www.counterfire.org | September 2011
What next for
Student Protest? Last autumn, a new student protest movement was born. Activists discuss the way forward now.
Clare Solomon
former President, ULU The demonstration on 10 November blew away all expectations. At midday, a 10,000-strong march from London colleges set off from ULU to join the main demo, instantly politicising an NUS notorious for its conservatism and irrelevance. By 2pm, some 50,000 students were on the move, crammed in from Trafalgar Square to Millbank. Here was
Fran Legg MSc student, SOAS
R a l l ie s , o c c up at ion s , demonstrations, and teachins need to be central to campaigns against fees, cuts, and closures. As students, we must join forces with lecturers and support staff facing attacks on their jobs. Like last year, the student movement must continue to lead by example.
the biggest student protest for generations. And there were thousands of sixth form and FE students, protesting against the scrapping of EMA. Then, unbelievably, there was a mass occupation of Millbank Towers.This year students can take the movement to a new level. Protests and days of action are already being organised and the TUC call for co-ordinated action on 30 November gives us a great opportunity to bring students and workers together on an altogether different scale.
Liam McCafferty Non-portfolio Officer, University of East Anglia Students Union The explosion of raw student anger which became the ‘student revolt’ was inspiring. The role of students in the coming period will be about injecting the energy, vitality, and tactics of the student movement into the wider struggle against cuts.
James Haywood President, Goldsmiths Students Union (pc) More than ever we now need to win the argument that universities are a public good, something that everyone should have a right to access. The universities W h it e Pap e r s i g n a l s privatisation on a mass
scale in higher education, so we need to renew our struggle – demanding that profit should have no role in knowledge and learning.
Maev McDaid President, University of Liverpool Students Union The new White Paper proves that even more vicious attacks are planned. It outlines systematic privatisation of higher education, where students become ‘consumers’ in a cut-throat, profit-hungry environment – alien to any notion of learning. We must rally behind the slogan of ‘free education for all’. That means opposing every intrusion of the market onto our campuses. Across Europe, students are fighting with us. We should prepare for demonstrations, strikes, and occupations to defend what’s ours.
http://www.europeagainstausterity.org/ http://www.tuc.org.uk/ http://www.coalitionofresistance.org.uk/
Jessica Lewis Student activist at University of East Anglia Like many other students, I started the year of ‘student revolt’ with very little k nowledge or interest in politics. It was when confronted with cuts to education and rocketing tuition fees that I began to wonder why students are being made to pay for an economic crisis we didn’t create. That’s how I became involved in the movement – and how an entire generation became radicalised.
Joshua Virasami Activist at Birkbeck The story is old: in times of crisis, they maintain the military machine, uphold the banks, and cut welfare. The coming year will be one of continued global revolt. Look at Chile and the student movement led by Camila Vallejo. Britain will be no exception.
Education under attack Sean Rillo Raczka, one of the leaders of the student revolt last autumn, now Vice President of University of London Union, assesses what is at stake for the student movement, and why we must rebuild it this year. Last year’s student movement saw mass resistance to Con-Dem tuition fee increases to £9,000. Many young people faced with losing their EMA – a lifeline for sixth-formers from working class backgrounds – also joined the protests. Young people care deeply about education and are furious at opportunities denied them by a generation that received free education and full grants. The Con-Dem onslaught continues, with cuts to colleges across the country, the withdrawal of all social science funding, a new White Paper
bringing private competition to the university sector. We have already seen 70% course cuts at London Metropolitan University, an institution with a large percentage of black and Asian students. The university implemented devastating course cuts on social sciences and the arts, telling current students to transfer elsewhere to finish their studies. Meanwhile, philosopher AC Grayling is setting up a private profit-making ‘college’, charging £20,000 fees to rich Oxbridge rejects
for contact with celebrity academics willing their sell their credibility for profit. The Con-Dems want to roll back access to higher education, denying qualifications and decent jobs to what will become a ‘lost generation’ of young people. They have money for war and nuclear weapons, but they cut spending on education, the NHS, and affordable homes. As students, we need to fight for an education system free for all at every level. We should demand all students
receive the support needed to access education on an equal footing. We must oppose privatisation and cuts in our universities, uniting with staff and unions in defending jobs and conditions. But the struggle against education cuts needs to link into the wider anti-austerity movement. Only by recognising that cuts are part of a Government assault on society as a whole can we create effective mass resistance – from school students to pensioners, from hospital campaigners to liberation activists.
