Against the Day

The new issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly includes a section called "Against the Day," in which a number of UC students reflect on the struggle over public education in California. Most of the essays focus in some way or another on the protests that took place in and around the UC during 2009-2010. From the introduction, by Christopher Newfield and Colleen Lye:

The essays collected here are all written by University of California students who were active in the California student movements of 2009–2010. These movements were the largest and most widespread campus-based actions in the United States since the 1960s. They were also remarkable for their intellectual diversity, their successful efforts to link generally disconnected issues, their systematic attempts to rethink student movement strategies, their reflections on their own internal divisions, and their escalating confrontations with local administrations and the police.

The movements became visible to the public in November 2009, when the UC Board of Regents voted for a 32 percent tuition increase -- on top of the doubling of tuition that it had already implemented over the course of the decade. But many of the group participants had been operating for years, and the conditions that reached a crisis in 2009 had been reshaping UC and its companion system, the California State University, for two decades.

Links to free downloads of the essays (via) are below the fold.

Reflections on the I-980/I-880 Takeover

From Anti-Capital Projects:

Like any number of urban freeways, the I-980 and I-880 are lines of containment. They mark out the zones and boundaries of economic apartheid, making West Oakland into an island of poverty, a police zone, boxed in on all sides. A freeway, in this sense, is merely one of the most visible forms of the lines of force that cut up our cities and, in turn, our lives, that butcher them according to the logics of race and class, money and property. How can we see these arteries as anything less than instruments for the formation of a controlled population, instruments in the successive waves of urban centralization, white flight, gentrification? They are checkpoints and blockages -- massive pours of concrete, of labor, erected to determine who gets to go where and how. And they have no meaning beyond the insinuation of the automobile into every facet of our lives, the automobile which is hallmark of US economic power in the 20th century, token of class mobility, passageway to pseudo-freedom, emitter of poison gases, turning our lives into a cut-and-paste of frantic alienation and isolation, responsible for more deaths than the M-16. Who could love a freeway?

Those of us who chose to take our march onto the I-980 have been accused of turning our backs on the tactic that made the student movement so powerful and inspiring, the tactic which inscribed our actions in a lucid, anticapitalist language -- occupation. Don’t worry. We haven’t abandoned anything, only expanded our repertoire. The last six months have been a process of experimentation, one in which it becomes difficult to distinguish the failures from the successes, since the two fold into each other, since each action, regardless of the outcome, is a process of learning, of adaptation, part of a living conversation, one in which there is as much disagreement as there is agreement. On a day dedicated to the convergence of political actors from multiple spaces across the Bay Area it would have made little sense to barricade ourselves inside a building on this or that campus. If there were a suitably central, common and defensible target, perhaps we would have occupied that. Perhaps we will next time. We still look forward to the emancipation of foreclosed homes and apartment buildings, shuttered workplaces, to the permanent occupation of university buildings. None of that is behind us. We are not yet powerful enough for these things. We are still trying to build a force capable of taking and holding a space, and then another, and another.

Some people have counterposed the occupation of buildings to the freeway takeover on the grounds that the former challenges property directly, that a building can be emancipated, communized, turned into a liberated zone for care and conversation, planning, learning, fun and eating and dancing. This is true, although it forgets that none of this liberation can happen if you’re surrounded by hundreds of cops, as is often the case with lockdown occupations that target essential buildings. Still, the obvious point here is that you can’t communize a freeway. You can only destroy it. But so what? There is much we will need to learn to destroy. We will have to learn to do this well, to shut down the flows and pours of capital and labor. Those who oppose this action on the grounds of a theory of property or value miss the fact that property is not a thing; it’s not matter. It’s a social relation, a form of interaction between people that is mediated by objects and signs. By commodities and commands. The freeway is no less a part of this relation than a university building. At the most abstract level, ours is a world in which there are bodies and there are values. The freeway is an instrument for circulating the former according to the self-expanding imperative of the latter. Buildings have no intrinsic value beyond this circulation -- beyond the inbox of bodies and the outbox of values. As such, we must learn to attack not only the immediate place of production but its apparatus of circulation as well. We must learn both to destroy and to emancipate. It’s true that we must create new spaces, new relations, but none of this will happen without a negation of the old. When we shut down, if only for a few hours, the forms of compelled circulation that condition our lives, when we circulate against these forms, running along the freeway with banners and medic kits and black flags, with cheers and megaphones, cries of amazement and fear, we are a little part of the future, a future where all the obstacles to flow have been removed and all the flows have been blocked. I felt that. But yes, shutting stuff down is only one part of it.

