We present here a short documentary about one of the student-worker occupations in California, at the University of California campus at Berkeley.

Some of us who participated in university occupations earlier in 2009, particularly over the summer at SOAS, will easily see the contrast between the attitude of student militants in this film, and members of the SWP who were an organised force in occupations in Britain.  In this film, occupiers stick unrelentingly to their demands, including those in solidarity with sacked workers.  They are not afraid to make police break down the doors as the price for the university’s unwillingness to meet those demands.  They understand that the power of the movement is not in a careful retreat at every stage (and there are always avenues and opportunities for careful retreats for those who want to find them).  Rather, the power of the movement is in its dedication to solidarity, its militancy, in the “ever expanding union” to which it gives birth.  The solidarity with workers shown by the UC Berkeley occupiers puts the SOAS occupation in the shade.

In the future we must raise the slogan, better to be dragged out for something you believe in, than walk out willingly for something you do not!

(brief commentary by Joe Thorne)

A statement by students at the university occupation in Vienna. See here for an interview with one of the activists involved. This document was published early in the struggle but is only newly available in English.

The strike signifies the refusal of work, but in this case it means an enormous intensity of labour. For more than a week people have been organizing, coordinating, communicating, writing, filming, photographing, cooking, doing media work and much more.

The university occupations didn’t occur out of the blue. Rather, they’re part and parcel of many years of work done by students, teachers, workers and particularly by non-institutional and self-organized groups and people. They not only call attention to the grievances with the university, the educational sector, and social structures more broadly – they are generating analyses, organising resistance, elaborating alternatives and living them. Therefore they are constantly fighting for the time and space to realize this. Without the work of this multitude of people, the protests happening here and now would not be possible.

These events are connected to the worldwide development of social movements. In this sense what is being fought for is not only better working conditions for students, teachers and other university personnel – rather it’s a fight for better working conditions across all sectors and borders.

Importantly, we’re also referring to the working conditions of those who are not directly contracted by the university, be they cleaning personnel or scientists. The protests argue for the visibility of these working conditions, including all of the unpaid and badly paid work – mostly done by women – in the household, in the educational and care sectors, and so many other fields.

Society benefits from the knowledge that is appropriated and applied across those unpaid domains of work that aren’t accredited with symbolic capital. Alongside this an image of a certain type of worker is imposed – a highly competitive, resilient, goal-oriented individual, capable of performing specified tasks at high speed, no doubt without any incentive to question working conditions. What’s wanted is human capital, what’s wanted is performance indicators for the national economy. This is highlighted by the reams of badly paid or unpaid internships that are being carried out at the present time.

The demand to improve the conditions of work is not a demand for an extra 5 cents per hour, 3 Euros more child benefit, or simply more money for the universities. The demand to improve working conditions means fundamental social changes – it’s obvious that the current social order mainly produces exclusion and discrimination. Exclusion of minorities, be they migrants, people with special needs, elderly or socially disadvantaged persons. And they are exclusions, the cost of which is primarily carried by women. These exclusions are promoted and exercised by the quasi-democratic, economized, patriarchal processes of decision- making that dominate society. This also includes certain kinds of societies, such as the traditionalist patriarchal organizations (Burschenschaften – Brotherhoods) that find their host in the university. Fundamentally responsible however are the hegemonial patriarchal, sexist, anti-Semitic, anti-roma, racist, nationalist, conservative, repressive and quasi-democratic politics that prevail in Austria.

Whilst a large part of the Austrian mediascape has been belittling or scandalizing the protests in the usual manner, there emerges a wave of amazement at how transversal, persistent, strong and significant these protests are. We refuse the appropriation of the protests by the Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts – this movement is not driven by an avant-garde of socially critical art that happens to be compatible with the market. With these protests, we are fighting for a space that is also imaginable because of the historical and political knowledge generated within the universities. More importantly however the space of this protest is constituted by the experiences we’re making and articulating across the interstices of our tight study schedules and difficult working conditions.

What’s lived and demanded here is:

- the abolition of exploitative power structures and their mechanisms of exclusion
- the absolute democratization of all institutions
- the end of racist and sexist laws, labour market politics and educational politics
- the end of racist and sexist service economies
- the end of free-work and appropriate payment of internships
- the payment of services that haven’t been accredited as labour, such as Housework, childcare, and caring for the sick, no matter who is doing it.
- the acknowledgement of non-institutionally legitimized knowledge’s

We demand free access to the educational system for everyone.
We demand not only the end of the economisation of education.
We demand the end of exploitation in all areas of life.

Re*claim your education
Re*claim your body
Re*claim time and space
Re*claim your life

by Dave Spencer

The Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire (1921-1997) is regarded internationally as the guru of adult education.  Since we are concerned as communists with educating ourselves and with “raising consciousness” among the working class, then it would seem useful to look at Freire’s ideas.

As luck would have it Freire’s classic textbook Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) is not only a statement of the principles on which to practise adult education, it is also a handbook on how to build a revolutionary party.  There are many references to liberation and revolutionary leadership throughout the book.  One of the reasons for this is that in the 1960s in Brazil when Freire was organising Adult Literacy classes on a mass scale, his activity was very radical because only literate people could vote in Brazil.  In 1964 after the coup Freire was jailed and then exiled for his efforts.  He went to Chile and then to UNESCO where he influenced Literacy programmes throughout the Third World.

One might wonder why Freire is not better known on the left. The reason is that his educational principles contradict entirely the practice and the theory of the left groups. Freire stresses the vital importance of educating and organising from below. The life experience of the students must be the starting point of the dialogue and the mutual respect and trust between tutors and students – between the working class and the revolutionary leadership if you will. The “leaders” should go to the working class to engage in discussion and to be prepared to learn, not to impart ready-made gobbits of “truth” or the party line. “The revolutionary’s role is to be liberated with the people, not to win them over”, says Freire.

Freire calls the top-down method, used by left groups, as well as the state, “banking” education.  Charles Dickens criticised this Gradgrind “give me the facts” or “the line” method of education in his novel Hard Times because of its lack of humanism. To Freire there is no neutral form of education – it is either encouraging critical thinking and therefore liberating – or it is uncritical and undemocratic and therefore “domesticating”, i.e. encouraging acceptance of the status quo.

Contrast this to the approach of the left groups. For example, Sean Matgamna of the Trotskyist group AWL wrote an article “The class struggle is the thing” epitomising this approach.  He argues that with the demise of Stalinism and the movement to the right of social democracy internationally, the way is clear for real socialism to show itself at last.  His advice is to go to the working class and to the working class movement — not to learn anything, not to listen, not to engage in dialogue, but ”to organise it, to re-organise it, to plant the seeds of unfalsified socialism”. Exactly the opposite of the principles advocated by Paulo Freire! Nothing personal against Sean, but he is arguing for a top down, “banking” approach where the truths have already been decided upon by an elite and it is just a matter of convincing the masses. This is clearly an idealist position, not a dialectical one and is typical of left groups. Freire sees the class struggle as a process in which revolutionaries play the role not of lecturers on the rostrum dishing out pre-existing truths to the workers but of organisers and facilitators of a dialogue in which the day to day experiences of the working class in struggle play a key part. The class struggle is a dynamic process during which lessons are learned through discussion and practice, not by some formulae from Party HQ.

