Occupation statement from California

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.

Press Contact: (eight-three-one) 332.8916

Occupation at UCSC

Read, follow, and spread the information. The occupation here has started: two hours in and counting...

https://twitter.com/OccupyUCSC

TODAY

Today is the day. All across the UC, walkout, join the mass mobilizations, and help bring the campus to a halt. Spread the word on this to any and all - those elsewhere in the States and especially abroad, we'll need your calls for support and your dissemination of information. Look forward to reports as things progress.

We are the crisis

I have been an absent one on the blog lately, in favor of more pressing issues. September 24th, the start of the University of California school year (except for perennial early-starter Berkeley), is this year a day of mass protest and mobilization of students, workers, and faculty against being forced to shoulder the costs of the university's blundering ineptitude and, more broadly, of the inevitable fallout of privatization. Hence the planning and preparations for this that all of us are doing have been swallowing time that otherwise might go a-zombieing. I'll be back writing in a week.

But from all of the long conversations engendered by this situation, a set of thoughts I've been having, perhaps worth spinning out here.

This entire situation is not "about" the university per se, and even less so the administrators. (The last thing we want is just a kinder, more liberal-seeming UC President who will continue the same doomed trendline, albeit with language more amenable to an "ethical/democratic" capitalism.) It is "about" the financial crisis. And none have been more insistent about this fact than those very administrators being blamed for this unfolding collapse. Their open letters, press statements, funding decisions, etc, etc, make very clear that we need a couple years of "strategic cuts", all around belt tightening (to the point where the belt becomes the noose that will finish off the public-ness of the whole system), and individual sacrifice: just some lean times, folks, so everybody hunker in and take your furloughs, if you really care about education, that is... All this is so many ways of saying: this is not our fault, this is a crisis that affects us all, it is beyond any of us, it is a deep tectonic shift in the architecture of capital and the consequent waves, battering us down equally.

It perhaps goes without saying, but this is the rankest of all bullshit. For a number of immediate reasons: the particular inflection and severity of this crisis is a consequence of the kind of decisions made by the ruling class and their finance capital whiz kids, it is a false choice between education and labor, the logic of sacrifice is the deep cynicism of our moment, and the actions of these particular administrators have little to do with the crisis but rather with the long term sweep toward the restructuring of public education into a privatized husk. None of this is very surprising, simply the surface story of the past decade, with long narrative roots reaching back through the 20th century.

However, what of the core of this, the core on which the radical left itself, from Marx on and for good reason, insists, namely, that capitalism is crisis? And this should be conceived of in two senses: both the manifestation of those infamous internal contradictions - hence crisis as the laying bare of the untenability of the economic regime as a whole - and as the necessary, cyclical event that allows for creative destruction and restructuring of labor relations and production/circulation patterns - hence crisis as necessity for the continued expansion of capital. Clearly, both the analyses and the descriptive/prescriptive power of this tradition are not things to be given up.

That said...

At a moment in which no one will accept blame for the crisis, we see that no "one" can: those who have been profiting off the system have shown themselves incapable, on any level, of thinking differently, and the asubjective ghost ship drive heart of capital clearly has no time or space for the moral register. Neither should we. Questions of moral responsibility have nothing to do with this.

But there is someone to blame, although not morally. It is our fault, the working classes and those who don't get access to work. All of us under the yoke of this system, it is our fault. We are the crisis.


We are crisis because we are at once the motor of the system and the wrenches and sand tossed into those gears. Capitalism innovates and progresses because we are not pure calculation and extraction of surplus value (thereby provoking the economic regime to find new ways of expanding, accumulating, territorializing), and capitalism shudders to near-halts for the same reason. We are at once the excess of a system that needs us and the material provocation that produces the dizzying heights of financial speculation, because we globally keep multiplying and demanding work, making it cheaper, making it not profitable.

We are to blame for this crisis. And we need to start taking this position as our point of departure, recognizing that this didn't happen because of either greed or an opaque current in patterns of finance. It happened because in spite of all of our concessions to the system, all of our hamstringing of our more radical possibilities, there remains the basic fact of us as things that want in the game and that always want more - i.e. just a decent life, in all the radicality of calling for that in a time when little of the world's population has it - than what we are given.

The move to make, then, is to take on the responsibility for this crisis, the responsibility that none will or can accept, to be the damned of the system that already thinks us as such, and recognize that capitalism is crisis because, internally and infernally, we are the crisis, always have been and always will be.

