47. Occupations/"call in question"

Director's cut of a comment piece I wrote for The Boar the day after Day X and the occupation of Warwick Arts Centre.

"The proletariat today is everyone who has no control over their own lives, and knows it." --Situationist International

The occupation of Warwick Arts Centre's conference room, which ended this morning under pressure from Warwick Security and police, came almost as an anomaly. As news of occupations and walkouts filtered through from around the country over the last couple of days – Birmingham, Leeds, SOAS, Oxford, London South Bank, Manchester, UCL, UEL – I could hardly imagine even the energy that I had seen at the NUS London demonstration earlier in the month bursting into something like this. During my time here, the university has seemed too settled, too sedate to give rise to that kind of thing: Warwick is a place where any classroom discussion gone political – in my case, of English Literature – would be swiftly punctured by the needle of capitalist realism – “Well that's not how it works in real life, is it?”; where the swagger of Business School students provides a permanent reminder of the economic ideology on whose sufferance you're still in education.

Warwick was one of the UK's major hotspots of student activism in what Alain Badiou has called the 'Interregnum' of the late 60s to the mid-70s, but has since become defined by its status as one of the pioneers of the monetisation of the academy, a mission that in Richard Lambert and Nigel Thrift has found its latest and least shakeable champions. It was appropriate that the tactic of the university occupation, following the model of factory occupations, should arrive at the point, at the end of the 60s, when higher education was first being reoriented towards a role of serving the market – a process that the radical historian E.P. Thompson recorded in Warwick University Ltd, written after the 1971 University House sit-in, and that has found its logical conclusion in the Browne Report's proposals: to almost completely axe the teaching block grant, and allow universities to charge triple the current top fees.

One of the significances of the recent student protests has been their showing how much the media has gotten the wrong end of the stick on the Browne Report: as Stefan Collini has pointed out, the coalition's moves are not simply 'cuts' and 'fees rises', but represent an attempt to wholly change the way we conceive of higher education – not as a public good, one of the crucial spheres of civil society, but solely as “a motor of the economy”, a means of improving the value of one's labour-power for sale at a later date. The media misrepresentation of student activists – as “vandals”, as solely and selfishly defending their own interests – are necessary to naturalise the government's own ideological violence, to distract from the possibility that there might be another conception of education – not, in that awful phrase, “learning for its own sake”, but for the sake of a value not posited in terms of the endless accumulation of cash; the notion, difficult to imagine after 30 years of neo-liberalism, that the society we owe to ourselves might be one that doesn't exclude the majority from the fruits of its wealth and knowledge.

The resurgence of student activism at Warwick and elsewhere is testament to a renewal of our political imagination. Against the monotone of 'There is no alternative', the new generation of student and anti-cuts activists are helping, as their predecessors did, to posit the idea that we might one day have some control over our own lives. They've shown the “confidence, courage, humor, cunning and fortitude” that Walter Benjamin called the “refined and spiritual things” to be won in political and historical struggles. We are 'all in it together' now, but not in the way the coalition wants to think.