First of all, we have witnessed over the last several weeks an effort on the part of some to cast the student occupiers as frightened victims of administrative terror. We have heard more than a few descriptions of events that – whether out of ignorance or political utility, we cannot be sure – describe students erecting barricades fearfully and desperately as riot police arrived. Not only is this factually inaccurate, it misrepresents the basic dynamic inside the occupation. It was a collective, preemptive decision by the occupiers to barricade the doors, not a fearful reaction to the imminent threat of police violence.

When negotiations with the university broke down, we had a number of discussions about how to respond, and ended up deciding to defend the occupation physically. We had taken over the administrative headquarters of the university; we knew the administration could not let us stay. When we made the decision to remain, we accepted the inevitability of police force being used to evacuate us – because when people occupy property that does not belong to them, and when they refuse to leave, they will eventually be forcibly removed by the state. Students put up barricades not in a last-minute panic as news spread that riot police were approaching, but because we made an assessment of the balance of forces and decided it was strategic to put up a fight. Though we recognized there was a good chance we would get arrested, we decided it was essential to demonstrate our unwillingness to give up control of administrative headquarters after the administration failed to grant any of our demands. We also calculated that we had enough support outside that our escalation tactic could potentially pay off.

The point is that there was nothing out of the ordinary or irrational about the way the administration or the police acted on that day. Administrators acted like administrators, and police acted like police. Anyone who was surprised or appalled by their actions seems to us naive in their understanding of the dynamics of power and resistance. The truth is that there was no “peaceful resolution” to the occupation, because the occupiers refused to allow it. It was not the administration’s fault that the police were called. The outcome was forced by the students themselves.

The conflicting interpretations of the occupation that have surfaced in the last week raise deeper questions about the way we understand and represent the emerging student-worker movement. Why do so many of the occupation’s defenders choose to frame the action using the discourse of non-violence, martyrdom, and moral purity? Why do they present the students as victims? From our experience anger and aggression characterized the mood of students more than fear and pacifism. This type of rhetoric is seductive in the short term because it has the power to keep more moderate supporters from feeling alienated by the movement. However in the long run it is a major obstacle to be overcome, because movements for radical change are not actually won by moral suasion. In a recent piece by George Ciccariello-Maher about the occupation of Wheeler Hall at Berkeley, he interviews a student, Ali Tonak, who participated in the day’s events. Tonak criticized the misguided attempts of some faculty members to quell the crowd’s rage when police forced their way into the building, commenting that “They have a warped understanding of how power works. They think that calming people outside was keeping the people inside safe, when it was really the opposite: the only thing that was keeping the folks inside safe was people being rowdy outside.”

Ciccariello-Maher develops the analysis further, commenting that “the final police and administration response–that of opting to let the occupiers walk out of Wheeler of their own accord–tells us just how powerful our collective presence was on that day. There can be no doubt that every single occupier would have been arrested, likely beaten and abused to some degree, and hit with the trumped-up felony charges, had the crowd not been assembled outside. And this was not merely because the crowd was bearing witness to injustice or expressing its verbal non-consent. It was not moderation and negotiation that created and sustained this pivotal moment and generated its outcome: it was the unmistakable show of force that the students gathered represented, a force that was not merely symbolic.”

Indeed, not symbolic but material. According to one participant in the Wheeler occupation, the police were threatening the occupiers with ‘felonies and beat-downs’ if they did not open the doors voluntarily. Of course, they did not open the doors voluntarily, and the principal factor precluding such asymmetrical violence was precisely the fact that the police were physically surrounded. The crowd did not disperse when met with a police charge, despite the injuries suffered. Rather, many people stood their ground and fought back, leaving the police with the only option of forcibly removing a thousand people if they were to arrest the occupiers. Faced with a potential situation they could not handle, the police had no choice but to simply cite and release the occupants of Wheeler.

In Santa Cruz, a similar crowd dynamic would likely have been necessary if it were not for the injury of faculty member Mark Anderson. It was not due to the peaceful chants of the small crowd that the occupiers of Kerr Hall were released with no charge. If it wasn’t for the immediate accidental injury of the faculty member, which made the police look brazen and overly-forceful at a key early moment, then the occupiers could have faced serious charges and injuries. Defeating such consequences would have been possible only by forcibly securing a defended perimeter around Kerr Hall.

The dynamics outside of Kerr Hall were most of all a result of the administration’s decision to send riot police at 6am Sunday morning, after threatening occupiers with police intervention for the duration of the night. Their calculation that sleepless occupiers and exhausted, dwindling supporters would present the least effective resistance and exit most passively was the sole reason for the timing of their action and it should be noted that such a diffusive end to the occupation would not have been possible at any other time.

