Communiqué from an Absent Future — Further Discussion (Round One)

From the AKpress Blog:

I recently posted Research & Destroy’s Communiqué from an Absent Future on this blog. The manifesto, circulated during the recent University of California walkout, has been generating a lot of online discussion.

I thought it might be useful to try to continue that discussion in a more, uh, “organized” manner…one that would free it from the sort of tit-for-tat exchanges that happen in listserv debates and within the confines of blog/Facebook comment boxes (though, of course, I encourage comments to this post).

I talked to one of the Communiqué’s authors, and to Brian Holmes (who wrote, I thought, a very interesting response to the manifesto), and to folks involved with the New School occupation. Together, we came up with three questions, based on reservations about and critiques of the Communiqué we’d seen circulated online.

So, here’s how the discussion will happen:

Round One, below, will be three sets of responses to the questions we came up with: one a collective response from Research and Destroy, one a collective response from Dead Labor (the aforementioned New School occupiers), and an individual response from Brian Holmes (who is one of the organizers of the “Continental Drift Seminar”).

Round Two, which will be posted in a week or two, will be everyone’s responses to the first round of responses.

These are the three questions folks were asked to answer:

1) Whaddya mean the management class is being proletarianized!?! Isn’t this somehow an insult/misrecognition regarding the REAL proletariat?

2) Does addressing the university student as the potential revolutionary subject get us closer to revolution? How? How not?

3) What would a non-reformist goal for a university be, if one exists?

Let the games begin! [Oh, by the way, it's a long post. If you prefer a printable PDF, click here.]

Occupy the Crisis: The Emerging Student-Worker Direct Action Movement in California

A summary commissioned by the antioch rebel newspaper from a participant in the ucsc actions

On Sept. 24, thousands of students, faculty, and staff walked out of University of California campuses across the state. The walk-outs and one-day strike were called by a wide coalition of UC unions and activist groups as a largely symbolic protest against the budget cuts, fee hikes and firings associated with the state budget crisis. At two campuses, however, in Santa Cruz and Berkeley, some people then walked back in and began to initiate occupations. Administrators and activists alike were stunned that the logic of symbolic protest had been abandoned for concrete, insurrectionary activity. Occupation, a tactic which is mostly unfamiliar in the U.S., is widely generalized in many social struggles throughout the world, and points towards new dimensions of struggle and autonomous organization that are likely to prove particularly vital as the economic crisis continues and deepens.

WHAT IS AN OCCUPATION?

An occupation is a break in capitalist reality that occurs when people directly take control of a space, suspending its normal functions and animating it as a site of struggle and a weapon for autonomous power.

Occupations are a common part of student struggles in France, where for example in 2006 a massive youth movement against the CPE (a new law that would allow employers to fire first-time workers who had been employed for up to 2 years without cause) occupied high schools and universities and blockaded transit routes. In 1999, the National Autonomous University of Mexico City was occupied for close to a year to prevent tuition from being charged. Both of these struggles were successful. In Greece and Chile, long and determined student struggles have turned campuses into cop-free zones, which has in turn led to their use as vital organizing spaces for social movement involving other groups like undocumented migrants and indigenous people.

Occupations have not been seen much in the U.S. since the 1970s until 2008 when workers at the Republic Windows and Doors Factory in Chicago occupied the building and won back pay from the bank that foreclosed the factory. In following months, university students in New York City staged several occupations in resistance to the corporatization of their schools. It was this activity which inspired the students in Santa Cruz and Berkeley.

General strike and occupation of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

General strike and occupation of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna! Come down to squat and join the party!

Greetings form Austria: “We are right now blocking the biggest lecture hall at the university in vienna, austria, to protest against the cut backs on the budget for education and for free access to university for everyone! keep on fighting for free education for everyone!!!

Today, Tuesday 20.10.09 from 12.30

Occupation of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Schillerplatz 3
At 12pm a press conference is to be held in front of the Academy of Fine Arts,

Followed by a symbolic evacuation of the university, and finally the occupation of the Academy.
Join us, take your friends and sleeping bags with you!

There’s food, music and ideas for further self organised programs.
The plan is to use the coming days in order to establish an increased number of protest measures!
No study fees for nobody!

Free education for ALL!

A CALL TO REVOLT

The glass walls of passivity, separating us from one another, can only be shattered with revolt. We are occupying a second building on the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California because we have answered the call of the first to occupy everything. Tonight is a demonstration to students and workers everywhere that the division between taking what you want and planning for a movement to come only appears as a problem for abstract thought about taking action. We only catch sight of the fires of the insurrection to come on the morning after the unrest of the night before.

A Plea from the Undead

From Occupy California:

PLEASE TAKE THE BELOW STATEMENT AND READ IT TO YOUR CLASSES

From the graveyard of history comes a plea from the undead… BE REALISTIC, DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE!!!

