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
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...
THE BEACHHEAD
[Our statement from the second day of the occupation]
We in here are undergraduates, graduate students, teachers, workers, and unemployed. We are not leaving.
People ask what we want. WE WANT EVERYTHING. We want the university, this bankrupt institution of a bankrupt society, to grind to a halt. One occupation is not enough.
We need to clear up a little misunderstanding. We are not the general assembly. We will not get what we want through endless discussion, but by taking action. TAKE ACTION.
Listen: we are getting fucked by this crisis. The crisis is not an ‘unlucky’ turn of events. It is the culmination of a long-term trend. Things are not going to simply ‘get better’, and anyway they were never enough.
But know this: the administration is just a cog in the machine; they aren’t going to help us. We’d do best to ignore them just as they are ignoring us.
The administration hopes that we’ll blow off steam. That we’ll go back to ‘business as usual’. WE CAN’T GO BACK.
No one will give us what we want, we have to TAKE IT.
We took this space, not because it is a graduate space, but because it was there for the taking. Have a look around. Other spaces are there for the taking, throughout the campus, the city, and beyond.
This is not about those of us inside this building. This is about what all of us do from here. We’ve show that this can be done. It must be done, again and again and again.
We will not tell you what to do. People in the crowd are already planning actions. Get involved. We will stand in solidarity with you as you stand with us!
More occupation notes
The links to find updates, statements, and positions from the occupiers:
http://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/
http://occupyca.wordpress.com/
http://twitter.com/OccupyUCSC
http://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/
http://occupyca.wordpress.com/
http://twitter.com/OccupyUCSC
Letter of solidarity from the Anithesis Collective
To the occupiers of UCSC,
We fellow workers and students from New York City stand in solidarity with those
at UC Santa Cruz who have occupied their university against
the cuts and austerity measures forced on them by capital and its bureaucrats.
Public services are some of the first gains to be rescinded when capital
desperately thrashes out in an effort to valorize itself.
As workers have been crowded out of their jobs, and as the
failure of various financial machinations to alleviate this
crisis has become clear, more have been heading back to school. They have
been burying their heads under even more debt with the hope of riding out the
job scarcity and making themselves more attractive to employers.
As California's universities reduce their enrollment by tens of thousands and
simultaneously increase student fees and tuition, they are giving us a
clear message: there is no escape from this turbulence.
So lets meet it head on.
We are workers and students. Both labels, while signaling different
functions under capitalism, infer social roles predicated on material
dispossession and a poverty of meaningful creative existence. These
are the conditions we seek to transcend through organization and
revolutionary praxis. These are the roles we seek to abolish.
Lately, those with a proprietary investment in the prevailing
political, economic and social order have labeled us with countless
specious and unflattering sobriquets: terrorists, intruders,
criminals, fanatics, undemocratic vanguardists -- even fascists.
You should expect the same.
That the rhetoric has risen to such vacuous and vitriolic heights only
reveals the imminent threat that self-organization and autonomous
action pose to the status quo.
Each of us began as atomized subjects careening off each other in
chaotic trajectories. This generalized separation is the direct
product of the destructive, competitive imperatives of capital imposed
upon every human life.
As individuals we learn, work, sleep, drink, debate, fight and
struggle. However, when we abolish the separation that permeates our
lives we become the human embodiment of that oft-trampled watchword,
solidarity, made shockingly concrete. It is only collectively that
our voices attain transformative potential. It is only as a singular,
united mass of human potential that we can take control over our lives.
In an epoch when all human life has been subsumed by capital we cannot spirit ourselves
away or live in self-imposed isolation. Our arena of struggle is the
battlefield of everyday life.
This is how we learn. This is how we fight.
ON OCCUPATION:
Capital appears both material and immaterial; a durable ware and a
ghostly chimera. Capital in its commodity-form is a social relation
reified; it is abstract exploitation disguised in concrete form. In
the acephalous netherworld of capital there is no spatial core, no
actor in the part of Lear, no time outside of commensurable,
compressible time.
Let us be clear: we cannot bomb a social relation; nor can we burn
down a mirage. Without a revolt an order of magnitude greater than
Watts, Paris or Iran isolated insurrection cannot illuminate, nor can
it transcend.
