Solidarity with Student Occupations Everywhere!

[Nathan (Animas SDS)]

Communique from an Absent Future: The Terminus of Student Life

The UC Budget Crisis in the Perspective of Global Social War

I

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the
university is bankrupt. This bankruptcy is not only financial. It is
the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and
economic, which has been a long time in the making. No one knows what
the university is for anymore. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the
old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too,
the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market.
These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly
maintained halls.

Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of
a dead future: these are the remains of the university. Among these
remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous
habits and duties. We go through the motions of our tests and
assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped
up by subvocalized resentments. Nothing is interesting, nothing can
make itself felt. The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe
is no more real than the windows in which it appears.

For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria
following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of
lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they
never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—
without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were
rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among
friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of
exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of
commodities. Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We
slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We
shepherd our emptiness from place to place.

But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a
condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just what
it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and
consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of
the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication
of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut
class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the
diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in
elliptical circles.

It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory
tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard”
has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—
drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into
databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long
ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk.
A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General
Motors.

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we
work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of
students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of
employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after
graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We
work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has
already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan
debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first
century—80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume—a
figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by
nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys
is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives.
What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class
without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent
interest. Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the
bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.

This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since grade-
school. Those of us who came here to have our privilege notarized
surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of
psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical
compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile.
No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the
cattle prod of parental admonition. On the other hand, those of us who
came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our
families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take
our place—that the logic here is zero-sum. And anyway, socioeconomic
status remains the best predictor of student achievement. Those of us
the demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of
color” have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit. But we
know we are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because
of them. And we know that the circuits through which we might free
ourselves from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery
of the past in the present for others, elsewhere.

If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste
our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby
teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like
everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it
makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system,
one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with
the demonstration of obedience. First we pay, then we “work hard.” And
there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded,
consumer and consumed. It is the system itself which one obeys, the
cold buildings that enforce subservience. Those who teach are treated
with all the respect of an automated messaging system. Only the logic
of customer satisfaction obtains here: was the course easy? Was the
teacher hot? Could any stupid asshole get an A? What’s the point of
acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes? Who
needs memory when we have the internet? A training in thought? You
can’t be serious. A moral preparation? There are anti-depressants for
that.

Meanwhile the graduate students, supposedly the most politically
enlightened among us, are also the most obedient. The “vocation” for
which they labor is nothing other than a fantasy of falling off the
grid, or out of the labor market. Every grad student is a would be
Robinson Crusoe, dreaming of an island economy subtracted from the
exigencies of the market. But this fantasy is itself sustained through
an unremitting submission to the market. There is no longer the least
felt contradiction in teaching a totalizing critique of capitalism by
day and polishing one’s job talk by night. That our pleasure is our
labor only makes our symptoms more manageable. Aesthetics and politics
collapse courtesy of the substitution of ideology for history: booze
and beaux arts and another seminar on the question of being, the
steady blur of typeface, each pixel paid for by somebody somewhere,
some not-me, not-here, where all that appears is good and all goods
appear attainable by credit.

Graduate school is simply the faded remnant of a feudal system adapted
to the logic of capitalism—from the commanding heights of the star
professors to the serried ranks of teaching assistants and adjuncts
paid mostly in bad faith. A kind of monasticism predominates here,
with all the Gothic rituals of a Benedictine abbey, and all the
strange theological claims for the nobility of this work, its
essential altruism. The underlings are only too happy to play
apprentice to the masters, unable to do the math indicating that nine-
tenths of us will teach 4 courses every semester to pad the paychecks
of the one-tenth who sustain the fiction that we can all be the one.
Of course I will be the star, I will get the tenure-track job in a
large city and move into a newly gentrified neighborhood.

We end up interpreting Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “The
philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point is to change it.” At best, we learn the phoenix-like skill of
coming to the very limits of critique and perishing there, only to
begin again at the seemingly ineradicable root. We admire the first
part of this performance: it lights our way. But we want the tools to
break through that point of suicidal thought, its hinge in practice.

The same people who practice “critique” are also the most susceptible
to cynicism. But if cynicism is simply the inverted form of
enthusiasm, then beneath every frustrated leftist academic is a latent
radical. The shoulder shrug, the dulled face, the squirm of
embarrassment when discussing the fact that the US murdered a million
Iraqis between 2003 and 2006, that every last dime squeezed from
America’s poorest citizens is fed to the banking industry, that the
seas will rise, billions will die and there’s nothing we can do about
it—this discomfited posture comes from feeling oneself pulled between
the is and the ought of current left thought. One feels that there is
no alternative, and yet, on the other hand, that another world is
possible.

We will not be so petulant. The synthesis of these positions is right
in front of us: another world is not possible; it is necessary. The
ought and the is are one. The collapse of the global economy is here
and now.

II

The university has no history of its own; its history is the history
of capital. Its essential function is the reproduction of the
relationship between capital and labor. Though not a proper
corporation that can be bought and sold, that pays revenue to its
investors, the public university nonetheless carries out this function
as efficiently as possible by approximating ever more closely the
corporate form of its bedfellows. What we are witnessing now is the
endgame of this process, whereby the façade of the educational
institution gives way altogether to corporate streamlining.

Even in the golden age of capitalism that followed after World War II
and lasted until the late 1960s, the liberal university was already
subordinated to capital. At the apex of public funding for higher
education, in the 1950s, the university was already being redesigned
to produce technocrats with the skill-sets necessary to defeat
“communism” and sustain US hegemony. Its role during the Cold War was
to legitimate liberal democracy and to reproduce an imaginary society
of free and equal citizens—precisely because no one was free and no
one was equal.

But if this ideological function of the public university was at least
well-funded after the Second World War, that situation changed
irreversibly in the 1960s, and no amount of social-democratic heel-
clicking will bring back the dead world of the post-war boom. Between
1965 and 1980 profit rates began to fall, first in the US, then in the
rest of the industrializing world. Capitalism, it turned out, could
not sustain the good life it made possible. For capital, abundance
appears as overproduction, freedom from work as unemployment.
Beginning in the 1970s, capitalism entered into a terminal downturn in
which permanent work was casualized and working-class wages stagnated,
while those at the top were temporarily rewarded for their obscure
financial necromancy, which has itself proved unsustainable.

For public education, the long downturn meant the decline of tax
revenues due to both declining rates of economic growth and the
prioritization of tax-breaks for beleaguered corporations. The raiding
of the public purse struck California and the rest of the nation in
the 1970s. It has continued to strike with each downward declension of
the business cycle. Though it is not directly beholden to the market,
the university and its corollaries are subject to the same cost-
cutting logic as other industries: declining tax revenues have made
inevitable the casualization of work. Retiring professors make way not
for tenure-track jobs but for precariously employed teaching
assistants, adjuncts, and lecturers who do the same work for much less
pay. Tuition increases compensate for cuts while the jobs students pay
to be trained for evaporate.

