THIS IS NOT A STUDENT STRIKE: No. 1

Block the fee increase and then after

Refuse the blindfolds that we’re offered

Translated by Jill Richards[1]

It would be unfortunate to see the strike only in terms of general assembly mandates, lists of demands, and plans of action, all proposed in due form. The “strategic considerations” often alluded to by the “specialists” of the student movement seem to us like blindfolds, there to make us follow a path drawn directly to the negotiating table with the government.  However, we don’t want to surrender so quickly. We want to let ourselves be immersed in what the strike “is,” beyond its function as a “means of pressure.” We want to wander towards the secondary routes, to get off the beaten track.

The strike is threatening because it short-circuits the rhythm of our everyday lives. It’s in this moment of rupture that we want to anchor ourselves. We want to take advantage of this political space we’ve created, in order to push the thinking about the struggle against student fee increases towards a much vaster horizon.  That is to say, we want to dig deep, to unearth the ideological foundations that underlie this umpteenth rise in fees, and focus on understanding the strike as something not exclusively about “student interests.”

Even though we are about to commit to more weeks of struggle, of anger, of rage and joy, let’s take a moment to reflect on the reasons pushing us to abandon the classrooms. Much of the rhetoric of the student movement focuses solely on the university and the increase in fees imposed by the government.  According to this discourse, we are engaging in a sectorial struggle offered to us by the student organizations in order to defend our status as university students. We refuse the separations orchestrated by the narrowness of a rhetoric incapable of perceiving the different causes of our everyday misery.

We cannot center our shared revolt solely around this question of student identity. We are total beings and, at some time or another, each of these separate spheres affects our life. We must not fall into a corporatist position incapable of understanding the complexity of our society.  We must not make the mistake of boxing in our multiple and constantly overlapping roles and identities. By avoiding the trap of corporatism, we avoid the trap that benefits the government, the rectors, the bosses, and the other owners.  By refusing this separation that has been imposed on us, we can also critique more broadly the world in which we live.

Understanding the rise in fees from an anti-capitalist perspective

The world economy is currently attempting to manage a financial crisis that it created. Throughout the world, it’s the poorest who pay the price. In Greece, it’s the austerity measures that are creating turmoil.  Elsewhere, it’s unemployment, or else the privatization of the commons that renders living standards precarious by depriving more and more people of fundamental rights and dignity.  In Canada, we are told that we needed to slave away two more years before we can retire. We too are living with austerity measures in Quebec, through the imposition of the “Tariff Revolution” that is part of a wider privatization of the commons, from the education sector to health care.

This fee increase is not the product of our government’s failing imagination – it’s one of the responses to the economic crisis in which we are living. The commodification of education, recommended by several international economic organizations, takes place on a global scale. Western countries must restructure their economies to produce merchandise that has a high “intellectual” content, since material production has been progressively displaced to the exploited countries of the global South. It’s according to the needs of the market that our student fees are rising, to the detriment of our needs. Therefore, it is against the needs of the market, against the capitalist imperatives, and against the imperialism of the international division, that the student struggle must fight.

We need to be the bearers of social change, and we must not just claim this change for ourselves. The strike we are going to bring about must set into motion a social opposition that throws off the corporatist shackles that come with our status as students. That is the project that we want to bring about, that this publication hopes to build, along with those that will follow.

It is crucial that the students extend the struggle to our society as a whole, and that we seek to rattle it, down to the foundations.

Next Edition:

*Down with Capitalism!

*Free tuition, but

inexpensive bananas

To End the Fog of Effects

How much longer will we fight against the fragmented effects, piece by piece, year after year, without putting our finger on the causes that hide behind them? Through fear of offending or frightening, are we going to keep ourselves from denouncing the wrongs, hiding our critiques in the cupboard? ? Under the blows of cuts regularly mete out across the decades, how to begin formulating what we want besides the guise of limited “reforms,” tinted with nostalgia?

Narrow struggle after narrow struggle, the laundry list of government attacks, one after the other, lengthens year after year:

* Increased costs of post-secondary education, due to rising tuition fees and incidental charges, beginning in the 1990s;

* Since 1996, an explosion of incidental fees for foreign students;

*After the pillage of the Axworth Reform (1994), the Legault Reform (2000), which chained the university budget to the logic of numbers;

*Shortening of student research budgets for the profit of private firms, as well as research centers subsidized through PPP, the Campus Ubis oft or programs called Club Med

*Repeated threats to abolish the Cégeps[2] or to drastically reduce the general curriculum;

* 103 million cut (2004-2005) accompanied by conservative reform of financial aid;

* Law on the governance of universities (2008), veritable equation to running a business;

*Accumulated cuts in the dozens of millions in the Cégeps, orchestrated with the intention of eventually instituting fees as high as those at the universities

*Standardization of diplomas though “quality assurance” (inspired by the Process of Bologne) with the goal of creating a world market and competition between universities based on the American model

*More private companies butting in on campus: exclusive contract with Pepsi Cola, advertisements in the bathrooms, fast-food restaurants, chain restaurant, and private cafeterias.

Even if we sometimes talk about the “right to education,” by criticizing the “commodification of education” and the “economy of knowledge,” it is rare that we manage to get out of this language of numbers that supposedly makes our critique acceptable in the eyes of some fictive “public opinion.” Even when we are only talking about education, we are hesitant to link different attacks to get to the root of the problem.

When asked to explain our struggle, we say that we are involved in a “strike against the rise in student fees,” even if we are convinced that it is reductive to describe it that way.  While the battle cries resounding in the general assemblies are otherwise engaging—the people talking about society, poverty, dependent children, and insurgency against this network of oppressions—our struggle remains trapped within the university, held back from joining other social struggles. This goes on as though education existed in a world by itself, without ties to other attacks carried out by the elite, on the backs of the working class.

We are tired of repeating, every seven years, this theater imposed on us from outside, in the form of defensive, corporatist struggles, almost always  ending with a sinister return to normal. The strike gives us an opening and through this opening, the realization that the world could be otherwise.

Let’s shake off the shackles of studenthood

By leaving the classrooms of our Cégeps and universities, we do not exile ourselves in a separate and idyllic sphere. First, there’s the precarious job that awaits us, where our boss regards us all as interchangeable pieces.  Devalued, precarious, alienated: there is no lack of words for defining our jobs in restaurants, retail, hospitals, call centers … Leaving work, we return to our neighborhoods where the price of our poorly maintained apartments has skyrocketed due to the building speculation of landlords. We are not the ones living in the condos.  Since our apartments are often poorly insulated, we are the first affected by the skyrocketing electricity costs, leaving us with an abrupt choice between poverty or cold.

With this return to the private sphere, we do not leave aside the relations of domination in society. In private, women are the first affected by the acceleration and the precarization of our lives; in effect, women will be the hardest hit by indebtedness, mostly because they often occupy the most precarious and poorly paid employment.

Another pitfall that threatens us is our tendency to criticize the obstacles baring the right to education solely at the university level. The reform of education at the primary and secondary levels participates in the same process of commodification of education, in which students are considered as a future workforce.  In this way, students failing several courses are invited by the school system to do “vocational training” in precarious forms of employment, so as to be initiated into the exploitation of the wage. At the middle school level, the process of commodification can be seen through the cuts of millions of government dollars. One begins to suspect that the latter will justify, in so many years, the imposition of scholarly fees for the Cégeps, to combat the under-financing created by the state itself.

Lesson in Respect

They tell us to respect the choices of others, to respect the liberty of others. But at what point does a choice become respectable? At what point does an act take for granted our own liberty?  From the moment when this particular act is registered, sanctioned as a right?

She tells me: “You have the right to make your choices, but not if they interfere with mine.” But her choices, and the choices of everyone else, don’t they interfere with my choice, my act, my will?

My act, my choice – she would like to reduce it to this: don’t go to class. And yet, when I’m on strike, the question I’m faced with is not about going to class or not. My choice, that’s to interfere with the normal course of things. It’s to interfere with the choices of the government that denies my choices.  And if this happens through a blockage of the university or of anything else that can harm it, I will do the best that I can to support it.  And she has just given me the lessons of democracy: that the decisions of a minister or of her boss are the choices of the people who elected them!

Her act. She would like to reduce it to this: go to class. Her choice, her right: to be able to cross the Champain Bridge “like the old days.” And yet, all this, her world, all of the conditions of possibility of her choices, also rest on a permanent balance of power, on an ability to take over, to take over a certain use of the world, of the city, of everything.

Private Property.  What has been and what is still necessary is violence and contempt—if that’s really the opposite of respect— to assert the value of private property and to respect the famous liberty that it makes possible. How many tricks have they used to convert everything into property, so as to be able to say afterward that all the transformations of urban space and semi-urban space, all the exploitation of “forest” space, and of the so-called Quebec “underground,” are the result of the freedom of choice? How many dirty blows have been necessary to guarantee that in all places, questions of use are solely the business of an owner and a buyer, of a landlord and a renter, or rather of a customer – that is to say, in all cases, of a legally  “entitled party”?

There is no choice whether to respect private property. No one ever asked us if we agreed.  It was never negotiated, never voted upon, but only justified, by the best and by the most asinine ideologues in history. So tell me. Why would I respect you? Because you have rights? Because we all have the right to be a landlord? Because everyone has the right to be a customer and to consume freely?

Freely …. To navigate from one property to another, without anyone asking us for any account besides the invoice. To have all things at your disposal without having to discuss their uses, their meanings, or how to relate to them. That there is your liberty: to be able to take possession of what you have the means to buy, and to renounce all the rest.  According to this, there wouldn’t even be respect for those with rights.

She talks to me about the bridge that we blocked. She says she respects our opinion, but that we do not respect hers. But crossing the Champlain Bridge twice a day to go live in a tranquil suburban house built freely on beautiful, arable land or ancient woods that were made to disappear, just as freely – that’s not an opinion. It’s a way of life.

Someone blocked you on the bridge. But haven’t you ever wondered what you were blocking, as many as you are, each time that you cross over in your big cars like a thirsty hoard, so convinced of its rights?

Then leave me alone with respect.  There is no liberty of choice.  There is war.

by Brian Whitener and Dan Nemser [1]

Editors Note: An earlier version of this text was delivered as a talk at the 2012 Edu-Factory conference, “The University is Ours!” which took place in Toronto, April 27-9.

During the 1990s, a rationalization of the workplace in American universities occurred, a process that critics described with terms like privatization, neoliberalization, financialization, and commericalization. By the late 1990s, however, the leading edge of this restructuring shifted from the university’s rationalization to its integration as a site of accumulation and investment in the circulatory system of capital. Notably, however, our discourse hasn’t changed, and today we continue to talk as if all that was happening in the university was the same process of rationalization. This is not to say that words like neoliberalization or privatization have nothing to tell us, but rather that, because the majority of gains were received from these changes by the end of the 90s, these words no longer capture the leading edge of change in universities today. Once adjunct labor makes up 70% of the university’s instructional workforce, for example, you can’t raise that percentage further without increasing the managerial workload of the 30% remaining tenure faculty. What we want to do here is to briefly outline the new insertion of the university into the reproductive circuits of capitalism.

