Over at Mute, my piece on the "occupation movement": finance, communisation, exceeding the categories of success and failure, experiments in opacity, and ghost-riding the whip as homegrown critique.
Showing posts with label financial crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label financial crisis. Show all posts
From the glass house to the empty car
Over at Mute, my piece on the "occupation movement": finance, communisation, exceeding the categories of success and failure, experiments in opacity, and ghost-riding the whip as homegrown critique.
A post-apocalyptic cinema is not a kind of film
My article for Mute on "catastrophe cinema in the age of crisis" is up online here. As they put it:
"Dusting off the tedium and ash deposited by Hollywood's recent spate of catastrophe movies, Evan Calder Williams takes aim at their world-affirming pessimism and calls for some real apocalypse..."
Indeed...
Mining the unobtainable
Avatar is possible the most staggering display of pure plenitude ever committed to the American screen. On what ground does it rest? Underground, a massive deposit of the unobtainable made manifest - the "Unobtanium" to be mined. Flowering above, total wet fecundity, illimitable hybrid biopower, interspecies interpenetration, an absence of agriculture or organized production, and trees that have developed an information network for which Google would happily displace many millions of animist, lithe, bare-assed tribes. (What is the wealth of the metal in the face of all that lush forest and "technologies of nature" to be explored?) Forget any issues about "war on terror," liberal guilt, noble savages, or the like. It's the full subsumption of politics to the prospect of an era of unbound plenty. If this is a cinema of the crisis years, it is so only it that blows away the very category and possibility of scarcity. A wish-fulfillment of profit and the profligate behind every corner, hanging from every luminescent vine. When each pixel digital fiber drips with such lush excess, what else is there to do but frolic and drool?
"awaking have found nothing in their hands" (from land-grab time to sand through the fingers)
Go read: this FT piece on the linguistic tendencies and frothings of financial crises.
Sir Isaac Newton, four centuries before, had remained a wallflower, seeing the South Sea Bubble for what it was. But he was persuaded to take the floor for the last waltz. “I can predict the motion of heavenly bodies,” he observed ruefully, “but not the madness of crowds.”
(Thanks to Gopal for this)
Pass the crystal ball
Amazing moment from Roy Anderson's Songs From the Second Floor. The Economic Faculty's council of experts passes around its non-functional crystal ball while their chairman can't find his long or short term future perspectives in his briefcase.
"It appears that we shall have to skip the strategies and concentrate on tactics instead."
"A chorus of voices and fists raised in support"
A key interview at the Socialist Worker that helps clarify and extend our positions.
"Our interest in occupation is to put certain radical tactics back on the map, to encourage others to occupy spaces everywhere and to innovate other tactics. At this moment, the beginning of what we believe to be the terminal crisis of capitalism, we need to salvage abandoned radical tactics and to forge new modes of struggle. We believe that occupation is a necessary means of escalation, but it is far from the only one."
A STAKE IN THE DEAD HEART
[Anon text from the occupation]
1. RED SHOOTS BLOOM
We have reached the terminal crisis of capitalism.It will not end this year or the next, in five years or ten or twenty, but its long overdue collapse has begun. Without doubt. Yet without doubt, it will neither end nor end well for any of us without our collective intervention. This crisis paves no automatic way forward, even as it points no way out.
We are in a downturn that does not turn up. We see it all around us, in the foreclosures of homes, the loss of jobs, the gutting of public education, and the contraction of common access to healthcare, housing, and a decent living wage. We have watched finance rise to obscene heights and crash down in speculative bubbles, working families lose their savings while the rich laughed all the way to the bank.
We see the effects of this world system’s slow death on the most local of scales: our houses, our towns, our factories and farms, and, in this case, our universities. With plans to raise tuition 30% in a single year, programs and services slashed, class sizes increased, faculty and workers laid off or forced to take furloughs, it becomes certain that something has permanently changed, a deep tidal shift too enormous to grasp outside of its local consequences, consequences that threaten the education and livelihood of an entire state.
But we must be clear: this is not the fault of bad administration. Indeed, they have made atrocious choices, lining their pockets smugly while preaching sacrifice to us all. They ask us to tighten our belts until we are choked off at the middle. They even dare to propose privatizing the university. And believe us, they will pay for this. But we have no interest in a regime change, in asking for kinder administrators to enact the same cuts and hikes that we reject today. They are merely figureheads in a system that dictates and rewards this kind of behavior. Their unacceptable actions are symptoms of a deeper sickness, one that exceeds their feeble attempts to try and wrest away what belongs commonly to us all.