In the midst of the current crisis, which will be long and protracted,
many on the left want to return to the golden age of public education.
They naïvely imagine that the crisis of the present is an opportunity
to demand the return of the past. But social programs that depended
upon high profit rates and vigorous economic growth are gone. We
cannot be tempted to make futile grabs at the irretrievable while
ignoring the obvious fact that there can be no autonomous “public
university” in a capitalist society. The university is subject to the
real crisis of capitalism, and capital does not require liberal
education programs. The function of the university has always been to
reproduce the working class by training future workers according to
the changing needs of capital. The crisis of the university today is
the crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a
period in which capital no longer needs us as workers. We cannot free
the university from the exigencies of the market by calling for the
return of the public education system. We live out the terminus of the
very market logic upon which that system was founded. The only
autonomy we can hope to attain exists beyond capitalism.

What this means for our struggle is that we can’t go backward. The old
student struggles are the relics of a vanished world. In the 1960s, as
the post-war boom was just beginning to unravel, radicals within the
confines of the university understood that another world was possible.
Fed up with technocratic management, wanting to break the chains of a
conformist society, and rejecting alienated work as unnecessary in an
age of abundance, students tried to align themselves with radical
sections of the working class. But their mode of radicalization, too
tenuously connected to the economic logic of capitalism, prevented
that alignment from taking hold. Because their resistance to the
Vietnam war focalized critique upon capitalism as a colonial war-
machine, but insufficiently upon its exploitation of domestic labor,
students were easily split off from a working class facing different
problems. In the twilight era of the post-war boom, the university was
not subsumed by capital to the degree that it is now, and students
were not as intensively proletarianized by debt and a devastated labor
market.

That is why our struggle is fundamentally different. The poverty of
student life has become terminal: there is no promised exit. If the
economic crisis of the 1970s emerged to break the back of the
political crisis of the 1960s, the fact that today the economic crisis
precedes the coming political uprising means we may finally supersede
the cooptation and neutralization of those past struggles. There will
be no return to normal.

III

We seek to push the university struggle to its limits.

Though we denounce the privatization of the university and its
authoritarian system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms.
We demand not a free university but a free society. A free university
in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a
prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life.
Instead we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and
workers into a declaration of war.

We must begin by preventing the university from functioning. We must
interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and
class to a halt. We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours.
Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and
mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we
are to be understood. This is the only meaningful position to take
when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of
society. Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common
ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to
destroy it.

The university struggle is one among many, one sector where a new
cycle of refusal and insurrection has begun – in workplaces,
neighborhoods, and slums. All of our futures are linked, and so our
movement will have to join with these others, breeching the walls of
the university compounds and spilling into the streets. In recent
weeks Bay Area public school teachers, BART employees, and unemployed
have threatened demonstrations and strikes. Each of these movements
responds to a different facet of capitalism’s reinvigorated attack on
the working class in a moment of crisis. Viewed separately, each
appears small, near-sighted, without hope of success. Taken together,
however, they suggest the possibility of widespread refusal and
resistance. Our task is to make plain the common conditions that, like
a hidden water table, feed each struggle.

We have seen this kind of upsurge in the recent past, a rebellion that
starts in the classrooms and radiates outward to encompass the whole
of society. Just two years ago the anti-CPE movement in France,
combating a new law that enabled employers to fire young workers
without cause, brought huge numbers into the streets. High school and
university students, teachers, parents, rank and file union members,
and unemployed youth from the banlieues found themselves together on
the same side of the barricades. (This solidarity was often fragile,
however. The riots of immigrant youth in the suburbs and university
students in the city centers never merged, and at times tensions
flared between the two groups.) French students saw through the
illusion of the university as a place of refuge and enlightenment and
acknowledged that they were merely being trained to work. They took to
the streets as workers, protesting their precarious futures. Their
position tore down the partitions between the schools and the
workplaces and immediately elicited the support of many wage workers
and unemployed people in a mass gesture of proletarian refusal.

As the movement developed it manifested a growing tension between
revolution and reform. Its form was more radical than its content.
While the rhetoric of the student leaders focused merely on a return
to the status quo, the actions of the youth – the riots, the cars
overturned and set on fire, the blockades of roads and railways, and
the waves of occupations that shut down high schools and universities
– announced the extent of the new generation’s disillusionment and
rage. Despite all of this, however, the movement quickly disintegrated
when the CPE law was eventually dropped. While the most radical
segment of the movement sought to expand the rebellion into a general
revolt against capitalism, they could not secure significant support
and the demonstrations, occupations, and blockades dwindled and soon
died. Ultimately the movement was unable to transcend the limitations
of reformism.

The Greek uprising of December 2008 broke through many of these
limitations and marked the beginning of a new cycle of class struggle.
Initiated by students in response to the murder of an Athens youth by
police, the uprising consisted of weeks of rioting, looting, and
occupations of universities, union offices, and television stations.
Entire financial and shopping districts burned, and what the movement
lacked in numbers it made up in its geographical breadth, spreading
from city to city to encompass the whole of Greece. As in France it
was an uprising of youth, for whom the economic crisis represented a
total negation of the future. Students, precarious workers, and
immigrants were the protagonists, and they were able to achieve a
level of unity that far surpassed the fragile solidarities of the
anti-
CPE movement.

Just as significantly, they made almost no demands. While of course
some demonstrators sought to reform the police system or to critique
specific government policies, in general they asked for nothing at all
from the government, the university, the workplaces, or the police.
Not because they considered this a better strategy, but because they
wanted nothing that any of these institutions could offer. Here
content aligned with form; whereas the optimistic slogans that
appeared everywhere in French demonstrations jarred with the images of
burning cars and broken glass, in Greece the rioting was the obvious
means to begin to enact the destruction of an entire political and
economic system.

Ultimately the dynamics that created the uprising also established its
limit. It was made possible by the existence of a sizeable radical
infrastructure in urban areas, in particular the Exarchia neighborhood
in Athens. The squats, bars, cafes, and social centers, frequented by
students and immigrant youth, created the milieu out of which the
uprising emerged. However, this milieu was alien to most middle-aged
wage workers, who did not see the struggle as their own. Though many
expressed solidarity with the rioting youth, they perceived it as a
movement of entrants – that is, of that portion of the proletariat
that sought entrance to the labor market but was not formally employed
in full-time jobs. The uprising, strong in the schools and the
immigrant suburbs, did not spread to the workplaces.

Our task in the current struggle will be to make clear the
contradiction between form and content and to create the conditions
for the transcendence of reformist demands and the implementation of a
truly communist content. As the unions and student and faculty groups
push their various “issues,” we must increase the tension until it is
clear that we want something else entirely. We must constantly expose
the incoherence of demands for democratization and transparency. What
good is it to have the right to see how intolerable things are, or to
elect those who will screw us over? We must leave behind the culture
of student activism, with its moralistic mantras of non-violence and
its fixation on single-issue causes. The only success with which we
can be content is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production
and the certain immiseration and death which it promises for the 21st
century. All of our actions must push us towards communization; that
is, the reorganization of society according to a logic of free giving
and receiving, and the immediate abolition of the wage, the value-
form, compulsory labor, and exchange.

