Politics as usual has failed. Students must take direct action
Tomorrow's day of action is the best way for students to protest against higher education cuts and higher fees
* Michael Chessum and Jonathan Moses
* The Guardian, Monday 22 November 2010
The day of action called by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts on Wednesday may prove a pivotal moment. It follows the protest this month when an unprecedented 52,000 students marched through London to oppose austerity measures. Students of this generation are being told they must pay for their own education as funding is cut by a cabinet of millionaires, all of whom went to university for free. Students are sick of being lied to by an out-of-touch political class and of having their anger sanitised by NUS representatives. The momentum created by students at the last protest must continue.
The alternative offering – an NUS campaign centred on the "right to recall" Liberal Democrat MPs who break their promises to students – risks detaching the student movement from political reality. No such provision exists or is likely to exist for a considerable amount of time. And it ignores our strengths – that tens of thousands of students across the UK are willing to mobilise against the government's proposals, with massive public support behind them.
Politics-as-usual has failed, and students have nowhere to turn but to direct action. The NUS is grasping at straws because it has developed a lethargy for mass politics, capitulating in its attempts to defend higher education while it courted New Labour governments. If it fails to join the call for peaceful days of action like the one on 24 November, it risks becoming defunct as the central point of reference for student mobilisation.
And mobilise we must. The coalition's proposals represent a nigh irreversible transformation of higher education, and the commodification of knowledge and learning. Dressed in the semantics of deficit reduction, it has been easy to play one sector off against another. Yet, as a recent report by the Higher Education Policy Institute acknowledged, these measures will increase public expenditure through this parliament and into the next. It is ideology, not necessity, that ultimately informs the coalition's agenda.
So critics needn't have scoffed, after the last protest, that "serious discussion" had been abandoned for an argument about the limits of protest. This is exactly the debate to be had as the crunch comes closer for saving higher education and social democracy from an ideology bent on dismantling both. The protest on 10 November wasn't just about a special interest; it was a litmus test for the prospect of mass resistance. Little wonder, then, that the unions are emboldened. In this respect alone, the day was a resounding success.
Let us be clear: a smashed window is not an effective political critique. But protest has too often become a self-congratulatory performance designed to mask the concession of its objectives. The Millbank demonstration abandoned that script: it articulated real, broadly felt anger, and showed that thousands of protesters were ready to take part in spontaneous, direct action.
Dismissed as apathetic, our generation has suffered from unparalleled self-perceived impotence: its seminal moment, the Iraq war, saw the biggest wave of protest in recent British history – along with the clearest refusal of government to listen to it. What resulted was frustration among a growing and mobilised section of young people.
Our campaign believes there is a constructive middle ground between sanitised and formless anger. We must rupture the attempts to appropriate our so-called right to protest by those who would have it as a right to be ignored.
Whatever happens on Wednesday, the idea of mass resistance to the ideology of cuts has captured the imagination of a generation whose futures and aspirations are under threat. The protest of 10 November was a good start – the student movement must prove this week and beyond that it can give form to its emerging strength. If it does not, education will be vandalised – and it is lives, not windows, that will be destroyed.
Politics as usual has failed. Students must take direct action | Michael Chessum and Jonathan Moses | Comment is free | The Guardian
Politics as usual has failed. Students must take direct action
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