At this very moment there remains for us, however, a
revolutionary immanence splayed across a million arenas and a thousand
moments of each living day. By occupying space and transforming its
use-value we not only arrest the temporal circuit of capital, we
transform ourselves and the actuality of our social relations. We magnify the
increasing historical potentiality of libertarian communism
immanent within capitalism.
Accumulation of capital is only possible through the movement of
commodities through space and time. In order to produce and realize
value, some portion of capital must be embedded in the built
environment to facilitate the ever-increasing velocity necessary for
expanded reproduction. Indeed, within this process capital constantly "annihilates space
through time".
Historically, one of the great powers of capital is its ability to
radically alter entire landscapes by organized exploitation of living
and dead labor. But this is also its greatest weakness, for when
capital fixes itself - embeds itself - it is motionless in space and
static in time. No longer an apparition, it is apprehendable and
therefore assailable.
Space produced by capital is alien to us, but represents the concrete agglomeration of
millions of moments of socially necessary labor time. Its true
potential is only immanent: capitalist space can only be valuable to
humanity insofar as it facilitates the negation of capital; insofar as
it becomes the venue for abolishing value as the mediation between the
production and distribution of use-values.
Until the overthrow of capitalism and the rise of worker and community
councils to democratically organize space, space-for-humanity can only
be achieved through the transcendence of capital-space through
organization and generalized occupation.
ON TACTICS:
There are many ways to appropriate space. The sit-in is a tactic that
has been well applied in past struggles. There are still situations
where it is worthwhile as a defensive tactic. However, it must be
stated that there is a fundamental difference between the defensive
sit-in and the offensive occupation. The sit-in entails blocking the
normal functions of space in order to gain recognition for a political
cause. Occupation, on the other hand, requires no recognition from
power. Occupation-for-itself is power: the power to transform the
narrow instrumentality of capitalist space; the power to abolish
exchange-value and monopoly rent; the power to farm fallow land or
utilize foreclosed houses; the power to open up space to those who
have none; the power to abolish exploitation; to form workers'
councils; to socialize production.
Occupation is the power of ordinary women and men to organize their
lives on their own terms.
However, just like insurrection, occupation can not succeed in
isolation. Nor can occupiers be content with a single street, squat,
block, college building, factory or borough.
When the wave of occupations begin, from
Greece to New York to Santa Cruz to Johannesburg to Beijing, those within space-made-free will
craft out of the cruel detritus of capital many mighty fortresses of
negation and affirmation. The crest will grow to a tide as workers,
students and communities create those novel conditions across space
and time that will be both the content and the form of universal
struggle. This tide will swell to a torrent and wipe away the stained
fabric of spectacle, alienation and dispossession.
So let us here and now inaugurate another step towards the birth of
generalized freedom from capital and constraint. Let us here and now
militate, propagandize, organize and occupy again and again and again!
In the glorious swoon of our myriad actions, let our bodies and minds
once more be the instruments that manipulate nature; as opposed to our
bodies and minds being objects mediated through machines. Let us take
control over our lives and our reality. We will occupy absolutely
everything, and finally, when we are completely draped in the fabric
of everything we know, this world will warp and reconfigure itself
with every move we make; space and time will obediently contort to the
instant of our gestures, a metabolism with nature that supersedes even
that which capitalism enabled; a metabolism that can only be shaped by
our communal will and can only be measured by the speed of our
thoughts.
This is the form and content of our struggle. This is the marriage of
theory and praxis. This is a social war with no relent and a means
with no end.
-------
For those with no stake in the prevailing order - the working class,
the homeless, the dispossessed, the students, the farmers - this moment is the
next note to the crescendo of a song. Together, we are reaching out to others
in struggle to build a massive collectivity that will strike in
concert. This is the symphony in which every woman and man is a
conductor.
We fight for ourselves, our families, our friends. This fight is
connected to our workplaces, communities and spaces.
We also fight for the past - our ancestors - those who have pulled the same levers as
we, who have spent their lives as empty as we. We fight for
redemption, not just of us-now but the redemption of all the dead. The
dead who spent their time in different prisons. The dead who fought
in daily wars untold and unmemorialized. The dead who were sucked dry
and stand before us everyday as constant capital. The dead who call
us now to revive their struggle and start anew.
Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in
the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe
from the enemy if he wins.
