our enemy. As we seek a new society, they preserve the status quo. Antagonism is inevitable. In the English language, the verb ‘to police’ originally meant to develop land by cultivation. The police do not ‘police’ our protests: they do not nurture or facilitate our democratic expression. The police are there on our marches to suppress us.
Violence is of course their coarsest and most visible weapon, and on recent demonstrations it has been used with abandon. More subtly, however, the police attempt to suppress us through simple data collection: pictures of our faces, our names, our location and our political acts. When, via the police, the state collects the data of politically active citizens, treating them in the process as criminals-in-waiting, it expresses its preference for weak citizenship. The range of discretionary powers possessed by our state bureaucracies mean that the collection and use of this data is completely sovereign: we have no say or influence over what our data is used for, nor where it is stored. In this respect we are dominated.
The question most commonly asked of those who object to all this is, “if you’ve done nothing wrong, what have you got to hide?” The question attempts to make us deviant and suspicious. We are not to be trusted because we do not acquiesce to the state’s suffocation of our political thinking. The question could be “what are you scared of?” To that question the answer is, “we can’t know”. We can’t know because of the arbitrary and discretionary powers the state has over the collection and use of our data. For expressing our politics, we are monitored, “noted”, catalogued.
When the Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) aggressively film us, when we are only let out of kettles on condition we have our faces filmed, when we are arrested en masse in Trafalgar Square for breach of the peace just so our personal details can be taken, when police cameramen turn up to community meetings of environmentalists or to student occupations – when any of these occur, the message is clear: we control your data, and we control you. By protecting what is ours, we deny the state control.
The sovereign power that the police gain through ownership of our personal data is used to isolate us. It is used to divide us, to individualise our fears, to alienate us from our political allies. The purpose is to deter us from continuing to express ourselves; to incite us to become again what we were always meant to be, weak citizens, safe and obedient participants in a moribund service economy. Data collection attempts to coerce us into self-censorship; to make us think twice about attending demonstrations, to make us hesitate when we make the choice between obedience and freedom.
The police will, as they’ve stated, pursue an increasingly aggressive surveillance approach in its suppression of students in 2011. They will seek to isolate us and dominate us by knowing us personally. As they escalate against us we will escalate our defence. The more the police contain us, the more determinedly we will break their containment zones. The more they target the wearing of masks at demonstrations, the more we will wear masks. They’ve stated their case and their aims, here’s ours: we will continue choosing freedom over obedience. Our only personal relationship is with each other. We become free as a collective; we control our personal data. Anonymity brings us unity and strength.
Cover your face: today, we can do nothing as somebody or something as nobody.
2.3 Solidarity & Anxiety
We should not tolerate a version of solidarity more suited to hashes than clashes. Protesters ejected from open air incarceration often return to the prison. A thousand protesters break the police line on Whitehall; strangely they come crashing back into the contained area. The only tactical advantage is an expression of solidarity. The experience of that solidarity cannot be digitised.
Those students who remained on the outside of the occupations, and those of us within who constantly fretted about every decision and movement, share a state of anxiety. While the first group concerned itself with the potential repercussions of illegitimacy, ours, the second group, was anxious not to allow the legitimacy it had gained to slip away.
Such anxiety feels specific to every individual; but it is a collective emotion, and binding. It stems not from an individual situation, but a collective subjection to power. Alienation, apathy, depression, fear – these have always been the names of the mental states prior to politicisation. Anxiety is the next phase – it propels people into new spaces of containment.
The Situationists were already noting in 1967 that the majority of students were destined to become low-level functionaries. For them this was a novelty. For us it is an overwhelming and indisputable fact. The atomisation of the campus, the way in which our universities come increasingly to resemble the service industry – these are not accidents or metaphors, but active correlations between the world of work and the institutions in which we are prepared for it.
