jakegrxz

[jakegrxz]

Foregrounding confrontation

Confrontational and/or disruptive activism can often be feared or shamed, by both those on the right and left. But what if it’s a sign that something good, productive, and radical is happening?

Following a week of protest targeting London’s key infrastructure by Extinction Rebellion, the topic of disruptive direct action has been once again made the topic of national conversation. Putting aside the very real issues with XR’s politics and relationship to the police to one side (this is not that piece), their activity has at least represented some of the most sustained, organised and spectacular direct action seen in the UK for some time. Reactions have ranged from inspired to derogatory, to somewhere in between. A glimpse at this can be seen through The Guardian’s reporting on the 21st April, where a couple from St. Helens in Merseyside were interviewed who had travelled down for some bank holiday shopping:

““I agree with some of the points but I disagree with the methods,” Michelle said after a lengthy discussion with an activist, adding that the movement appeared quite London-centric. “It wouldn’t happen in St Helens,” added her partner.”

This is, of course, nothing new. We find the same reactions whenever there is a tube strike in London, or whenever any activist group takes direct action for any number of reasons. The invocation is made loud and clear: think about all the innocent people you are disrupting. You are causing needless harm. You are being rude and confrontational. You need be mature and sit around the table with those in power to make the change you want. In this vision of politics, political ideas can be divorced from the methods used to achieve them, as evidenced in the Guardian quote above. The political ideas aren’t the things that’re really engaged with or critiqued (indeed, they’re usually brushed aside: yes yes, we all want higher wages; yes, we all care about climate change); rather, it’s the disruptive and confrontational methods. It’s the textbook media/elite response to disruptive protest: focus on disruption or property damage to evacuate the event of all meaningful politics.

What’s concerning is that this objection isn’t even exclusively the property of the reactionary, conservative right – some leftists engage in it too, perhaps more subtly. Think about, for instance, some of the supposedly ‘radical’ lecturers in universities, who take pride in their ‘critical’ scholarship yet balk at the idea of actually taking direct action or standing up to university managers. Or some people in the Labour Party whose so-called socialist ‘credentials’ stem not from any serious radical praxis, but rather simply a position in a social network, a circle of friends masked by institutional rhetoric and elected positions. Time and again I have encountered people who consider themselves on the left, but feel uncomfortable and uneasy about being disruptive and confrontational to the point of actively stopping such action from happening.

There seems, then, to be a theoretical gulf between strategy and tactics on the left; leftists have the theories to critique the big picture (why capitalism is bad, why the gender binary is bad, etc.), but not the theories about tactics needed to actually intervene in this big picture. What I want to do in this piece, then, is to try and integrate those two theoretical strands. Rather than think political ideas/strategies and political methods/tactics apart, they need to be thought together. To do this, I centre the moment of confrontation in any direct action – the confrontation between you and a security guard, an angered commuter, an angered manager, a sexist male leftist, a racist white ally –and all the emotions (anger, anxiety, confusion, glee, sadness) that comes with. Rather than bemoaning these moments of confrontation, I instead try to critically value them, and see where that takes us. In other words, what if confrontation, far from being a negative sign in activism, is actually a sign that something good, productive, and radical is happening? This is the question that undergirds this piece.

 Theorising confrontation

To begin we need to note the observation made by numerous cultural and social theorists as part of the recent “affective turn” in the arts and social sciences that emotions and feelings are not individualised phenomena. While mainstream discourses around wellbeing, mental health, self-care and happiness present emotions as coming from within our minds, as a problem for the rational liberal individual, these theorists have argued that while emotions or “affects” are of course instantiated at the levels of chemicals in the brain, they ultimately exist on the plane of social relations. We are always sad/happy/angry about something or other or for some reason or another; emotions thus involve directions and orientations towards some object. Our emotions are always related to something or other in the social field – hence why, if I were asked “where is the anger?” in a given situation, I wouldn’t point at the person getting angry, but at those spaces in between the angry person and the thing they were angry at: a virtual field of relations going back and forth between subject and object, reshaping each of them as they move.

The feeling of confrontation, of being confronted, of being critiqued, should therefore be theorised as the affective dimension of a system of power being questioned. The moment of confrontation doesn’t emerge because of some combination of “individual” interiorised emotions – because, for instance, an individual protester is “inherently” angry as some interior quality. The anger, anxiety, discomfort, awkwardness, joy – you name it – that comes in these moments is the affective surfacing of multiple deeper world-views coming into friction. The people targeted in moments of confrontation don’t get emotional for no reason. It’s because, often, what’s happening to them baffles and disrupts them at a very fundamental level. The ways of life they have become attached to are being broken through political action, prompting an emotional, bodily, affective response – an embodied breaking of that previous attachment. This is not a failure of radical activism and direct action, but in fact a condition for its existence. We have to accept that and work with it, planning for the risks involved. Sometimes we may even have to encourage it. [1]

In other words: the commuter’s rage is capitalism getting emotional. The foul-mouthed tirade that assaults our eardrums does not stem from this individual commuter’s bad temper – though that may aggravate it – but instead a system of power being challenged and disrupted.

Rather than being an arbitrary nuisance, then, confrontation is demanded by radical politics that seeks systemic transformation. If we want a total transformation of the economy and society, then we will find ourselves coming up against the deeply held identifications, communities, and desires that some people have formed in relation to the capitalist economy and society. We are going to have to disrupt their everyday understandings and navigations of the world. Simply, dismantling imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy is going to piss some people off; it’s going to make white people feel awkward, embarrassed, and uncomfortable when they’re called out on their conscious and unconscious racism; it’s going to prompt men to get defensive when their sexism shows. These varying emotional responses, which will vary in different contexts and depending on the relation of power being questioned, should not be conceived of as the outward pouring of an individual’s ‘inner’ emotions. Instead, they represent a broader social system of power being rattled, making itself heard through the chemical neurotransmitters that jump from neuron to neuron in our brain and the air that rises through our lungs and passes through our vocal chords in an emotional act of speech.

The fact remains though that these moments of confrontation are difficult and often unpleasant, for all involved. In the workplace, speaking up, confronting your superior, can risk your job and your material security. In the street, taking direct action, you risk being castigated by an angry disrupted bystander, and perhaps even being physically hurt. Learning to persevere and critically value these moments, and not be afraid of them, takes concerted persistence and effort; a whole new way of living contra how we may have been brought up.

On this point, Sara Ahmed’s recent book Living a Feminist Life is a valuable resource [2]. In the conclusion, Ahmed offers up a “killjoy manifesto”, making a passionate defence of the killjoy: the person who confronts questionable jokes at the dinner table, causes discomfort and upset, that quite simply refuses the imperative to keep everyone happy. Ahmed notes how our definition of happiness has changed since the Middle Ages and the rise of positive psychology, such that ‘happiness is defined not in terms of what happens to you but of what you work for’ (265). Happiness becomes the precious project of the individual that cannot be disrupted and must be honoured. To be a killjoy, then, is not to want everyone to be permanently unhappy, but to refuse this imperative to be happy, the expectation of happiness, the fetishization of happiness. For this imperative to be happy not only works to nudge people into norm-conforming behaviour, but also to silence violence around us, to pathologise the highlighting of injustice. When happiness becomes an imperative, unhappiness becomes the failure to be happy (which then causes more unhappiness), rather than, as Ahmed notes, a ‘refusal, a claim, a protest, or even just some ordinary thing, a texture of a life being lived’ (58). To pathologise direct actions because they make people unhappy is therefore also to reinforce this imperative to be happy, fed to us through our families, popular culture, and the ‘happiness industry’.

From this Ahmed arrives at the principles of her killjoy manifesto: I am not willing to make happiness my cause. I am willing to cause unhappiness. I am willing to support others who are willing to cause unhappiness. I am not willing to laugh at jokes designed to cause offense. I am willing to live a life that is deemed by others as unhappy and I am willing to reject or widen the scripts available for what counts as a good life. I am willing to snap any bonds, however precious, when those bonds are damaging to myself or to others. And so on it goes. Let us stick by them at family meals, social occasions, and in our activism, face to face with the police, security guards, infuriated members of the public, and more.