Freire’s principles are consistent with other approaches to broader education based generally on a cognitive approach to psychology. These contrast with more dominant psychological approaches used by the state, like ideas of inherited genetic intelligence and behaviourist notions of changing the environment to change behaviour. The cognitive approaches to child development of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky stress the importance of practical experience in the form of play, active stimulation and problem solving for young children, as against rote learning. As I understand it, these are the principles behind the “Scandinavian methods” used in nursery and infant education. For older children and adults, writers like Michael Apple, H. Giroux and J. Mezirow encourage the development of critical thinking in the classroom as against the regurgitation of facts.

A recent example from my own experience may explain the basic issues involved. I was teaching at the local university and one of the modules I was teaching was “Mental Ill Health”. The new administrator approached me one day for a word and said that he wanted me to break down my 10 week module into parts – quarter of an hour by quarter of an hour in the form of PowerPoint presentations. If I were ill one week this would mean some other tutor could take over.  Assessments of the students’ knowledge would take place in week 3, week 6 and week 9. As I understand it, this is very much what Freire would call the “banking” approach to education! I pointed out that I did not believe in teaching this way. I explained that among the students in my evening class at that time were a young man under medication diagnosed with schizophrenia, two paramedics who were used to sectioning people, a woman whose son had autism and a man whose mother was in the first stages of dementia. I said I thought the life experiences of these students were more important to listen to, to understand and to discuss than me giving a load of “facts” on a slide — not that there are many “facts” in this subject, there are conflicting explanations. Our dialogue would lead to critical thinking and personal development — which of course could be assessed. The administrator did not understand what I was talking about.  I think Paulo Freire would have done.

Freire starts with the oppressed and their “culture of silence”, “fear of freedom”, lack of self-confidence and their fatalism – but also with their wealth of life experience and culture within their communities. The tutors or revolutionary leaders, using their book knowledge, create a dialogue with the oppressed which leads to praxis — that is to informed and agreed action against oppression. Without this democratic dialogue there can be no genuine revolution. Freire is quite definite on these points:

“Manipulation, sloganising, “depositing”, regimentation and prescription cannot be components of revolutionary praxis, precisely because they are components of the praxis of domination…

“Revolutionary leaders who do not act dialogically in their relations with the people either have retained characteristics of the dominator and are not truly revolutionary – or they are totally misguided in their conception of their role and, being prisoners of their own sectarianism, they are equally non-revolutionary. They may even reach power. But the validity of any revolution resulting from anti-dialogical action is thoroughly doubtful.”

This is quite clear and uncompromising and I can think of many examples on the British left where these principles could be applied. The behaviours within left groups are not quirky characteristics of left leaders, as for example described amusingly by Jim Higgins in his book on the SWP or by John Sullivan in his pamphlet Go Fourth and Multiply, they are unfortunately consistent with the behaviours of the ruling class and can be judged as such.

I have dealt here with the basic principles of Freire’s work.  I have argued with Freire that any revolutionary movement can only be built from below, starting with the life experiences of the working class, not from the top down using theory used in a biblical fashion. The question of how Freire’s principles can be implemented in a British context is more complex, requiring further discussion.

Nathan Coombs interviews a participant in the university occupation movement in Vienna, Austria. See here for his previous article ‘The battle for free education begins’, featuring a video on one of the occupations.

Why did you decide to occupy? How and when did you occupy the building, and why did you choose the particular space that you did?

After years of exhausting fights between students, teachers and the rectorate there was evidently great discontent. One of the main reasons for this was a successive undemocratisation of the academy of fine arts going along with a structural empowerment of the rector. Even the election of the rector caused significant resentment and was followed by a state ruling that Clementine Deliss, who applied for the rector’s job, was sexually discriminated against, as she was not chosen although she had been the only candidate with a broad popularity amongst students, teachers and the senate.

Our goal was not to get stuck in political helplessness, which we had experienced for a long period before, but to take action and participate in political decision processes.

At October 22nd, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, the rector of the academy, signed the new development and financial agreement that would likely include the realisation of the Bologna process, including at this stage the institution of the bachelor-master system for the teaching department and the department of fine arts.

As a form of protest against the neoliberalisation of education there was a press conference organised by the students that led to the occupation of the main hall.

Besides the demonstration the goal of occupying was to overcome the lack of consciousness, to create a situation where information can circulate, where alternative concepts can be worked on theoretically and in every day life and to give a voice and publicity to the aims of students and teachers (who were in solidarity right from the beginning).

The main hall, which is the geographical center of the university, until then had been an underemployed space that could not be used by anybody except by enterprises having their festivities and Christmas parties.We occupied a room – or a room was taken – that was badly needed and that we did not have before.

Have you been influenced by the Occupy California movement?

We knew of the things happening in Santa Cruz and I can also say that they impressed us. But as the political situation – based on the politics of the last years – made this step necessary, I think we would also have occupied without knowing about the Santa Cruz movement. We have now established contact and exchange with those students.

Are you interested in making demands? Are these limited to education? How do you see student occupation movement in relation to wider political issues?

As our starting point was defending the contract between our university and the ministry, we regarded demands (against the implementation of Bachelor/Master, against neoliberalisation and economisation of the education system) as being necessary and important for our situation.

But we still are aware of the discussions and problems that are connected to making demands.

Our demands are not at all just university specific but are meant to show the broader social context connected with educational problems. This is not only part of our demands, but furthermore texts are being produced that deal with different social issues as for instance the kindergarten protest, the problem of wage-labour and precarious workers’ conditions, the marginalization and discrimination of people because of sex, sexual orientation, religion, ancestry… a critique of neoliberal politics, and so on. As an open space, the university radiates into society and is soaked by its outside. That is why topics of education politics can never be understood and solved without a social connection and an awareness of broader structures. And even the students themselves have experiences with discrimination concerning their identity as men, women, migrants, etc.

In the text of the University of California Santa Cruz movement, they described their position as “communist”– how do you take this? Do you associate yourself more in the communist or anarchist traditions? What do you think of the analysis in the Communique from an Absent Future?

Of course we read the Communique from an Absent Future and just quoted a passage today that I think perfectly fits the point: “We demand not a free university but a free society. A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison.” But unlike them, we are not bound to a specific political tradition. Although we define ourselves as politically left wing and there are anarchist positions as well as communist ones amongst the students, we think it very important to make pluralism possible. I am personally much more connected to anarchist theory and traditions but that’s my private approach and not the topic of the protests.

What do you think of the text by the French Tarnac-9 collective’s The Coming Insurrection?

I think that there are people who have read that text, I myself actually have read it. I would not say I am influenced by it, but at the same time I do not want to deny. But as I tried to explain earlier we do not define ourselves as a specifically anarchist movement although some of us would call themselves anarchists.

