7/31/2019 Britains student movement looks to the future

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7/31/2019 Britains student movement looks to the future

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2011 will likely go down in history as a year of mass protest and revolution. One of thoseyears - like 1968 or 1848 - when a series of apparently disconnected events all over theworld feed into one another and create a sense that radical political change is coming.

One of those times when what once seemed politically impossible, such as domino-likefall of dictators across the Middle East, suddenly appears to be inevitable.

The student movement in Britain was one, very small, part of this wider process ofradicalisation that we saw in 2011. From the Arab Spring to Occupy, we are now living ina time of mass protest and revolution.

But these changes create challenges for the radical left.

The question is how do we build effective, large anticapitalist organisations? How do wecreate a swing to the left in the working class, such that we have seen in Greece with thearrival of Syriza as a mass political force? How do we raise the need to move beyondstruggles for bourgeois, representative democracy towards real democracy, rooted in theworkplace, where mass of the people have power over the economic levers of our society?

In a formal sense, the student movement mobilised around the immediate issues of theday, the attacks on education. This gave it many of the "normal" features of a united frontin the Marxist sense, of unity in action, of politically disparate forces "striking together".

But, it was also more than that. It brought together young people who wanted to changethe entire direction society was moving in. In this sense, it shared a common theme of theradicalisations of 2011, encapsulated by Occupy's overtly political call for a new kind ofpolitics, one no longer based on the 1% but championing the interests of the 99%.

One of the most interesting things that happened in Britain was the debate over radicalpolitical organisation: over the relative strengths and weaknesses of the "new left"',horizontalist activism and the traditional or old left Trotskyist-Leninist parties.

Initially these debates were less fruitful, prone to demagogy on both sides, but actuallyovertime there was a certain backlash against this way of arguing, with large number ofstudent activists wanting a more concrete debate about politics and organisation that didnot start from the a prioriassumption these approaches were irreconcilably opposed.

Instead growing numbers of activists favoured flexibility and pragmatism in politicalorganisation. The spirit of doing what helps us win is popular in the new movement.

This collective feeling, shared by large numbers of activists, Im sure is not unique toBritain, but crosses borders. It reflects a desire amongst a new generation of youngpeople, activists and workers, to move towards a socialist politics that can be truly

emancipatory, working in a way that does not repeat the terrible totalitarianism of thelast century, and finding practical answers that can develop resistance.

For the revolutionary left, this imposes on them the crucial importance of being hostile todogmatism, and understanding the need to try and find ways, working alongside widerlayers, to develop a revolutionary politics that is organic to the new movements and doesnot simply appear as outsiders "intervening" into these protests in the same old ways.

Ive been involved in theAnticapitalist Initiative, a project that came directly out of thesestruggles of 2011, precisely because we want to attempt to find forms of organisation andmobilisation that can help popularise revolutionary Marxism among wider layers.

This article is based on a talk given to the summer school of the New Anticapitalist Left

in the Czech Republic, August 2012

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