An Open Letter to: Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, EVCP George Breslauer, Chief Mitchell J. Celaya III, Stephen Stoll, Director of the Office of Emergency Preparedness, Tyrone Morrison, Records and Communications Supervisor
Accounts from on-site witnesses and from videos raise some disturbing questions about the behavior of UCB Police last Thursday night, September 22, toward students participating in the open occupation at Tolman Hall. According to witnesses, sometime shortly after 9 pm, police blocked the outside doors of the building, deliberately preventing students from leaving the building. The police did not communicate to the students their reasons for taking this action nor did they give any other information to the students prior to or after the unexpected blocking of the exit doors. No dispersal order had been given. One protestor when trying to leave was tackled by police and restrained aggressively. That protestor was subsequently arrested was refused medical care while in custody. Students had previously planned to respect the closing time of the building and to leave the building when the police gave an order to disperse. We reiterate the fact that the police did not give such an order, nor communicate any instructions at all. 1 Since the actions of students had been entirely peaceful, the sudden blocking of the doors to keep students in without explanation was unexpected, illogical, and traumatic to the students inside.
We request that the administration and the Police Review Board undertake an immediate review of what happened at Tolman Hall and we ask that the administration and UCPD provide answers, in a document to be published in the Daily Cal, to the following questions:
Who was in charge of the police response to the student activities on September 22, 2011? Who decided that police should block doors and prevent students from leaving? When was this decision made and when did the police at Tolman know of it?
What policy or policies govern the level of aggression and risk of injury permitted in police responses to student protest activities? To what degree were police actions consistent or inconsistent with those policies?
Given that the police are carrying guns, what are the guidelines guaranteeing the safety of those they are supposed to protect, or, in cases of protest, to monitor? What are the guidelines guaranteeing the safety of the police officers? Of bystanders and people from the media?
Upon what authority did the police tackle and injure the student who tried to leave the building? What was the reason for that violent response? Why was that student not allowed to receive a medical examination and care while he was in custody?
Do the police or administrators claim that one or more students engaged in any violent or aggressive act that justified this threatening and violent response? Or does the current policy and practice allow UC Police to violently restrain students whose behavior is not actually violent or threatening? What are the current criteria for arrest of students on campus?
Signed:
Amanda Armstrong, Head Steward, UC Berkeley, UAW 2865
Kyle Arnone, Trustee UAW 2865 (UCLA)
Jessica Astillero, UC Berkeley undergraduate
Erika Ballesteros
Andrea Barrera, Undergraduate, Rhetoric Dept.
Joi Barrios-Leblanc, UC Berkeley Lecturer
Axel Borg, Librarian, Shields Library, UC Davis, Vice-President for Legislation, UC-AFT
Shane Boyle, Head Steward, UC Berkeley, UAW 2865
Gray Brechin, Dept of Geography
Natalia Brizuela, Associate Professor, Spanish & Portuguese
Jordan Brocious, Sgt. at Arms UAW 2865 (UC Irvine)
Chris Chen, Department of English
Natalia Chousou-Polydouri, Head Steward, UC Berkeley, UAW 2865
Mandy Cohen, Recording Secretary UAW 2865 (UC Berkeley)
Jean Day, UC Berkeley staff, UPTE member
Ivonne del Valle, Assistant professor/Spanish and Portuguese
Cheryl Deutsch, President UAW 2865 (UCLA)
Charlie Eaton, Financial Secretary UAW 2865 (UC Berkeley)
Katy Fox-Hodess, Head Steward, UC Berkeley, UAW 2865
Judith Goldman, 2011-12 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry, Dept. of English
Ricardo Gomez, UC Berkeley undergraduate
Jane Gregory, graduate student, Department of English, UC Berkeley
Lyn Hejinian, Professor, Department of English
Shannon Ikebe, Member, UC Berkeley, UAW 2865
Nick Kardahji, Trustee UAW 2865 (UC Berkeley)
Kathryn Kestril, UC Lecturer
Elliott Kim, Southern Vice President (UC Riverside)
Seong Hee Lim, Graduate Student, History Department, UC Santa Barbara
Larisa Mann, Head Steward, UC Berkeley, UAW 2865
Brenda Medina-Hernandez, Trustee UAW 2865 (UC Davis)
Blanca Misse, UAW 2865 Guide (UC Berkeley)
Dustianne North- UCLA Social Welfare, Doctoral Candidate
Megan O’Connor, Graduate Student, UC Berkeley English Dept.
