K-Box

On the first strike at Sydney Uni I found myself on a picket chanting ‘no class, class war,’ as bemused young men with sports bags walked towards us over the Parramatta Road footbridge. Throughout that day such a complex welter of emotions stirred in me, but in that moment I felt amusement and an overwhelming sense of relief. It was a relief to be part of a collective response to the larger undercurrents that have been responsible for the many small discontents and everyday alienations of the ten years of university in my life.

The first strike was called in March this year, and four more followed, the last in early June. They were called as part of an enterprise bargaining campaign but seem to have focused the energy of many people frustrated with university management and their neoliberal push. This has been experienced particularly in the form of job cuts, increasing casualisation and diminishing work conditions, and its consequences are wide reaching and insidious. This economic agenda comes from beyond the university and engulfs it. Our experiences of its effects in the university are compounded by the ways it restructures our lives outside it. The university is a creator of workers as well as an exploiter of labour. It culturally assimilates people to middle class lifestyles and values, it offers a place for some critique of the social order, but not the means or, it seems often, the inclination to act on these critiques in substantial ways. The mounting pressures of strident neoliberalism, and the experience of the strikes seem to have catalysed around me a more robust response, and a more open discussion, about what people would like the university to be.

For me, the strikes have brought an intoxicating coalescence of camaraderie and action, allowed the forging of new connections, and opened up the space for more political conversations. My emotions, experiences and analysis have become entangled, and here I will try to explore and describe some of what I have felt and thought about the strike and the university. I want, too, to write something of the visceral experience of the pickets, of the weeks of strike: the joyfulness of the sudden release of tension that comes when you do the things you always dream of, and live just for a minute in that precise and perfect moment of struggle, however short-lived, alongside all your new best friends and strangers.

The First Day

I spent the first day of strike at the Parramatta Road footbridge picket. It was a scratchy day. Those of us standing on the picket brought a mix of different political approaches and we lacked strong affinity or trust as a collective body. We struggled to make democratic decisions together, and as a result the political discussion was made up of isolated and prickly conversations between individuals. Arguments centred on how to make decisions on the picket, and whether and how to follow the union’s protocol, which many of us did not feel was binding as we had no part in making it. Union officials and several others tried to control other picketers’ behaviour without being willing to engage in discussion. I was asked several times to ‘control my friends’. I felt politically squeezed from different sides, as different friends and comrades were frustrated with each other’s tactics, but didn’t feel comfortable having these conversations as a group. Students crossing the picket seemed to have little idea what the strike was about, or what crossing a picket might mean – many offering their support as they walked past. I felt ineffectual and inarticulate, wedged between different ideas about how to be effective with apparently no means to work out how to navigate these in order to have some coherent, democratic strategy. It provided tangible evidence of the way we are fragmented at the uni, and have grown unused to making decisions together without recourse to some higher power.

48 Hour Strike!

Before the next 48 hour strike many of us put a lot of effort into spreading the word about why there was a strike and how students could support it. At the 48 hour strike, the campus felt more politically aware and tense. Arguments on the pickets about union protocols and police continued, as more picketers chose to block traffic, and others organised disruptive actions such as making noise around the campus itself. Students who were antagonistic to the strike were angry and threatening. To me, it seemed that at least some of these conversations began to concentrate on the underlying political differences which caused them: disagreements about what kinds of action are legitimate, strategic or democratic, and disagreements about how the university should function. Police responded to disruptive tactics with brutality and arrests. Widespread solidarity for those brutalised was lacking, and some strikers even tried to defend police actions and involvement. The feeling of conflict on campus was tangible, with political faultlines exposed and raw. After the arrests and police brutality, and the antagonism and heartlessness of unsupportive students, I felt my own rage and frustration mounting. Walking around on the second day of the strike, beating a makeshift drum so hard I turned my thumb into a bloody mess, I didn’t notice the pain and even the intimidating behaviour of macho students barely registered above my own anger. After more arrests I reached my personal nadir, crying pitifully in the gutter outside newtown police station. The 48 hour strike felt like the breaking point – the point when it became harder for people to pretend the strikes weren’t happening, but also the point when I felt the most broken.

