Student Power:
1968... 2010
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/student-power-1968-2010
Anthony Barnett,
27 November 2010
I've just been in to University College London to show solidarity
with the students, including Guy Aitchison, now occupying the Jeremy
Bentham Room #UCLoccupation. It freshened up my memories of the first
wave of student occupations in the late sixties. Much feels the same,
except for the laptops and phones and the hired in security. Others
might want to add their reflections.
The sixties was the start of the great capitalist cycle of expansion
- its announcement. Education was free, jobs were plentiful, rent was
cheap, consumerism was just getting into its stride, for young people
especially those with any skills. In England, we were at the
forefront of the wonderful economic sixties: music, mini skirts, mini
cars, a swinging boom. It was 'Americanisation' but we influenced them too.
Accompanying this heady sense of emancipation was the sense that our
parents were from another planet. They had grown up without
television, central heating, open sexual relations before marriage,
rock and roll, and often without university education as we were part
of the first great expansion of mass higher education then underway.
There was a generation gulf.
A lot of the student protest was driven by opposition to the
hierarchy that was the residue of the old order; its ridiculous rules
and not so much the morality as the hypocrisy of the older
generation. For students, authoritarian teaching methods and secrecy
('open the files' was a demand, and a number of occupations broke
into the administration to do just that) were another target.
While it was a strongly international moment, each country had its
own national characteristics. The revolution in France was against
the culture of "Oui Papa", the formalism was much stiffer than here
and a wartime General was the President. In Germany, which had much
the deepest and best sixties, the "anti-authoritarian movement"
embraced an entire generation who had to deal with the fact that
their parents had been Nazis.
While London pioneered an early, massively popular consumer
revolution from the mid-sixties, the political student movement here
was relatively late and narrow in European terms. Sit-ins were in
part inspired by and directly emulated the example of France.
Then there was Vietnam. The sixties were fundamentally violent as
well as joyous, and America expressed both. Hundreds of thousands of
their troops were occupying another country, thousands of Vietnamese
were dying by the month, torture by the West was routine: this was
the deadly backdrop to the arrival of drugs, which then fed its
stream of victims into the maelstrom. (The combination was
personified by Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison - I saw the Doors at the
Roundhouse.)
How does then compare to now?
It feels to me that today, like forty years ago, the protest connects
to something larger. Now we are at the end not the start of a long
boom, even if the BRICs are just taking off. While socially much more
equal and open as a society, economic injustice in Britain has
increased astronomically. It lost all legitimacy when the system
crashed - exposing bankers as robbers, skimming off unearned capital,
rather than ensuring we all benefited. The popularity of the Millbank
protest movement, the fact that it was not seen as self-indulgent
privileged students trying to look after themselves, must be due in
part to millions saying when they saw the images, "At last somebody
is protesting".
Whereas in 60s Britain student protests were marginalised as well as
pilloried, today by contrast they are making a credible claim to be
representative of the wider public. The fact that the student
demonstrations have been joined by children protesting about the
abolition of the EMA (Educational Maintenance Assistance, that pays
girls and boys from hard-up families to stay in school) adds to this sense.
The web also creates a generational divide: the way young people
experience how they communicate and relate to each other is making
them the pioneers of a twittered world in which they can flash mob,
be flexible and communicate instantly. The kind of society their
generation will set about building will be, therefore, in some way
unlike that of any that has gone before. It is easy to exaggerate
this and then puncture the falsely inflated projection. It's a gap,
not a gulf as humanly painful as their sixties predecessors. But it exists.
The relationship to violence is also much better, as shown by the
spontaneous revulsion of the demonstrators against throwing the fire
extinguisher at Millbank. There is an understanding of the need for
no willed violence against people. Doubtless provocateurs will try
and spoil this. But this student movement, if that is what it is
becoming, will not go on to create bands of terrorists like the Angry
Brigade. Because it has already been preceded by terrorism, and
everyone can see how reactionary it is.
Women and race (added in the morning): the sixties student
occupations preceded the feminist movement. The basic attitude to
women was set by the Rolling Stones. They were "chicks". Attachments
with closed mouths and short skirts. This was not imposed, individual
women could insist on being treated as equals and then were. It was a
culture of experimentation for everyone, of both sexes (and as with
drugs, experiments can go badly wrong). But the energy also fed into
the feminist movement which became the greatest political legacy of
the sixties along with the idea that to protest is a right.
There weren't black and ethnic students in any significant numbers in
the 60s for their participation to be an issue. Today, it seems to me
from just an initial glance that women are equal but not yet equal.
That's to say, while their participation is not a problem the boys,
if I may call them that, have not yet been taught - or taught
themselves - to desire equality as a mutual benefit. There is a
casual 'of course you can be equal if you want to be' attitude which
somehow leaves open the possibility of benefiting from inequality 'if
that's what they want'. All this unspoken, of course. I may be wrong,
but I don't think the feminist struggle is over yet.
It also struck me from the videos that there seem to be many more
black pupils among the school protestors than amongst the students.
Here, unlike France and Germany, the political movement of the
sixties was pushed away and marginalised by the political
Establishment. The exception was Ken Livingstone but his story shows
how hard they fought, and succeeded, in keeping him out of official
national power. Ed Milliband's saying he thought of going out to talk
to the students was a smart move. Times have changed.
But then his father backed the revolting students of 1968.
.
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