The defining image of the student occupation at University College London is probably a MacBook. Walk past security, through the corridor plastered with hand-made signs, and into the brightly-lit Jeremy Bentham Room, which is overflowing with students, and you’ll be struck by the proliferation of laptops. Clusters of large tables are dominated by them, supporting the core of the UCL occupation: the working groups.
The Media Team are updating Twitter, an important tool that has brought the support of a previously reluctant NUS president. “Outreach” are working on the daily leaflet to persuade fellow students to join us. The “Process” group are untangling the complicated business of helping meetings of hundreds to make decisions. “Events” haven’t taken a break for days, filling our schedule with meetings and entertainment. “Escalation”, a group dedicated to building the movement, debate the next political action before breaking off to start it. The UCL occupation is constantly working.
These groups are largely composed of new activists. Fired up by attacks on education they’ve joined with living wage campaigners and union members, long active on campus, to form the backbone of the occupation. They are the social media obsessed, apathetic, celeb-enamoured generation of popular myth. But they’re taking the emblems of this stereotype – the laptop, the Blackberry, the internet – and turning them into political tools. And for young people often tarred with the apathy brush, they’re intensely hardworking. As a new visitor said to me last night, “you’re surprisingly disciplined for a group of students”.
It’s not all hard work, despite the sense of commitment that gets us out of our sleeping bags every morning. As the temperature drops and the huge windows darken, clusters of tired occupiers enjoy music and comedy, provided by some of our 2,000 Twitter followers who’ve made the trip to Bloomsbury. The floor is covered with sheets and hunched figures paint our latest slogans on them. One security team comes in to grab some dinner from the communal supplies while another replaces them, carrying the books and playing cards they’ll need to fill a four-hour shift. But as the day’s work winds down, the discussion continues. With music and dancing in the background we keep talking politics.
This is important – in this space, politics has become not something we consume, then cast away, but a process we have to build for ourselves. There’s a feeling of a work in progress here, a work that we own. Coming up against the sharp end of cuts brought the occupiers here. What’s keeping us here is not just the struggle to defend education, but an investment in exploring how that can best be done. Fighting cuts and fee rises are our goals, but the ongoing experience of constructing our own movement from the ground up is of equal importance.
Let’s not be starry-eyed about this. We’re not a new “generation of 68”, skipping past cops and holding hands across barricades. Implicit in the reclaiming of what constitutes politics is a hard-edged cynicism. Not about our ability to win, or at least to build something of lasting significance, but about university management, the media, mainstream politics and even “our” national union. When it was announced that the NUS President Aaron Porter planned to visit us, no one jumped for joy. A lot of us might be new to this, but none of us is naïve. As the debate stretches out into the night, as we wake up to another day of hard organising work, we continue precisely because of this cynicism – no one is going to do this for us, so we’d better get it right.
Sofie Buckland is an English Literature student at UCL, and a former member of the NUS National Executive Committee. You can follow the UCL occupation on Twitter here and find out about student actions across the country here.
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