[Update Wednesday 4:48 pm]: For full coverage of Anticut 3, there's a reportback from Bay of Rage here, another one from Surf City Revolt here, a third by Reginald James here. Pictures are up on Indybay here and here.

Yesterday, Anticut 3 marched through downtown Oakland, stopping outside the jail and chanting so loud -- "Inside! Outside! We're all on the same side!" -- and generally making so much noise that prisoners inside could be heard banging on the windows in response. Expect a reportback soon, but for now here's the media's take:

OAKLAND -- A vociferous but peaceful protest turned heads Friday evening as a group of about 100 marched through downtown Oakland in solidarity with Pelican Bay State Prison inmates who are on a hunger strike and the victim of Sunday's BART shooting.

Also, be sure to check out the statement that was handed out during the march:

Now, finally, the money is gone. The world has run out of future, used it up, wasted it on the grotesque fantasies of the rich, on technologies of death and alienation, on dead cities. Everywhere the same refrain, the same banners and headlines: there is nothing left for you. From the US to Greece, from Chile to Spain, whatever human face the State might have had: gone. The State is no longer a provider of education or care, jobs or housing. It is just a police force, a prison system, a bureaucracy with guns. . .

Sometimes, maybe, we get treated to some political theater: faked expressions of concern or outrage from the puffy, grimacing faces. But the result is always the same – in Oakland, in Sacramento, in Washington, in the offices of the IMF – whatever the owners of wealth want, they get. The rest of us are sacrificed on the altar of the bottom line.

No money on which to retire after a lifetime of crushing work. No money to go to college. No money for the grade schools and high schools, which every day look more and more like prisons. No money for the people maimed, sickened and driven insane by this unbearable society.

We could go through the new California budget line by line, but you basically already know what it contains. It’s not a budget but a bludgeon. Every line says the same thing: Fuck you. Die.

There is no money. And yet, still, we live in a society of vast, almost obscene wealth: blocks of homes sit empty, mountains of luxury goods glut the shopping emporia, unused factories and equipment gather rust. All of it under the spell of a strange collective hallucination called “property.” All of it protected by cops and the threat of prison. . .

Yes, the money is gone and there is no future. No future for capitalism. All attempts at reform are now as absurd as making home repairs while the rest of the house is on fire.

The latest from Bay of Rage:

//July 8th, 6:00 sharp, don’t be late//
//Intersection of Broadway and Telegraph//

against capitalism
against austerity
against prisons
in solidarity with the Pelican Bay hunger strike

This is the third in a series of anti-austerity actions designed to resist and make visible the new age of austerity and crisis in which we find ourselves. As many will know, the state of California recently passed a devastating budget, inflicting deep cuts to health care programs, universities and community colleges, public assistance grants, mental health, and programs for the elderly and disabled. Resistance is more necessary than ever. Since it has become clear that neither corporations nor the state can provide jobs or resources for us, we need to begin providing for each other directly. To do that, we first need to get together, get organized and get going. This is what Anticut 3 is about.

But because any attempt to fight the austerity regime will be met by state repression -- which we saw a glimpse of during Anticut 2 -- and because the current budget will swell California’s already overcrowded prisons, we have decided that this next action should stand in direct solidarity with the important hunger strike by prisoners at the notorious Pelican Bay “Supermax” prison. Anticut 3 is dedicated to articulating the links between austerity and the prison system.

• be on time; we leave at 6:00 pm sharp
• bring noisemakers! pots and pans, horns, etc
• bring friends, banners, propaganda
• let’s keep each other safe
• for more information on the newly-passed California austerity budget, read this
• for more information about the Pelican Bay hunger strike, visit this website

also, be sure to make it to our comrades’ action in SF on July 7th: Take Back the Day

[Update Thursday 12:48 pm]: The Pelican Bay hunger strike is spreading -- even the official numbers (which are most likely underestimates) suggest that 6,600 prisoners from 13 of the state's 33 prisons are refusing to eat.

Also, if you can't make it to Anticut 3 on Friday, there are a number of other actions planned for this weekend. Check them out here, along with a couple new propaganda posters you can download and post around. As always, austerity is accompanied by the deployment state violence -- the murder of Charles Hill by BART cops last Sunday night is only the most recent and extreme example, but it can't be separated from the everyday violence of the prison-industrial complex. Solidarity with the Pelican Bay hunger strike!