On this day of convergence, we wanted to come together and we did. Those of us who were on the freeway can only laugh at the liars who sought, immediately, to paint this action as the joyride of a bunch of white-boy insurrectionists. On the contrary, we were women and men, white and Latino, African-American and Asian, gay men and lesbians and trans-people. We came from multiple political perspectives. We were anarchists and communists, liberals and libertines; students from UCs and CSUs and Community Colleges; teachers and public workers and taxi-drivers. We were 12-year-olds with skateboards. We were people who did and did not form a we, who formed other we’s inside of this one, people who might not agree on much but who were there together, for all kinds of reasons. Together we demonstrated that ruling class attacks -- on public education, on jobs, on immigrants -- will not necessarily be borne by managed and ineffectual forms of protest. We will not suffer these austerity measures quietly. Regular programming will be interrupted.

It is false, of course, to assume that the solidarity between those gathered on the freeway, the commonalities this action created, meant the complete and instant erasure of all hierarchies and all violence, the erasure of privilege, racism, sexism. This form of dissolution, sharing and solidarity is real, and has been attested to by many people, but just as often such situations of emergency and intensity bring out the worst in people, allow for the ugliest of manifestations. These situations have no innate political character; the social relations we want will not appear as if by magic . . . If we experience glimpses here and there of true collectivity, they are just that, glimpses. Still, it is hard to imagine anyone unmoved by the experience of hearing and seeing, across the street, the inmates banging on the windows of the County Jail as we were being arrested. It is hard not to think that, at that moment, the strength of the state which enforces separation, hierarchy and interpersonal violence, was not, to some degree, trespassed. The same goes for the motorists who got out of their cars and cheered and raised their fists as we were being led off the freeway.

Was it a fail? A win? We should not take 150 arrests lightly. No one should think of the action as successful in that respect. We wanted to get away, and we failed. We were hurt by police batons and by the legislative violence of the state. We lost time in the abyss of county jail. A 15-year-old (who, from all accounts, knew what he was doing) was grievously hurt, and there is nothing that can make such facts worth it, or justifiable. There is no calculus of victory or failure here. But the truth is that this is a part of the movement, too -- those of us who arranged legal support, who are arranging benefit parties, who brought food and cars to North County and Santa Rita, who attended arraignments, made phone calls and sent emails to find out if those we loved were alright, were just as much a part of this process of experimentation as anyone. We learn how to care for another, and we learn from our mistakes.

This wasn’t an activist arrest action. No one wanted that, and no one sat down. We wanted to get away, we ran from the hail of blows the OPD delivered and most of us got caught, and from this perspective, we fucked up. But the idea that such an action meant certain arrest is false. The march was ragged, and too slow, and undisciplined. If there had not been a squad of riot police following us onto the freeway, many would have escaped. We could have taken a U-turn at the junction of I-880 and I-980 .We could have been faster, or organized into clusters. If there were more of us, we could have backed the police down with material and rhetorical force. We could have blasted past the police car on the Franklin exit, entered the streets and begun Round Two. We could have built barricades. But we didn’t, and so, in this respect, we failed. But the past conditional, the retrospection, this is all part of the movement. This is how we go forward. Nothing can take back the baton blows, the faces rubbed in asphalt, the arrests, the money lost on bail; nothing can take back the suffering caused to Francois Zimany and his family. But these things will impel us forward. They will have their effects.

