200 students start occupation at Sussex uni

Great stuff! Seems like some momentum's really growing. The call-out mentions sleeping equipment. So these guys might be in for the long haul?

Any updates would be great. The twitter feed has gone quiet.

Posted a news article here - http://libcom.org/news/university-occupations-following-london-student-protests-16112010 - feel free to update if you can.

Second item on google news for 'student protests' now - http://google.co.uk/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=uk&hl=en&q=student+protests

first is the fitwatch takedown.

Looks like the occupation is still going strong...

In a strange way it's actually nice to see Anarchists and the SWSS both involved in giving talks at the occupation rather than working at cross-purposes.

Auto:

Assuming the SWSS means to say that you need the State to take power, this seems very much at cross purposes. Or is this the typical "let's forget about fundamental differences when we're confronting a greater enemy"? You don't create genuine unity by being weak, by hiding differences. I've seen too much of this supposed non-sectarianism to know that such an attitude can only lead to sitting down with your future oppressors.

And I'm not talking about long-term future here; those with hierarchical forms, content and goals of supposed anti-capitalist activity always fuck up struggles. Take this, for example, about the occupation of a hospital ward at UCH in London in 1993 (from here):

Watch your backs!

or the Sussex House occupation 6 months ago, which the SWP opposed, then went along with, then argued to end it from within, which happened, but not before they stuck their unmasked faces out the window, got suspended and became cause celebres* for a cause they retrospectively championed, including changing their facebook profiles to the aforementioned unmasked posing...

by complete coincidence the following week, while 4 leading SWP activists were banned from campus, a mass struggle blossomed which won... their reinstatement.

* only 4 of the Sussex 6 were SWP (the others were singled out by virtue of management recognising ones voice on the phone, and by being arrested).

Nevermind then, eh?

Fuck.

Curious about this occupation, because i want to understand how it compares with student occupations I've known a bit about in France.

How many people are involved (still 200? 170 as stated on Indymedia? is it growing or diminishing?). Do the lectures and tutorials and seminars continue alongside the occupation? Are outsiders (non-students or non-Sussex Uni students) allowed to vote? Has the canteen been taken over by the students? Is there much graffiti, and if so, what's the content? Are there any attempts to directly go to other people in other places, or is it all done through the internet or what?

Can't find a specific internet site for this occupation, so I'm asking all this here.

wasn't there much yesterday, but while 170+ took the room only around 30-40 stayed over night.

i think they're being relocated, but it's happened before. normally it's decided in a general meeting whether to move to the back and allow classes to continue, disrupting peoples education is a controversial issue (and given the number of direct participants, probably rightly so).

technically security aren't letting in non-Sussex students/staff, but there's no ID checks or anything and it's pretty much open access. everyone in the room gets a vote. Edit: i should add while majority voting is used, there's a lot of hostility to this from anarchists who favour consensus. the result is sometimes the worst of both worlds, with the peer-pressure and railroading of consensus combined with the weakness of a narrow mandate on a close vote that nobody feels confident to implement.

nope, just a single lecture theatre in a larger building.

none.

from the occupation itself, mostly internet appeals to other unis as well as some direct links with and participation from some students at the other Uni in Brighton (there's two). hopefully there'll be more IRL attempts to reach out too, students normally visit local picket lines etc.

www.defendsussex.wordpress.com is the general sussex uni stop the cuts blog.

in general, there seems to be quite a divide between the (mostly leftist) politicos in the Stop the Cuts campaign and the wider 'student community'. a lot of people in the room just walked out of the initial meeting when it got railroaded into a discussion about whether to condemn Aaron Porter (which the SWP were mainly pushing for to support the NUS left, reclaiming the union etc), and later when it got party political (are we against the cuts or the Tory cuts etc).

