Rank-and-file students and their national leaders are travelling in opposite directions. At college and university level, students are preparing for further action against soaring tuition fees. At national level, the Labour-led leadership of the National Union of Students (NUS) is heading for the hills.
Behind the rhetoric of a “decapitating” Lib Dem MPs, the NUS is actually trying to behead the spontaneous movement that erupted on London’s streets last week. The NUS wants to direct student energy towards – wait for it – collecting signatures with the aim of making Lib Dem MPs face by-elections!
This is not so much a strategy as a travesty. The proposed law about recalling MPs is not even published yet and it will simply be restricted to issues of corruption like expenses fraud. Meanwhile, the majority party in the Coalition, Cameron’s Tories, are simply let off the hook.
The aim of NUS president and aspiring Labour MP Aaron Porter is to postpone, hinder, divert and fragment a growing social movement against the Coalition government. Simply marching from point A to point B with the aim of winning over “public opinion” won’t bring about change and frustration with a failed political process exploded at Millbank. Naturally, Porter – who is not opposed to tuition fees in principle – condemned as “despicable” the students who went on to attack the Tory Party HQ.
The reality is that the struggle against the Coalition’s massive spending cuts, which are driven by a deepening global debt crisis (with Ireland this morning on the verge of bankruptcy), cannot be contained within “normal” boundaries of protests and one-off strikes. And the state is conscious of this and will learn from the police’s obvious unpreparedness for the size and anger of last week’s march.
According to the Observer, defence firms are working closely with the government on a "militarisation" strategy to meet mass resistance to the impact of the cuts. Firms are apparently in negotiation over possible orders for armoured vehicles, body scanners and surveillance equipment. Scotland Yard's National Public Order Intelligence Unit and other state bodies are said to be stepping up monitoring of left-wing groups.
So while the NUS and the leaders of the major trade unions in Britain sit around in la-la land, the state, as always, is getting tooled up. This has to be the case because, ultimately, the emerging struggles revolve around and are decided by the central question of state power – who wields it and for what purpose.
The present capitalist state will everything and anything to sustain the very system upon which it rests. If that requires massive spending cuts and propping up failed banks, that is precisely what it will do. If that obliges the state to bring out the iron first, it won’t hesitate.
In these unprecedented times, where existing political processes are reduced to a cul-de-sac against a background of insoluble economic crisis, direct action and extreme forms of protest will in themselves not be enough to defeat the Coalition and the state. Students, however, having taken the lead in the struggle against Cameron-Clegg, are in a position to inspire a significant shift.
They could achieve that by going outside of their campuses to the local communities and workplaces with an appeal to create People’s Assemblies. These could become a democratic alternative to a failed undemocratic political system. A network of People’s Assemblies will have the capacity to facilitate a transition to a society based on co-operation and self-determination instead of profit and corporate power. Then we could repudiate the state’s debts to the banks and create an education system free for all.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label Millbank. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Millbank. Show all posts
Monday, November 15, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Students come up against a political brick wall
The explosion of anger on London’s streets yesterday was not confined just to the students who attacked the Tory Party HQ. It was also expressed in the fact that unexpectedly vast numbers of students and lecturers turned out to demonstrate against soaring tuition fees and education cuts.
Over 50,000 came to express their opposition to the Con-Lib government’s programme of cuts. It was the first major march against the Coalition and the biggest student turn-out for over a decade. Frustration and anger ran through the whole march. A common refrain was that “no one is listening” – reflecting the fact that the accepted political process is a dead end.
“Tory scum”, chanted students breaking in to the Millbank headquarters of the Tory party. They should have added “Liberal Democrat and Labour scum”. In fact the Tories are the only main party that are not fees turncoats. Before the election, every Liberal MP signed a pledge to oppose a rise in fees. And it was New Labour that first introduced top-up fees in 2001, against Blair’s specific election pledge not to do it.
New Labour commissioned the Browne review of higher education funding, which went even further than the Coalition to propose lifting the cap on fees altogether. Who can say they wouldn’t have accepted its proposals if they were in government?
NUS President Aaron Porter, a member of the Labour Party and like Ed Miliband a supporter of a graduate tax, cannot explain how a tax, rather than higher fees, would enable young people from less well off backgrounds to go to university in the first place.
Lord Browne’s proposals represent the completion of the marketisation of higher education, which is enthusiastically supported by all parties in parliament. It discusses university entirely in the narrow terms of economic growth and money. David Cameron was happy to be able to tell a Chinese student that raising fees for British students would mean fees for overseas students could be held down.