Yesterday, the Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio briefly occupied the Mexican consulate in New York City in solidarity with five political prisoners, members of the Zapatista "Other Campaign," in Chiapas. Later, they released a communiqué (in Spanish) and some pictures from the action. Here's a rough translation:

At 7:30 in the morning, on the fourth day of the campaign called "5 Days of Worldwide Action for the Bachajón 5," members of the Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio, from the "Other Campaign" New York, entered and took over the Mexican Consulate of New York City. We initiated this occupation as part of this campaign to protest against the cruel repression of the State against the dignified struggle of the ejidatarios from San Sebastián Bachajón, Chiapas, Mexico, who are also adherents to the "Other Campaign and are defending their natural resources from greedy transnational corporations disguised as an "ecotourism venture."

In our action today, like all the other Mexicans forced to wait in line to enter the Mexican Consulate, we had to pass through a pack of guards. We realize that security is getting tighter and the number of guards is multiplying every time we do actions here. There are always more than the previous time. But in any case, this didn't stop us. We continued with strength, entering the tall building located between golden streets that extend out like veins from the heart of global capitalism.

It's here in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and inside these gray buildings, where decisions are made that not only fill the pockets of greedy capitalists and their political lackeys with money, but also affect simple, hardworking, dignified, and humble people around the world.

On entering the consulate we saw that -- as always -- it was full of other Mexican immigrants, displaced like us, waiting to be helped by government functionaries, who with brutal irony were the ones who forced us to migrate here. With banners and fliers in our hands, and with a deep outrage in our hearts, we shouted our chants. We demanded that the consul come out and listen to us read a letter denouncing the violence and injustice that the bad government of the PAN, PRD, and PRI [the three main political parties in Mexico] has exercised against the community of Bachajón, and demanding that the Mexican government and its bureaucratic accomplices immediately release the five political prisoners from San Sebastián Bachajón and respect their demands.

Several times the guards tried to remove us from the building, even physically. The bureaucrats tried to shut us up, but they couldn't.

A compañera from the Movimiento read our letter out loud so that all our Mexican comrades who were in the building would hear what the bad government is doing, and we shouted: "Not the PRI, not the PAN, not the PRD, the 'Other Campaign' against Power!" The functionaries and guards looked at us and tried to intimidate us by taking out their cameras and taking pictures to record our faces. We handed out informational fliers explaining the situation that our brothers and sisters in Bachajón are facing, and the serious abuses that the five prisoners are suffering. Finally, the officials from the Mexican Consulate called the police, and they also tried to shut us up and make us leave. But their fear has no dignity. We overcame their attempts and handed out more fliers.

In the end, we went back to our community in East Harlem. Here in El Barrio, like our brothers and sisters in San Sebastián Bachajón, we struggle against displacement and for dignity. We also struggle, as part of the 'Other Campaign," so justice is done in our Mexico, so that our people from Mexico no longer has to flee from poverty, like we had to do. Although we're here in New York, Mexico lives in our hearts and our dreams. And that's why we did this action. They say in the "Other Campaign" that "si nos toca a un@, nos tocan a tod@s" (if they touch one of us, they touch us all." For the humble and simple people of El Barrio, this isn't just a saying, but, as we demonstrated today, a practice, an action that should be our path toward justice and dignity.

The Mexican Consulate in New York has been occupied by the Movimiento por Justicia en el Barrio in solidarity with five political prisoners from the community of Bachajón, Chiapas. On February 3, Chiapas state police raided the community and arrested 117 people. After worldwide protests erupted in response, the government released 112 of the prisoners. But five remain in jail, facing charges of murder or attempted murder.

The Bachajón Zapatista supporters are adherents to the Other Campaign, which was initiated by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in order to form national and global alliances amongst leftist organizations and movements.

The arrests stem from a confrontation between rival indigenous groups that occurred the previous day in San Sebastian Bachajón, which is an ejido, or communally held lands. Marcos García Moreno, an ejido member who belonged to the faction that allied itself with the government, was shot and killed during the confrontation with ejido members who are Other Campaign adherents. The government accuses the Other Campaign adherents of murdering García Moreno and attempting to murder a second man who was shot during the confrontation. The Other Campaign adherents deny the charges. They say they were unarmed, and that the government-allied ejido members were shooting guns into the air during the confrontation.