Occupation will be a critical tactic in our struggle, but we must
resist the tendency to use it in a reformist way. The different
strategic uses of occupation became clear this past January when
students occupied a building at the New School in New York. A group of
friends, mostly graduate students, decided to take over the Student
Center and claim it as a liberated space for students and the public.
Soon others joined in, but many of them preferred to use the action as
leverage to win reforms, in particular to oust the school’s president.
These differences came to a head as the occupation unfolded. While the
student reformers were focused on leaving the building with a tangible
concession from the administration, others shunned demands entirely.
They saw the point of occupation as the creation of a momentary
opening in capitalist time and space, a rearrangement that sketched
the contours of a new society. We side with this anti-reformist
position. While we know these free zones will be partial and
transitory, the tensions they expose between the real and the possible
can push the struggle in a more radical direction.

We intend to employ this tactic until it becomes generalized. In 2001
the first Argentine piqueteros suggested the form the people’s
struggle there should take: road blockades which brought to a halt the
circulation of goods from place to place. Within months this tactic
spread across the country without any formal coordination between
groups. In the same way repetition can establish occupation as an
instinctive and immediate method of revolt taken up both inside and
outside the university. We have seen a new wave of takeovers in the
U.S. over the last year, both at universities and workplaces: New
School and NYU, as well as the workers at Republic Windows Factory in
Chicago, who fought the closure of their factory by taking it over.
Now it is our turn.

To accomplish our goals we cannot rely on those groups which position
themselves as our representatives. We are willing to work with unions
and student associations when we find it useful, but we do not
recognize their authority. We must act on our own behalf directly,
without mediation. We must break with any groups that seek to limit
the struggle by telling us to go back to work or class, to negotiate,
to reconcile. This was also the case in France. The original calls for
protest were made by the national high school and university student
associations and by some of the trade unions. Eventually, as the
representative groups urged calm, others forged ahead. And in Greece
the unions revealed their counter-revolutionary character by
cancelling strikes and calling for restraint.

As an alternative to being herded by representatives, we call on
students and workers to organize themselves across trade lines. We
urge undergraduates, teaching assistants, lecturers, faculty, service
workers, and staff to begin meeting together to discuss their
situation. The more we begin talking to one another and finding our
common interests, the more difficult it becomes for the administration
to pit us against each other in a hopeless competition for dwindling
resources. The recent struggles at NYU and the New School suffered
from the absence of these deep bonds, and if there is a lesson to be
learned from them it is that we must build dense networks of
solidarity based upon the recognition of a shared enemy. These
networks not only make us resistant to recuperation and
neutralization, but also allow us to establish new kinds of collective
bonds. These bonds are the real basis of our struggle.

We’ll see you at the barricades.

Research and Destroy

2009

http://wewanteverything.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/absentfuture.pdf

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Occupy California! Statement from the UCSC Occupation

September 24, 2009

We are occupying this building at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, because the current situation has become untenable. Across the
state, people are losing their jobs and getting evicted, while social
services are slashed. California’s leaders from state officials to
university presidents have demonstrated how they will deal with this
crisis: everything and everyone is subordinated to the budget. They
insulate themselves from the consequences of their own fiscal
mismanagement, while those who can least afford it are left
shouldering the burden. Every solution on offer only accelerates the
decay of the State of California. It remains for the people to seize
what is theirs.

The current attack on public education – under the guise of a fiscal
emergency – is merely the culmination of a long-term trend.
California’s regressive tax structure has undermined the 1960 Master
Plan for free education. In this climate, the quality of K-12
education and the performance of its students have declined by every
metric. Due to cuts to classes in Community Colleges, over 50,000
California youth have been turned away from the doors of higher
education. California State University will reduce its enrollment by
40,000 students system wide for 2010-2011. We stand in solidarity with
students across the state because the same things are happening to us.
At the University of California, the administration will raise student
fees to an unprecedented $10,300, a 32 percent increase in one year.
Graduate students and lecturers return from summer vacation to find
that their jobs have been cut; faculty and staff are forced to take
furloughs. Entire departments are being gutted. Classes for
undergraduates and graduates are harder to get into while students pay
more. The university is being run like a corporation.

Let’s be frank: the promise of a financially secure life at the end of
a university education is fast becoming an illusion. The jobs we are
working toward will be no better than the jobs we already have to pay
our way through school. Close to three-quarters of students work, many
full-time. Even with these jobs, student loan volume rose 800 percent
from 1977 to 2003. There is a direct connection between these
deteriorating conditions and those impacting workers and families
throughout California. Two million people are now unemployed across
the state. 1.5 million more are underemployed out of a workforce of
twenty million. As formerly secure, middle-class workers lose their
homes to foreclosure, Depression-era shantytowns are cropping up
across the state. The crisis is severe and widespread, yet the
proposed solutions – the governor and state assembly organizing a bake
sale to close the budget gap – are completely absurd.

We must face the fact that the time for pointless negotiations is
over. Appeals to the UC administration and Sacramento are futile;
instead, we appeal to each other, to the people with whom we are
struggling, and not to those whom we struggle against. A single day of
action at the university is not enough because we cannot afford to
return to business as usual. We seek to form a unified movement with
the people of California. Time and again, factional demands are turned
against us by our leaders and used to divide social workers against
teachers, nurses against students, librarians against park rangers, in
a competition for resources they tell us are increasingly scarce. This
crisis is general, and the revolt must be generalized. Escalation is
absolutely necessary. We have no other option.

Occupation is a tactic for escalating struggles, a tactic recently
used at the Chicago Windows and Doors factory and at the New School in
New York City. It can happen throughout California too. As
undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff, we call on
everyone at the UC to support this occupation by continuing the
walkouts and strikes into tomorrow, the next day, and for the
indefinite future. We call on the people of California to occupy and
escalate.

http://occupyca.wordpress.com

[Nathan (Animas SDS)]

(a summary commissioned by the antioch rebel newspaper from a
participant in the ucsc actions)

On Sept. 24, thousands of students, faculty, and staff walked out of
University of California campuses across the state. The walk-outs and
one-day strike were called by a wide coalition of UC unions and
activist groups as a largely symbolic protest against the budget cuts,
fee hikes and firings associated with the state budget crisis. At two
campuses, however, in Santa Cruz and Berkeley, some people then walked
back in and began to initiate occupations. Administrators and
activists alike were stunned that the logic of symbolic protest had
been abandoned for concrete, insurrectionary activity. Occupation, a
tactic which is mostly unfamiliar in the U.S., is widely generalized
in many social struggles throughout the world, and points towards new
dimensions of struggle and autonomous organization that are likely to
prove particularly vital as the economic crisis continues and deepens.