“Good” and “bad” confrontation

We have to be careful with the argument so far, though. I have to stress that I am not valuing confrontation in itself, as some fetishized object. After all, is a fascist not “confronting” a Muslim woman when they hurl racist abuse at her? Is a sexist man not “confronting” his partner when he engages in domestic abuse? These kind of things are clearly indefensible from any serious political and moral perspective, and pose questions for my arguments above. As extreme examples, they show that confrontational politics has the potential to become something unproductive and even potentially dangerous. To put it in cruder terms, then, when is confrontation “good”, and when is it “bad”?

Let us bring Chantal Mouffe into the conversation here. For Mouffe, antagonism (as expressed in the moments of confrontation noted above) is the essence of the political, which she defines as ‘the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies’ (On the Political, p.9). In simpler terms, social issues always involve decisions that require people to make a choice between conflicting alternatives. In that the very act of decision requires a prior period of undecidability, when the various alternatives are all on the table, antagonism (expressed here through the conflicting alternatives) is constitutive of social life and politics. Antagonism is also present in the realm of political identities. Mouffe notes that political identities are constitutively relational: a ‘we’ can only be defined by establishing an exterior ‘they’. You only know who your ‘friends’ are because there are other people who are ‘enemies’ from which you distinguish your friends from. Antagonism is therefore present in the very ways we define ourselves; it cannot be escaped, denied or negated, as liberalism attempts to do. It has to be accepted as the foundation for political action.

Whether confrontation is “good” or “bad”, then, is ultimately a question of politics. The confrontation of the fascist is bad because it is fascist. The fascism provides the framework for the entire confrontation, from beginning to end. This is why we object to fascist confrontations, arrange anti-fascists marches, no platform fascists, and the suchlike. We, the anti-fascists, confront the initial confrontation.

It’s all well and good saying this, but life is rarely so simple. In most situations political actors find themselves in, what is politically objectionable is not always clear; the water is politically muddied. The classic example is in activist movements when, for instance, there is someone involved who is considered a ‘good activist’ but has a questionable history of sexual harassment, for example. Confronting this person (almost always a man) risks causing divisions in the movement, derailing months of often unforgiving work, and leaving no legacy, to the detriment of the many people who could potentially benefit from the movement’s actions. But equally, keeping things as is threatens the safety of (again, almost always) women in the movement, which could well only multiply if left unchecked. Finding adequate solutions out of these contradictory situations is often difficult and absorbs a huge amount of mental and emotional energy for activists involved, which in this case often tend to be women, BAME, trans, disabled, or LGBTQ+. They are serious issues that need to be accounted for in any discussion of confrontation.

In these cases, I think it’s important to stress that the moment of confrontation doesn’t necessarily mean excommunication or furious tirades (sometimes, though, these may be necessary). While it may appear that’s what I’ve meant throughout this piece, really it isn’t; instead confrontation instead just means occupying and time and space that one isn’t normally supposed to, and making very clear an injustice is happening that wasn’t really being spoken about before. Considering this, while it’s tricky to make any blanket statements here because every situation is riven with its own nuances and complications, I think it’s fair to say that some kind of confrontation has to occur in these situations. The precise form that takes is up for debate. But surely, something has to be said, a confrontation has to happen.

Confrontation then, is no easy matter, no thing to be uncritically fetishized. I certainly wouldn’t want the takeaway of this post to be “it’s okay to be an arsehole”, as if every act of confrontation is de facto ‘radical’ (as I argued above, it isn’t: it’s a matter of politics and context). Our lives are built from relations of care and dependence, and these need to be taken seriously; we need to care for others. But surely, in the midst of the ever-growing need to totally overhaul the way we treat nature, the economy, and society on a global scale, modesty should not be the default disposition in our activism. Confrontation should never, at least, be feared. It should always be a serious option, always on the table, and never shied from.

Footnotes

[1] This idea of confrontation essentially being fundamental to political life is stated here with great inspiration from Chantal Mouffe’s work. See On the Political and The Return of the Political.

[2] Ahmed is just one example of the exploration of the interconnections between emotions/affects and politics, which is most seminally demonstrated in her work The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Others include Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia series, and Lauren Berlant. The traditional left exists at quite some distance from these theories, sometimes to the degree of mocking them for being too ‘postmodern’, but it’s clear they have utility for any truly radical political project involving direct action. Beyond this piece, I encourage readers engaging with them.

[jakegrxz]

Inside the occupation

Written in a brief moment of quiet on the evening of 15th March, the fourth night of the ongoing occupation of Deptford Town Hall by Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action. At this point, open access to the occupation had not been granted, and occupiers like myself had been subjected to siege warfare tactics by the university. Days were spent desperately trying to find ways to get new protesters in - scaling roofs, climbing through windows, stealing keys, and the suchlike. 

This was a spontaneous attempt to try and make sense of the high emotions that day.

To occupy is to hold tendentially. There are gaps in an occupation; they are never totalising or complete. Occupations imply negotiations between borders-in-flux – work/leisure; coloniser/colonised; inside/outside. Simply, occupations imply resistance to the occupation – from the micro-resistance of slacking off at work, to the numerous organised anti-colonial revolts throughout history. All are resistances to an occupation.

Occupations are about the ownership of some space, some time, some space-time. They involve negotiations over this ownership.

It is usually the powerful who occupy, who have hegemony over a certain space-time. However, the nature of their occupation as an occupation, due to this power, does not appear. The cracks in the amour do not show. The space-time appears one and the same with the powerful who occupy it, rather than two separate levels. Deptford Town Hall, as a physical and material space, appears as Goldsmiths. But it is not. Goldsmiths (the senior managements who run Goldsmiths, to be specific) occupy Deptford Town Hall. Security staff stand on the frontline of this occupation, they stand as its embodied symbol and material protector. But there’s a whole web of relations behind that, which constitute this occupation – particular laws relating to property rights, the police, and far, far more.

When those oppressed – racially harassed BAME students, discriminated and exploited by a structurally racist university and society, in this case – challenge these claims to ownership, and undertake their own (counter-)occupation, we reveal the chinks in the armour. Goldsmiths’ occupation of Deptford Town Hall becomes clear. They have to lock the building down, hire security staff on overtime, lock the counter-occupiers in, to retain control. Suddenly, the nature of this space is in question. Who owns it? Who should own it? What should it be used for?

But it’s precarious for us, too. We put our lives on hold; we survive on snack food; we sleep on hard floors; we have to block corridors and hold open doorways against physical resistance; we constantly have to be on the offensive and defensive, because our (counter-)occupation is always in threat. We are holding this space tendentially.

I am exhausted in this occupation, I am anxious, I want things to get back to normal. But I take solace in the fact that our actions expose a certain contingency inherent in the nature of power, the constant openings for resistance that exist in our lives. The physical and mental exhaustion I am feeling right now is the direct expression of that, and in a way, that is comforting. It signals power in question, power contingent, power open for re-appropriation. Chances for something better; openings.

[jakegrxz]

Be activists, not bureaucrats

This piece was originally written for new students’ union officers starting at Surrey in 2018, but has relevance for student officers and activists everywhere. The message is clear: in an age where universities, students and academics are under relentless attack, students’ union officers need to do more than arrange recreational events (as is often the case). Instead, they need to be energetic activists, constantly organising collective and empowering campaigns on campus. Without such activism, a progressive future for higher education recedes from the horizon of possibility. [Originally published online here.]

On the 9th July 2018, the new Students’ Union (SU) officers at Surrey take office. Social media accounts will be handed over, pictures on the SU website will be replaced, and eventually a new banner of fresh faces will grace the side of the SU building. Thus begins a new year at the Students’ Union.

This new start for the Union, however, should be more than cosmetic. For too long our Union has been an inert force for change, prioritising recreational events and “charitable objectives” over serious political campaigning, organising and educating. I thus write this article as an open call to all the new officers in the union – both the paid full-time officers and the voluntary part-time officers, within the ‘zones’ and the Liberation Committee – to make this year different. From those of you getting their first taste of student politics and campaigning to those of you more well-worn, I urge you all to be activists, not bureaucrats. Through this article, I want to help you all realise the power, importance and significance of your various positions, and implore you to use that in an effective political manner.