The government has attempted to paint the conflict as a dispute between rival indigenous factions over control of a tollbooth that charges a fee to enter the Agua Azul waterfalls, one of Chiapas’ most popular tourist attractions. However, the Bachajón adherents and their lawyers at the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center (“Frayba”) say that they have proof that the tollbooth confrontation was designed to provoke government intervention and police occupation of the region. The Bachajón adherents argue that the government orchestrated the confrontation at the tollbooth “as a pretext to take over the Agua Azul Waterfalls Ecotourism Center for its transnational interests and projects.”

The occupation of the Mexican Consulate takes place on the fourth day a five-day campaign "5 Days of Worldwide Action for the Bachajón 5." Here's the message that was sent out, including the demands -- we've translated it into English (Spanish and Tzeltal are below the fold):

Compañeros from the alternative, autonomous, and independent media,

We have occupied the Mexican Consulate here in New York to demand the liberation of the Bachajón 5. In this way we are trying to ensure that the demands made by our brothers and sisters in San Sebastian Bachajon make an echo around the world. We ask that you help us spread the word. Later we will send a write-up and photos.

Our demands, which are the demands from San Sebastian Bachajon, are the following:

We demand the unconditional release of our compañeros, political prisoners who have been taken hostage by the bad government of Chiapas and Mexico.

We demand respect for the lands and territories of our mother earth within the framework of our autonomy as Indigenous Peoples.

We demand respect for our right to administer and care for our natural resources from our culture as Originary Peoples.

We will be posting updates and photos as we receive them.

[Update Monday 1:17 pm]: An article on the occupation was just published in the Mexico City daily La Jornada (in Spanish). Here's a rough translation of the opening paragraphs:

Mexico City -- This morning, the Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio of New York, adherent to the "other campaign," peacefully occupied the offices of the Consulate of Mexico in New York City, in order to demand that the government of Chiapas release the "Bachajón 5." The action took place as part of a worldwide campaign that has been developing in many countries since April 1.

Protest actions have taken place in front of the Mexican Embassy in London, and the Consulate in Montreal. On Sunday, the Unión Sindical Solidaria, meeting in Paris, demanded the liberation of the five tzeltal peasants from San Sebastián Bachajón, Chiapas, who have been captive for five months facing charges for crimes they did not commit. The Association Ya Basta! participated this past weekend in anti-war marches in various cities of Italy, and included the release of the indigenous prisoners among their demands.

[Update Tuesday 11:40 am]: The Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio has released a communiqué (in Spanish) and some photos from the action. We've posted a rough translation here.

From thosewhouseit:

The rally is on! We will be gathering in front of North County Jail in Oakland at 7th & Clay this Friday (12/16) at 4 pm. Shortly thereafter we will march to 14th & Broadway armed with reams of flyers, at which point we will hold a larger rally and concert in front of City Hall beginning at 6 pm. If we are going to successfully challenge this veritable media blackout and get across our message -- that demonstrating solidarity with prisoners is both legitimate and desirable -- we will need as many people as possible. We need to show the corporate media and the world that the Georgia prison strikers’ struggle is our struggle. We feel a certain affinity with all of their demands, and in fact their demands are our demands. Our struggle against preposterously high levels of incarceration in California, against oppressive prison and jail conditions, against police violence, and against austerity measures and privatization is their struggle as well. Our struggles are one and the same!

Bob Meister's back with a new article that rips apart Yudof's "Blue and Gold" plan. Enjoy the whole thing. Here we've posted just the part dealing with B&G.

You have also recognized that financing higher education through increased personal debt is a growing problem for many students. That’s why you argue that UC tuition increases will not deter attendance provided that the Blue and Gold program, which relieves families from paying tuition, is available to a wider income band. Much of the press and the public seem to have bought your claim that higher tuition can actually make UC more accessible by extending UC’s Blue and Gold program to families with annual incomes of up to $80,000. But the high tuition burden still falls disproportionately on those just above this cut-off, so you mitigate this obvious problem by giving students a one-year reprieve on tuition increases if they are otherwise eligible for aid and if they come from families with incomes of $120K or less, after which they will simply have to borrow more. You then claim that higher tuition would leave the majority of UC students (55%) with undiminished or improved access. This claim is based on two assumptions: first, that the incomes of UC graduates will continue to grow -- and to grow much faster, than those of other Californians, much as they did during the high tech boom; and, second, that Blue and Gold means that most UC students on financial aid will need to borrow less in order to attend.

