Reposted from Necessary Means Fight.
Academic Workers for a Democratic Union, a reform caucus in UAW Local 2865, stands in solidarity with our fellow union and caucus member who was raped by Seth Miller, a member of the Progressive Labor Party. In response, the Progressive Labor party sought to undermine the account of the survivor, attacking her and her allies, offering only a privately circulated self- evaluation and a slap on the wrist to her assailant as their pretense of accountability.
In their official response to the demand for accountability, the organization claims to fight “sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny in every aspect”, while virtually in the same breath slandering the survivor and her allies as “informant-provocateurs” acting in collusion with the fascist police state. The PLP has made clear that the oppression of women means nothing to them when it challenges the practices and the structure of their organization. They have gone to considerable lengths to make this go away, including slandering the survivor, rather than addressing the problem that they have a member who has committed sexual assault. The organization, in very practical terms, has made a decision here. The Progressive Labor Party are apologists for a rapist, and therefore have placed their commitment to male supremacy – and silencing anything that would get in the way of that – above other concerns. They could have lived up to their own rhetoric regarding opposition to all forms of sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny, or they could continue to privilege their cadre over the project of social justice. By continuing to take the latter course, the Progressive Labor Party has indicated that it is an impediment to the goal of the radical transformation of society.
With this statement of solidarity, we call out Seth Miller as a rapist and PLP as an organization that harbors rapists and perpetuates rape culture. The PLP is no longer welcome in any organizing spaces we are a part of. We will not contribute to a political project that boils down to rape apologism and victim-blaming. We will work to stand in solidarity with all those who experience gender-based discrimination, assaults, and other forms of violence both in the various activist circles that we are a part of and in the broader society. Our stance is that the work of class struggle must be combined with struggles against all forms of oppression without the attempt to reduce or simplify them into a hierarchy. We pledge to redouble our efforts of addressing patriarchal behavior throughout our union and all of our other communities. We will also continue to create structures to challenge patriarchal practices in our organization, in our local, and in our international, directly addressing the way that our dynamics contribute to the oppression of our comrades and to women everywhere.
provisional home of the College of Debtors in Defiance
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Management's Backup Plans
From the perspective of those who govern the University of California, all has not been going according to plan.
There was the logo fiasco last fall, for one, which involved a series of biting news stories in national publications and concluded with a grudging, manifestly bitter concession statement from Daniel Dooley, one of UC's ten vice presidents. It was evidently difficult to defend a logo that looked at once like a toilet bowl, an internet refresh icon, and a sex act. But the logo redesign is only one of a number of issues on which the administration has recently been forced to retreat; the others have been more consequential.
Tuition Freeze
At the UC Regents' meeting last month, President Yudof declared that "undergraduate tuition increases are largely off the table." Given Yudof's previous positions and actions as President, his recent declaration that further fee hikes almost certainly won't be happening anytime soon is striking.
In the summer of 2009, following sharp reductions in the State's contribution to the UCs, the Regents gave President Yudof emergency powers, which he used to impose furloughs on staff and faculty, to fire approximately two thousand workers throughout the UC system, and to initiate a 32% undergraduate fee hike. These regressive transformations spurred the first round of recent anti-privatization protest at the UCs: during the fall of 2009, a series of multi-sectoral walkouts, street demonstrations, and building occupations took shape on campuses across the state. While this wave of opposition resulted in the rehiring of a few previously laid-off workers, and spurred then Governor Schwarzenegger to put a bit more money into the UCs, it did not meaningfully interrupt President Yudof and the Regents' push for a more privatized university -- a university where high student tuition rates help fund, free of state oversight, the construction of new biotechnology and energy research laboratories, sporting facilities, administrative offices, and high-rent dormitories, as well as the expansion of upper management layers and the growth of executive salaries and bonuses.
While Yudof and the Regents never attempted, following the Fall of 2009, a fee hike as drastic as the 32% increase they'd passed that year, they nevertheless kept up a steady march of 6%, 8%, and 10% fee hikes in subsequent years, such that, by the Fall of 2011, undergraduate in-state tuition had reached $12,200 (up from $3,800 in 2003). Then, in an attempt to make inevitable another four years of fee hikes, President Yudof proposed in the Fall of 2011 a multi-year financial plan that included annual fee hikes of between 8 and 16 percent, to be determined by the level of State funding -- a plan that could have brought undergraduate tuition to $22,000 by 2015.
It was in this context, which happened to coincide with the emergence of the Occupy movement in the US, that another round of mass protest at the UCs took shape. Campus-based occupy encampments and assemblies emerged at Davis, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Riverside, Irvine, and Los Angeles. Those participating in occupy events at the UCs tended to pick up and expand upon the critiques of ballooning student debt that were being articulated by the wider Occupy movement -- critiques that worked to link our local opposition to fee hikes with broader social and economic dynamics and impasses.
