Sussex students library occupation

The library is ours!
On Tuesday the 28th of November, over 80 students occupied the library of the University of Sussex for the whole night. The students wanted:
- a free and universal education system
- a say in the election of senior management and the stepping down of the VC as the chair of senate
- more contact hours
- the reinstatement of the equal opportunities department which had recently been closed down.
- no more rent rises
- no commodification of education

Last year sympathisers of SortUSOut organised 2 occupations and quite a few demonstrations. After years of letter writing and petitioning, suddenly senior management started to listen. Having learned our lessons from last year, we are determined to continue our actions so that senior management will continue to listen. Thus the protest this year has to be seen as a continuation of the protests of last year, with many demands still being the same. Since last year the Students' Union has managed to negotiate some improvements. Whilst we hope that that these negotiations will continue to be successful, it is vital to recognise that they are only so due to the initial and sustained pressure exerted by students on senior management.

Past experience has shown that management will attempt to divide the student body through the use of their media. We will be hearing about radical minorities, threats of violence and immature actions. We will be hearing about ongoing negotiations. We will be hearing about a willingness to co-operate on the side of management, and an unwillingness on the side of the few extremists...Don't be fooled, this is part of senior management's attempts to divide us and to destroy what we have won last year.

Beyond shitty management.
Whilst we are campaigning for improvements here in Sussex, we have to realise that our protests are not alone: students are occupying and demonstrating in Greece, Germany(1), Italy, Slovakia(2) and all over Europe; workers and students have been protesting and occupying in France last year against the CPE(3) and in Germany against new unemployment regulations(4). Furthermore, students in Cambridge occupied a lecture theatre a month ago. All this points to issues that are bigger than just Sussex or even the UK. We find ourselves in the midst of a new time of crisis for capitalism. In order to secure its survival, it once again needs to expand the borders of its markets so it can secure continuing profits; it once again demands the privatisation of ever more commons and public services.
It is easy to see how we fit into this picture: Universities are to be tied in to the rest of the market; degrees are to be sold as nothing but a commodity. It is also easy to see why we now take to the streets: it is in periods of change, that people directly experience capitalism's true face, its emptiness, its boredom, its loneliness and its exploitative nature... and the possibility for change!

We believe that however useful the improvements will be that SortUSOut can achieve here locally, they will merely constitute improvements in our actual poverty. As long as we remain stuck in demands for more contact hours, or against tuition fees, we will be stuck with an education that is losing all its meaning and which is becoming more and more empty. We acknowledge that local improvements right now are vital to reduce the increasing pressure put on us by modern capitalism, but insist that as long as these changes remain trapped within the logic of capitalism, no real improvements will be gained.

Sussex Autonomous

Footnotes:
(1)  http://libcom.org/library/school-occupations-and-strikes-germany-2005
(2)  http://libcom.org/library/student-protests-in-italy-and-slovakia-2005
(3)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrat_premi%C3%A8re_embauche
(4)  http://libcom.org/library/protests-against-welfare-reform-in-germany-2004