According to your own, internal, financial aid studies, both of these assumptions are false. The first assumption is false because the income of UC graduates has not increased at all for the past ten years, and neither has the willingness of most students who borrow to take on greater debt. As a consequence of their growing debt-resistance, UC has a growing middle income access problem -- it seems that students in the income band that takes on the greatest proportional debt are also transferring down within the Master Plan scheme -- and that 70% of Community College transfer students now go to for-profit institutions. So, we now have a Master Plan that seems to operate in reverse.

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.

This is the introduction from After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California, which was officially released today. Happy Valentine's Day:

I. Like A Winter With A Thousand Decembers

In Greece, they throw molotovs in the street. For every reason under the sun: in defense of their friends, to burn down the state, for old time’s sake, for the hell of it, to mark the death of a kid the cops killed for no reason. For no reason. They light Christmas trees on fire. December is the new May. They smash windows, they turn up paving stones, they fight the cops because their future went missing, along with the economy, a few years ago. They occupy buildings to find one another, to be together in the same place, to have a base from which to carry out raids, to drink and fuck, to talk philosophy. The cops smash into packs of their friends on motorbikes. They hold down the heads of their friends on the pavement and kick them in the face.

In Ssangyong, one thousand laid-off workers occupy an auto factory. They line up in formation with metal pipes, white helmets, red bandanas. Three thousand riot cops can’t get them out of their factory for seventy-seven days. They say they’re ready to die if they have to, and in the meantime they live on balls of rice and boiled rain. Besieged by helicopters, toxic tear gas, 50,000 volt guns, they fortify positions on the roof, constructing catapults to fire the bolts with which they used to build cars.

In Santiago, insurrectionary students mark the 40th anniversary of Pinochet’s coup by attacking police stations and shutting down the Universidad Academía de Humanismo Cristiano for ten days. No more deaths will be accepted, all will be avenged. In France, a couple of “agitators” dump a bucket of shit over the President of Université Rennes 2, as he commemorates the riots of the 2006 anti-CPE struggle with a two-minute public service announcement for corporate education. The video goes up on the web. It drops into slow motion as they flee the mezzanine after the action, not even masked. It’s easy, it’s light, it’s obvious. How else could one respond? What more is there to say? We know your quality policy. A cloud of thrown paper breaks like confetti in the space above the crowd below—a celebratory flourish. The video cuts to the outside of a building, scrawled with huge letters: Vive la Commune.

In Vienna, in Zagreb, in Freiburg—in hundreds of universities across central and eastern Europe—students gather in the auditoriums of occupied buildings, holding general assemblies, discussing modalities of self-determination. They didn’t used to pay fees. Now they do. Before the vacuum of standardization called the Bologna Process, their education wasn’t read off a pan-European fast food menu. Now it is. Fuck that, they say. They call themselves The Academy of Refusal. They draw lines in the sand. We will stay in these spaces as long as we can, and we will talk amongst ourselves, learn what we can learn from one another, on our own, together. We will take back the time they have stolen from us, that they’ll continue to steal, and we’ll take it back all at once, here and now. In the time that we have thus spared, one of the things we will do is make videos in which we exhibit our wit, our beauty, our sovereign intelligence and our collective loveliness, and we’ll send them to our comrades in California.

In California, the kids write Occupy Everything on the walls. Demand Nothing, they write. They turn over dumpsters and wedge them into the doorways of buildings with their friends locked inside. Outside, they throw massive Electro Communist dance parties. They crowd by the thousands around occupied buildings, and one of them rests her hand upon the police barriers. A cop tells her to move her hand. She says: “no.” He obliterates her finger with a baton. She has reconstructive surgery in the morning and returns to defend the occupation in the afternoon. We Are the Crisis, they say. They start blogs called Anti-Capital Projects; We Want Everything; Like Lost Children, the better to distribute their communiqués and insurrectionary pamphlets. Ergo, really living communism must be our goal, they write. We Have Decided Not to Die, they whisper. Students in Okinawa send them letters of solidarity signed Project Disagree. Wheeler, Kerr, Mrak, Dutton, Campbell, Kresge, Humanities 2….the names of the buildings they take become codewords. They relay, resonate, communicate. Those who take them gather and consolidate their forces by taking more. They gauge the measure of their common power. They know, immediately, that if they do not throw down, that if they do not scatter their rage throughout the stolid corridors of their universities, that if they do not prove their powers of negation, if they do not affirm their powers of construction, they will have failed their generation, failed the collective, failed history.

