What happened, why, and what next: examining the new spirit of protest
When the student protests erupted in the UK in November 2010, establishment voices, with a few honourable exceptions, reacted by formulating a simple and comforting narrative: middle-class higher-education students, angry at the government's proposed, but necessary, increase in tuition fees, were marching in protest, only for such legitimate, traditional dissent to be overtaken by the actions of violent anarchists.
History, context, the workings of knowledge, power and resistance, and the lived reality of what was happening, rarely came into it. If they had, the mainstream account of the recent demonstrations might have looked very different. Thankfully, two new books are attempting to do this by revealing the protests to be not mindless, but mindful; a considered rebellion against the global neoliberal financial deal that has been struck.
Neither is simply an account of what happened. Fight Back! A Reader on the Winter of Protest, edited by Dan Hancox (openDemocracy.net, £8.99), which collates articles on the student and anti-cuts demonstrations in the UK, says that rather than just recording protests, the experience chronicled "suggests that the 'fight back' of winter 2010 contains the seeds of a politics". Springtime, which widens its scope to cover protests in Italy, the United States, France, Greece and Tunisia, declares it is "a chronicle, but not just a chronicle. It is the formulation of an experience . . . to develop alternatives that challenge the priorities of capitalist society".
One of the ways in which Springtime does this is through the inclusion of "flashbacks" – texts from the past, interspersed with accounts from the present – which give crucial political and theoretical context to events that are usually presented as devoid of history, and remind readers of the systemic nature of the inequalities being resisted. Eric Hobsbawm's thoughts on May 1968, for example ("these are not French but potentially international phenomena"), could easily apply today, as could Fritz Teufel's account of what we would now recognise as police kettling tactics in 1967 Berlin.
Added to these are (sometimes wearily) familiar names from Britain's more recent leftwing past, energised by the opportunity to restate their case. But it's the new voices (such as Leila Basmoudi, Elisa Albanesi) who really impress. The range and diversity in many of these pages, the fresh perspectives on recurring themes (the occupation of space, Book Blocs, police brutality, why knowledge for knowledge's sake matters, why EMA students need EMA, why the violence of state power is more shocking than a smashed TopShop window) are compelling. Springtime is stronger on this because it is both regional and global, revealing in fascinating account after account the existence and causes of (mainly) student rebellions from Pisa to Puerto Rico, about which most people know little. For the power of these largely leaderless and organic protests lies in the fact that there are so many of them in different locations but they have been formed for related reasons.
What this also points to is genuine solidarity. Evan Calder Williams, on the student protests in California, highlights "the fact of coming together not in abstract solidarity, but in acts . . . a recognition of what is not held in common, the distances separating where we begin apart from each other, and, above all, what it takes to come together against the order of the day".
As a contribution on the marketisation of higher education in Italy explains, this is why politicians are "horrified" to see students and pensioners demonstrating together – they fail to understand, or maybe they understand too well, that it is precisely this interconnectedness that is fuelling collective resistance.
The mainstream media, even "supposedly supportive media outlets such as the Guardian", is also criticised for its misunderstandings and misrepresentations. On the morning after the student protests of 10 November, Daniel Trilling reminds us in Fight Back!, "almost every national newspaper published an identical photograph of a masked man kicking at one of the plate glass windows that lined the ground floor of the building" – the Guardian was not an exception. But as Susan Matthews, mother of Alfie Meadows, the student who had brain surgery after allegedly being struck over the head by a police truncheon, writes in Springtime: "The images that stay with me from the student protests are not those of the violence splashed on the front pages."
No doubt these interventions will be dismissed by many as breathless, not grown-up enough, out of touch with reality. But what a reality, forged while we looked the other way. And what a time to be opening your eyes to it, what a time to be young, in spirit if not in years. Despite the constrained choices facing young people today, of unemployment or precarious employment, of crippling fees for the freedom to be educated – this is their resistance, and a compelling alternative.
Fight Back! is also published on openDemocracy.net