March 13th, 1967 saw London School of Economics students start a sit-in and 8-day occupation of the main university building. It was the first ever sit-in at a British university – and one in which we were both involved.
Steve, who arrived at LSE as a 19-year-old undergraduate in October 1965, had already been involved in the UK’s direct action and mass peaceful civil disobedience movement of the early 1960s. In 1961 he was arrested twice on Committee of 100 sit-downs, once in an attempt to occupy Parliament Square and once in front of the Russian Embassy after the Tsar Bomba nuclear test. Richard, arriving as a 24-year-old postgraduate in 1964 had been arrested while a university student in South Africa during anti-apartheid protests after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre.
Sitting-in was a relatively new form of direct action in the Black American civil rights movement that exploded after the successful Greensboro store sit-ins of 1960, when activists occupied segregated public spaces. It migrated to students at UCLA with the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement demanding the right of students to support political causes on the university campus.
Embed from Getty ImagesAfter the Second World War social welfare was demanded and conceded nearly everywhere in Western Europe. The 1960s saw major changes to higher education in Britain. University education was offered to a much wider cohort than ever before, as more skilled labour – including intellectual labour – was needed. The Robbins Report (1963), a landmark review which shaped British higher education policy, argued that university places ‘should be available to all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment and who wish to do so’.
While the expansion of British higher education made it accessible to a much larger section of society, the political order that embedded itself from the late forties on was dominated by the Cold War. Ideas of discipline, authority, deference and class still dominated the British social order. New university entrants from a wider range of backgrounds and experiences were being invited to ‘fit in’ to the old ways of running society.
Nothing, however, was static. As Prime Minister Harold MacMillan recognised in 1960 (with African independence in mind), ‘the wind of change’ was blowing. Yet successive governments were trying to steer the change to leave as much unchanged as possible – a kind of progressive conservatism that also dominated Labour’s social-democratic thinking. There were clouds on the horizon. A grumbling dissatisfaction expressed in social and political countercultures, was on the rise while Folk music, jazz, skiffle and then rock and roll created a cultural music rebellion. Many of the LSE students in the 8-day occupation had earlier supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, both a movement of disaffection and an affirmation that another world was possible. This growing social disaffection combined with a growing intellectual radicalism was captured in the sociological buzzword of the time, alienation (derived from the young Marx’s recently available writings).
LSE in 1964-5 still had a (largely misplaced) reputation as a centre of radicalism, based on its Fabian Society roots and its handful of Labour-supporting left academics like RH Tawney and Harold Laski in the 1930s and 1940s. In the mid-1960s we largely found its academic content boringly conventional, its teaching methods stultifying, and its senior echelons projecting unacceptable conservative notions of hierarchy and deference. Slowly and often inchoately, we organised within the LSE but also against it. Taking seriously Marx’s dictum that ‘The educators had first to be educated’, we set about providing ourselves the education LSE did not.
Who were the ‘we’ and how did we organise? The LSE Socialist Society (SocSoc) as it was known, met weekly in term time from 1-2. Meetings were open to all and functioned broadly by consensus. We organised meetings with invited speakers like Isaac Deutscher; we advised students on whose lecture courses they should bother to attend. We also believed in education through action. LSE’s proximity to Rhodesia House, South Africa House, Downing St – central sites for anti-apartheid protest – meant on occasion tens and sometimes hundreds of students experienced the highly consistent but negative role of the police in maintaining ‘order’ by arresting or mistreating protestors without cause.
In October 1965, the LSE Socialist Society set up a radical magazine. It was named after a short-lived South African satirical newssheet itself honouring the South African apartheid government’s practice of labelling its opponents ‘agitators who need crushing’. Our publication, The Agitator, encouraging debate and a wide range of left views, was sold to students in growing numbers. SocSoc members and others would also meet virtually every day in fierce political argument in the LSE canteen that continued (after much time in the library) over drinks in the Three Tuns or the George.
Our disillusionment with Harold Wilson’s Labour government turned rapidly to disgust when it introduced a wage freeze in 1966, its promise of ongoing improvement for all crumbling at the first challenge. The increased involvement of the US in the war on Vietnam from early 1965 – and the pressure for Britain to join in – led to a rapid growth in political awareness. This was made ever stronger by the presence of graduate American student draft dodgers at the LSE and their experiences of opposing the war. And on November 11th 1965, too, the wind of change in Africa was blown back by Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence. UDI was the eventually doomed attempt by white Rhodesian colonials to cling on to white power in Zimbabwe.