The university is no longer primarily a site of production (of a national labor force or national culture) as it was in the 1970s and 80s, but has become primarily a site of capital investment and accumulation. The historical process through which this transformation was implemented is long and complicated, and we cannot give a detailed account of it here. Instead, we want to describe the general shape of this new model and the consequences it might have for political action in a university setting. We take as paradigmatic the case of the University of Michigan, where this model has been worked out in its most developed form and from which it is spreading across the United States, as university administrators across the country look to and emulate what they glowingly call the “Michigan model.” In this new university, instruction is secondary to ensuring the free flow of capital. Bodies in classrooms are important only to the extent that money continues to flow through the system. It is a university that in a global sense has ceased to be a university—its primary purpose is no longer education but circulation. This is the new logic of the university. If we want to fight it, we have to understand it.

There are two key mechanisms through which the university has been coupled into circulation—or, to be technical, coupled into the circulation of both productive capital and money capital. The first is the cycle of wealth transfer that moves federal dollars directly into corporate and bank coffers. Well-known examples of these processes include the TARP bailout program after the 2008 financial crisis and the system of military privatization, grants, and contracting firms built up by the Bush administration after 2001.[2] In the education sector, these programs of direct wealth transfer were localized most conspicuously in the (now defunct and much abused) Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP), wherein the federal government purchased loans originated in its name from private banks (the premium paid by the U.S. government on each loan was direct profit for the bank).[3] The federal funding of R&D at research universities works in the same way: by paying for the research that corporations would otherwise have to carry out for themselves, the federal government improves their profitability.[4] So does the government’s backing of 100% of the loan value of federal loans from 1998 to the present day, and private loans from 2005-2010, which makes these loans risk-free for banks and secondary investors (in the securities markets) and inspires predatory and excessively risky lending practices.[5]

The second mechanism, the emergence in the post-crisis context of capital over-accumulation—that is, a surplus of capital with no profitable investment outlet—has helped to transform universities into privileged sites of capital investment. Due to market conditions and credit availability, universities have been able to increase tuition without limit (for example, at the University of Michigan, tuition has gone up 297% since 1990), which in turn has driven up their credit ratings and made borrowing cheap for them.[6] As a result, banks, hedge funds, and institutional investors have begun investing heavily in and through universities, buying up construction and other bonds as well as student loans. In this way, some of the money that once was put into the faltering credit and mortgage markets has found a new home in the student loan and secondary student loan markets.

Through these mechanisms, the university has come to serve as a key site for capital accumulation and the investment of over-accumulated capital. This takes place primarily at four locations, which operate as sinks or pools for investment and accumulation: construction, endowments, loans, and R&D. Construction functions as a safe site of investment when profits are hard to find. Aggressive capital-raising campaigns for endowments by universities have served (on a smaller scale) the role that pension and large equity funds once did: namely, pooling together vast sums of money that people have accumulated as wages in order to make them available once again to the financial system. Student loans—which have now topped $1 trillion, surpassing credit card debt in total value—are a site for the investment of excess capital, in both direct loans and the secondary SLABS market. R&D, as mentioned above, transfers business expenses to the federal government by routing them through the university; the university then sells patented technologies back to the business, which in effect gets two transfers for the price of none.

Currently, the University of Michigan has four sources of revenue (in 2010 numbers): tuition generates $1,015 million (roughly $412 million of this in student loans); federal research money, approximately $1 billion (roughly half is appropriated by the university directly through the F&A program);[7] the endowment (which, after a vigorous capital raising campaign from 2000-2009 that generated $3.2 billion in new donations and gifts), sits at roughly $6.6 billion, but which only adds $253 million (in 2011) to operating revenues each year;[8] and, finally, funding from the state, totaling $315 million in 2010).[9] What is important here is not just that the state represents a tiny fraction of the university’s funding, but the degree to which there is a convergence between the university’s revenue and its insertion into the sphere of finance capital. From a revenue perspective, the university is completely dependent on the circulation and accumulation of capital in and through the institution.

All universities, public and private, small and large, research to teaching colleges, are moving toward this circulation model and beginning to aggressively chase these dollars, because the university’s integration into circulation is rarely partial. All of its components are mutually dependent—attracting R&D depends on having the best labs, which in turn depends on the ability to engage in new construction, which in turn depends on the credit rating, which in turn depends on the endowment and tuition hikes, which in turn depend on there being sufficient credit in credit markets for students to withdraw, which depends on having fancy, new buildings to attract rich out-of-state students paying marked up tuition.

When seen from the perspective of students and workers instead of capital, the race to integration sets in motion a series of destructive cycles. First, it leads to a sort of infrastructure arms race. As research universities pursue R&D dollars, they build bigger and more technologically advanced labs trying to lure faculty who are capable of landing federal grants. The same happens with on-campus housing and classrooms, as universities chase increasingly rich, fickle student-consumers who can afford to take out massive loans to pay for professional school or whose parents can pay exorbitant out-of-state tuitions. But these building booms are only possible because of the over-accumulation of capital in U.S. banks and financial institutions and the lack of more attractive investment options.[10] At the same time, these rich undergraduate and professional students are being chased after by admissions professionals because they and their families can potentially contribute to the endowment, which ends up shutting out poor, of color, and marginal students. Raising tuition to maintain the credit rating and the flow of capital generates an increasing dependence on rich students who can pay or students who are willing to take out massive loans to finance their education. And then the cycle starts all over again.

But this cycle cannot sustain itself forever—at the very least, it has weak points. Because it displaces in part the capital-labor relation inherent in production, the primacy of circulation creates new potential crises. Capital must pass through certain points, and at these chokepoints political pressure can be applied.[11] Thus, the new university suffers all of the same problems as any other just-in-time operation; namely, if the circulation of money ceases or is interrupted—even for a few days—the system is thrown into chaos (which might explain in part why some university administrations have been so quick to repress student protests over the last few years). The problem with attacking circulation is that it is frequently immaterial—there are no bars of gold in a bunker underneath the financial aid office. How would you attack an endowment? Where is the flow of student loans made material?

We want to suggest that a politics against the university of circulation has to engage in two tactics towards one strategic goal. First, make material the immaterial circuits of capital flow; and second, attack the weak links, the chokepoints in the system of circulation. Consider, for example, the strategy of occupation deployed in the California student struggles of 2009, which sought to register and interrupt the flow of capital into construction and away from instruction. The occupation strategy, however, was relatively unsuccessful in interrupting the flow of capital per se, since, after all, the bonds have already been sold long before construction begins. Another possible weak link in the chain of circulation is presented by student loans, especially since they are most often dispersed through a centralized office during a few days in the fall and winter. These offices could be made into critical points for blockage. If we are to combat the university of circulation, we have to invent new ways of materializing these immaterial flows in order to capture and make vulnerable the university’s sinks and pools.

Finally, this system of integration into circulation could only emerge with the rise of an administrative class educated in neoclassical forms of economics in U.S universities. To truly move beyond this situation, to the university we desire—a free, open university—we have to, as Foucault once said, cut off the head of the king. Only the removal of this administrative class and its replacement with a system of student-worker control will have the power to delink the university from the sphere of circulation and turn its considerable material and social capabilities to other ends.

Editors Note: An earlier version of this text was delivered as a talk at the 2012 Edu-Factory Conference, “The University is Ours!”, which took place in Toronto, April 27-29.

Throughout the student movements that have swept the globe since the crisis of 2008, students and allies have repeatedly claimed that cuts to education and tuition increases cannot happen because “This is Our University.” This prompts the follow up that we, as students and “the public,” must “Reclaim the University” from the greedy bankers and financial raiders that have taken it hostage since the 1970s. While it is true that these statements are slogans and rallying cries for organizing, a truly radical student movement must also assert that the institutions of higher education we mobilize around are not now and have never properly been ‘Our University.” Since the inception of formal education, its content and function have been determined by the economic and political conditions that foster and encourage its existence. Reform of the university comes with the transformation of those economic and political conditions. Historically, however, the formation of alternative institutions of education have played a crucial role in the transformation of these conditions and the reform of existing institutions along new lines. This can best be illustrated by a rapid jaunt through the development of the institution of the university

As the Roman empire fell apart and the Church rose to dominance in the 6th century, the Church developed rural monastery schools to train its future leaders and legal minds in knowledge of two “books” that shed light on human possibility: the Bible and Nature. Through the trivium – grammar, rhetoric and dialectic – the Bible could be studied, while the quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music – opened an understanding of Creation. These schools were adept at canon law. With the rise of trading cities in the 9th century, urban cathedral schools emerged to displace the monastery schools. Writing in The University, an Illustrated History, Mariano Peset notes that these cities were “settlements of merchants who won privileges and freedoms from monarchs and feudal lords for their dealings and travels, and were entitled to elect their city authorities.” The cathedral schools came to specialize in recent works devoted to canon and Roman civil law as the merchants, popes and civil leaders sought to define their relationships. The development of the university out of these cathedral schools in the 12th century was closely connected to the rise of scholasticism and systematic theology and grew in conjunction with Civil leaders’ attempts to carve out spaces of autonomy from the church. It arose as an attempt to codify and suss the contradictory rulings of various popes, assemblies, church councils and other leaders regarding rational faith and civic conduct. Through the arts, scholars and their various backers hoped to determine the relationships between earthly rulers of all sorts: churches, kingdoms and city leaders. Because of the knowledge that universities held – and their ability to train highly skilled legal and theological minds – cities craved their presence, though student strife made for an sometimes ambivalent reality. (For instance, Christopher Lucas writes that during the brutal repression of the Parisian student strike of 1229, King Henry III of England encouraged the Parisian university faculty and students to relocate to England.) University charters, further, guaranteed a high degree of autonomy from Church and city leaders, making it the one place beyond the control of the authorities – it was a zone where controversial ideas could be debated and discussed. They also ended the monopoly that the Church had maintained on the development and codification of knowledge during the monastery and cathedral school years.

During the Italian and Northern Renaissance, young scholars fled the universities as they saw little hope for true reform of methods and governance in these already established institutions. Forming academies devoted to the knowledge flooding in from Arabic scholars, these Humanists aligned themselves with princes and noblemen seeking to displace the power of the Pope and Holy Roman Emperor. Where scholasticism had developed to give order to a mess of laws, decrees and texts, the Humanist could only see poor translations, outdated formal requirements and allegiance to a passing system. Martin Luther, teaching at an academy in Wittenburg, initially urged the destruction of the universities, but soon saw the usefulness of founding new institutions – his academy became the first of the new Protest Universities in Northern Europe. By reorganizing knowledge and the sources used, Renaissance and Reformation thinkers saw that they could found new institutions that could supplant the older. Following the Counter-Reformation, which also formed new universities to deal specifically with the new threat, the existing universities were made to choose which side they would support. The University of Bologna, among others attempting to remain neutral, slid into mediocrity.