What has been the response to the occupation by students, staff and the mainstream press?

There was solidarity with the protests from the teachers right from the beginning that exhibited itself, for instance, by some teachers becoming active within the occupation, compiling the programme for the occupied room where we have different things happening such as workshops, talks, concerts etc. But the reaction of the press was radically different as they tried to infantilise the protests and define the objectors as lazy, beer drinking, partying, apolitical students. By now this has kind of changed as we worked very hard at communicating our theoretical demands, opinions and where we are coming from.

What is the future?

An end to the occupation is neither planned nor foreseeable.

By now we are in the situation where we start to realise the problems with demanding utopias – although I think that the only things you can demand are necessarily utopian. That does not mean that there is going to be a relativization of our theories, goals, wishes and demands but it means that there are many things left to be talked about and that there is loads of theoretical work to be done still.

The following piece was written by one of the Tower Hamlets College (THC) ESOL teachers who were on strike for four weeks until recently.  For context, it would be best to read our previous coverage – Lessons of the Tower Hamlets ESOL Strike – first.  The article is not current, though it has not previously been published.  It was begun at the end of the summer term 2009, has had a few updates since, and describes unofficial action taken at a training day, which included materials by educational theorist Lev Vygotsky*(whose work it is in no way necessary to be aware of in order to read the following).  The article shows the power of workers to make themselves unmanageable, and some real dynamics of taking assertive action at work in 2009.

By ‘Rachel’

Some local supporters witnessed an open air meeting of our union branch on Friday 3rd July where we had to take the decision of what to do on the Monday of the last week of work. Monday was not a strike day because it was planned as something more important. Teaching finished on Friday and the following week has always been a week of paid Continuing Professional Development – ‘CPD’ where there is a variety of sessions on offer and staff can choose what they’d like to do from a varied list of options including more practical things like learning new software programs or exploring new teaching theories.

There is now a professional requirement for FE teachers to attend and log 30 hours of CPD per year. A teacher who belongs to a radical discussion group who was there Friday told me that at his work place, the (entirely hourly-paid) staff considered CPD something imposed from above and seemed to consider it a victory that no one did it. This is very different from what we had at THC where we were paid well to go to relevant, interesting training sessions.

But this year with the new management in the counting down to redundancies and trying to force in a new work culture, we were told all 300 teaching staff had to attend one CPD session, ironically enough on ‘Differentiation’ which means catering to different needs within the classroom (something we do constantly by many methods such as preparing materials at 2 or 3 different literacy levels).
We objected to all being told what to do, this was entirely new in the history of the college. We also to the objected content of this session.

We understand the differences between learners as largely social; the professional trainer believes it is about a difference in people’s brains – are you a kinesthetic learner or a visual learner, or whatever. In fact, according to Pivotal Education, the trainers hired for the day, learners are apparently as ‘individual as fingerprints’. This chimes very much with current government thinking that conceives of learners as individual consumers of education with their own needs and goals and that teachers must cater to these diverse needs through Individual Learning Plans (long opposed and abandoned by teachers at THC).

So, as the battle shaped up in the 30 day ‘consultation period’ our brilliant CPD coordinator began, with others, to plan an alternate sessions for the day, mostly focussing on how to improve the good practice we have in the college and oppose the target culture. These sessions were bookable on the intranet and were of course more popular than the one we were told to go to. After a few days however our session disappeared off the computer system and we were told that there was only one CPD, had only ever been one CPD and we were all required to attend this. We continued to plan ours and told people to vote with their feet, until the SMT told us that if the alternate session went ahead the planners and those who attended would be in breach of contract and would face disciplinary measures.

So, during one of the one-day strikes we held an open air meeting outside the college where we voted on this issue: so called ‘option 1’ which would be to continue with our plans and face the consequences, or ‘option 2’ which would be to back down, go to the official CPD but not cooperate.

Just before the vote the UCU regional rep delivered to us the speech of ultra-left mythology: if you do this you will be breaking your contract and the union will have to repudiate you, the people planning the CPD and our local reps would be at risk.

Even without this it was pretty clear that most people didn’t wanted to take the risk.. A few people voted for option one, but overwhelmingly people wanted to abandon the alternate plan and attend the One CPD but try to disrupt it and make our feelings felt when we were there.

Later that day this felt like a real step back – although it was a relief that to know our friends and colleagues were safer, we worried that a retreat meant we would lose momentum for the whole struggle. A friend watching the outdoor meeting said he thought it was shameful – of the college management, the union, and us for caving so quickly and voting to do what management wanted us to do.

However, it became clear next week that we’d taken the right decision.

On Monday most of the 300 teachers showed up to the meeting wearing stickers printed with ‘Here under Duress’ and ‘NO CPD by Diktat’. We were sent into two big rooms, 150 people in each, and proceeded to show that we were not under their control.  In the room I was in, the tone was set by a teacher who spoke not ideologically, but from the heart: she said that she was not capable of participating in the sessions given what was going on the college – the wholesale attack on our teaching culture and countdown to mass redundancies. After that many people started objecting to the session, telling the trainer while we appreciated he had been put in an awkward position we asked him not to collude with management in forcing us to sit through the session.

The Trainer tried his best to keep control of the situation through humour, pleading and bullying but it wasn’t going to happen as he wanted. Management people and security guards were there watching but because we were so many we felt strong. Eventually the session was cancelled but not before we had received an assurance from Principal Michael Farley (by email on the interactive white board – he was somewhere in the building) that no one who left the session would be disciplined.

That was a great day. The trainer in the other room carried on and taught a small group of people who wanted to stay, mostly managers and wannabe managers. Many of the middle managers in the ‘scab CPD’ later came out and stayed on strike with us for the 21 days.

This was also the day we got to know each other a bit more. UCU at THC is two branches, one based at Poplar, the 6th form, and the other combining Arbour Square, Bethnal Green, the Ideas Stores and Outreach (community centres). The Poplar branch is dominated by the SWP and is a much more traditional FE Union branch. The Arbour branch is much more decentralised and less hierarchical; it also tends to be more practical and less bureaucratic.

We at Arbour teach mostly adults and have little contact with the 6th form. I had never met any teachers of the vocational options such as hair and beauty and motor vehicles. So when we were sat in the room with 150 others it didn’t seem surprising that people hadn’t gone for the unofficial action of the self-organised CPD; we have to communicate a bit and create solidarity before taking that step.

That same day we had a joint branch meeting where we voted unanimously for all-out strike …

*the training handouts for the disputed CPD session tried hard to be hip and quoted from many sources including Monty Python, Jung and Vygotsky, using radical theory for conservative purposes.

by Rob Marsden

Starting out

It is 16 months since Staffordshire County Council announced its plans to restructure education in Tamworth and 14 months since we launched an active and vibrant campaign in opposition to this.