Their system their crisis SOAS economist James Meadway explains the economic crisis and argues that we have to fight the madness of the cuts. The economic news grows daily more grim. Stock markets reach new lows. Unemploy ment creeps upwards. Stagnation haunts the major economies. The financial crash of 2008 heralded the first stages of an epochal crisis of capitalism. When the world’s third largest investment bank, Lehman Bros, filed for bankruptcy in September that year, it provoked a terrifying collapse of the global financial system. Because this system consists of a tightly-woven web of interconnections between financial institutions, the sudden disappearance of a major bank threatened banks everywhere. Financial crash The dense web threatened to unravel. As losses mounted, governments began to resort to the same solution – bailouts. Over the preceding decade, financial corporations came up with more complex ways to manage loans. The theory was that risks could be carefully packaged and controlled.
A huge credit boom ensued. Debts across the major economies shot up. Bankers paid themselves fat bonuses on the back of their apparent success. Sub-prime mortgages were one symptom of the bubble – mortgages offered to people with low incomes or none at all. . They began to turn bad in 2005, as mortgageholders started defaulting on their debts. The ripples spread through the system, as it became clear that the new financial instruments intended to manage the risks were failing. The bailouts were an attempt to correct this. Governments borrowed money and simply shoved it into the banks. The IMF estimates that this cost almost $7 trillion globally. The UK bailouts alone have been worth £1.3 trillion – almost the same as the entire national economy. And these colossal sums depended on government borrowing. But the bailouts did not solve the crisis. They merely moved it somewhere else.
Debt and austerity This is the second stage of the economic slump. National debts have risen as a result of the financial crisis. But these public debts are themselves held by private institutions. Rising public debts increase the risk of countries defaulting. This is what the financial markets fear may happen in Greece, Ireland, or Portugal. Since private banks hold the public debt,
they are exposed to this risk. The crisis of public debt is turning back into a crisis of the private financial system. This is the mechanism driv ing spending cuts right across the developed world . Gover n ments fear they may soon have another financial crisis on their hands, and so are desperately attempting to strengthen their banking systems by reducing public debts.
Death-spiral But austerity programmes – spending cuts and tax rises for ordinary people – are fatally undermining the real economy. The reason is simple. If governments reduce spending, there is less money flowing through the economy. Firms sell less, jobs and wages are cut, less money f lows, and there are even more bad debts and cutbacks. A vicious downwards spiral ensues. T h is is t he process d riv ing t he retu rn to recession in Britain. By supporting austerity, the Con-Dem Government is privileging the City ahead of the real economy. They wou ld rat her suppor t bankers than the NHS. The solution is clear. Increase public spending to support the economy. Tax the rich to pay for it. And transform our dysfunctional financial system by clamping down on speculation and using nationalised banks to invest in public spending. The depth of the crisis va r ies , but t he sa me basic issues can be found everywhere. That is why the Europe Against Austerity international conference in London on 1 October is so important. Every activist should register now.