In the British colonies of North America, settlers themselves founded Harvard in 1636, using Cambridge as their model. In the 1670s, a commencement speaker claimed that without Harvard, “the ruling class would have been subjected to mechanics, cobblers, and tailors, the gentry would have been overwhelmed by lewd fellows of the baser sort, the sewage of Rome, the dregs of society which judgeth much from emotion, little from truth… Nor would we have rights, honors or magisterial ordinance worthy of preservation, but plebiscites, appeals to base passions, and revolutionary rumblings.”1 By the revolutionary War, nine colleges had been formed to create a ruling class, with Princeton and its adherence to the Scottish Enlightenment a crucial development, that were on the front lines of agitating for Republican education.

Higher education was organized for a “Public Trust” constructed around the core ideals: first of Puritanism, then the Great Awakening anchored by the Scottish Enlightenment and then Republican democracy. Through an education in Renaissance art and literature, as well as the Bible, Greek and Latin, it was assumed that the colleges would produce men, from all classes, who would lead the colonies in a proper comportment. A conservative reaction to student protest, which shook Princeton and William & Mary in particular, and the general freedom of the colleges at the turn of the 19th century led to a cutback in support from denominations and the arrival of several seminaries in which the old Puritan knowledge could be reanimated.

From the 1820s-1870s, the US entered into a prolonged period of experimentation and polemics regarding education. ‘We need Discipline and Piety’ (to use Laurence Veysey’s term). ‘We need openness and choice.’ ‘Students are adults;’ ‘students are children,’ ‘etc.’ The challenge fostered by the integration of German universities into the state, further, hastened the demise of the older forms of higher education. As the manufacturing and landlord class – the bourgeois owners of property - began to assert their hegemony, existing institutions implemented small reforms. Throughout New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin, however, several new institutions were founded that offered a rejection of the older Northeastern establishment, basing their curriculum on usefulness and science.

John William Draper, in arguing for the mission of NYU in 1835, laid out the new tone: “Mere literary acumen is becoming utterly powerless against profound scientific attainment.”2 He followed this by asking, “To what are the great advances of civilization for the last fifty years due – to literature or science? Which of the two is it that is shaping the thought of the world?” The Old Colleges disagreed, however. The Yale Report of 1828 offered their clearest statement: “The two great points to be gained in intellectual culture, are the discipline and the furniture of the mind; expanding its powers, and storing it with knowledge.” The mind, like the body, should be exercised daily. Knowledge to be taught should be that “best calculated to teach the art of fixing the attention, directing the train of thought, analyzing a subject… for investigation; following… the course of argument; balancing… evidence presented to the judgment; awakening, elevating and controlling the imagination… [and] rousing and guiding the powers of genius.”

Following the global recession of 1837, People had less money, needed family labor, and were not particularly interested in a classical education anymore. This only increased the fervor to found institutions: by the Civil War, there were more than 250 colleges and universities in the US. In 1850, the state of Ohio, with three million people, had more than 30 institutions. The country of England, meanwhile, with a population over 23 million, had four institutions for higher education.

In the Mid/West and South, especially, attacks on the old schools mounted: in 1858, the superintendent of California schools declared that the graduates of the old colleges were more or less useless individuals. A newspaper in Georgia declared that, “We are now living in a different age, an age of practical utility, one in which the State University does not, and cannot supply the demands of the state. The times require practical men, civil engineers, to take charge of public roads, railroads, mines, scientific agriculture.”3 Henry Tappan – a professor at NYU and soon to be president of the University of Michigan, declared that, “The commercial spirit of our country, and the many avenues of wealth which are opened before enterprise, create a distaste for study deeply inimical to education… The manufacturer, the merchant, and the gold-digger, will not pause in their career to gain intellectual accomplishments. While gaining knowledge, they are losing the opportunities to gain money.”4

According to the historian Laurence Veysey, by the 1870s, two dominant modes of instruction – Utility and Research – had relegated the Discipline & Piety model of education to the dustbin of history. While these emerged based on German models, the US was seeking something new: Edward Channing of Harvard told President Eliot that, “The question for us to consider is not whether the Harvard student is on a level with that of Berlin. The question before us is: ‘How can we give as many American boys as possible as good an education as possible’.”5 Part of that meant that the lower classes, to avoid revolution, should be given access to a utilitarian education. Utilitarian knowledge birthed applied sciences as well as the Social Sciences. Even in what becomes the Humanities, philosophy, literature and history were undergoing small revolutions as some faculty began to embrace research rather than idealism or right culture.

Utilitarian education was driven by the recently founded Midwestern schools that sought to distance themselves from the older elite universities and from some of the elite universities (especially Harvard) that sought to mitigate the rebelliousness of this attitude. Stanford President David Starr Jordan claimed in the 1890s that university education was moving “toward reality and practicality.”6 A professor at NYU in 1890 declared that, “The college has ceased to be a cloister and has become a workshop.” They were interested in the day to day realities of life: William James, at Harvard, claimed that this education was the, “the fighting side of life… the world in which men and women earn their bread and butter and live and die.” Not yet ready to compete with apprenticeship in training waged workers, the early strength of the schools was in the Social Sciences. According to Veysey, they saw in university training three ends: 1) each graduate would feel themselves obliged to civic virtue, 2) they would train national, state and municipal leaders in correct governing principles rather than of graft and corruption, and 3) replace community accountability with rational methods.

The other ideal for the university was disinterested Research. This ideal believed in non-utilitarian learning and investigation  - knowledge for its own sake. Basic Science: discovery of natural laws, through investigation. In 1894, a JM Barker summed up the difference between utilitarian and research driven visions of the university: “On the one hand, there is a demand that the work of our colleges should become higher and more theoretical and scholarly, and, on the other hand, the utilitarian opinion and ideal of the function of a college is that the work should be more progressive and practical. One class emphasizes the importance of… making ardent, methodical, and independent search after truth, irrespective of its application; the other believes that practice should go along with theory, and that the college should introduce the student into the practical methods of actual life.”7 The Graduate Program was the ideal for both models; their preferred method of training was the recently developed laboratory and seminar.

The third ideal of higher education, continuing to follow Veysey, that animate the university developed in the 1890s as a response to the loss of Culture with the influx of immigrants and to the degradation of knowledge implied by those money grubbing assholes in utility or worthless knowledge mongerers in Research. The social conservatives who built the modern Humanities sought to update the Discipline & Piety model to awaken a democratic aristocracy – echoing Max Weber’s reasoning for supporting the growth of the bureaucracy. Paul Shorey, of the University of Chicago, claimed precisely this: “There is one great society alone on earth, the noble living and the noble dead. That society is and always will be an aristocracy.”8 This ideology has always been a minority in the university and its advocates, often in the Humanities, have been better at attacking utilitarian and research oriented education with wit and sarcasm. They were able, however, to take advantage of a conservative reaction in the early 1900s to bring structure back to undergrad education – advocating for at least two years of general ed or survey courses before students were allowed specialization and curricular choice. Ideally they would have liked to have seen four undergrad years spent in liberal culture followed by specialization in grad school, but no one would have gone to school!

By 1920 (when enrollment numbers for the 18-24 age group begin to near 5%) the basic structure of US higher education had come to exist: an administrative apparatus devoted to building the institution through prestige, public relations and management/procurement of resources. A faculty more or less loosely aligned to one or a mix of the three educational ideals. And a student body increasingly attracted to the university by a job market that not only rewards those who bring social and professional skills, but has, with the arrival of unemployment in the 1880s, begun to punish those without marketable skills. The large public and private universities of today were essentially all in existence by this time and represented the ideal to which education aimed. Elite (and mediocre) Colleges, specializing in a liberal arts undergraduate training followed behind. Normal Schools, long the realm of teacher’s education, were to become state colleges – poor mirrors to the elite liberal college. There were 248 Junior Colleges by 1927, educating more than 45,000 students, a 10 fold increase in just 8 years.

Junior Colleges are important because they give an insight into access: President Lowell of Harvard found something wonderful in these schools – One of the “merits of these new institutions will be [the] keeping out of college, rather than leading into it, [of] young people who have no taste for higher education.”9 JC’s, then, operated as a mechanism for giving the appearance of democratic openness of education while giving limited vocational skills to the growing industrial work force.

Since the crisis of the 1970s, which saw the trimming of critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies and Gender Studies departments that had been forced into the university in the late 1960s, the legal and juridical framework governing the university has further shifted to enshrine market logics throughout higher education (for a critical breakdown, see Slaughter and Rhoades’ Academic Capitalism and the New Economy). The 1972 Higher Education Act, which made students into consumers of education, the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to patent knowledge produced in its hallowed halls, and University of Florida v KPB (1996), which saw the Florida Supreme Court uphold the university ownership of lectures given on university property are but three examples of a seismic shift in university activity – all of which has been dictated by the demands of neoliberal market dictums.

The “American Public University” – which should include private universities as a subset – is a fundamentally capitalist organization of knowledge and laborers that arose as the industrial capitalist class in the United States was coming to assert its hegemony over the US in the mid-19th century.  The “Public” that these universities helped call into being is now the Public “in crisis” – a Public now confronting the precarious life that has always haunted and sustained modern liberal capitalism. History teaches that universities, even before the modern era, act as a conservative influence – the inertia of their forms is such to dampen efforts to revolutionize them. It is through the founding of outside bodies that can apply pressure – in line with the development of knowledge associated with a rising class – that universities have had reform thrust upon them in the past. The modern public university is not, then, “Our University,” but rather the university of the capitalist class and must be met by both strong student and worker mobilization for resistance within as well as the formation of new bodies capable of physically and socially intervening into the property relations that constitute the neoliberal capitalist world.

Mark Paschal is a graduate student at UCSC; he is also on the editorial board of Viewpoint Magazine.

Notes :

1. Quoted from Brubacher and Rudy, Higher Education in Transition, 1997.

2. Quoted from Lucas, American Higher Education, 1996.

3. Quoted from Lucas, American Higher Education, 1996.

4. Quoted from Lucas, American Higher Education, 1996.

5. Quoted from Veysey, Emergence of the American University, 1965

6. Quoted from Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, 1965.

7. Quoted from Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, 1965.

8. Shorey, Representative Phi Beta Kappa Orations, 1915.

9. Quoted from Kemenetz, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, 2010.

by Amanda Armstrong

I want to talk some today about what’s been going on at California universities over the past couple of years, focusing particularly on the restructuring of educational institutions according to the imperatives of the financial services industry, and on recent student protests against these transformations. Along the way, I’m going to try and draw out some of the limits of university-based organizing in California, and to offer a few thoughts about what it might take for these limits to be worked through.

To begin though, I should say a little bit about social reproduction and enclosure – two concepts that will help to orient my subsequent discussion of university struggles.

