Outstanding doc from inside Wheeler Hall by Brandon Jourdan and David Martinez:

And an update on last night’s UC Davis action:
Video of an early negotiation with a typical faux-sympathetic administrative snake at Mrak Hall, UC Davis:

The second Davis Occupation ended last night when administrators agreed on 5 student demands, including recommending charges dropped against the students arrested in the last week’s occupation, and not pursuing academic sanctions against those students.
Last time the administration decided to arrest all occupying students, this time the students left around 11 pm without a single arrest!
The administrators are running scared, UC! Keep up the momentum! Occupy again! Again and again!

Here’s administrator Janet Gong reading the agreement:

If she doesn’t seem too happy, it might be because she refused to meet these demands the day after the occupation in front of a ballroom of pissed students who attempted to reoccupy Mrak that night, but after this succesful action she was forced to give in!

Here’s a video of Janet Gong earlier in the night arguing the pigs she just called aren’t riot cops, they’re just armed with “tactical equipment” like tazers, batons, and shields!

More from the Davis Students’ blog: http://ouruniversity.wordpress.com/

In other news, there was another large student demo at UC Irvine this afternoon, and Université de Lausanne in Switzerland was occupied today!

(more photos from UCB by Andrew Stern)

From Student Activism:
Tomorrow is the one-week anniversary of the first University of California protests (and arrests) against the regents’ decision to impose huge new fees on the students of the system, and UC’s activists show no signs of letting up.

Today saw a rally and march on the main administration building at UC Irvine, and the first arrest of the week at that campus. It also saw a candlelight vigil — still ongoing — at UC Berkeley, in the wake of the news that the university will be investigating charges of excessive police force at protests there last week.

And at UC Davis, where 52 protesters were arrested in an occupation of administration building Mrak Hall last Thursday, students are hunkering down for the night at Mrak again. The Davis activists’ blog reports that between sixty and seventy students are in Mrak now, and they’ve “made a commitment to stay the night.” They’re dancing, they’ve ordered pizza, and they’re settling in to chat about demands.

Follow the Davis occupation on twitter.

From Democracy Now:

As UC Berkeley Investigates Police Brutality Against Students Protesting Fee Hikes, a Report From Inside the Takeover of Wheeler Hall

The University of California, Berkeley is investigating allegations of police brutality against students and workers protesting fee hikes and budget cuts last week. 40 students were arrested Friday night after campus police entered Wheeler Hall, which the students had taken over earlier in the day. The students were part of a statewide movement protesting the UC Board of Regents decision to raise tuition by 32 percent. Independent journalist Brandon Jourdan, who was embedded with the students inside the occupied building on Friday, files a report for Democracy Now!

Outraged by the eviction of the Wheeler Occupation and the police violence around Berkeley Friday, over 100 students seized UC Headquarters demanding to talk to UC President Mark Yudof.

With supporters and riot police massing some administrators apparently talked to the students for 2 hours, and the students left by the time the building closed.  This tweet indicates a very phoney sounding compromise on the part of a UC administrator. Nonetheless, action continues throughout California.

Follow this indymedia link for updates on Monday’s action and search these Hash Tags on Twitter: #UCStrike #OurUni #UCregents

AN OCCUPATION IS A VORTEX, NOT A PROTEST

via This is Our Emergency

on the end of the kerr hall occupation: from the occupants and the admin

* * *
A little less conversation, a little more action…

EVERY TIME a building has been occupied at UCSC, the administration has responded by moaning publicly (and into every @ucsc.edu mailbox) about the monetary costs of alleged damages, as if by beating this drum to insist we focus only on what is important to them – property – rather than the present and future of our lives or any other issues that are at stake here. We’ll admit it, we felt a cruel pleasure as the cables screamed and cried when they were parted from the conference room tables; the tables begged for mercy as we broke their legs, jumping up and down on them with malicious glee; and we could only chortle as the filing cabinets complained loudly that we had not had a 4-hour long democratic process before strapping them across doorways. We imagine that the same bureaucrats who normally use the building, and who piously denounce our acts of collective negation must feel a similar thrill as they ransack our futures.

Seriously, they should be glad we didn’t burn the fucker down.