In order to understand what happened that morning we must also consider the role played by some of the faculty members present, in particular the attempt made by some professors to negotiate a resolution to the occupation.  Professor Bettina Aptheker, for instance, communicated directly with both EVC Kliger and students inside Kerr Hall in an effort to persuade students to leave before the police were called. She described her efforts to the Santa Cruz Sentinel: “I told Kliger, ‘If you give me another five minutes I think I could get the door open.’  And he said, ‘I don’t have five minutes.’” ” The Sentinel and others have characterized Aptheker as negotiating on students’ behalf, but we would like to point out the logical absurdity of that statement. Let’s think about it for a second: Aptheker was negotiating on behalf of students to convince students to leave before the police arrived? If she was really acting on behalf of the students inside, why was she desperately trying to buy more time so that she could convince us to leave? And why was she unable to do so? Because we had made a collective decision to leave on our own terms, when we were ready. Aptheker was never given permission by us to negotiate with Kliger. If we were to give her any kind of authority to do this, we would have asked her to help win demands, not to convince him to let us leave – when the whole point of setting up barricades after negotiations broke down was to demonstrate that we weren’t going anywhere!

Clearly Aptheker was not acting on behalf of students but as a representative of certain faculty members who thought the occupation had reached its limit and that it was time for students to leave. These faculty members asserted their own political goals outside Kerr Hall by demanding a clean-up outside and inside the building, regardless of student aims. With “Faculty Observer” signs duct taped to their shirts and strung around their necks they immediately attempted to take control of the situation. One faculty member, without discussing her reasoning with students and supporters gathered outside, enforced a no-smoking zone near the building by telling students that they would “lose the faculty” if they did not obey. Some faculty took it upon themselves to contact students inside via cell phone and encourage them to leave.

When police arrived some of these faculty members took up a policing role themselves. Students who reacted to the riot police in anger, who wanted to demonstrate collective power and antagonism toward the authorities, were instructed to remain “peaceful.” Students who used swear words against the police were reprimanded and those who broke the police tape that cops had strung around the building to keep the crowd away were told to back away and observe the line.

While we do not doubt that these faculty members acted out of a desire to protect the students inside, we question the sense of authority and paternalism that guided their behavior. They clearly felt they had either a right or a responsibility to manage the situation as they saw fit. Faculty acted as though those of us inside were not aware of the possible consequences of our actions or were too naive to think them through.  In reality we had already spent hours discussing every aspect of police and university repercussions and made our decision together, as informed adults. Real solidarity would have meant supporting our collective decision and joining the crowd outside as participants rather than “observers.” Instead their mode of interaction undermined student autonomy and collective power.

It is clear that the unprecedented events of the last several weeks – occupations, blockades, strikes, sit-ins, and demonstrations across the University of California system – were generated almost entirely by student and student-worker initiative. Therefore we must make it clear to all faculty members who attempt to assert their authority over our actions that they should follow our lead, rather than the other way around. As we experiment with new political forms we will make our own decisions about tactics and strategy and cannot accept their recommendations as sacred. We welcome their genuine participation and support but we will not allow the teacher-student relationship that we experience in the classroom to characterize our interactions in this movement.

This also means we must say goodbye to the sanitized and pacified version of the sixties that has been surfacing at recent actions and events. The spectre of the sixties – its political symbols, modes of discourse, and cultural forms – is part of the mechanism by which the older generation seeks to maintain its authority over the movement emerging now. More than a few times we heard faculty members telling students, “Don’t link arms when the police arrive because it will antagonize them. Trust us, we did this in the sixties.” Every time these words were used in the context of persuading students to follow pacifist principles. And some students themselves embraced the climate of political nostalgia, choosing songs and chants from the era and flashing the peace sign. Our point here is not to trash the movements of the past but to caution against condemning ourselves to repeat the gestures of a bygone era, against letting the political weight of a particular set of symbols and messages be used to discourage us from generating our own ways of thinking and acting. The world has changed and a new generation will develop its own political forms. While history offers up many lessons that we may find useful, ultimately the present must be made anew.

Finally we must address the issue of property damage, which has proven so controversial in the wake of the occupation. As the administration and local news outlets broadcast inflated figures relating to clean-up costs, many have rushed to defend the occupiers by denying the fact that damage occurred or by characterizing it as unavoidable and minimal. In one sense these statements are generally accurate. Based on our experience it is correct to say that the majority of students inside the occupation had no desire to deliberately cause damage to the administration building.

However, while we appreciate these expressions of support and recognize their tactical utility in the midst of a smear campaign, we again fear that they overlook an important aspect of the political content of occupation. For we witnessed something else as well, something that seems not incidental but central to the experience of occupation itself: we watched the sheer glee with which students took over the headquarters of the university adminstration and made it our space. We ate food, listened to loud music, smoked cigarettes, wrote messages on every available surface, spread our belongings everywhere and used the Chancellor’s conference room as a screening center to watch the news coverage of the day’s events as well as footage from similar movements all over the world.  We took back university property in a way that was much more than symbolic and in the course of so doing we experienced directly the realization that the institutional spaces from which power emanates – which we are taught all our lives to treat with deference and respect – were merely ordinary physical places, filled with mundane objects. And the shared experience of messing up that space, of treating the property inside as valueless, created instant bonds between participants. It was also a moment of genuine – if temporary – expropriation, as we claimed the property of the authorities for our own collective use.