Hands Off Tamworth Schools was born after a wave of outrage swept the town at plans to turn one of our five High Schools into an Academy, close one school completely and remove all Sixth Form provision from the remaining four schools and concentrate it on a single site, entirely in the hands of the Academy.

Queen Elizabeth’s Mercian School (QEMS), the school earmarked for closure was not a bad or ‘failing’ school. It was a well respected, popular and successful one. However, its central location and extensive playing fields made it a prime target for the bulldozers as County, together with the mysterious Landau-Forte organisation, drew up plans to locate a Sixth Form College on the site.

A couple of us parents got together and decided that we needed to start a campaign.

Letters to the press and an article in the local paper, which plugged a hastily convened meeting, meant that 35 people crammed into a room provided by the local GMB union and Hands off Tamworth Schools (HOTS) was born in August 2008.

We had three strands to the campaign – opposition to school closures, opposition to Academies and other forms of privatisation-by-stealth and defence of the existing school-based Sixth Forms and, by extension, the specialisms on offer at each of those schools.

The campaign was parent-led from the outset and we drew in parents, as well as teachers and the wider community, from all the local High Schools. From the outset we enjoyed very good relations with the trades unions in education- not just the teachers’ organisations but those representing ancillary staff.

Political geography

Tamworth Borough Council is almost entirely Tory, with just a three Labour councillors after a near wipe-out a few years ago, but retains a Labour MP – the New Labour lapdog Brian Jenkins. Staffordshire County Council which was ramming through the BSF plans, was Labour controlled (until its own wipe-out by the Tories in last June’s County Elections).

Clearly, there were no local councillors or other elected representatives we could rely on to fight on our behalf so we had to do it ourselves. Of course, we did canvas all local and County councillors and ‘our’ MP- sending documents, inviting them to discuss the issues.

In addition to public meetings, petitioning, lobbying etc. we held regular open planning and information meetings to which all were welcome. Each week we would go back to scratch, rehearse old arguments with new people, discuss tactics and strategies. It felt like going round in circles but it did begin to pay off- we developed a layer of people, a cadre if you like, able to carry quite complex arguments back to their schools, their neighbourhoods and communities and to address and counter some of the nonsense coming from County through the media and through their official publications and communications.

I had some initial expectation that we would find at least some local activists with some campaigning experience, perhaps people like myself- ex-members of the SWP or other groups, maybe some Greens, but essentially there was no pre-existing Left, no networks to tap into.

We did enjoy support and advice from socialists in the Birmingham area – in Respect and Socialist Resistance, principally through Richard Hatcher and education researcher at BCU and also from the Anti-Academies Alliance and some SWP members.

In the course of campaigning, we did pull together a hard core of campaigners some of whom were former or current Labour Party members which did cause a few crises of conscience in the initial stages of the campaign and later as the County elections loomed.

The first phase – making local waves

Inevitably, the QEMS closure issue tended to dominate in the first phase of the campaign. This was the sharp end in terms of the effect it would have on our community, the forced uprooting and dispersal of our kids, the loss of teaching jobs and the increase in the size of the school roll at the remaining four.

As a campaign group we were able to ride a wave of anger and also put forward the need to oppose Academies and the other elements of the County plans as well.

We were attacked as being opposed to a ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity to bring £100 million of Building Schools for the Future investment into our schools and we counter-attacked by making it absolutely clear we welcomed the money- but we didn’t want to see it Building Schools for Forte! The money on offer was tax-payers money, our money, and it should come without strings, it should be allocated to the existing schools on the basis of need. And it should be spent according to plans drawn up by local people- teachers, heads, governors, pupils, parents and the wider community- the very ‘stakeholders’ who were being carved out of the sham consultation process which always accompanies moves to set up Academies.

These ideas were eventually to form the basis of our alternative submission to the BSF process- “Putting Communities First – Education At the Heart Of Tamworth”.

With the aid of funding from the teaching unions- NASUWT (the largest teachers union locally) and the NUT and the goodwill of the GMB and UNISON, we were able to pull off a public meeting of 100 people in a major town centre venue.

We used this as a launchpad to go into the ‘official’ consultation meetings to be held in the five schools.

The response to the consultation meetings was patchy and most schools saw a small meeting, albeit one where concerned parents articulated their deep concerns to a County Council team which continually repeated the mantra that investment in infrastructure was required and raising standards across the town was necessary- as if by saying these two things often enough people would be fooled into believing that the former is not only a pre-requisite, but a guarantor, of the latter!

QEMS was different. It was big – 450 parents, kids and teachers. And it was angry, as person after person got up to take apart County’s plans. I’ve never felt quite so proud of my 13 year old son as when he made the first contribution from the floor, standing on a chair so he could be seen, and took the panel to task over their lack of consultation with kids and their trampling of his rights under the UN Rights of the Child!

The panellists who had come to sell the Academy, the ‘re-modelling’ of our schools and the closure of QEMS, were lucky to escape without being lynched.

We organised a march of 200 through town just before Christmas, followed by a party where children were invited to make Christmas cards with a message to the Corporate Director of Children and Lifelong Learning, Peter ‘privatiser’ Traves.  We delivered 100 cards to Stafford on Christmas Eve.  We later organised another march and public meeting just before Easter, which were both attended by children’s author and education activist Alan Gibbons.

The second phase – hitting them where it hurts

In May, the Labour County Council withdrew proposals to axe QEMS-  a small victory for us but there were no concessions on the Sixth Form issue despite widespread opposition from all the schools heads and the Academy was set to go ahead, with no changes, in the face of bitter union opposition to the unaccountable anti-union sponsors, Landau-Forte.

At around this time, the two main teaching unions balloted for, and won, action in all the affected schools. There was a withdrawal of goodwill, with teachers no longer providing cover and out of hours activities along with a number of one-day strikes and rallies.

This dovetailed with the County Elections which Labour were widely expected to lose heavily and, after much internal discussion, the HOTS campaign eventually made the decision to stand a full slate of six candidates at the County Council elections.

The aim was to force education onto the agenda as an election issue – which it most certainly became. The Labour Party refused even to mention its flagship policy on its election literature – not a word about Academies and privatisation, just platitudes about raising standards and one concrete pledge- to replace plastic meal trays in schools with locally sourced china plates! Radical stuff and I still wonder if they would have had the bottle to try to impose this bold socialist policy on the Academy had they not been utterly annihilated at the Election!

All our candidates were active in the town centre, talking to local people on Saturday afternoons whilst the other parties made scarcely an appearance. We also visited the teachers picket lines and addressed their mass rallies and got 33,000 leaflets out to every house in town

The Tories, sensing we could make a big impact in this lacklustre election, came out with a policy of their own to retain the sixth form provision within local authority control and under the governance of the existing high schools.  Of course, they reneged on this as soon as they were elected, adopting wholesale the current Labour proposals.

HOTS gained 10% of the town’s entire vote (matching the proportion of eligible electorate who have children at Tamworth’s High Schools). In some areas our vote was as high as 18%.

The future?