WHAT IS AN OCCUPATION?

An occupation is a break in capitalist reality that occurs when people
directly take control of a space, suspending its normal functions and
animating it as a site of struggle and a weapon for autonomous power.

Occupations are a common part of student struggles in France, where
for example in 2006 a massive youth movement against the CPE (a new
law that would allow employers to fire first-time workers who had been
employed for up to 2 years without cause) occupied high schools and
universities and blockaded transit routes. In 1999, the National
Autonomous University of Mexico City was occupied for close to a year
to prevent tuition from being charged. Both of these struggles were
successful. In Greece and Chile, long and determined student struggles
have turned campuses into cop-free zones, which has in turn led to
their use as vital organizing spaces for social movement involving
other groups like undocumented migrants and indigenous people.

Occupations have not been seen much in the U.S. since the 1970s until
2008 when workers at the Republic Windows and Doors Factory in Chicago
occupied the building and won back pay from the bank that foreclosed
the factory. In following months, university students in New York City
staged several occupations in resistance to the corporatization of
their schools. It was this activity which inspired the students in
Santa Cruz and Berkeley.

WHAT IS THE CRISIS?

Students at UCs and CSUs are facing a 32% fee hike which their
governing bodies will ratify on November 17. 50,000 students were
turned away from community colleges this year, and as many will be
turned away from CSUs starting next year. The hikes, cuts and firings
affecting public education (among other services) throughout this
state (among other places) are described as austerity measures in
response to the global economic crisis. Like the recession, those in
power who are making these decisions would like us to believe they are
temporary.

But it seems some of us have learned a little too well. It turns out
that global capital has been in decline for about 30 years, and has
only been kept aloft by various financial bubbles – the S&L bubble in
the 80s, the dot-com bubble in the 90s and more recently the housing
market bubble which burst in 2008. This has led to the mass
foreclosures throughout California as well as food riots throughout
many of the poorer countries in the world.

We are going to school to avoid having to engage in menial labor for
the rest of our lives, but this long collapse means the jobs simply
won’t be there. Most of us are working shit jobs already, sometimes
alongside people with degrees. In the meantime, student loan volume
has skyrocketed 800 percent since the early 80s. College is now just a
place where we’ll get ripped off one last time on our way to be dumped
out of the system as debt-laden, unemployed nobodies. Out of a
workforce of 20 million in California, 2 million are now unemployed
and 1.5 million underemployed. Each year, it seems, capitalism needs
fewer and fewer of us as workers (except for cops to keep the rest of
us in line). We could well be heading into another Great Depression
where we will have to band together to squat, loot and organize our
own communities just to survive.

Crises are often times when reactionary forces take hold, capitalizing
on people’s anxiety and desires to get back to “the way things were”.
This will very likely not be possible this time. This is why activist
approaches geared towards returning things to normal and negotiating
with the state miss the point entirely. We have a chance, if we use it
wisely, to steer this crisis away from the reactionary option and
towards a decisive break with the nightmare reign of economic value
which renders us nothing but its disposable appendages.

WHAT IS HAPPENING ON CALIFORNIA CAMPUSES?

The occupation of UC Berkeley on Sept 24 failed due to the
intervention of reformist student activists, but the occupation of the
Grad Student Commons at UCSC went off successfully. Seizing control of
this building on the campus’s central plaza, occupiers hung banners
that urged “TAKE OVER CAMPUS, TAKE OVER THE CITY, END CAPITAL!” and
read a statement entitled “Occupy California”. This explained that the
occupation was a tactic to directly open space for the development of
student and worker power, not a ploy to bargain with administrators.
The discourse of the activist is dead for us. We know there is no
funding and these assholes couldn’t help us even if they did see us as
anything besides numbers.

Over the next 6 days, the space was used to host meetings about how to
broaden and escalate the struggle, as well as to throw several raging
dance parties in the plaza. There was also an attempt to raid the
campus bookstore en masse which was thwarted by cops. Eventually the
occupation was dissolved as the deadline of a threatened police action
approached, so that the momentum could be kept up and transferred to
new projects rather than everyone getting arrested for no reason. The
GSC was a bold step forward in an experimental process. One thing we
learned was that at this stage, authorities are very reluctant to
create confrontations: they know they look bad enough already. A
tremendous amount of enthusiasm was focalized through the space, but
unfortunately, the occupiers of the GSC had not planned to be able to
hold the building for so long and had to scramble to assemble plans to
spread radical activity. We learned that people will come out of the
woodwork if they are excited about what’s going on, but also that the
occupation has to grow and ramify or it’s nothing.

In the weeks since then, a number of sit-ins and soft (not barricaded)
occupations of space have occurred at UC Berkeley, CSU Fullerton, and
CSU Fresno. Another building at UCSC, this time including the office
of a dean who cut many programs and fired a bunch of people, was
occupied briefly. Participants in the UCSC occupations traveled to
several campuses in southern California recently and a UC-wide general
assembly was held in Berkely. Many folks have been inspired by the
actions taken in Santa Cruz and there is a lot of talking and planning
going on right now.

Some of the main obstacles the emerging student movement is facing are
how to connect with non-student workers on campus, with people at
other kinds of schools and with society as a whole. Another big issue
is how to avoid being recuperated and co-opted by administrators and
activists. One of the sit-ins, at a library at UC Berkeley, was seized
on by the administration as an excuse to privatize library hours while
showing how they are really listening to the students. At the second
UCSC occupation, a Marxist professor convinced many people to
dismantle barricades and go home early. It’s hoped by some that the
insurrectionary approach will have the virture of deepening, not
neutralizing the contradictions we are currently experiencing.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Unions and student groups have announced they are planning to shut
down the UC Regents meeting at UCLA on November 18th to prevent the
fee hike from being voted in. With the CSU Board of Trustees meeting
in Long Beach on the same day, actions are being organized at public
campuses around the state. While geared to this temporality, the calls
to action are not being framed around any deluded hopes for a return
to a normalcy that was never good enough to begin with, and is
certainly not coming back anyway.

We are under no illusions that we are ‘leading’ a struggle, only that
we are situated uniquely to confront the crisis as youth recognizing
that we simply have no future in capitalism. We can only begin where
we are. If we begin, it opens space for other people (like non-student
staff) to also begin taking charge of their own lives. If we act in
concert, we can collectively dissolve the academy along with the
alienating and exploitative society that it serves.

As it states in the “Occupy California” communique, “This crisis is
general and the revolt must be generalized… We call on the people of
California to occupy and escalate.” This means schools, workplaces,
foreclosed homes, BART stations. This means we will break with
capitalist time to inaugurate OUR time. We have begun.

http://occupyca.wordpress.com
http://wewanteverything.wordpress.com
http://likelostchildren.blogspot.com

http://myspace.com/925arrow

————————————————————————————

Four Theses on The Invisible University

A radical critique of the university and student activism from the
Regents of the Invisible University. Dedicated to our comrades at the
University of California

Thesis 0.1: The University is a Machine in the Network of Capitalism &
Empire.