Afghanistan: ten years of killing Joe Glenton, former soldier, conscientious objector, and now student at Leeds Met, explains why we should all join the Trafalgar Square mass anti-war protest on 8 October. Ten years of war have taken the veneer off the War on Terror. It is little more than a brand to obscure greed for both power and money. You only have to scratch the surface to see how weak the arguments are. Amidst the propaganda is the democracy argument, the idea that democracy can and should be imposed through the barrel of a gun on people too feckless to achieve it themselves. Muslims who are supposedly i nc ap a ble of f re e i n g themselves have bogged down the world’s greatest superpower with little
more than Kalashnikovs i n A fg h a n i s t a n, a nd overthrown Western-backed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt. Women’s oppression If we look at the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the test run for Iraq, we can see more of this hypocrisy. One claim by the UK/US coalition was that Afghanistan must be invaded to improve the lives of women – as if war has ever improved the lot of women. Te n ye a r s on, t he administration put in power by the West has passed a law
allowing husbands to refuse food to their wives if they do not satisfy them sexually. While a senior US military figure, when questioned over President Obama’s Nobel-winning escalation of the war, explained that the President could not be concerned with the ‘trivial fate of women’. The lies do not stop. The US claimes it has withdrawn from Iraq, leaving it a democracy. But it fails to mention the 50,000 US troops and 94 military bases that remain, and that there is full foreign control of oil. In Libya we see a similar
pattern. A month before the bombing began, the UK was selling weapons to Gaddafi, a one-time favourite son of the West, to use against his own people. Disrupting Libya’s revolution and backing a collection of former Gaddafi men as the new power in Libya is done on the pretence of ‘protecting Libyans’. The waste of war At the same time, Saudi Arabia, run by ‘friends’ whose excesses would make the Taliban shudder, invaded Bahrain unchallenged, to do what Gaddafi was doing in Libya: crush pro-democracy
demonstrators. All this is paid for by us, and it is here that we can calculate the impact of wars abroad. Each Cruise missile fired into Libya costs £1 million. Each dead ‘insurgent’ in Afghanistan costs $1 million. US military aid paid to the government of Pakistan, incidentally, is then filtered through the Pa k istani intelligence to the Pakistani Taliban, thus funding the weaponry and operations which kill Western troops. How much are we willing to sacrifice for oil, profit, and US power?
stop iSLamophobia
SOAS students Faduma Hassan and Feyzi Ismail discuss the impact of the war on British Muslims.
The so-called ‘War on Terror’ is now a decade old. Far from making it a safer and more tolerant place, the war has made the world more dangerous and less democratic. In order to justify the billions spent on arms and killing, the war on terror has provided politicians – from dictators to neo-cons – the pretext for attacking ordinary people. Muslim communities across the country have suffered the brunt of these attacks: Britain has witnessed an upsurge of Islamophobia in the past decade. By instituting stop and search measures that target Muslim youth, and by implication attacking Muslim culture, the Government has created an atmosphere for Islamophobia and far right groups to get a hearing. Fuel for fascists Fascists and racists like the British National Party (BNP) and the English Defence League (EDL) have been revitalised by the war on terror and the portrayal of Muslims as the main enemy. It is to the credit of groups fighting against Islamophobia, including Muslim
communities and campaigns such as the Stop the War Coalition and Unite Against Fascism, that the likes of the EDL are still marginal. Media collusion is also part of the problem. In a recent ComRes survey, 29% of people surveyed blamed the media for the rise of Islamophobia in the UK. The Norway attacks are a good example. Amongst the confusion, the one certainty seemed to be that the killings were, and had to be, the work of an Islamic fundamentalist group, probably Al-Quaeda. Then it emerged that it was in fact the work of Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian right-wing extremist with anti-Muslim views. Con-Dem racism Now the Con-Dem Government has renewed a key part of Labour’s ‘counter-terrorism’ strategy under the same name – Prevent. One aim of this is to work with institutions, including universities, which, as Home Secretary Theresa May recently wrote, are ‘vulnerable to radicalisation’. Un i v e r s i t y m a n a g e m e nt s and Muslim societies are being encouraged to identify individuals who are potential ‘extremists’ and who do not subscribe to ‘British values’. The Con-Dem Government has extended the definition of ‘extremism’ to include anyone who holds ideas they consider extremist and liable to lead to illegal activity.