Workers and students, in this generalized crisis of capitalism, we
will constantly search for the fractures in the system and attack them
with all of our might. Now is the time to use all of our weapons: the
strike, the rally, the propaganda, the fires, all the diverse and
joyful expressions of our reason and our rage.
Above all, we must occupy the fractures, occupy the space between and
inside institutions, overturn markets, agitate in communities, and
arrest all the circuits of capital. We must, in essence, occupy space
and time.
We must act not just to stop the functions of the system,
nor to merely displace the detritus of this rotting world, but to
simultaneously destroy and create: to allow the birth of a new world
so pregnant within the womb of the old.
In lives so totally subsumed by the logic of capital, revolution can
only possibly mean a total rupture from the past. Let us not view
this as simply the most recent of world crises of capital, but the
last!
Take over the campus. Take over the city. END CAPITAL.
New School Schwarz und Rot,
Antithesis Collective (NEFAC)
24 September 2009
We fellow workers and students from New York City stand in solidarity with those
at UC Santa Cruz who have occupied their university against
the cuts and austerity measures forced on them by capital and its bureaucrats.
Public services are some of the first gains to be rescinded when capital
desperately thrashes out in an effort to valorize itself.
As workers have been crowded out of their jobs, and as the
failure of various financial machinations to alleviate this
crisis has become clear, more have been heading back to school. They have
been burying their heads under even more debt with the hope of riding out the
job scarcity and making themselves more attractive to employers.
As California's universities reduce their enrollment by tens of thousands and
simultaneously increase student fees and tuition, they are giving us a
clear message: there is no escape from this turbulence.
So lets meet it head on.
We are workers and students. Both labels, while signaling different
functions under capitalism, infer social roles predicated on material
dispossession and a poverty of meaningful creative existence. These
are the conditions we seek to transcend through organization and
revolutionary praxis. These are the roles we seek to abolish.
Lately, those with a proprietary investment in the prevailing
political, economic and social order have labeled us with countless
specious and unflattering sobriquets: terrorists, intruders,
criminals, fanatics, undemocratic vanguardists -- even fascists.
You should expect the same.
That the rhetoric has risen to such vacuous and vitriolic heights only
reveals the imminent threat that self-organization and autonomous
action pose to the status quo.
Each of us began as atomized subjects careening off each other in
chaotic trajectories. This generalized separation is the direct
product of the destructive, competitive imperatives of capital imposed
upon every human life.
As individuals we learn, work, sleep, drink, debate, fight and
struggle. However, when we abolish the separation that permeates our
lives we become the human embodiment of that oft-trampled watchword,
solidarity, made shockingly concrete. It is only collectively that
our voices attain transformative potential. It is only as a singular,
united mass of human potential that we can take control over our lives.
In an epoch when all human life has been subsumed by capital we cannot spirit ourselves
away or live in self-imposed isolation. Our arena of struggle is the
battlefield of everyday life.
This is how we learn. This is how we fight.
ON OCCUPATION:
Capital appears both material and immaterial; a durable ware and a
ghostly chimera. Capital in its commodity-form is a social relation
reified; it is abstract exploitation disguised in concrete form. In
the acephalous netherworld of capital there is no spatial core, no
actor in the part of Lear, no time outside of commensurable,
compressible time.
Let us be clear: we cannot bomb a social relation; nor can we burn
down a mirage. Without a revolt an order of magnitude greater than
Watts, Paris or Iran isolated insurrection cannot illuminate, nor can
it transcend.
At this very moment there remains for us, however, a
revolutionary immanence splayed across a million arenas and a thousand
moments of each living day. By occupying space and transforming its
use-value we not only arrest the temporal circuit of capital, we
transform ourselves and the actuality of our social relations. We magnify the
increasing historical potentiality of libertarian communism
immanent within capitalism.
Accumulation of capital is only possible through the movement of
commodities through space and time. In order to produce and realize
value, some portion of capital must be embedded in the built
environment to facilitate the ever-increasing velocity necessary for
expanded reproduction. Indeed, within this process capital constantly "annihilates space
through time".
Historically, one of the great powers of capital is its ability to
radically alter entire landscapes by organized exploitation of living
and dead labor. But this is also its greatest weakness, for when
capital fixes itself - embeds itself - it is motionless in space and
static in time. No longer an apparition, it is apprehendable and
therefore assailable.