We wonder why the issue of mess and property damage has proven so controversial in the way the occupation has been portrayed. Obviously we live in a society obsessed with the sanctity of property rights; however, the extent to which the issue has raised objections even among leftists suggests that it again taps into conflicting ideas about the nature of the movement itself. The pacifist camp seems to find the very notion that the occupiers deliberately made a mess or damaged property distasteful if not scandalous. It seems that they believe that every action on the part of students has to be represented as a defensive act, forced by the administration. For them the students are obligated to constantly embody the moral high ground, and their tactics have to cause the least amount of damage, disruption, or controversy possible under the circumstances. Their response to critics is always the apologetic “We were left with no other choice. The administration forced us to take this drastic action.” With this reactive approach to political action there can be no effective way to go on the offensive, to analyze the existing scenario and traverse the political terrain as we see it, based on our own terms and initiative. We prefer to take responsibility for our own actions and plans instead of perpetually playing the victim.

Based on the criteria of the pacifists, deliberately careless treatment of private property seems like a liability, because in an immediate sense it was not necessary for the political success of the action. However, it sent an important message to administrators, namely that we had come to the point where we no longer felt intimidated by their authority.  We have observed that some of the recent actions at various campuses have been controlled relatively easily by administrators. A number of sit-ins were successfully de-escalated when an administrator was sent in to “talk with the students” about the budget and students, through force of habit, responded with deference. In situations where students refused to enter into a paternalistic dialogue with university representatives their efforts to disrupt university functions have been much more successful. More importantly, we initiated real, materialized disregard for administrative property that rippled through the minds of fellow students. Let’s not forget that the purpose of a movement is not just to enact a series of symbolic spectacles but to transform its participants, their relationship to one another and to the structures of authority that govern their lives. We submit that a lack of care for administrative property demonstrates not immaturity or irrationality but a very real sense of collective power and agency that is critically necessary if we are to sustain the courage necessary to continue to attack existing institutions.

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 movement has already become acquainted with its enemies: the unionist, student politician type being only the most insidious and veiled. In this we have had to re-learn one of the primary lessons of the Movement of 77: the actual complicity of all unions and parties, however radical sounding, with the cops. At Berkeley, this special type of policing seems far more prevalent than at Santa Cruz, along with the historical baggage of Savio and the Black Panthers weighing like a nightmare on this current generation, not to mention the tired front-group appeals to some sort of radicality concerning Obama, which is about as sad and deluded as one could get . Whereas at SC, these safety valves were less firmly in place, and the flimsy protection of last resort for American capitalism, that is to say the pathetic ideological detritus of Crimethinc, was more in evidence. At SC, the occupation of Kerr Hall marked a high point of initiative and offensive, as the protestors left their original building and took another. This perhaps shows the opportunities afforded by the “repressive tolerance” of the SC administration. Yet after a while even this was not enough- in truth, what was important was not so much the building taken, but the audacity of the participants. This energy was lost throughout the following time, as the occupation tried to sit still while the police sent informants and surveyed the area, readying a response. Meantime, a list of responsible, and because of that, totally boring and irrelevent demands were made. It must be said that these demands were far less reasonable than others that might be made, or even better, as happened previously, there could be a breaking with the logic of demands itself. For the demands, to our knowledge, were not fulfilled in any serious way, nor could they be by a terminally ill capitalism on life support- rather there was a recognition of force, and the peasant ferocity of the police quickly gave way to a leniency when a crowd was present (at all occupations, from what one can gather, but especially in the case of SC and Berkely). Thus far, no one has deigned to say what is explosive, or perhaps implosive, in the US situation- the knavery of the police (smashing that girl’s hand, rubber bullets, numerous instances of wanton brutality, etc.) is rather the product of a deep fear among the US elite: their army is twice defeated, collapsing from a morale and logistical perspective; the country is essentially bankrupt; the inequality, notable even for the sociologists, continues to grow. These times are revolutionary, it must be said, even if the people are not yet.