The severe, if also everyday, forms of police violence carried out against occupy activists from New York to Oakland were mirrored as well at the UCs -- students and professors at Berkeley were struck repeatedly in the ribs with batons, those at Davis were shot with pepper spray while seated on the quad, and those at Riverside were hit with rubber bullets. These moments of state violence were shocking, though they weren't entirely dissimilar from the acts of violence that the UC Police Department had carried out against student protesters from 2009 through 2011. It was only in the context of the Occupy movement -- where livestreaming was ubiquitous, and where a practice of mobilizing in response to instances of police violence had emerged -- that these acts of violence set off radiating outrage and strike actions, and thus brought about the thorough delegitimization of UC administrators and police officers.
At UC Berkeley, for example, the campus with which I am most familiar, not only did the police violence of November 9th compel students and professors to cancel classes and assemble on Sproul Plaza during the evening of November 15th -- composing the largest wildcat strike at Berkeley since the Third World Liberation Front strike in 1969 -- the violence also forced the previously moribund Academic Senate to pass, during a well-attended special session on November 28, resolutions condemning the Berkeley Chancellors and calling for significant changes in police protocols on campus.
While the occupy movement on UC campuses, like the broader occupy movement, lost some momentum through the spring of 2012, a series of demonstrations and marches, including a multi-week direct action to shut down a US Bank branch at UC Davis, a four-day march from Oakland to Sacramento, and an occupation of the State Capitol building in early March, kept pressure on university administrators and state politicians up through the summer of 2012. This was the moment when Governor Jerry Brown compromised with the advocates of a Millionaire's Tax to formulate what would become Proposition 30, and when the Regents agreed that, if a certain percentage of the tax revenues generated by Prop. 30 were directed to the University of California, they would freeze undergraduate tuition rates. While these were partial and uncertain victories -- the watered-down proposition very well could have been defeated -- in retrospect, this moment appears as a significant turning point: this was when President Yudof's push for indefinite tuition increases ground to a halt.
Resignations
Some indication of the degree to which recent protests and their aftermaths have rattled and delegitimized those who govern the UCs can be found in the subsequent resignations of four prominent administration and police figures: President Mark Yudof, Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, Berkeley Police Chief Mitch Celaya, and Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza. While only Spicuzza's resignation was accompanied by an explicit concession of wrongdoing, and therefore it's theoretically possible that the other resignations were unrelated to recent protests and their repression, the timing and distribution of the resignations would suggest otherwise.
When considered in the context of the Berkeley Academic Senate's vote to condemn Chancellor Birgeneau and to call for changes in police practice, the resignations of Birgeneau and Celaya, as well as the recent hiring of Nicholas Dirks, appear as attempts by those who govern the UCs to recapture faculty loyalty, or at least to hold off further significant ruptures between the faculty and upper administration at Berkeley. Anecdotally, it seems that Dirks enjoys the trust of most of the professors who publicly broke with Birgeneau in the fall of 2011. So, even though Vice-Chancellor Breslauer -- who had been delegated authority to make decisions for Birgeneau on November 9 -- remains in his position [Update; 5/13/13: Breslauer announced in April that he will retire next fall], and even though the UCPD remains armed and substantially unreformed, it seems that members of the faculty are at least willing to give the new campus leadership the benefit of the doubt, meaning that they aren't at the moment likely to provide much support to those inclined to push for the disarming or disbanding of UCPD, or for the expansion of student and worker control of university spaces and priorities. A pacified faculty would make it harder for campus unions to win significant concessions from management in upcoming contract negotiations -- negotiations that, if successful, could provide wage and benefit gains for workers and students, as well as class size reductions and a check on the proposed expansion of online education at the UCs.
Labor Conflicts
While those who govern the State and the University of California appear to have at least temporarily conceded on the issue of student tuition, they are simultaneously intensifying their efforts to limit the power of campus workers and to cut non-managerial labor costs at the UCs.
At UC Berkeley, staff positions are being eliminated through attrition, while a few hundred workers will likely be relocated to a building on the far side of the city, which would damage institutional memory and weaken the relationships amongst staff members and between staff and departmental faculty. Management is also pushing, so far with some success, a two-tier pension plan, which could produce resentment amongst newer workers towards their more senior colleagues, and thus similarly weaken forms of solidarity between campus employees.