B ut t he re i s a l m o s t no understanding, amongst those who advocate Prevent, of the links between foreign policy choices, in particular the wars Britain has fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya, and the growth of extremism. At the same time, our civil liberties – and especially those of Muslims – are being attacked. Civil liberties threatened In 2008, Rizwaan Sabir and Hicham Yezza at Nottingham University were arrested and released without charge for downloading a copy of the socalled ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’, a document that is freely available on the internet, including from US Government websites. From the
Government’s perspective, identify yourself as a Muslim and you’re likely to be labelled a ‘potential terrorist’. Universities should be freethinking spaces, where ideas can be debated without fear or intimidation. If the Government was serious about tackling extremism in universities and wider society, it would not occupy Muslim countries, and it would not waste billions in the process. This year, our fight against fee increases has to be a central part of challenging the Government’s whole austerity plan, and it must be waged alongside a vigorous campaign against Islamophobia. We must expose the lies behind the war on terror and the backlash against British Muslims.
Mass Assembly, Trafalgar Square Saturday, 8 October 2011 12 noon onwards Ten Years On: Troops out of Afghanistan, Cut Warfare not Welfare Called by Stop the War, CND, and British Muslim Initiative www.antiwarassembly.org www.stopwar.org.uk 020 7801 2768
All out on 30 November
Everyone should get involved on 30 November for a day of united action against austerity.
T
his year’s Trade Union Congress ended with a call to action against drastic government plans to cut pensions and increase the retirement age. Delegates unanimously voted for a campaign of strike action, and leaders of Unite, Unison and GMB, the biggest three unions, pledged to organise co-ordinated strikes on 30 November. Many more unions are set to follow. Unions leaders are arguing to turn 30 November into a mass day of action. The attack on workers’ pensions is about making ordinary people pay for the bankers’ crisis and to open up public services to privatisation. It’s another threat to all our futures. Unity is key, across the public sector unions to the private sector, and across the whole movement against austerity. As PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said : “We have always said that the more united we are, the harder it will be for the government to push through their ideologically-driven and damaging cuts. This is not just a fight for public servants, we want fair pensions for all.” Co-ordinated strikes of millions can have a huge impact, but 30 November is not just a day for trade unionists. Everyone who hates what the government is doing to our society can get involved in what Unite general secretary Len McCluskey called a ‘caolition of resistance’. 30 November can take the fight against the government to a new level, but only if we all act together. To make the union leaders’ words a reality we need to make sure that every workplace and union branch, every campaign, every community and every college, is focused on building action on that day. If every part of the movement, including the students, throws itself into building the strikes and protests, we can deal the government a huge blow.
Events Booklaunch: The People Demand: A short history of the Arab Revolutions With John Rees and Joseph Daher Wednesday, 28th September, 6.30pm The Bookshop Theatre, 51 The Cut, London SE1 8LF Europe Against Austerity International Conference Saturday, 1 October, 10am-5pm Camden Centre, London WC1H 9AU www.europeagainstausterity.org TUC Demo at Tory Party Conference Sunday, 2 October, 12 noon Albert Square, Manchester Anti-war Mass Assembly: Troops Out of Afghanistan Saturday, 8 October, 12 noon onwards Stop the War, CND, British Muslim Initiative www.stopwar.org.uk Counterforum: The Politics of Resistance Saturday, 15 October, 12.30-6pm Packhorse Pub, Leeds www.counterfire.org National Student Demonstration: Defend education, fight privatisation Wednesday, 9th November, 11am Central London TUC co-ordinated strike action Wednesday, 30 November Across the country www.tuc.org.uk
Counterfire publications Strategy and Tactics: how the left can organise to transform society John Rees
Capitalism and class consciousness: the ideas of Georg Lukács
The People Demand: A short history of the Arab Revolutions John Rees and Joseph Daher
Eleven Reasons to resist the Con-Dem cuts Neil Faulkner
Chris Nineham
All publications are available online at www.counterfire.org or by post: Counterfire, The Bookshop Theatre, 51 The Cut, London SE1 8LF.
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