New Alexandria

Sheets of paper, sheets of flame. The Romans are burning the Great Library again.
Today the Liberals and Tories, the British ruling class’s oldest parties, are
voting on their own plans to eat the young. Like the Labour government before
them, they have realised that educating working-class youth is an unnecessary
expense. University fees must rise, subsidies to support teenagers through school
must go, and there need be no more pretence that education is for the benefit of
anything other than capital.

While the MPs are voting, students will be protesting and resisting heroically, as
they have been over the last few weeks, and the ruling class will once again send
squads of riot police against them. Schoolkids whose future educations are being
stolen from them will instead receive extra lessons in applied batons and horse
charges.

As revolutionary Surrealists – and as students, ex-students and education workers,
and people who have been taught to read and write – we hardly need to say that we
are viscerally opposed to this assault on youth and education. We will fight these
education cuts with all the means at our disposal. But we will not do so in the
name of defending education. Britain’s education system in its current form is
frankly not worth defending.

Cringing Liberals have been pointing to the post-1992 expansion of higher
education to justify the fee hikes, arguing that the massive increase in student
numbers has made the system unsustainably expensive. Many of those who oppose the
rise in fees – including the so-called left wing of the very Labour Party which
introduced tuition fees in the first place – say that this newly accessible
university is precisely what must be ‘defended’.

But those of us who have worked and studied on these intellectual factory farms
know that education in this country has been nothing short of a disaster, from Key
Stage 2 SATS to the Research Excellence Framework. Children fed poetry that’s been
reduced to the literary equivalent of Turkey Twizzlers; students told that
politically flabby post-New Left bullshit is the way to make sense of ‘culture’;
academics chasing ever-decreasing funding by publishing in elitist journals with
ever-decreasing readerships… Defend that crap? Not on your life.

Where, in all of this, is the beautiful savagery of the mind? Where are the things
that are appalling to know, that score the flesh with their uselessness and
wonder? Learning is no commodity: it’s an acid to burn money. Bound in human skin,
it’s the toxic arcane to be championed, explored, succumbed to, seduced by,
conquered. It’s traced in golden words of fire that fall blazing from the page,
flaring and dying as we read them, gone in an explosion of unknown suns.

The only library that we defend is the one that’s set alight by its own blazing.
Sheets of paper, sheets of flame. The Great Library will burn down Rome.

 http://robberbridegroom.blogspot.com/2010/12/new-alexandria.html

 http://libcom.org/library/notes-violent-minority

(The post above has videos in the text not included here)

A text drafted during the November 2010 university occupations focussing on liberal ideology, state repression and the student movement.

The Millbank riot and some of the subsequent student protests have been widely condemned in the media as the actions of a 'violent minority'. NUS president Aaron Porter infamously described the riot as ‘despicable’. Property destruction, we were told, undermined the message of the NUS’ peaceful protest. This was the behaviour of ‘anarchists’, outsiders hijacking what would otherwise be respectable political protest in a liberal democracy. But liberals would do well to reflect on their own glass house before casting such rhetorical stones.
Liberalism: doctrine of the violent minority

Liberalism in fact is nothing but the ideology of minority violence par excellence. Margaret Thatcher’s favourite thinker, Adam Smith, was refreshingly frank about this back in the 18th century:

“Laws and government may be considered in this and indeed in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence.” (source)

The father of liberalism, John Locke, was equally candid: private property was prior to government, and government existed to protect private property. Consequently, property is freedom, and only proprietors should have political representation in the state. For liberalism legitimate political violence is that of the state, exercised to defend the privilege of the propertied minority (Locke’s ‘right to revolt’ only applied should a government fail to do this). Despite the bitter struggles to extend the franchise beyond the male propertied elite, it still does this remarkably well. The Liberal Democrats’ pre-meditated abandonment of their pledge on tuition fees is only the latest example. Much like Aaron Porter, subsequent self-serving backtracking notwithstanding, they stand at odds with those they purport to represent.

