My student occupations - University of Kent at Canterbury (1981-84)

My first student occupation took place shortly after arriving at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC), and it was a short one. As the the anti-apartheid struggle raged in South Africa, Barclays Bank was a frequent target for protest due to its heavy involvement in the South African economy.   On October 15th 1981, as part of a national 'Boycott Barclays' day of action called by the Anti-Apartheid Movement, a group of students temporarily occupied the small Barclays bank  on the university's campus. According to this report in the student newspaper Incant (November 1981), around 25 people entered the bank at 3:15 pm - shortly before it was due to close - and refused to leave. It seems we stayed there until around 8 pm before leaving to attend a student union meeting, which seems a little half hearted! The bank though was a regular target for graffiti and window breaking over the next few years.

During the rest of that college year the big issue was a rent strike prompted by the high rents charged for university accommodation. The student union set up a large  'rent tent' as the campaign HQ on the lawn in the middle of campus which I recall blowing down on one cold and windy January night.  Later there was a portacabin where the union collected rents and held the money in reserve to be paid to the college when a deal was agreed. I noted in my diary (10th February 1982) 'At dinnertime there an open air mass meeting about the Rent Strike. I spoke in favour of escalating the campaign. A call for occupation was defeated but it was agreed to organise dining hall boycotts' to further hit the university's income.  The rent strike was called off in May 1982 having achieved a real term reduction in rents.  

A picket during the 1981/82 rent strike

In March 1982, 700 students from different Kent colleges marched from the art college up to UKC in a protest against the level of student grants. At the end of the march 'the union provided a soup kitchen and disco' (Incant, March 1982).

Education cuts were the focus of a library sit-in in November 1981, basically staying overnight in the library. A similar event on 8 November 1982  took place during a week of action called by Kent Education Alliance, made of education unions. As well as the  'work in' at UKC there was one at  Christchurch college, the teacher training college in Canterbury.

On 23 February 1983 more than 100 colleges responded to the National Union of Students' call for 24 hour occupations as part of its Grants Cuts Campaign. Senate House (University of London), Queen Mary College and University of Sussex were among those taking part. At UKC  a 'Special Committee' had been set up following a Union General Meeting to plan an occupation despite the opposition of some local student union officials. Around 150 people occupied the Cornwallis building where 'a disco consul was brought in and films set up' before moving in to the Registry (the main admin. building for the university). An editorial in Incant bemoaned that  'The university's belligerent action of preventing access to the Registry made it necessary to cause a small amount of damage to actually effect entry into the building'. I seem to remember a couple of people climbing on to the roof of the Registry and later one person managed to enter the building through an air vent and then open the door for others to enter.  As planned, the occupation only lasted one night.

Incant, March 1983

A more sustained occupation took place a few weeks later led by the Overseas Student Organisation. Overseas students had previously been more or less guaranteed accommodation on campus, but this had been reduced to 48 out of 250 students. Living in the city was not felt to be safe for some black students in particular, with its military barracks and sometimes late night punch ups. The occupation started on 16th March 1984 and lasted for about a week, taking over the college accommodation office and for a little while the Registry again. 

The occupation was pretty life changing for me as I became very close to a couple of anarchists who remained friends for long after. Unable to stomach a return to social reality when the occupation ended we hitch hiked to Amsterdam, where we went to the Melkweg club among other adventures.

The final occupation of my student days came in March 1984. The University had agreed to run a 13 week IT course to Marconi  management recruits which involved them staying in new Park Wood accommodation that had been built for students. With student accommodation in short supply - many had to travel in from Whitstable or Herne Bay - this in itself was controversial. But there was also a broader question of the privatisation of the university with corporate income substituting for government funding. And the fact that  electronics company Marconi was essentially a military contractor (hence the 'Marconi sells death!' graffiti on campus). The occupation continued for nearly two weeks before the University took out a High Court injunction. 