The concept of social reproduction, which emerged as a central concept of Marxist feminist theory in the 1960s and 70s, references those practices, mostly mundane, that in some way maintain the underlying conditions of given social institutions and forms. The still largely gendered labors of domestic life, including cooking, cleaning, bearing children, and teaching kids to talk and listen, are all considered forms of social reproduction, especially insofar as they provide current and future wage earners, including the domestic worker herself, with the capacities necessary for work. In reproducing wage earners’ ability to work at no direct cost to management, unwaged domestic labor enables the reproduction of the exploitative wage system – a central component of capitalist society. The domestic sphere is not, however, the sole site through which labor power is, or historically has been, reproduced. Various state institutions have come to play a role in this process as well. Universities, for instance, now effectively train and stratify the workforcesrequired for contemporary labor processes. And many social service agencies seek to enable populations otherwise excluded from waged work to find and hold down jobs.

While pedagogical state institutions like public schools and clinics prepare people for waged work, more repressive state institutions such as courts and the police impose conditions that render work necessary for life. By sustaining regimes of ownership, by enforcing fees for basic necessities, and by breaking up squats and communal encampments, police forces, the courts, and other state bureaucracies enclose the material conditions of life, making it virtually impossible to reproduce ourselves and each other free of waged work. Acts of enclosure thus constitute a kind of negative mirror image of undercompensated reproductive labor. Like such labor, enclosures tend to take place at some remove from capital-intensive workplaces. And yet, both reproductive labor and the closing off of what we could hold in common help make waged work a central dimension and determinant of our lives, as well as the primary means by which social wealth is distributed.

The privatization of public universities in California since the 1980s – and particularly what we’ve seen in recent years, with severe tuition hikes, the expansion and financialization of student debt, and the partial replacement of community colleges with for-profit educational firms – has layered processes of enclosure and of social reproduction together in striking ways. What’s emerged is a situation in which universities both train, sift, and stratify future workers (thus maintaining their Fordist social reproductive function), while at the same time initiating students into years of future indebtedness, thus closing them off from the temporal substance of their present and future lives.

Higher education’s emergent role as debt factory is actually coming to overshadow, and reshape, its enduring role as training ground for future workers. This turn toward debt imposition is most starkly revealed in the ongoing displacement of community colleges by for-profit educational firms, which charge much higher tuitions, and often lie to prospective students to obscure their low placement rates and educational quality. The shift toward high cost, low quality education is consistent with, and has contributed to, broader economic transformations over the past forty years. Since the 1970s, the general rate of profit has remained low, structural unemployment has been severe, and financial and real estate speculation have offered those managing capital fragile but significant profits. In this context, the expansion and financialization of student debt ensures, for those who manage capital, that the time students spend in college continues to be generative of surplus value, even if – as is increasingly common – former students end up underemployed, or working in jobs for which whatever training they received in college is largely superfluous. Regardless of the work students find following college, and even if they don’t find much, their debt-financed education – as well as their financialized debt – continues to pay off, just not for them. And students can’t simply evacuate colleges and universities in order to avoid taking on debt, given the existence in most industries of exclusionary, credential-based hiring practices – practices that took shape alongside the expansion of higher education in the mid-twentieth century. Students thus constitute a massive reserve of potential debtors, who have little option but to pay whatever ends up being charged for their degree – their one-way ticket, however unreliable, to the crumbling world of waged work.

The turn toward debt-financed higher education in California, coupled with the erosion of child and elder care, public housing, and social welfare services, has also intensified the burden of unwaged domestic labor – a burden that still falls unevenly on women, and particularly on women of color. Student debt captures time that could otherwise be used for care work, among other activities, and captures income that could otherwise go to purchase increasingly privatized goods, such as child care or housing. Indebtedness thus exacerbates what are becoming unfulfillable burdens of domestic labor, particularly for women. Moreover, student debt is itself distributed unevenly in terms of gender: women take out heavier loans than men, anticipating that they’ll need to be better credentialed to compete for the same jobs. And, as noted in the Concordia Simone de Beauvoir Institute‘s statement on the Quebec student strike, because women continue to receive lower wages than men for the same work, it takes them longer to pay off the same amount of debt. University privatization, and the regime of indebtedness it helps set in place, is thus intensifying the stress and duration of unwaged domestic work, and in doing so is contributing to the devaluation of reproductive labor and to the reconstitution of the gendered double shift.

The increasing centrality of debt as a mechanism for reproducing labor discipline hasn’t resulted in the elimination of former modes of social reproduction, including higher education and unwaged domestic labor. Rather, the regime of indebtedness, in its ascendance, takes up these modes and remakes them according to its imperatives. It haunts existing sites of social reproduction, and, in Richard Dienst’s recent formulation, “sliver[s] up [these sites]” and “reconfigure[s them] from the outside” (122).

***

As a way to begin talking more concretely about university struggles in California, and to give some indication of how these struggles might counter regressive transformations in the sphere of social reproduction, I want to consider two seemingly minor details from recent strikes and occupations at UC Berkeley, where I work as a graduate student instructor. The first is connected to the occupation of Wheeler Hall in the fall of 2009, a critical moment in the initial wave of student anti-privatization protest in California. Following the UC Regents’ decision to raise fees by 32% that fall, forty-three of us barricaded ourselves inside the English Literature building on campus, on the final morning of an only partially observed campus strike. In reclaiming Wheeler Hall, we prevented classes from taking place inside, and sparked a lasting confrontation outside the building, where thousands of assembled students and workers maintained impassable picket lines and pressured police barricades, in an attempt to join those inside and to prevent us from being arrested and transported off campus. Throughout the day, people offered each other various forms of mutual aid; food was tossed through windows to occupiers inside, and expressions of care passed back and forth through the walls of Wheeler Hall. These acts offered glimpses of insurgent forms of social reproduction.

The detail from this day that I want to focus on is actually one of the stated demands of the occupation: namely, that the university extend its no-cost lease to the Rochdale student housing cooperative. For the past 30 years, the Rochdale cooperative has housed, at very low rent, about two hundred and fifty students, mostly working class students of color. But at the time of the Wheeler occupation, the university was considering charging the co-op for its lease, which would have significantly increased its members’ rents. Shortly after the occupation, the university conceded and renewed the no-cost lease. I’m interested though, in what can be gleaned from the fact that a group of students were at once barricading ourselves inside an academic building on campus, thus wresting it from the managerial control of university administrators, while simultaneously petitioning those same administrators to continue granting ourselves and others free access to another building? What might this seemingly contradictory gesture tell us about the limits of UC organizing in the fall of 2009, about the different temporal layers of our protests, and about the contested dynamics of social reproduction at this moment?

Before taking up these questions, I want to talk a bit about another small detail from recent campus uprisings in California – a detail that resonates in certain ways with the Rochdale demand. This past fall, in opposition to a proposed multi-year, 81% fee hike – which would have brought annual UC tuition to 22,000 dollars – students on various campuses staged a one-day walkout. At UC Berkeley, we held a large general assembly that day, and decided to set up a tent encampment. From the moment the first tent went up, we were met with police force; three times that day, students who linked arms around the small encampment were struck in the chest and stomach with batons, as police attempted to break through our lines and clear the tents. By the time the third raid of the day concluded, over two thousand students and occupiers from around the bay had gathered in the plaza, many of whom had seen videos of police violence from the afternoon. Those assembled that night held another general assembly, at which we decided to call a system-wide day of strike for the following week. The strike, which involved a campus-wide open university throughout much of the day, was larger and more-fully observed than any other action we’ve held at Berkeley over the past few years; it also helped set off a number of large-scale strikes and tent occupations on other campuses, most notably UC Davis. At an assembly on the evening of the strike day, we reestablished the encampment, which was able to persist for two nights before being raided once again.

While this wave of protest was successful in preventing the UC Regents from implementing any fee-hikes this year, it lost momentum fairly quickly. At Berkeley, after the final police raid, a combination of exhaustion, emergent fissures within the group, and the lingering effects of recent traumas prevented us from establishing another lasting encampment. A small group of students, many of whom hadn’t been involved before the walkout, maintained a constant presence on the steps of Sproul Hall for the final weeks of the semester; but, while those occupying the steps looked out for each other in powerful ways, sharing blankets and emotional support, the conditions of this occupation were fraught. As a result of steady police intervention, food preparation and some other daily tasks necessary for the reproduction of the encampment had to take place off-site. During this period, a single person, with a few rotating sous chefs, cooked dinners for fifty in her rented apartment at least three times a week. In this way, something like separate spheres of social life reemerged within the UC Berkeley occupation; and the gender and racial composition of those occupying each of these spheres mirrored broader, hegemonic divisons of labor and life – divisions which themselves are being intensified through new rounds of enclosure.

The detail that I want to focus on from this sequence is actually the single structure that the police allowed to remain beside Sproul Hall even after their last raid – a makeshift, drafty tent made of canvas, that had been stretched across a collection of sticks. On the side of this tent, someone had affixed a sign that read: “affordable student housing.” This sign, given its context, is strikingly ambiguous. On the one hand, it can be read as an ironic commentary on a demand frequently issued to the state, generally to limited effect (a demand that we also articulated in 2009 when we called for the renewal of the Rochdale lease). It’s possible to read the sign on the tent as subverting the force of the demand it reiterates: it seems implicitly to say, “While the state allows our rents to increase and foreclosures to force us from our homes, we will meet our need for free housing on our own, by occupying.” On the other hand though, given the context of relative defeat and demoralization for the student movement, the sign can be read as marking the reemergence of the petition or demand form, which presupposes the authority of the addressee, in this case the university administration. The shabbiness of the lone tent also evokes the reconsolidation at this moment of administrative authority over campus life. Not incidentally, the question of whether to formally present demands to the administration in conjunction with protest actions was, at this time, sharply dividing our assembly.

***

Recent ruptures in the ordering of time and space on campus have, at least in California, been frustratingly short-lived. Even when occupations have persisted for more than a day, they’ve lived more of a spectral existence, as they’ve generally not been able to maintain the conditions of broad-based, oppositional social life and reproduction, nor have they been able to displace, for more than fleeting moments, the authority of administrative bodies. This short-livedness of recent occupations reveals the degree to which student struggles in California have been restricted insofar as they haven’t involved indefinite strikes, and thus how much California has to learn from Quebec, Chile, and other sites. The fleetingness of acts of protest can also tell us something about how the emergent regime of student debt molds the times of our lives, and how it sets before us particular problems of organizing.

Debt carries a gravitational force, which draws students on into futures subordinated to its imperatives. Given that each semester of classes imposes another installment of loans, the longer a student stays in college, the more of her future she sacrifices. The debt-imposed imperative to rush to graduation leads students to take on burdensome, if not unfulfillable, course loads, giving them less time for organizing strikes, and other uneconomic activities. Even more consequentially, this imperative magnifies the toll of a semester- or year-long strike on the student herself. Striking for an entire semester seems to many students to be an immediately self-undermining act, given that, at least in California, they would still have to pay the university and take out loans for the duration of the strike, not to mention the fact that striking wouldn’t help them find work upon graduating. In The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James make a point about the effects of strikes in the domestic sphere that resonates with this problem: They argue that the role of the working class family in reproducing capitalist relations is particularly difficult to overcome, because the family is,

“the support of the worker, but as worker, and for that reason the support of capital. On this family depends the support of the class, the survival of the class – but at the woman’s expense against the class itself…. Like the trade union, the family protects the worker, but also ensures that he or she will never be anything but workers. And that is why the struggle of the woman of the working class against the family is crucial” (41).