***

Marches enter the freeway at multiple points, pinning the police in a half-mile stretch. Motorcycle cops race toward the crowd, then stop. There are too many of us. Tires are lighted on fire. Road signs are pulled down and used for barricade material. Traffic has stopped throughout the entire metropolitan area. The streets now completely deserted of police, people move through the main thoroughfares, looting the stores. One group passes by the undefended police station, destroying everything. A nearby college campus has been liberated, and many of the people from the freeway reconverge there, sharing out the looted goods, mending wounds, talking and listening and learning from each other, going over mistakes, planning for the next day, arranging jail support. There is friendship and argument and the cooking and eating of food, there are everyday task becomes themselves a part of the struggle and they are just as important as fighting. Inside the County Jail they know we’re coming for them. And this is just the beginning.

Maybe They Could Sew Badges on Their Clothes

"You can't really identify the professional protesters from just regular people in the group cause they do blend in so well."



Update: Says Dettman, "That, or at least carry some kind of documentation. Don't they have a professional organization? A union even?"

Another update (3/12): CBS 5 retracts their initial report... sort of:

OAKLAND (CBS 5) -- Last week a group of U.C. fee hike protesters took over the 880 freeway for the better part of an hour. At the time we though many of them were professional protesters, but it turns out many of them had never been involved in this type of demonstration before.

More than 150 people stormed onto interstate 880 in Downtown Oakland during the evening commute last Thursday and blocked traffic for 45 minutes, causing traffic to back up for miles.

After the incident, the Oakland police department said half of the 150 people arrested were so-called professional protestors, people who show up every time there is a march, regardless of the reason. It turns out that was not the case.

Now they're saying there were just a "few" "professionals."

Race and Privilege on the 880

Since March 4, a series of criticisms of the highway action have appeared on blogs, facebook, and email lists that advance a set of very similar arguments. Primarily, they assert, the "leaders" of the action were "white anarchists" with little or no connection to Oakland, outside agitators who hijacked a peaceful rally and turned it "violent" by tricking people of color and youth into coming onto the highway with them -- and getting them arrested. These conversations are in line with earlier ones regarding race and privilege in the student movement in general, only this time they have become more focused. The first one to turn up was written by Nico Dacumos, and posted on his facebook page (link below); it reads as follows:

Police Attack 880 Interstate Takeover

Raider Nation Collective Statement on M4 Highway Takeover

From occupyca:

Once again there is debate on the nature that mass rebellion should take as anger grows in the face of colonial, economic, racial and gendered violence. On three occasions in the last year—the first Oscar Grant uprising, the recent UC Berkeley protests and now the takeover of Hwy 880 in Oakland—the race, class and gender of those who participated in the rebellions has come under fire.

On all three occasions individuals have tried to denounce these rebellions as white, middle class outsiders “leading” the youth of color. Reports and analyses from the first two uprisings have already exposed these assumptions as completely false:

Regarding the Oscar Grant rebellions:

http://www.sfbayview.com/2009/oakland-rebellion-eyewitness-report-by-pocc-minister-of-information-jr/

http://www.counterpunch.org/maher01162009.html

Regarding the UC Berkeley occupations (also relevant to the Oscar Grant uprisings):

http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/response-to-a-critic-of-the-%E2%80%9Cwhite%E2%80%9D-student-movement/

The reality is that the rebellions are more nuanced and complex than the caricatures drawn by those who choose to censor them as “extremist” and “violent”, without questioning their very deployment of these terms. On what basis are these individuals concluding that all the people involved are white, heterosexual and male when footage and first-person accounts reveal otherwise? On what basis are they assuming the people involved are necessarily middle-class or strangers to Oakland?

Individuals who were not a part of the rebellions, and have accepted the police discourse of “outside agitators” predictably disseminated through the corporate media, make these so-called observations. In contrast, accounts from the protesters themselves speak to the heterogeneous character of the crowd, made up in part by poor, queer, women, of color. To erase their presence and agency only replicates an established tradition in History.

A recent article by Nico Dacumos stated, “At issue here is not so much the political ideology of mostly white black bloc anarchists, but the ways that their incitement of actions here in Oakland speaks to an entitlement and privilege that makes them think it is okay to encourage people of color, mostly African American and Latino males, to engage in ‘violent’ forms of protest when they are already groups targeted and abused by the police.”