This has led many to say they’re not doing their job. Our representatives are meant to represent us, and they’re not doing an adequate job. This completely misunderstands the nature of representative politics. The string of ‘bad apples’ that have headed the NUS; warmonger Jack Straw, racist liar Phil Woolas, despicable Aaron Porter; the undeniable Machiavellianism of politicians who say whatever it takes to get elected then go back on their word once in office… These are not exceptions but the rule. Representation produces so many bad apples because it is rotten to the roots. It was designed to empower the propertied class and it does so like clockwork. The problem is not that ‘our representatives’ aren’t doing their job but that they exist.
Chomsky meets Gramsci

Once elevated to positions of power, with the salaries, prestige and privileges to match, representatives no longer share our interests. Careerist NUS bureaucrats and lying politicians are a symptom not a cause, the problem is the inherent divergence of interests between representatives and the represented, which forever frustrates attempts to replace ‘bad’ representatives with ‘good’ ones, who go bad in turn. Representation means elected officials are empowered to speak for and take decisions on behalf of those who elected them, as opposed to simply carrying out the will of the electors (as with mandated delegates). Guy Debord had the Leninist dictatorships in mind when he wrote that “the representation of the working class radically opposes itself to the working class” (source), but the point generalises to representation itself. So if the system’s rotten, how does it survive?

Clearly, it does not do so by brute force alone. Unlike the various flavours of tyrannical regime, liberal democracy requires a large degree of consent, without which the rule of the propertied can only be enforced by brute force – too much of which reduces liberal democracy to straightforward tyranny. This consent is not a natural phenomenon, but is constantly being manufactured. The role of the free press here is central – as the headlines following the Millbank riot would suggest.

Noam Chomsky’s famous ‘propaganda model’ explains how this works, without the direct political censorship of dictatorial regimes nor resort to conspiracy. Rather the media consist of businesses that aim to make a profit by selling a product to a customer. However the product is not neutral information sold to readers - the media make most of their money by selling their audience's attention to advertisers, which in turn means that information is subjected to different pressures and filters. The information reported is shaped by business interests and corporate hierarchies : at the top sit corporate and state interests, and like in any hierarchy, promotion is achieved by pleasing your superiors. Writing cutting exposes of said corporate and state interests is a sure-fire way to abort a promising career. The safer path is to internalise the expected line and repeat it like Pavlov’s dog.

Altogether now: ‘the violence was despicable’, ‘anarchist infiltrators’, ‘outside agitators’, ‘ruining it for the majority’… We even see this working with the unpaid careerists around the student press. In York, the student paper has even been identifying students who took part in the occupation of Millbank. The aspiring Pavlovian editors are no doubt eager to bolster their CVs with examples that they’ve learned the correct script. In a year or two, they’ll likely be on the dole queue with the rest of us, if they aren’t copying and pasting press releases for some local paper somewhere. But hey, maybe if they grass up enough students they’ll get a foot on the propaganda ladder, manufacturing consent.
Hegemony and repression

The consent thus manufactured is what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called hegemony, where the ideas of the ruling class – the propertied - are accepted by the majority. Thus liberalism is the default ideology of capitalism. Pretty much all of us start off as liberals, and only change our ideas when certain facts hit us in the face. Sometimes those facts are batons.

Since liberal democracy rules by hegemony and not brute force alone, using too much repression undermines itself. While liberal regimes have historically turned into illiberal ones when faced with internal unrest (we need only think of the Weimar Republic), in general hegemonic rule is far more stable, easier to maintain and more conducive to capitalist economics than plain old tyranny. Thus the violence of liberal democratic states can be self-defeating. An example is the occupations here at Sussex uni earlier this year.

When students occupied management offices in Sussex House in March, management fabricated a hostage situation and called in riot police (clearly they knew perjury charges wouldn’t be brought against the defenders of property). The subsequent police violence hastened the end of the occupation, but created a massive backlash on campus. The next week, hundreds of students occupied the Arts A2 lecture theatre in direct defiance of a High Court injunction.

The first time, no major laws were broken and the police attacked with violence not seen on campus for some time (the videos are still on YouTube). The second time, over a thousand students and staff openly broke the law with impunity. No doubt the state had the violent capacity to evict the occupation. But it felt unable to use it for fear of losing legitimacy and weakening their hegemony.
Direct action, not representation

So direct action like occupations or the Millbank riot opens up a counter-hegemonic space that not only challenges the state but exploits a chink in its armour. And few who take part in such actions are unchanged by the experience. Once you’ve broken a window or punched a cop, or even simply left the route of the sanctioned A-B march against the orders of cops or stewards, liberal democratic hegemony never quite has the same hold over you. Once you’ve read the newspapers take on events you experienced first hand, you can never quite take them at face value again.

"Direct Action is a notion of such clarity, of such self-evident transparency, that merely to speak the words defines and explains them. It means that the working class, in constant rebellion against the existing state of affairs, expects nothing from outside people, powers or forces, but rather creates its own conditions of struggle and looks to itself for its means of action." - Émile Pouget

Direct action is fundamentally opposed to the politics of representation. It means the dispossessed – i.e. those of us who don’t own enough property to make a living – taking action for themselves independently of, and invariably against those who claim to represent them. It can mean strikes, occupations, riots, blockades. It is strongest when it is done on a mass scale, involving people who’ve never taken such action before.