Think big: Higher education in context

The world of student politics, and university life more broadly, is one of constant flux. Thousands of students both begin and leave university every year, rapidly changing the make-up of the student body on an annual basis. Additionally, lengthy holiday periods over Christmas, Easter and summer puncture any sense of continuity within a single year, as many students leave campus to live at home, go on holiday, or work. Full-time officers in the Union, furthermore, can only serve a maximum of two one-year terms before they are forced to step down, adding to the lack of continuity that permeates student politics.

As a result, it can be extraordinarily difficult to appreciate the broader picture of what’s going on as a student officer or activist. But doing so is vital if you, as new officers, want to genuinely address the many injustices ongoing at Surrey. If you want to make serious, long-lasting change that benefits not only current students but also the many generations of students to come – some of whom may be your children – appreciating the larger historical and political context is necessary.

So what is this larger historical trajectory that I speak of? What is the ‘bigger picture’ in higher education? At the risk of sounding like a broken record to some who may read this piece, I would argue it can be summed up in one word: marketisation. Over the past three decades British higher education has undergone a radical transformation, predicated on a series of neoliberal ideological assumptions about education and society. Simply, marketisation is an ideology that believes education is best treated as a commodity that should be delivered through market mechanisms. Degrees (and university experiences) are treated as commodities whose benefits are perceived solely in relation to individuals (e.g how much money the degree will allow the graduate to earn) rather than society as a whole. Meanwhile, it is assumed that the best way to improve the ‘quality’ of these degree-commodities is for universities to compete in a marketplace over students and resources (rather than co-operate), supposedly driving up the quality of teaching and research.

While this may sound reasonable on the surface, these fundamental – and above all ideological – assumptions are why higher education is no longer free, the government has cut funding to universities (particularly for arts and social science courses), university league tables have been constructed (these only came into existence some 26 years ago), maintenance loans have replaced maintenance grants, the number of private universities in England is multiplying, and a dizzying array of largely arbitrary metrics like the NSS and the TEF have emerged to measure and ‘rank’ universities into a differentiated higher education ‘market’. The goal of all these reforms is clear – to fundamentally change the nature of higher education in the UK, such that universities behave like businesses (prioritising how they appear on an open day over actual student and staff welfare) and students think like consumers. The only people that benefit from this process are the rich, who find universities increasingly bending over to their profit-driven interests in order to secure funding and are able to afford the many costs of higher education, while ordinary students and university workers suffer, being loaded with debt and forced onto low-wage or insecure contracts. Marketisation makes universities engines that reinforce (rather than challenge) structures of inequality; it is a pernicious ideology that must be resisted at every turn.

“Marketisation is not an ‘abstract’ thing – some distant ‘national’ problem we can worry about later while we focus on ‘real’, local student issues for now – it affronts students everyday through a diverse range of often mundane and localised practices”

Furthermore, marketisation is not an ‘abstract’ thing – some distant ‘national’ problem we can worry about later while we focus on ‘real’, local student issues for now – it affronts students at Surrey everyday through a diverse range of often mundane and localised practices. Examples of these are plentiful: remember the Economics lectures happening in an Odeon earlier this academic year? That was marketisation in action, as the university over-recruited for a certain course in the interest of maximising tuition fee income in the wake of government funding cuts. The Politics department almost getting effectively shut down in 2015? Again that was marketisation, where the arbitrary demands of narrowly-defined “research excellence”, most prominently measured through the Research Excellence Framework, came above students’ and academics’ needs and interests. I could go on: from our Vice-Chancellor’s £366,000 a year salary while 47% of Surrey’s academics exist on casual or insecure job contracts, to the emphasis on building expensive student accommodation at Manor Park (which will be over £150 a week when completed) over the provision of cheaper accommodation, the neoliberal logic of marketisation is being enforced daily at Surrey.

It’s not just the historical context that student officers need to be aware of, though; it’s also the broader contemporary political context. For as the excellent NUS President candidate Sahaya James pointed out in her campaign earlier this year, ‘the world doesn’t end on our campus’. Universities are not bounded spaces that are simply occupied by students and nothing more. Instead, at every level we find universities maintaining important and often problematic links with the ‘outside world’. Indeed, in some sense, we can say the university is a factory – it produces knowledge and research that then circulates throughout society, and has particular effects. What knowledge, research, and teaching that is produced by universities and funded by governments is therefore a highly political process. SU officers and activists need to be aware of this fact, and struggle to make sure the research produced by universities serves the demands of global justice, emancipation and equality, not profit, imperialism, and greed.

“What knowledge, research, and teaching that is produced by universities and funded by governments is a highly political process. SU officers need to be aware of this fact, and struggle to make sure the research produced by universities serves the demands of global justice, emancipation and equality, not profit, imperialism, and greed.”

For example, at Surrey, we are seeing a particular emphasis on the interests of big business, defence institutions and aerospace companies in the kind of research produced and supported. One particularly egregious example here is the fact that BAE Systems, one of the world’s leading multinational defence, security and aerospace companies, houses its UK Head Office on the university’s Research Park. Even worse, the university and BAE are official partners, with BAE providing many placement opportunities for Surrey students, and more. In other words, the University of Surrey is the willing landlord to a multinational defence corporation that has major contracts with states such as Saudi Arabia, the US and the UK, providing them with weapons, communications and transport technologies that facilitate their fatal imperialist projects and murder innocent Middle Eastern populations. In 2014, for instance, BAE supplied Saudi Arabia with 72 fighter jets that were subsequently used to bomb hospitals in Yemen. Do we, as Surrey students, want to support this agenda? Do we want our university to be providing students, resources, and academic labour to such an immoral programme? The answer for student activists should be a resounding ‘no’.

Take action: Be activists, not bureaucrats

When all this is appreciated, it becomes clear that British higher education is in a state of crisis that needs action now – and students’ union officers around the country are some of the people best placed to fight this state of affairs. When we look back at this period in the future, when universities are potentially sites of ever-higher fees and rents that exist solely to service the interests of the wealthy, what side do you, as officers, want to have been on? Do you want to be the one who simply organised the odd social event? Or do you want to be the one that stood up, got unashamedly angry, and organised effective political opposition to university managers in the interests of the many, not the few?

I invoke history here not for the sake of moral grandstanding, but to make you realise that every act you make as an officer is an act of history. Your actions have impacts beyond your local, everyday environment, impacting bigger structures and trajectories, and having political consequences. Indeed, collectively the Students’ Union is a potentially powerful political and historical actor. It has its own building on campus, five full-time paid sabbatical officers, almost 20 full-time members of staff, and links to every student on campus. These kinds of resources are the stuff of dreams for everyday student activists, and indeed many flailing trade unions; collectively, they hold the potential power to make genuine progressive political change on campus.

But how to unleash this potential power? You may agree or appreciate that you stand at an important historical juncture, an actor in the broader historical process of marketisation, with the power to challenge this. But how? What does this ‘power’ look like?

The key point I want to stress here is that your power – indeed, students’ power – largely does not derive from your position on a university’s governing committee. At Surrey and I presume many other universities, full-time SU officers sit on literally more than a dozen university committees, successfully co-opted into the University’s governing structures and bureaucracy. (This is not the case, it should be noted, for the trade unions on campus.) Consequently, it is easy and commonplace for new officers to get sucked into this bureaucratic maze, internalising the language of university managers and thinking they are making a difference simply by being on a committee and chipping in now and then.

But while student voices on university committees are valuable, and can make small changes, they are remarkably limited as vehicles for advancing students’ interests. Being on a committee does nothing to empower students or fundamentally alter the structures that oppress them, because senior university managers have the power in these meetings and will not take action against their own interests without collective and public political opposition. Furthermore, sitting on committees is a significant time drain. Every second you sit on these committees, listening to university managers’ pointless jargon about hitting X or Y quota, you could be spending talking to actual students, getting them angry, getting them organised – in other words, empowering them.

“One SU officer in a committee meeting has very little leverage – but an SU officer in a meeting backed by hundreds of students taking action outside, through mass protest or direct action (such as a rent strike or a boycott), has the power to grab significant wins from university bosses.”