What Dalla Costa and James indicate in this passage is that strikes in the sphere of social reproduction, while similar to ‘conventional’ labor strikes insofar as they directly counter exploitative forms of work discipline, appear different from such strikes in two crucial, and seemingly contradictory, respects – first, that they seem to directly undermine the survival of working class subjects, and second, that they carry with them the promise of liberating the working class from the requirement to labor in order to survive. If we translate this analysis into the university context (something that Dalla Costa and James also do, at times, in their essays), we can see certain resonances with the problem of the student strike under the regime of indebtedness.

Insofar as the university strike magnifies debt burdens, it directly intensifies the subordination of the student and of the domestic worker, and therefore of the class (even if it also has the potential to reduce the price of education for current and future students). And yet, partly because the strike raises the specter of this intensified subordination, it also calls out for solidarity strikes, including rent strikes and debt strikes, as well as lasting, autonomous forms of social life – forms through which the oppositional collectivities forged by the strike could be reproduced and opened up. Some such forms might include land occupations, where food could be cultivated and prepared, and where people could live free of rent; or free universities, where people could teach, learn, and potentially receive a degree (assuming this piece of paper still had any meaning), without being subjected to debt and overwork. While these are, to be sure, difficult projects with uncertain prospects, there are already moves being made in these directions in California. Just last week, for example, hundreds of occupy activists, including dozens of students, reclaimed an acre of land that UC Berkeley was planning to sell to Whole Foods and remade it into a small farm. As of now, as far as I know, the land occupation has not been raided, and has resulted in the planting of 15,000 new shoots. The wobbly rows of crops in which these shoots are nestled run right alongside a university housing complex, perhaps pointing the way toward futures a little less wrapped up in work and debt and all that….

On April 9th – 11th, we’re calling District Attorney Nancy O’Malley and asking that she drop the charges on the Sproul 13. Please join us! It only takes a few minutes…

Last November 9, UC Berkeley students, staff and faculty tried to set up a small encampment on campus, in solidarity with the then-burgeoning Occupy movement and in opposition to the ongoing privatization of the UC. Campus police and Alameda County Sheriffs viciously beat the students in order to stop the tents from going up. This incident, captured on videotape, sparked international outrage. Nonviolent protesters were dragged to the ground by the hair, hit over the head with batons, and sent to the hospital with broken ribs. The event was a scandal for the campus police and the administration, and the Chancellor eventually admitted that he took “full responsibility for [the] events” and offered amnesty under the campus code of conduct to everyone arrested that day. You can watch the videos of the events here:

Now, nearly four months after the fact, 13 people are being charged with misdemeanors for the events of November 9, even though most of them were never arrested. Their charges include obstruction of a thoroughfare, resisting arrest, battery on a peace officer and remaining at the scene of the riot. Conviction on these charges could bring, at worst, up to a year of jail time. Despite the Chancellor’s promise of amnesty, the UC Berkeley police forwarded cases to the DA, recommending charges for 12 students and one professor. What’s worse: the DA recently issued stay-away orders for 12 of the protesters, telling them they could only set foot on UC property for “lawful” purposes, such as attending class. After public pressure from government officials, the DA has rescinded these orders, but they remain evidence of the vindictive arrogance of the prosecutors.

The charges against the Sproul 13 set a troubling precedent. Students who protest the rising tuition and mounting indebtedness that follows in the wake of the privatization of the University should now fear that, at any time in the future, they might receive a letter in the mail, carrying with it the threat of jail. These unfounded charges have already produced strong responses at Berkeley and beyond. The faculty associations of Berkeley and Irvine have condemned the charges, and called on Chancellor Birgeneau to stand with them. The Graduate Assembly at Berkeley has called for the charges to be dropped, as has UAW 2865, the graduate student union. The Berkeley City Council passed a resolution calling for the charges to be dropped. And the ACLU has issued a letter putting the circumstances of the charges into question. This is, of course, in addition to the widespread outrage about the role of the police and the administration that day.

On April 9th – 11th, we’re calling the Alameda County DA’s office and telling her to listen to all of these groups and drop the charges against the Sproul 13. Please join us and tell her that no one should be charged following the shameful events on November 9.

If you have five minutes, also call Chancellor Birgeneau, and ask him to publicly call on DA Nancy O’Malley to drop the charges.

We believe that a wave of phone calls, at this moment, could prompt the DA to rescind all charges. Please help us by making a few calls this Monday through Wednesday.

District Attorney Nancy O’Malley’s phone #: 510.272.6222; (510) 268-7500; email: askwwm-da@acgov.org

Chancellor Birgeneau’s phone #: 510-642-7464; email: chancellor@berkeley.edu

THANATOPSIS

Here again just a few minutes to see
What we’ve done with what they let us have.
Like spring in Washington, D.C.
The way we’re taught to imagine days

As reprieves from other days, cherries snowing
Inexpressiveness, the nation’s capital
An experience of how it is to be
Caught up in pink and white again.

This year is somewhat different
In that there are very few days,
They have names like N9 and M1,
What they’ve let us do with what they can’t

Keep us from having, a stand your ground
Law to address weeks of solid rain,
The street that goes on where the way is closed
Responding to events as they spread

From each instance to the live rule
Requiring them like spring requires trees
To flower at points along their branches.
Today is M22, a private garden

And a public square, the path between them
Traced by daylight saving time
Over the freedom of George Zimmerman.
Like his ability to move in fantasy,

Certain days don’t stop but shed
New ends continuously, as though
In lifeworlds not defined by the clock
Of limited resources. Other days

Not yet here—a greater scarcity
Of water, the first of the new kind
Of arrests—already reach back
Through their inevitability

Into potentials of the present tense,
The stare of passersby as you make
A viewing party of yourself, shouting
Drop the charges stemming from N9

On the one hand, while on the other
Wanting Zimmerman in chains
Beyond the stance he’s chosen for himself.
Meanwhile the purple no one saw fall

Dotting the concrete outside my house
Like a pattern unpursued doesn’t seem
To leave the paulownia any barer,
It’s participant in day but temporarily

Immune. As the resources disappear
There will be several such readjustments
But will they be chosen or imposed? Probably
The latter then the former then both

Going on together like towers,
Working in tandem without looking up
To see what day it is or was
That they ruined time and we have it.

Geoffrey G. O’Brien is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

*

Event: Support the Sproul 13

In one of his most widely read essays, Louis Althusser made the famous remark that ideology and its subjects never run around saying “I am ideological!”[1] From the perspective of the interpellated subject, there is no such a thing as an “outside” to ideology—because ideology has already profoundly structured the subject’s sense of self-understanding. We’ll ask the reader to indulge us and allow us to paraphrase Althusser’s statement with respect to recent political development on UC campuses after yet another year of protests, police violence, administrative impunity, and repression of political activism: One of the defining peculiarities of state violence today is that it never runs around proclaiming “I am violent!”

In the context of the ongoing prosecutions of student activists and a faculty member who were brutalized on November 9,[2] let us revisit a recent civil court case, in which a former graduate student sued UCPD officer Brendan Tinney for breaking her finger at a large protest in support of the Wheeler Hall occupation on November 20, 2009. While silently watching the trial from the back of the courtroom, we learned a great deal. We witnessed how cops lie under oath with arrogance and impunity: we heard improbable accounts of students trying to snatch guns from cops and pull their batons—improbable because these incidents had never been reported up to that moment, even by the officers themselves. We saw—yet again—that the UC administration will spare no expense to crush its own graduates, teachers, students, scholars, and community members; that it will resort to grossly unethical practices and attack the integrity, dignity, and humanity of its own students, scholars, and workers; that, in blatant disrespect for its own professed “community standards,” it will engage in calculated humiliation and disrespect of those same members whose “outstanding academic achievements” it will then take credit for.

But we want to stay on point here, so we’ll focus on one fine yet significant detail from Officer Brendan Tinney’s and Sergeant Donald Jewell’s public testimonies. Why could these two police officers so easily claim, genuinely blind to the glaring contradictions, that what they did on November 20, 2009—by crushing the hand of a graduate student, by thrusting their batons into the stomachs, spleens, kidneys, and ribs of dozens of bare-bodied students in the vicinity of the incident—did not constitute an act of “violence”? How could they deny that their acts were violent?

One thing we learned from Officer Tinney’s public testimony is that police officers are trained to “separate out the injury from the reasonable force the police [have] to use.” In other words, in the mind of an officer who has undergone “proper training,” the causal relationship between the “force” used and the injury or death it causes, between the act of violence and the wounded, maimed, or dead body, is intentionally obscured. Their batons don’t injure bodies, they make “contact” with them. In the cryptic, sanitized language of crowd control policies and police training manuals, serious injury and even death are present simply as the collateral effect of maintaining “peace and order,” “health and safety”[3]; they are disembodied, bureaucratic facts that need to be filed away.

Further, the excess of violence (“force” in the idiom of contemporary policing) is never self-evident from the point of view of the police because ”force” is always the preemptive measure deployed against an imagined stable, ahistorical violent subject, projected onto concrete and diverse situations, humans, and realities. Shortly after November 9, 2011, the UC Berkeley Police Association published an open letter to the outraged public to explain their perspective and offer excuses (prefaced by a denial—“by no means are we interested in making excuses”).[4] Compared to 1964, the era of the Free Speech movement on campus, the letter states, “[o]ur society in 2011 has become an extremely more violent place to live and to protect. […] Disgruntled citizens in this day and age express their frustrations in far more violent ways—with knives, with guns and sometimes by killing innocent bystanders.”[5] Unlike the old days, in other words, the world today is a far more dangerous and unsafe place. This is a bizarre statement—the sense of threat could apply to any place and time; it reveals nothing but prejudice, verging on plain indoctrination. It gives us a genuine picture of the collective subjectivity of a “well-trained” cop, in whose imaginary an outbreak of violence is always imminent. So in response to students pitching tents and linking arms, the article continues, “[i]n the back of every police officer’s mind is this:  How can I control this incident so it does not escalate into a seriously violent, potentially life-threatening event for all involved?”[6]

For those of us who do not come from communities where police brutality is an everyday reality, it is worth repeating that the police are trained to “see” violence before it happens, and if it doesn’t happen—to invent it, to interpret every gesture with a prejudiced eye and imagine the aggressive, threatening, “violent” behavior. And then, to unleash a preemptive attack. Again, there is a long history of how many times police have murdered individuals because they have interpreted the gestures of their victims the wrong way. Such prejudice has long been racialized, exposing communities of color to chronic harassment, incarceration, and death. Currently, the state is engaged in promoting a new ahistorical stereotype of the “violent protester,” structured around a logic of prejudice, stigma, and exclusion—where violence against protestors appears a priori reasonable and justified. That the figure of the “violent protester” has become a trope in the liberal media and a target of condemnation in popular liberal discourse is a direct effect and continuation of the logic of the violent state, masqueraded behind the language of peace, order, and safety. We’ll continue this thought in another post.

