Radicals in Quiet Years.

OP-ED / STUDENT AFFAIRS

Some Notes on Student Activism in Dunedin.

Among older figures in the world of left-wing activism, especially outside the official party politics of the parliamentary left, there has been a recurring concept of "missing generations" of the left starting roughly in the 1990s. This article is intended to serve as a recollection of entering the fractious world of left-wing student activism during one of those "missing generation" moments, the post-Occupy malaise of the early 2010s. It recalls being a student radical in a time and place where few were interested in such a notion.

From the end of high school through to my postgraduate years, I was active in what passed for student politics in Dunedin. I was involved with a variety of projects over that time, many of which are now forgotten, and only some of which I will be able to include. Keep in mind throughout this article that a shifting medley of people were involved in not only the projects mentioned but an array of others which appeared on a near constant basis.

In 2011 I was enthusiastic when the news started carrying stories of radical movements spreading rapidly across the world in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis. I began visiting the Dunedin Occupy encampment but was too chronically shy to leave my friends to talk to the people demonstrating. 

A friend would take me and some others to annoy Pentecostal preachers in the Octagon at this time. Juvenile, but a first taste of expressing our political displeasure at something. In my final year they took me to my first protest (against expanded surveillance powers for the GCSB), and introduced me to Black Star Books, a long-running local anarchist infoshop.

Soon after, in 2014, I graduated and began studying at Otago University. From a culturally stifling high school to the nominally open fields of tertiary education, I threw myself into the activist scene. For me this took the form of joining the Black Star Books collective and becoming the student liaison for the local anti-TPPA (Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement) organising committee. The committee was largely much older, made up of people who often had a background that included some connection to the left-wing of NewLabour/Alliance back in the 1990s and 2000s. Meetings usually featured perhaps ten people at most. 

At the time there were national demonstrations every few months, probably around five over 2014-2015, which in Dunedin tended to number around 1,500 to 3,000 people. Between these there were regular committee meetings, pickets, lectures, letters to media, leafletting, and everything else which kept me for my small part quite busy in my spare time.

At this time, I volunteered most weeks at Black Star Books, often using the opportunity to study, read, or organise other political affairs. With that project I opened the infoshop and ran a weekday afternoon shift perhaps two or three times a month, it being open two afternoons a week at the time. I helped run the People’s Kitchen, a free meal service held varyingly from once a week to once a month, and my old high school friend was usually the cook. There was opening the space to be used by various campaigns as a meeting venue and hosting occasional talks or documentary screenings. All this was organised by a loose-knit collective that might have a dozen people at a well-attended organising meeting but was often kept running by maybe eight or so. Their political affiliations spanned the anarchist spectrum, and were of a younger cohort than the anti-TPPA organisers (being perhaps in their late-20s to early-40s).

This was on top of various other activist causes, a brief summer stint on student radio, and the usual undergrad experience. By late-2015, I properly burned out for the first of a few times. I was overextended, obviously, and constantly working with small collectives to conduct such large projects was exhausting for all of us.

In my last year of undergrad, I tried again. I tried my hand at community access radio, and we attempted to cohere a more concrete student collective which could be the centre-point for activity. This was affiliated with the student union as a club to gain access to resources. 

I and a couple friends made it a few chapters into an ad hoc reading group which tried Capital and Caliban and the Witch (falling apart only due to the others moving). Our student collective set up our most ambitious project, Radical Orientation. With this, we tried to put on a full week of events as an alternative to O-Week. RadOri to counter ReOri. 

We pulled off two of them, building a coalition of progressive campus groups to host at least one event per day for the whole week. Each culminated in a gig. One was a “spontaneous” gig on campus (university authorities were very mad about that one), and one was held at stalwart local venue The Crown. Bundled in were film screenings, talks, craft workshops, introductory sign-up days for radical study groups, and attached to each gig was a progressive clubs day, tabled by all the organisations who contributed to the overall project. 

These were still grasping efforts to forge our own way with no real advice or platform to build off. In retrospect, however, it was an attempt to get more serious. What we had tried to do was give some level of structure to our activity, and to start learning rather than just always being active. RadOri didn’t lead anywhere, though. We put a huge amount of energy into it, a student at the Polytech even made a short documentary about us (now lost to time), but after the bang there was no rush of interest. We built it, showed it off, had a bunch of people turn up, and after the fact almost nobody came. 

We hit the same brick wall we’d hit the last time – very few students on campus were interested in what we had to say. We could be as active as we wanted, but it would accomplish nothing if we simply could not convince the people who we wanted to be active with us of our ideas or that the matters at hand had anything to do with them. And especially if those people not only disagreed but just did not want to hear it. 

So, I burned out again, and all our groups once more fell apart. By this time, I was nearing graduation and postgrad loomed. In 2017 I was still active but largely retreated to Black Star Books off campus and became an at-large member of the Canterbury Socialist Society.

While I attended and organised various events over this time, I was far more focused on completing my master's over the next year. I began writing, not just for university but for a general audience. My topics were niche and not always well received, but I felt it was better as part of my changing appreciation for the intellectual side of politics. 

By 2019 I was working a dead-end job while I figured out what to do with myself, and some of my contacts began to rope me into helping out with an exciting new wave of high school environmental protesters who were planning their first action soon. This was seemingly the point where, in my mid-20s by this point, my circles were no longer the youngest faces in the scattered activist scene. We were largely either graduated or finishing postgraduate studies, out the other side after the turbulent handful of years in which one is part of the student milieu. 

A lot of relearning old lessons happened in a few short years, and I suspect I'm not alone in taking them with me into the projects I've been involved with since. The point of this piece is not to promote those, but to see if this experience resonates with today's student activists. From the vantage point I am at today, the conditions seem better suited to the kind of student radicalism we had wanted but could not pull off a decade back. My hope is that even if the times have changed a great deal in the years since, this piece might provide some encouragement for the campus radicals of today.

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Tyler West