I found this diary entry for March 13th 1984 which describes how it started: ‘next term's accommodation lists had been published and the university had gone back on an earlier verbal promise and was going to rent out 25 rooms in Park Wood to Marconi Electronics. We went over to the union offices where some more people had gathered in small groups. We went over to the Registry and took it over though unfortunately due to bad planning we only got one office upstairs in addition to the finance office downstairs. Subsequently as doors were mysteriously broken down we had access as well to all the corridors, toilets, kitchens the post room and the print room. The first thing that happened was that people rifled through files and cupboards, a lot of university stationery was expropriated. A key was found which opened another office which we took over as the 'Autonomy Office', we covered the door and some corridors with anarchist posters’. The more 'hippyish' occupiers also set up their own area, which they christened 'Weird City'.

Among other things I recall that during the occupation we had a film showing of The Hunger, the vampire movie which starts with Bauhaus playing Bela Lugosi's Dead. Socialist Workers Party leader  Tony Cliff gave a talk in the occupied foyer on the Russian revolution with a bad tempered argument about Kronstadt thanks to anarchist questions, and a couple of miners came by - the miners strike was just starting in the local Kent coalfield and was soon to become the main focus of radical student activism for the next year (see previous post on miners support in Kent).  I also recall having sleep deprivation hallucinations, looking out from the occupation and buildings seeming to move.

These occupations were mainly short lived and actively involved a minority of students, though the size of union general meetings where these actions were discussed and sometimes agreed was quite impressive, more than 600 people for instance at one of the meetings discussing Marconi. Disagreements about tactics and maneuvering by different factions was sometimes exhausting. But the act of taking over space and living together in a common cause outside of the routines of everyday life, even for a short time, is an intense experience never forgotten.

[at the time of writing this, May 2024, students at UKC have set up a pro-Palestine encampment at the university and a campaign against education cuts is continuing with courses facing closure including art history, music and audio technology, philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, health and social care, and journalism.]

Solidarity with Gezi Park

Protests are spreading across Turkey following the violent police assault on the Gezi park occupation on Taksim Square in Istanbul city centre. At least 100 people have been injured as gas and water cannon have been deployed against people protesting against the demolition of the park to build a shopping centre.

Pictures from: http://occupygezipics.tumblr.com/

Earlier, occupiers had put up tents and had the usual occupy mix of meetings, discussions, music and hanging out.

This video shows people singing Çav Bella - the Turkish translation of the Italian partisan song, Bella Ciao.

Badiou's Rebirth of History

Alain Badiou's latest book to be translated into English is 'The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings' (published by Verso Books, 2012).

Essentially it is a reflection on the popular movements that have erupted over the past couple of years, in particular those sometimes referred to as the 'Arab Spring'. For Badiou, this amounts to the start of nothing less than a rising up of what he terms 'the inexistent':

'Let us call…people, who are present in the world but absent from its meaning and decisions about its future, the inexistent of the world. We shall then say that a change of world is real when an inexistent of the world starts to exist in this same world with maximum intensity. This is exactly what people in the popular rallies in Egypt were saying and are still saying: we used not to exist, but now we exist, and we can determine the history of the country. This subjective fact is endowed with an extraordinary power. The inexistent has arisen. That is why we refer to uprising: people were lying down, submissive; they are getting up, picking themselves up, rising up. This rising is the rising of existence itself: the poor have not become rich; people who were unarmed are not now armed, and so forth. Basically, nothing has changed. What has occurred is restitution of the existence of the inexistent, conditional upon what I call an event'.

 The fact that these movements have coalesced around physical locations - most famously Tahrir Square in Cairo - is no coincidence. For Badiou, any radical idea has to be 'localized' to find meaningful expression, even if  it must ultimately move beyond the limits of the local: 'in times of historical riot the masses create sites of unity and presence. In such a site the massive event is exhibited, exists, in a universal address. A political event occurring everywhere is something that does not exist. The site is the thing whereby the Idea, still fluid, encounters popular genericity. A non-localized Idea is impotent; a site without an Idea is merely an immediate riot – a nihilistic spurt'.