I sincerely hope that all of you know about the walkout and the student occupation that took place the whole first week of school. The struggle continues, and this message is brought to you by those students who were a part of the occupation as well as those who have joined them in their fight.

One of the most bewildering observations made from the inside of these events, especially the student occupation, was the realization of how symbolically important they were for activists all around the world- within hours a solidarity rally was held in Union Square in New York; letters of solidarity have come groups from all over California, all over the US, as well from as far away as South Africa, Croatia, the UK, Greece, and Italy; The UK Guardian ran an editorial several days ago on the emergence of new student movements that began its story with the UCSC occupation- and here, right in front of us, how unimportant they were for those who passed by and read our banners, looking upon us as if we were no different than some student group in the quad advertising our fraternity of sorority.

New School Releases Stupid Report on April 10th Occupation

New School administrative chumps release their version of events of the reoccupation of 65 5th ave on April 10th, 2009.

Download Report here

Highlights:

• One banner read “April Fools, motherfucker.”  Because the Occupation was on April 10, it is not clear what this banner was intended to suggest.

• The officer called on police Hazmat units to contain the trash can and the area around it, which was dyed red.

• In the period between approximately 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m., members of the occupying party, wearing hoods and masks, began appearing on the roof for different intervals of time.  Reports indicate that during these intervals the occupants read a list of complaints regarding the University as well as manifestos criticizing the capitalist system.

Communiqué from an Absent Future

From the University of California Santa Cruz occupation: WeWantEverything |  pdf

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt.  This bankruptcy is not only financial.  It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making.  No one knows what the university is for anymore.  We feel this intuitively.  Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market.  These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university.  Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties.  We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments.  Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt.  The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.

New School Solidarity Statement with UC Santa Cruz

To the occupiers of UCSC,

We fellow workers and students from New York City stand in solidarity with those at UC Santa Cruz who have occupied their university against the cuts and austerity measures forced on them by capital and its bureaucrats.

Public services are some of the first gains to be rescinded when capital desperately thrashes out in an effort to valorize itself. As workers have been crowded out of their jobs, and as the failure of various financial machinations to alleviate this crisis has become clear, more have been heading back to school.  They have been burying their heads under even more debt with the hope of riding out the job scarcity and making themselves more attractive to employers.

As California’s universities reduce their enrollment by tens of thousands and simultaneously increase student fees and tuition, they are giving us a clear message: there is no escape from this turbulence.

So lets meet it head on.

UC Santa Cruz Occupied!

http://occupyca.wordpress.com/

http://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/communique-from-an-absent-future/

We seek to push the university struggle to its limits.
Though we denounce the privatization of the university and its authoritarian system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms.  We demand not a free university but a free society.  A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life. Instead we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into a declaration of war.

Destroy the University

by André Gorz 1970

• The university cannot function, and we must thus prevent it from functioning so that this impossibility is made manifest. No reform of any kind can render this institution viable. We must thus combat reforms, in their effects and in their conception, not because they are dangerous, but because they are illusory. The crisis of the institution of the university goes beyond (as we will show) the realm of the university and involves the social and technical division of labor as a whole. And so, this crisis must come to a head.

All Your Waste are Belong to Us

Summer has terminated.  We hope you enjoyed your break.  Much of ours was spent advising the Obama team on all and sundry issues.

No we cannot.  We already did.

The Free Press and other publications on campus are running retrospectives of last year’s tumult between the student-commodities and the presidential one.  We read these with utter delight.  There is no better way to commemorate an uprising than by obliterating its force.  All uprisings have failed, so it is therefore appropriate to maintain their impotence with the most impotent instrument of them all: the pen.

Students, faculty and management have returned to their respective sectors. Hopefully all future communication between them will be restricted to the most banal circumstances. In the halls and in class, some whisper that all there is left to do is to annihilate the commodity, laughing.

New School Disorientation Guide RELEASED

Download the New School Disorientation Guide:

FOR PRINTING

FOR READING

The campus has been dead for months now, it yearns for the hustle of students running late to class, meeting each other in the courtyard and recanting their nights, marching angrily or partying in the streets. During the summer the administration had the time and space to put everything back in its right place: sandblasting graffiti, installing a Starbucks, closing the 65 5th Avenue building for good, prosecuting and fining rebellious students, sweeping up the broken glass and letting the pepper spray disperse in the air. For the University administrators, the last two semesters were a nightmare, but they are hopeful that with Kerrey’s announcement that he will resign in 2011 (which effectively fooled many into thinking he had already resigned) that the action on campus will calm down. Students will return to focusing on trivial “quality of life” issues such as “greening” the campus and getting more organic food into the cafeteria, so the New School’s return to radicalism will finally come to the end.

What they didn’t count on is the incoming student body actually knowing what they are entering: a war-zone.  . . .