Representatives want to channel anger into safe outlets which don’t challenge existing power structures – of which they are a part. They oppose direct action so vehemently, so reflexively precisely because it renders them superfluous. If they had it their way, we’d all peacefully march through London, chant some slogans, then go home. A million marchers didn’t stop the war. The difference between representative politics and direct action is the difference between saying ‘Not in my name’ and ‘No fucking way’, between feeling like you’re doing something and fighting to win.

With the vicious, and yes, violent austerity programme, the stakes are simply too high for all of us to do anything else: the future they have written for us is call centres and SSRIs. The Millbank riot has to be just the beginning. It has to set the tone. In 1912, the Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst wrote:

"There is something that governments care for more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy.... Those of you who can break windows—break them."

We need not necessarily break windows, but we will need to break some laws. In doing so, we’ll no doubt meet the uniformed violent minority of liberalism, defending the interests of the propertied, of capital, of austerity. No riot, no matter how spectacular will reverse the austerity programme alone. But widespread direct action in our campuses, towns and workplaces just might. In 2006, French students reversed the CPE law which attacked the rights of young workers after weeks of rolling direct action, including the use of economic blockades of strategic targets – train stations, department stores, major junctions... It can be done, and as friends new and old, lovers and strangers we can do it.

If we want to organise our resistance we will thanks very much, as free individuals and groups we will spontaneously communicate (that is form networks) and coordinate our struggles. Fair enough objecting to the old ways of doing things, naturally we will innovate to be effective. What exactly are you calling for? An end to what has been building for decades in the anarchist movement, just because you were at a riot and think its more exciting. What about the daily work of building institutions to replace the old? Because whatever you destroy will only come back if you don't.

Anarchy is order! We need to keep up the fluidity and spontaneity, but it'd be good if people wanting to do that could meet up before hand so they can direct their force against something.

Sorry this is so incoherent, not sure what exactly I'm arguing against because the substance in your article is wrapped up in pretentious poetry, can't you just say what you mean so people can understand. It sounds nice enough if your an english or philosophy student or something like that but I just want the truth.

Interesting article though cheers :)

I think there is certainly some validity in the arguments the article makes; there are pitfalls in the activist mindset/ghetto which can sometimes act to restrict a more spontaneous movement. And clearly 'activists' have to learn to be humble and ensure that their interventions are not motivated by ego.

Having said all that, based on my experiences I think you are exaggerating these problems massively. In my locality I think it's fair to say that anti-capitalist activists have either got involved in these new struggles, with a humble attitude and an eye to supporting and radicalising them, or (in some cases) not got involved at all. I haven't seen any activists acting as a restraining force; on the contrary in some of the earlier local demos here they were the ones at the front taking the most militant action and urging others to as well.

Finally, it's complete bollocks to discard organisation altogether. Unless, next time you are beaten by police you plan to reject the help of action medics? Or refuse the food of activist kitchens when you are hungry after being kettled for hours? Thought not.

Got a little carried away perhaps but important questions here as usual.

 http://res0nance.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/whats-left-against-the-management-of-struggle-for-its-self-organisation/

The majority of students having not been engaging in radical tactics for very long, I don't see the engagement of activist groups in the current protests as a bad thing. It has been shown to be easy for those new to direct action to just as quickly give up when the momentum stops rolling and numbers dwindle.

Anarchist, anti-capitalist and environmental theories and movements are growing in strength thanks to tireless life long activism from people of all ages. Some tactics may be getting entrenched, but this is obvious to most of us and staying mobile and adaptable is what most activists strive for - unfortunately there is no current rallying point to draw this out.

Perhas when we are on the streets we don't draw the same attention as the mass student protests, but many of the issues interlink with the activist community, so why should it step aside to let the 'young people' stand alone?

My point is that activists for the most part are simply good open minded people doing their best to right oppression and giving up huge portions of their time in that work. There is no insidious sense of wanting to enact a new government and rein in anyone who differs in opinion - most activists I know are resoundingly anarchistic and fighting for freedom, not a new hierarchy of 'more conscious than you so do as I say' (at least I would hope not)

The problem of activism as a way of resistance is very well prodded and poked in this worthwhile text:
Give Up Activism

 http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no9/activism.htm