My basic point here is that Surrey students’ power cannot be fully realised in these committee meetings, where you will be one voice among many managers. We will not win significantly lower rents, free education, bigger bursaries, more ethical research funding or better postgraduate contracts solely by having an individual well-intentioned SU officer getting angry at a committee meeting. Instead, our power is fundamentally only realised when we act as a collective force – a union. One SU officer in a committee meeting has very little leverage – but an SU officer in a meeting backed by hundreds of students taking effective political action outside, through mass protest or direct action (such as a rent strike or a boycott), has the power to grab significant wins from powerful university bosses.

As a student officer, therefore, you need to get organising. Set up campaigns! Talk to students! Add them to campaign groups on Facebook! Organise fun and empowering meetings! Do banner drops! The list goes on. Essentially, you just need to get students speaking to each other about the political issues that concern them, organising them into a collective force as they do.

To conclude, I therefore plead to all new officers: don’t be passive bureaucrats. Organise your fellow students, raise their expectations, get them angry. The more you sit back, the more you simply poll students for their “feedback” rather than actually talking to them, informing them, and organising them, the more you reproduce a cycle of student apathy. Organising and campaigning is hard, yes, and entails a road paved with setbacks, defeat, and opposition from powerful actors. But the potential victories are too important to ignore, and could seriously empower and benefit the most marginalised current and future students of the university.

So to all the new officers, I implore you: learn about what’s happening in higher education; go to activist training events run by the NUS, People and Planet, or the National Campaigns Against Fees and Cuts; meet fellow student activists from around the country; organise and unite Surrey students around political goals; stand up to university managers; and above all, go out and win. Good luck – I wish you all the very best.

[jakegrxz]

Students’ unions should be more than nightclubs – they should be bold, campaigning forces

Students’ unions in the UK tend to be toothless organisations. Rather than genuine, mass democratic organisations, all too often they function as de facto ‘student experience’ departments of their respective universities, co-opted into their bureaucratic structures and internalising the depoliticised discourses of charity law and university managers. In this article, originally written for Incite, the political journal I was Editor of whilst doing my undergraduate degree, I direct this critique at the University of Surrey’s Students’ Union. Through this, I outline a more radical direction for it, and other students’ unions like it.

As the annual students’ union elections loom on the horizon, Surrey students should be thinking carefully about what they want their Students’ Union (SU) to be. I talk here not about minor bureaucratic reforms, pertaining to specific rules surrounding course representatives or societies, for example. I am instead prompting questions surrounding our students’ union’s fundamental nature. Why should it exist? What should it do, on a fundamental level? We are lucky enough to be granted an institution on campus that has its own building, 19 permanent paid staff and five full-time sabbatical officers, and links to all 15,000 students at Surrey. This is a massive resource with huge potential for local change on Surrey’s campus, which could theoretically be used for any number of ends. It is thus vital that politically concerned students here should think seriously about how our Students’ Union should be wielding that power.

What an SU shouldn’t be

Unfortunately, Surrey’s sabbatical officers and Union staff past and present do not seem to have engaged in such big-picture thinking. Instead, for far too long, our Union has essentially functioned as an entertainment venue with some neglected democratic appendages attached as a footnote, when the reality should really be closer to the other way around. This is not to say that our SU should shut down Rubix or suddenly adopt some puritan stance towards clubbing and fun in general – absolutely not. But it is to say that student entertainment is not the fundamentalreason for the Union’s existence – nightclubs exist across Guildford for students to go to, and students can throw their own parties and socialise as they wish, as they often do. Parties, fun, and entertainment, therefore, are not the Union’s unique raison d’être. Students in the UK did not occupy university buildings or organise sit-ins (as in Haringey in 1968, or Oxford in 1973) to have a nightclub built for them on campus.

But in fairness, most officers in Surrey’s Students’ Union would not argue that entertainment is the fundamental reason for the SU’s existence. Instead, the SU’s purpose is fundamentally to give its 15,000 members ‘representation’ or a ‘voice’, in order to improve ‘the student experience’. None of this sounds particularly problematic on the surface, and indeed I would argue that it is the Union’s primary job to be a body that represents Surrey students. What I take issue with, instead, is the particular conceptualisation of ‘representation’ that seems to plague much of the student movement in the UK today.

Let me use a concrete example from Surrey to explain myself here. In Surrey Decides’ ‘Question Time’ event earlier this year, the chair made the remark during the VP Voice debate that the role of VP Voice was “looking after student opinion and taking it to higher levels”. To me, this offhand remark encapsulated the entire way apolitical sabbatical officers tend to think about students’ unions’ ‘representative’ role. They see students’ unions as merely another link in the chain, a feedback mechanism for university managers at “higher levels” who can then use the feedback to supposedly improve the ‘student experience’. Under this view of ‘representation’, students’ unions get reduced to a benign listening post; a voice on a committee that can easily be ignored or misappropriated. Not only that, but it also denies any political agency to the thousands of students existing outside the SU or university’s official structures, and locates the site of political struggle in a backroom committee meeting. It reinforces the idea of passive students-as-consumers, of a commodified university education which students ‘purchase’. Students’ unions do not truly ‘represent’ their members when they solely act like this – they rob them of their democratic rights and powers.

“The Union Makes Us Strong”: What should an SU be?

How should students’ unions exercise their ‘representative’ function, then? Unions in general – whether they be trade unions, students’ unions, or tenants’ unions – exist to organise and unite specific factions of the working class and other oppressed groups, and give them the means to fight back against the forces that exploit them and reproduce their subordination. Rogue landlords, under-paying bosses, and universities that charge extortionate tuition fees and rents in halls, are forces backed by significant capital and the coercive power of the state and the law. It is only through mass mobilisation and organisation that they can be successfully fought back against, and that is why unions exist. That is why the working class have fought, and often died, historically, for their right to unionise – because it is their way of fighting back against powerful vested interests, successfully. There is literally no point in unions, including students’ unions, therefore, if they do not engage in a collective fight. The clue is in the very name!

Consequently, students’ unions fail their members (and fail to represent them) when they do not organise collective action, or engage them in meaningful democratic practice. Representing students does not mean simply being a feedback mechanism – it means being an active and campaigning force on campus, that organises and mobilises its thousands of members as a collective force for progressive change. It is through this that students’ unions “represent our collective material interests”, as free education activist Luke Dukinfield has written.

Unfortunately, this sort of political leadership is something our union at Surrey has consistently shied away from. At a recent Executive Committee meeting in November, doubts were raised over a free education motion because it did not represent students who agreed with tuition fees – one sabbatical officer thus suggested that a survey be taken of current students to gauge the student body’s opinions before deciding any policy on free education. Other committee members seemed ambivalent or uninformed about the issue, an understandable (the turnover in student politics being extraordinarily fast) if disappointing sight to see. This denial of leadership, this refusal of any kind of responsibility for politically important and contentious issues, fails all those students who are marginalised and struggling at Surrey – the very people we should always be fighting for, and alongside with.

Instead, if our SU really wants to represent and engage students at Surrey, it should be taking bold collective action. Rises in rents and poor living conditions should be met with by rent strikes, as was recently done successfully by thirty students at the University of Sussex. Cuts to student support should be met with sustained campaigning and protest, as has recently been done at UCL. On a national level, marketising reforms to higher education should be met with a boycott of the very mechanisms by which it is marketised, as the national boycott of the National Student Survey by the NUS attempted to do last year. This collective action and protest gives us our material leverage which we can then use to win real, radical change when negotiating with University management.

A Radical Future for Surrey’s SU

This may sound idealistic or contrarian (“protesting for protest’s sake”), but it is said with a completely sober awareness of the challenge any collective action by our SU would face. Students are often politically apathetic at Surrey, with the University lacking the history of activism other major UK universities have. Surrey primarily delivers practical science and business courses, lacking hugely in the social sciences, humanities and to a lesser extent arts, disciplines more closely affiliated with political radicalism. The University’s location in Guildford also poses difficulties, tending to attract more affluent and privileged students from the south of the UK. All of this poses steep challenges to the success of any collective action that may arise on our campus, which student organisers must be aware of and prepared to face.

But this is not an immutable truth, a law of nature – it can be, and is being, changed. The past two years have seen a gradual upswing in political activity here, as students, slowly and latently becoming radicalised by both the assault on their education by the Conservatives and the success of Jeremy Corbyn in voicing an alternative, have become receptive to bolder political ideas and tactics on campus. Attendance at Executive Committee meetings has increased, and debates have become more contentious. A demonstration was held against Trump’s “Muslim ban” earlier this year in February. A ‘Cut the Rent’ group has been set up by myself and other comrades, seeking to organise a critical mass of students to withhold their rent in order to push the University of Surrey to cut the rent and build cheaper halls.