Moreover, when considered in the context of labor/management antagonisms, the recent push by the Governor and the Regents for online-mediated instruction and student support appears as an attempt to expand class sizes and to outsource work that had been performed by unionized graduate students and clerical workers to non-unionized labor (as is already happening at San Jose State University, through their partnership with the online instruction company Udacity). While the full-scale imposition of online education at the UCs doesn't seem imminent, Dean Edley and others have signalled some longer term plans in this area, which, if implemented, could have the effect of intensifying race and class stratifications in the UCs (creating a situation where working class students of color were concentrated in online classes and on campuses facing severe cuts to departmental budgets and graduate programs, while being increasingly excluded from relatively unaffected flagship campuses).
Health Insurance Fees
Despite the fact that UC administrators seem generally to have shifted their focus away from making students pay more for their education, and towards shoring up their support amongst members of the faculty and weakening the power of organized labor on campus through speedup, downsizing, and automation, recent moves by the administration around the UC Student Health Insurance Plan could result in what is effectively a new fee increase for graduate and undergraduate students.
Partly in response to a campaign by the Student-Worker's Union (UAW 2865) for the elimination of caps on lifesaving care and for free preventative pre-natal care -- reforms which would bring UC SHIP more in line with the regulations of the Affordable Care Act -- management has initiated a push to raise SHIP fees for all students covered by the plan. They are claiming that UC SHIP has been operating at an annual deficit of around $20 million, and that fee increases are therefore urgent and inevitable. This despite the fact that the UC medical centers are earning over $900 million in annual profits -- profits that could be used to help fund the insurance plan. In a report recently delivered to the graduate assembly, outgoing President Yudof proposed student health insurance fee increases of up to 70% over the next three years -- increases that would amount to approximately $1,500 per person. While the administration would like to present their push for higher health insurance fees as a matter of the prudent management of a faltering program, when put in the context of recent antagonisms at the UCs, it appears much more as an attempt to find a politically tenable means of raising student fees while claiming not to be doing so.
It's one of their backup plans. We'll know in a few months whether it works.
[Update; 5/13/13: The outcome of the latest round of health insurance negotiations: no more caps on care, but variably increased fees.]
There was the logo fiasco last fall, for one, which involved a series of biting news stories in national publications and concluded with a grudging, manifestly bitter concession statement from Daniel Dooley, one of UC's ten vice presidents. It was evidently difficult to defend a logo that looked at once like a toilet bowl, an internet refresh icon, and a sex act. But the logo redesign is only one of a number of issues on which the administration has recently been forced to retreat; the others have been more consequential.
Tuition Freeze
At the UC Regents' meeting last month, President Yudof declared that "undergraduate tuition increases are largely off the table." Given Yudof's previous positions and actions as President, his recent declaration that further fee hikes almost certainly won't be happening anytime soon is striking.
In the summer of 2009, following sharp reductions in the State's contribution to the UCs, the Regents gave President Yudof emergency powers, which he used to impose furloughs on staff and faculty, to fire approximately two thousand workers throughout the UC system, and to initiate a 32% undergraduate fee hike. These regressive transformations spurred the first round of recent anti-privatization protest at the UCs: during the fall of 2009, a series of multi-sectoral walkouts, street demonstrations, and building occupations took shape on campuses across the state. While this wave of opposition resulted in the rehiring of a few previously laid-off workers, and spurred then Governor Schwarzenegger to put a bit more money into the UCs, it did not meaningfully interrupt President Yudof and the Regents' push for a more privatized university -- a university where high student tuition rates help fund, free of state oversight, the construction of new biotechnology and energy research laboratories, sporting facilities, administrative offices, and high-rent dormitories, as well as the expansion of upper management layers and the growth of executive salaries and bonuses.
While Yudof and the Regents never attempted, following the Fall of 2009, a fee hike as drastic as the 32% increase they'd passed that year, they nevertheless kept up a steady march of 6%, 8%, and 10% fee hikes in subsequent years, such that, by the Fall of 2011, undergraduate in-state tuition had reached $12,200 (up from $3,800 in 2003). Then, in an attempt to make inevitable another four years of fee hikes, President Yudof proposed in the Fall of 2011 a multi-year financial plan that included annual fee hikes of between 8 and 16 percent, to be determined by the level of State funding -- a plan that could have brought undergraduate tuition to $22,000 by 2015.
It was in this context, which happened to coincide with the emergence of the Occupy movement in the US, that another round of mass protest at the UCs took shape. Campus-based occupy encampments and assemblies emerged at Davis, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Riverside, Irvine, and Los Angeles. Those participating in occupy events at the UCs tended to pick up and expand upon the critiques of ballooning student debt that were being articulated by the wider Occupy movement -- critiques that worked to link our local opposition to fee hikes with broader social and economic dynamics and impasses.