Gabe Page, Steward, Comparative Literature, UAW 2865
Gautam Premnath, Dept of English
Brian Riley, Student Unity Movement
Manuel Rosaldo, Head Steward, UC Berkeley, UAW 2865
Robert Samuels, Lecturer, Writing Programs, UCLA, President, UC-AFT
Chris Schildt, Head Steward, City and Regional Planning, UAW 2865
Sara Smith, Northern Vice-President, UAW 2865
Ann Smock, Department of French
Michelle Squitieri, UCB Alumna and Field Representative, UC-AFT
Daniela Torres-Torretti, PhD Candidate in Education, UCD, Student Unity Movement
Jennifer Tucker, Unit Chair, UC Berkeley, UAW 2865
David Vandeloo, graduate student, Department of English
Megan Wachpress, Recording Secretary, UC Berkeley, UAW 2865
Josh Williams, Head Steward, UC Berkeley, UAW 2865
[_]THEOAKLANDCOMMUNE
AUSTERITY. This is the name originally given, let’s remember, to the economic policies of WWII, the name for the total mobilization of society to the task of war. Up until WWII, austerity had a purely personal meaning – it referred to ascetic practices, the self-discipline of monks and penitents. But in Britain during the Blitz it came to stand for an entire moral order, a series of measures – austerities—which continued into peacetime, when the citizenry were called upon to rebuild the country through volunteerism, rationing and self-sacrifice. There was austerity cuisine, austerity clothing and austerity furniture . Austerity was “a homefront without a war.” Or rather, it was a homefront in search of a war, a homefront that became the war, allowing the state to apply military discipline to the entirety of society.
All of the hallowed institutions of the British welfare state – ones that American leftists might hope to establish here – originate from this period: vast public housing projects, accessible universities, a comprehensive national health project. The welfare state is not, therefore, the opposite of the austerity state. These are simply the Janus-faces of an apparatus that has taken total control over social reproduction – over consumption levels, access to credit, access to health care and education – because these things can no longer be entrusted to the market alone. Austerity regimes are never laissez-faire. If money is taken away from social programs, it is returned to the economy through interventions in the money supply, bailouts for banks, credit programs and the like. If it is taken away from housing programs, it is returned as prison construction. In both regimes of austerity and welfare, the state is fulfilling its function as helpmeet to capital, ensuring that the right amounts and kinds of workers meet up with the right amounts of money and products in the workplaces and markets. Once the state has begun to manage these processes, the withdrawal of this or that mechanism or program is not the end of state intervention, only its calibration and adjustment to the changing needs of capital.
The false opposition between austerity and welfare may lead some anarchists and anti-state communists to prejudge the fight, to conclude that it is rigged from the start, locked within the horizon of the liberal-democratic state. But history is full of examples of people who think one thing and do another, who make revolution for reasons of simple necessity. And in any case, we can no more choose to fight on some other terms than we can choose to start breathing carbon dioxide. In the near term, struggles against austerity are what we have. As with Egypt and Greece, Madrid and Madison – we should expect to see more conflicts between “the people” and “the state.” We should also expect to see struggles over matters of government policy take on a near-revolutionary intensity. This is because, in the present period – when corporations and capitalists find such extreme constraints on profitability
– states are unlikely to yield any ground except in the face of the fiercest opposition. Because states are themselves radicalized by the crisis, because they are at war with their population, we live in a time of tremendous radicalization.