I have been involved with many of these campaigning endeavours in the past two years, and what has consistently struck me is the genuine appetite for more radical action when properly explained and presented. But it shouldn’t surprise me – Surrey may not have a history of activism, but that doesn’t mean its students here aren’t being exploited, aren’t facing discrimination, or aren’t struggling to make ends meet. Because they are: private rents in Guildford are extortionate, Surrey’s new student nurses now no longer receive a bursary, and the University has consistently over-recruited in the past few years, leading to overcrowded lecture theatres and overstretched student support services. All this material exploitation is creating a latent anger amongst the student body, and laying the foundation for future collective action that fights such exploitation. The task for our Students’ Union now is thus to build on this foundation of anger and exploitation, and organise it into campaigns, direct action, and protest.

Let’s put an end to vapid, disempowering notions of ‘voice’ and the ‘student experience’, and turn our Union into a radical campaigning force that genuinely fights and wins for its members in all the years to come. That is what our Union should be.

[jakegrxz]

Where next for Corbyn’s Labour?

Written in the wake of the June 2017 general election and its shock result, this essay (originally written for Incite) attempts to make sense of Labour’s success and theorises potential routes forwards for the left in the party. All of this revolves around Labour taking mass politics seriously, democratising its internal structures and truly embedding itself in local communities through solidarity work and supporting grassroots campaigns, strikes, and direct action. [See the print edition here]

This isn’t the article I was supposed to be writing. Two months ago, it was assumed that at this point the Conservative Party would be governing with a substantial majority, delivering a hard, efficient Brexit, while the Labour Party lay disintegrated, having suffered an historic defeat. Instead, we find ourselves in almost the exact inverse of that situation. Theresa May and the Conservatives look weaker by the day, having lost their previous majority and fumbled their way through several concentrated crises, the tragic Grenfell Tower fire being the most notable. Brexit looks even more uncertain and confused than it did before, with the Conservatives’ negotiating hand weakened and the scale of the task ever-dauntingly enormous. And - most importantly regarding this article – the Labour Party stand rejuvenated, having waged a passionate, positive campaign that mobilised many and produced a net gain of thirty seats.

The question for the left, therefore, has changed. No longer is the question about Jeremy Corbyn’s status as leader following an historic election defeat, for this position is, for now, rightly secure. All wings of the Labour Party are now united in their belief that Corbyn has earnt his right to stay, even if for many in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) this belief stands on thin, conditional foundations. Instead, with this leadership position now secure, and another potential general election (and Labour victory?) around the corner, the British left must ask: where next? How should the left mobilise in Labour? What reforms to Labour’s party apparatus must the Corbyn leadership make? Formulating responses to these questions is an urgent task – without sufficient answers, Labour could soon find themselves in power without an adequate associated popular movement to defend them against a global political and economic system designed to induce the failure of the type of socialist policies Corbyn espouses. Furthermore, without such a movement, the left’s standing in Labour will continue to be relatively weak and could face future defeat, facilitating a return to vapid, technocratic and undemocratic politics within the Labour Party, as was the case in the New Labour era.

For the Many, Not the Few

To help determine the social, political and electoral potential of the Corbyn project, it is first worth reflecting on its remarkable short campaign, which culminated in the first increase in Labour seats since 1997, and the biggest increase in vote share since the historic Labour landslide of 1945. Considering the onslaught Corbyn has received from the mainstream media and most of the PLP in the past two years, this is nothing short of a political earthquake, which has collapsed the mainstream foundational assumptions of British politics and opened up a new space for the resurgence of the left. For once, let us not ask what went wrong, but rather: what went right?

Simply, the success of Labour’s campaign lay in its effective mobilisation of supporters through numerous means, which all ultimately came to complement each other. A core element here was Labour’s manifesto, which eschewed much of the negative triangulation that characterised its predecessors and instead plainly offered a positive, accessible and credible vision of the future to all who read it. The beneficial consequences that flowed from the manifesto were manifold; not only did it help members and supporters, who could now canvass and persuade with reference to a document they had genuine faith in (unlike in 2015, when Labour canvassers found themselves having to defend reactionary policies such as the benefit cap and continued austerity on the doorstep), but the document was also an asset in itself, being widely shared on social media. The achievement here should not be understated – that the Corbyn leadership managed to produce a serious, transformative and credible document with the consent of most wings of the party, amidst passionate internal divisions and in a short time span, is no mean feat.

If it was Labour’s positive vision that mobilised supporters, this was done not just through the manifesto but also Corbyn himself. Through 90 mass rallies, held in both safe seats and marginals up and down the country, Corbyn tirelessly articulated a hopeful vision of the future, and energised supporters. These types of rallies have often been derided by political journalists, ever since they burst onto the scene via Corbyn’s first leadership campaign in 2015. The criticisms usually had two dimensions: first, that the rallies amounted to the mere ‘politics of protest’ that was uninterested in effecting ‘real’ change through the legislative arms of the state; and second, that they simply served to ‘preach to the converted’ rather than sway undecided voters. But Labour’s astonishing results in this election have roundly discredited these arguments, unveiling how little Westminster lobby journalists understand mass politics in the process. Anyone who has been to a mass protest or rally will know they are exciting, electrifying events; rather than simply reinforce previous individual political positions, they help produce a collective political consciousness. They empower those involved – alone, someone sympathetic to socialist politics may feel hopeless in the face of the neoliberal onslaught of the past four decades. But in a field with potentially thousands of other like-minded people, cheering and chanting, the sense of hope and empowerment is overwhelming. (This, incidentally, is where the political power of the “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chant comes into view.) The amazing thing is that one doesn’t even need to be present at a rally to feel this empowerment; in our digital age, watching videos of Corbyn rallies via Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat (the kind of which Labour skilfully produced throughout the campaign) have a similar energising effect. The result? People are sparked into action: they volunteer to canvass, they share supportive content on social media, they talk to their friends and family about politics. This is how mass politics works.

“Anyone who has been to a mass protest or rally will know they are exciting, electrifying events; rather than simply reinforce previous individual political positions, they help produce a collective political consciousness.”

If Corbyn played the role of energising a supportive base and crafting a collective consciousness, then Momentum served a crucial role in this election in harnessing that new energy and converting it into electoral activity, especially in seats Labour HQ wrote off as unwinnable. Through text and WhatsApp, the organisation contacted and mobilised supporters, directing them towards their nearest marginal seats using their online tool My Nearest Marginal. In turn, Momentum helped rectify the pitfalls of Labour’s defensive campaign, which directed more resources to existing Labour seats compared to marginals based on (ultimately inaccurate) internal polling that suggested electoral disaster. In marginals such as Croydon Central, Derby North, Sheffield Hallam, and Crewe and Nantwich (all of which went to Labour from the Tories this election), volunteers directed and organised by Momentum made a huge impact. Indeed, in Sheffield Hallam (where Nick Clegg was gloriously unseated), Momentum filled a significant gap left by the Labour Party machine, taking up the tasks of taking campaign photos, printing election materials and making memes for social media while local Labour activists were told by the central Labour Party to instead head to the neighbouring Penistone and Stocksbridge, where Labour MP Angela Smith was said to be at risk of losing her majority. In the end, both seats went to Labour.

It wasn’t just the ground campaign that Momentum played an active role in, though. Through producing engaging videos and other content on social media, the organisation also helped facilitate and organise an effective digital campaign for Labour. Reportedly, 25% of all UK Facebook users saw a Momentum video on their feeds in the last week of the campaign, all through organic sharing (rather than paid-for ‘promoted’ Facebook posts) – an astonishing statistic.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Labour’s campaign, which I have touched on above, is how much of it was unofficial and organic, emerging from the grassroots with no official direction from the Labour party machine. The emergence of ‘Grime4Corbyn’ is one of the finest example of this; by offering a programme that would seriously transform the lives of working-class and BAME communities (the background of many grime artists), as well as having an extensive history of being involved in anti-racist and anti-imperialist campaigns, Corbyn managed to re-engage a group of people in politics who had previously been left behind. As such, without any impetus from Labour HQ, many high-profile grime artists such as Stormzy, Akala, JME and Lowkey rallied behind the Labour leader, and encouraged their (mainly young) followers to register to vote and support him, as well as appear in numerous videos made for social media spreading that message. Once again, we see the transformative potential of the Corbyn project; by offering something radically different, it has made new cultural linkages amongst the masses, and ultimately constructed new political identities.