What must change this is willfulness. At SC, certain proposals were insinuated as to the hosting of a love-in, or auto-reducing, to open lines of supplies and communications. An interruption of the “business operations of the University” is only the beginning; far more important is to elaborate new forms-of-life to replace the old world. Against this, one excuses onself from acting with the old Situationist shuffle step of not wanting to be an avant-garde. But if not us, who, and if not now, when are we to taste the delights of communism? We must be honest here: if a radical nucleus allows pitiful demands to be made, for fear of being too radical, then they only allow themselves to become pitiful. At the end of the SC occupation, a clever choice was made to withdraw from Kerr Hall without arrests. But this is also because there was nothing worth getting arrested for, let alone dying for. And to think of the splendor of Exarcheia, and how Alexandros was killed there, and the comrades there fight the cops, fascists and state-controlled armed struggle groups every day and face a biopolitical democracy that has revealed the Nazism in its heart- no, no, there has been far too much shallow triumphalism thus far from the unions and bureaucrats, pleased to have stirred out of their sickbed for a breif while; we must be honest, film screenings commemorating what has happened thus far must be discarded, true revolutionaries can not be satisfied with what has thus far transpired, even indulgently, as if we wait long enough without acting radical, revolutionary things will happen on their own. It is time we leave the beautiful soul of the post-1972 Situationism that does nothing but criticize behind, in order to direct and succour the unthinking consciousness that tries to act. Communism can not be talked about, it must be really lived. This is the historic task, at once simple and complicated, of this, the final moment of world-spirit. The prisoners of Plato’s cave must be led into the sunshine of the revolution, not bantered with in the darkness of capitalism.

Ergo, really living communism must be our objective. As the Kerr Hall protestors perhaps discovered when they were leaving the building, what mattered was not a building they took, certainly not the architectural concrete disaster of Kerr Hall, but what was in their hearts. A wall falling down means nothing, so long as we believe in communism, since it was never a country, or a party, but a way or relating to one another. One slogan appropriate to this revelation might be the title of the latest Tiqqun re-issue in France: Everything has failed, long live communism!

Concordantly, writing petty trash about saving and defending the university, or any other number of things, must be forgotten. Our first task must be to liberate all of our prisoners: poor Doug and so many others. And just as in the prior form of spirit, factory strikes became qualitatively more revolutionary when they posed political, international goals, so must we leave behind the sad demands of students pleading and whining for integration into a failed social system: we should rather aim to punish the wicked, to deliver a crushing riposte to the infamous scoundrels and their arrogant pretensions of this depraved time. Moreover, in Greece, the Conspiracy of the Nuclei of Fire are our prisoners too; these poor kids framed by an increasingly repressive state need to be liberated. There is another ridiculous new arrest in the Tarnac affair, coming on the heels of an intimidation arrest in Rouen, which only underlines the petty malice of the government that its frame up there has collapsed. And the 9 defendants are still prohibited from seeing one another! This is all too shameful: let us call for an unlimited human strike, since the revolutionary general strike of the working class is no longer the proper figure of spirit, respond to a 32% increase with rent strikes, mass expropriation, sabotage of classes, refusal of alienated social relations- here’s hoping we collapse the dollar and further aggravate the crisis!

This is where our movement must go in order not to be covered with infamy; at the hour when the Greeks and Austrians descend en masse on American embassies- to help us, to magnify our blows!- to allow others to pose these shit demands and to do nothing crazy with these buildings when we take them is simply ineptitude plastered over with good will. Why are not the clocks spirited away, masks given to all, monogamy annulled, electronics banned, counter-intelligence set up to ferret out spies, look outs placed around the building, sorties mounted to harass the enemy, food expropriated, and surreptitious withdrawals enacted to commence the party somewhere else? We know the Commune is not dead, it is wherever we are: “The hopes and expectations of the world up till now had pressed forward solely to this revelation, to behold what absolute Being is, and in it to find itself. The joy of beholding itself in absolute Being enters self-consciousness and seizes the whole world; for it is Spirit, it is the simple movement of those pure moments, which expresses just this: that only when absolute Being is beheld as an immediate self-consciousness is it known as Spirit.” This, one suspects, is precisely what exists in Tarnac, in Exarcheia, in millions of hearts the world over, and it is this that the dying old world hates so much. As for us, it is time to start really living what we believe.

In closing, the future of humanity will be communist, or not at all. This current movement can remain ignominiously tied to a collapsing system, its leaders, unions, daily routine, practices, and parties, or it can desert this sinking ship, and accomplish greater things than anyone can presently imagine. These are the ethical, profoundly metaphysical choices of the moment: “There is no longer a problem of the Head. There is only a problem of the body, of the act.

So that perhaps some on the campuses will know at least one of the authors of this piece, and better understand their encounters, which may have confused them, owing to the caprices of this strange war of shadows in which we find ourselves engaged, and thus remembering may change prior opinions that were formed, this is signed,

M.

Post-script: “In other words: the situation is excellent. This isn’t the moment to lose courage.”

Should you make a move from protest to resistance, you will be brutalized, arrested, destroyed.

That is the message sent by the police attack upon two students outside the second UCSC occupation on October 15. Carrying a picnic table toward a building with the best intentions—to wedge a stick into the maw of capital—they were pepper-sprayed without warning. One of them, cuffed, arrested, and thrown in a cruiser, now faces suspension.