In the immediate aftermath of November 9, 2011, Chancellor Birgeneau attempted to justify the brutality of the police by claiming that “linking arms is not non-violent.”[7] But the origin of this infamous claim—which Birgeneau reproduced uncritically—should be properly attributed to UCPD Captain Margo Bennet. According to Bennet, “[t]he individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence […] I understand that many students may not think that, but linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.”[8] This is also how shaking or holding a barricade, chanting “hold the line,” linking arms, refusing to leave, or even simply being trapped and having nowhere to go after being ordered to leave, becomes an act of violence. Bennet’s and Birgeneau’s dangerous leap of logic has now culminated in UCPD’s sinister tactic of using their legal right of access to the medical records of baton-injured students who sought treatment at the Tang Center, to identify them for the purpose of prosecuting them. It is a classic example of how the police have increasingly turned statutes and laws, initially aimed at protecting the victims from its assailants, against the victims themselves (charging Occupy Oakland activists with hate crimes or lynching is another recent example). Such use of the law was rightly called “perverse” by ACLU attorney Linda Lye.[9] It shows that the state is making a causal link between wounded bodies and violent perpetrators, resulting in a tautological configuration that turns the victim of police violence into a violent subject, into an aggressor, while at the same time victimizing the real perpetrator and erasing from the picture the actual agent of violence.

If, then, one asks what remains in the category of “non-violence” according to the rationality of the police, it is the absolute, uncritical obedience to their authority, especially when that authority violates the rights of the people or grossly abuses the means of violence and the power to incriminate—in short, “non-violence” according to the police means the uncritical compliance with the growing arbitrary power of the sovereign. This takes us to the somewhat self-evident point that the state has successfully instrumentalized and redefined the slippery term “violence” to repress and criminalize various forms of dissent against austerity measures, and to shrink and eliminate established spaces and practices of constitutionally protected forms of political expression. One may argue that, stripped of its legitimating rationality, this is the creeping logic of authoritarian power. And to a certain extent it is. But this is not the same as the classical expansion of the executive authority of the state, such as, for instance, this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, passed with a provision that allows for the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects on US land, including citizens, without trial. Much more insidiously, the police operate within the juridical regime of the liberal state, while using interpretive tactics to bend definitions of crime and expand their own power to incriminate dissenting subjects.

If we take into account these drastic shifts in the meaning of “violence,” a much less self-evident point emerges—that violence is a discursive rather than an ontological category. Even some of the most astute political thinkers and philosophers who have written extensively on the question of violence have treacherously presumed, or even argued for, the ontological nature of violence. But if we take violence as a discursive construct, we can see how it has become a crucial terrain upon which the state wages a war against political dissent. Currently, it is being pushed to the limits of the intelligible in order to accommodate the expanding authority of the state to prosecute and eliminate different forms of political resistance against deepening austerity.

Last November, a few days after videos of riot police beating Berkeley student protestors were blowing up on youtube, an article in the New York Times announced that UC-Berkeley’s Chancellor Robert Birgeneau had been travelling to establish a satellite campus within the intimate confines of Shanghai’s Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park. Because Birgeneau had been in Asia during the entirety of the week leading up to and following the events of that day, he had had very little to say about what was happening on his campus, with the exception of two extremely tin-eared and downright offensive emails. We knew he was out of town while campus police were brutalizing their campus, but that’s all we knew.

(photo via OccupyCal)

In retrospect, though, the chancellor’s junket is the perfect coincidence: he couldn’t have had anything to do with police violence against anti-privatization protesters because he was quite literally too busy advancing plans to privatize the university. But of course, police brutality and privatization are structurally interwoven: as anti-privatization protesters are fond of saying, behind every fee hike, a line of riot cops. “Privatization” describes the inexorable move away from any sort of education whose value can’t be immediately monetized, and so police violence reminds us that visions of public education which conflict with that of the administration will just as inexorably be suppressed by armed force, as surely as customers trying to break into a store after business hours.

As a closer look at the events around the November 9th strike reveal, moreover, the connection between the force meted out on student bodies on campus and long-developed plans to chart new directions for the university — in China and as an online university — are not simply conceptually related. The Chancellor’s physical absence from campus on Nov. 9^th and the way his place was quite literally taken by the physical violence of the police speaks to the very concret retreat from actual university space, what they call the “bricks and mortar” campus, that gives “privatization” a tangible form.

To understand what privatization is, let us look to the Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park, whose website describes its intention to “progressively replace the life cycle of traditional industries” as a way to “represent the revolutionary transformation trend of China’s economic development pattern.” In one sense, this is simply business-speak for the kind of state-run economic development such parks represent, replacing “traditional” industrial development. Yet this is also a rather stunningly literal statement: re-vamping the “life-cycle” of technological innovation also means absorbing as much of the entirety of the human life cycle into the contoured confines of the 25 square km Hi-Tech Park as possible; everything from government research, multi-national corporations, residential units for workers, eating spaces, a few well-regulated parks, and now, even education, are to be laid out into the neat grid of Zhangjiang’s campus.

(photo via)

Fiat Lux! The price tag for UC-Berkeley’s particular space in this nexus of governmental and corporate interests is $50 million for five years, which we are reassuringly told will all be paid in full by unspecified “private donations.” As the Dean of UC-Berkeley’s engineering school emphasized, that the program would pay for itself was the primary criteria: along with needing “to enrich students’ cultural experiences,” his two requirements were that it “be fully funded by external sources and create future resources for the UC engineering department.”

There is good reason to be at least a little skeptical about this projection; UC-Berkeley has a long history of coming up with its own funds – funds raised from skyrocketing student tuition – after promised donations fail to actually materialize. Yet as UC-Berkeley breaks new ground in refiguring the university as an ancillary project of multinational corporations, perhaps, rather than asking whether it will pay, we should question why new revenue streams are the only desirable outcomes the university seems capable of chasing.

In any case, while Birgeneau has said that the satellite campus will only house joint research projects, Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley, Jr. clearly envisioned a much broader range of possibilities while talking to the Daily Californian:

“We are exploring degree and non-degree teaching, executive education, and online teaching, as well as more traditional exchanges and research collaborations.”

Edley’s language sounds familiar to us, because he’s also been spearheading similarly “exploratory” plans to develop an online UC curriculum, one which will charge students UC tuition — currently close to $22,000 — to enroll in online classes, even though, as Wendy Brown has observed, comparable online programs typically anticipate a drop-out rate of up to 70%. But of course, that figure has nothing to do with the programs’ overall profitability: since students still pay for courses and programs they don’t complete, cyber campuses profits even when they don’t educate students. And despite vigorous opposition from the faculty senate, a pilot version of the online UC is currently in progress.The project is also going forward despite, it should be noted, the fact that Dean Edley utterly failed to raise the money he promised to raise to fund it: to make up the difference between the $7.5 million needed and the $750,000 raised, the university ended up springing for $6.9 million of the start-up costs. In the early stages of the project, Edley said he “should be shot” if he was unable to obtain millions in private funds for the project, a line many of us are recalling, now, with a certain zesty interest.

As a result, the brick-and-mortar campus languishes while Chancellor Birgeneau and Dean Edley chart a new agenda for the university by turning to for-profit online education and corporate tech parks as models for the future “space” of UC-Berkeley. And this is a transformative course: both the online UC and UC-Zhangjiang Tech Park jettison the arts, humanities and social sciences almost from before the very beginning. In the case of the online university, this streamlining comes as a result of a curriculum that only offers courses lending themselves to online format, typically ones that rely upon rote memorization. Biotech research initiatives that may turn into degree-granting programs focus on securing agreements with multinational corporations and Chinese national labs, but defer consideration of the programs’ educational mission until after research plans are well under way. As a result, both programs fit education to available technology and available funding (or funding that is promised to be available).

It should not surprise us, therefore, that plans to corporatize and technologize the university have been coupled with an accompanying disinvestment from and disinterest in the current space of the university. As a result, the coincidence of police brutality on the Berkeley campus and the chancellor’s trip abroad points to more than a series of logistical missteps on the part of an administration physically distanced from the university campus. It stems from a deep, structural lack of concern for the future of the current UC-Berkeley, both the campus itself and the students it serves.

It should not, therefore, surprise us too much that while police are paid to beat students in the name of “health and safety,” the university can’t even pay people to pick up trash on campus anymore:

(photo via the East Bay Expess)

As the article that photo is taken from explains, budget cuts to staff have meant that groundskeepers who were originally “hired as experienced gardeners, are now forced to spend most of their time picking up trash while the campus grounds fall further into hazardous disrepair”; far from “America’s Greenest Campus,” UCB won’t even spend money to recycle. But this is not austerity; when the university can come up with an unexpected $7 million for an online education that no one but Dean Edley seems to want, we are talking about priorities.

In the immediate aftermath of the police violence last November, it seemed like Chancellor Birgeneau was so busy re-imagining the space of the university that he simply ceded campus control to the police (albeit through a chain of administrative command so murky as to defy any kind of accountability). Certainly this is true, and certainly it is, in and of itself, fairly damning: in his now infamous email to the “campus community,” Birgeneau claimed ignorance of what had happened, that his trip to Shanghai gave him only “intermittent” updates on the situation unfolding on the Berkeley campus (sparking quite a lot of ironic commentary on internet malfunctions during a technology summit).

Thanks to a public records request by the ACLU, however, we now know that Birgeneau was being disingenuous:

Vice-Chancellor Breslauer wrote to the chancellor at 4:28 p.m. on Nov. 9, after the first skirmish, stating “Protesters locked arms to prevent police from getting to the tents. Police used batons to gain access to the tents. There are still 200-300 people gathered, watching, and, in some cases, screaming at the police…”

Within the hour, Chancellor Birgeneau wrote back: “This is really unfortunate. However, our policies are absolutely clear. Obviously this group want[ed] exactly such a confrontation.” Chancellor Birgeneau then wrote back again, at 5:36 p.m. Pacific time, approximately an hour after receiving the initial email, stating: “It is critical that we do not back down on our no encampment policy. Otherwise, we will end up in Quan land.”

Refuting the Chancellor’s face-saving excuses is not really the point; the ACLU’s efforts only confirm that the Chancellor’s long-standing policy of pre-approving and pre-praising any and all police actions is still in effect. But his emails do demonstrate quite clearly that a lack of information about what was happening was not the Chancellor’s problem; the problem was that he lacked interest. When the Vice-Chancellor informed him that “Police used batons to gain access to the tents,” he did not express concern for the manner in which these batons were “used,” nor did he request more information about what lies behind that word, “used.” He already knew everything he needed to know. “Obviously,” he pecks out on his blackberry, the people in tents got what they wanted, what they deserved, what was coming to them.