After the elections, with the summer holidays approaching, the campaign and also the teachers’ industrial action lost momentum somewhat. However, County has lost its most ardent champions of this particular Academy plan, the New Labour government is floundering and has lost the clear direction it had when Lord Adonis was in charge of schools privatisation.

Lobbying continues, with the unions taking a more direct role, albeit not in the field of industrial action. The campaign continues and we are confident there will be future flashpoints as local people see the direct and immediate effects of the loss of Sixth Forms on their schools, the demoralisation of teaching staff and little in the way of improved facilities or raised standards to show for it.

The October issue of our monthly paper The Commune is now available. Click the image below to see the PDF, or see articles as they are posted online in the list below.

To purchase a printed copy for £1 + 50p postage, use the ‘donate’ feature here. You can also subscribe (£12 a year UK/£16 EU/£20 international) or order 5 copies a month to sell (£4) online here. If you want to pay by cheque, contact uncaptiveminds@gmail.com.

we’re not ‘all in it together’ – editorial of The Commune

update on the activities of our network

tuc congress: an opportunity wasted? – by Gregor Gall

fragile livelihoods at cowley mini factory – by  Brian Rylance

what is the london postal strike really about? – interview of CWU reps by Sheila Cohen

gordon brown’s workhouses for single mothers – by Emma Gallwey

‘new’ tactics versus rubbish bosses – by Adam Ford

lessons of the tower hamlets esol strike – interview with two members of teaching staff

how we fought education cuts in tamworth – by Rob Marsden

on the necessity of pluralist communism – by Nathan Coombs

a letter from tegucigalpa: resisting the honduran coup – by a member of Socialismo o Barbarie

political report from the land of the haggis-eating surrender monkeys – by Allan Armstrong

electoral parties: let’s not put old wine in new bottles – by David Broder

a beginners’ guide to cuts – by Robert Kirby

platform of our communist network

Two workers who took part in the recent strike over cuts to teaching roles and student places in English for Speakers of Other Languages and other subjects spoke to The Commune about the lessons of the dispute.

Tell us about what unions workers are in, their organising capacity, and of their previous relationship with management

All teachers are in the University and College Union. Support staff/admin staff are mainly in Unison or no union. UCU has always been strong in the college and in the two years before the strike successfully campaigned to make 60 hourly paid teachers into permanent employees with higher pay and more rights. UCU also led an unofficial walkout earlier in the year to support our longstanding caretaker who was sacked.

What cuts were proposed?

The original Securing the Future document proposed 40 full time jobs and 1000 ESOL places cut, as well as a general attack on our conditions and contracts, which had been quite good.

How did the campaign against the cuts begin?

Before the document was issued we’d already had an indicative ballot for industrial action based on suggestions that we’d be facing compulsory redundancies. This saved us crucial time as the ballot process is so lengthy. We were officially balloted a couple of weeks later. The campaign began immediately as everyone’s classes became campaigning ground, with teachers and students creating materials relating to the cuts, writing letters, discussing, and spreading the word. It was a creative and exciting time with masses of participation, ideas, actions including:

« Unofficial walkout on one site

« Community demonstration

« Two one-day strikes

« Mass rebellion of 250 teachers against imposed staff training: corporate trainers forced to flee the college

The campaign began to focus more on the 13 jobs remaining at risk after 25 people took voluntary redundancy. Casework began to defend individuals who had been selected through a punitive performance-related scoring matrix for redundancy.

Negotiations were ongoing during this time but were characterised by complete intransigence by Principal Michael Farley who refused to extend the 30 day consultation process to allow alternatives to be considered. Union reps put forward detailed suggestions on money-saving but it was clear that Farley did not explore other cost-cutting measures because the process was designed to ensure that there would be compulsory redundancies at the end. There was never a serious irresolvable financial crisis; there were funding cuts, but they exploited these in order to try to destroy the power of the union.

What actions were undertaken over the summer?

Very little happened over the summer because teachers go away. Some people in London met and began to plan for pickets. We found a strike headquarters at London Action Resource Centre (LARC) in Whitechapel.

Indefinite strikes are very rare – how was the decision to take this course of action made?

Farley had planned the thing so as to make strike action impossible – the 30 day countdown to mass redundancies at the end of the year meant that we couldn’t get a strike ballot together in time to make a meaningful withdrawal of labour (the end of term is trips and parties).

It felt like a real stitch up because the next striking possibility was September when people would have already been sacked. After meeting and discussing (the one day strikes were discussing across sites) we realised that there was a huge opportunity to threaten strike action in enrolment week. We held a union meeting directly after the teachers’ revolt over training and it was at this meeting where we voted unanimously to go on all out strike in the most strategically important time of the year for the college-enrolment week (funding is based on student enrolments). We may not have been able to make the decision without the strength and solidarity created during the training revolt.

What was the mood at the start of the strike?

Fantastic. People were immediately mobilised into action. Everyone came out to the picket lines – not only the usual activists. Autonomous activity was undertaken by all sorts of people carving out roles in publicity, fundraising, artwork, meetings, leaflet writing, picket line, communicating with students, translating leaflets, organisation and so on.

How solid were the pickets, and to what extent was support mobilised among other workers and from students?

Pickets were solid across the three sites. At our site the very few scabs came out with us after a few days. Middle managers were also on strike for the duration. Students stood with us on the picket lines and gave their full support (we’ve started teaching again now and the support and solidarity continues to be amazing). As for other workers in the college, individuals helped us many small and large ways and that help was so key to the morale on the picket line. We could have done more to work with Unison who are not well organised in the college.

How was the strike organised?

Although there was initial agreement that were would have daily strike committee meetings, in fact the two branches organised themselves in very different ways. Poplar organised on the basis of picket line meetings. This branch is a more traditional branch with Socialist Workers Party members in the key positions. Their strike was based around relentless fundraising and delegation work with little time for discussion. The Arbour/Bethnal Green Centre branch has for years had a decentralised, anti-hierarchical organisation and a focus on real local issues. There is also a culture of discussion and involvement by members. One of the many things that inspired us during the strike were the daily strike committee meetings where issues were brought to the meeting for discussion. The many action points arising from the meetings were taken away and reported back on or further discussed. The effect of this was effective action underpinned by a deep collective understanding and commitment. Each issue that was thrashed out with whoever was there made us stronger.

Did you perceive the strike as losing momentum?

No, the strike got stronger over time. The Poplar reps who came to the strike committee meetings said weekly (from the first week!) said repeatedly that their members did not want to stay out much longer and were starting to drift back to work. This was puzzling to us from other sites because, although there were more scabs at that site, at each weekly mass meeting there was the same huge vote (150+ people) to stay out, and there seemed to be little difference in the strength of feeling between the two sites. Certainly the Poplar reps were pushing for a settlement much earlier than anyone else and it seemed to us that this didn’t reflect the feelings of the strikers, but we didn’t spend enough time over there so we don’t know for sure.  There was the same mass vote to stay out two days before we heard about the settlement deal. Definitely people were feeling like we were getting near the end – financially of course it was so hard on people, and there was more talk about people ‘worrying about their students’ and so forth but people wanted to see it through until we got a decent deal. There were still loads of people on the picket lines and being active in other ways. Striking ESOL tutors had started teaching free ‘solidarity’ classes in community centres. On the day of the final meeting some of us had been on a demo/banner drop action in the City to put pressure on a College Governor. There were busking dates and gigs and delegations being organised. There was loads going on.