Space produced by capital is alien to us, but represents the concrete agglomeration of
millions of moments of socially necessary labor time. Its true
potential is only immanent: capitalist space can only be valuable to
humanity insofar as it facilitates the negation of capital; insofar as
it becomes the venue for abolishing value as the mediation between the
production and distribution of use-values.
Until the overthrow of capitalism and the rise of worker and community
councils to democratically organize space, space-for-humanity can only
be achieved through the transcendence of capital-space through
organization and generalized occupation.
ON TACTICS:
There are many ways to appropriate space. The sit-in is a tactic that
has been well applied in past struggles. There are still situations
where it is worthwhile as a defensive tactic. However, it must be
stated that there is a fundamental difference between the defensive
sit-in and the offensive occupation. The sit-in entails blocking the
normal functions of space in order to gain recognition for a political
cause. Occupation, on the other hand, requires no recognition from
power. Occupation-for-itself is power: the power to transform the
narrow instrumentality of capitalist space; the power to abolish
exchange-value and monopoly rent; the power to farm fallow land or
utilize foreclosed houses; the power to open up space to those who
have none; the power to abolish exploitation; to form workers'
councils; to socialize production.
Occupation is the power of ordinary women and men to organize their
lives on their own terms.
However, just like insurrection, occupation can not succeed in
isolation. Nor can occupiers be content with a single street, squat,
block, college building, factory or borough.
When the wave of occupations begin, from
Greece to New York to Santa Cruz to Johannesburg to Beijing, those within space-made-free will
craft out of the cruel detritus of capital many mighty fortresses of
negation and affirmation. The crest will grow to a tide as workers,
students and communities create those novel conditions across space
and time that will be both the content and the form of universal
struggle. This tide will swell to a torrent and wipe away the stained
fabric of spectacle, alienation and dispossession.
So let us here and now inaugurate another step towards the birth of
generalized freedom from capital and constraint. Let us here and now
militate, propagandize, organize and occupy again and again and again!
In the glorious swoon of our myriad actions, let our bodies and minds
once more be the instruments that manipulate nature; as opposed to our
bodies and minds being objects mediated through machines. Let us take
control over our lives and our reality. We will occupy absolutely
everything, and finally, when we are completely draped in the fabric
of everything we know, this world will warp and reconfigure itself
with every move we make; space and time will obediently contort to the
instant of our gestures, a metabolism with nature that supersedes even
that which capitalism enabled; a metabolism that can only be shaped by
our communal will and can only be measured by the speed of our
thoughts.
This is the form and content of our struggle. This is the marriage of
theory and praxis. This is a social war with no relent and a means
with no end.
-------
For those with no stake in the prevailing order - the working class,
the homeless, the dispossessed, the students, the farmers - this moment is the
next note to the crescendo of a song. Together, we are reaching out to others
in struggle to build a massive collectivity that will strike in
concert. This is the symphony in which every woman and man is a
conductor.
We fight for ourselves, our families, our friends. This fight is
connected to our workplaces, communities and spaces.
We also fight for the past - our ancestors - those who have pulled the same levers as
we, who have spent their lives as empty as we. We fight for
redemption, not just of us-now but the redemption of all the dead. The
dead who spent their time in different prisons. The dead who fought
in daily wars untold and unmemorialized. The dead who were sucked dry
and stand before us everyday as constant capital. The dead who call
us now to revive their struggle and start anew.
Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in
the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe
from the enemy if he wins.
Workers and students, in this generalized crisis of capitalism, we
will constantly search for the fractures in the system and attack them
with all of our might. Now is the time to use all of our weapons: the
strike, the rally, the propaganda, the fires, all the diverse and
joyful expressions of our reason and our rage.
Above all, we must occupy the fractures, occupy the space between and
inside institutions, overturn markets, agitate in communities, and
arrest all the circuits of capital. We must, in essence, occupy space
and time.
We must act not just to stop the functions of the system,
nor to merely displace the detritus of this rotting world, but to
simultaneously destroy and create: to allow the birth of a new world
so pregnant within the womb of the old.
In lives so totally subsumed by the logic of capital, revolution can
only possibly mean a total rupture from the past. Let us not view
this as simply the most recent of world crises of capital, but the
last!
Take over the campus. Take over the city. END CAPITAL.
New School Schwarz und Rot,
Antithesis Collective (NEFAC)
24 September 2009
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.
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.
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