The constituency formed by students is always in flux, but we persist in discussing 'the students' as if they are a static mass. When I finished my BA in 2006, my classmates and I were quick to throw off the 'student' label - it always carried a stigma in Manchester, where the physical frontier between town and gown has always been blurred. Now people who already have degrees take a quasi-ironic pleasure in slagging off the bloody students - a bit like when the Year 8s at comp take the piss out of the Year 7s, or when teenagers act more adult around younger children. It's a way of asserting your separation from the crowd, your malleable identity, your resistance to collective labels, your self-interest. At yesterday's demo against education cuts, workers and pensioners and sixth-formers and unemployed graduates and part-time students marched against the withdrawal of state support for education. It's ludicrous to claim this is an expression of self-interest, as Polly Toynbee did a few days before the protest, her position now backed by the unceasing, tedious groan of online commentary. If you are a student now, chances are you won't be directly affected by the policy changes. My PhD funding for the next three years is guaranteed (I hope). Self-interest would be to sit back and wait for graduation day. Sartre, in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (crude analysis of complex text i haven't read in full alert), distinguishes between serial collectivity, in which people are passively unified by social structures, and the group-in-fusion, in which people actively unite towards a mutually acknowledged purpose. If the students are a series, can a group campaigning for their rights break up that identity? I think so.
Why criticize students for being posh and middle-class? The social homogeneity of higher education is only going to get worse under the new proposals. I've heard people express support for higher fees on the grounds of their own disillusionment with university - huge class sizes, apathetic teaching, no contact time. These problems exist, but they were created by what Nina Power calls the 'the increasingly utilitarian approach to human life that sees degrees as nothing but "investments" by individuals'. It's perverse that an intensification of this approach is now being hailed as a solution to the problems it caused. I've heard people call for non-violent protest. First: smashing up a building is a lesser form of violence than self-starvation. Second: it's vital to see the Millbank occupation as an important part of something much bigger. Some bloggers are discussing the occupation as the only worthwhile part of the demo: it's a shame to discount the peaceful protests of 50,000 people, just as it's a shame to "condemn" (such sanctimonious language) the less peaceful protests of a sizeable minority as "petty vandalism" (I should stop reading Facebook comments).
Political demonstrations are a form of performance, which isn't to say they are falsified or trivial, but that they are a way of staging problems that are not easily articulated. Demonstrations turn private misery - no jobs, benefit cuts, young people who can't afford to learn to think critically - into the sorts of images and noises that can be transmitted and shared. They turn the violence of law, which is shadowy and invisible and easy to hide, into the kind of violence that can be communicated. They force the police, some of them nice enough people, into the role of The State, making them perform government violence instead of working to naturalize it, keep it invisible. This might not seem fair. But remember who's directing this performance. Protestors don't set the stage. They just storm it.
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