Spontaneous horizontalists
29 November 2011. At the London School of Oriental and African Studies, they had occupied a room in the library, which they’d plastered in hand-crayoned manifestos. Their demands were modest, focused on the running of the school, the non-victimization of the protesters and, finally, a request for the college management to state its public opposition to the fee increase.
In the corner was a prayer area for Muslim students. On the floor lay those iconic books: Hardt and Negri’s Multitude; a Foucault primer; Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Fanon’s collected works.
They’d called a mass meeting about 300 strong, a young guy with a beard officiating. To his right huddled a small group of hard leftists; at the back were some of the college staff, including a few veterans of 1968 with long grey hair and beards. The question was whether to continue the occupation—they had been going for a week—but very few people spoke to the issue. One man, a young Syrian, stood up to say: ‘What we’re doing is having a global impact. This French journalist came up to me and said, this is amazing, this never happened before. What are the Brits doing? I said—what, you think the French are the only ones who can riot?’
The method, as people speak, is to waggle your hands: upwards if you agree, downwards if not, more vigorously if you agree more, etc. I first saw it used in the late 1990s by the anti-globalization movement. But in the space of ten years the whole menu of ‘horizontalist’ practice —forms of protest, decision-making, world view—has become the norm for a generation.
And the meeting we are attending is not the only meeting: there is another one going on, in the form of tweets and texts that people are sending to their friends in other colleges. This is normal in the student movement: ‘virtual’ meetings that will never be minuted or recorded. As @littlemisswilde describes it: ‘We use Twitter to expand the room.’
It comes to the final vote. Shall they stay in occupation? One of the Sixty-Eighters pipes up with a last-minute call for a strike and occupation of the main admin block. He is applauded—almost as if it is okay to applaud somebody whose politics and hairstyle date from the epoch of applause instead of hand-waggling.
But this is a blip. Most of the meeting is conducted in an atmosphere of flat-faced calm. This is an obvious but unspoken cultural difference between modern youth protest movements and those of the past: anybody who sounds like a career politician, anybody who attempts rhetoric, espouses an ideology, or lets their emotions overtake them is greeted with a visceral distaste. The reasons are hard to fathom.
First, probably, it’s because there is no ideology driving this movement and no coherent vision of an alternative society. Second, the potential for damage arising from violence is larger than before: the demos, when they get violent, immediately expose the participants to getting jailed for serious offences, so they will go a long way to avoid getting angry. Third, and most important, it seems to me that this generation knows more than their predecessors about power. They have read (or read a Wikipedia summary of) political thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, Dworkin. They realize, in a way previous generations of radicals did not, that emotion-fuelled action, loyalty, mesmeric oratory and hierarchy all come at an overhead cost.
At the end of the meeting, the consensus is to stay in occupation for another night. ‘That’s good,’ smiles the bearded guy announcing the result, ‘because my house is shit anyway.’
Day X: Kettled youth
After Millbank, in the occupations, squats and shared houses, the makeshift ideology of the students had veered rapidly towards a kind of makeshift anarchism. ‘Don’t underestimate this generation, Paul,’ one chided me. ‘Unlike you, they’ve had to do tests every month of their lives; some of them were working for the Lib Dems and Labour six months ago, but they are so angry now, some of them are heading in the direction of insurrectionary violence.’ As the mood changed, students started to talk about a ‘Day X’. The posters proclaiming this new demonstration, slated for 24 November, had begun to borrow the imagery of Paris 1968.
But since Marx is out of fashion, and Lenin and Mao have been branded left fascists, who else is there to study but the Frenchman whose musings have become required reading in the era of Lady Gaga: Guy Debord?
Many students were familiar with Debord and his Situationist movement, for the simple reason that he is taught on every art course, and the big London art schools—Slade and Goldsmiths—were centres of militancy. But also because, as we will see, some of the Situationist tactics that failed in May 1968—basically, spreading out to create chaos—do not look so ludicrous if you own a Blackberry.
While the undergraduate occupation movement grew, the sixteen-to eighteen-year-olds at further education colleges (the British equivalent to high school) were facing a double hit. If they got to university, they would be the first to pay the fee increases. But in the interim the government had decided to cut the Education Maintenance Allowance, a payment of up to £30 a week Labour had introduced in 2004 to combat—or conceal, depending on your viewpoint—structural youth unemployment. At the time of its abolition, 647,000 under-eighteens were receiving EMA. Though conceived as a kind of paternalistic ‘pocket money’, most of those I talked to were so poor that they were spending the money on essential groceries for their family.
On 24 November at 11 a.m., school walkouts began in towns and cities all across the UK. ‘They’re taking away our future. They’re rich, they don’t care about us’ was the theme of the vox pops as the twenty-four-hour news channels televised it all. Rough kids from Newham in London; polite kids from Dundee; Asian kids from Birmingham; white kids from Truro, Cornwall. In Morecambe, Lancashire, 200 students blocked the traffic and beat drums. In Liverpool they blockaded Lime Street station. ‘The police are outnumbered, they don’t know what to do,’ one participant texted.
Instead of Guy Debord, the under-eighteens opted for Anglo-Saxon literalism. They swarmed into Trafalgar Square, off buses from London’s poorest neighbourhoods, clambered over the lion statues and chanted: ‘David Cameron, fuck off back to Eton!’
Then they surged down Whitehall, trashed an abandoned police van, covered it in graffiti, smoke-bombed it, attacked the police and danced. The iconic image of the day is the police van being protected by a cordon of schoolgirls who thought the violence had gone too far.
The police, in response, repeatedly ‘kettled’ the protesters, and at one point charged at them on horseback. The experience of getting kettled would be central to the process of radicalization. It was not a new tactic: it had been deployed against protesters on various anti-globalization demos, and at the G20 Summit in April 2009. But for most of the students it was new and shocking: you can tell this from the vividness of the language, the way first-person accounts spark into life when they describe it. Taught throughout their lives that their rights were primarily individual, not collective, but at the same time inalienable, kettling seemed to many like an offence against the person. Sophie Burge, aged seventeen:
We waited and waited. Kettling does work when you have no choice about where you move; you start to feel very desolate and very depressed. People were crying. It was horrible; it was freezing and there were no toilets … we all just had to wee in a specific corner.2
Activist Jonathan Moses spelled out the political conclusion many of them drew: ‘that property comes before people; the rights of the former supersede those of the latter’.3
With the momentum and the radicalism increasing, the school students staged a Day X-2 on 30 November, again clashing with police and attacking property in central London. Now the stage was set for Day X-3: the demo to coincide with the final parliamentary vote on the fee increase.