Reforming the Machine

All of the above are significant achievements, planting the seeds of a serious blossoming of socialist mass politics in the UK. But there is still much hard work to be done if this is to become genuinely embedded, an urgent task for the British left; for without such a robust mass movement, any future left government will simply crumble once faced with inevitably punitive measures from international business, the EU, and international financial institutions such as the IMF and WTO. On a smaller scale, the left in Labour also risk a premature demise, discredited before being able to properly prove themselves. What should be done?

For Labour, the node that lies at the centre of this nascent mass movement, some constitutional rule changes need to be made. Cloaked in the language of Labour bureaucracy, these changes are resolutely un-sexy and dull-sounding, but they have important implications for how the Labour Party is run and links into any emergent mass movement in the UK. The most pressing of these changes is the so-called ‘McDonnell amendment’, which is due to be voted on at party conference in September. The amendment proposes lowering the nomination threshold for those wanting to run for party leader from 15% of the PLP down to just 5%, thereby redressing some of the inequality of power between the parliamentary wing of the party and the membership. If the McDonnell amendment were to pass, any MP running for Labour leader would only need 14 others to nominate them, instead of the 40 as is currently required. As a result, not only would the left be guaranteed a spot in any future Labour leadership race, but leadership contests would also be more diverse, lively and democratic contests – good for all involved.

Other constitutional changes – currently not officially on the table like the McDonnell amendment -  also need to be fought for by Labour members. (Again, a precursory warning about dreary bureaucratic language.) The first of these is the expansion of the number of elected representatives that sit on Labour’s governing body, the National Executive Committee (NEC). This is currently made up of 35 members, representing different stakeholders in the Labour Party (the leadership, the parliamentary party, the trade unions, the membership, allied socialist societies, and so on). Currently, only six elected membership representatives sit on the NEC, meaning the approximately 550,000 Labour members only have a say over about 25% of the NEC’s constitution (if one generously includes the Leader and Deputy Leader, who sit on the NEC). If Labour is to take mass politics seriously, it must democratise itself and grant more powers to its members, which in this case would mean doubling the number of elected member representatives on the NEC from six to twelve, as Alex Nunns has argued.

Secondly, a serious debate about ‘mandatory reselection’ must once again be opened within Labour. Currently, sitting Labour MPs are automatically reselected as parliamentary candidates at each election, even if local members are unhappy with their candidate. This further insulates the parliamentary wing of the party from membership-led internal democracy, and complicates the task of Labour playing any substantial role in driving an emergent mass politics. As such, new members keen to mobilise within Labour should look towards getting involved in their local Constituency Labour Party (CLP) and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, in order to introduce themselves to Labour’s internal democracy and fight for the changes it needs. If the principle of “for the many, not the few” is seriously going to be put into action in the UK, it must necessarily apply to Labour’s internal democracy too.

Building Solidarities, Facing Contradictions

But the energy unleashed by this year’s campaign should not just be harnessed through rule changes – far from it. Alongside campaigns for rule changes, community action needs to be taken, and certain policy changes need to be considered to refine Labour’s vision. Both of these efforts can broaden and deepen mass engagement with Labour and socialist politics more generally.

In terms of community action, Labour and Momentum should look to such contemporary and historic examples as Solidarity4All in Greece and the Black Panther Party in 1960s and 1970s America, to name just two examples. Both groups offered a range of social programmes to marginalised and working class groups neglected by the state and the political establishment, and can offer useful templates for strategies aimed at building a mass movement through grassroots activism. Solidarity4All, for example, emerged in the wake of Greece’s sovereign debt crisis and subsequent austerity, running soup kitchens (pictured below), citizen-run health clinics, food banks and legal aid hubs for all those left impoverished in their wake. Kept afloat by donations (in particular, Syriza MPs donate 20% of their salaries to a solidarity fund that helps fund Solidarity4All – an example for Labour, perhaps) and the good-will of volunteers, the point is to be more than just charitable. Behind this sort of solidarity work is always some sort of political motivation and vision, aimed at fostering a new, grassroots form of politics built around communities and solidarity, rather than consumerist individualism. As such, historically a core plank of such community activism has been political education. The Black Panthers, for example, in addition to running free classes on politics and economics, also famously ran the Free Breakfast for Children Program, which not only fed tens of thousands of children a day at its peak, but also helped introduce them to black history and liberation lessons while they ate.

Encouragingly, there are signs Momentum has begun to appreciate the virtues of such solidarity work. Dozens of local groups have already run donation drives for food banks, for example, as well as screened I, Daniel Blake in halls and community centres across the country. (Not only does the latter help serve to strengthen the cultural ties between socialist politics and marginalised communities, but the proceeds were donated to foodbanks and homeless shelters, too.) Nationally, activist Deborah Hermanns has also signalled that ‘Momentum Solidarity’ is in the pipeline, “which will amplify the community work done by local groups and share knowledge and resources in an attempt to roll out a solidarity network across the country”. It is vital this is built upon, for if the left is to achieve long-lasting change within the UK, Labour must become more than a parliamentary party, with Momentum as its vote-mobilising accomplice wheeled out in election time. Instead, both must be firmly rooted in the culture and everyday experiences of all those oppressed and marginalised in Britain today.

Labour and Momentum, therefore, as the central node in an emergent mass politics, should also be actively engaging with pre-existing grassroots struggles, offering them organisational support, exposure, and financial assistance. What springs to mind here are local struggles such as the recent LSE cleaners strike, the rent strikes occurring in UK universities with increasing frequency, the UK Black Lives Matter movement, and local housing action groups such as Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth. This is easier said than done, as the object of many of these protests and campaigns are the very organs of the state Labour are aiming to take the reins of: universities, the police, local councils (including many Labour councils, some of which have an abhorrent record on social housing and gentrification). Contradictions abound, therefore: how can Labour claim to be a voice for BAME communities and support their struggles while also nationally campaigning for an increase in police numbers and powers, which is likely to make such BAME communities less safe? How can Labour defend social housing while some of its very own councils are complicit in explicit practices of gentrification and social cleansing via the ‘regeneration’ of certain estates? The list goes on. But if Labour want to be in “permanent campaign mode”, as Corbyn has stated, it is vital these contradictions between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary activity are at least somewhat settled, for these grassroots movements are the very solution to Corbyn’s desire to be permanently on campaign (a laudable and correct desire). As stated, resolving these contradictions won’t be easy, requiring difficult reflection on and reform of Labour’s current policies (especially around policing and security) as well as its organisational structure, as written about above. But it is vital if Labour is to take mass politics seriously.

Conclusion

What I’ve attempted to show is that while the left is fully entitled to indulge in the jubilance of Labour’s success at this election, its position remains precarious, incomplete and contradiction-ridden. Labour’s election campaign may have opened the bottle of a revived socialist mass politics in the UK, but all that excited energy is likely to dissipate without future action and consolidation. Action must be taken by all groups on the left – not just Labour – but here I have briefly overviewed some of the roles Labour and Momentum can play, as central nodes of a nascent movement. All of these roles are oriented towards the fostering a mass politics, driven by the grassroots, departing from a previous era of vapid, top-down, technocratic politics. First, Labour must make constitutional changes to bridge the power inequalities that exist between the parliamentary wing of the party and its membership base. Without these, any attempts by the membership to seriously control the party risk being thwarted by bureaucratic barriers or a detached party elite. Secondly and relatedly, Labour – and Momentum in particular – must innovate at the local level, engaging in solidarity work that creates cultural linkages between the left and the dispossessed communities of contemporary Britain. In addition, other local campaigns should also be offered an olive branch. Lastly, Labour’s current vision and policies must be subject to continued critical scrutiny from activists at the grassroots level – otherwise, contradictions in Labour’s approach to policing, security or housing could soon undermine it, particularly when/if in government.

