Remembering the violence, missing the point? The violence is the point!

Written by Burc Kostem | 02 December 2010
Posted in Education - Comment

Students at the National Demonstration. Photograph: Andrew Moss/Flickr

“Those anarchists, I condemn these utterly immature criminals”. These were the generic words used by many politicians, senior MPs and anyone else who wanted to use occasion to somehow legitimise their own views, to describe the violent protest outside Millbank just two weeks ago. While the phrase “anarchists” repeated again and again succeeds in leaving Socialist Worker Party members who were present at Millbank absolutely gutted (much to my delight), it also gives a portrayal of the protests that is completely inaccurate.

At first, one is tempted to dismiss the violent protest of the minority, as the media have tried to do, and remind everyone of the fifty thousand students that marched peacefully - which mainstream media hasn't been particularly helpful with. By talking about how the protest has completely undermined the argument of the NUS and other students who demonstrated peacefully, we are actually helping build a self-fulfilling prophecy of taking attention off the NUS and putting it back on the rioters, right? Well if the violence was that easy to dismiss than why all this paranoia about it? Clearly most of the British mainstream (and not just the Daily Mail) feel threatened by this small band of “anarchists”. You know there is an elephant in the room when everyone in the British media all of a sudden agree.

It is my conviction that the perceived wisdom of “let's forget about what a bunch of idiots did, there is a real political debate going on here” should be completely turned upside down. Sure we could completely forget about the violence and try to focus on the real debate at hand. Talk about student fees and graduate taxes. Talk about how Labour don't have a clear alternative and how the Liberal Democrats sold out. Yet who wants to have another boring debate dictated by the narrow sphere of political choice modern politics offers? This frustration with what mainstream politics has to offer, the stagnant bureaucracy of political debate, the idle slogans of the political class: isn't this what the violence was all about?

Most students taking part in the protest were not particular members of a political group. To call them anarchists would already be going too far. For most of them it was their first protest and the first radical act of their life. They were, for the most part, raving, drinking, dancing, “proper” university students. Yet to suggest they were not part of any particular group or even devoid of substantive political awareness doesn't mean that the act of destroying the Tory headquarters was a meaningless anomaly either.

Instead I like to think the protesters as the misfits, the excrement of mainstream politics, the social excess that can't be categorised. This was our generation fighting to find its political voice. After being bombarded by depoliticisation, we the career kids of the internet, iPhone and X Factor, lacking the language and the institutions through which we could sensibly express our anger have engaged in the absolute zero level of political action. Students have come out of their house parties and employment fairs to try and give a message just to see that they actually can. For many students it was an act of self awareness devoid of all other meaning apart from the confirmation of their existence as a real political force.

I want to stress that I don't necessarily support any of the actions taken by the people in Millbank. Heck, I wasn't even there in London. Yet “the people do not judge like a court of law” and it would be foolish to expect for them to do so. It is also the least of my intentions to provide an ethical code of correct and peaceful demonstrations. Therefore instead of trying to avoid the issue of violence through dismissal, delegitimisation or denial, it is more advisable to take the issue of the violence head-on and diagnose it symptomatic of deeper problems within the political system of the UK. This is at least the more honest approach, I feel, even if not the appropriate one.