Those of us in the minority who voted against accepting the offer didn’t think we would be out for ages more, but we thought we could have done better. Even going back to work on the following Monday would have made us feel a lot stronger than dancing to Farley’s tune and starting work on the Friday.

We still don’t understand what the strategy was for the Poplar reps and how similar or different it was from the national union. The UCU negotiator Barry Lovejoy had indicated in the summer that he thought it would be all over in first week, if we even had to strike at all. He also apparently said that strikes are won or lost by four weeks so at the time we took that to mean that we couldn’t expect strike pay after this time and sure enough, the strike ended after four weeks.

How did the strike come to an end?

The so-called victory is that there are no compulsory redundancies. Instead the 13 at risk were re-deployed or won appeals or have accepted so-called voluntary redundancy.

There was no withdrawal of the threat of compulsory redundancy.

There has been no agreement that there will be no further compulsory redundancies, or any other agreement about honouring our existing terms and conditions.

Through threats and bribes some of the compulsory redundancies have been re-named as voluntary. The pressure came both from management and from the union. Both national and local officials phoned up people at risk and told them they should take so-called voluntary redundancy. Two days before the Acas ‘breakthrough’ our mass meeting had affirmed that, it was clear that though most people wanted the strike to be over soon, we were prepared to see it through in order to protect these people, and these people were not under pressure to accept a deal.

The agreement states that compulsory redundancies have been avoided and this is the “victory” that the UCU, the SWP etc are crowing about. In fact there have been compulsory “voluntary” redundancies – people have been bullied into accepting “voluntary” redundancy.

This deal was sold through with the most outrageous manipulation of the mass meeting where discussion was suppressed before and during the meeting as far as possible, with members being shouted down by union officials.

In the short time there was for debate, many people spoke against accepting the deal but in the end there were 24 votes against, many abstentions and the clear majority voting to accept and go back to work (though the meeting was of course smaller than our usual weekly meetings).

What is the mood among the ESOL staff now?

Ready to fight the battles that we’ve got to fight, but also ware of opportunities lost in the strike – maybe we could have saved more courses. Definitely ready to take on the management over day to day issues – this is already happening with good results.

Students at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) have begun an occupation in protest at the slashing of services and jobs in the state. The current economic crisis has given the state government reason to carry out an ideological war on public services, and the occupation intends to resist such attacks: however, students are also engaged in a more thoroughgoing critique of how education is organised. One example of this is the recently published ‘Communiqué from an Absent Future‘, calling for such occupations, which we reproduce below.

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt. This bankruptcy is not only financial. It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making. No one knows what the university is for anymore. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university. Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties. We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments. Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt. The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.

For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities. Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.

But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.

It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume—a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives. What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest. Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.

This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since grade-school. Those of us who came here to have our privilege notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile. No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the cattle prod of parental admonition. On the other hand, those of us who came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take our place—that the logic here is zero-sum. And anyway, socioeconomic status remains the best predictor of student achievement. Those of us the demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of color” have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit. But we know we are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because of them. And we know that the circuits through which we might free ourselves from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery of the past in the present for others, elsewhere.

If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience. First we pay, then we “work hard.” And there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded, consumer and consumed. It is the system itself which one obeys, the cold buildings that enforce subservience. Those who teach are treated with all the respect of an automated messaging system. Only the logic of customer satisfaction obtains here: was the course easy? Was the teacher hot? Could any stupid asshole get an A? What’s the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes? Who needs memory when we have the internet? A training in thought? You can’t be serious. A moral preparation? There are anti-depressants for that.

Meanwhile the graduate students, supposedly the most politically enlightened among us, are also the most obedient. The “vocation” for which they labor is nothing other than a fantasy of falling off the grid, or out of the labor market. Every grad student is a would be Robinson Crusoe, dreaming of an island economy subtracted from the exigencies of the market. But this fantasy is itself sustained through an unremitting submission to the market. There is no longer the least felt contradiction in teaching a totalizing critique of capitalism by day and polishing one’s job talk by night. That our pleasure is our labor only makes our symptoms more manageable. Aesthetics and politics collapse courtesy of the substitution of ideology for history: booze and beaux arts and another seminar on the question of being, the steady blur of typeface, each pixel paid for by somebody somewhere, some not-me, not-here, where all that appears is good and all goods appear attainable by credit.

Graduate school is simply the faded remnant of a feudal system adapted to the logic of capitalism—from the commanding heights of the star professors to the serried ranks of teaching assistants and adjuncts paid mostly in bad faith. A kind of monasticism predominates here, with all the Gothic rituals of a Benedictine abbey, and all the strange theological claims for the nobility of this work, its essential altruism. The underlings are only too happy to play apprentice to the masters, unable to do the math indicating that nine-tenths of us will teach 4 courses every semester to pad the paychecks of the one-tenth who sustain the fiction that we can all be the one. Of course I will be the star, I will get the tenure-track job in a large city and move into a newly gentrified neighborhood.

We end up interpreting Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” At best, we learn the phoenix-like skill of coming to the very limits of critique and perishing there, only to begin again at the seemingly ineradicable root. We admire the first part of this performance: it lights our way. But we want the tools to break through that point of suicidal thought, its hinge in practice.

The same people who practice “critique” are also the most susceptible to cynicism. But if cynicism is simply the inverted form of enthusiasm, then beneath every frustrated leftist academic is a latent radical. The shoulder shrug, the dulled face, the squirm of embarrassment when discussing the fact that the US murdered a million Iraqis between 2003 and 2006, that every last dime squeezed from America’s poorest citizens is fed to the banking industry, that the seas will rise, billions will die and there’s nothing we can do about it—this discomfited posture comes from feeling oneself pulled between the is and the ought of current left thought. One feels that there is no alternative, and yet, on the other hand, that another world is possible.

We will not be so petulant. The synthesis of these positions is right in front of us: another world is not possible; it is necessary. The ought and the is are one. The collapse of the global economy is here and now.

II

The university has no history of its own; its history is the history of capital. Its essential function is the reproduction of the relationship between capital and labor. Though not a proper corporation that can be bought and sold, that pays revenue to its investors, the public university nonetheless carries out this function as efficiently as possible by approximating ever more closely the corporate form of its bedfellows. What we are witnessing now is the endgame of this process, whereby the façade of the educational institution gives way altogether to corporate streamlining.

Even in the golden age of capitalism that followed after World War II and lasted until the late 1960s, the liberal university was already subordinated to capital. At the apex of public funding for higher education, in the 1950s, the university was already being redesigned to produce technocrats with the skill-sets necessary to defeat “communism” and sustain US hegemony. Its role during the Cold War was to legitimate liberal democracy and to reproduce an imaginary society of free and equal citizens—precisely because no one was free and no one was equal.