All of the same empty criticisms we encountered in previous rebellions are re-articulated in this one sentence. Not only is it a problem to assume that the people of color in the protests are led blindly, but it is also ridiculous to suggest that street rebellions are the purview of the white and middle class.

Is it not true that poor black and brown people have led the largest and most influential street rebellions of the last 50 years? In a 1968 speech, Stokely Carmichael stated, “A lot of people in the bourgeoisie tell me they don’t like Rap Brown when he says, ‘I’m going to burn the country down.’ But every time Rap Brown says, ‘I’m going to burn the country down,’ they get a poverty program…[applause]…they get a poverty program…”

Frederick Douglas tells us that power concedes nothing without a demand: Street rebellions force the establishment to yield to the demands of the movement or be faced with an ungovernable, rebellious populace. In short, stopping highway traffic in protest of the dismantling of public education was a smart move and we support it with no caveats.

-The Raider Nation Collective

Quote of the Day, March 4 Edition

"Freeways are the new buildings when it comes to occupying stuff."

Berkeley Pre-Game Communiqué (That's Not the Sky, That's the Ceiling)

From occupyca:

UCB Faculty Thinks You're Stupid

Sorry, this was posted earlier, but it's so amazing it has to be posted again, this time all by itself. Christopher Kutz, the chair of the UC Berkeley faculty senate, sent this email out yesterday:

Dear all,

Like many of the readers of this list, I am very excited about the March on the 4th in Sacramento -- SAVE has done
an incredible job organizing.

Perhaps like many of you, I am also getting pretty concerned by all the reports about plans for more occupations, "actions,"
and more confrontational kinds of campus protests next week, including on the 4th. I know a lot of this is just smoke, an attempt deliberately to rattle the cages of those of us who think we need to make the public, political case for higher education. But Durant Hall is evidence that some things will happen -- things that have the potential to get students hurt, and to shift the focus from the insistent demand to restore educational funding, to violent internecine conflict on campus. I really don't want either of those.

The students bent on occupation and confrontation will do what they do, and will take the consequences. But I am especially concerned to avoid another Nov. 20th-like event, where the real chaos and danger lay outside, with large groups of protestors. My fear is that there may be many students, eager to support the inside protest or simply curious, who will not know how to protest safely, without putting themselves at risk of arrest, on campus discipline, or injury, especially when they hear voices of some activists urging them to rush the police lines.

So I thought the Senate might directly recruit some "Casque bleu" peacekeepers from among the faculty, who could be counted on to play the role some faculty (particularly SAVE members) did in November, of trying to calm the crowd and instruct them, via bullhorn or leaflet, on "Peaceful Protest 101." If you would be willing to play this role, or know someone who would, could you please write me directly to let me know? You won't be representing the administration, or any particular principle except informed consent on the part of students -- how to engage in protest without (unwittingly) risking injury or academic career.

thanks,
Chris

Students: the faculty thinks you're stupid. Prove them wrong. Strike March 4!

Two Official Emails

The first one was sent out today to UC Berkeley building coordinators by Stephen Stoll, Director of the Office of Emergency Preparedness/Homeland Security:

Building Coordinators

PLEASE DISSEMINATE THIS INFORMAITON TO YOUR BUILDING STAFF

As you may have heard, this coming week has several scheduled activities, including the planned rally on Thursday, March 4^th. There may also be other associated activities around the campus, including potential marches through campus buildings and “sit-ins”. These activities may present some unique challenges for the campus as the majority of our facilities are open to the public.

Although we do not expect any malicious activities, its possible your building may be marched through or even have minor disruptions, so it is best to be a little more vigilant for those who may be roaming our halls.

As always, UCPD will be continuously monitoring activities around campus and if the situation arises, be providing you with information specific to your building/facility.

It might be good to review standard operating procedures for this eventuality (see below).

**************************************************

Please remind your building occupants of the following procedures should marchers enter your building:

If marchers enter your building, let them. Try to carry on business as usual. If the noise becomes too great, or the crowd too large, feel free to close and lock your office doors - this is a departmental decision.

Do not close your buildings unless the Police advise you to.

As always, if you have questions please feel free to contact the UC Police department at 642-6760 or call via cell phone to 642-3333.

**************************************************

From an informational perspective, if you observe any unusual gatherings or activities in your building/facility, if you observe any suspicious activities or if you experience actual disruptions to classrooms or administrative routines, call UCPD (642-6760 or 642-3333) and we will provide the appropriate support.

We will be utilizing the BC email as a conduit for campus-wide specific information we need to disseminate, so please check your email regularly.

Thank you for helping get the word out!

PLEASE DISSEMINATE THIS INFORMAITON TO YOUR BUILDING STAFF

The second email was sent out yesterday to the UC Berkeley faculty senate by chair Christopher Kutz:

Dear all,

Like many of the readers of this list, I am very excited about the March on the 4th in Sacramento -- SAVE has done
an incredible job organizing.

Perhaps like many of you, I am also getting pretty concerned by all the reports about plans for more occupations, "actions,"
and more confrontational kinds of campus protests next week, including on the 4th. I know a lot of this is just smoke, an attempt deliberately to rattle the cages of those of us who think we need to make the public, political case for higher education. But Durant Hall is evidence that some things will happen -- things that have the potential to get students hurt, and to shift the focus from the insistent demand to restore educational funding, to violent internecine conflict on campus. I really don't want either of those.

The students bent on occupation and confrontation will do what they do, and will take the consequences. But I am especially concerned to avoid another Nov. 20th-like event, where the real chaos and danger lay outside, with large groups of protestors. My fear is that there may be many students, eager to support the inside protest or simply curious, who will not know how to protest safely, without putting themselves at risk of arrest, on campus discipline, or injury, especially when they hear voices of some activists urging them to rush the police lines.

So I thought the Senate might directly recruit some "Casque bleu" peacekeepers from among the faculty, who could be counted on to play the role some faculty (particularly SAVE members) did in November, of trying to calm the crowd and instruct them, via bullhorn or leaflet, on "Peaceful Protest 101." If you would be willing to play this role, or know someone who would, could you please write me directly to let me know? You won't be representing the administration, or any particular principle except informed consent on the part of students -- how to engage in protest without (unwittingly) risking injury or academic career.

thanks,
Chris

Incompetent Police

From the Daily Cal:

UCPD did not have adequate staffing to address Thursday night's occupation of Durant Hall and had hoped for assistance from local police departments. But the help did not arrive in time to prevent the occupiers from taking to the streets in what would become an hour-and-a-half-long riot.

About 50 protesters occupied the UC Berkeley building at about 11:15 p.m., but UCPD did not respond until 11:49 p.m. and did not request assistance from the Berkeley Police Department until sometime between midnight and 12:30 a.m., according to Berkeley police Officer Andrew Frankel. The assistance did not arrive until after the occupiers left the building more than an hour later at about 1:38 a.m., according to UCPD Captain Margo Bennett.

"It's a given that when you have routine patrol staffing on board, that is not enough staffing to handle the taking over of a building," Bennett said.

"We've relied upon the working arrangement we have with the BPD, and ... upon the Office of Emergency Services through the county to help us with providing more staffing than we can provide."

Bennett did not specify how many UCPD officers were on duty at the time of the occupation.

Although the occupiers remained at Durant Hall for more than two and a half hours, the police departments did not muster enough of a presence to keep them from leaving the scene and taking to the streets.

"We requested BPD to assist us, and they arrived after the students left the building," Bennett said.

More Banner Drops @ UC Berkeley

Barrows Hall



Wheeler Hall


(via indybay)

BLACKOUT in Solidarity with UCSD

(via occupyca)

Durant Hall Is Occupied!