Having been very physically present that day and that night, I must confess that the word “obviously” sticks deep in my craw. On being told that campus police were beating student protesters with “batons,” the Chancellor regarded the motivations of the students as so transparent, and the police reaction so beyond question, that he does not request more information. The situation is, to him, “obvious.” And so he writes a blank check, one that would result in further police violence later that evening. This is, in my opinion, a profound and damning ethical failure on his part, and we should never forget that.

Others reacted differently. As Bob Hass, the former US poet laureate, recalled in the NY Times:

Earlier that day, a colleague had written to say that the campus police had moved in to take down the Occupy tents and that students had been “beaten viciously.” I didn’t believe it. In broad daylight? And without provocation? So when we heard that the police had returned, my wife, Brenda Hillman, and I hurried to the campus. I wanted to see what was going to happen and how the police behaved, and how the students behaved. If there was trouble, we wanted to be there to do what we could to protect the students.

What we didn’t know then, we now know: “the police had returned” because they got the order to do so from the administration: the Chancellor had re-iterated to his Vice-Chancellor that it was “critical that we do not back down on our no encampment policy.” And so, having been clearly directed to contoinue beating students until moral improved, the police came back, and continue beating the students and faculty members.

Here, we have another apposite coincidence: when university chancellor Robert Birgeneau heard that his students had been beaten, he asked for no details and ordered the beatings to continue; when poet and teacher Robert Hass heard that his students had been beaten, he went to see for himself, and then he put his body where it could do some good.

But I’m not interested in trying to judge Chancellor Birgeneau; his own words damn him more effectively than I need to. Instead, I’m interested in understanding why he was so removed, so distant, and so uninterested in doing anything but upholding a policy against tents (and at this point, it’s worth adding to the record the fact, which later came out, that the policy against tents was not originally meant to apply to students; the faculty members who formulated the policy were thinking only of non-student campers, as one of them recalled at a later faculty senate meeting).

The phrase “Quan land” provides part of the answer to the Chancellor’s certainty: in his mind, the worst case scenario was what Oakland Mayor Jean Quan had allowed to happen in the first few weeks of Occupy Oakland, where a group of occupiers gained a foothold precisely because the city had not used police violence, immediately, to enforce their policy. Now, of course, Jean Quan is better remembered for the police vilence she eventually authorized against Occupy Oakland, but for Birgeneau, apparently, the lesson of Mayor Quan was that more police force, sooner, was the way to handle things.

But I think the most important element is, simply, this: the relationship between fundraising and higher education has become a zero-sum game in which attention to one is predicated upon unapologetic neglect of the other. I am not suggesting that fundraising is an unconditional evil, of course; I’m grateful for the faculty and administrators who devote endless hours to grant writing and donor solicitation in an attempt to keep the university’s doors open. But I second Celeste Langan’s concern about an administration which directs its energy “toward seeking donations from entities that ought to be taxed,” especially when deep structural transformations in the university itself seem to precede even the existence of the revenue itself. To put it bluntly, our top administrators are not only allowing massive deals like the Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park – or the online education initiative – to determine the course of the university’s educational mission, but seem incapable or unwilling to imagine any other way forward.

For a truly disorienting sense of how removed the chancellor was from his own campus, compare these images of Sather Gate, which stands on the northern tip of Sproul Plaza:

(photo via UCBerkeleyNewsMedia, Occupy Cal)

To this imitation of the gate at the 2010 and 2011 “Berkeley Ball” in Shanghai  (sponsored by VeriSilicon Holdings Co., Ltd), a gala event that followed the Berkeley Biotech Forum where Birgeneau and company were last November:

(photos via Berkeley Club of Shanghai)

Sather Gate is an important piece of campus architecture. It once marked the entrance to the UC-Berkeley campus, and although the grounds were expanded to include Sproul Plaza in the 1960s, the archway still serves as a symbolic gateway to the heart of campus. Once upon a time, it was a campus tradition to block the gate, once a year, as a symbolic demonstration of the campuses autonomy from the community outside.

Let us note, then, that in the former image, protesting students are flooding through Sather Gate to fill Sproul Plaza with signs, bodies, and tents.  One student holds a sign spelling out recent tuition and fee increases (around $5000 in 2005, just over $22,000 in 2011). But in the latter photo, Sather Gate has morphed into a pseudo-proscenium, a background for photo-ops with potential investors, representing no more than the symbolic capital which Berkeley has become: less a place than a certificate. This “arch” opens onto nothing: it frames a projection screen, allowing external images to bounce back endlessly.

I wish that I had more information to share post about UC-Berkeley-Zhangjiang Tech Park.  In fact, I wish that any public source had information to share about such plans.  But the administration’s silence has been as telling as it is characteristic: side-stepping any public discussion around corporate partnerships, the administration chose instead to release a single two-paragraph announcement, the contents of which have been copied pretty much wholesale in all media outlets covering the story.

Turning to the images and language used to imagine the university might seem like a way to side-step more pressing questions such as: the university president’s refusal to relinquish emergency powers, never-ending fee hikes, and the devaluation of the arts and humanities, which just a few of the consequences of privatization. Dwelling on just a few of the proliferating photos and messages swirling around recent events, however, might just allow us to attend to the deep structure of the administration’s disregard for its academic community and the campus space which that community works each day to create.

When asked, for example, about what students might miss out on when they “go to class” at the computer screen in their bedrooms instead of on an actual campus, Dean Edley opined,  “What you won’t get? There won’t be beer bashes, yeah.” That’s right: college campuses are only good for keggers. If you shared my initial response to this statement – an inclination to forgive what must have been a misguided and altogether regrettable slip of the tongue – Edley has reiterated and defended his views on multiple occasions. And Dean Edley’s disregard for the current university is matched only by that of UC President Mark Yudoff who confided to the New York Times that “being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery.”

These are not just examples of administrative rhetoric at its most hyperbolic, or of “down-to-earth” men speaking off the cuff. This is who they are. The language we use to describe our world reflects our understanding of its contours, and of how we want to shape that world’s future. And so, to sum up: in Dean Edley’s words, the university campus is value-less ground; in President Yudoff’s, it’s a dead wasteland. These are precisely the sorts of imaginative de-populations of the university that underwrite Chancellor Birgeneau’s ability to describe UC-Berkeley students as “intruders” and then send in riot police to forcibly remove them. In the interests of “hygiene and safety,” administrative regulations aggressively and violently champion the banal, and in so doing, they actively foster the exact campus atmosphere which allows them to dismiss university culture as value-less – and so move towards privatizing it. The space of the university campus is not only good for nothing; the space must be rigorously protected so that it becomes good for nothing.

In the weeks after November 9th, the administration’s attempts to devalue the university and its campus campus reached even greater heights. Their responses to weeks of protest took shape not as discussion but as a recitation of campus policies and release of PR articles. My personal favorite was when, in a maddening display of solipsism, the Berkeley Graduate Division published a series which re-cast the recent protests and ensuing police brutality as an “extraordinary season” of activism on campus. Written entirely in the past tense, the articles “offer resources for understanding” a movement which was, in the view of the administration, a thing of the past. Photographic montages generate a visual corollary for this narrative, juxtaposing exuberant students holding signs with Robert Reich speaking to thousands on the Mario Savio Steps. Images of riot police beating of students and faculty, dragging professors by their hair, or arresting 40 people have, of course, been tastefully excised. In the final image, which occupies the bottom right corner of the screen, a man power-hoses the (now-empty) Mario Savio Steps. The occupation is over; health and safety has been restored. The students have been removed.

(photo via UCBerkeley News Center)

The first pamphlet, tentatively entitled Long Walks, is a project we began partly in anticipation and support of the upcoming march for public education that will begin in Berkeley and will end, a mere eighty miles away, on the capitol grounds in Sacramento.

Traversing great distances on foot has long been part of the tradition of popular resistance. Perhaps one thinks of Gandhi’s 241-mile journey across the Indian subcontinent, which he undertook in 1930 in opposition to the British Salt Tax. Or perhaps one thinks back to 1960, when about six hundred Americans participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights. The first time the Montgomery-bound protestors set out, they were met with billy clubs and tear gas. A second attempt was made, and after making their way across highway and mead, they arrived at the Alabama state capitol. More recently, protestors from Occupy Wall Street set out on a 230-mile walk from New York City to Washington DC. And last summer, a “walk to work” campaign was started in Uganda, as a way to demonstrate against rising fuel prices and poor living conditions.

Reclamations invites you to submit work that reflects on walking as a political and cultural practice. Artwork and/or short pieces of writing are welcome. For the latter, submissions should be somewhere in the vicinity of 1250 words.

Questions and topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

• How does the simple activity of putting one foot in front of the other become a form of political praxis?
• What might it mean to walk long distances, especially in a context in which walking is a mode of transport that many consider inefficient or outmoded?
• Walking as collective action
• Walking and the reclamation of public spaces, particularly the street, the highway
• Reflections on historical walks or marches
• The long walk as a response to the privatization of public education
• Commentary or analysis of the California walk in March
• Walking as slow-speed transit
• The political walk as it may resonate with other cultural practices, like the pilgrimage or the procession
• Walking as the crossing urban, suburban, and country spaces
• Walking in the context of other forms of political action, like the strike or the occupation
• What might distinguish the politically motivated walk from perambulation, itinerancy, the promenade, the idling of a wanderer?
• Walking as a form of labor
• Why walk?
• Walking-as-a-fuck-you-to-great-injustice
• Walk-onomics

Work received and accepted before February 27^th will be made available to those embarking on the four-day journey to Sacramento. Submissions will also be accepted through April 1, and all accepted contributions will be gathered and printed in the second edition of Long Walks.

Email submissions to reclamations@gmail.com. Other queries should be directed to michellety2@gmail.com.

Untitiled

— Puck Lo, Oakland, CA.

From the diffuse clouded sunlight, which looks and feels the same in January as it does in June, to the broken glass glinting on the sidewalks, downtown Oakland is as usual. The city barely skips a beat anymore during and after the now-normal political riots that clog otherwise empty, wide downtown thoroughfares, drawing relatively little attention from non-political passers-by beyond perfunctory updates on Twitter decrying the lack of parking due to #oo or contemplating the sometimes nearly monolithic young whiteness of these latest exhilarated, raging masses.

Since the diverted building takeover on Saturday and the police riot, kettling and violent mass-arrest of marchers outside the YMCA, interest in denouncing and trying once again to co-opt and control the unruly Occupy has returned with a vengeance. Recently dormant factions of the Bay Area’s Leftish communities and political intelligentsia, often genuinely well-intentioned, are issuing statements condemning so-called violence against buildings and other inanimate objects or taking issue with the insurrectionist strategy of facing off with police and antagonizing city officials. This unnamed Occupy strategy, coupled with the hyper-militarized state of Oakland’s police force, culminated on Saturday with some 400 arrests and hundreds of thousands in city dollars spent to terrorize the populace of our fiscally gutted, deeply unequal and gentrifying city.