Every strength is, from one angle, a weakness, and every weakness a strength. If the present movements against austerity exhibit a purely negative character, if they can say nothing about the world they want except what it is not, if they are largely confined to describing, in letters of fire and broken glass, the world they hate, this indicates at the same time their unwillingness to accept any of the simulacra which past movements hung under the name of communism and anarchy. But it also means that, until something inhabits the space left vacant by the old programs and parties, we are left forcing reactions by the state apparatus. We are a statism by proxy.
We do not need a program. But what we do need are rapidly reproducible practices that focus on our non-possession of the things we need to live – in other words, our reliance on money, on employment and the state. The only possible response to the antinomies of anti-austerity politics – which break down all too often into a fight between anti-tax and pro-welfare populisms – is to say that if we had direct, immediate access to such things, we would need neither state provision nor its powers of taxation. Only when capital is a natural, unsurpassable horizon does this appear as a real problem. This is why the truest response to a round of austerity measures is the looting of supermarkets and the jumping of subway turnstiles, tax evasion and debt default, the squatting of houses and the establishment of free communal gardens and kitchens.
“A GOVERNMENT SO SMALL YOU CAN CARRY IT WITH YOU EVERYWHERE”
bayofrage.com
01.
[_]THEOAKLANDCOMMUNE
This grim present is marked by unremitting unemployment. Where did all the work go? It went into the future. And not in a cool science fiction way. Work has gone into the future in a way that assures our misery indefinitely. That’s what debt is. It is the guarantee that you will spend all the hours of your future laboring to make good on a promise you were forced to make by an economy that can’t provide either the minimum nor the maximum (for these are one and the same) of what we want from life: to live.
Debt has more faces than a yearbook. Some of them seem to face us from a distance: the sovereign debt of nations now perpetually at risk of default, precipitating crises across the Eurozone. The massive debt of corporations deemed Too Big To Fail. But all of this turns out to be our debt. The inherited debts of deficit spending and massive bail-outs. All the “personal” debt we have been compelled to take on, to make ends meet as real wages have declined since the Seventies. The mass of mortgages injected into the economy in fallow capital’s desperate search for alternate avenues of profit. The trillion bucks in outstanding student loans we have been pushed to “accept” as tuitions have ascended twice as fast as inflation. Our shoulders and backs are where this crushing
FIGHT THE FUTURE:
weight of debt always comes to rest, we citizens of capital.
Debt is a book of years, not a fortune but a kind of fortune-telling: it knows what you’ll be doing three decades from now. You won’t like it. Debt will like it just fine.
Let us agree on three things about debt:
Debt is not natural. But it is native to the soil of capitalism, which must both intensify and extend itself ever further in both space and time. Globalization and financialization are the two vectors of this appetite for extension. There is no capitalism without increasing debt; this is logically necessary, and historically evident. An end to debt (and let us remember that “debt” is always a polite term for “your prolonged immiseration”) requires an end to capitalism.
Austerity is an attempt to solve the debt crisis with more debt. Confronting insolvency at every stratum from local libraries to the nation-state, austerity’s idea is to tighten our belts. But have they promised to lower the prices of everything correspondingly? Hardly. Instead, austerity’s lower pay, fewer jobs, and vanished services mean that we will have no choice but to indebt ourselves further so as to stay afloat so as to search for jobs that are even worse than the awful jobs we never wanted in the first place.
Capital requires debt to function.
Capitalism is in catastrophic crisis. It can no longer sustain the accumulation it needs via the simplicities of buying and selling, the minimums of the marketplace. It needs to displace its contradictions in space and time. It needs credit and debt more than we do. In fact, we don’t need it at all. We don’t need a given rate of accumulation. We’re not capital, we’re humans. We’re too small to fail.
THE TIME HAS COME FOR MASS DEFAULT. Every debtor an Iceland! This is in some sense already happening as if by accident, as lives shudder under the unsustainable burden. It’s time for default as an organized, general strategy of self-defense and war on the owners of our present and future misery — a form of solidarity with strikes, sabotages, squats. It will require the organizing of communities to provide basic needs for the garnished, the liened, the excluded. This is both strategy and a renewed social order. This will be the practical meaning of a politics of friendship.