For this sickness is global. Capitalism is dying, but it will not die. Its death is slow and ongoing; it still has the blush of health. This fall-out had been postponed by banks, governments, and corporations. Yet the general trendline of the past 30 years, the move away from manufacturing profits toward an increased reliance on financial speculation, could only ever delay the inevitable. And now, it has hastened that end. The emergency measures taken to shock the weakened, tremulous heart of capital have flat-lined it.
We won’t fully realize or feel this for a long while: its mechanisms and circuits still function on autopilot, ceaselessly trying to generate wealth, and its champions desperately insist that the green shoots of recovery are coming. But we stand here at the beginning of the end, faced with a wound that cannot close. In that space, in that deep cut, we see new possibilities, real hope forged out of the dejection and hopelessness of so many workers, students, and those blocked from being either.
Red shoots bloom in these dark days.
2. ORGANIZE, INNOVATE, AND ESCALATE
Why do we occupy? What is the connection between this tactic of the militant repossession of space and the historical moment we have inherited?Older strategies of political action and involvement have proven themselves entirely incapable of enacting change. We do not live in the ‘60s anymore, and we cannot return to them. Those were times of the deep plenitude of capital, its golden years of global profit and proliferation. And those were times in which mass protest appeared capable of effecting changes in the social, economic, and political structure of capitalism.
Those days are over: the very nature and events of those times have produced this very different situation. Capitalism bleeds out, desperate for horizons it cannot find. In these days of crisis and the urgency of our interventions, the older modes of protest and resistance most remembered and repeated are useless. We are expected to let a few protesters represent us, do a sanctioned march for a day, and then return home, knowing both that we “did all that we could” and that nothing will be different tomorrow.
We drive a stake through the dead heart of that past moment, the double death of global economic growth and global mass representational protest. We must truly kill those older modes in order to resurrect something fiercer, smarter, and capable of combating a world gone very wrong, a history gone off the rails.
Occupation is, therefore, a tactic resurrected, salvaged from an abandoned radical past and constructed anew for this moment.
We occupy to help break those older logics. We occupy to show that radical options are not just on the map again but are a way of redrawing the map, giving shape and form to the dissent and discontent that seethes around the world. We occupy to create an anti-capitalist and anti-privatized space, no matter how small or for how long, out of the institutional zones of capitalism. We occupy to produce sparks that draw awareness and attention to a situation that can no longer be tolerated. We occupy again and again, as long as it takes.
We occupy to show that it can be done, and that what must be done is both the occupation of more spaces around the globe and the creation of new tactics, innovative modes of resistance that we have yet to see. We cannot know where struggle goes from here. We cannot, and do not wish to, dictate its direction. Rather, we call on everyone to look coldly at the state of the world and to plan hotly how to reclaim what is ours and take what we have never been allowed.
We drive a stake to widen that wound of the present, to destroy the nostalgia that has held us back, and to insist that this situation will not go away.
We do not go back from here.
There is no movement now that is not forward. Organize, innovate, and escalate!
In solidarity,
WE ARE THE CRISIS
SC Local Support Letter
Dear, dear Movimiento Estudiantil de UCSC
Sorry it took us so long to simply state our support. And sorry about that time I heckled you when you were jogging on West Cliff. Um, yeah. We're stoked on the trouble you're making up there on the hill. We are also tired of writing letters and the "two minute limit" freedom of speech and the permit-required democracy. It hasn't gotten us anywhere. No more modest requests. Time to make demands. We want everything too. We want reparations for our time spent working. We want food, shelter, a little weed, and healthcare; no exceptions. We want adequate education for our children, and music lessons, and languages, and surfing, and preschool, and gardens, and enough time to play. We want education in all those useful things: how to grow food, how to fix things when they're broken. We want much more than this, but it's a good start. Of course, we don't have much faith that the city or the State or the state are going to supply us with these things. So, I guess we're gonna have to do it for ourselves. Dudes, rise up! We're gonna have to drag some of your energy down into town too. Occupy everything, like you said. City Hall? The Office of Education? And let's tear up Hwy 17 and let the forest grow back. Torch the Boardwalk. Squat Urban Apparel and use it as a homeless shelter. A garden where every parking lot once lay...
From now on, kooks and trannies, we are at your side. And you'll be by ours.