this was a divide the big Arts A2 occupation overcame in March, with over 1,000 students (out of 12,000 total) participating through the week despite a High Court Injunction criminalising the occupation, but it seems to have resurfaced. in my opinion it's the difference between a political campaign (where you relate to others through lowest-common-denominator leftist politics) and a class movement, where you relate to others through shared interests and accept or even embrace the political heterogeneity that implies (i mean most people start off liberals with all sorts of illusions in legalism, the sanctity of property, idealist methods etc, it's through direct action that many develop more radical ideas...).

i think the Arts A2 occupation overcame this divide for a number of reasons; a tactical error by management to fake a hostage situation and call in riot cops against peaceful students which caused widespread anger, a highly visible central location on campus, and considerable effort to open up the occupation as a space for students and workers to meet and discuss (there were some excellent contributions from support staff - cleaners etc). i wrote this at the time trying to think a bit about these dynamics. the big danger is to the extent the occupation is done by Stop the Cuts and not students as a whole, it's very much reinforcing the activist-student divide and closing off activity to those not in the clique, reinforcing the resigned passivity many have towards austerity. i think a lot of people are aware of this danger, the question is whether to try and use the energy from last wednesday to bolster the STC campaign or to ask what was so exciting about last wednsday, and where are all those faces who took action for the first time in the occupation?

I should really get down there but got shit to do :/

Joseph Kay - thanks for all that.

by way of a caveat to the more machiavellian antics mentioned above, i should add i don't really subscribe to anti-SWP sentiment per se. they normally do nothing more sinister than caucus and make arguments, often confidently and articulately. obviously i disagree fundementally in all sorts of ways with their politics, but i don't think people can complain about a group being organised and making arguments. there's a danger the SWP become a bogeyman to cover the lack of organisation and strategy on the part of anarchists/communist/libertarians.

well i've documented some of that above. but tbh in this occupation it has been mostly arguments (i haven't been there for 24 hours, so maybe it's changed). that doesn't stop people complaining about the 'bloody SWP', which i think becomes a convenient target for frustrations. now even making arguments can fuck up struggles by determining the character of the space - most of those who weren't leftist politicos left very quickly, one who stayed made the point that her friends were leaving because they didn't agree with the political assumptions everyone was assumed to share (that wasn't just the SWP either tbf, it's an easy thing to slip into). so assertively taking leftist assumptions for granted very quickly alienated non-activist students and reduced the occupation to mostly the usual suspects rather than broadening it out.

i'm certainly not saying we shouldn't talk about the role the SWP (or others) play, my point is that how they play it is often not particularly sinister or machiavellian.

Any update on the occupation?

Joseph Kay - any reason there's no graffiti? Too many cctvs, etc and people can't be bothered to mask up for the cameras? too indifferent? student bureaucrats against it and everyone just accepts it? or what?

I think there's probably (a not unfounded) feeling that criminal damage to university property would further isolate the 'activists' from the broadly sympathetic but uninvolved student body, which is fairly liberal in terms of politics. there is a fair amount of CCTV etc, but you could easily get away with it if you wanted.

i popped in today, and there was only a handful of people there. i think we really fucked it in the first 30-60 minutes, alienating all the liberals/non-activists and thus precluding any radicalisation/political/theoretical conversations or development. once people have felt that, no amount of leafletting in the square will get them back... a lot of (political) friends are really frustrated and feel like we shot ourselves in the foot, but we're trying to focus on making the 24th interesting.*

* note to journos: i'm not planning a riot.

Note to journos riots are spontaneous affairs.

interesting stuff Joseph Kay. you sound bang on about the first 60 mins.

glad there's no grafiti - juvenile pish and will not help things one iota. nothing revolutionary about pissing in your own backyard.

Those are almost the exact words a judge told me in court except he said 'stupidity' and not 'pish'. He also said graffiti was behaviour befitting of wild beasts and not of civilized societies.

You are joking right?

Thanks for the updates Joseph Kay. I hope the problems are just a temporary setback. In any case hearing about the events in the UK has definitely cheered me up, good luck to those in the "belly of the beast".

alibi:

So the Universities are our own backyard are they?