Does anyone still pretend that earning a degree is anything other than
job training? Can professors still hide that their knowledge is
commodified? Is it not clear that the university is the lap-dog of the
state?

Thesis 0.2: There is No Crisis. It is all Business as Usual.

We cry for the loss of a dream that never was. The university was
never ours. After shaking off the unessential it will rise from the
grave merely mutated and continue to serve its master.

Thesis 0.3: The University Cannot be Saved.

Stop occupying dead space. Our demands merely echo through the empty
corridors. There is nothing here for us to take-back or transform,
except their administration of an infertile garden.

Thesis 0.4: Defect to the Invisible University!

Abandon the university! Join the university! We are building a new
community in the shell of the old: an universitas magistrorum et
scholarium, a community of teachers and scholars.

The pretty PDFs can be downloaded from http://zinelibrary.info/four-theses-invisible-university

————————————————————————————

Beyond Zombie Politics

Because we care about justice, democracy, and sustainability we
shouldn’t “save” the UC

“…being president of the University of California is like being
manager of a cemetery: there are many people under you, but no one is
listening. I listen to them.”

Much has been made of UC president Mark Yudof’s revealing analogy
between the university and a graveyard. Yudof recognizes that the
university must be radically restructured. Higher education’s
traditional position within the political economy has become untenable
as fiscal constraints mount and competing needs grow. The university’s
constituents, as Yudof notes, deny this reality, therefore he compares
them to a city of the dead. They are not listening to compelling
realities.

A broad coalition of faculty, students, staff, administrators, and
alumni has rejected Yudof’s position on the state’s budget crisis,
which they have deemed disingenuous, arrogant, and disrespectful among
other things. Perhaps his statements and actions as of late are all of
these and more.

Even so, Yudof’s pithy commentary was far more realistic than anything
the self-described defenders of public education have offered so far.
It is worse than unfortunate that virtually no one has taken his
cemetery metaphor seriously. It is self-delusional and self-defeating.

If we hope to build a democratic, accessible, education and research
system, whatever it may look like, the so-called defenders of the
university will have to deal much more honestly with the reality of
Yudof’s cemetery metaphor, in ways that Yudof isn’t even prepared to
face yet. (We say “build” rather than “save” or “defend,” because we
believe that the first order of business in any discussion about the
future of higher education in California must be to recognize that as
it stands the system is amazingly unjust and inaccessible.)

Acknowledging the truth; in its current form and function, and in the
historical sources of its fantastical growth, it is not possible to
save the UC or defend its major contours. It is a dying institution.
We must accept this and recognize it as a reason to forward our own
radical visions of reconstructed institutions of educational and
knowledge production in relation to wider crises confronting us.

So far, however, the underlying basis of opposition to UCOP’s
acceptance of specific austerity measures (formulated in cooperation
with UC board of Regents, the governor, and many of the state’s
corporatist leaders) seems to be based on the notion that there is
nothing fundamentally insolvent about the status quo. Rather, UC
activists claim that the university (and the state in more general
terms) is experiencing a crisis born out of chronic “mismanagement”
combined with a temporary economic downturn. As one catchy but
incorrect slogan circulated around UC Santa Cruz put it, “THEY make
the crisis.”

“THEY” do not make the crisis. Many of us incorrectly ascribe more
power and vision to the elite than they actually possess, pretending
that they hatch shock and awe treatments upon us after careful
planning from their boardrooms and country clubs. In doing so we
simplify and temporally delimit the nature of our society’s crisis. We
put blame on “them,” the Gerald Parskys, Richard Blums, Mark Yudofs,
and Arnold Shwarzeneggers of our time and flee from our own
responsibilities and powers. There is no singular crisis, and the
crises we face have no single instigators. We should cease to confuse
the aggressive and opportunistic plans of the elite with the
underlying troubles facing the economy, our political system and
environment.

The most sophisticated analyses blaming “THEM” are quite compelling
and point to the state’s dysfunctional tax formula, the budgeting
process, and opportunity costs (like the prison boom of the last
twenty years), combined with the global economic downturn that has hit
California particularly hard, combined again with years of cronyism
and scandal at UCOP, creating deep mistrust from the legislature which
has cut funds in response. All of this conspires against the
university community, according to those who would “save” the UC.
Programmatic cuts, salary furloughs, increasing privatization of the
budget and research operations, student fee hikes, and other proposals
are vehemently opposed under the assumption that this is part of a
coherent strategy by the state’s elite to bring about a neoliberal
revolution within the state’s educational system. It may very well
play out like this here and now, but there’s something deeper at work
here.

Slogans such as “save the UC,” “democratize the UC,” and “defend
public education,” have proliferated as a result of this analysis.
Unfortunately, this kind of politics is bound toward defeat, if not
now than certainly over the long-term, that is to say in over the next
couple of generations, which is the scale of time we should be
thinking in terms of if we are really speaking about collective
politics instead of self-interests. Opposition to the president, the
Regents, et al. has so far been, modifying Yudof’s quip, a politics
developed by the living dead, by zombies.

Whereas Yudof the cemetery keeper sees the UC’s defenders as immobile
corpses, a more accurate appraisal is that they are zombies, in denial
of their own condition, unwilling to submit to reality, and therefore
incapable of finding a new way to live, but still wandering in a daze,
clinging to their former lives, comforts, identities.

Defenders of the university are promoting zombie politics because they
refuse to recognize the root causes and depths of California’s fiscal
crisis. There will be no “economic recovery” over the long-haul. Even
if there could be we are confronted with the ethical question of
whether we should even hope for an “economic recovery” given what this
would mean for the continued expansion of global capitalism and US
empire, the exploitation of the working class and reinvigorated
exploitation of the environment. The dual disasters of an unfolding
global ecological and social crisis that is unraveling the material
and political grounds upon which the university (and all other
dominant institutions in California’s peak capitalist system) depends
calls into question the possibility of a future for a system that is
organized around killing the human and natural base upon which it
grows. Zombie politics also refuses to recognize the moral question of
the UC’s legacy to the world. UC is not a beneficent institution
engendering of life and democracy. UC is in fact a key contributor to
the existential crises we face.

The UC’s budgetary problems are a microcosm of wider economic and
ecological difficulties facing virtually all large-scale organizations
during this time of deepening crisis for global capitalism generally
and California’s preeminent status within American empire
specifically. To expect that the UC can be returned to an idyllic era
of major state financial support, low fees, high salaries, new
campuses, bigger and better labs, and an ever expanding roster of
PhDs, increasing and diverse student enrollments, etc., is to expect
that an unsustainable institution that has been built by a wildly
unsustainable economy, that has depended significantly on US imperial
ambitions, can somehow be made permanent in all its most self-deluded
grandeur.

