NEW SCHOOL WALK OUT MARCH 4

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

“After the Fall” No Conclusions: When Another World is Unpopular

After the Fall: Communiques from Occupied California is now available for on-line reading

The parting words of After the Fall– at once both a summation and a call– present the occupations in the past 6 months as a “vulgar and beautiful” destabilizing force within a larger arena of forces, at times nomadic and imperceptible, at other times spectacularly, with declarations and attitude.

Still, the finale of welfare state social services, the numbing terror of disaster, displacement, the colonial politics, the social death of civic life, the logic of representation, the endless reproduction of modern misery, the absent future, the crises of capital, the Afghan offensive, the government in a box– none of this deserves the elegance of any of the words we printed in this publication. They deserve a swift, merciless street fight.

Quickly now.
After the Fall.

Fight Everywhere Strike March 4!

Occupy Everything Fight Everywhere Strike March 4!

The call has gone out. On March 4th, students, workers and teachers throughout the nation and across the globe will strike. Pre K-12, adult education, community colleges, and state-funded universities will come together in an international Strike and Day of Action to resist the neoliberal destruction of public education in California and beyond.

We stand beside all who wish to transform public education, and we seek to advance the struggle by generalizing the tactic that has, by far, been the strength of the movement: direct action.

In keeping with the spirit of March 4th, we call upon everyone, everywhere, to occupy everything—from collapsing public universities and closed high schools to millions of foreclosed homes. We call on all concerned students and workers to escalate the fight against privatization where they are, in solidarity with the California statewide actions. We envision a network of occupied campuses in multiple states across the nation.

Das Kapital study group, session eight, Fall ’09, NYC. Chapter Three, special theme.

Our group convenes this week and begins with a discussion and celebration of the latest events from comrades in the West and the possibility of further accelerations of struggle in our own vicinity. We respond to a series of questions posed by a Greek bourgeois newspaper concerning their year of insurrection and revolt. Our attention then turns to our weekly collective study. This week we prepare to continue reading chapter three.

We review, recite and observe with a particular emphasis: the capital process is masked by its constant transformations into concrete particular modes of existence; the commodity’s dual aspects are masked by their existence in the equivalent and relative forms as only a use-value for the reciever and only an exchange value for the transmitter; the labor and marginal theory of value of the political economist is a mask that freezes time as opposed to the historically dynamic abstract and socially necessary labor time at the root of the value of products; capital’s money-form as wages for the proletariat mask their role in the circulation of variable capital as drafts for means of subsistence as opposed to money as disposition for productive consumption, for the capitalist; convention, culture and juridical activity mask the productive-historical factors that are behind them leading to bizaare rituals and value systems; markets mask the myriad shifts in supply and demand for countless productive activities which we lose track of and therefore control over, passively deferring to the inexorable spiral of self-valorization; exchange masks the intentions and concrete conditions of production; etc.

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!

Photos from NYC solidarity march

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

Video: NYC March in Solidarity with UC Occupations!

Students and friends take the streets, dropping banners off of statues and buildings, crashing New School art parties and decorating the city in solidarity with all the UC occupations!!!

Occupation: a do-it-yourself guide

 

 

Download zine printable format

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.]

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.

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.

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.  . . .

New School Benefit Gets Wild; 15 arrested

UPDATE:
15 were arrested last night, all but three have been released with non-criminal disorderly conduct charges

From Exquisite Corps – So there was a gigantic benefit show for the New School arrestees last night in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

As usual the philosophical-politico Manhattanite university crowd turned out, as well as a handful of strictly Brooklyn party types. The half-anarchist half-hipster crowd couldn’t help but appear reminiscent of a certain catastrophic scenario in recent memory. Around 1:30 AM police showed up outside the 210 Cook street building and unplugged the sound system.

More Photos Here