I suppose this and this was juvenile pish .

This is a real shame. To go from over 100 students to a mere handful (presumably the 'usual suspects') is a real blow.

Yet I don't see how you can stop it from happening. Politicised members of a group will always start spouting off because they assume their perspective is the obvious one that everyone should share.

I think this goes right to the heart of the problem. Over the coming months various political groups and perspectives will be trying to take control of various struggles for their own ends. If direct, open democracy can't take root in these struggles, then they'll be throttled by the old politics of the left.

But how do you avoid it? I can't see an easy answer.

Thanks for this Joseph Kay, I think your point about the difference between a class movement and a political movement is very important.

*note to journos Joseph Kay is deputy in charge drawing moustaches on pictures of authority figures at the next riot.

i agree on the importance of organisation, but i disagree we need to 'promote a perspective', at least in the first instance. i think political groups tend towards impotence precisely because they conceive of politics as one-way communication of pre-developed ideas, the crudest example being Kautsky/Lenin bringing us consciousness that eludes us. i think the way out of that impotence is to relate to other not primarily on the basis of political ideas (or assumptions), but shared interests. the politics come in terms of how we articulate those interests etc.

in practical terms this is similar to what you suggest; beginning by keeping the occupation as inclusive as possible along the lines of making everybody who opposes the cuts, or even just education cuts/fees welcome (this is not about 'broad politics', that's a symptom of basing action on shared interests). then in subsequent debates, i guess advertised for Day 2 we can argue the toss. i still think the 'political perspective' people like us would push would be primarily a tactical/strategic one though (e.g. arguing for 'flying pickets' going to other unis/colleges/picket lines to spread the struggle...) rather than me standing up and talking about libertarian communism as superior to ParEcon or something.

in some ways this is a rearticulation of the classical view of Direct Action (Pouget), although i draw different organisational conclusions to Pouget for a variety of reasons; essentially if people act for themselves in their own interests, they are driven to try and comprehend those actions and interests, which may lead to revolutionary ideas. action running ahead of consciousness which then seeks to make sense of it, as opposed to consciousness being delivered Blue Peter style as one prepared earlier by a vanguard party or would-be leadership of ideas. it's not to say i think political propaganda or arguments are always-already pointless, i spend considerable time doing them, but i think they have to be conceived as dialogue based on interest rather than simple dissemination of a line and the associated political practices; rhetoric, demagoguery etc.

just to pick up on this... student bureaucrats aren't really a problem at Sussex. the student union officers only serve a year full time then typically return to study, which means they don't have time to completely bureaucratise or their interests too sharply diverge from students (although in principle it can happen v. quickly, and i could think of some small examples, it generally hasn't been an issue at Sussex in the last year i've been around). the students union is also pretty lefty. there's an interesting division of labour where basically the students union doesn't organise these kind of struggles at all, something which would be hard to conceive with trade unions, based as they are on a mediating position. rather the demonstrations, occupations etc are organised by Stop the Cuts campaign and the union is typically verbally and to an extent materially supportive to the extent permitable by bureaucratic/legalistic considerations.

however, that's not to say all the same problems of bureacratisation aren't reproduced by STC activists becoming specialists in struggle, alienating others, subordinating action to their own agendas etc, as discussed above.

I think this article picks up on some (though not all) of the issues outlined above about specialists in struggle running campaigns at Sussex uni (though the author now doesn't like most of the article..). When i was at sussex, the left was basically just anarchists but as the 'specialists' they acted in much the same way as other 'authoritarian' groups (not out of bad will like, they were all really nice people but just for, what they felt was, the best..)..

This is good.

So is this.

I think there's something in that, an parallel, to finding themselves upset with the world, looking for a solution which fits how they feel. This is a much stronger position that reading around political ideas and picking one which looks interesting.

On similar lines, I've heard it said that people don't choose their actions according to their morals, they choose their morals according to their (preferred) actions. I think there's something in that.