The zombie analysis fails to recognize the following facts:

The global economic crisis is not a “recession.” It is not part of the
“business cycle,” nor a Kondratiev wave. Rather, it is the first
iteration of what will be a deepening decline of a world capitalist
economy based on hydrocarbon energy which is no longer available in
recoverable quantities capable of sustaining previous levels of
growth. Economic shrinkage is already happening in no small part
because of this post-“peak” moment for oil, gas and coal. No society
is more dependent upon these carbon fuels than California, the
suburban model par excellence, built up upon its own now extinguished
petroleum deposits, its Central Valley a petrochemically powered
agricultural plantation, its major cities absurdly impossible without
automobiles, its industry irrevocably dependent on what was once
thought to be inexhaustible and benign. The likelihood that a
“technological breakthrough” will allow Californians to produce even a
fraction of the energy we now consume within the same frame of time in
which we are exhausting recoverable oil, gas, and coal deposits is at
best hopeful thinking. At worst it is an example of exactly the kind
of bizarre ideological faith in technological progress that the UC has
a been a hotbed of spreading for over a century.

Simultaneous to this immanent exhaustion of our society’s energy
supply (on which all economic activity and therefore wealth and state
funds depend) is the concomitant destruction of ecosystems and the
disruption of previously stable and slow changing patterns in climate
and biological processes. This is the ecological angle of the crisis,
and it is already bringing about the catastrophic loss of biodiversity
and the collapse of the planet’s capacity to reproduce the “nature”
upon which “civilization” lives. Rather than representing solutions to
the ecological crisis, the quest to transcend hydrocarbon energies
with “green” technologies (solar cells, wind farms, tidal generators)
or a “sustainable” capitalist political economy (cap and trade carbon
markets) represents a deepening of the crisis. Our society’s fixation
on technological fixes reveals our refusal to change our behaviors, to
honestly address our own greed, and question our material affluence.
Rather than approaching the crisis as a political issue —how we
concretely relate to the world’s masses of poor and exploited— and as
a question of values, we flee into the fantasy that somehow our lives,
in their gross material incarnation, can continue on, more or less
unchanged. We fight for an extension of consumerism and disposability
as the status quo.

The specific effects of the global ecological crisis and how it will
impact California in a direct sense are difficult to predict. Things
we can be sure of, however, include the drastic decline of
precipitation in the American West, leading to the collapse of water
supplies upon which California’s urban and agricultural regions are
entirely dependent. The disappearance of water means the decline of
California’s agricultural economy which will have a rippling effect
across industrial sectors. It will also mean the shrinkage of major
urban areas such as Los Angeles or San Jose. Industry, as the major
consumer of water in urban areas, will wither. Climactic shifts in the
average temperatures in an upward direction are already leading to
mass deforestation across Western North America. Droughts, fires, wind
erosion, invasive species, and other factors are already destroying
ecosystems in California and the wider hinterlands it exploits.

Beyond California and the national borders ecological problems are
even worse; extractive industries (with their headquarters often in
the USA) operate even more intensively in the global south. Given that
California’s dramatic rise as an unrivaled core region of global
capitalism has been critically dependent on the state’s ability, via
US foreign policies, to profit from the expansion of US empire, in
both its war making and “productive” economic forms (e.g. Iraq,
maquiladoras), and given the unsustainable nature of these state-led
and corporate-led adventures, just in environmental terms, how can the
continued expansion or even maintenance of California’s hyper-wealth,
upon which the current university system depends be expected to
continue?

The continued existence of institutions like the UC must be deeply
questioned. We live in an era of unraveling American empire. The
predominance of this nation in economic terms is disappearing due to
imperial over-reach, as well as the rise of new centers of capitalist
accumulation. Given California’s starring role in the late 19th
century and mid-20th century expansion of US empire, and the benefits
the state reaped from this, how can it be expected that the
relationship of domination which has made limitless growth of the
state possible continue into the future? Why defend this status quo,
even if in an indirect sense?

Of utmost importance for those who would “defend” or “save” the UC is
the question of the university’s instigating and facilitating role in
US empire. The UC has been a scientific, technological, and political
instrument for the creation of everything from weapons used to enforce
US dominance, to technologies enabling the vast enclosures and
exploitations of peripheral regions. For example, one of the UC’s
greatest institutional achievements has been the creation and
expansion of the state’s unique agricultural economy of industrially
organized neo-plantations, highly mechanized, but also dependent on
the exploitation of racialized immigrant labor, utilizing enormous
petrochemical inputs and demanding gigantic engineered water projects
and a global system of distribution which has undermined more
localized crop farming.

Exporting this model of agriculture, first to the US South, and then
to the global south was pursued in earnest by both “natural resource”
scientists as well as economists working within the halls of UC. This
system of agriculture is an indisputable cause of the ecological
crisis, to say nothing of the social trauma it has inflicted
continuously on the rural economies it penetrates, reorganizes,
poisons and despoils. Furthermore, imposition of this system on
peripheral regions has been a major cause of social and political
instability in regions from Chile to India. Now in a logical extension
of this disastrous combination of science and industry the UC finds
itself at the cutting edge of newer, more dangerous forms of
enclosures of nature for capitalistic exploitation – genetic
engineering, biotechnology, biofuels, etc. Does it makes sense to
speak of “defending” an institution that takes on these expressly
capitalistic and predatory research agendas aimed at enclosing life
itself?

The UC and California’s contribution to war making is another concrete
example. As the site of the largest armaments industry on the planet,
California companies build missiles, war planes, tanks, UAVs, and
almost every conceivable weapon, and some that, because of state
secrecy, are unconceivable. As the state’s leading research
institution, UC’s intellectual workforce has provided billions of
dollars in contracted research services for the production of advanced
weaponry since World War II. Contrary to common opinion this is not a
sideline aspect of the university. It is not an unfortunate tangent
that so many “defenders” of the UC characterize it as.

It is one of the university’s core functions to manage nuclear weapons
laboratories, design high explosives, study aerodynamics of rockets
and jet craft, fine tune the logistics of war fighting, conduct
applied research on biometrics, targeting systems, autonomous killing
machines and whatever else it takes to serve the state’s military
industrial complex. That an uncanny number of UC Regents, especially
the chairmen, vice chairs, and key committee heads have so often been
the CEOs of companies like Lockheed Martin, URS, or Homestake Mining
is profoundly significant and cannot be shrugged off.