In solidarity,
SC Locals
Sorry it took us so long to simply state our support. And sorry about that time I heckled you when you were jogging on West Cliff. Um, yeah. We're stoked on the trouble you're making up there on the hill. We are also tired of writing letters and the "two minute limit" freedom of speech and the permit-required democracy. It hasn't gotten us anywhere. No more modest requests. Time to make demands. We want everything too. We want reparations for our time spent working. We want food, shelter, a little weed, and healthcare; no exceptions. We want adequate education for our children, and music lessons, and languages, and surfing, and preschool, and gardens, and enough time to play. We want education in all those useful things: how to grow food, how to fix things when they're broken. We want much more than this, but it's a good start. Of course, we don't have much faith that the city or the State or the state are going to supply us with these things. So, I guess we're gonna have to do it for ourselves. Dudes, rise up! We're gonna have to drag some of your energy down into town too. Occupy everything, like you said. City Hall? The Office of Education? And let's tear up Hwy 17 and let the forest grow back. Torch the Boardwalk. Squat Urban Apparel and use it as a homeless shelter. A garden where every parking lot once lay...
From now on, kooks and trannies, we are at your side. And you'll be by ours.
In solidarity,
SC Locals
Television Coverage
VIDEO HERE:
http://www.ksbw.com/video/21154167/
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. -- A group of graduate students at UC-Santa Cruz who are protesting budget cuts to higher education have barricaded themselves inside a student center.
Members of a group called Occupy California marched to the Graduate Student Commons and barricaded themselves inside after attending Thursday's campus rally against student fee hikes and faculty furloughs.
The protesters are calling the occupation the start of an "escalation" of activities designed to raise awareness about higher education cuts. Members said their hope is that other UC campuses follow suit.
"Older forms of protest have become unattainable and unworkable," said protester Evan Calder [apparently they don't hear names very well]. "We've moved past the point where we can write our Senator or ask them to make changes. Therefore, we're trying to show there are other ways to protest, other ways to interact and spread awareness."
University officials have raised concerns about the potential fire hazard and inconvenience to students who want to use the center. But, so far, they have declined to force the protesters out.
The group has hung banners in the student center that say "Raise Hell, Not Costs," but not all students are in support of the protest.
"I think they're idiots! I think they're looking for a fight," said graduate student Paul Soas. "They're trying to feel oppressed but they're not. I'm not down with budget cuts either at all … but I want my graduate lounge, and their music sucks too!"
The protesters said that the building is open for students, but furniture has been seen blocking the entrance path to the center.
"I would very much like my own space to study, because I come here for a quality education and quality space in which I can work and actually succeed in what I'm trying to do here," said student Sarah Macezo.
But protesters said the reason they are unwilling to move out is so students like Macezo can have a quality education.
"This isn't about making a statement," said Mike Raskin. "This is about rallying the student population."
http://www.ksbw.com/video/21154167/
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. -- A group of graduate students at UC-Santa Cruz who are protesting budget cuts to higher education have barricaded themselves inside a student center.
Members of a group called Occupy California marched to the Graduate Student Commons and barricaded themselves inside after attending Thursday's campus rally against student fee hikes and faculty furloughs.
The protesters are calling the occupation the start of an "escalation" of activities designed to raise awareness about higher education cuts. Members said their hope is that other UC campuses follow suit.
"Older forms of protest have become unattainable and unworkable," said protester Evan Calder [apparently they don't hear names very well]. "We've moved past the point where we can write our Senator or ask them to make changes. Therefore, we're trying to show there are other ways to protest, other ways to interact and spread awareness."
University officials have raised concerns about the potential fire hazard and inconvenience to students who want to use the center. But, so far, they have declined to force the protesters out.
The group has hung banners in the student center that say "Raise Hell, Not Costs," but not all students are in support of the protest.
"I think they're idiots! I think they're looking for a fight," said graduate student Paul Soas. "They're trying to feel oppressed but they're not. I'm not down with budget cuts either at all … but I want my graduate lounge, and their music sucks too!"
The protesters said that the building is open for students, but furniture has been seen blocking the entrance path to the center.
"I would very much like my own space to study, because I come here for a quality education and quality space in which I can work and actually succeed in what I'm trying to do here," said student Sarah Macezo.
But protesters said the reason they are unwilling to move out is so students like Macezo can have a quality education.