Within these sites, Badiou identifies 'a movement communism' in action:  '"Communism" means here: the creation in common of the collective destiny. This 'common' has two particular features. Firstly, it is generic, representative in a site of humanity as a whole. In this site there is to be found every variety of person of whom a people is composed; every speech is listened to, every proposal examined, and every difficulty dealt with for what it is. Secondly, it overcomes all the major contradictions that the state claims it alone can manage, without ever transcending them: between intellectuals and manual workers, men and women, poor and rich, Muslim and Copts, people from the provinces and people from the capital, and so on. Thousands of new possibilities arise in connnection with these contradictions at every instant, to which the state - any state - is utterly blind. We see young female doctors from the provinces care for the wounded, sleeping among a circle of fierce young men... We see everyone talking to neighbours they do not know. We read a thousand placards where each person's life joins in the History of all, without any hiatus. The set of these situations, these inventions, constitutes movement communism. For two centuries now the sole political problem has been this: How are we to make the inventions of movement communism endure?'

The difficulty is that the 'Instensification' associated with such moments of 'movement communism' is inherently difficult to sustain for long periods: 'During a massive popular uprising, a general subjective intensification, a violent passion for the True occurs which Kant had already identified at the time of the French Revolution under the name of enthusiasm. This intensification is general because it is an intensification and radicalization of statements, taking of sides and forms of action as well as the creation of an intense time (people are in the breach all day long, night no longer exists, people do not feel tired even though they are washed-up, and so on). Intensification explains the rapid exhaustion of this kind of moment.. it explains why at the end there are only scant detachments in the squares on the strike and occupation pickets, on the barricades (but it is they who will be the vector of the organized moment should it arrive). This is because such a state of collective creative exaltation cannot become chronic. It certainly creates something eternal, in the form of an active correspondence, whose power is dictatorial, between the universality of the Idea and the singular detail of the site and circumstances. But it is not itself eternal. Nevertheless, this intensity is going to carry on unfolding long after the event that gave rise to it has itself faded. Even when a majority of people revert to ordinary existence, they leave behind them an Energy that is subsequently going to be seized on and organized'.

There's lots of food for thought here. I am sceptical of Badiou's wider historical political perspective, in particular his ongoing Maoist reverence for the Chinese cultural revolution as some kind of model of potential emancipation (instead of the brutal faction fight that I would regard it as). The ghost of leninism haunts his concern for the minority who must, in his view, carry forward the movement when the period of 'Contraction' follows the exhaustion of 'Intensification'.

I think he is right that in the heat of intense movements, social contradictions can be challenged and partly overcome, though I think it is important to recognise that they don't disappear overnight- witness the sexual assaults in Tahrir Square. My own observations of the Occupy movement is that class  (not to mention gender and race) privilege still asserts itself in who gets to speak, and that when movements contract it is not necessarily the most radical minority that remains - the 'Energy' Badiou rightly identifies can be seized on by aspiring politicians and wannabe movement professionals.

But I do think the dilemma of sustaining movements after an initial period of enthusiasm is a real one. Models of revolution or even of a future society which imagine life as a permanent festival of never-ending passionate creativity neglect the human needs to relax, sleep, look after children and animals, and sometimes do boring tasks because somebody's got to do them. While History is Made at Night has championed the politics of festivity, we also have to recognise that on its own it's not a sufficient basis for a human community. Everyone knows that sleepless nights of hedonism have to be balanced with recuperation to prevent burn out and breakdown, similarly in radical politics there has to be more than the search for the intense buzz of riots, uprisings, strikes and occupations. By their nature these cannot be permanent, and it can be demoralising to return to everyday life afterwards. But like a great party, something always remains to sustain and inspire us through the mundane but essential task of building and sustaining human relationships (including political and social movements) in difficult circumstances.