What were once seminars are now merely miscategorised lectures, ‘contact’ hours have diminished into minutes and academics have been ‘incentivised’ to prioritise their research over their pastoral obligations. Some staff are complicit in this process, while many others resent their transformation from teachers to tick-box service providers.
At the same time costs to students have been inexorably pushed up. Successive UK governments have gradually flattened the appetite among students for intellectual and political opposition. Humanities and Social Science degrees are now a mirage: they continue to offer their image of education for a life critical and vigorous long after they have become in effect training camps for ‘flexible’ work.
The crisis encourages the state to accelerate its programme of immiseration.
2.4 What the Big Society really means
This ongoing process, which only now acccelerates, has also already received responses. The demand from below has been against the language of business, and the romanticisation of management. The Big Society is this demand returned in distorted form: the bread is festering, the circuses are spinning out of control. Voluntarism is presented as an excuse for unemployment, tax breaks for the rich as liberty, and freedom from the welfare state as autonomy – but greater real state oppression. Less universities, more batons.
In the face of these changes, the state encourages us to placate one another, as we move slowly back towards the so-called horizon of steady growth under conditions of intensified social depredation. It calls the collective acquiescence to depredation community.
The universities are a test-case in the falsity of this rhetoric. ‘University’ is now a misnomer. Its two connotations, as a community and as something universal, have been rendered archaic and misleading. We compete against each other for grades and then for jobs. What we learn is now specific rather than general, particular rather than universal. The division of education into separate disciplines is identical to the division of labour in the workplace. We are trained to play a small part within the total reproduction of capital. Those courses that try to go beyond the particular, that try to understand the universal, to take the student beyond herself – the arts and humanities, interdisciplinary studies – have been challenged.
Education, once a by-word for transformation and liberation, submitted to the paradigm of post-modern work, is now merely a replica of those characteristics of contemporary capital which have become all too familiar: networked transience and homogeneous precarity. In the 1950s, ivory towers became concrete towers as universities were finally pulled from the seventeenth century into the world of capitalism, unleashing parallel possibilities of revolution and domination. Ivory towers became kitsch: even for those who study within their walls they signify history no more than a postcard.
Now concrete has been replaced by plate glass windows. The inviting ‘openness’ of those windows is a stylistic homage to the glass façades of banks and consultancies; in truth they signify openness to the customer, which, as ever, means those with the resources to pay.
Domination won out.
3. Manifestation
3.1 Rights
In practical terms, left liberalism has made of itself a spectacular farce. In theoretical terms it continues to flourish. The wave of occupations at the end of 2010 left us up to our throats in the discursive debris of left liberal slogans. Education, we were told, is a ‘right’. The arts and humanities are profit-generating ‘sectors’ of a knowledge-economy whose growth is vital for the national interest.
For the financier MP of the front-bench, this is divine music. In response he offers a sincere apology: he regrets what he does, but if any Higher Education whatsoever is to be sustained, he must do it anyway.
We remember 2003, when our protest against a war of imperialist mass slaughter was conscripted by the state as justification for that war. In the future, we were informed, the families of the slaughtered would be able to protest also. We are now subjected to a new round of rhetorical recuperation. Our “right” to education is suspended in the name of its “sustainability.”
No more conceptual games. The tactic of occupation is more advanced than the politics of the occupiers who, in their (and in our) efforts at self-justification, have too often yearningly invoked the ‘rights’ which, in Higher Education as elsewhere, have always been the rights of those with power and wealth to exploit and suppress the excluded.
The danger of our occupations is therefore not just their immediate impact. Those who have mobilised in the last months have no intention of contributing to an economy whose growth in ‘real terms’ is nothing but growth in voluntary servitude, more flexible and less remunerated. When the occupations ended, we marched out onto the streets. The process of forgetting began in that instant: but the effects on the subjects who were once within those walls remain. The occupations became past tense. The sense of liberation through rule-breaking, the sleeplessness and camaraderie, was transformed into something else.