Not surprisingly, every faction involved is staying on-message.

The cops blame the protesters. The Mayor blames the “fringe” protesters who are out of touch with and beyond the control of the non-profits who claim to represent authentic communities. Within activist communities, pacifists blame the rioters. Non-profits blame outside agitators.

And though I agree with their overall analysis, many of the same Occupy-ers and insurrectionists who seem to value above all else militant confrontation with the police (as much as someone unarmed can actually “confront” a heavily armed force who have state-sanctioned powers to kill) now act shocked that cops don’t follow the letter of the law, that even white kids from Cal can get arrested for walking down a street, and jail is not a good place.

Such “politicizing” experiences – manifested in moments like the almost festival-like solidarity vigil outside Santa Rita Jail on Sunday, replete with self-important individuals pacing officiously and the back-slapping camaraderie shared by those for whom jail is an rebellious, exotic adventure – only highlight some of the contradictions between the rhetoric and the reality in the 99% movement.

Let’s be clear: I can’t think of any social movement that has overthrown dictators, ousted exploitative corporations, or catalyzed its populace to build alternatives to a corrupt system that hasn’t engaged in one or more of the following militant tactics: building and land expropriations, illegality, strategic confrontation against police forces and other such militant tactics.

Are every one of those movements in other places and times are somehow savvier, more tightly coordinated, better trained than our own fractious masses in the here and now? Certainly not. Of course there is much we stand to learn from comrades who have been fighting and winning social struggles against austerity and budget cuts around the world. But should we wait until political leaders and organizations organize Occupy into a winning campaign that privileges unity, compromise and conventional forms of electoral power over the messy business of experimenting with utopian forms of direct democracy?
Hell, no.

Since its bizarre origins as an Adbusters brainchild, Occupy has seemed like an out-of-control bus with no driver behind the wheel, careening wildly and sideswiping political organizations, labor unions, wingnuts and everyone else. It inspired many in the world with calling the first General Strike in the US in decades. With reckless, visionary ambition and rather disingenuous co-optation it coordinated a multiple port shutdown on the West Coast. What it seems to have awakened in all of us, anarchists as well as Stalinists, is our own control-freaky desires to shape, manipulate, denounce, and take over this diffuse, wildly disagreeable, polymorphous beast in accordance with our own political ideals.

Perhaps the most hopeful and exciting thing about Occupy, manifested in its many camps spread nationwide, ironically, is in fact its disorderliness, its inability to even just be cohesive. It does not heed leaders or pander to conventional forms of political power. Refreshingly, in our time of professionalized revolution and pragmatic bargaining, Occupy refuses to officially represent.

Occupy wants to be seen as amorphous actions and multitudes, dynamic and changing, not as a fixed set of actors with definitive agendas. But as the months tick by in Oakland, such a characterization seems increasingly disingenuous.

Occupy’s most visible bullhorn-carriers, spokespeople and tireless organizers are recognizable to anyone familiar with the Bay Area anarchist/ insurrectionist scene. Undoubtedly, Occupy supporters will insist that its main players are not majority white and neither are the other Occupy adherents, but my only response is that one need only look at the protests themselves, or the photos that Occupy activists themselves post and redistribute.

Nationally, in the name of “the 99%,” what has become the Occupy mishmash of a movement comes closer than any other recent social movement in my lifetime to advancing an agenda to expropriate some of the collective resources that have been stolen from all of us and administratively controlled by the State. Yet simultaneously, Occupy Oakland nonchalantly appropriates from many of the communities of color who are absent from its meetings and who bear the brunt of the fall-out from Occupy’s insurrectionist strategy of constantly escalating confrontations against the police.

Occupy Oakland’s high-drama performances of protest bravado do beg the question: Does it matter who occupies land, who burns the flag, who storms city hall? Can we think about tactics and strategy separately from the actors who use them? In Oakland, are riots now a white thing? When white people riot in the name of people of color, is it still a white riot? Are meetings with the mayor doomed to be the authentic “grassroots people of color” approach?

Politics are always about, at its best and worst, power and representation.

The most exciting politics transform previously normalized and violent relationships, processes and systems from being invisible to being instead articulated, controlled by and accountable to the people who have the fewest social privileges. In short, people who hadn’t had any control over their own lives now do.

At its worst, politics consolidate power in the hands of a few who claim to represent the interests of others who are excluded or tokenized.

In our messy world of inequities and contradictions, blindsided by subjective experience and trauma, the reality is that the most radical of anti-authoritarian projects are very imperfect.

Occupy Oakland certainly is, and has been since the beginning.

I recall one quiet night there before the first police raid, when, with a mug of hot cocoa in hand, I sat with a friend on the concrete amphitheater steps with some forty others and watched a documentary about Iceland’s financial crisis. It was dorky; it was sweet; it was lovely. The air was still, the stars blazed warmly, and I felt an unusual sense of – dare I say it?– community. What had once been a lifeless, vacant space had been transformed into a free, welcoming public resource. We never finished the movie. A rumor about an imminent police raid cut the screening short, and many worried people packed up their tents and left.

Unfortunately, I remember far more nights at Occupy where my primary experience was gendered harassment – getting incessantly hollered at and followed in the plaza. One day a harasser followed me across the plaza and nearly halfway to my apartment building. When, weeks later, I encountered him again and demanded that he accompany me to a mediation tent, he refused while dozens of onlookers gawked blankly at me. One man approached me and told me that he was sorry that I was upset. Meanwhile, my harasser – a white, barefoot, dreadlocked hippie – walked back into the relative anonymity in a throng of tents, looking nervously behind him at the confrontation he had just successfully evaded. Sadly, gendered harassment at the encampment was the norm and not the exception among my friends and most other women and queers I’ve talked to. And while the actions of individual assholes cannot be blamed on a leaderless social experiment, the total lack of interest from most Occupy committees and individuals to acknowledge or address the problem in isolated incidents as well as on a systemic level was truly disappointing.

The brief romance between Occupy and many in my communities terminated abruptly in late December when a group of young local indigenous organizers asked Occupy Oakland to change its name from “Occupy” to “Decolonize” to respect the area’s history and Native activism. These organizers had recently organized a 108-day occupation and saved a burial site in a nearby city from destruction. They would have had much to contribute to the project in Oscar Grant plaza. But “Decolonize” was voted down. The Native activists from Oakland were accused of being divisive and irrelevant, and even of being undercover federal agents. While many perspectives exist and they do not fall neatly along raced lines, the experience was for me and others I know profoundly disheartening. Many people of color whose political work included an analysis of colonization stepped back from Occupy after this vote.

Of course, not all of those who were caught up in the police sweeps on Saturday young, white or privileged.

I spent my Saturday night answering the National Lawyer’s Guild hotline, hearing firsthand accounts from panicking people who were being surrounded and then tear-gassed by police outside the YMCA. They had been told to disperse only after they had been corralled. Included in the mix, along with many others, were the young women from Palestine Youth Movement who had been planning on bringing a proposal the following night to the Occupy Oakland General Assembly to support the movement to support Palestinian liberation by boycotting, divesting from and sanctioning Israeli corporations.

And of course jail is a bad place.

On Saturday I took calls from jail and heard about people bleeding from the head, and a woman whose hands had turned purple and swollen from her too-tight handcuffs. One of the lawyers at the Guild later characterized the mass arrests and the conditions of captivity over the weekend – the bruises, welts and blatant denial of prescription medications to those needing them – as “sadistic.”

On Sunday night, while hundreds who had been arrested the previous day still languished in jail, I sat on the cold stairs at the General Assembly. The crowd around me looked like who I’d expect to find at the bike messenger punk bar in San Francisco. When occasional lulls fell – when the facilitator paused, or when votes were being counted – individual men (always men, it seemed) would bellow, in chest-thumping pep rally fashion, “OCCUPY!!!”

“The system has got to die!!!” another male voice would scream. “Hella hella OCCUPY!!!” And the crowd roared its approval.

A small group with many of the usual suspects stepped up to propose that the General Assembly endorse a call to “Occupy May Day.” After narrating the constant refrain that “the whole world is watching Oakland,” the proposers read off a statement calling for a General Strike on May 1st in the tradition of celebrating the Haymarket martyrs and in solidarity with “immigrants, people of color, workers, queer and trans people.” It was once again a moment where the people named as recipients of solidarity were notably absent.

Ultimately, what I ask is this: What would the tactics of occupation, expropriation and redistribution look like if they were truly available to Oakland’s varied communities, who have specific and unique cultures and different historical trauma?

What if all the people who have been mistreated by police officers for the first time think about what it might be like if one couldn’t engage arrest and jailtime so flippantly, if indeed most of one’s daily life, mobility, identity and race was shaped by the ever-expanding nexus of administrative and judicial systems of control that make up the prison-industrial-complex? What if the project of “the 99%” centered those experiences in its vision for redistribution and justice? (Indeed, the National Occupy Day in Support of Prisoners on February 20th provides us an opportunity to make good on that potential.) Perhaps Occupy Oakland does not have the ability to change itself to meet all these needs I list above. It is likely Occupy Oakland and I want different things. I don’t wish it gone. On the contrary, I wish a similar encampment or project existed in every plaza, on every block, in every foreclosed home and abandoned building. I will continue to cautiously and critically support the movement inspired by Occupy as best as I can, and hope that over time there will be more such projects to support, some of which will truly speak to my communities and be more relevant to our lives. Occupy politics have done a lot to invigorate thousands of people across the world, and in Oakland, it seems to have imbued many (white men, it seems, in particular) with a sense of agency and urgency to engage and reshape the world into one that is – at least in name – more just. In the “mainstream,” Occupy Wall Street has changed what newspapers cover, and how economics is talked about. Occupy is to Debt what actions are to nouns. That is momentous. Thanks to Occupy Wall Street we can all get away with a little more when we’re fighting against the current in the straight world. For that we should be pleased. Here at home, I hope for the prospect that all of us decolonizers and revolutionaries and other sorts of militant dreamers, who are passionately excited about direct democracy and autonomous self-determination, might figure out how to engage in this moment and continue the work in our own lives, learning and adapting as we go. I hope we resist the bait that will be offered to us by politicians and leaders who want to turn us against radical and militant tactics, who will condemn building takeovers and blame Saturday’s police riot on the people who were gassed and arrested. I hope for those of us planning for the Occupy May Day General Strike we will prioritize and support direction from and respectfully collaborate with the multitude of women, men and students who left work and school to march down the streets of Fruitvale back on May 1st in 2006, sometimes risking joblessless and deportation to take a stand. I hope that Occupy’s horizontalist forms and utopian militancy might inspire us queers, migrants, people of color and other radicals to believe that our wildest dreams are political platforms, and to re-imagine a political landscape outside the paradigm of state power, the juridical impulse for legislative equality and faith in elected leaders.