"This isn't about making a statement," said Mike Raskin. "This is about rallying the student population."
this is our emergency
More perspectives and writings on the occupation over at this is our emergency.
Further statements of solidarity
Columbia University Statement of Solidarity with UCSC Occupation and UC Walk-Outs
Students rise up, revolt, and reclaim their school. Together with workers and faculty, they walk out of class and don’t beg, don’t ask, but demand in unequivocal terms that the State give back their university. The call resonates on every campus. There are people in every classroom waiting to hear such a call, whenever and from wherever it may come. Today it was from California, soon it may emerge from others’ lips, with other words perhaps, but in similar spirits, with similar rage.
This is our hope. This is how, we believe, things should be. The university is ours, each campus, each building, by right belongs to those who work in them, who teach in them, and to us who study and live in them. Education is ours, by right. It is not to be doled out and denied according to legislators’ and administrators’ whims. It is not to be suspended at the rhythm of capitalism’s failure. Education is not, and should never be, a privilege.
But as you are showing, students refuse to be controlled. We refuse to be complacent consumers and victims of a “market” pitted perpetually against us. We refuse to have a line drawn before us- of gender, class, race, sexuality, or any other form of privilege, of unpayable tuition hikes, of asphyxiating budget cuts. Petitions, protests, walk outs, negotiations, and occupations are only the beginning of a fight that will, by whatever means necessary, be decided on the part of the students.
UC Santa Cruz and every school in the University of California system is your school. Each and every school, public or private, is our school. The workers’, the students’, and the faculty’s. Occupations are not theatrical stunts for media attention, or powerless angry outbursts by activists, or even simple and routine “protests.” They are fundamentally, radically, reminders to ourselves and to all students who are seeing their universities under attack: there is another way. Another university and another world are possible and necessary.
Occupations and protests, all student movements are the forceful eruption of a crisis. The crisis we feel daily. The crisis millions face at work, in class, on the streets, at the dinner table. The incompatibility of our needs and desires on one hand, and the present condition, imposed upon us from above, on the other, is catastrophic. And so we revolt.
The present occupation, and the wave of student protest that is arising is an answer to the question forced by this crisis, the question we have been asking ourselves for a while now: “WHOSE SCHOOL?” Thanks, UC Santa Cruz and all UC students in resistance, for giving us such a fucking good, loud answer.
From the east coast to the west in love and solidarity,
A Collection of Radical Students at Columbia University
Students for a Democratic Society, International Socialist Organization, Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, LUCHA Columbia, Students Against Imperialism, Columbia Coalition Against the War
New York City, September 25, 2009
Solidarity from Connecticut Students Against the War
Declaration of Student Solidarity
Students, Youth, Workers, People of Color, and all Oppressed Peoples are being forced to absorb the crisis of Wall Street. We are being attacked and Wall Street and Washington are trying to make us pay for their crisis. Their plan is to cut our public programs, attack our social support systems, attack our families with mass layoffs, and expand the war on workers and the poor. The conditions that Students and Youth are faced with are just the beginning of what we will experience as we enter the world as workers. In this common interest, Connecticut Students Against the War issues the following statement:
Students and Youth all over the world face tuition increases, firings of staff workers, adjunct, and non-tenured faculty, cuts to programs and classes, expansion of class sizes in college and the public school system, cuts in essential programs, a general decrease in opportunities for employment, the Economic Draft and growing military influence in Youth Programs and schools.
In Connecticut, our public schools are facing drastic cuts threatening the jobs of an estimated 1500 teachers and paraprofessionals, threats to unions contracts, the closure of several extracurricular programs, and the halt in school purchases of needed supplies. This threatens the jobs of these workers and the quality of each student’s education as class sizes grow, work hours increase, supplies drop, and as the crisis deepens.
At the same time that we receive no relief from our debts, while the government bails out the institutes who are responsible for the crisis, while it continues to fund illegal wars and occupations around the world. We have become victims of a crisis that we could not prevent and over which we have no control to reverse.
We as Connecticut Students Against the War declare opposition to tuition increases, staff reductions, forced work increases, abandonment of children and students, attacks on union contracts, cuts to academic programs and classes, and any present or future disciplinary measures by administrations against students struggling for justice.
We call for the canceling of all student debt, an expansion of the education system, an expansion of employment opportunities for youth and workers to include truly green jobs, an expansion of government aid to all who seek education, and a reduction of tuition costs to increase access and affordability to higher education. We call for students in the public education system and at the college level to unite with their communities to resist all cuts and to demand an end to the war on workers and the poor to make us pay for the crimes of high finance.