3.2 Resources
Occupation has re-entered the political vocabulary. But for us it is also a new political philology. The tactic supersedes the empty verbiage of ‘rights’. In occupation, we seize a space and then hold open its doors. The space is in itself a valuable resource; and our occupation of it demonstrates that we intend to make those resources the possession of all.
Be under no illusions: this scares the management. If the university managers do not exercise control, they have no remaining function. The courts are on their side, the police are on their side. They are desperate less for us to leave as for the status of the space to revert to the sanitised, clockwork order of before.
It is well known that the proposed fees in higher education will change the “conditions of access” to higher education institutions. Once translated out of the bureaucratese of neutralised public policy discourse, what this means – what everyone knows – is that under the new fee-regime less of the poorest will go to university. Large numbers of young working class people think that the state is trampling their opportunities in its eager search for ‘savings’. In response, the state announces that it will be ‘listening to’ and ‘working with’ young people to find out how best to explain to them that they are wrong. For the government, this is democratic participation in a nutshell: the door which slams shut is pasted with welcome signs.
The state argues that fees are ‘fair’ on the basis that a university system financed by general taxation is not. When the state makes this argument, it does not mention (which is to say, it conceals) that low-income working people have always paid for HE, and that doing so has involved paying not just for teaching, but also for a decades-long programme of investment in Higher Education infrastructure: in research libraries, lecture theatres, seminar rooms, sports halls, residences. In the publicly financed Higher Education Funding Council for England’s 2010-2011 budget, £562 million was set aside for ‘Capital Investment’. The new fees will in effect exclude the poor from accessing this material wealth.
In occupations, the status of that wealth is contested. The process is quite simple. When we occupy a teaching space, we realise it is possible to participate in the composition of our syllabus without making a £9,000 per annum ‘personal investment’. When we occupy a research library, we realise we can determine who is kept out and who comes in. For the middle class students who resist fees on principle (and, let’s face it, there are many), occupation is an education in the material reality of property relations. We learn how the spaces we occupy are policed under usual conditions: but we also begin to learn at what cost.
In the occupations, we struggled to convince our peers that our tactics were right, that escalation was not “extremism”, or “radicalism for the sake of radicalism”, that we were not “going too far”, or “too soon”, or “too late”, or “in the wrong place”. The resistances we encountered from fellow students were, often enough, the index of middle-class anxiety in the face of real political antagonism. This anxiety is one of the collective inheritances of two decades of enormous capital expansionism. During those decades the relentless brutalisation of the majority of those who produce value was magicked away – by the outsourcing of production, by the ghettoisation of the resultant surplus populations, by the distribution of some marginal benefits of asset inflation to the middle classes. Aversion to antagonism has a social history.
If occupation failed to include more of the student body, that “failure” taught us how much work still needs to be done if students are to possess a political culture that is prepared for antagonism. It also did some essential work towards that preparation. The new open spaces of the occupation offer new modes of understanding. Democracy is experienced by many in ways they had never imagined. Working groups co-operate for a greater good beyond the meaningless and arbitrary production of commodities or predetermined social goods of the welfare state.
Dumbfounded by the cogs of our society’s machinery, we break things to participate: the rules, the law, windows, property rights, norms, the officially determined uses of public spaces. Breaking away from our timetables, from our work/play divides, we came together not as producers or consumers, but as friends, in real places, with real tales to tell. The university became both a target and a home.
We create our own bounded space when we occupy, but we create boundaries only in order to explode them. Where movement was previously prohibited to students we invite others in, disrupting the popular view of our ‘legitimacy’ as students. Nothing can be locked up at night. We feel like we own a space in occupation, but truly we understand the occupation to be a process we create. We don’t want just another classroom, or another police containment zone: rather we want people to join us and we want to join them. We risk the space becoming a fetish, and all too often it does. But when the occupation ends we continue our process on the streets and in the classrooms. We continue pointing to the boundaries we wish to destroy. All too often those boundaries follow us wherever we go.