MASS DEFAULT AS ANTI-CAPITALIST INITIATIVE
01.bayofrage.com
WE ARE FED UP! let’s block everything
Posted by OaklandCommune on Thursday, June 16, 2011 ·
statement for Anticut 2, Friday June 17
We are here today taking the streets because we’re sick of it.
Sick of the library and day care center closures, sick of the dismantling of public schools and elderly care facilities. Sick of the corporate tax cuts and their $12.8
trillion in bailouts and their record profits.
We’re sick of being threatened every second with joblessness, sick of being exploited and humiliated at our jobs. We’re sick of the mass misery of unemployment,
and of those desperate for work being pitted against those barely hanging on. That isn’t work, it’s a fucking hostage crisis. And we’re sick of the way this daily
game of threats and power falls especially on the shoulders of women, disproportionately expected to provide the “human services” that capitalism will never pay
for again.
We are sick of having to point out that austerity is also sexism, racism, homophobia, sick of the way it intensifies every inequality that can be exploited.
We’re sick that being a cop is one of the few high paying public jobs left in California (“Starting salaries in Oakland are over $70k + rich benefits package”) at a
time when “peace officers” enforce austerity and deploy deadly violence to terrorize and cordon off black and brown communities.
We are sick of immigrants being murdered in their homes and at the border, and being scapegoated in the press, by politicians
We are sick of the state running the Oakland schools into $100 million in debt, doubly sick of Wells Fargo buying the debt to make obscene profits on the interest
after getting a $25 million bailout, then turning $12 billion in profits last year, and paying no taxes. Scam. Rigged game. We call bullshit.
But we don’t call bullshit on a few villains. We call it on capitalism. We’re sick of imagining a better version, of playing the “Capitalism2.0” game. .
Sick of being held hostage by a sickening economic idea that separates us from what we need to survive, separates us from each other, and makes us all supplicants,
blinded and demoralized by our needs that it can’t provide.
Business as usual is killing us and our communities.
We’re sick of priding ourselves on radical spirit when we are not all in the streets raising hell. We’re sick of the cops being outside agitators. We can do better.
We’re also sick of blaming ourselves. But we know that we’ll stay sick while they stay rich if we don’t change all of this. Starting now.
Everything belongs to everyone. Starting now.
Bay of Rage is an anti-capitalist initiative based in the Bay Area. The site will function during this period of austerity and crisis as a clearinghouse for calls to action,
event announcements, communiques and analysis.
austerity means class war
[Note: Today, we marched in downtown Oakland as part of the third in a series of anti-capitalist actions designed to resist and make visible the new age of austerity and crisis in which we find ourselves. Below is the communique handed out during the action.]
Now, finally, the money is gone. The world has run out of future, used it up, wasted it on the grotesque fantasies of the rich, on technologies of death and alienation, on dead cities. Everywhere the same refrain, the same banners and headlines: there is nothing left for you. From the US to Greece, from Chile to Spain, whatever human face the State might have had: gone. The State is no longer a provider of education or care, jobs or housing. It is just a police force, a prison system, a bureaucracy with guns. . .
Sometimes, maybe, we get treated to some political theater: faked expressions of concern or outrage from the puffy, grimacing faces. But the result is always the same – in Oakland, in Sacramento, in Washington, in the offices of the IMF – whatever the owners of wealth want, they get. The rest of us are sacrificed on the altar of the bottom line.
No money on which to retire after a lifetime of crushing work. No money to go to college. No money for the grade schools and high schools, which every day look more and more like prisons. No money for the people maimed, sickened and driven insane by this unbearable society.
We could go through the new California budget line by line, but you basically already know what it contains. It’s not a budget but a bludgeon. Every line says the same thing: Fuck you. Die.
There is no money. And yet, still, we live in a society of vast, almost obscene wealth: blocks of homes sit empty, mountains of luxury goods glut the shopping emporia, unused factories and equipment gather rust. All of it under the spell of a strange collective hallucination called “property.” All of it protected by cops and the threat of prison. . .
Yes, the money is gone and there is no future. No future for capitalism. All attempts at reform are now as absurd as making home repairs while the rest of the house is on fire.