We declare support for and stand in solidarity with struggles against cuts in education and social support systems.
We declare our support and stand in solidarity with UC Students who are standing up against the regressive policies of the university and the state of California.
OFF THE SIDEWALK, INTO THE STREET!
[update from our New School comrades]
OFF THE SIDEWALK, INTO THE STREET!
The night was joyous revelry. The mass moved through the conduits of the city, undeterred by material and social barriers, spurred on by the barricades we've raised in our hearts. Barricades against boredom, exploitation and the false trappings of a decaying so-called affluence.
Roving and ranging through the streets of Manhattan, we disrupted the rote circulation of the city's walking dead. We occupied streets and ticked off taken avenues: 5th Avenue, check; 6th Avenue, check; 7th Avenue, that's OURS.
Onlookers gawked and gaped as though watching a spectacle, though perhaps unaware that this was in fact its absolute negation. Others spontaneously joined in: evening revelers in their Friday finest shouting OCCUPY EVERYTHING; proletarian youth on bikes chanting WHOSE STREETS, OUR STREETS; young student passers-by screaming FOREVER IS GONNA START TONIGHT.
We played cat-and-mouse with police. City traffic allied with crooked streets to give us a decisive advantage. We moved leaderless through time and space, pleasuring in every moment of movement. After all, this is a movement with no demands except FUCKING EVERYTHING. When the time came we dispersed spontaneously, few words spoken because all had been said that needed saying.
But this is not enough, it is never enough. Now is the time to make connections and push this crisis to its necessary conclusion. Solidarity with Santa Cruz means ATTACK.
So rise up Berkeley, rise up CUNY, rise up Stella Doro, rise up workers and students!
Take the streets. Occupy everything. Off the sidewalks, into the FUTURE.
- New School for Social Revolution
OFF THE SIDEWALK, INTO THE STREET!
The night was joyous revelry. The mass moved through the conduits of the city, undeterred by material and social barriers, spurred on by the barricades we've raised in our hearts. Barricades against boredom, exploitation and the false trappings of a decaying so-called affluence.
Roving and ranging through the streets of Manhattan, we disrupted the rote circulation of the city's walking dead. We occupied streets and ticked off taken avenues: 5th Avenue, check; 6th Avenue, check; 7th Avenue, that's OURS.
Onlookers gawked and gaped as though watching a spectacle, though perhaps unaware that this was in fact its absolute negation. Others spontaneously joined in: evening revelers in their Friday finest shouting OCCUPY EVERYTHING; proletarian youth on bikes chanting WHOSE STREETS, OUR STREETS; young student passers-by screaming FOREVER IS GONNA START TONIGHT.
We played cat-and-mouse with police. City traffic allied with crooked streets to give us a decisive advantage. We moved leaderless through time and space, pleasuring in every moment of movement. After all, this is a movement with no demands except FUCKING EVERYTHING. When the time came we dispersed spontaneously, few words spoken because all had been said that needed saying.
But this is not enough, it is never enough. Now is the time to make connections and push this crisis to its necessary conclusion. Solidarity with Santa Cruz means ATTACK.
So rise up Berkeley, rise up CUNY, rise up Stella Doro, rise up workers and students!
Take the streets. Occupy everything. Off the sidewalks, into the FUTURE.
- New School for Social Revolution
This ain't no fall trend
[another solidarity action, this time from New Orleans]
On Friday, September 25, the ATMs and doors of three banks in New Orleans' French Quarter were sealed shut by the New Orleans Political Fashion Police. Fuck banks. So ugly.
These actions were in solidarity with the occupiers at UC Santa Cruz and our comrades in Pittsburgh. We also did this for New Orleans, in the initial phase of our project to expel capital from our beautiful home.
This ain't no fall trend. Increasingly, righteously bad behavior becomes a part of our everyday routine. Thinking, talking, making - these things are insufficient in a society that co-opts any and everything except that which attacks directly.
There is no reason to be scared. You, too, can fight.
Dressed to kill,
The New Orleans Political Fashion Police
On Friday, September 25, the ATMs and doors of three banks in New Orleans' French Quarter were sealed shut by the New Orleans Political Fashion Police. Fuck banks. So ugly.
These actions were in solidarity with the occupiers at UC Santa Cruz and our comrades in Pittsburgh. We also did this for New Orleans, in the initial phase of our project to expel capital from our beautiful home.