Police use UV ink at Occupy Montreal

Bouncers tricks and bass lines at the eviction of Occupy Montreal:

'Occupy protesters “branded” with UV ink: Montreal police borrow tactic from club bouncers to stop protesters from returning to public square


Occupy protesters in Montreal were dismayed to find they had been marked by police with a special ink that is only visible in UV light after being arrested during a raid of Victoria Square Friday. Police told CTV Montreal they borrowed the technique from bouncers at clubs and bars and it is meant to mark protesters who might return to the square.

But they apparently weren’t so forthcoming with at least one protester. “They wrote on my hand with a permanent marker and then after I felt something pointy and metallic scraping across my skin,” wrote protester Nina Haigh on Facebook, continuing: 'I immediately asked “What are you doing” and they simply said we wrote on you with a pen and showed me a bunch of various pens in her hand. I didn’t argue about it and I was unable to look at my hands as they were tied behind my back with zipties. As soon as I was released I looked at my hands and there was no ink on them from a pen. …

This morning we tested my hands under a black light and sure enough there was a number 2! The freaky thing is this is IN my skin, washing my hands and scrubbing with abrasives will not get this off…. perhaps in several months of my skin cells renewing themselves if will eventually fade.What ever ink that is in there is irritating my skin slightly and its a very terrible feeling that they put a substance in my body with out my consent and then later lied about it' (Salon, 30 November 2011).

This took place during the eviction of the Occupy Montreal camp on 25 November, as reported in The Link, 29 November 2011:

'In the end, Occupy Montreal didn’t go out with a flash bang, but with a bass line. Exactly six weeks after the global Occupy phenomenon came to the city, Victoria Square was a place transformed, then transformed again.  Gone was the intricate maze of shelters and structures. Gone were the kitchen and library areas. And gone were many of the inhabitants of the tent city, kicked out by members of the Service policière de la Ville de Montréal on Nov. 25.

Still, despite the naked landscape of the square compared to the bustle and crowds that had been a mainstay for the past month and a half, on Saturday afternoon, a few hundred people came back to the site to discuss what they had been a part of, and where the movement will go now.  Unlike the violent end to the Occupy camps in New York, Oakland, and UC Davis, Montreal’s version didn’t end in clashes with the cops—instead, it ended with a concert. Local legends Bran Van 3000 performed a stripped-down set marked with the refrain, “Love is in the air.” [Bram Van 3000 are best known in the UK for their track Drinkng in LA]...

Today, the tents have been torn down, and the inhabitants have all gone back to wherever they came from. All that’s left is the question that’s been levied at the movement since the beginning: what’s next? What do you do when a protest predicated on the physical occupation of a location no longer physically occupies that space?

“That’s a good question,” said di Salvio. “Even in the middle of summer we were wondering what was going to happen in the winter. We’re human, and it gets very cold". Rather than look at the winter as a time for bonds to weaken, di Salvio, who had also paid a visit to New York City to check out Occupy Wall Street, thinks that breaking up the camp will result in different kinds of organization—digital and physical—that will lead to bigger things when the temperatures rise again in the spring...It’s almost like a tour: you go and reinforce and recharge to meet up again next summer.”

Occupy London Second Thoughts

Since last Saturday's start of Occupy London Stock Exchange (Occupy LSX), I've been back a couple of times to the camp. The tent town by St Paul's Cathedral is now settled in complete with food, information and legal tents, portaloos and a library. There's a Uni tent with lectures and discussions, I gather my old comrade Massimo de Angelis spoke on Wednesday.


The best thing about it is probably its messthetics. Don't get me wrong, it seems very tidy, but its very existence messes up the sterile homogeneity of this part of London. You rarely see much in the way of street life other than tourists and people rushing to and from work, so it was interesting yesterday seeing all the little encounters and conversations and encoun going on around the camp with protesters and passers-by. Good too to see the walls plastered with all kinds of posters and messages.