But if this ideological function of the public university was at least well-funded after the Second World War, that situation changed irreversibly in the 1960s, and no amount of social-democratic heel-clicking will bring back the dead world of the post-war boom. Between 1965 and 1980 profit rates began to fall, first in the US, then in the rest of the industrializing world. Capitalism, it turned out, could not sustain the good life it made possible. For capital, abundance appears as overproduction, freedom from work as unemployment. Beginning in the 1970s, capitalism entered into a terminal downturn in which permanent work was casualized and working-class wages stagnated, while those at the top were temporarily rewarded for their obscure financial necromancy, which has itself proved unsustainable.

For public education, the long downturn meant the decline of tax revenues due to both declining rates of economic growth and the prioritization of tax-breaks for beleaguered corporations. The raiding of the public purse struck California and the rest of the nation in the 1970s. It has continued to strike with each downward declension of the business cycle. Though it is not directly beholden to the market, the university and its corollaries are subject to the same cost-cutting logic as other industries: declining tax revenues have made inevitable the casualization of work. Retiring professors make way not for tenure-track jobs but for precariously employed teaching assistants, adjuncts, and lecturers who do the same work for much less pay. Tuition increases compensate for cuts while the jobs students pay to be trained for evaporate.

In the midst of the current crisis, which will be long and protracted, many on the left want to return to the golden age of public education. They naïvely imagine that the crisis of the present is an opportunity to demand the return of the past. But social programs that depended upon high profit rates and vigorous economic growth are gone. We cannot be tempted to make futile grabs at the irretrievable while ignoring the obvious fact that there can be no autonomous “public university” in a capitalist society. The university is subject to the real crisis of capitalism, and capital does not require liberal education programs. The function of the university has always been to reproduce the working class by training future workers according to the changing needs of capital. The crisis of the university today is the crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period in which capital no longer needs us as workers. We cannot free the university from the exigencies of the market by calling for the return of the public education system. We live out the terminus of the very market logic upon which that system was founded. The only autonomy we can hope to attain exists beyond capitalism.

What this means for our struggle is that we can’t go backward. The old student struggles are the relics of a vanished world. In the 1960s, as the post-war boom was just beginning to unravel, radicals within the confines of the university understood that another world was possible. Fed up with technocratic management, wanting to break the chains of a conformist society, and rejecting alienated work as unnecessary in an age of abundance, students tried to align themselves with radical sections of the working class. But their mode of radicalization, too tenuously connected to the economic logic of capitalism, prevented that alignment from taking hold. Because their resistance to the Vietnam war focalized critique upon capitalism as a colonial war-machine, but insufficiently upon its exploitation of domestic labor, students were easily split off from a working class facing different problems. In the twilight era of the post-war boom, the university was not subsumed by capital to the degree that it is now, and students were not as intensively proletarianized by debt and a devastated labor market.

That is why our struggle is fundamentally different. The poverty of student life has become terminal: there is no promised exit. If the economic crisis of the 1970s emerged to break the back of the political crisis of the 1960s, the fact that today the economic crisis precedes the coming political uprising means we may finally supersede the cooptation and neutralization of those past struggles. There will be no return to normal.

III

We seek to push the university struggle to its limits.

Though we denounce the privatization of the university and its authoritarian system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms. We demand not a free university but a free society. A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life. Instead we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into a declaration of war.

We must begin by preventing the university from functioning. We must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and class to a halt. We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours. Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are to be understood. This is the only meaningful position to take when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society. Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it.

The university struggle is one among many, one sector where a new cycle of refusal and insurrection has begun – in workplaces, neighborhoods, and slums. All of our futures are linked, and so our movement will have to join with these others, breeching the walls of the university compounds and spilling into the streets. In recent weeks Bay Area public school teachers, BART employees, and unemployed have threatened demonstrations and strikes. Each of these movements responds to a different facet of capitalism’s reinvigorated attack on the working class in a moment of crisis. Viewed separately, each appears small, near-sighted, without hope of success. Taken together, however, they suggest the possibility of widespread refusal and resistance. Our task is to make plain the common conditions that, like a hidden water table, feed each struggle.

We have seen this kind of upsurge in the recent past, a rebellion that starts in the classrooms and radiates outward to encompass the whole of society. Just two years ago the anti-CPE movement in France, combating a new law that enabled employers to fire young workers without cause, brought huge numbers into the streets. High school and university students, teachers, parents, rank and file union members, and unemployed youth from the banlieues found themselves together on the same side of the barricades. (This solidarity was often fragile, however. The riots of immigrant youth in the suburbs and university students in the city centers never merged, and at times tensions flared between the two groups.) French students saw through the illusion of the university as a place of refuge and enlightenment and acknowledged that they were merely being trained to work. They took to the streets as workers, protesting their precarious futures. Their position tore down the partitions between the schools and the workplaces and immediately elicited the support of many wage workers and unemployed people in a mass gesture of proletarian refusal.

As the movement developed it manifested a growing tension between revolution and reform. Its form was more radical than its content. While the rhetoric of the student leaders focused merely on a return to the status quo, the actions of the youth – the riots, the cars overturned and set on fire, the blockades of roads and railways, and the waves of occupations that shut down high schools and universities – announced the extent of the new generation’s disillusionment and rage. Despite all of this, however, the movement quickly disintegrated when the CPE law was eventually dropped. While the most radical segment of the movement sought to expand the rebellion into a general revolt against capitalism, they could not secure significant support and the demonstrations, occupations, and blockades dwindled and soon died. Ultimately the movement was unable to transcend the limitations of reformism.

The Greek uprising of December 2008 broke through many of these limitations and marked the beginning of a new cycle of class struggle. Initiated by students in response to the murder of an Athens youth by police, the uprising consisted of weeks of rioting, looting, and occupations of universities, union offices, and television stations. Entire financial and shopping districts burned, and what the movement lacked in numbers it made up in its geographical breadth, spreading from city to city to encompass the whole of Greece. As in France it was an uprising of youth, for whom the economic crisis represented a total negation of the future. Students, precarious workers, and immigrants were the protagonists, and they were able to achieve a level of unity that far surpassed the fragile solidarities of the anti-CPE movement.

Just as significantly, they made almost no demands. While of course some demonstrators sought to reform the police system or to critique specific government policies, in general they asked for nothing at all from the government, the university, the workplaces, or the police. Not because they considered this a better strategy, but because they wanted nothing that any of these institutions could offer. Here content aligned with form; whereas the optimistic slogans that appeared everywhere in French demonstrations jarred with the images of burning cars and broken glass, in Greece the rioting was the obvious means to begin to enact the destruction of an entire political and economic system.