This ain't no fall trend. Increasingly, righteously bad behavior becomes a part of our everyday routine. Thinking, talking, making - these things are insufficient in a society that co-opts any and everything except that which attacks directly.
There is no reason to be scared. You, too, can fight.
Dressed to kill,
The New Orleans Political Fashion Police
WE WANT EVERYTHING (a flyer from the occupation)
(PDF available here)
WE WANT EVERYTHING
As college students, we are told we should be grateful for being here. It's our supposed salvation from a lifetime of wage slavery and misery, but it's becoming very obvious that our future has already been looted by our present leaders. Most of us will spend most of our lives in debt, chained to commodities, working for things we'll never own. We become students in order to sell our activity as complex labor, to become technicians of this vast capitalist machine we call 'society'. That is to say, not because it's the best possible use of our lives but because other means of survival have been foreclosed. Being a student, like being a worker or prisoner, is a social role defined by its relation to the reproduction of the economy of capital. Now we live like lost children, because capitalist society has no future: it is collapsing in on itself, and trying to take us with it. We are nothing, and to become anything at all we will have to take everything we need.
If one thing is brutally obvious, it's that there is no point demanding anything from a system which is trying to eat us alive, or negotiating with rulers who will never see us as anything but numbers. From budget cuts at our schools to mass layoffs and foreclosures, from police murders on BART to the exploitation and persecution of migrants from the south, from the criminalization and incarceration of youth of color to political activists facing decades in prison, from the destruction of UCSC's Upper Campus ecosystems to the giant plastic garbage dump in the middle of the sea, these 'problems' are all symptoms of a system based on private property and the police who enforce it. The solution cannot be granted to us by anyone: we have to build it ourselves by organizing autonomously, developing collective power and generalized self-management.
This won't be easy. All our lives we have been trained to obey authority instead of to subvert and resist it and trust ourselves and each other.
We can only learn by doing. We can only find each other in struggle. We have begun.
WE ARE students, workers, unemployed; we are undocumented and on probation; we are sick of being ripped off by bosses and bullied by cops; we are the youth, we have no future, and we are power hungry.
WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS; YOU'LL NEVER BE ALONE AGAIN.
- an autonomous committee at occupied ucsc
WE WANT EVERYTHING
As college students, we are told we should be grateful for being here. It's our supposed salvation from a lifetime of wage slavery and misery, but it's becoming very obvious that our future has already been looted by our present leaders. Most of us will spend most of our lives in debt, chained to commodities, working for things we'll never own. We become students in order to sell our activity as complex labor, to become technicians of this vast capitalist machine we call 'society'. That is to say, not because it's the best possible use of our lives but because other means of survival have been foreclosed. Being a student, like being a worker or prisoner, is a social role defined by its relation to the reproduction of the economy of capital. Now we live like lost children, because capitalist society has no future: it is collapsing in on itself, and trying to take us with it. We are nothing, and to become anything at all we will have to take everything we need.
If one thing is brutally obvious, it's that there is no point demanding anything from a system which is trying to eat us alive, or negotiating with rulers who will never see us as anything but numbers. From budget cuts at our schools to mass layoffs and foreclosures, from police murders on BART to the exploitation and persecution of migrants from the south, from the criminalization and incarceration of youth of color to political activists facing decades in prison, from the destruction of UCSC's Upper Campus ecosystems to the giant plastic garbage dump in the middle of the sea, these 'problems' are all symptoms of a system based on private property and the police who enforce it. The solution cannot be granted to us by anyone: we have to build it ourselves by organizing autonomously, developing collective power and generalized self-management.
This won't be easy. All our lives we have been trained to obey authority instead of to subvert and resist it and trust ourselves and each other.
We can only learn by doing. We can only find each other in struggle. We have begun.
WE ARE students, workers, unemployed; we are undocumented and on probation; we are sick of being ripped off by bosses and bullied by cops; we are the youth, we have no future, and we are power hungry.
WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS; YOU'LL NEVER BE ALONE AGAIN.
- an autonomous committee at occupied ucsc
Electrocommunism
We threw a massive electrocommunism dance party in front of the occupied commons. It was an incredible sight - hundreds of sweating dancers yelling "OCCUPY EVERYTHING" and having the time of their life. This is at least part of what Communism looks and sounds like.
And the occupation goes on...
And the occupation goes on...
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