What could be less surprising? There is no difference between the treatment of these students by the cops and the treatment of all students by the administration, an assault on lives in deference to already-falsified expenses. Our lives are permanently under attack, and the beatings will continue until we convert the crisis we are into the generalized revolt we must become.

Why have students begun to barricade the doors of buildings that we claim as our own? To carve out material spaces of resistance and emancipation. To do so requires us to make explicit the state of siege under which we live, to exteriorize the locks and chains by which it compels assent. This teaches us that these emancipated spaces can only exist outside the law, inside the barricades. The students inside the building evaded arrest; the students outside the building were attacked and detained. The spaces in which we are free are those that we take and hold by force. That is the hard lesson we all have to learn.

Some of us are learning it more quickly than others. Let there be no end of generosity toward comrades who are punished for their courage rather than for their complacency. Our support for those willing to act will be material, immediate, and unyielding. Networks of mutual aid will be essential.

Though we have no interest in theatrical protests intended to court police crackdowns, we know that as the movement becomes more militant the brutality of the police and the punitive character of the administration will not cease to make itself evident. In the confrontation between property and people, the police are agents of property, poorly paid to protect the rights of things. As long as they refuse to act in solidarity with other exploited workers, they can only protect the sanctity of walls, dumpsters, and picnic tables while attacking anyone who might challenge the logic of their own exploitation. We must sustain our militancy in the face of their attacks, and our support for those targeted.

This arrest is the first aimed at student resistance on UC campuses this year. We know there will be more. How could it be otherwise, so long as the absolute antagonism between oppression and resistance continues to clarify itself?

For the soldiers of property: nothing but contempt.

Demand nothing. Occupy everything.

Research and Destroy

18 October 2009

WE LIVE AS A DEAD CIVILIZATION. We can no longer imagine the good life except as a series of spectacles preselected for our bemusement: a shimmering menu of illusions. Both the full-filled life and our own imaginations have been systematically replaced by a set of images more lavish and inhumane than anything we ourselves would conceive, and equally beyond reach. No one believes in such outcomes anymore.

The truth of life after the university is mean and petty competition for resources with our friends and strangers: the hustle for a lower-management position that will last (with luck) for a couple years rifted with anxiety, fear, and increasing exploitation—until the firm crumbles and we mutter about “plan B.” But this is an exact description of university life today; that mean and petty life has already arrived.

Just to survive, we are compelled to adopt various attitudes toward this fissure between bankrupt promises and the actuality on offer. Some take a naïve romantic stance toward education for its own sake, telling themselves they expect nothing further. Some proceed with iron cynicism and scorn, racing through the ludicrous charade toward the last wad of cash in the airless vault of the future. And some remain committed to the antique faith that their ascendingly hard labor will surely be rewarded some day if they just act as one who believes, just show up, take on more degrees and more debt, work harder.

Time, the actual material of our being, disappears: the hours of our daily life. The future is seized from us in advance, given over to the servicing of debt and to beggaring our neighbors. Maybe we will earn the rent on our boredom, more likely not. There will be no 77 virgins, not even a plasma monitor on which to watch the death throes of the United States as a global power. Capitalism has finally become a true religion,wherein the riches of heaven are everywhere promised and nowhere delivered. The only difference is that every manner of crassness and cruelty is actively encouraged in the unending meantime. We live as a dead civilization, the last residents of Pompeii.

Romantic naïvete, iron cynicism, scorn, commitment. The university and the life it reproduces have depended on these things. They have counted on our human capacities to endure, and to prop up that world’s catastrophic failure for just a few more years. But why not hasten its collapse? The university has rotted itself from the inside: the “human capital” of staff, teachers, and students would now no more defend it than they would defend a city of the dead.

Romantic naïvete, iron cynicism, scorn, commitment: these need not be abandoned. The university forced us to learn them as tools; they will return as weapons. The university that makes us mute and dull instruments of its own reproduction must be destroyed so that we can produce our own lives. Romantic naïvete about possibilities; iron cynicism about methods; scorn for the university’s humiliating lies about its situation and its good intentions; commitment to absolute transformation — not of the university, but of our own lives. This is the beginning of imagination’s return. We must begin to move again, release ourselves from frozen history, from the igneous frieze of this buried life.

We must live our own time, our own possibilities. These are the only true justifications for the university’s existence, though it has never fulfilled them. On its side: bureaucracy, inertia, incompetence. On our side: everything else.

I

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.

For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities. Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.

But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.

It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume—a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives. What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest. Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.

This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since grade-school. Those of us who came here to have our privilege notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile. No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the cattle prod of parental admonition. On the other hand, those of us who came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take our place—that the logic here is zero-sum. And anyway, socioeconomic status remains the best predictor of student achievement. Those of us the demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of color” have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit. But we know we are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because of them. And we know that the circuits through which we might free ourselves from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery of the past in the present for others, elsewhere.