For around 60 hours we seized control of the driver’s seat of UCSC, the main economic power and site of social reproduction in the local metropole. In the aftermath, heading towards another seven-day unit of capitalist commodity-time, we feel the deadening of our existence especially sharply in contrast to the fullness of hours spent behind barricades, fighting for our right to our own destinies. It’s clear that the momentum we are part of has grown by leaps and bounds and as the crisis ramifies, we are forming new bonds and new complicities. Young people confronting an absent future are finding each other, recognizing ourselves in others as far away as Greece and Vienna, as near as the streets of LA. We are getting a taste of the power we want and it feels amazing.

There are a number of aspects of the Kerr Hall event that we as participants would like to illuminate.

AN OCCUPATION IS A VORTEX, NOT A PROTEST. People will go on and on about their ideologies and what “we should do”, but consciousness is determined by one’s experiences, one’s material conditions. Most people have never experienced much besides the life of a docile subject within capital, endless spectacular reiterations of commodification. It was rarely talking that changed anything, but rather the moments we gave in to the seduction of the vortex of collective power and desubjectivization – the vortex which leads towards anarchy and communization. Politics as such can only be a barricade against this process. A number of things have happened in the past few days which would have been almost too ridiculous to expect, almost right up til the moment they happened (see below), and a number of individuals underwent transformations in terms of their consciousness, their orientation to struggle and their relations to others. The most potent moments were those of collective illegality and subversion, the becoming-powerful of a we that defies precise naming.

First, the storming of Kerr Hall on Thursday. The taking of administration buildings had been raised before and dismissed as pie-in-the-sky unrealistic. It was, for the small groups of people who planned and carried out the GSC and Humanities occupations. But those bold actions got the ball rolling in a way that began to have clear ramifications by the Science Library soft occupation and by the actions being carried out by comrades on campuses elsewhere. The storming of Kerr became possible because of the occupation of Kresge Town Hall in order to hold a general assembly – organizers had been charged $400 to hold one there previously. The logic of occupation became very clear to people in the sense that the school wanted to rip us off over having a place to talk about the fact that they’re ripping us off. And it turned out that most of the people in that room were down to occupy an administration building, immediately, so in a great raw burst of species-being, we did.

Second, that on Saturday night the occupation democratically decided to escalate the barricade tactic in response to the deceptive, manipulative, bad faith farce that the administration tried to pass off as a negotiation process. This came after a day in which the pacifist-liberal faction had been threatening to dominate utterly, through rambling, circular meetings about how “barricades will prevent the administration from negotiating with us” (even when the agenda item was the upcoming negotiation meetings) and so on; it came at the end of a long, bitter, stressful, and contentious evening meeting of about 150 occupiers falling in a spectrum ranging from almost evenly-matched liberal to radical camps, that most of us on the “ultra-left” had gone into expecting that the majority would want to either remove the barricades entirely, or send us off to barricade another floor. When the decision was (narrowly) made to make the space as tactically secure as possible, we were all a bit shocked: the democratic faction dissolved itself out of the occupation via its very insistence on democracy. (Reminds one a bit of the line about capitalists selling you the rope to hang them with.) There was an immediate and intense change of energy, much like the surge we’d felt on Thursday (or on Friday when the door to the Chancellor’s wing was taken down). All of a sudden, we were bumping Justice, we were dancing on tables, we were pulling on masks, pushing the heaviest pieces of furniture we could find to new homes chanting “This means war!” People who minutes earlier had been telling us that building more barricades was a violent and foolhardy act and they would leave if we did so suddenly felt that surge of collective power and realized they wanted it, and they stayed. And some of them started helping us move tables and thanked us for sticking to our guns.

Third, that at 6am there were around a hundred people outside the building who faced off with a huge force of riot police armed with chemical weapons, and stood their ground with linked arms. It was incredibly moving to see our friends and people we didn’t know on the other side of a plate glass window being steadily driven back underneath a hail of baton blows they were taking for our sake. There were faculty, parents and staff in the crowd as well (a professor was hospitalized).

Fourth, what happened when the fire department ripped off the doors and cut the barricades. The cops asked us to come outside to be arrested one at a time and we refused. They then offered us a written guarantee that if we left the building voluntarily through a side door within ten minutes, we wouldn’t be IDed, detained, or arrested. Instantly all the anti-barricade arguments were shown to have been completely meritless. We all realized more or less instantaneously that we had won as much as we were going to win and that there was no point in symbolic, sacrificial arrests. Again: the cops asked us to walk outside and let them arrest us, and when we said “no,” they just fucking let us go. This is in many ways a testament to the fact that the occupation enjoyed widespread support from faculty, staff, unions, students, community members and even some of the administrators. It completely blew our minds. We had all been sure that we were going to jail, and all of a sudden we were outside with our friends and allies, everyone hugging, crying and cheering, stunned, chanting “We’ll be back!” as we marched off to Kresge.

Fifth, another aspiration articulated earlier and dismissed as a pipe dream – the obtaining a permanent organizing space – has also been realized. The occupation of Kresge Town Hall nearly collapsed as the focus of energy moved to Kerr, but the Kresge provost is so supportive of the movement that he has offered to waive all fees for use of the space for General Assemblies or related activities.

* * *

NOTES ON BARRICADE ARCHITECTURE for the benefit of other aspiring radical interior decorators. Kerr Hall was an extremely difficult place to thoroughly lock down due to the great number of possible entry points; hence the occupation of only one floor. Most of the doors were secured using the “bold new method” as described in the imaginary committee’s occupation guide. This method was battle-tested for the first time at UCLA and UCB in the past few days. At Kerr’s north entrance, the barricade was effective enough to require the fire department to actually rip the doors off of the building. At the front, the barricade gear had not been set properly and it proved embarrassingly easy for them to pry open a door with a bar and cut the strap. This was because the push bars were secured by only one clamp each, and at least one of these was too close to the hinge (thus allowing give at the other side). Really these kinds of doors should have two clamps each, toward the opening side of the door. Everything needs to be cranked down as tight as possible.. And more to the point, those who have knowledge on these matters should be double-checking each other’s handiwork. We all need to become architects. If they had not been able to open that door so easily, they would have been put in the position of having to smash windows to get in. We might still be in there now; who knows. Also, we would like to re-emphasize the idea of using the burliest clamps and tie-downs available, and webbing to keep clamps in place frictively on pushbars. Some pushbars are flimsy and break under too much pressure. We re-affirm the importance of permeable doors and outside support, when possible.

* * *

OCCUPY THE CRISIS. Some criticism has been leveled from anarchist circles that the emerging student movement is a reformist movement, or that contrasted the statements issued from Kerr Hall with those from the GSC and Humanities. It’s true, there was a different rhetoric, a quite different tone, pace, and constituency of the events. There were way more people involved this time, a lot of them were liberals who occasionally went on awful power trips, and a lot of them were either tremendously radicalized by this or forced to clarify their narrow and normative positions. We only learn by doing.

We recognize that this struggle has limits. It’s true. This struggle is nothing on its own. So is any struggle, hence, the point of transcendence, the “swerve”. The concept of an “imaginary party”: there is no vanguard or formal organization at the helm; we are connected because it is evident that we are (as proletarianized and precarious). Actions do not ramify simply because of courteously patronizing attempts at “outreach” and bureaucratic coalition-building, but because they have consequences. TPTG, a group of Greek anti-state communists with whom some of us are in touch, observed in response to our early communiqués and the GSC occupation that demandlessnesss is usually not a starting point of struggles, but a point of transcendence that occurs when they reach critical and concrete frustration. When Bangladeshi garment workers who will never see their back wages riot and loot, they are entering the vortex. When French workers threaten to blow up the bankrupt Fabris factory, it’s not because there is an easier way out of it for the boss. It’s because the society of capital is in crisis. When young people, docile-capitalist-worker-subjects-in-training, confront the negation of their future via massive tuition hikes, whether in California, Greece, Austria, or Mexico, it’s not because that is a “single issue” that would be “good enough” to fight on its own, but because people begin where they are.

We have begun. Connections have formed between agitators across the state and the increasingly pissed off students, workers and student-workers who make up the educational system. We are not occupying anything as a protest, as a means to simply meet demands: we know now that they are also spaces to experiment with new forms of social relations and self-organization that could lead us beyond the utterly impoverished future on offer within this decaying social order. We also are increasingly confronting the fact that there is no point in demanding anything anyway; those who rule us cannot give us what we want; we have found it instead in each other. We are forming relationships and something like a force, something born out of many, many people’s resentment of the cheats and failures of everyday life in capitalism; born just as much from our experiences of the vortex of becoming powerful together, of sharing of our difficulties and of our needs. The result is a diffuse force which may continue to become more so as the crisis deepens. Remarkably few among us know the story of Mai 68 and how student struggles in a period of economic decline ramified into the greatest general strike in history, but we know it. And all of us are learning how to organize and struggle together, which is the only education worth fucking having, anyway.

Never be alone again…

* * *

more fine pictures from the occupation here

see here for further discussion of the communique from an absent future and the emerging position of students and their movements in the current crisis (and coming insurrection?)

there is a general assembly tomorrow night 8pm at kresge town hall

Via Indybay

At night on 19 Nov, approximately 75 (non)students from the New School, NYU, CUNY, and other university-factories in NYC marched from Washington to Union Squares and back in a gesture of solidarity with the wave of occupations that has swept the University of California system in response to the 32% tuition hike, budget cuts, and the reproduction of students as consumer-commodities ready to work for spectacle-subjects. The march saw crazy hooligans hanging banners off of buildings; masked rogues scattering trashcans, newspaper boxes and plastic barricades across Fifth Avenue; sexy dancing throughout the streets an attempted occupation of a Parsons art party as well as the good ol’ 65 5th ave. Unfortunately, the fun ended when cops managed to pierce the motley mob, arresting two after beating them on the sidewalk.

The two arrested were taken to the 6th Precint in the West Village, where much of the crowd ended up at the end of the night, dancing and singing out front, distributing pamphlets and glow sticks, and remaining until the two walked free.

The full Contextual Video is also available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly96pnN2KK0
The Short Video is also available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KPA3N7josQ

— Statement from one of the organiziers —-

On November 19th we marched in solidarity with the occupiers in California reclaiming their universities in Santa Cruz, UCLA, Fresno, and Davis. While students are generally considered privileged members of society many of us will graduate deeply in debt and forced to integrate into a culture more alienating and atomized then ever before. At the New School and NYU we occupied both to protest these conditions and to unleash the tactic of occupation in hopes that it will become generalized, spreading from the universities to the factories, homes facing eviction, forests to be clearcut, and anywhere space is being stolen from the commons.
Occupation is a particularly effective tactic because it is both historically venerated by liberals after its historical use in student and labor movements, and affirms the very un-liberal principles of hatred of authority and private property.
As we reclaim space authority reveals its usually hidden violent face. For taking whats ours: the streets, the schools, the factories, the land, we will be beaten, gassed, and incarcerated. In the face of cop beating a student we see the violence that underlies the normality of capitalist existence. When we expose this violence and resist it head on we learn to resist more effectively, to create an affinity amongst the dispossesed, to open spaces for action and meaningful politics, to shift the weapon of crisis from their hands to ours.

DEMAND NOTHING
OCCUPY EVERYTHING

indymedia link: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/11/21/18629843.php

Like Lost Children blog

“we seek to push the university struggle to its limits.”
-communique from an absent future

“there is nothing in the world of capital that compares to the feelings of comradery and power in the moments when it is only possible to speak of i-as-we.”
-politics is not a banana

this is not a rational discourse, only some brief reflections of an arrow in flight.

tonight around 200 people are occupying the largest administrative building at ucsc. the chancellor’s office is denied to him as education will be denied to thousands of youth in california, as the uc and csu approved 32% tuition hikes earlier today in so cal. (police were exceptionally violent at the ucla protest, where regents were trapped inside the building for a time. lots of pictures of them tasing and beating the fuck out of people. pigs also got pretty brutal at the solidarity demo in nyc and 45 people were arrested occupying an admin building at uc davis. the ucla occupation dissolved today due to threat of police attack.)

but wait how did this happen? weeks ago we said “don’t even bother talking about kerr hall, it’s a pipe dream”. the only way to make the impossible possible is by building action through action. today there was a general assembly at occupied kresge where 3-400 people decided “let’s go occupy something!” really, it was that simple. we marched around campus for about 20-30 minutes chanting. hahn and the bookstore were both on lockdown. then suddenly we were descending on kerr hall. they locked the doors inside as the swarm approached. we started runnning. someone finds an open window and a door is propped open from inside.

then there are 300 people running through kerr hall, chanting, screaming, pounding on the walls. such a tremendous feeling of collective-being. into the stairwell, but the doors are locked; someone hops in an elevator and then we are pouring up into the second floor, where the main entrance lobby and the chancellor’s office both are. HOLY FUCK! we just occupied kerr hall!! um… what do we do now?!

how easily it is done, and how difficult. not to over-dramatize what is happening here, but it immediately brings to mind, for instance, what we’ve heard about mai 68 from theorie communiste. once we make the insurrectionary rupture – then what?? how to organize, how to spread?

there are those who view our struggle as moral or philosophical rather than material or tactical. they are lost in abstractions. they think we all want “democracy” and “openness”, they think not in terms of communication but of appearance, and they feel that they have common ground with bureaucrats. well, let them have it. the strength of our movement, of our communization, if it takes strength, is in our material force and our ability to collectively impose what we want. not to dialogue democratically with those who own the means of our existence; not to recognize, acknowledge and thus reinforce their position but to render it irrelevant.

to push the university struggle to its limits. obviously, it has limits and we are bearing down on them. splits “within the movement” will be clarified (perhaps as brutally as at berkeley, where, again, a certain “section” literally took it upon itself to police the “rest of” the movement, as far as collaborating with the actual police). we’ll see.

the occupation at kerr hall compiled a very long list of demands. this happened because people with a megaphone decided that as soon as we had taken the floor the first thing to do was have a very long meeting where we decide on demands that we want to be satisfied before we would leave the building. demands are all well and good, there were many beautifully impossible demands issued. some of us however ditched this meeting because arguing about impossible demands is silly and pointless and most of all so if there is no occupation – ie no leverage to make them with. so we set about working on the practical details of inhabiting the space.

anyway, obviously the demands are ungrantable. a crisis period means that this will be more and more common, for instance, wage struggles in europe and asia, boss napping in france and riots in bangladesh and china… if there is nothing to pay them, there is just nothing to pay them. at this point it is only the police – the state – who enforce class belonging and prevent forceful communization via rioting and looting. this is the direction in which existing contradictions must currently be pushed.

there will be no business as usual tomorrow at kerr hall. there will be a union-organized rally at noon followed by an enrage-organized general assembly. the admin will begin threatening us that they need the building back on monday. instead of listening to their bullshit, we need to underline our demands. one of which was that school be canceled for a day; this could be monday. the admin obviously don’t know what to do about the fact that they keep losing control of parts of campus, other than wait it out. obviously this may change but we need to keep the initiative.

they also like to portray themselves as being “on our side”, against the cuts. this is a chance to demand that they PROVE IT instead of just talking out their asses like we know they do. they can take our side against the regents. or they can catalyze further struggle. or whatever. again, the point is we want them to become irrelevant. the point is we will hit our limits soon and have some choices to make.

anyway. two buildings are occupied right now. hella tight.

can’t stop, won’t stop. push the contradictions. escalate.

occupy the fucking shit out of everything.

Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley occupied this morning after unsuccessful occupation of Capital Projects yesterday. Police entered building at 6 am, pepper-spraying and beating occupiers. Most of the people remain barricaded on 2nd floor, holding strong. Police are threatening to use tear-gas. Close to 50 police in riot gear inside the building beating on the door. . .


This is what happens when one threatens the rule of property, making visible the nightsticks and pepper-spray which undergird everyday life. Get down here and help hold the building. Everything belongs to everyone

And so it spreads. . .

AntiCapital Projects

18 NOVEMBER 2009.

The University of California is occupied. It is occupied as is the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and the Technical Institute of Graz; as were the New School, Faculty of Humanities in Zagreb and the Athens Polytechnic. These are not the first; they will not be the last. Neither is this a student movement; echoing the factory occupations of Argentina and Chicago, immigrant workers occupy forty buildings in Paris, including the Centre Pompidou. There is still life inside capital’s museum.

We send our first greetings to each of these groups, in solidarity. We stand with everybody who finds themselves in a building today because they have chosen to be, because they have liberated it from its supposed owners — whether for the hint of freedom’s true taste, or out of desperate social and political necessity.

This declaration and this action begin with contempt for those who would use their powers to cordon off education, cordon off our shared world, those who would build “opportunity” on the backs of others who must inevitably be exploited. This is why it begins here in this building with its Capital Projects, its Real Estate Services, its obscenely named Office of Sustainability — it begins in the corridors of accumulation, the core of the logic that privileges buildings over people. But it also begins with love for those who would refuse such enclosures, who are committed to the deed rather than the petition, who are committed to deprivatization as an act. This antagonism cannot be negotiated out of existence. We make no demands but the most basic one: that our collective life shall admit no owner.

Whoever has watched the disease of privatization, precaritization, and financialization spread through the University of California will not fail to recognize it as the plague of neoliberalism insinuating itself into every corner of the globe, every minute of our lives. In the most recent revelation, we have discovered the obscene student fee increases are being used not for education but as collateral for credit operations and building projects. This is the Regents’ will. If bonds aren’t repaid, the fees — that is, our days and years of work, extending into an empty future — must be used for repayment.

There is a grotesque irony to this. Student fees are being securitized and repackaged exactly like the toxic assets that triggered the latest economic collapse. Four years ago it was subprime mortgages; now it is “subprime education,” as Ananya Roy says. The very strategies and schemes that bankrupted millions of lives, and that showed the bankruptcy of the economic sphere — it is to these that the university has turned for its salvation, even after such strategies failed spectacularly. The Regents reveal themselves not simply to be dishonest, venal, and indifferent; they are too stupid to learn the most basic lessons of recent history. Or perhaps this is their idea of solidarity: that all members of the university community (save them, of course) must join the nation and the world in its immiseration, must be battered equally by a nightmare economy built on real human lives. We say to them: if you summon forth such solidarity, do not be surprised when its power escapes you.

The arriving freshman is treated as a mortgage, and the fees are climbing. She is a future revenue stream, and the bills are growing. She is security for a debt she never chose, and the cost is staggering. Her works and days are already promised away to raise up buildings that may contribute nothing to her education, and that she may not be allowed to use — buildings in which others will work for less than a living wage, at peril of no wage at all. This is the truth of the lives of students, the lives of workers (often one and the same). This is the truth of the relation between them and the buildings of the university, in the eyes of the Regents and the Office of the President.

No building will be safe from occupation while this is the case. No capital project but the project to end capital. We call for further occupations, to pry our buildings and our lives from its grip. We call for a different university, and a different society in which this university is embedded. We call for a different relation between lives and buildings. We do so freely. We are the power.

http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com

anticapitalprojects@gmail.com

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Stories at NYC IMC / NYU News / New School Free Press / More photos

At night on 19 Nov., approximately 75 (non)students from the New School, NYU, CUNY, and other university-factories in NYC marched from Washington to Union Squares and back in a gesture of solidarity with the wave of occupations that has swept the University of California system in response to the 32% tuition hike, budget cuts, and the reproduction of students as consumer-commodities ready to work for spectacle-subjects. The march saw crazy hooligans hanging banners off of buildings; masked rogues scattering trashcans, newspaper boxes and plastic barricades across Fifth Avenue; sexy dancing throughout the streets an attempted occupation of a Parsons art party as well as the good ol’ 65 5th ave. Unfortunately, the fun ended when cops managed to pierce the motley mob, arresting two after beating them on the sidewalk. This was caught on film: watch here

The two arrested were taken to the 6th Precint in the West Village, where much of the crowd ended up at the end of the night, dancing and singing out front, distributing pamphlets and glow sticks, and remaining until the two walked free.

Until Next Time…

DEMAND NOTHING
OCCUPY EVERYTHING