Solidarity at the pickets

At the next strike, union officials and others still tried to enforce the union protocol, or even police interpretations of it, but I felt that the attrition of political arguments accompanied by police violence and unreasonableness was bringing people into tighter solidarity. Some of this might have happened because people with convergent political persuasions sought each other out on particular pickets, but the result was a stronger sense of support on those pickets which chose to prevent the entry of traffic. I missed the next strike but police violence continued, accompanied by arbitrary arrests intended to intimidate and break the strike. Since then, university management and police have continued to threaten students, staff and community members with time-consuming legal proceedings and other formal means of intimidation including campus bans and threats of expulsion.

In the face of these iniquities, solidarity has swelled and strengthened, although still with hiccups. It seems that the strikes have opened up space for the development of a more profound political conversation, and strengthened ties between different people and parts of the uni. In a time of overwhelming fragmentation, this solidarity is reassuring. Looking back to the first strike day, I find even my own self unrecognisable. Each strike, each conversation I felt more confident in making the political arguments I wanted to make about the university. My confidence stemmed from feeling the solidarity of others on the pickets, from conversations with others at the strikes and the meetings in between, and from the way the strike helped me to comprehend my own experiences of the university in a political context. In particular, explaining to students approaching pickets why I was there helped to condense many of my own experiences with an unexpected clarity. I realised, in the middle of a conversation with a student who thought staff had too much sick leave, that at the age of 29 I had never had a job with any kind of sick leave at all. I thought of days suffering from chronic depression, dragging myself from my room to teach, never relating my experience to the neoliberal changes at the university I had been involved in campaigning against. Explaining my working life to others, in the context of the excellent analysis provided by so many different people around the strikes, let me better comprehend it myself.

Alienation at the University

The strikes also helped me articulate and understand the ways alienation operates at the university. During the strikes, when the force of the state and security was most on show, it became more obvious how it operates implicitly on other days. The idea of professional protestors and outside agitators was very present, in media representations and management emails, but also on the pickets. Security pointed out to me people who they thought weren’t students – class figured highly in their requirements of what students look like. Many students commenting on videos of pickets made comments such as “not a degree in sight” and suggested that none of the people in various clips were staff or students. Leaving aside how anyone could possibly know by face all of the staff and students of the university, and the fact that their claims were patently wrong, visual profiling of the categories of people who ‘belong’ in a university was common place as a means to describe people as outsiders. These claims were not only used to diminish the ‘rights’ of people to be involved in the dispute, but also to characterise anyone on the pickets as outsiders, thus reinforcing the alienation of people who do not appear to be privileged and who are not willing to culturally assimilate to elite values and political persuasions.

Neoliberalism in Daily Life

There are many privileges attendant to working and studying at university, and for a long time this has been coupled with the nostalgic image of the university as being above or outside of capitalism, which hides some of the ways the university exploits my labour. And yet I have many experiences of neoliberalism in my everyday life which are as conspicuous as the brute force which makes it viable on the days of the strike. As I ride along Eastern Avenue on busy mornings, my way is obstructed by markets and I can never decide what annoys me more, that there are shops selling shoes and bags on campus, or their pseudo market chic. Cops stroll about ever more confidently, military recruitment drives become more frequent, and entire haunted castles, ferris wheels and fairy floss stands materialise as I race by to meet deadlines and arrive at class on time. The university is decorated with advertising for what is effectively private tuition in the techniques of capitalist exploitation. The university has demolished and rebuilt at least one building each year of my attendance, while it claims to have no money for pay rises or resources for postgraduates. Whilst there is a temptation to imagine the university was once a pristine institution outside of capitalism, the truth is this campus has been intimidating from my first arrival. When I first attended uni in Newcastle, it felt like a liberation from the social stratification and the intense and gendered social gaze of school – but Sydney Uni offered much more intimidating versions, intensified by class politics.

On the picket line at the first strike, I felt confused about what I was defending. At each succeeding picket, it became easier to articulate that I wanted to challenge all of these things. The strikes offered some of my first satisfying confrontations with particularly entitled and arrogant students who have always made me feel uncomfortable. At last I felt comfortable telling them what I thought the university should be, and even though it was pointless to engage with them, I was glad to render their ease slightly less comfortable.