I've included quite a few images of the posters because they give a flavour of some of the different positions of people in the occupation (click on images to enlarge to read some of the posters in more detail) - anarchist, marxist, liberal, new agey etc.









In a way, the fact that people are sleeping in the streets here represents a reclaiming of the City as a living space. The financial area of London is now largely empty of residents - it is a place to work, not to live. But until the nineteenth century it was the heart of London, filled with people of all kinds living in close proximity. The population of the City reduced from around 130,000 in 1800 to only 10,000 today, while the rest of London has expanded and become home to millions.
The camp is actually on Church land, and today the Church authorities issued a statement saying that they were having to close the cathedral for health and safety reasons because of the protest. It seems inevitable that this will be used as a pretext to seek the eviction of the camp, and the 'health and safety' has to be taken with a pinch of salt. The tents are not blocking the entrances to the church and people have been freely entering the Cathedral all week. Indeed even this afternoon, after the Church had issued its statement about closure, a service was held there for school children - so presumably it was safe enough for them.

The outcome probably reflects political tensions within the Church - on the one hand there is some support from radical Christians for the protest (and some are active within it). On the other hand, St Paul's is at the establishment end of the Church spectrum, with its 'corporate partners' including JP Morgan, Lloyds Bank and the London Stock Exchange.


The assembly today (pictured above) vowed to continue the occupation. In a sense what is being played out repeats the medieval history of this part of London. From the 12th to the 14th century St Paul's enclosed surrounding streets with a wall and annexed them for the Church, and the citizens demanded the right to continue to assemble on the land.

According to the historian John Stowe: 'King Edward II. in the 10th of his Reign [1294], granted that the said Churchyard should be inclosed with a Wall, where it wanted, for the Murthers and Robberies that were there committed. But the Citizens then claimed the East Part of the Churchyard, to be the Place of Assembly to their Folk-motes; and that the great Steeple, there situate, was to that Use, their common Bell; which being there rung, all the Inhabitants of the City might hear, an come together. They also claimed the West Side, that they might there assemble themselves together, with the Lord of Baynards Castle, for view of their Armour, in defence of the City' (A Survey of London, 1603).

Glad to say that this week there was no sign of some of the dubious anti-semitic currents I detected at the weekend (see Occupy London: first thoughts), indeed there was singing and dancing there this week for the Jewish Simchat Torah celebrations.

Occupy London: first thoughts

The various Occupy actions around the world at the weekend have varied in scale, intensity and political mood. Rioting and huge crowds in Rome, a big demonstration in Madrid, and an extension of the Occupy Wall Street movement into the heart of New York, with a demonstration in Times Square.

Anti-austerity protests based on the occupation of public spaces in the heart of the city have been building for months (Puerta del Sol square in Madrid, Syntagma square in Athens, not to menton Tahrir Square in Cairo and Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv). This weekend can be seen as a conscious internationalisation and that counts for something when a major trend in relation to the crisis of the global economy is a resurgence of populist nationalism.

The London action was smaller than New York, Spain or Italy, but respectable in terms of numbers - I would say there were a couple of thousand but difficult to be sure, as the crowd was split up by the police cordon. Unsuprizingly, police lines prevented entrance to Paternoster Square, home of the London Stock Exchange, but the crowd did manage to occupy the steps of St Pauls Cathedral. There were some surreal scenes such as people dressed up for weddings in the church making their way through the crowd, and tourists variously frustrated and entertained. I heard one American woman complaining about the protests say that she had come here to help our economy but she wouldn't be coming back!



Compared to previous actions in the City, Occupy the London Stock Exchange felt a bit lacking in energy/intensity. But then again while Stop the City in the 80s and J18 in the 90s aimed to cause havoc for a day and then disperse, the Occupy movement is in for a longer haul, with many people staying there all weekend (and we shall see how much longer). So maybe some conservation of energy was in order.

