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> I wonder what our British comrades thought of events in London. Is > there any possibility of the notion of joint actions developing? > > comradely > > Gary My own tuppence. Everyone was surprised by the scale of the turnout, including the NUS leadership. It was more than double the 'expected' turnout, which was based on the number of people who'd registered to come. On a bad day, a lot of people who claimed to be coming wouldn't have bothered, so the fact that the turnout was so high is certainly a sign of something developing. The character of the protest was also surprising. The kind of imaginative militancy displayed, involving far more than a few 'extremists' no matter what the papers say, is redolent of the anticapitalist protests of a decade ago, but with many more people involved. It looks like the beginning of a student movement, which could be the avant-garde of the anti-austerity coalition - provided the tempo is not dictated by the leadership which is an auxiliary of, and recruiting ground for, the parliamentary Labour Party. The background, as I've found from speaking at unis across the country over the last year, is that the left - which has been on the backfoot in campuses for a while now - is gradually beginning to rebuild itself, including in unis where it wasn't even that much in evidence at the height of Stop the War. This revival pre-dated the Browne report on higher education, and even the leaked disclosure of many of its proposals, so is arguably part of a more general response to the cuts. Some of the students participating in this movement will have got their political training while occupying campus buildings over the blitz on Gaza in 2009, though many of those will have graduated now. Many of them have been participants in anti-cuts campaigns such as Right to Work, which has brought them into contact with people fighting their employers. I was surprised by the number of students and young workers attending a conference of Right to Work last year. And the majority are in casual, low-paid work to support their education. A group of students I know all work in the same call centre, and have been trying to get it unionised. So, they're working class kids with a direct experience of exploitation and confrontation with their bosses, and who can no longer afford to look at their student jobs as temporary stopping points on the way to a better life. Graduating today doesn't mean a good job tomorrow. While the NUS wanted this demonstration be exclusively about fees and thus a narrowly a sectional affair, the slogans and placards on show evince a much wider awareness of the situation - in a word, the students are generalising from their own experiences. The statement by students who occupied Tory HQ made it clear: "We stand against the cuts, in solidarity with all the poor, elderly, disabled and working people affected. We are against all cuts and the marketisation of education. We are occupying the roof of Tory HQ to show we are against the Tory system of attacking the poor and helping the rich." So, to get to the point, is there a possibility of joint action? Plainly, yes - but I have a feeling that the most important ways this will happen will be in spontaneous actions outside of the official channels of the labour movement. The TUC rep got a good reception at the demo, and invited students to join the national demonstration in March - but it seems so inadequate, such a 'too little too late' response to the worst attack on the public sector in post-war history, that I expect students to find other ways of linking up with others well before then. -- *Richard Seymour* Writer, blogger and PhD candidate Email: leninstombb...@googlemail.com Website: http://www.leninology.blogspot.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/leninology Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Seymour_(writer) Book 1: http://www.versobooks.com/books/307-the-liberal-defence-of-murder Book 2: http://www.zero-books.net/obookssite/book/detail/1107/The-Meaning-of-David-Cameron ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com