Labour’s campaign this year gave us glimpses into the excitement, hope and potential of a revived mass politics. Let’s not stop there.

[jakegrxz]

Struggling in the neoliberal university

How has the broader socio-economic process of neoliberalism restructured higher education in the UK? What are the everyday, human implications of this? What form should resistance to it - from students, workers, and academics - take? [See the print edition here.]

Editor's note, 20th June 2018: This piece was originally written in February 2017 as the feature of Issue 9 of Incite, the political magazine I was Editor of while completing my undergraduate degree. As a piece published for a campus magazine at the University of Surrey, it was originally intended for Surrey students to read, and some of the language (e.g.: 'our Students' Union') reflects this. I have left this in tact rather than amending it.

In the wake of exam season, one wonders what exactly the point of the whole exercise was. At best, the experience feels meaningless and frustrating, if manageable. At worst, it can be anxiety-inducing and sleep-depriving, making us question our own abilities and feel wholly out of control. And yet, despite this, it all feels natural at this point. We have been examined in education for years now; this is how it is.

Perhaps it is just us, too, inside our minds. As the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote, who devastatingly took his own life last month, stress in our society has been ‘privatised’. In tracing the roots of our unhappiness, instead of looking outward to deteriorating social and political conditions, we are increasingly inclined to look inward, towards brain chemistry or personal history. The deteriorating conditions we operate under, which may include precarious work, constant monitoring (via workplace appraisals, target setting, or university examinations) are deemed unfortunate yet ‘natural’, depoliticised.

Fisher’s analysis is no doubt pertinent in reference to the university. Our very own Students’ Union has not agitated for less assessments or a less intensive exam season, but rather released a saccharine Facebook video entitled ‘You Can Do It Surrey!’, aiming to motivate students to put themselves through “late nights and early mornings” with the promise that it “will definitely be worth it”. Simultaneously, it has offered events to help exam stress such as “Therapy Dog Session” and “Happiness Café”. The message is clear — exams are natural, unavoidable and worth it. Either distract yourself from them or look inwards, in futility. Structural change is unimaginable.

But contra the Students’ Union, we should resist such narratives, and connect our distresses to the broader structures of neoliberalism. Indeed, the pressure, stress and general malaise of exam season functions as a highly visual spectacle of how neoliberalism, mediated by the institution of the university, is oppressing students. For what fuels such anxiety in exam season is the fear of failure, precisely constituted by a fear of becoming less ‘employable’. During exam season, our relationship to the labour market as students is even more exposed than usual. Most (but not all) students come to university to help with their future careers in some way; the expectation is that, devoid of much other choice, getting a degree will secure a certain level of income, security and perhaps ‘success’. Exam season pushes this logic to the limit, as exams are the very conditionalities we need to meet in order to pass our degree, and thus achieve that certain level of income, security and ‘success’. Exams thus come to function as unnaturally distilled and measurable indicators of our future income, security and status. With such distillation and measurability comes heightened anxiety for all, to varying degrees. A lot comes to depend on very little.

I should note that I am not arguing for the removal of assessment in education. Assessment, reducing it to the very verb to assess, is an integral part of social life. We assess when we debate with a friend, relative or coworker — we judge their arguments against what we know of the subject under discussion, retort accordingly, and then they repeat the same process themselves. Knowledge is exchanged; education takes place. Hence, what I am arguing instead is that the particular form of assessment we are exposed to as students operates under a neoliberal framework that, through commodification and grading, serves to create unnecessary stress and divisions, as well as undermine the value of education as an end in itself. For assessments do not have to come in the form of time-restricted exams in silent teaching rooms that take place in an intense two-week period. Nor do they need to be numerically reduced to certain grades that hierarchically rank students and implicitly ascribe higher scoring students higher value. Rather, one can imagine education as radically egalitarian and cooperative — we may write essays, and then discuss them with our tutors, without the need for arbitrary grading, ranking or disciplining. Students of the natural sciences may be numerically tested, but not have their degree depend upon passing, nor be tested in the form of hours-long examinations that occur twice a year. Education need not be given a ‘score’ that inevitably becomes a symbol for our ‘value’, understood in terms of ‘employability’ or market viability.

The focus of this essay is not, however, solely on assessments. Rather, they serve as a portal into a wider topic of discussion: the neoliberal university. If exam season is noticeably distressing in part because of neoliberal logic, what other parts of university life in 2017 are too, perhaps less noticeably? How else is market logic corrupting education? And more broadly, what purpose have universities come to serve under neoliberalism? Assessing these questions, and the interplay between them, requires us first to trace the history of the institution of the university and neoliberalism.

The Road to the Neoliberal University

Universities have always served certain purposes in society, with these purposes shifting as other factors in society, such as class relations or the dominant modes of production, have shifted. This point may seem abstract, or irrelevant, but it is vital. It reveals how the university has always been situated within a particular social, political and economic context which has shaped its functions. Understanding the university, therefore, requires contextual understanding. This can be appreciated historically.

Regarding the UK, before the nineteenth century, universities primarily served as important sites for the socialisation of elites from the ruling classes, immersing them in a certain kind of knowledge and ‘high culture’. For example, late medieval and early modern universities such as Oxford and Cambridge served to educate members of the ruling classes for high positions in the church, the law and government. Thus, as Michael Rustin notes, “their primary function was more to provide a cultural and social formation for elites than to produce useful knowledge”. This function was enlarged with the onset of industrialisation in the early 1800s, when the rising bourgeoisie of industrial manufacturers contributed to the formation of great city universities such as Leeds and Sheffield which specialised in engineering and science, and the expanding bureaucratic arm of government led to modernisations in university curricula. The influence of dominant modes of production and the market on the university become clearer at this stage — as mass capitalist industrial production spread, so did the imperative for technical university education in subjects such as engineering, for example.

The context of the aftermath of World War Two saw the next big institutional changes of the university. With the rise of welfare states and new class compromises across Europe, the university came to expand into a ‘mass institution’, emblematic of enhanced opportunities and shared entitlements. Universities no longer came to be seen as primarily the home of the ruling class but became open to all those with the adequate academic qualification, reflecting new class settlements. In the UK this was expressed via the 1963 Robbins Report, whose reforms began a gradual increase in young people attending university; before then the rates had been stuck at 4–5% — now nearly 50% of the 18+ age group attend university. This period saw the university, at least within the UK, at perhaps its most decommodified and egalitarian — grants were issued to all students, and the 1960s-1980s oversaw the birth of exciting, radical new academic disciplines such as sociology and cultural studies.

This particular institutional formation, however, soon began to break down. Although more democratic and egalitarian than previous formations, it was also, unsurprisingly, far more expensive. Removing tuition fees and paying for increasing numbers of young people to study at university, in the name of equal opportunities, was not — and never will be — cheap. Consequently, as the post-war class settlement lost legitimacy amidst the worldwide economic troubles of the 1970s, the university began to be gradually integrated into the emerging dominant political and economic order — neoliberalism.

One may then fairly question at this point: what exactly is neoliberalism? There is no concrete definition, but the term generally describes a set of political and economic ideas and policies that emerged internationally (led by states such as the UK, the US and Chile) from the 1980s onwards, influenced by classical liberal economics. Policies related to privatisation, reduced public spending and free trade are all classic examples of neoliberalism in action, all tied together by an unconditional veneration of the market and ethics of individualism and individual choice. A central component of neoliberalism is market creation, in all areas of life. The state’s role, then, thus becomes to create, uphold and ‘regulate’ such markets, rather than provide services. Early UK examples of market creation were in the energy and telecommunications sector under Thatcher, where state owned enterprises were sold off in order to build a market of private providers, following the logic that entrepreneurial competition would drive down prices, increase efficiency and offer consumers more choice. In the UK, neoliberal market-making has gradually ‘spilled over’ into more and more sectors — the Major government oversaw the privatisation of the railways in a crooked attempt to create a transport provider market, reforms under the New Labour and Coalition governments created internal markets inside the NHS, and — most related to this piece — the Blair and Cameron years were instrumental in the creation of markets within the education sector.

