You can't have your cake and eat it too – The Response

Carlus Hudson responds to an article believed to be targeted at Exeter Socialist Students.

Back in June, there was an article written by Rachel Brown about an alleged ‘boycott’ from Socialist Students of the Let Them Eat Cake event which she was to chair and I to be on the panel for. The event was intended to be a discussion of the way activists in the Western world, but particularly Exeter, could go about changing the world without feeding into a racist, oppressive paradigm.

“It almost goes without saying that there is going to be an unavoidable level of frustration along the way as [a genuinely healthy, vibrant and inclusive activism at the university] develops, and it shouldn’t be that surprising that a panel event to discuss this issue was not able to go ahead on the first try…”
Photo Credit: ginnerobot via Compfight cc

I expressed concern to the other organisers early on in the process of formulating the question we’d be discussing at the event to avoid it falling into the trap of being too Western-centric and limiting as a topic, which the whole event was (in my opinion) intended to be combating. Perhaps it would have been worth spending more time redrafting the question during that planning process, but ultimately I decided to go with what seemed like the best draft we’d get and aim to spend a good chunk of my talk at the event critiquing the question itself.

As it happened I was heavily – and quite stressfully – involved with a number of other socialists and anarchists working on a political response to the crisis within the SWP and incidents like it in other left-wing political organisations. Additionally, a number of members of Socialist Students (and comrades at the university but outside the society) had been made to feel uncomfortable at how the event was unfolding, as a result of abuse received over Facebook.

Indeed it was an incident not too dissimilar on Facebook during the Oxfam Bake Sale for International Women’s Day which the article rightly points out was the background to why the Let Them Eat Cake event was organised. Arguably, this issue stretches back to the campaign against the safer sex ball theme as well. With the deterioration of the event, on top of the genuine pressure I was under from the workload of my other activism, I didn’t feel I was in a position to either adequately prepare for or present my arguments at the event.

At the heart of this issue from ‘The Socialists’ (whatever exactly is meant by this label) is a genuine desire to totally change cultural, socio-economic and even political structures so that racism (and all other oppressions) are no longer issues. It’s quite fashionable (though not quite as much since the recent economic crisis started) to imagine we live in the ‘end of history’ in a post-political or post-ideological world where things like exploitation, oppression, discrimination and so on, are either gone entirely or that the people opposing them actively or even just taking a strongly critical approach to systemic problems today are just exaggerating about their extent.

But for anyone who recognises that there is a major systemic problem that needs to be addressed, there’s no doubt that it’s necessary to link up with like-minded people (whether they identify themselves as anarchists, socialists, feminists, environmentalists, etc.) and start working on that systemic problem. In practice, no one trying to effect change on that scale can pretend that people who don’t share 100% of their views don’t exist or refuse to work with them in any context whatsoever.

The idea that there is some ‘non-engagement policy’ is even more ridiculous when you look at Socialist Students’ record over the past academic year. The Socialist Students-led campaign Rape Is No Joke reached out to and involved many students outside the society and immediate supporters.  The society’s Valentine’s Day public lecture which included a very thought-provoking material geography case study for chocolate (symbol of love, after all) was one of our best attended events of the year with plenty of faces not even a seasoned activist like me recognised. Not to mention that members of Socialist Students have been involved in Friends of Palestine and the Gender Equality society, and have been involved in organising the Reclaim The Night event. Socialist Students has even hosted a discussion with an advocate of the IF campaign (a campaign supported by Oxfam GB, who were at the centre of the controversy over the International Women’s Day bake sale).

However, Socialist Students even at its best can only be one part of a genuinely healthy, vibrant and inclusive activism at the university. It almost goes without saying that there is going to be an unavoidable level of frustration along the way as that develops, and it shouldn’t be that surprising that a panel event to discuss this issue was not able to go ahead on the first try for reasons I’ve discussed above. I certainly don’t think anything is helped by the article putting the blame for the event not going ahead exclusively on ‘The Socialists’, throwing around accusations of being conspiracy theorists, patronising one half of this discussion with the label ‘angry activism’, and by grossly misrepresenting the views of Socialist Students and others.

The article seems to fall into exactly the same trap of an unhealthy and oppressive discourse that it accuses ‘The Socialists’ so strongly of. If students interested in making the world a better place take the view expressed in the article that ‘this is not about setting the facts right’ when it comes to the barriers to an inclusive activist discourse, how can any of us understand those barriers in a way that’s even factually correct let alone overcome them? How can anyone possibly expect the discourse to improve without understanding what made it so awful to begin with?

Carlus Hudson

Leave a comment below or write to the Comment team at the Exeposé Comment Facebook Group or on Twitter @CommentExepose.