The severe, if also everyday, forms of police violence carried out against occupy activists from New York to Oakland were mirrored as well at the UCs -- students and professors at Berkeley were struck repeatedly in the ribs with batons, those at Davis were shot with pepper spray while seated on the quad, and those at Riverside were hit with rubber bullets. These moments of state violence were shocking, though they weren't entirely dissimilar from the acts of violence that the UC Police Department had carried out against student protesters from 2009 through 2011. It was only in the context of the Occupy movement -- where livestreaming was ubiquitous, and where a practice of mobilizing in response to instances of police violence had emerged -- that these acts of violence set off radiating outrage and strike actions, and thus brought about the thorough delegitimization of UC administrators and police officers.
At UC Berkeley, for example, the campus with which I am most familiar, not only did the police violence of November 9th compel students and professors to cancel classes and assemble on Sproul Plaza during the evening of November 15th -- composing the largest wildcat strike at Berkeley since the Third World Liberation Front strike in 1969 -- the violence also forced the previously moribund Academic Senate to pass, during a well-attended special session on November 28, resolutions condemning the Berkeley Chancellors and calling for significant changes in police protocols on campus.
While the occupy movement on UC campuses, like the broader occupy movement, lost some momentum through the spring of 2012, a series of demonstrations and marches, including a multi-week direct action to shut down a US Bank branch at UC Davis, a four-day march from Oakland to Sacramento, and an occupation of the State Capitol building in early March, kept pressure on university administrators and state politicians up through the summer of 2012. This was the moment when Governor Jerry Brown compromised with the advocates of a Millionaire's Tax to formulate what would become Proposition 30, and when the Regents agreed that, if a certain percentage of the tax revenues generated by Prop. 30 were directed to the University of California, they would freeze undergraduate tuition rates. While these were partial and uncertain victories -- the watered-down proposition very well could have been defeated -- in retrospect, this moment appears as a significant turning point: this was when President Yudof's push for indefinite tuition increases ground to a halt.
Resignations
Some indication of the degree to which recent protests and their aftermaths have rattled and delegitimized those who govern the UCs can be found in the subsequent resignations of four prominent administration and police figures: President Mark Yudof, Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, Berkeley Police Chief Mitch Celaya, and Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza. While only Spicuzza's resignation was accompanied by an explicit concession of wrongdoing, and therefore it's theoretically possible that the other resignations were unrelated to recent protests and their repression, the timing and distribution of the resignations would suggest otherwise.
When considered in the context of the Berkeley Academic Senate's vote to condemn Chancellor Birgeneau and to call for changes in police practice, the resignations of Birgeneau and Celaya, as well as the recent hiring of Nicholas Dirks, appear as attempts by those who govern the UCs to recapture faculty loyalty, or at least to hold off further significant ruptures between the faculty and upper administration at Berkeley. Anecdotally, it seems that Dirks enjoys the trust of most of the professors who publicly broke with Birgeneau in the fall of 2011. So, even though Vice-Chancellor Breslauer -- who had been delegated authority to make decisions for Birgeneau on November 9 -- remains in his position [Update; 5/13/13: Breslauer announced in April that he will retire next fall], and even though the UCPD remains armed and substantially unreformed, it seems that members of the faculty are at least willing to give the new campus leadership the benefit of the doubt, meaning that they aren't at the moment likely to provide much support to those inclined to push for the disarming or disbanding of UCPD, or for the expansion of student and worker control of university spaces and priorities. A pacified faculty would make it harder for campus unions to win significant concessions from management in upcoming contract negotiations -- negotiations that, if successful, could provide wage and benefit gains for workers and students, as well as class size reductions and a check on the proposed expansion of online education at the UCs.
Labor Conflicts
While those who govern the State and the University of California appear to have at least temporarily conceded on the issue of student tuition, they are simultaneously intensifying their efforts to limit the power of campus workers and to cut non-managerial labor costs at the UCs.
At UC Berkeley, staff positions are being eliminated through attrition, while a few hundred workers will likely be relocated to a building on the far side of the city, which would damage institutional memory and weaken the relationships amongst staff members and between staff and departmental faculty. Management is also pushing, so far with some success, a two-tier pension plan, which could produce resentment amongst newer workers towards their more senior colleagues, and thus similarly weaken forms of solidarity between campus employees.