{_}
We live, as everyone knows, in times of record unemployment: Oakland itself now has an official unemployment rate of nearly 16%, a figure which does not even take into account those who have abandoned the hope of employment altogether. Of course, capitalism can never provide full employment. Even in times of plenty, it needs to manufacture “joblessness” in order to keep wages down by making sure there are multiple applicants for every job. Still, times are different now. If in the past employment was seen as the norm – that is, the unemployed seen as the otherwise employed fallen on hard times – now more and more people are simply “cast off.”
Naturally, as capitalism continues to create larger and larger populations deemed “superfluous” –or economically unnecessary – informal black markets like the drug trade become one of the only areas where one can make a halfway decent living. Many of California’s prisons are bursting with simple drug offenders, a trend which will only continue. Therefore, at the same time as capitalism creates these populations it also creates the apparatus to deal with them in ever more ruthless ways: to manage, fragment, displace and warehouse them. Whereas once capitalism sought to manage populations through public welfare, vocational schools, and housing projects, now such programs are incompatible with profits. Prisons take their place.
We should remember that the prison system is a form of state planning, a way of adjusting demographics so that the needs of capital are met: the right number of pliant workers, a tolerable level of “crime.” In the same way that a company might invest in new factories and machinery, prisons are investments that capital makes in its own future. Prisons are insurance against the risk of social upheaval, especially necessary in the present era of deepening austerity. They make promises to the “business community” that California will continue to be an attractive investment opportunity. And, of course, prisons are profitable for the companies who supply their inferior food and health care, for the building contractors and the people who run private prisons, not to mention the companies, from AT&T to Starbucks, that employ prison-labor for pennies on the dollar. In many of the desolate, rural areas of California, working for a prison is the only job in town. Likewise, in many urban centers, being a prisoner is the only “occupation” many will know.
Just as austerity means prisons, increasingly austerity is prison, locking the poor into their imposed poverty by denying basic services, education, housing and health care. Gang injunctions are deployed across California’s cities in order to manage their young black and Latino populations, now unable to do the very things we all should do more of in the face of the current onslaught: to meet, to congregate and build bonds. Public schools assume the role of holding cells, while a parallel universe of elite private educational institutions springs up to serve communities wealthy enough to afford them.
It is quiet now, relatively speaking, on the American streets. Still, one senses that the clouds of tear gas suffocating Athens and London, Santiago and Guangzhou, are closer than they seem. In defense of austerity, the police attack protests unprovoked, as happened during our last march, Anticut 2. A pervasive system of handheld and closed-circuit video surveillance continues unabated. Irrational police violence increases as police treat cities as occupied territory.
It is only the narrow idea that everybody has of their own home that makes it seem natural to leave the street to the police. By the same measure, we understand that prison is not something “over there”: it hangs over the head of all of us who would resist the current order of things, just as we see the real face of the police every time we step in the streets. No political struggle has ever been without its imprisoned faction, and indeed, many struggles live and die based on their relations with their imprisoned comrades. The prison system is as much addressed toward the “free” as it is addressed toward the imprisoned. It is meant as a stern warning to all of us.
Over the last few decades, the number of US prisoners has quadrupled. There are now over 2.5 million humans buried alive in these institutions. The largest penal system anywhere: a quarter of all prisoners the world over are rotting in US prisons. As almost everyone knows, this population is overwhelmingly black and Latino. For this reason, we say that, just as much as the growth of the prison system is a symptom of the collapse of the welfare state in the face of deindustrialization, it should also be regarded as collective punishment for the militancy, revolt, and generalized conflict of the 1960′s and 70′s, especially in those zones of civil war located in California.
US prisons long-ago abandoned even the pretense of “rehabilitation.” They are now simply containers designed to hold “dangerous” populations in a state of cryogenic suspension. They are instruments of “social death.” And literal death. Even the notoriously conservative Supreme Court of the US decided that the overcrowding in US prisons constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.” Not even they could ignore the barbarity of a system where every 6 or 7 days someone dies due to treatable causes.