If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience. First we pay, then we “work hard.” And there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded, consumer and consumed. It is the system itself which one obeys, the cold buildings that enforce subservience. Those who teach are treated with all the respect of an automated messaging system. Only the logic of customer satisfaction obtains here: was the course easy? Was the teacher hot? Could any stupid asshole get an A? What’s the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes? Who needs memory when we have the internet? A training in thought? You can’t be serious. A moral preparation? There are anti-depressants for that.

Meanwhile the graduate students, supposedly the most politically enlightened among us, are also the most obedient. The “vocation” for which they labor is nothing other than a fantasy of falling off the grid, or out of the labor market. Every grad student is a would be Robinson Crusoe, dreaming of an island economy subtracted from the exigencies of the market. But this fantasy is itself sustained through an unremitting submission to the market. There is no longer the least felt contradiction in teaching a totalizing critique of capitalism by day and polishing one’s job talk by night. That our pleasure is our labor only makes our symptoms more manageable. Aesthetics and politics collapse courtesy of the substitution of ideology for history: booze and beaux arts and another seminar on the question of being, the steady blur of typeface, each pixel paid for by somebody somewhere, some not-me, not-here, where all that appears is good and all goods appear attainable by credit.

Graduate school is simply the faded remnant of a feudal system adapted to the logic of capitalism—from the commanding heights of the star professors to the serried ranks of teaching assistants and adjuncts paid mostly in bad faith. A kind of monasticism predominates here, with all the Gothic rituals of a Benedictine abbey, and all the strange theological claims for the nobility of this work, its essential altruism. The underlings are only too happy to play apprentice to the masters, unable to do the math indicating that nine-tenths of us will teach 4 courses every semester to pad the paychecks of the one-tenth who sustain the fiction that we can all be the one. Of course I will be the star, I will get the tenure-track job in a large city and move into a newly gentrified neighborhood.

We end up interpreting Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” At best, we learn the phoenix-like skill of coming to the very limits of critique and perishing there, only to begin again at the seemingly ineradicable root. We admire the first part of this performance: it lights our way. But we want the tools to break through that point of suicidal thought, its hinge in practice.

The same people who practice “critique” are also the most susceptible to cynicism. But if cynicism is simply the inverted form of enthusiasm, then beneath every frustrated leftist academic is a latent radical. The shoulder shrug, the dulled face, the squirm of embarrassment when discussing the fact that the US murdered a million Iraqis between 2003 and 2006, that every last dime squeezed from America’s poorest citizens is fed to the banking industry, that the seas will rise, billions will die and there’s nothing we can do about it—this discomfited posture comes from feeling oneself pulled between the is and the ought of current left thought. One feels that there is no alternative, and yet, on the other hand, that another world is possible.

We will not be so petulant. The synthesis of these positions is right in front of us: another world is not possible; it is necessary. The ought and the is are one. The collapse of the global economy is here and now.

II

THE UNIVERSITY HAS NO HISTORY OF ITS OWN; ITS HISTORY IS THE HISTORY OF CAPITAL. Its essential function is the reproduction of the relationship between capital and labor. Though not a proper corporation that can be bought and sold, that pays revenue to its investors, the public university nonetheless carries out this function as efficiently as possible by approximating ever more closely the corporate form of its bedfellows. What we are witnessing now is the endgame of this process, whereby the façade of the educational institution gives way altogether to corporate streamlining.

Even in the golden age of capitalism that followed after World War II and lasted until the late 1960s, the liberal university was already subordinated to capital. At the apex of public funding for higher education, in the 1950s, the university was already being redesigned to produce technocrats with the skill-sets necessary to defeat “communism” and sustain US hegemony. Its role during the Cold War was to legitimate liberal democracy and to reproduce an imaginary society of free and equal citizens—precisely because no one was free and no one was equal.

But if this ideological function of the public university was at least well-funded after the Second World War, that situation changed irreversibly in the 1960s, and no amount of social-democratic heel-clicking will bring back the dead world of the post-war boom. Between 1965 and 1980 profit rates began to fall, first in the US, then in the rest of the industrializing world. Capitalism, it turned out, could not sustain the good life it made possible. For capital, abundance appears as overproduction, freedom from work as unemployment. Beginning in the 1970s, capitalism entered into a terminal downturn in which permanent work was casualized and working-class wages stagnated, while those at the top were temporarily rewarded for their obscure financial necromancy, which has itself proved unsustainable.