Moreover, when considered in the context of labor/management antagonisms, the recent push by the Governor and the Regents for online-mediated instruction and student support appears as an attempt to expand class sizes and to outsource work that had been performed by unionized graduate students and clerical workers to non-unionized labor (as is already happening at San Jose State University, through their partnership with the online instruction company Udacity). While the full-scale imposition of online education at the UCs doesn't seem imminent, Dean Edley and others have signalled some longer term plans in this area, which, if implemented, could have the effect of intensifying race and class stratifications in the UCs (creating a situation where working class students of color were concentrated in online classes and on campuses facing severe cuts to departmental budgets and graduate programs, while being increasingly excluded from relatively unaffected flagship campuses).
Health Insurance Fees
Despite the fact that UC administrators seem generally to have shifted their focus away from making students pay more for their education, and towards shoring up their support amongst members of the faculty and weakening the power of organized labor on campus through speedup, downsizing, and automation, recent moves by the administration around the UC Student Health Insurance Plan could result in what is effectively a new fee increase for graduate and undergraduate students.
Partly in response to a campaign by the Student-Worker's Union (UAW 2865) for the elimination of caps on lifesaving care and for free preventative pre-natal care -- reforms which would bring UC SHIP more in line with the regulations of the Affordable Care Act -- management has initiated a push to raise SHIP fees for all students covered by the plan. They are claiming that UC SHIP has been operating at an annual deficit of around $20 million, and that fee increases are therefore urgent and inevitable. This despite the fact that the UC medical centers are earning over $900 million in annual profits -- profits that could be used to help fund the insurance plan. In a report recently delivered to the graduate assembly, outgoing President Yudof proposed student health insurance fee increases of up to 70% over the next three years -- increases that would amount to approximately $1,500 per person. While the administration would like to present their push for higher health insurance fees as a matter of the prudent management of a faltering program, when put in the context of recent antagonisms at the UCs, it appears much more as an attempt to find a politically tenable means of raising student fees while claiming not to be doing so.
It's one of their backup plans. We'll know in a few months whether it works.
[Update; 5/13/13: The outcome of the latest round of health insurance negotiations: no more caps on care, but variably increased fees.]
Thursday, January 31, 2013
UC Administration Continues to Grow Relative to Faculty
Last time we wrote on this subject was September 2011, when for the first time UC senior administrators officially began to outnumber faculty. Now, via Charlie Schwartz, we have the most recent data on administrative bloat at the UC, which goes up to October 2012.
Schwartz writes:
This shows the continuing outsized growth of the management cadre (defined as the employees classified in Senior Management Group and Management & Senior Professionals): their numbers grew by 252% over the 21 year period while total employee numbers grew by a mere 51%. (The total number of employees shown in this graph is scaled down so that one can compare the relative growth, over time, of each population.)
For another comparison, the latest total number in this management category (SMG + MSP) is 9,457 FTE (full time equivalent employees) while the number of Regular Teaching Faculty is 8,657 FTE.
Similar graphs for each individual campus of the university system can be found here (.doc) or here (.pdf). For several campuses we note a mild decrease in the Management numbers in the past few years but then a new upward surge with the latest data.
Elsewhere I have written about the repeated requests for UC’s top officials to either justify this apparent bloat or to get rid of it; and their inability to do either. My previous estimate was that, if the apparent excess is not justifiable, then UC is wasting something like $1 Billion per year.The UC administration constitutes a parasitic bureaucracy that grows and expands by consuming those elements of the university that remain outside of it. It can only survive by extracting tuition from students and wages from university workers. In return, it does not grow the university—it grows only itself. While budget cuts at the state level are an important piece of the crisis of higher education, the administrative bureaucracy at both campus and system level is by no means an innocent actor. It is the UC administration that must be held responsible for expanding, intensifying, and accelerating the processes of privatization.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Open Letter to President Yudof on UC Logo Fiasco
December 15, 2012
Mark Yudof, President
University of California Office of the President
1111 Franklin Street, 12th Floor
Oakland, CA 94607
Dear President Yudof:
The enormous public backlash to the UC logo change evidences a major problem at your office. Open communication between the Office of the President and your faculty, students, and alumni is being ignored. Whether this was intentional for this rebranding project or an oversight, it is unacceptable.
I write you as a senior professor of Art at UCSB, where I have taught since 1992. I have also taught at UC Berkeley, and have served as a visiting assistant at the Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and San Diego campuses. I attended UCLA and received my BA and MFA degrees from UC San Diego. In short, I am both intimately familiar with and acutely invested in the University of California.
How an in-house design team can operate for three+ years rebranding the university's visual identity without the university's own Art faculty knowing is beyond me. Our campuses boast internationally renowned experts in the visual arts, design, and criticism. We educate scores of cutting edge MFA candidates each year. My top undergraduate art students are the best in the country. Why were none of us consulted? In this time of budget cuts and clustering, why weren't our own resources tapped? What happened to the UC's esteemed history of self-governance and openness? And who, exactly, oversaw these decisions? My colleagues and I are dumbfounded.
My problem is actually less with the final campaign logo and video (which I find vapid and derivative), and more with the way this entire process came to light. The UC sits at a critical crossroads in the public eye and can no longer rely on our historical reputation and prestige to see us through. Yes, the California electorate passed Prop 30, but debate continues on tuition hikes, state pensions, administrative accountability, and the role of state funds in higher education. I know firsthand how important state support is and how valuable and life-changing a UC education can be. We need to present these stories to the public, not get entangled in critical and emotionally charged mistakes like this. I urge you to immediately implement a more open dialogue between your office and UC faculty, students, and alumni. I ask you to implement the type of communication that would have steered this rebranding program from the beginning.
On a related note, I was not previously familiar with any members of this UCOP in-house design team, but I am appalled by the public immaturity and lack of professionalism being tweeted by the Creative Director. Again, I ask -- who hired these people and oversaw these decisions?
Sincerely,
Kip Fulbeck
Professor
Monday, December 17, 2012
Progressive Labor Party Defends Rapists
reposted from Necessary Means:
In 2006 Progressive Labor Party member Seth Miller raped an anarchist activist who had been his close friend and a fellow organizer for many years in the Los Angeles area. The activist found no recourse in the legal system but hoped that PLP leadership would intervene and do something to hold Seth accountable for being a rapist. The party leadership did nothing despite the activist reaching out multiple times.
Early in 2012 the activist found renewed support for holding Seth accountable after learning that he had recently been part of some organizing spaces with the activist’s allies. The activist, along with a small collective of allies, approached PLP again in May 2012 to remind them of the rape and demand a process of accountability. After several weeks and a meeting between the activist, her allies, and a member of PLP leadership, the party seemed to acknowledge it was harboring a rapist but refused to act unless the activist provided “conclusive evidence” that Seth had raped her. Instead, the party leadership engaged in victim-blaming and insinuated that the activist was merely feeling guilty about consensual sex. While party leadership agreed to take up the issue, they opposed any process that didn't conform to their terms and obstructed progress on holding Seth accountable by canceling meetings at the last minute and issuing unreasonable expectations for rescheduling.
It is now several months after those initial conversations with PLP’s new leadership, and Seth remains an operating member of PLP, though he is now based in New York City. Recently the activist found through her own investigation that the party held a secret meeting in New York in July or August during which they agreed that while there was no “conclusive evidence” to their standards proving that Seth is a rapist, they would require him to drink with a buddy from now on and write a self-criticism about his relationship to women and patriarchy. These so-called solutions do nothing to protect our communities from a known rapist.
PLP leadership has failed to acknowledge this meeting just as they have failed to protect our communities from this predator. The party has, however, asked that the activist and her allies stop spreading “gossip” about Seth because they see the activist’s rape as a private matter rather than a political matter.
PLP is incapable of promoting truly revolutionary politics because it refuses to acknowledge individual and systemic sexual violence. In response, we ask a few things of you. The first is to exclude PLP from all activism and organizing spaces. The second is to warn your allies of the fact that PLP is defending and harboring at least one known rapist. The third is to examine and address the patriarchal behavior throughout all of our activist communities that protects and promotes sexual violence. The fourth is to actively support and defend the many individuals in our community that have suffered sexual violence. Finally, we ask you to address these matters in the best way you see fit - you do not need our permission to act.
In 2006 Progressive Labor Party member Seth Miller raped an anarchist activist who had been his close friend and a fellow organizer for many years in the Los Angeles area. The activist found no recourse in the legal system but hoped that PLP leadership would intervene and do something to hold Seth accountable for being a rapist. The party leadership did nothing despite the activist reaching out multiple times.
Early in 2012 the activist found renewed support for holding Seth accountable after learning that he had recently been part of some organizing spaces with the activist’s allies. The activist, along with a small collective of allies, approached PLP again in May 2012 to remind them of the rape and demand a process of accountability. After several weeks and a meeting between the activist, her allies, and a member of PLP leadership, the party seemed to acknowledge it was harboring a rapist but refused to act unless the activist provided “conclusive evidence” that Seth had raped her. Instead, the party leadership engaged in victim-blaming and insinuated that the activist was merely feeling guilty about consensual sex. While party leadership agreed to take up the issue, they opposed any process that didn't conform to their terms and obstructed progress on holding Seth accountable by canceling meetings at the last minute and issuing unreasonable expectations for rescheduling.