This is why we say that all prisoners are political prisoners, their incarceration the product of the machinations of power, the flows of capital, and the structural prejudices of the police. Their potential to revolt, to organize amongst themselves and attack their conditions is always assumed by the state. Hence, the creation of the modern maximum-security and “Supermax” prisons, which generalize solitary confinement to the entirety of a prison population. These are systems predicated upon the most extreme isolation of prisoners, designed to remove them from human contact entirely, hold them in a state of deprivation which, as any number of writers and studies have pointed out, causes permanent psychological damage. This is not accidental but the very purpose of such systems. Extended solitary confinement is essentially non-surgical lobotomy – designed to break people’s will, render them pliant.
{_}
Now, for the second time in less than a year, we witness a major uprising in the US prison system. Following on the heels of the brutally repressed work stoppage in Georgia, prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay – the Supermax prison inside the Supermax – have begun an indefinite hunger strike. As of this writing, the hunger strike has spread to 10 other prisons. More than 6000 people refused food over the 4th of July weekend.
Reading the demands of the hunger strikers at Pelican Bay, one notes immediately how modest they are. They are willing to die in order to have their conditions brought into line with Supermax prisons in other states – better food, education, some possibility of getting off the SHU. What this demonstrates is that the State is always looking for an angle; that is, it is always looking for a way to cheat at its own game. It wants to produce exceptions to its own rules, produce places within the law that are, at the same time, outside the law. For example, the prisoners at Pelican Bay are, like the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, held in a state of legal suspension – an indeterminate gray area of administrative decision which can, potentially, extend their stay on the SHU indefinitely. Pelican Bay is a limit case for the prison system.
We say again: all prisoners are political prisoners. Even those whose actual actions we find abhorrent in one way or another suffer as the result of capitalism’s crimes, not theirs. They suffer the consequences, in other words, of a society in which people have become so defenseless, and so alienated from each other, that the only response to interpersonal violence is forced confinement. All prisoners are political prisoners. One of the men currently on the SHU at Pelican Bay is Hugo Pinell, former comrade of George Jackson and survivor of the 1971 San Quentin prison uprising, itself a part of one of the most significant narratives in American history, the open resistance of the Black Panther Party and its affiliates in the civil war of the 1960s and 1970s.
There is no austerity without prisons. No capitalism without prisons. No possibility of a “colorblind” prison-industrial system and penal state. By the same measure, we believe that the destruction of capitalism will mean, at one and same time, the abolition of prisons and the regime of forced confinement that has spread over the earth for the last several centuries. To all those in prison, we have one thing to say: we are coming. As soon as we can.
{_}
Postcript: As we were finishing up this piece, we discovered that BART police have murdered yet another person – this time in San Francisco. They want us to believe that a “wobbly drunk” with a knife deserves to be shot dead within a minute of officers arriving on the scene. Moreover, they sense a potential public relations coup: because the victim was “White,” and one of the officers involved “Asian,” BART police could not possibly be a racist institution! Even more insulting is the additional implication that the whiteness of the suspect should somehow quell all outrage, as if those of us who protested the murder of Oscar Grant in January 2009, and yet again last July 8th when Mehserle’s verdict was announced, only cared about the “racist” part of “racist police murder.” We oppose police murder, period.
You can’t set fire to the prisons unless you first destroy the police. Let’s do that now.
{_}
Anticut 3
Oakland, CA
July 8, 2011
{_}
In the aftermath of the breakup of the Sacramento State occupation…
First off, we’d like to congratulate the occupiers of Sacramento State for their hard work in holding their space for almost four solid days. More broadly, it was so inspiring to watch the wave of sit-ins and occupations at so many of the Cal State campuses, and to know that it emerged from the ambitious plan to occupy all 23 campuses on the same day! Amazing!