There was a mix of people there, good, bad and ugly according to your taste. It would be very easy to listen to a few of the latter and dismiss the whole movement out of hand, as for instance Ian Bone does ('One Thousand Cultists Kettled at St Pauls'). But I would say that it is currently too diverse, fluid and open to give up on - there's plenty of room for discussion and development.



And there's certainly plenty to argue about... The adulation of some for Julian Assange, who turned up on Saturday, certainly made me feel uncomfortable, as the guy seems to have a bit of a messiah-complex combined with some incoherent politics (leaving aside the rape accusation - he hasn't been tried yet after all).

A movement without visible leaders is not one that has necessarily solved the problem of leadership, i.e. how to create direction and momentum without giving rise to a self-serving elite (whether elected or self-appointed). Without consciously tackling this issue, the lack of leaders can just mean that the 'leader's chair' still exists even if it remains empty, just waiting to be filled by the first plausible demagogue/celebrity that comes along .

Likewise a movement that disdains politics is not a movement without political assumptions. There is a fundamental shared feeling of 'enough is enough', of the refusal of austerity, and the search for an alternative to a life subject to the fluctuations of the economy. That's all good, but then what?



There are some odd alternative economy models around in the occupations, notions of capitalism without finance capital (the 'real economy'), of monetary reform, of a resource-based economy that is beyond capitalism and communism (this is the line of the new-agey Zeitgeist Movement who had a banner on steps of St Pauls). It is not just that some of these ideas seem to have very little understanding of what capitalism actually is and misrepresent it as a conspiracy by a few rich bankers rather than a global mode of production and exchange. It's far worse than that, because some of these ideas have very murky antecedents and indeed dubious present-day associations.

A lot of 'monetary reform' notions just read like recycled 'Social Credit' ideas, as developed before the Second World War by CH Douglas. As Derek Wall pointed out in his article Social Credit: The Ecosocialism of Fools (Capitalism Nature Socialism, September 2003), Douglas was not only an extreme right wing racist, but his monetery ideas are saturated with an anti-semitic world view. Likewise, the Zeitgeist Movement basically rehash the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, simply subsituting the word 'bankers' for 'jews' (see Zeitgeist Exposed at the Third Estate).

At the Bristol occupation at the weekend this racist conspiracy theory view of capitalism was openly articulated by someobody telling the occupation that 'Zionists want a new world order'. What was disgraceful about this episode was that people dutifully repeated this poison and cheered him rather than kicking the guy out. And that whoever was responsible for 'Occupy Bristol update' on youtube thought this was uncontroversial enough to give the guy a platform.

The 'human microphone' thing in the occupations is in danger of becoming an absurd fetish. In Wall Street people repeated the phrases of speakers to make sure that people further back could hear speeches when a microphone was banned. In most cases where there is no ban it would be surely be better - and very simple - just to set up a PA or use a megaphone, like people have been for years. By the looks of the Bristol occupation, there was no need for anything as the crowd seemed small enough for everybody to hear. It did look like a religious 'call and response' exercise, and involved people in the bad faith exericse of speaking nonsense which on reflection I would hope many would prefer not to utter.

I know that there are plenty of good sound people camping out at St Pauls now, and I think it is very important to get involved and challenge reactionary ideas. To just walk away holding our noses could allow some of these dangerous ideas to get a foothold in the very high profile occupation movement.

Oh yes and this poster on Saturday really got on my tits: 'Go to work, follow fashion, watch TV, spend money, look happy, act normal, repeat after me. I am free'. Patronising activist superiority complex nonsense, looking down on the 'duped' proles. People who work, follow fashion and watch TV (I am guilty on all three counts, your honour) know when we get out of bed every morning that we are not really free, and we know when we have to spend money we haven't got what the economy is all about in a visceral way. And until we move, the 'movement' against capitalism is going nowhere.



See also: Occupy London Second Thoughts