The point of this random description of the economic and ecological
crisis and its roots in the political-economy of California, and the
UC’s central role in as an instigator of all of this, is that not only
should we reckon with the UC’s many, many undesirable aspects, but we
must recognize it as its own gravedigger. The UC has actively aided
and at times even instigated in bringing about social, economic, and
ecological transformations that far from improving life for the
majority, have actually made life more difficult and uncertain. The
unsustainable-ness of the UC isn’t an unfortunate and correctable set
of shortcomings, no, it is the UC’s single most important contribution
to the world. Capital and empire have so over-exploited and destroyed
the world’s resources and peoples that we have reached a crisis moment
in which we either will make a rapid transition away from capitalism
and the nation state, or else we will be nothing better than zombies.
From its very inception on a gentle hill overlooking the Golden
State’s Chrysopylae, the UC has grown in violent expansionary tandem
with its corporate and military corollaries.

Ah, but it’s not this simple….

If this is all true, why would anyone call for “saving” or “defending”
the UC. The answers are quite obvious; parallel to or in the process
of serving capital, the state, and the military in their quest for
empire and limitless growth, the UC has, especially since the 1960s,
been a site of genuine progress and creative, democratic innovations
in science, technology, arts, humanities, and the social sciences. No
one can deny the importance of the educational benefits accrued by
attending UC or its equivalent. As so many say, it really does help
millions become more democratically attuned citizens. It does have a
positive impact on our lives. Some of the technologies it brings into
being are arguably “progressive.” There are reasons why so many fought
to open up the university and make it accountable to a broader range
of publics.

But to recognize this requires that we also acknowledge how the UC
became a more socially beneficial institution. Social movements fought
for access, affordability, and justice in higher education. Movements
to “open up” the intellectual possibilities of science, technology,
and the humanities were partially successful over the past fifty
years. A wider public was able to be involved, and what they would be
involved in wouldn’t just boil down to knowledge production and
education for corporations and the military, but to new constituencies
however they were defined.

From the black freedom movement to feminism and ecology, movements
pried open universities across the United States and transformed them
at the same time. However, the UC that was forged in this struggle was
not a sustainable formation. What happened in the post-World War II
era was that elites involved in managing the UC recognized that the
institution faced a crisis of legitimacy if it continued to
marginalize and exclude nonwhites, women, the working class, and a
broader constituency of knowledge-industry patrons than Kerr’s limited
multiversity allowed for. In order to stabilize the educational
system, and to ensure the continued operation of the UC’s core efforts
in creating the technologies of empire and enclosure, elites
essentially capitulated to the most immediate demands of social
movements. They rapidly expanded the university system, allowed for
the creation of new departments, new centers, and the stretching of
university functions so much so that the university became internally
contradictory. Marxists, feminists, and antiracists began openly
teaching theories of anticapitalism, liberation, and decolonization in
many departments. Whole centers sprung up for the development of labor
scholarship or the exploration of ethnic identity.

This solution, as hard as our foremothers and forefathers fought for
it, and as much positive change it engendered, was in the end only
possible because of American hegemony and especially California’s
amazing economic growth and fiscal wealth. Elites were able to cave
into demands for justice because the pie was growing. Now that the
project of American empire has stalled out, and given the increasing
intensity of both economic and ecological crises that will not allow
for continued urban growth, capitalist accumulation, and intensified
exploitation of labor and the environment on a global level, this
solution has become impossible. Thus, “defending” or “saving” the UC
is outside of the bounds of reality. It is a zombie politics because
it is a position that defends a system that has significantly already
killed itself, and may very well kill us all with it.

The political and economic conditions of an ever-enlarging pie are
long gone. Certainly a new tax code could do much to alleviate the
immediate fee increases and furloughs facing students and faculty, and
prevent privatization. Over the long run, however, the contours of the
UC as a multi-billion dollar university system plus two multi-billion
dollar nuclear weapons labs, is impossible. The form of higher
education and research we have is the logical form of a university in
an expanding capitalist imperial state. If capitalism and the imperial
project are truly hitting political and ecological limits, how can we
sustain this university form?

But more to the point, if the university is so heavily inculcated in
capitalism and empire, why defend it at all? Is it not our
responsibility to take it on as a site of struggle? What does the
eager “defense” of the university’s status quo say about the vision,
honesty, and goals of those so conspicuously opposing Yudof and his
ilk? What does it say about our own comforts and privileges? Why are
we so invested in the status quo that we cannot muster compelling
alternative visions of higher education and research, counterpoised to
that of the Regents, ones that would face the reality of various
crises, while also forging ahead with our common democratic values?

It needs to be recognized that Yudof, the Regents, and the
constituencies they represent are also deeply in denial. While they
recognize a systemic crisis and seek radical changes in university
budgeting and structure (giving them an advantage over the
“defenders”), the crisis they recognize is not the fundamental one we
face. Their attention is fixated on immediate problems. They hold
faith in the economic system they stand at the pinnacle of. They
believe in technological solutions to the disappearance of carbon-
based energy. They hold faith that the ecological crisis is not a
severe as many scientists now say it is, but also that its effects
will be “manageable.” This too is a dead politics of reforming our
totally unsustainable system toward planetary collapse.

What then are the solutions? We offer none. We only offer our
disturbing recognition of these problems, and hope that if others face
reality we will collectively find a way to step back from the brink,
while expanding on those just and sustainable parts of the University
of California that were fought for and achieved over many hard years.

——————————————————————————

Will Occupation Become a Movement?

From The Chronicle of Higher Education

With a 150-person sit-in at Berkeley and members of the two UCSC
occupations beginning a southern tour of talks at several campuses
near Los Angeles this week, the movement appears to be gathering
steam. In the next 24 hours, occupiers will explain their strategy for
movement building — “demand nothing, occupy everything” at UCLA,
Irvine, and Cal State Fullerton.

The administration appears to be helping to set the stage for
escalation by, according to witnesses and victim testimony on the
movement blog, macing students without warning and heavy-handed
efforts at police infiltration and espionage.

I interviewed a graduate student with knowledge of the events
surrounding the second occupation at UC Santa Cruz last Thursday and
Friday:

Q. I understand the group occupied a particular administrator’s
office. Can you tell me how that decision came about?

The administrator in question is the Dean of Social Sciences, Sheldon
Kamieniecki. The social sciences have been particularly threatened by
the “necessary” budget cuts and restructurings, with proposed layoffs
that would destroy both the Community Studies and Latin American and
Latino Studies programs. Among those who planned this action, the
sense was that Dean Kamieniecki did not pursue alternatives,
particularly in terms of keeping the jobs of lecturers vital to these
programs, and accepted the cuts passed down in spite of massive
student discontent. The decisions of the group are both political and
tactical, if the two can be separated. As such, the space was chosen
both because of Kamieniecki’s office and because its central location
and physical layout made it possible to take the building and to bring
a large number of students there to participate following an earlier
potluck and discussion.

Q. Shortly after the occupation began, there was an incident with the
campus police. What happened?

Three students, not involved in the occupation itself, were moving a
picnic table in front of the building and were pepper-sprayed at very
close range by the police. They were not told to cease and desist,
they were not warned that they were about to be sprayed (for doing
something that was not in any way physically threatening to an officer
or any students in the area), and the one who was arrested was not
read his Miranda rights. (He was later told that, “any pain you feel,
you deserve.”) This violent response to the action is clearly
unacceptable.