From reclaimuc.org:

Architecture has, like other growing phenomena, to go to school before it can wisely be emancipated. It is a distinctly promising sign of future power, for a young people . . . to forget self for the time being in the quiet, assiduous acquisition of knowledge already established by others. The time for fresh personal expression will come later.
--John Galen Howard, 1913

Accelerate: we are here to help architecture make the leap to emancipation. The architect John Galen Howard, who designed and oversaw the construction of what is now called Durant Hall at the beginning of the last century, was a hesitant man. We say: the time for fresh personal expression is now! There is no question that we are already the product of other people's assiduously accumulated knowledges, so many that they become impossible to catalog exhaustively. The accumulation of knowledge is a library, perhaps, but it is also a struggle, a movement, a tactic. Likewise, the acquisition of knowledge does not have to be quiet -- next to the sound system, self is forgotten and the commune emerges. The dance party: a distinctly promising sign of present power.

Future power too. On March 4, UC Berkeley students, workers, and faculty will march in solidarity with those from other UCs, CSUs, community colleges, and K-12 schools across California and the country as a whole. Like this building, reclaimed from the graveyard of financial speculation, we will reclaim the streets of Oakland in conjunction with an international day of action for public education to be free and democratic.

For the last two years, Durant Hall has been little more than a shell, surrounded by piles of rubble and heavy machinery, themselves surrounded by uneven rows of chain-link fencing. No longer is there any trace of the library it once was -- the East Asian Library, now moved across campus to a new building named after an insurance mogul who founded the notorious AIG. Language has been uprooted, pruned, and replanted as well. The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures went with the library, and in the process lost half its Japanese, Korean, and Chinese classes as well as the faculty that taught them -- over 1,500 curious students will be turned away this year. Subtracted from the flow of campus life, Durant Hall has existed only as a barrier, an inconvenience, a silent witness to the frustration of the thousands of students, workers, and faculty protesters who surrounded the neighboring Wheeler Hall and clashed with police last November.

But apparent emptiness conceals the movement beneath the surface, behind its fenced-off walls: capital flows through its veins. "Capital Projects," the administration of the University of California calls them. As we now know, the UC administration has used not only students' tuition, but also the promise of future tuition increases, to secure the bonds and bond ratings necessary to channel ever increasing resources into construction projects. They will always need more money, and it will always be our money. A general concern that changes the way we see the campus that surrounds us. But if there is one building in particular that exemplifies this process, it is Durant Hall: its renovation was halted in 2008 for lack of funds, and only started up again after the administration sold $1.3 billion in construction bonds last May backed by our fee hike as collateral. Its melancholy fate is to become yet another administration building. Durant Hall will be inhabited by deans and staff of the College of Letters and Science, but it has already been occupied by a bloated administration with private capital on its mind.

Capital, like architecture, is a growing phenomenon, but one that never matures. It pushes outward continuously in all directions, always presupposing an endless, spiraling expansion. New endpoints replace old ones in smooth succession, projecting themselves onto the grid of the future, erasing languages, knowledges, and histories that do not fit easily into the right angles of its blueprints. But we will not let their future bulldoze our present. We have our own bulldozers: dance parties to reclaim dead buildings, marches to reclaim the streets. On March 4, fight back!

ESCALATE-OCCUPY-RECLAIM

Signed,

The College of Debtors in Defiance.

Update: For more information check out The Durant Riot: Initial Brief and this email from previous occupants of Durant Hall.

Banner Drops

At SF State and UC Santa Cruz:



Get ready for March 4.

Take the strike pledge.

UCI: Sit-In Turns Into Occupation

Beginning at 9:30am, 20 students held a sit-in at the UCI administration building, Aldrich Hall. A rally started up outside. The police arrived around 9:45. Then this:

11:00am: Sources from on the ground report that the police are preparing to arrest the students.

11:25am: Sources say that people outside the building are barricading the doors to Aldrich Hall in an attempt to circumvent the police from arresting and moving the students sitting-in the building!

11:45am: Sources state that a, “giant cage is being built around Aldrich Hall.” and that, “things are heating up.” Photos to come! Police, administrators, and sit-in participants are barricaded inside Aldrich Hall.

Stay tuned for more information. Demands are also posted at the link.

Update: 17 arrested, including students and workers. More analysis up at occupyUCI.

March 4 Strike Poster

March 4 Strike Pledge

Sign it at ucstrike.com

Rolling University Starts Today: Dwinelle Hall

After the Fall PDF Available

Read it here.