The police tactics used to end the occupation are ridiculous, but regrettably predictable. We may count on the police to engage students and workers in protests with a high level of violence in order to demonstrate their power. Yet, it’s the administration and not the police that should receive the greatest share of anger. Certainly, we should be angry about the police response, but much angrier at the administration for calling them and authorizing the tactics that they used. This is usually a decision made by — you guessed it — a high ranking administrator in their capacity as the ‘steward’ of the campus. The police can always be counted on to overreact and enact violence on students in these situations; it’s their job to maintain the relations of power. One need look no further than the response by police agencies to protests/sit-ins/occupations across California (and plenty of other locations) in recent times. In the Bay Area just last month a pregnant steel worker was struck in her stomach with a nightstick during a Berkeley Steel workers protest.
THE BINARY OF PEACEFUL/NON-PEACEFUL PROTEST
It’s not useful to mark the distinction between “peaceful” and “violent protest”; that distinction is made in the aftermath when one looks at effects and responses. As our comrades at reclaimuc
OCCUPATION HAS REAL AND IMMEDIATE EFFECTS
We say that the university belongs to those who use it, i.e. partake and produce its use-value, so we take spaces. This is a direct assault on the forms of dominant power in university administrations. They make all kinds of arguments about safety and loss of the ability to run classes—which they say hurts students— but the truth is that occupations directly subvert the relations of production. The students, faculty, and workers who occupy don’t ‘own’ the buildings, but they do produce the products that the university profits from. The university takes the product and profits from it as an exchange value.
The objection could be raised that students don’t make the products. One might grant, at least, that faculty do and that the service and administrative workers support this endeavor with their labor. However, the students do make the use-value. If the product is ‘knowledge’ in a kind of loose sense for now, then one has to look at how it becomes profitable. Profit is produced by paying for labor in a manner that is incommensurate (read: lower than) with the exchange value of the product that the workers produce. The way that this works during our conjuncture has plenty to do with how the reputation of the product is produced. Universities participate in economies of intellectual capital, which grows in exchange-value, in part, through the mechanism of the research profile in conjunction with ‘ranking’. Faculty research output (books, talks, articles, reputations) are the most obvious example of this, but there are more. Graduate student research, post-ph.d. job placement, aid to professors, and teaching also contribute. What about undergraduates? This is probably the most simple and overlooked part of the equation, insofar as it is completely ‘obvious’. Althusser warns us that we should recognize ideology in any ‘obviousness’. Undergraduate entrance GPAs, standardized test scores, acceptance rates, graduation rates, job placement, alumni giving, graduating GPAs, and graduate school acceptance rates are responsible for a large part of a school’s ranking. That is to say, that simply by virtue of being a ‘good student’, one’s labor produces a part of the exchange-value of the university.
SO? DON’T STUDENTS BENEFIT, ULTIMATELY?
Why does this matter? You might say, so what, the students benefit from the school’s reputation…
In the case of the UC system, the university is able to engage in profit making ventures like drug and product research, distance learning, parking structures, etc., by virtue of capital bonds issued at a rate commensurate with the university’s projected profit ratio. This is influenced by the impression that a given school with increase its value through maintaining or increasing its rank (thus insuring its longevity—read: ability to pay funds back with interest). Poor schools don’t get to borrow money in the same way. A ‘nice’ side effect of this is that underfunded universities remain so.
If the university makes a profit, it does so by borrowing money against tuition and projected growth, which it can do based on rank and research profile, which is produced by faculty, service, administrative, graduate and —THAT’S RIGHT —undergraduate labor.
Occupation was a tactic produced in the factory setting. Workers locked themselves inside plants to halt production, thereby affecting profit; this gave them leverage. If the product of the university is value inflected knowledge. Disrupting classes is in fact the objective. It tarnishes the reputation of the university, hindering its increase in value/rank/etc. So, yes, in a certain sense, the administration is worried about classes being cancelled, but not in the way that they say or ‘think’ that they are.
STRIKE, OCCUPY, BARRICADE
Although we’ve been talking about occupation as a tactic, any protest/resistance that intervenes in the profit production of the university would submit to a similar analysis with similar results. Another way of saying this is that it doesn’t matter if the protest is ‘peaceful’ or not; if it interrupts the economy of power-profit, it will be treated by the agents of state repression as ‘violent’. Finally, if this is the case, it means that we should engage in escalating compression, i.e. more occupations, disruptive protests, and with greater duration.