"To intervene as workers"

Spread the word on the UC Faculty walkout and actions in solidarity. A first day in what will be a hot autumn of our making. Moving from simmering discontent to articulated resistance, calculated disruption, and antagonism against all those who have gotten rich off from gutting access to education and living wages.

The autonomy of the apolitical

Creative destruction, in its distinctly non-Bakunin version

A few related comments of autonomous zones, ecological concerns, and the aesthetics of occupation.

First, a discussion over at Frugal Me that my attacks on pseudo-salvage ideology provoked, at least in part. And more so given that the owner of a company I singled out (mostly for its typicality and its laying bare of the trumpeting eco-pretensions underpinning much of the "green" commodity market, not for being particularly green-evil) got involved. He seems like a thoughtful guy, albeit one I disagree with on many things. You can read the back and forth in the comments there.

However, I think these issues are thought better in a wider context, one raised by Owen in his quite good account of the two fairs, the fun-fair and the Climate Camp. Furthermore, in a dark - or rather day-glo fur and neon body-paint - mirror of the bastard child of the Climate Camp and the fun camp, the Burning Man festival is going on in the States right now. Indeed, that might just be the bridge between that two of ethics and jouissance, of the community of the like-minded (the bonded group of the eco-minded) and the occasional group (the heterogeneous mish-mash of all those who come to the fair, whether to watch antiquated machines hurl tweens around or to smell funnel cake). Or, it might be that bridge if the way it is talked about wasn't such an unholy hybrid of messianic fervor and the fetid remnants of hippiedom.

Two men enter (with foam swords), two men probably leave

That is actually a shame, because taken on its own terms (and not as a scalable exercise in autonomous political/social zones), there is much to celebrate there, mostly, the real ingenuity, construction, and non-work time that goes into making the art works/bicycles made to look like titanium unicorns shooting confetti out of the horn. My neighbors are devoted Burning Man types, and I've been genuinely impressed by how much work they've done to make a giant human hamster wheel. And while my impulse is at times to say, fuck, you could have built housing for the homeless with that much effort, I'll support efforts toward the production of the frivolous as long as it escapes the logic of leisure time as the mere shadow of the working day, as Adorno claims, rather snarkily, about the D.I.Y. fad. And indeed, even the "creative destruction" of the objects - again, an odd mirror for the autophagic creative destruction of capital in crises of overproduction/underconsumption - is something I could get behind. Not the form that my Dionysian impulse takes, but go for it. Personally, I will never go. Living in Santa Cruz is already too much of the Burning Man ethos for me. I like my countercultural impulses with more black, grime, and bile, on one end, and the razor sweep of the modern, on the other. (And, lastly, they do have, at Burning Man, a very serious Thunderdome. Which I can get very much behind. Perhaps they will let Dominic bring a locally sourced lightsaber.)

However, it is the fetishization of a deep, utopian content that betrays all that, particularly taking the form of "it's an economy without money, mutual aid, just people sharing." No, it is the appearance of such, and not least because you have to buy a ticket (from about $200 on up, it seems) and because people bring supplies that they already purchased. (That's like saying that you and your friends live free of the money form because you all buy groceries separately, and then sometimes have a potluck.)

The point of all this is that we should consider two forms of appearance of TAZs (temporary autonomous zones) as a way of considering both their political usefulness and the harder question of: do they want the world to look like this? There is, first, the appearance that is concerned with a fantasmatic microcosm image of how the world should look, ranging from the powerfully collective (modes of group housing and eating, genuine forms of skill sharing and mutual aid) to the goofy and inane (naked dancing with feathers glued to your ass, pissing on hay bales to "rural it up a bit," the misrecognition of how money spent is money spent). Such a model should be rejected, not because some of things done are silly or a waste of time. Rather, because it inevitably falls into the problem of representation, of how you are perceived by those not involved (those fucking kooks), of how you perceive your own involvement (does the presence of such kooks necessarily invalidate the real radical work we are trying to do?), and of what such a zone "represents" in the face of a capitalist totality (a welcomed subtraction of those for whom the government must provide social services and, more than that, find jobs in the long downturn period of the general crisis of manufacturing and overproduction).