The Neoliberal University

Finally, then, we arrive at the concept of the neoliberal university, the current institutional formation of the university under neoliberalism. What does the neoliberal university look like, and what environment does it operate in? As with other historical formations, the answers to these questions can be found by looking at contemporary class relations and dominant modes of production. As multinational companies have come to dominate the sphere of production in evermore areas of the economy, the neoliberal university has come to be an institution that places more emphasis on ‘profitable’ subjects over less profitable, even so-called ‘mickey mouse’ ones. Indeed, the fastest growing subjects by student numbers are universally from the natural sciences (biological sciences, veterinary sciences and mathematics in particular) while the slowest growing or even shrinking subjects tend to be related to history, philosophy and languages. The reasons for this general trend are twofold. First, in the UK, the government has actively discouraged additional funding for subjects deemed antithetical to ‘enterprise culture’, such as the humanities and social sciences. The Browne Report of 2010 (which raised tuition fees to £9000 — yes, that one), for example, completely removed the teaching grant for arts, humanities and social science subjects, a grant that remains in place for STEM subjects. Secondly, the logic of neoliberalism makes it more rational for many applicants to choose more ‘scientific’ or ‘proper’ subjects, because the financial burden of tuition fee debt increases the incentive to seek substantial financial return upon graduation. Neoliberalism turns academic degrees into financial investments, and one can hardly blame growing numbers of students for seeking some kind of return on it, however sorry that situation may be. Thus, through this double bind, the neoliberal university represses ‘subversive’ or ‘less profitable’ academic disciplines while encouraging the growth of subjects deemed useful to big business.

Another key feature of the neoliberal university is how it operates within an artificial and manufactured higher education market. This is most pronounced in countries such as the US, but successive governments in the UK have made creeping reforms (amidst huge resistance) that are gradually constructing a ‘free market’ of higher education. The logic behind these reforms is based upon an erosion of the traditional class settlement in the UK, at least with regards to higher education. No longer is higher education understood in terms of class compromise, where the higher classes primarily fund a higher education system free and open to all; rather, class is factored out of the equation almost completely. Society is instead understood as a collection of atomised individual consumers, and consequently higher education becomes not a universal right based upon dominant notions of equality of opportunity, but a commodity to be purchased. All this was made ever more clear when the responsibility for universities moved from the Department of Education to the Department of Business, Industry and Skills in 2009.

Upon these underlying assumptions, markets are being built. The latest attempt at this is the government’s Higher Education and Research Bill, which is slowly making its way through Parliament against various currents of opposition. The 2016 White Paper on higher education preceding the Bill makes it very clear that the government ultimately seeks to create a differentiated, deregulated and competitive market in higher education, and outlines policy proposals to reach this goal. For example, the White Paper proposes streamlining bureaucratic structures to make it easier for new higher education providers to enter the ‘market’, and provides provisions for so-called ‘market exit’, where under-performing universities cease to exist. Additionally, the Paper allows better performing universities (as so judged under the controversial Teaching Excellence Framework) to charge slightly higher fees than lesser ones from the 2018–19 year onward. These are gradual reforms, and we have not seen the creation of a fully unleashed market as of yet. Most significantly, the maximum tuition fee cap remains in the Bill (although it now increases with inflation). Nonetheless, the reforms reflect the continuation of a 25-year old trend in British higher education towards markets and away from good quality higher education for all.

The Human Cost

The commodifying effects of these market-making reforms may appear abstract or distant, but they have very real consequences. For the transformation of higher education into a commodity bought on a market is not simply a theoretical point — it affects the everyday lives of students, professors, and university administrators. Regarding students, a key way to appreciate this is to think back to the example of exam season I used to open this piece. As noted, exams are so stressful because they reveal in stark terms how exposed our higher education is to the labour market under the neoliberal university. Higher education becomes a means to escape the precarious, low-wage labour market neoliberalism has created — but only if we do well in our exams. We are thus always under the watchful gaze of ‘employability’ while at university, exposed, and this damaging exposure manifests itself in numerous ways. The inadequacy of maintenance loans/grants for many students is one such way, forcing many students to take up part time casual work in order to keep themselves financially afloat at university. This takes time away from students to properly focus themselves on their degree (causing additional pressures when examinations or assessments are present), and transforms students into a useful pool of casual labour that neoliberalism thrives on. As Jeremy Gilbert notes, exposure in this sense acts to discipline students towards a certain kind of behaviour, making it harder for students to question their place in the world at the exact time they have historically done so. Furthermore, a reliance on part-time work at university pushes students towards the mould of passive consumer, who ‘purchases’ their education through ‘proper’ work. Critical thought is side-lined in the process.

What is less apparent to students is how academics, too, are struggling in the neoliberal university. Much of this stems from the erosion of academic freedom that neoliberalism has brought about, as universities in the UK have increasingly come to be managed like businesses or brands. Since the 1988 Education Reform Act universities are a form of ‘corporation’ legally, and governed increasingly hierarchically, marginalising formerly collegial and relatively democratic forms of internal governance. Accordingly, the power of academics over university decision-making has generally decreased, and this goes hand in hand with the growth of managerial roles within university governance. As neoliberalism has submitted the university increasingly to market logic, occupations with expertise in markets and regulation have blossomed within it — accountants, public relations and human resource practitioners, administrators, and so on. With these reforms the university increasingly follows a corporate model, embedded within business culture, creating various pressures and incentives for academics. Research begins to be subtly influenced by business interests in order to bring in funding, ‘customer satisfaction’ becomes paramount with academics subject to new regimes of monitoring and assessment, and ultimately academic autonomy suffers. With these pressures, it comes as little surprise mental illness is an increasing problem among academics, as a 2013 University and College Union report found.

Pressures come not just from the content and high expectations of academics’ employment, but also the terms of it. Part-time, fixed term, and zero-hours contracts are on the rise in academia as universities seek to minimise costs and squeeze as much productivity out of their workers as possible. As a Guardian investigation revealed last November, more than half of all academic staff working in UK universities are on insecure ‘atypical’ contracts, with more prestigious Russell Group universities being particularly guilty of this. The results are as you’d expect — low pay, for long hours, on insecure terms. A number interviewed for The Guardian noted yearly pay as often around the extremely low mark of £6000 a year, despite academic success (by contrast, the average yearly wage is £26,500). This is the human cost of the neoliberal university; when education becomes a commodity, so do the teachers. The result is dehumanising practices of poor pay, overwork, and insecure employment.

Conclusion: What Next?

The picture, then, seems bleak. Not only are academics and students suffering under the neoliberal university, but there seems little we can do to change it; as shown, the shift to neoliberalism is a global and historical one, infiltrating and feeding off of every aspect of our lives. What then can we as students do to resist? Is it even possible?

The answer is: of course, provided we are pragmatic, organised, well-informed and realistic. While we may not be able to overthrow global neoliberalism by ourselves, what we can do is resist it locally, at every point it impinges upon our lives. The NUS is doing this right now with its boycott of the National Student Survey (NSS), and it is a struggle we should wholeheartedly get behind, unlike our Students’ Union which has disgracefully opposed it. From next year, the NSS will be used by the government as part of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) to grade universities, allowing higher TEF-scoring universities to charge higher fees. The intention behind this, as I wrote above, is to create an artificial higher education market in the UK, and as such the NSS functions as a locality where the marketisation of higher education collides directly with students. A co-ordinated national boycott, then, could hugely complicate the government’s neoliberal higher education plans, which we as students should be 100% opposed to in every way.

For we should never underestimate the strength of mass collective action, well informed by a broad historical understanding of neoliberalism, in effecting change. Just last year, 1000 UCL students held a rent strike in protest against poor living conditions in expensive student accommodation, and won a rent cut worth £850,000 and a £350,000 bursary for students from low-income backgrounds. Their demands were carefully linked to an understanding of the neoliberal university, noting how UCL profited £16 million per year from student rent, and student ‘Cut the Rent’ groups are now spreading across the country, aided by the NUS. We should take these rent strikes as inspiration — one thousand coordinated students at UCL have started a national movement and achieved real successes. Think of what one thousand coordinated students at Surrey could do: not just rent strikes, but also exam strikes, assessment strikes, campus boycotts. So often we are demoralised and apathetic about our struggles when in reality, with organisation and conviction, together we have power. And when we resist, exercising that power, we plant the seeds for a new, better, post-neoliberal future. Only then can we begin to escape the neoliberal university, and all its oppression.