When LSE announced in 1966 that its new director, from 1967, would be Walter Adams, the then head of University College Rhodesia, it created a perfect storm. There had been no consultation with the student body and Adams’ collaboration with the racist regime in Rhodesia was exposed by an Agitator pamphlet we wrote. We used direct evidence from Bhasker Vashee, a student activist Adams had victimised who was now an LSE student.
The antiracism we were already committed to – several SocSoc and African Society students had been arrested in the protest outside Rhodesia House on the day UDI was declared – was given an immediate target. Adams’ appointment condensed and focused all our dissatisfactions: the LSE’s undemocratic structure with its ponderous, pompous, bureaucratic workings; its definition of its mission as feeding the needs of corporate Britain; and its infantilisation of us as students. This was made manifest by its suspension of the Presidents of the Students’ Union and the Graduate Students’ Union for writing a letter opposing Adams’ appointment to The Times without permission.
Embed from Getty ImagesThe occupation began when SocSoc members left a 500-strong student meeting debating how to respond to the suspension of their elected officers, saying ‘enough talk, we’re starting the sit-in now’ – and did precisely that in the entrance lobby. We were soon followed by the vast majority of those in the meeting. When senior university managers then suspended Steve and threatened to do the same to everyone else who remained sitting down blocking the main entrance to the university, we decided to turn the sit-in into an occupation. We took over the Old Theatre and hundreds bedded down that night there and elsewhere in the building. Food was brought in. Management was kept out. On the second night about a hundred of us occupied the adjoining management building, so management called in the police who had to carry everyone out – and they rejoined the main occupation. Richard became a trusted negotiator for the students with management who finally saw that they had to make some real concessions to get to end the occupation.
In SocSoc, we believed in participatory, grass-roots democracy and those who turned up and were willing to follow through inevitably carried great weight. SocSoc was open, it was transparent. But above all, it was able to lead and to listen. And by listening its capacity to lead was enhanced.
And we educated ourselves. And became radicalised. We took the particularities of our situation at LSE seriously but also tried to understand LSE in the wider world. And the more we understood, the more critical we became. What started out as a simple struggle for ‘free speech’ and ‘justice’ in 1966-67 for the victimised Student Union leaders had, by 1968, evolved into a much broader critique. This was a critique of a global system, of imperialist wars, and of the power structures of capitalist society including the role played by the LSE’s Director in enabling white Rhodesia to survive for 14 years after 1965.
We had intellectual arguments to back up our emotional instincts and to give them a firm and convincing foundation. And here the slogan ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism’ was, for many of us, a lodestone.
We took our struggles in the LSE very seriously but were not limited by their parochial nature. We argued among students to take them beyond the ivory tower and were prominent on picket lines and supporting other struggles. And we argued for the institution to play its role in wider social change, against the inherent triviality of what passed for the social sciences it largely purveyed at the time.
We wanted to know why poverty persisted, why the US was at war in Vietnam, why racism was pervasive in British society. But also why the LSE, radical in its origins, was run by a Court of Governors nearly entirely made up of leading British finance and industrial capitalists?
We did not stop the appointment of Walter Adams in 1967, but we did win the reinstatement of the two suspended students and new rules. Instead of beginning ‘All students shall obey all rules and instructions given by the Director’, the new first regulation stated: ‘All students shall be entitled to freedom of expression, assembly and association’.
For all these reasons in 2024 some 20 of us came together to reprise our experience by writing to the latest LSE Director calling on him to withdraw all disciplinary charges against seven students. They had peacefully and noisily picketed a short-course enrolment day to draw attention to LSE’s continuing holdings of significant investments in companies supplying the Israeli army and in fossil fuels (like BP). Like in 1967, the university was forced to reinstate the students, whose wider campaign continues with new force.
Lessons for today: The importance of building from below. Winning over those who have not started out on your side. Learning from your mistakes. Not being carried away by your successes. Being committed, while recognising you can be wrong (or misguided). Dreaming of a different world while being rooted in this one. And if politics is the art of the possible, learning how to redefine what is possible to add the ‘impossible’ to the current agenda.
And finally, laugh more than cry, and always intend to succeed but don’t expect it. As Samuel Becket put it in Worstward Ho:
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Further reading: