Cali: March 4th Second March and Oakland Freeway Takeover

From Berkeley Liberation Radio.

Following Thursday, March 4th’s Berkeley to Oakland march and rally at Frank Ogawa Plaza for the statewide strike and day of action against budget cuts, layoffs and furloughs to public education, a second march commenced. 200-250 students, educators, and activists marched from the close of the rally to the exterior of Mark Yudof’s office for a street dance party. The group then made their way toward the I-880 freeway, where 150-200 elected to enter on foot to shut down traffic.

All traffic slowed to a stop, and no individuals were in in any danger of being struck by automobiles. The riot police pursued them as they hopped over barriers in an attempt to make their way to the Jackson street off-ramp. As police closed in, most of the group sat down in anticipation of being arrested.

The police were violent with many of the protesters, using excessive force with their riot batons. None of the arrested were reported to be carrying weapons of any kind, and none were attempting to attack any of the officers. The police shut down the freeway in both directions, handcuffed and escorted the marchers to the Jackson street offramp where police busses slowly arrived to take the prisoners to North County and Sana Rita Jail facilities.

155 individuals were reported to have been arrested, in addition to some minors who were released into the custody of their parents. Francois Zimany was taken to the hospital after either falling, jumping, or being pushed by police off of the freeway, and is now at home with his family. The group was held over night, and released periodically throughout the day on Friday.

You can learn more by visiting indybay.org. All photos were taken by BLR DJ Paisley Cuttlefish who was among those arrested. She sustained a bad fracture to her elbow after being hit with a police baton.

MARCH 4th SCHEDULE

TAKE THE CITY

Rally at Gov. Paterson’s Office, 4 pm

(633 Third Ave. @ 41st St.)

Then March to the MTA Hearings at FIT

(Seventh Ave. @ 27th St.)

Facebook event page

• Stop the school closings and privatization of public education
• Stop the cuts to K-12 and higher education
• Restore the free student MetroCard
• Full funding for all educational needs
• Education is a right – Free, high-quality education for all

Economic Riots in Greece

A striking taxi owner protests on Monday

Libcom – State of war” declared by Greek PM

The greek PM, Giorgos Papandreou, has declared the country in “a state of war” after extended meetings with the EU economics commissioner Mr Rehn, leading workers to declare more strikes.

Video: dance parties, smashed windows, ghost ridin’, burning dumpsters, whining liberals, and police lines in Berkeley

Yesterday the dumpsters, Tomorrow the world: UC Irvine

occupy uci

UCI is NOT a state of anarchy!” – UCI Political Science Department Chair Mark Petracca, to Muslim students disrupting Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s talk 2 weeks ago.

Well, Mr. Petracca, we’ve tried it your way, it’s time for ours!

A curious thing happened yesterday at the University of California Irvine: for several hours, the campus descended into a state of anarchy.

At 9:30am, 14 students and 3 AFSCME 3299 representatives began a sit-in outside Chancellor Michael Drake’s office.  The police were caught completely flat-footed, and it was only because a police officer saw the crowd and rushed to the 5th floor to lock Drake’s door that the students didn’t get inside.  A list of demands was issued, and while there has already been much debate and discussion about the demands, we have no interest in dissecting the demands–the fact that these issues are even being talked about is sufficient.  Police seemed unprepared to deal with the sit-in; really, nothing like this has happened in years on our quiet Stepford-esque campus.  After nearly an hour, police finally made the move to arrest the protesters.

Occupy Boston

occupyboston

As “youth,” there is no future presently worth working or studying for. We study in hopes of getting jobs, even while lost in the mazes of precarity. We work in hopes to make enough to live, despite the guarantee of needing to work for the rest of our lives.

As “adults,” we face the same problems. We work forever in order to give our children the chances of getting their own job upon graduating. This of course is for the “lucky” ones with parents able to help out.

The present future offers us nothing other than the uncertainty of whether we are able to continue to live; we are left worrying about food and money. The only assurance we have in the present future is uncertainty. The uncertainty of whether we are able to complete college. The uncertainty of getting a job after graduating. The uncertainty of having enough food to feed ourselves. The uncertainty of living life. Only these uncertainties are for certain.

Yet, in these uncertainties is also the assurance for the need of a new world. In order to break the illusion of this future that is laid out before us we must to take matters into our own hands. To break the illusion, we must take what we need. No more asking politely. We are to take and appropriate. We are to occupy and live.

March 4^th is not just a National Day of Action to Defend Education. It is also the National Day of Action to Stop Police Brutality. It is also the National Day of Action Against Capitalism. It is also the National Day of Action to Fight for Our Lives: To Fight for Our Futures.

We are with you California and New York and everyone else (you know who you are).

Occupy Everything for Everyone

See you March 4th

-occupyboston

7-Day Weekend

Issue 1 of 7-Day Weekend, UCSC endless occupation

contents:

– Introduction: This is your life
– Students vs. prisoners?
– Occupation in Mexico, 1999-2000
– Too few jobs for too many people
– A message to the faculty
– The last remaining reason
– Kerr Hall: A personal reflection
– News briefs and upcoming events at UCSC

Communiqués from the Valley

A new pamphlet compiled by the Modesto Anarcho Crew entitled “Communiqués from the Valley: Love letters from the emerging Student-Worker movement in California’s Central Valley.”

A Torchlit Evening with Birgeneau

“Everybody throw your lighters up, tell me y’all finna fight or what?” -The Coup

It is no secret that the kids are pissed. Since September, we’ve carried out over a dozen building takeovers of varying scale and intensity on California campuses, and during the Days of Action against Cuts and Hikes in November, students in Berkeley and LA actually fought police. In the past few days, evictions of occupied spaces at SFSU and Berkeley by the armed agents of the state and academy can only represent the future of this form of education. Last night, we marched to war and for once didn’t wait for the enemy to strike the first blow.

Greece on Fire Again!

Continuous Updates at Occupied London

The Game: Take What Is Ours, Because Everything Is Ours

From the imaginary committee

Here is a shout out to fellow west coast conspirators
for some good ol’ fashion insurrection!
Its a time of crisis,
but it sure don’t look like one yet!

So get going and bring it on,
because we are the crisis!
This is a call for a competitive occupation
to get things started:
this will be called the Game.
And this game never fucking ends!

Letter from an Anonymous Friend

Some passing thoughts on the Berkeley and Santa Cruz occupations, from someone who was there briefly

It is no great secret that the terminal crisis of capitalism is before our eyes: the welfare state, the bitter product of two world wars, the child of Hitler and Noske, wherein a certain social safety net was provided for a measure of social peace, is in the process of being forcibly liquidated by the exigencies of an incresingly bankrupt social system. This much is evident to all those who have a basic thinking capacity. And thus, those who are protesting for a defense of this transient historical form will find nothing here of value, nor even anything here addressed to them. Such people can protest all day for a return to the glory days they imagine, but since these halcyon times never existed anyways, one can see they will certainly have no success now. Rather we address ourselves to those who believe in any fashion in the “terminus of student life”; but not of course to open something so worthless as a literary polemic or discussion, nor to presume to give prescriptions or orders — all we do here is attempt a “generalization of insinuation.” For, to be right means nothing, what is important is acting in consequence.

The Bricks We Throw at Police Today Will Build the Liberation Schools of Tomorrow

“If you’re scared today you’ll be scared tomorrow as well and always and so you’ve got to make a start now right away we must show that in this school we aren’t slaves we have to do it so we can do what they’re doing in all other schools to show that we’re the ones to decide because the school is ours.”

The Unseen, Nanni Balestrini

Days later, voices in unison still ring in our ears. “Who’s university?” At night in bed, we mumble the reply to ourselves in our dreams. “Our university!” And in the midst of building occupations and the festive and fierce skirmishes with the police, concepts like belonging and ownership take the opportunity to assume a wholly new character. Only the village idiot or, the modern equivalent, a bureaucrat in the university administration would think we were screaming about something as suffocating as property rights when last week we announced, “The School is Ours!” When the day erupted, when the escape plan from the drudgery of college life was hatched, it was clear to everyone that the university not only belonged to the students who were forcefully reasserting their claim but also to the faculty, to every professor and TA who wishes they could enliven the mandatory curriculum in their repetitive 101 class, to the service workers who can’t wait for their shift to end, and to every other wage-earner on campus ensuring the daily functioning of the school.

Last week, the actualization of our communal will gave us a new clarity. The usual divisiveness of proprietorship was forcefully challenged; cascades of hidden meaning rush onto rigid notions of possession and our eyes look past surface appearances. So now when asked, “who does the university belong to?” we can’t fail to recognize that the college itself was built by labor from generations past, the notebook paper is produced by workers in South America, the campus computers are the output of work in Chinese factories, the food in the student cafe is touched by innumerable hands before it reaches the plates, and all the furniture at UC Berkeley is produced by the incarcerated at San Quentin. Thus the university, its normal operation and existence, ought to be attributed to far more than it regularly is. To claim that the school is ours requires our definition of ownership to not only shatter the repressive myth that the college belongs to the State of California and the Regents but to also extend belonging past national and state borders and throughout time. It’s clear, the entire university, for that matter, every university belongs to everyone, employed and unemployed, all students and all workers, to everyone of the global class that produces and reproduces the world as we now know it. The school is ours because it’s everyone’s and the destruction of the property relation, with all its damaging and limiting consequences, is implicit in the affirmation of this truth. It’s our university…

The Necrosocial: Civic Life, Social Death, and the UC

Printable PDF

Occupied UC Berkeley, 18 November 2009

Being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: there are many people under you, but no one is listening.
UC President Mark Yudof

Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor.
Karl Marx

Politics is death that lives a human life.
Achille Mbembe

Yes, very much a cemetery.  Only here there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt.  The classroom just like the workplace just like the university just like the state just like the economy manages our social death, translating what we once knew from high school, from work, from our family life into academic parlance, into acceptable forms of social conflict.

Who knew that behind so much civic life (electoral campaigns, student body representatives, bureaucratic administrators, public relations officials, Peace and Conflict Studies, ad nauseam) was so much social death?  What postures we maintain to claim representation, what limits we assume, what desires we dismiss?

And in this moment of crisis they ask us to twist ourselves in a way that they can hear.  Petitions to Sacramento, phone calls to Congressmen—even the chancellor patronizingly congratulates our September 24th student strike, shaping the meaning and the force of the movement as a movement against the policies of Sacramento.  He expands his institutional authority to encompass the movement.  When students begin to hold libraries over night, beginning to take our first baby step as an autonomous movement he reins us in by serendipitously announcing library money.  He manages movement, he kills movement by funneling it into the electoral process.  He manages our social death.  He looks forward to these battles on his terrain, to eulogize a proposition, to win this or that—he and his look forward to exhausting us.