If the administration and their agents (the police) pat us on the head and thank us for behaving, haven’t we done something wrong? They’ll ‘listen’ and then return to their desks enacting policies that dismantle our future and the futures of other students. The only way to affect change is through action that disrupts the descending vertical flow of power, causing them real losses.
STRIKE! OCCUPY! TAKE OVER! BARRICADE!
WE WANT EVERYTHING!
Rei Terada in “Outside the Free Speech Cage” constructs an argument for how the rhetoric of public safety may be used as a tool of repression.Even though the UC has repeatedly argued that it’s highly invested in insuring student safety, as Terada reminds us, there has been little concern by UC regents for the real safety of protestors. Without rehashing the argument that I have made before or referencing the brilliant one made here, I would like to continue to argue against the rhetoric of free speech. Free speech is nothing more than a liberal construct that contains within it the politically bankrupt idea that protest has limits internal to it. There is no such thing as a good or bad protest, but merely protests that are effective or ineffective. It is ludicrous to speak in terms other than that of strategy when confronting state opposition to self-determination. There is a reason that some acts of ‘free’ speech are ‘sanctioned’; they are non-threatening. This being the case, what must be considered is the question of will the tactics produce results that are real. Are there material gains to be made in the struggle? If we mount attacks against the application of power against our interests, then we should be able to see real gains as a result.
In the recent UAW contract ratification vote, the UAW leadership told its members that the contract was good enough and that we should be happy (any other workers on campus would be, they said) with the contract agreement that was reached. They want to avoid a strike because they are afraid that it will damage their working relationship with the UC, something that they have stated explicitly. The UAW utilized campus activism as a resource before the election and pushed for us to take certain actions in order to put pressure on the UC; however, they want to be able to prescribe limits to what we want in order to proscribe our actions. They see a limit to our demands and our expression of them. They see a strike as a threat. We see it as a beginning.
The UAW leadership essentially has said that they think that our demands are beyond possibility. Having a raise that keeps up with inflation is beyond possibility? If that is the case, then we should start to wonder what they are fighting for. We are the union and we decide what our goals are and when we have a contract that we’re satisfied. Our demands are not unreasonable. We refuse to let the union leadership tell us when we have achieved a win. The want to limit our expectations in advance, but we pay dues so that they will fight our battle for us, not tell us what we want. They’re concerned with making sure that they keep their jobs, and while we are sympathetic that they are in a hard position, it IS there job to fight for us when we want them to. Our position is in contradiction with the university, so why should we sympathise with them? They would pay us less if they could. There are no voices from UCOP telling the bargaining team that they have to be fair in negotiations.
Similarly, the UC wants to tell us that there are limits to acceptable protest and that we have to be reasonable. Of course they’re arguing for this; they want our actions to be benign. The latest round of absurd repression is proof that the UC is feeling our anger and it is for this reason that we have to keep the pressure up. We can’t get mired in liberal debates about what the acceptability of protest actions are, because by their very nature they are meant to put pressure on the university to meet our demands to change the configuration of power. They listen when we make them listen and not when we ‘speak reasonably’. When we fight together and in solidarity, we fight as a class and we have exercise power. No fight was ever won by sympathizing with the hand that holds the yoke.
Don’t let them prosecute our friends without a fight.
Don’t let the union tell us what a ‘fair’ contract is.
Don’t let the university tell us what the limits of protest are!
We decide our demands!
We refuse to accept limits on what we want that aren’t even justified with budget transparency!
NO UNION BUREAUCRACY! NO AUSTERITY! NO COPS ON CAMPUS! NO CUTS TO OUR WAGES OR THE ALREADY UNDERPAID WORKERS ON CAMPUSES!
DISARM UCPD! FIGHT LEGAL REPRESSION!
Soon there will be some commentary posted on recent actions at UC Berkeley, the Regents Meeting, the Press, and the UAW’s attempt to make us eat a shitty contract.
In the meantime, read this about the NO vote -