It is now several months after those initial conversations with PLP’s new leadership, and Seth remains an operating member of PLP, though he is now based in New York City. Recently the activist found through her own investigation that the party held a secret meeting in New York in July or August during which they agreed that while there was no “conclusive evidence” to their standards proving that Seth is a rapist, they would require him to drink with a buddy from now on and write a self-criticism about his relationship to women and patriarchy. These so-called solutions do nothing to protect our communities from a known rapist.
PLP leadership has failed to acknowledge this meeting just as they have failed to protect our communities from this predator. The party has, however, asked that the activist and her allies stop spreading “gossip” about Seth because they see the activist’s rape as a private matter rather than a political matter.
PLP is incapable of promoting truly revolutionary politics because it refuses to acknowledge individual and systemic sexual violence. In response, we ask a few things of you. The first is to exclude PLP from all activism and organizing spaces. The second is to warn your allies of the fact that PLP is defending and harboring at least one known rapist. The third is to examine and address the patriarchal behavior throughout all of our activist communities that protects and promotes sexual violence. The fourth is to actively support and defend the many individuals in our community that have suffered sexual violence. Finally, we ask you to address these matters in the best way you see fit - you do not need our permission to act.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Update: Eshleman Hall Barricaded in Defense of Multicultural Student Spaces
Update, 10:50 Tuesday, Nov. 27: The Occupation has ended, following a negotiation with UCB Administrators. Everyone was allowed to leave the building, without having IDs checked. The Administration conceded to the demand for amnesty; they agreed to let the Bridges community vote on whether their rooms would be on the 2nd floor, 4th floor, or in the basement of the future student center (whereas previously the administration had decided unilaterally to move the Bridges community's rooms to the basement); and they agreed to have a task force (rather than review board) on the Multicultural Student Development Offices and Recruitment and Retention Center, which will include six members chosen by the Bridges community who will present demands directly to the chancellor.
This afternoon, a group of students barricaded themselves on the sixth floor of Eshleman Hall at UC Berkeley, reclaiming a building that has been designated for demolition and demanding that the Administration abandon plans to cut support for the recruitment and retention of students of color. At this point, a couple hundred supporters have gathered in lower Sproul Plaza, while the police have closed off the building. Those barricading the building are calling on supporters to gather at Eshleman in order to protect those inside and intensify the force of their resistance.
The demands:
We Demand that the Multicultural Student Development Offices be restored to their former structure by Vice Chancellor Gibor Basri. Countless students and the ASUC as an entity have voiced this opinion and received no changes.
We demand that the budget allocation of the multicultural student development offices be increased to meet the needs of their work.
We demand that none of the peaceful protesters in this occupation receive any punishment or repercussions for this activity.
We demand an increase in funding for the Recruitment and Retention Center to assist in their mission of increasing the enrollment of underrepresented minorities on campus.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Until we have more than speech and linked arms at our disposal...
The following speech was given by Professor Geoffrey O'Brian on Sproul Plaza, during the walkout on November 8.
It feels good to be with you.
I could write that sentence ahead of time because I remember what it feels like from other moments when we’ve come together to risk saying what the Regents and the administration would rather we didn’t even think, let alone shout. Most sharply, I remember this feeling from last November 9th, when we gathered to protest what we still have before us to protest. I remember what it’s like to protect strangers like they are the only people you know; to establish a line and hold that line while the Alameda Sheriff’s Dept. wades in with batons in obedience to an absent Chancellor. Our line didn’t last very long that day, but it lasted longer than a police line would last if it didn’t have guns and gas, shinguards and faceplates, sound cannons and an afterlife in false charges and malicious prosecution.
The powers that would like to take the public out of public education don’t have our conviction, they have greed plus an arsenal; they don’t have community, they have closed-door meetings and staging areas. And as their cops hit us last year they were also striking at what we expressed in the linkages of our arms. They were jealous of our resolve and unhappy to be reminded it’s possible. They were unhappy we didn’t have names and serial numbers on our chests. Which is why we felt good even then and can feel good now as we gather (despite their having tried to turn on the rain machine and the cold). This feels like living. This feels like not being in debt.
The Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, in a poem about the necessary bravery and the certain vulnerability of the protestor, wrote a line that has stayed with me for years: “Come today in fetters to the marketplace.” That is, bring your problems back to their source, bring them as part of what you offer and are, bring your discomfort with leaving privacy behind. Because doing so might make the marketplace simply a place, a place where a public can dream itself back into being and out of the prison of only private lives. In our current struggle here, for “fetters” read debt, for “marketplace” read the rapidly privatizing university, pricing out the poor, and turning as ghostly as an online education pilot program. But for “today” still read today, the only day available to us again and again, the only day between us and the wrong future, the day wherein we gather to see the first person break its fetters and go plural. We need to strengthen and populate that plural until we can do more than protest, can instead refuse things and have our refusals be more than symbolic. Until we can claim and keep the Gill Tract. Until we have more than speech and linked arms at our disposal.