Ssangyong factory occupation

The second kind of appearance, the one crucial to our strategy, is that of appearance as tactic, as a weapon of negation, in which how one appears - as a TAZ - does not "represent" anything about how we think the world should look, at least in a direct micro to macro telescoping. The model here would be factory (or other) occupations that do not say, "camping out in our workplace and defending it against the police is a desired model of the world to come." (Although, in a unsettling sense, it is perhaps a far more accurate depiction of what the zones and spaces of resistance will continue to look like for quite a while.) The TAZ is propaganda, in the best form, a sort of spatial shock troops who might prove not that we could live like this but we could stop living like this. How to live otherwise, to live beyond capitalism, is to be determined elsewhere, in hard discussions and innovated practices of everyday life. But here is a way to hasten that end, through forcible, non-scalable autonomy that knows itself and its enemy better.

For the sun or for tear gas

Like so much else of global importance, the Honduran "coup" was only able to hold American media and public attention for a fleeting flood of images and misinformation. The situation has not quietly gone away. Go read Joseph Shansky's account of conditions on the ground, of continued resistance and repression.

Sort, sever, detangle, grasp

[this following the last section on salvagepunk, capitalist salvage operations, and Schwitters, as the midstop before moving toward The Bed-Sitting Room and contemporary horizons]



But isn't this whole salvagepunk enterprise bound to the paradigmatic form of object worship that haunts the whole enterprise, slipping from crass consumerism to the financial crisis call to "get back to real things," the primitivist thought of rediscovering a natural life of pure use-values? The fantasy of the most radical tendencies lying in the most desperate configurations of global slum dwellers, and a melancholic drool before the postindustrial loveliness of all falling apart? Both the fetishization of the tool's rough and ready possibilities of world fixing, and the fetishist's excited glance at what cannot be fixed, all kitsch and crumble?

In short, is this not just more reification, totally unable to escape the hypnotic fixation on objects, however innately venomous or thrown from the cycles of capitalism, as symptom and solution?

To which we answer: yes, indeed.

This is a position intentionally occupied and line of thought taken to its horizon in order to do that same dialectical work of "punk" described, of tracking out to the point of collapse. Fittingly, to see what should be scrapped and what should be saved.

What must be scrapped is clearly this elevation of the object world of late capitalism, antagonistic as it may be to the world that created it. We end up back where we departed and with less clarity, over our heads in contemplation waste, holding up scraps to be recombined, thinking that it we just unlock the potential of all this crap, we'll have the weapons we need.

But, paradoxically, what must be saved is precisely that reification. For what is to be drawn out from salvagepunk is a mode of relating to the cursed inheritances of history, drawn out through that very elevation of objects to the status of social relations.


What needs to be salvaged are social relations, broken forms of lived Communist thought, discarded by our moment as the outmoded waste of a century. At once lost utopian kernels and the massive weight of sometimes catastrophic attempts to live differently, not just the traces but the ruins of an attempt to move beyond capitalism. When we talk of occupying trash sites and of building tools from the junkyard, this is what we mean. Not that we should valorize either the waste dweller forced to live in abjection or the cluttered objects themselves, but rather that our relation as radicals to our radical history must take the form of salvage. The thought of salvage is the thought of all that is thrown out by the totality of late capitalism, the traditions and horizons of collectivity, solidarity, and true antagonism.

As such, we need this anti-capitalist reification of thinking human relations as things and things as embodiments of human relation. We need this in order to grasp - apocalyptically, with a sense of both the immanence and imminent returns of these relations - how to relate to what been ruined, yet which is persistent. The constitutive excess (radical thoughts of the radical reformation of life) can't ever quietly shuffle off the stage, because it is always created anew, ceaselessly, in every moment of the reproduction and circulation of capital. Like the objects of this outmoding world, they are made anew and tossed aside, not broken but declared broken and devoid of value.

Salvagepunk, along with being a kind of cultural object that hasn't fully come into its own, is the attempt to use the shards of a radical antagonism and solidarity in the same way that we might sort, sever, detangle, and grasp objects of insistent value from the wasteland. With a keen eye to what needs to be left to rot and a keener eye for how the world order has shifted since the time the things joined the realm of the unwanted. And from there, the grim smile that recognizes past struggle in its momentary successes and its resonant failures. A dissembling and hacking apart of those past moments, saving something and tossing away more, particularly those traditions in which we've invested too much to see them for the lumbering hindrance that they've become. And the montage and assemblage of our moments of real shock and slow resistance, constructs of waste to face up to this hurtling crash of a system predicated on the construction of waste.

