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Students across Britain offer hope for a co-operative future

NICK MATTHEWS met students forming a national body to promote co-ops in their universities - and says it could mark real progress

Paul Mason's book Why It's Kicking Off All Over points to changes in society, technology and human behaviour that have propelled a generation onto the streets in search of social justice.

New forms of activism - vast, agile cyber networks - facilitate protest, from culture wars to the tent camps of the Occupy movement.

This analysis may be true but many of us have been disappointed by how ineffectual movements like Occupy have become. Lots of cyber chatter but little practical output.

One part of our community under tremendous pressure from the whole austerity drive has been the young. They have faced the most concerted attacks on their standard of living and on their life chances.

I had hoped for their repoliticisation, especially of the enormous number of students who have been crippled by the double whammy of rising debt and murderous costs for housing, energy and food.

The earlier large-scale demos seem to have petered out into a mixture of cynicism and apathy marked by sporadic outbreaks of guerrilla style protest against the privatisation of education and student immiseration.

Underneath, however, something has been stirring.

I am always on the lookout for new manifestations of co-operation and I had noticed that on university campuses many students had been forming co-ops to help them reduce the cost of essentials.

This seemed to be a growing movement. When they asked me to do a workshop at the national event to mark the formation of a body to promote student co-operatives I found myself a mixture of curious and excited.

The event was held in the Guild of Students at Birmingham University.

This was a bit like visiting the scene of the crime. Birmingham's vice-chancellor Professor David Eastwood is one of the architects of the current drive for unlimited fees.

He delighted staff and students at the university this year by accepting an 8 per cent pay increase to almost £420,000 a year.

It was also the time we had lost the great cultural thinker Stuart Hall. Birmingham had been his academic home for many years.

He followed Richard Hoggart as director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and 2014 is the 50th anniversary of its founding. There's little to celebrate though because minds that are enslaved to outdated neoliberal ideas have no space for enlightened cultural thinking and closed the centre in 2002.

This narrow economist approach to intellectual endeavour does raise the question of just what the purpose of the academy is in the 21st century.

So with all that in my mind I was unsure of what to expect from this group of students. Now having met them and having had the pleasure of sitting in and listening to one of their large policy-making sessions, I have to say this was one of the most uplifting co-operative experiences of my life.

"The start of any social movement can be a long and arduous process," said one of the movers of this new movement, Sean Farmelo. I have to say it was great honour to be a witness to this social movement being born.

 

We are familiar with pictures of the Rochdale Pioneers as old guys in fading pictures but when they set out they where as young as many of these students.

The students' ambition, drive, passion and commitment is no less than that of the pioneers. And the reasons are obvious. Their very lives may yet depend on the success of these co-operatives.

The fact is that today's economy is not going to deliver the basic things they need at prices they can afford and is certainly not creating the jobs they need to enable them to enjoy its fruits.

They have been abandoned. But instead of wallowing in self-pity they have set about building the world anew.

So far it may be small-scale stuff, from a bike maintenance co-op in Birmingham, a reuse hub in Edinburgh or a food co-op at Warwick, but now there are dozens of student food co-ops across Britain.

These students are learning how to do things differently. Their collective buying power and social activity is making a difference to their university communities.

With students coming from as far away as Aberdeen the next step is clearly to create an effective national body to co-ordinate support and promote the model.

Then they will begin to take on the bigger challenges like housing. Students in both Sheffield and Birmingham already aim to have the first student housing co-ops in Britain very soon.

It seems to me that we need to give them as much support as we can, from advice and guidance to plain cash if we have it. If we get behind them these co-ops really can take off.

Emily Amic described the conference on Twitter. The "awesome & inaugural" conference was both "historic & hopeful"!

I could not agree more.

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