That we are not that many yet is hard, but it isn’t as hard as not trying would be. This is what we have -- after Proposition 30 has passed, which I’m glad of, but which is a bandaid, written by the governor to tax the rich less than the proposed Millionaire’s Tax would have and which swaps some of the burden to the working class through a sales tax increase. This is what we have, with a new Chancellor and UC Police Chief on the horizon from whom we can expect nothing but more of the same; while intellectual property is sold to British Petroleum and campus child care is outsourced to a Bain subsidiary named Bright Horizons, and staff are laid off and furloughed, this is what we have. We have each other, now, today, in the rain. But this is living rather than seeking not to. This feeling, as solidarity becomes purpose and it runs through us, is what we have, and it has to be enough. Keep coming, and bring your fetters with you.
(Photo from the Daily Cal)
It feels good to be with you.
I could write that sentence ahead of time because I remember what it feels like from other moments when we’ve come together to risk saying what the Regents and the administration would rather we didn’t even think, let alone shout. Most sharply, I remember this feeling from last November 9th, when we gathered to protest what we still have before us to protest. I remember what it’s like to protect strangers like they are the only people you know; to establish a line and hold that line while the Alameda Sheriff’s Dept. wades in with batons in obedience to an absent Chancellor. Our line didn’t last very long that day, but it lasted longer than a police line would last if it didn’t have guns and gas, shinguards and faceplates, sound cannons and an afterlife in false charges and malicious prosecution.
The powers that would like to take the public out of public education don’t have our conviction, they have greed plus an arsenal; they don’t have community, they have closed-door meetings and staging areas. And as their cops hit us last year they were also striking at what we expressed in the linkages of our arms. They were jealous of our resolve and unhappy to be reminded it’s possible. They were unhappy we didn’t have names and serial numbers on our chests. Which is why we felt good even then and can feel good now as we gather (despite their having tried to turn on the rain machine and the cold). This feels like living. This feels like not being in debt.
The Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, in a poem about the necessary bravery and the certain vulnerability of the protestor, wrote a line that has stayed with me for years: “Come today in fetters to the marketplace.” That is, bring your problems back to their source, bring them as part of what you offer and are, bring your discomfort with leaving privacy behind. Because doing so might make the marketplace simply a place, a place where a public can dream itself back into being and out of the prison of only private lives. In our current struggle here, for “fetters” read debt, for “marketplace” read the rapidly privatizing university, pricing out the poor, and turning as ghostly as an online education pilot program. But for “today” still read today, the only day available to us again and again, the only day between us and the wrong future, the day wherein we gather to see the first person break its fetters and go plural. We need to strengthen and populate that plural until we can do more than protest, can instead refuse things and have our refusals be more than symbolic. Until we can claim and keep the Gill Tract. Until we have more than speech and linked arms at our disposal.
That we are not that many yet is hard, but it isn’t as hard as not trying would be. This is what we have -- after Proposition 30 has passed, which I’m glad of, but which is a bandaid, written by the governor to tax the rich less than the proposed Millionaire’s Tax would have and which swaps some of the burden to the working class through a sales tax increase. This is what we have, with a new Chancellor and UC Police Chief on the horizon from whom we can expect nothing but more of the same; while intellectual property is sold to British Petroleum and campus child care is outsourced to a Bain subsidiary named Bright Horizons, and staff are laid off and furloughed, this is what we have. We have each other, now, today, in the rain. But this is living rather than seeking not to. This feeling, as solidarity becomes purpose and it runs through us, is what we have, and it has to be enough. Keep coming, and bring your fetters with you.
(Photo from the Daily Cal)
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Third Debtors' Assembly at UCB
Debt is a permanent feature of most of our lives. Yet the socialization of risk debt isolates individuals, locking us in the private misery of our dealings with banks and creditors. Medical debt, student debt, consumer debt, foreclosures -- these social forms mark so many personal failings and moral obligations, we are told. Debt, in other words, not only insures our continued servitude to the corporate pursuit of dwindling private profits. It also serves to alienate us from one another and foreclose the possibility of collective resistance.
Debtors’ Assemblies, then, are a first step in fighting back to reclaim our stolen futures. Please join us Wednesday, November 7 at 5pm in front of California Hall for our last Debtors’ Assembly to learn more about the many forms of debt and discuss ways to resist debt’s claim upon our lives.
And remember, tomorrow (November 8) is the walkout and sleepout on campus.
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