Cops off our campuses!

The riot police response to the Sussex house occupation shows plainly and clearly the role that the police play in protecting capitalism.

On Wednesday, Sussex University students occupied management offices on their campus to protest against education cuts at their university. When a solidarity demonstration was called at 4pm it was met with 16 police vehicles full of cops who were tooled up and ready for action.

The police were armed with riot gear, tasers, batons and attack dogs. They attacked people joining the 200 strong demo, and dragged students out of the occupation.

Tabitha, one of the students present at the demonstration said “I was just ten feet away from police grabbing students and throwing them down a hill. It was appalling. Some of the police were polite but others were very abusive. The police presence was ridiculous and completely out of proportion.”

Two students were (wrongly) arrested for assaulting a police officer and a security guard who fell over when the students entered Sussex House. In fact the head of security Richard Morgan locked himself into a room in an attempt to say that the students had taken him hostage. This was a lie, but he did manage to draft an injunction passed by the courts, which makes any more protests involving occupations at the campus unlawful.

REVOLUTION expresses our solidarity with all the students at Sussex who fell victim to police brutality. We call for any charges to be immediately dropped, and for the dropping of the injunction. We condemn the actions of the police and the management at Sussex who called them in.

REVOLUTION has also learned that four students have been sent exclusion letters from the Vice Chanceller Michael Farthing after Wednesday’s action. This bypasses the official structures for a disciplinary hearing. The whole student movement must demand that the exclusion notices are immediately withdrawn.

When capitalism moves in to take away our jobs, our public services, our education and our futures, the bosses know that we will resist them – through demonstrations, campaigning, occupations and strikes. But when we start winning victories – like at Sussex where 80 per cent of teachers in the UCU have just voted to strike to save their jobs – the bosses show their true nature. In the final analysis they resort to violence to keep us down and save their system.

Russian revolutionary VI Lenin understood this well. In his book The State and Revolution, he explained, drawing on the works of communists like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, that the state acts to defend the ruling class in any society. The state isn’t just made up of the Houses of Parliament – but of the courts run by wealthy judges, the prisons, the police with their batons and the power to arrest, and the army with their tanks and guns. All these state institutions exist to keep working people down and to try and stop them from fighting for their freedom. Lenin argued that you couldn’t just take over the police and the army who are loyal to the system – but that you have to smash and break them up in a socialist revolution. Lenin and Bolshevik party did exactly this in 1917.

As the crisis takes hold and the resistance continues to swell, we should be prepared to expect more violence from the police. Indeed, there were many police and security positioned on campuses all over the country on Wednesday in response to national days of action called by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts. Today, police broke up an anti-fascist demonstration called to stop the fascist English Defence League marching through London. As a result the fascists managed to march with their police escort to the Houses of Parliament.

We need to organise self-defence in preparation for police violence in the future. Students at Sussex helped to start this by linking arms to avoid arrest on Wednesday. We should argue for the police to be banned from university campuses in Britain, like they are in Greece and Italy.

We say:
* Abolish the Tactical Support Groups (the bastards in the blue helmets)
* Strip the police of their weapons: no batons, CS gas, riot shields, etc.
* Workers and youth to safeguard their own areas.