Occupy Everything Fight Everywhere Strike March 4!
Animas SDS
throughout the nation and across the globe will strike. Pre K-12,
adult education, community colleges, and state-funded universities
will come together in an international Strike and Day of Action to
resist the neoliberal destruction of public education in California
and beyond.
We stand beside all who wish to transform public education, and we
seek to advance the struggle by generalizing the tactic that has, by
far, been the strength of the movement: direct action.
In keeping with the spirit of March 4th, we call upon everyone,
everywhere, to occupy everything—from collapsing public universities
and closed high schools to millions of foreclosed homes. We call on
all concerned students and workers to escalate the fight against
privatization where they are, in solidarity with the California
statewide actions. We envision a network of occupied campuses in
multiple states across the nation.
[we will be connected by a series of tubes!]
We call upon all Bay Area students, teachers, and workers to unite on
March 4 to march from Berkeley into downtown Oakland. We encourage all
those in the Bay Area to organize actions alongside and in support of
the occupation movement, so that March 4th becomes a day of blockades,
sit-ins, mass marches to the streets and freeways, a day for
reclaiming public spaces and institutions. In solidarity with hundreds
of occupied schools and workplaces across the globe, we seek to make
March 4th an international day of action demonstrating our collective
resistance.
Why Direct Action?
We understand clearly that decades of rallies and petitions have not
and will never be enough. We have already witnessed the violent
extremism and radicalism of the other side: behind every fee increase,
a line of riot cops. Behind every call for “dialogue,” the threat of
prison. Behind calls for “shared public sacrifice,” millions in
obscene raises and bonuses.
Governor Schwarzenegger’s recent proposal to tie public education to
privatized prisons has accompanied the authorization of mass student
arrests, the labeling of student activists as “terrorists,” and the
accelerating militarization of California from its public campuses to
its patrolled borders.
The state’s decision has also revealed the power and effectiveness of
direct action to turn the tide against the corporate and financial
interests, the lobbyists and politicians, who have used the crisis to
enrich themselves while destroying or privatizing fundamental public
goods like education and health care.
Public Education Versus Private Prisons: A False Choice
As more and more jobs are lost and homes foreclosed, an entire
generation has been reminded that those who work do so at the expense
of others who are barred from doing so. The availability of scarce
future jobs depends upon the forced subtraction of a portion of the
population from the work-force. This is the web of relations in which
we work and study; this is the truth of a profoundly racist,
neoliberal society whose logic education reproduces, alongside
prisons, in the name of “meritocracy” or “a better life.”
Prisons and schools are the last remaining spaces in our society where
individuals rendered superfluous by contracting job and housing
markets gather together for years at a time. Schools and prisons house
the “privileged” or the “pathological.” The university produces the
wage earner-to-be, with skills financed by a lifetime of debt. Prisons
are a home of last resort for those unable to pay the steep price of
admission for job training, certification, and the right social
networks.
The Governor’s zero-sum proposal pits various sectors of the
population against each other for diminishing resources, for the right
to die slower or faster. It is a false choice and we reject it. This
crisis cannot be solved, only magnified, by distributing violence and
misery among scapegoated populations: immigrants, prisoners, the
“urban poor,” and now, students and youth in general.
The Crisis Is General. So Too Is The Resistance
To occupy a building, to defend it against the police, to shut down a
city, is to subtract ourselves as much as possible from the property
relations that govern our relationships to each other—from the
enclosure of knowledge and skills within dwindling job markets and
hollowed-out institutions; from the enclosure of universities within
admissions policies which crowd out students and workers of color
through exclusionary logics of race, class and citizenship; from the
enclosure of tuition within capital projects financed by student and
worker debt; from the enclosure of work within the wage relation which
clearly cannot meet the basic human needs of the vast majority of us.
On March 4, ESCALATE—OCCUPY—RECLAIM