For public education, the long downturn meant the decline of tax revenues due to both declining rates of economic growth and the prioritization of tax-breaks for beleaguered corporations. The raiding of the public purse struck California and the rest of the nation in the 1970s. It has continued to strike with each downward declension of the business cycle. Though it is not directly beholden to the market, the university and its corollaries are subject to the same cost-cutting logic as other industries: declining tax revenues have made inevitable the casualization of work. Retiring professors make way not for tenure-track jobs but for precariously employed teaching assistants, adjuncts, and lecturers who do the same work for much less pay. Tuition increases compensate for cuts while the jobs students pay to be trained for evaporate.

In the midst of the current crisis, which will be long and protracted, many on the left want to return to the golden age of public education. They naïvely imagine that the crisis of the present is an opportunity to demand the return of the past. But social programs that depended upon high profit rates and vigorous economic growth are gone. We cannot be tempted to make futile grabs at the irretrievable while ignoring the obvious fact that there can be no autonomous “public university” in a capitalist society. The university is subject to the real crisis of capitalism, and capital does not require liberal education programs. The function of the university has always been to reproduce the working class by training future workers according to the changing needs of capital. The crisis of the university today is the crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period in which capital no longer needs us as workers.

We cannot free the university from the exigencies of the market by calling for the return of the public education system. We live out the terminus of the very market logic upon which that system was founded. The only autonomy we can hope to attain exists beyond capitalism.

What this means for our struggle is that we can’t go backward. The old student struggles are the relics of a vanished world. In the 1960s, as the post-war boom was just beginning to unravel, radicals within the confines of the university understood that another world was possible. Fed up with technocratic management, wanting to break the chains of a conformist society, and rejecting alienated work as unnecessary in an age of abundance, students tried to align themselves with radical sections of the working class. But their mode of radicalization, too tenuously connected to the economic logic of capitalism, prevented that alignment from taking hold. Because their resistance to the Vietnam war focalized critique upon capitalism as a colonial war-machine, but insufficiently upon its exploitation of domestic labor, students were easily split off from a working class facing different problems. In the twilight era of the post-war boom, the university was not subsumed by capital to the degree that it is now, and students were not as intensively proletarianized by debt and a devastated labor market.

That is why our struggle is fundamentally different. The poverty of student life has become terminal: there is no promised exit. If the economic crisis of the 1970s emerged to break the back of the political crisis of the 1960s, the fact that today the economic crisis precedes the coming political uprising means we may finally supersede the cooptation and neutralization of those past struggles. There will be no return to normal.

III

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.

We must begin by preventing the university from functioning. We must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and class to a halt. We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours. Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are to be understood. This is the only meaningful position to take when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society. Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it.

The university struggle is one among many, one sector where a new cycle of refusal and insurrection has begun—in workplaces, neighborhoods, and slums. All of our futures are linked, and so our movement will have to join with these others, breeching the walls of the university compounds and spilling into the streets. In recent weeks Bay Area public school teachers, BART employees, and unemployed have threatened demonstrations and strikes. Each of these movements responds to a different facet of capitalism’s reinvigorated attack on the working class in a moment of crisis. Viewed separately, each appears small, near-sighted, without hope of success. Taken together, however, they suggest the possibility of widespread refusal and resistance. Our task is to make plain the common conditions that, like a hidden water table, feed each struggle.

We have seen this kind of upsurge in the recent past, a rebellion that starts in the classrooms and radiates outward to encompass the whole of society. Just two years ago the anti-CPE movement in France, combating a new law that enabled employers to fire young workers without cause, brought huge numbers into the streets. High school and university students, teachers, parents, rank and file union members, and unemployed youth from the banlieues found themselves together on the same side of the barricades. (This solidarity was often fragile, however. The riots of immigrant youth in the suburbs and university students in the city centers never merged, and at times tensions flared between the two groups.) French students saw through the illusion of the university as a place of refuge and enlightenment and acknowledged that they were merely being trained to work. They took to the streets as workers, protesting their precarious futures. Their position tore down the partitions between the schools and the workplaces and immediately elicited the support of many wage workers and unemployed people in a mass gesture of proletarian refusal.

As the movement developed it manifested a growing tension between revolution and reform. Its form was more radical than its content. While the rhetoric of the student leaders focused merely on a return to the status quo, the actions of the youth – the riots, the cars overturned and set on fire, the blockades of roads and railways, and the waves of occupations that shut down high schools and universities – announced the extent of the new generation’s disillusionment and rage. Despite all of this, however, the movement quickly disintegrated when the CPE law was eventually dropped. While the most radical segment of the movement sought to expand the rebellion into a general revolt against capitalism, they could not secure significant support and the demonstrations, occupations, and blockades dwindled and soon died. Ultimately the movement was unable to transcend the limitations of reformism.