Let them throw cake

This came my way via Retort - an update on the situation.

A vivid note from Athens to a friend in Ithaca, NY: The government still hasn't realized this is an overwhelming protest by the people verging on an insurrection. But never mind. They will leave sooner or later. Two things. One important and one just funny. At the boy's funeral his class mates read a letter out addressed to us. It was a great J'Accuse of our generation and how we have stripped youth of dreams, values, aspirations, how they feel ashamed of us but would like to be proud of us only all we do is buy and sell. "You don't dream any more, you don't fall in love, all you do is buy and sell and we are ashamed of you." It was really a great text. I shall find it somewhere and translate it for you. Now the funny one. Scuffles and skirmishes are continuing all over the city and at one of these yesterday where the cops were harassing some school kids, people in the cafes near by (oldies on the whole) dashed out and started throwing the sandwiches and cakes they had been eating at the cops! It's a lovely scene. Oh, and we (the Greek state if that is 'we' of course) have run out of tear gas. I don't know just how many tons have been used. Final bit, a banner that read "Money for the banks and bullets for the kids". More later.

Yes.

"after dark hundreds of professed anarchists broke the windows of upscale shops, banks and hotels in central Athens and burned a large Christmas tree in the plaza in front of Parliament."
(from the NY Times descrition)

More importantly, this text from those occupying the School of Theater in Thessaloniki:

DAYS OF DEMOCRACY 2008

EITHER WITH THE GUNS OF THE POLICE - OR WITH THE STRUGGLES OF SOCIETY
No insurrection in history could ever be controlled, manipulated, or submitted to ideologies or political parties and mechanisms, it could never be merely political in content. Every riot, every insurrection has always been a social affair and has thus been deeply political in the broadest sense. After the murder in cold blood of 15-year-old Alexandros, a tumult of rage and discontent has come to the surface. A wave of excluded, disappointed, repressed, desperate people flooded the streets, of diverse cultural background, education, experience and class and were united in a spontaneous cry of a society that is being suppressed, deprived of its future, that is watching its dreams being crushed. This is a generation that has been systematically excluded from any means of expression, deprived of any possibility to decide for itself at school, at university or at work, through its growing alienation. This generation is choosing destruction as its own expression of rage and creativity. Rage is not just a feeling. It is a struggle for social justice. As long as there is no justice, there will be no social peace.

We are out on the streets as part of this society but also as part of this social rage. We do not seek to be the leaders of this discontent, we are not experts in violence. We are out on the streets because we are on Alexandros' side. Any one of us could have been in his position. We know well, from our everyday experience in social and labour struggles, in the struggles of immigrants for dignity, in the struggles of the marginalized and the prisoners for a glimpse of freedom, that the State and the institutions of power have always confronted us with the finger on the trigger.

We do not just feel hurt, outraged and revolted by the unjust death of a young person. We are also fully aware that, whether we are friends, parents or relatives, for each one of us and each of our beloved ones, there is a police bullet waiting for its fatal call. Guilty are the State and its uniformed murderers. It is they who are the true specialists and actual managers of violence.

They started it. They are the ones who are responsible for this wave of violence and insurrection that broke out with the murder of Alexandros. There was never justice for the murders of Koumis, Kanellopoulou, Kaltezas, Temboneras, Boulatovic, and of so many more immigrants...Social rage grows with State violence, chemical warfare on the streets (teargas cartridges shot directly at demonstrators), rubber bullets, beatings and hooded plainclothes policemen arresting demonstrators.

The explosive social situation these days could - and should - create the conditions and the consciences for a better future. But it could also create the conditions for accepting and legitimizing the use of firearms by the police. How else could we interpret the riot policeman in Athens waving a revolver against demonstrators during the demo on Sunday?
How else could we interpret the numerous firings in the air by special-force policemen right after Alexandros' funeral?
How else could we interpret knife-flogging fascists helping out the police during their attack against demonstrators in Patras on Tuesday evening?

However hidden from the majority, all the above-mentioned incidents are true.

NO MORE HYPOCRICY. THESE ARE NO "ISOLATED INCIDENTS" - THIS IS THE REALITY OF STATE VIOLENCE.
COPS SHOOT TO KILL - WE ARE AT WAR

Whoever pretends nothing is happening has already chosen which side they are on.

Occupied School of Theatre
Thessaloniki
December 9 2008