Public funding for universities is being slashed by 40%, to be replaced by 2012 with student fees of up to £9,000 a year at some universities. Students starting university this year will already leave with debts of at least £25,000 each and the new measures will push that even higher.
And when they graduate, they will enter a job market in slump. With 69 candidates chasing every graduate job, the 2010 graduate cohort joined thousands still unemployed from the previous two years. They are now part of a generation of young people, graduate and non-graduate, who are over-represented in the ranks of those unemployed for more than a year. Youth unemployment is nine times higher than the national average.
The reality is that universities are now part of the market state and unworthy of the passionate commitment that lecturers and students continue to give them. The answer to this massive problem is to go beyond protest against the Con-Lib government, and recognise the transformation of the state as a whole that has resulted from corporate-driven globalisation.
States provide education only insofar as it will benefit big business. Whichever party is in control they are ready to sacrifice the future of millions of young people – and everything they could achieve for human society – on the altar of the mighty market.
But using technology and networks that have been largely created by the younger generation, a global alliance of the young and older workers can facilitate a transfer of power away from these global elites, and their corporate masters, and into the hands of the majority.
In the end, neither marching nor extreme forms of protest like the attack on the Tory Party HQ by themselves will bring about the kind of social revolutionary change that will create a world free from profit and exploitation.
People’s Assemblies, with full representation of every part of the community including students, young people and the unemployed, are the way to make a start in the process of transforming society’s economic and political power structures. All students are invited to come to Liberation Beyond Resistance – Towards a People’s Assemblies Movement in London on December 11, to plan the next steps along this road.
Penny Cole
Over 50,000 came to express their opposition to the Con-Lib government’s programme of cuts. It was the first major march against the Coalition and the biggest student turn-out for over a decade. Frustration and anger ran through the whole march. A common refrain was that “no one is listening” – reflecting the fact that the accepted political process is a dead end.
“Tory scum”, chanted students breaking in to the Millbank headquarters of the Tory party. They should have added “Liberal Democrat and Labour scum”. In fact the Tories are the only main party that are not fees turncoats. Before the election, every Liberal MP signed a pledge to oppose a rise in fees. And it was New Labour that first introduced top-up fees in 2001, against Blair’s specific election pledge not to do it.
New Labour commissioned the Browne review of higher education funding, which went even further than the Coalition to propose lifting the cap on fees altogether. Who can say they wouldn’t have accepted its proposals if they were in government?
NUS President Aaron Porter, a member of the Labour Party and like Ed Miliband a supporter of a graduate tax, cannot explain how a tax, rather than higher fees, would enable young people from less well off backgrounds to go to university in the first place.
Lord Browne’s proposals represent the completion of the marketisation of higher education, which is enthusiastically supported by all parties in parliament. It discusses university entirely in the narrow terms of economic growth and money. David Cameron was happy to be able to tell a Chinese student that raising fees for British students would mean fees for overseas students could be held down.
Public funding for universities is being slashed by 40%, to be replaced by 2012 with student fees of up to £9,000 a year at some universities. Students starting university this year will already leave with debts of at least £25,000 each and the new measures will push that even higher.
And when they graduate, they will enter a job market in slump. With 69 candidates chasing every graduate job, the 2010 graduate cohort joined thousands still unemployed from the previous two years. They are now part of a generation of young people, graduate and non-graduate, who are over-represented in the ranks of those unemployed for more than a year. Youth unemployment is nine times higher than the national average.
The reality is that universities are now part of the market state and unworthy of the passionate commitment that lecturers and students continue to give them. The answer to this massive problem is to go beyond protest against the Con-Lib government, and recognise the transformation of the state as a whole that has resulted from corporate-driven globalisation.
States provide education only insofar as it will benefit big business. Whichever party is in control they are ready to sacrifice the future of millions of young people – and everything they could achieve for human society – on the altar of the mighty market.
But using technology and networks that have been largely created by the younger generation, a global alliance of the young and older workers can facilitate a transfer of power away from these global elites, and their corporate masters, and into the hands of the majority.
In the end, neither marching nor extreme forms of protest like the attack on the Tory Party HQ by themselves will bring about the kind of social revolutionary change that will create a world free from profit and exploitation.
People’s Assemblies, with full representation of every part of the community including students, young people and the unemployed, are the way to make a start in the process of transforming society’s economic and political power structures. All students are invited to come to Liberation Beyond Resistance – Towards a People’s Assemblies Movement in London on December 11, to plan the next steps along this road.
Penny Cole
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