Ultimately the dynamics that created the uprising also established its limit. It was made possible by the existence of a sizeable radical infrastructure in urban areas, in particular the Exarchia neighborhood in Athens. The squats, bars, cafes, and social centers, frequented by students and immigrant youth, created the milieu out of which the uprising emerged. However, this milieu was alien to most middle-aged wage workers, who did not see the struggle as their own. Though many expressed solidarity with the rioting youth, they perceived it as a movement of entrants – that is, of that portion of the proletariat that sought entrance to the labor market but was not formally employed in full-time jobs. The uprising, strong in the schools and the immigrant suburbs, did not spread to the workplaces.

Our task in the current struggle will be to make clear the contradiction between form and content and to create the conditions for the transcendence of reformist demands and the implementation of a truly communist content. As the unions and student and faculty groups push their various “issues,” we must increase the tension until it is clear that we want something else entirely. We must constantly expose the incoherence of demands for democratization and transparency. What good is it to have the right to see how intolerable things are, or to elect those who will screw us over? We must leave behind the culture of student activism, with its moralistic mantras of non-violence and its fixation on single-issue causes. The only success with which we can be content is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the certain immiseration and death which it promises for the 21st century. All of our actions must push us towards communization; that is, the reorganization of society according to a logic of free giving and receiving, and the immediate abolition of the wage, the value-form, compulsory labor, and exchange.

Occupation will be a critical tactic in our struggle, but we must resist the tendency to use it in a reformist way. The different strategic uses of occupation became clear this past January when students occupied a building at the New School in New York. A group of friends, mostly graduate students, decided to take over the Student Center and claim it as a liberated space for students and the public. Soon others joined in, but many of them preferred to use the action as leverage to win reforms, in particular to oust the school’s president. These differences came to a head as the occupation unfolded. While the student reformers were focused on leaving the building with a tangible concession from the administration, others shunned demands entirely. They saw the point of occupation as the creation of a momentary opening in capitalist time and space, a rearrangement that sketched the contours of a new society. We side with this anti-reformist position. While we know these free zones will be partial and transitory, the tensions they expose between the real and the possible can push the struggle in a more radical direction.

We intend to employ this tactic until it becomes generalized. In 2001 the first Argentine piqueteros suggested the form the people’s struggle there should take: road blockades which brought to a halt the circulation of goods from place to place. Within months this tactic spread across the country without any formal coordination between groups. In the same way repetition can establish occupation as an instinctive and immediate method of revolt taken up both inside and outside the university. We have seen a new wave of takeovers in the U.S. over the last year, both at universities and workplaces: New School and NYU, as well as the workers at Republic Windows Factory in Chicago, who fought the closure of their factory by taking it over. Now it is our turn.

To accomplish our goals we cannot rely on those groups which position themselves as our representatives. We are willing to work with unions and student associations when we find it useful, but we do not recognize their authority. We must act on our own behalf directly, without mediation. We must break with any groups that seek to limit the struggle by telling us to go back to work or class, to negotiate, to reconcile. This was also the case in France. The original calls for protest were made by the national high school and university student associations and by some of the trade unions. Eventually, as the representative groups urged calm, others forged ahead. And in Greece the unions revealed their counter-revolutionary character by cancelling strikes and calling for restraint.

As an alternative to being herded by representatives, we call on students and workers to organize themselves across trade lines. We urge undergraduates, teaching assistants, lecturers, faculty, service workers, and staff to begin meeting together to discuss their situation. The more we begin talking to one another and finding our common interests, the more difficult it becomes for the administration to pit us against each other in a hopeless competition for dwindling resources. The recent struggles at NYU and the New School suffered from the absence of these deep bonds, and if there is a lesson to be learned from them it is that we must build dense networks of solidarity based upon the recognition of a shared enemy. These networks not only make us resistant to recuperation and neutralization, but also allow us to establish new kinds of collective bonds. These bonds are the real basis of our struggle.

We’ll see you at the barricades.

Research and Destroy, 2009

Rally this Saturday: 2pm – 4pm Altab Ali Park, near Aldgate East Station, just south of Brick Lane.

Teachers at Tower Hamlets college are now in their third week of indefinite strike action against cuts to jobs and courses.  Indefinite strike action (rare in the UK), the level of commitment and creativity shown by the strikers, and the wider social objectives of the struggle make it a crucial battle for us to support.

Visitors are welcome at picket lines outside the college’s three sites, from 7.30am each morning (though showing up at any time will be appreciated, and a list of other ways to help appears at the bottom):

• Poplar E14 0AF
• Arbour Square E1 0PT
• Bethnal Green E2 6AB

The proposed cuts involve:

• 13 compulsory redundancies, and the loss of a further 40 staff (part timers, equivalent to 20 full time jobs) through voluntary redundanies, despite the employment of 15 new middle managers.  (A govenor of the college earns £500,000 a year as Chairman of the Prudential.)
• The loss of around 1,000 places for ESOL – English as a second or other language – courses.  These cuts will hit working class, migrant women hardest.   Tower Hamlets is a centre of Bangladeshi migration due to the presence of a large existing community.  Most migrants are women, who have come to live with husbands in Britain.  English is a vital condition for new residents from overseas to assert their rights, gain some measure of independence and interact with other Tower Hamlets residents who don’t speak their first language (not only people born in Britain, but migrants from other countries).  The cuts are therefore a direct attack on the rights of migrants, particularly Asian women, and an attack on the prospects for local working-class community cohesion.
• Many other courses are ‘access’ courses; primarily used by local working class people of every background to gain entry to further or higher education.

The community has rallied behind the strikers, and while students are no longer being asked not to cross picket lines, when they were, many stood with strikers.  The strike is causing significant disruption to the college.  Enrollment does not appear to have been completed on time, and most classes are currently not happening.  The next vital step in the campaign is that admin staff, some of whom are organised by UNISON, are set to strike on Monday 14th September – an especially good morning to be on a picket line.  However, this looks as though it will be a long dispute, so donations to the strike fund and other forms of solidarity are vital: let’s draw a line in the sand!

Further updates to follow.  For up to date info, video and photos join the Facebook group: ‘Tower Hamlets – Stop the Cuts!’

Other ways to help

1. Organise a meeting at your place of work and invite a striker to come and speak.

2. Take a collection at work:
Strike fund: c/o Keith Priddle UCU THC Treasurer
Tower Hamlets College, Arbour Square Site, E1 0PT.
Sort code 089299
Account number 65252262

3. Send urgent messages of support to:
Richard McEwan (Branch Sec) 07532364638 richmcewan@hotmail.com
Alison Lord (Branch Chair) 07805819605 lallylord@hotmail.com
John Budis (Branch Sec) 07967893664 johnbudis@gmail.com

4. Write to the Principal Michael.farley@tower.ac.uk

5. Come to the rally on Saturday 12th September, from 2pm to 4pm. It will be held at Altab Ali Park, near Aldgate East Station, just south of Brick Lane.

6. Sign: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/THCollegefunding

7. For up to date info, video and photos join the Facebook group: ‘Tower Hamlets – Stop the Cuts!’

8. Write to your MP: www.theyworkforyou.com