Sinead Rylance reports on the occupation of the Edmond J Safra Building at Kings College London

Need for radical politics, not 'realism'

Around midday on the second national day of action against tuition fees (December 30th) the ‘we support our teachers’ group and some of its supporters occupied the Edmond J Safra building, which has a capacity of about 500 people. The we support our teachers group was set up last year, but it’s better to start at the beginning of the year to explain where it came from. There are quite a few SWP students at King’s and last year SWSS (their student group) and their student front Another Education is Possible held meetings on various subjects. They also set about building an anti-cuts group whilst engineering and Portuguese departments were cut and management bought Sommerset House. After trying and trying to build unsuccessfully, the group at King’s and the SWP nationally decided they needed broaden their politics to be more inclusive. Thus the Education Activist Network sprung up at King’s alongside the we support our teachers campaign, which involved supporting the teachers as they went on strike. So this campaign has largely had its direction given to it by SWP members, who fair enough are saying what the middle of the road student wants to hear anyway.

So when this day of action was called as with some of the others, SWP comrades have gone into occupation instead of joining the masses in protest, I don’t know if this is particular to London?

After occupying this large lecture theatre the occupants struck a deal with management to take a smaller and less important room, in exchange for which management would let any London student or speakers into the occupation, would not shut off heating and would shut off security cameras. Like one of the occupiers said “this is an occupation to make a statement to the management- we don’t bargain with them so we can both get a cosy deal” but as another said “we just didn’t have the numbers to fill that room”. When I got there, there was around 50 people.

The occupation is about half and half members of socialist groups and unaffiliated students, with quite a few SWP full timers for backup. On the first day when we passed a motion of intent, one student raised a point from the floor to change words like ‘struggle’ and ‘solidarity’ as these are ‘socialist’ words and would alienate people. We also set up some working groups; events, media, housekeeping etc. With 1 person ‘representing’ each group to be accountable to the rest.

We also had a meeting on ‘Cuts, Austerity and Protest’ and a general meeting where we came up with the demands. The local demands specific to the university management were along the lines of; no victimisation of staff and students involved, that management condemn education cuts,  for management to facilitate the group, and to open the university’sbooks (a demand voted down at the recent EAN conference).

Our national demands caused the biggest disagreement. There was a long discussion over free education. After the recent demonstrations with thousands of students chanting along to free education, I don’t see how this any longer can be perceived as a radical demand that could alienate students. And I almost expected the SWP to have done a complete U-turn without explanation and be fighting for free education again, after realising they were spouting a line to the right of politically conscious students. CS and NCAFC comrades argued in favour of a demand along the lines of free education for all (though we never got to finalise it) and seemed to get a good response from the room until SWP comrades one after the other proclaimed how they were ‘actually for free education, but the mass student body isn’t and this will alienate them’.

At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter whether students are for or against free education, the point of socialist agitation is  to be there to change their minds on such demands. An occupation is supposed to be radical, challenging and enticing to students. If they wanted to discuss whether free education was a ‘realistic’ demand they could go down to the SU bar and talk to the union’s sabbatical officers, who would be in full agreement. Marxists should be bringing communist ideas to student politics, not conforming our politics to the most commonly held view and then arguing for it more vehemently than the rest. In the end our national demands read: no cuts to education, no rise in tuition fees, no scrapping of EMA. Whilst I watched SWP comrades in the room argue against the demand for free education, I noticed behind them an SWP placard reading ‘F*ck Fees, Free Education’. I thought they might have taken this down before arguing against this very idea!