Q. Have any charges been filed?

Yes, the student who was arrested was charged with misdemeanor
obstruction of justice. We expect that the university will try to
pursue “disciplinary measures” of their own. We urge them strongly not
to do so and to consider once more the gulf between how they valorize
a radical past of protest and dissent and how they respond to students
pursuing radical actions in the present. It is all too evident that
the elevation of past protests as part of a storied history serves
equally to denigrate the real attempts now to fight back as misguided
anger and to claim and hold spaces as petty vandalism.

Q. Overall, the police response was different this time — is that
correct? They were photographing persons gathered outside in support
of the occupiers? Do you think this is a change of tactics by the
administration?

Yes, that is correct. They were photographing and taking the
information of persons gathered in support, not to mention the earlier
brutality of outside supporters. The tactics are not necessarily
different, but the severity of the response certainly is. It shows
that the administration is worried about such events and about the
possibility of a far wider radical movement emerging, one that
incorporates greater numbers and a broader range of students, workers,
and faculty. For this reason, they appear intent on making an example
out of those who participate in these actions and on attempting to
divide students by falsely portraying the actions.

Q. What motivated the end to the occupation?

The mistreatment and threat, physical and legal, to supporters outside
motivated the end of the occupation. Those involved felt that it was
not safe to those there in solidarity in this situation. To be clear,
this is not how we wanted this action to go. But we remain committed
to not putting students and supporters in harm’s way, a commitment the
administration seems entirely to lack. We know that the situation has
escalated, and we can only expect that their future responses will be
escalated as well. We are not interested in human barricades and
refuse to put bystanders and supporters at risk of violence. We are
interested in seeing these spaces not simply as calculations of
property that has to be protected at all costs, and we will claim them
accordingly. Not small numbers of us who ask for the solidarity of
others or who assume that we “represent” other students. Massive
numbers of us who wish to express discontent in any way that we find
productive and necessary. Occupation is one such way, but far from the
only one.

Q. What should we look for next — at UCSC and across the state?

Look for the real and rapid expansion of protest across the state, as
networks of committed activists merge with those who have not felt
actively involved previously. Look for the broadening and innovation
of tactics as we respond to the changing conditions and political
climate. We should all look forward to, and prepare ourselves for, a
far longer struggle, a struggle for which these actions, regardless of
what one thinks of them, do not serve as inspirations but rather as
concrete expressions of what is felt by countless others across the
system and world.

On Sep 27, 10:54 am, "Nathan (Animas SDS)" <nj...@fortlewis.edu>
wrote:

[Nathan (Animas SDS)]

California: Days of Action Against the Tuition Strikes

University students and workers in California must organize
immediately to occupy, blockade and strike on all campuses November
17-19.

We call for a wave of occupations and blockades to bring the
university to a halt. The proposed fee hikes of 32 percent, to be
ratified November 17-19, are only the latest indication that the
California university system is bankrupt. We cannot allow it to
continue through the end of the term.

Too many workers have already lost their jobs. The jobs for which our
educations supposedly prepare us have already disappeared. We have
given our ‘representatives’ enough time to work out peaceful solutions
to these problems, and we see no indication that they have made any
progress. We are not interested in any more tedious conferences or
assemblies, which draw out hundreds of people, but only for an endless
conversation. We are not interested in more ’symbolic protests’,
whether walkouts or strikes, insofar as they are pre-announced to end
after one or a few days. More meetings and protests will only waste
our energies, while the administration continues to implement its
plans without hindrance.

A movement of occupations has been building. Multiple occupations
broke out in recent weeks at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley, at CSU
Fullerton and CSU Fresno. These occupations are part of a worldwide
movement, stretching from California to New York, from England to
Greece and Austria.

These occupations have proven that we can take action immediately.
People are convinced to act not through endless talk, but when they
see that others are willing to take risks. It is only when those who
have little to lose actually do something that those who have a lot to
lose can join them.

These occupations have proven that we can take action without fear.
The administration has been so brazen, raising tuition and cutting
jobs, only because we let them. In fact, they are the ones who have to
fear confrontation, not us. They have done and can do nothing to stop
us, but only if we act. These days of action are a chance for us to
expand our movement, for new people to get involved, for new spaces to
be taken and transformed.

http://theimaginarycommittee.wordpress.com/

Days of Action Against UC/CSU Tuition Hikes: A Call and a How-to-
Occupy Guide

From The Imaginary Committee
http://theimaginarycommittee.wordpress.com/

University students and workers in California must organize
immediately to occupy, blockade and strike on all campuses November
17-19.

We call for a wave of occupations and blockades to bring the
university to a halt. The proposed fee hikes of 32 percent, to be
ratified November 17-19, are only the latest indication that the
California university system is bankrupt. We cannot allow it to
continue through the end of the term.

Too many workers have already lost their jobs. The jobs for which our
educations supposedly prepare us have already disappeared. We have
given our ‘representatives’ enough time to work out peaceful solutions
to these problems, and we see no indication that they have made any
progress.

We are not interested in any more tedious conferences or assemblies,
which draw out hundreds of people, but only for an endless
conversation. We are not interested in more ’symbolic protests’,
whether walkouts or strikes, insofar as they are pre-announced to end
after one or a few days. More meetings and protests will only waste
our energies, while the administration continues to implement its
plans without hindrance.

A movement of occupations has been building. Multiple occupations
broke out in recent weeks at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley, at CSU
Fullerton and CSU Fresno. These occupations are part of a worldwide
movement, stretching from California to New York, from England to
Greece and Austria.

These occupations have proven that we can take action immediately.
People are convinced to act not through endless talk, but when they
see that others are willing to take risks. It is only when those who
have little to lose actually do something that those who have a lot to
lose can join them.

These occupations have proven that we can take action without fear.
The administration has been so brazen, raising tuition and cutting
jobs, only because we let them. In fact, they are the ones who have to
fear confrontation, not us. They have done and can do nothing to stop
us, but only if we act.

These days of action are a chance for us to expand our movement, for
new people to get involved, for new spaces to be taken and
transformed.

PLEASE GO TO The Imaginary Committee site and download 'OCCUPATION: A
DO-IT-YOURSELF GUIDE'

http://theimaginarycommittee.wordpress.com/

> http://occupyca.wordpress.comhttp://wewanteverything.wordpress.comhttp://likelostchildren.blogspot.com

>
> http://myspace.com/925arrow
>
> ————————————————————————————
>
> Four Theses on The Invisible University
>
> A radical critique of the university and student activism from the
> Regents of the Invisible University. Dedicated to our comrades at the
> University of California
>

> Thesis 0.1: The University is a Machine in the ...
>
> read more »