The Greek uprising of December 2008 broke through many of these limitations and marked the beginning of a new cycle of class struggle. Initiated by students in response to the murder of an Athens youth by police, the uprising consisted of weeks of rioting, looting, and occupations of universities, union offices, and television stations. Entire financial and shopping districts burned, and what the movement lacked in numbers it made up in its geographical breadth, spreading from city to city to encompass the whole of Greece. As in France it was an uprising of youth, for whom the economic crisis represented a total negation of the future. Students, precarious workers, and immigrants were the protagonists, and they were able to achieve a level of unity that far surpassed the fragile solidarities of the anti-CPE movement.

Just as significantly, they made almost no demands. While of course some demonstrators sought to reform the police system or to critique specific government policies, in general they asked for nothing at all from the government, the university, the workplaces, or the police. Not because they considered this a better strategy, but because they wanted nothing that any of these institutions could offer. Here content aligned with form; whereas the optimistic slogans that appeared everywhere in French demonstrations jarred with the images of burning cars and broken glass, in Greece the rioting was the obvious means to begin to enact the destruction of an entire political and economic system.

Ultimately the dynamics that created the uprising also established its limit. It was made possible by the existence of a sizeable radical infrastructure in urban areas, in particular the Exarchia neighborhood in Athens. The squats, bars, cafes, and social centers, frequented by students and immigrant youth, created the milieu out of which the uprising emerged. However, this milieu was alien to most middle-aged wage workers, who did not see the struggle as their own. Though many expressed solidarity with the rioting youth, they perceived it as a movement of entrants – that is, of that portion of the proletariat that sought entrance to the labor market but was not formally employed in full-time jobs. The uprising, strong in the schools and the immigrant suburbs, did not spread to the workplaces.

Our task in the current struggle will be to make clear the contradiction between form and content and to create the conditions for the transcendence of reformist demands and the implementation of a truly communist content. As the unions and student and faculty groups push their various “issues,” we must increase the tension until it is clear that we want something else entirely. We must constantly expose the incoherence of demands for democratization and transparency. What good is it to have the right to see how intolerable things are, or to elect those who will screw us over? We must leave behind the culture of student activism, with its moralistic mantras of non-violence and its fixation on single-issue causes. The only success with which we can be content is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the certain immiseration and death which it promises for the 21st century. All of our actions must push us towards communization; that is, the reorganization of society according to a logic of free giving and receiving, and the immediate abolition of the wage, the value-form, compulsory labor, and exchange.

Occupation will be a critical tactic in our struggle, but we must resist the tendency to use it in a reformist way. The different strategic uses of occupation became clear this past January when students occupied a building at the New School in New York. A group of friends, mostly graduate students, decided to take over the Student Center and claim it as a liberated space for students and the public. Soon others joined in, but many of them preferred to use the action as leverage to win reforms, in particular to oust the school’s president. These differences came to a head as the occupation unfolded. While the student reformers were focused on leaving the building with a tangible concession from the administration, others shunned demands entirely. They saw the point of occupation as the creation of a momentary opening in capitalist time and space, a rearrangement that sketched the contours of a new society. We side with this anti-reformist position. While we know these free zones will be partial and transitory, the tensions they expose between the real and the possible can push the struggle in a more radical direction.

We intend to employ this tactic until it becomes generalized. In 2001 the first Argentine piqueteros suggested the form the people’s struggle there should take: road blockades which brought to a halt the circulation of goods from place to place. Within months this tactic spread across the country without any formal coordination between groups. In the same way repetition can establish occupation as an instinctive and immediate method of revolt taken up both inside and outside the university. We have seen a new wave of takeovers in the U.S. over the last year, both at universities and workplaces: New School and NYU, as well as the workers at Republic Windows Factory in Chicago, who fought the closure of their factory by taking it over. Now it is our turn.

To accomplish our goals we cannot rely on those groups which position themselves as our representatives. We are willing to work with unions and student associations when we find it useful, but we do not recognize their authority. We must act on our own behalf directly, without mediation. We must break with any groups that seek to limit the struggle by telling us to go back to work or class, to negotiate, to reconcile. This was also the case in France. The original calls for protest were made by the national high school and university student associations and by some of the trade unions. Eventually, as the representative groups urged calm, others forged ahead. And in Greece the unions revealed their counter-revolutionary character by canceling strikes and calling for restraint.

As an alternative to being herded by representatives, we call on students and workers to organize themselves across trade lines. We urge undergraduates, teaching assistants, lecturers, faculty, service workers, and staff to begin meeting together to discuss their situation. The more we begin talking to one another and finding our common interests, the more difficult it becomes for the administration to pit us against each other in a hopeless competition for dwindling resources. The recent struggles at NYU and the New School suffered from the absence of these deep bonds, and if there is a lesson to be learned from them it is that we must build dense networks of solidarity based upon the recognition of a shared enemy. These networks not only make us resistant to recuperation and neutralization, but also allow us to establish new kinds of collective bonds. These bonds are the real basis of our struggle.

We’ll see you at the barricades.

Research and Destroy, 2009

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