But why wouldn’t they throw down, and scatter, and prove, and negate, and affirm? After all, what the fuck else is there to do?

II. September, October, November

A particular political sequence is always at once discrete and continuous, at once a singularity and a relay. And the series of militant occupations that would sweep the state in November both emerged from and exploded the limits of a political conjuncture whose parameters were established in September.

On September 24, the first day of the fall quarter at most UC campuses, a faculty-organized walkout over the handling of the budget crisis during the summer erupted into the largest coordinated protest in the history of the University of California. At UC Berkeley, over five thousand people flooded Sproul Plaza. On the same day, two occupation attempts at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley would result in markedly different outcomes. At UCSC, a group of over twenty students successfully locked down and occupied the Graduate Student Commons for a full week, throwing massive Electro Communist dance parties in the open space of Covell Commons below the balcony, issuing online communiqués that would circulate internationally, and putting the incipient California “student movement” on the map of radical circles around the world. The slogans on their banners resonated because the collective “we” in whose name they spoke recognized itself therein, saw itself captured, concretized, enacted, redistributed in their terse formulae, their unabashed desire for totality, their articulation of an urgency at once symptomatic and prescriptive: “We Want Everything”; “We Are The Crisis.”

At UC Berkeley, a more ambitious occupation attempt would fail on the same night that UCSC succeeded. Having arrived with equipment to lock down the doors, a group called for the Berkeley General Assembly—a mass gathering of some 300 people on the evening after the walkout—to occupy Wheeler Hall. Despite drawing wide spontaneous support from the assembly when they read the occupation statement from Santa Cruz, any effort to bring their proposed action to a vote was interminably stalled, and a subsequent decision to force the issue by locking down the majority of doors in the building resulted in a tense and protracted conflict between those who viewed the occupation attempt as a “vanguardist” affront to procedural consensus and those who viewed it as an effort to seize an important opportunity for collective direct action. The standoff continued until police walked into the building and cut through the locks some ninety minutes later.

The split within the Wheeler auditorium that night, and the split within the broader UC movement as to how the occupation at Santa Cruz was regarded, would largely shape both the discourse and the practical possibilities of the mobilization over the next month and a half. While a second, brief occupation at UCSC on October 14 would establish the tactic as a constant threat on UC campuses, partisans of slow and steady movement building decried such actions as irresponsible adventurism. This was an antagonism that would persist throughout the fall—a familiar split between “Trotskyist” and “ultra-leftist” orientations within the movement, the former holding fast to the supposedly democratic framework of General Assemblies while the second insisted that actions themselves were the means through which the movement was both organized and pushed forward.

While a massive organizing conference on October 24 would call for a statewide “Day of Action” on March 4, a small group of UC Berkeley grad students—not content to wait until the spring semester to act—launched a website and signature page calling for an indefinite student, staff, faculty strike beginning on Nov. 18, when the UC Regents would meet in UCLA to vote on a proposed 32% student fee increase. It’s notable that although this call for mass action was most actively pushed forward by many of the same people who had attempted the occupation of Wheeler on Sept. 24, it was also supported by representatives of the same groups that had most vocally opposed it. But even if the antagonisms within the movement that had emerged through October and early November would not be entirely displaced by the events that unfolded during the week of the strike, at least the tedium of ideological playfighting would be.

On Nov. 18 and 19, thousands of protesters from across the state clashed with riot cops outside the Regents meetings at UCLA, chasing the Regents back to their cars as they were escorted from the building. The protests were met with a repressive police response, including taser attacks and eighteen arrests over two days. On the evening of Nov. 18, an occupation attempt at Berkeley would be foiled for the second time, when a team of about forty attempted to lock down the Architects and Engineers building—home of Capital Projects, Real Estate Services, and the Office of Sustainability. Forced to abandon their attempt when administrators locked themselves in their offices, the group nonetheless succeeded in drawing strong support from a crowd that gathered outside the building, and the aftershocks of that spontaneous solidarity would make themselves felt two days later. Later that night at UCLA, a group of forty students occupied Campbell Hall, successfully locking down the doors with impressive barricades and holding the building for over twenty-four hours before abandoning the occupation on the morning of the 20th. On the afternoon of the 19th, UC Santa Cruz students, already holding down Kresge Townhall, escalated their occupation by storming the main administration building. They held Kerr Hall for three days, locking it down after their demands were rejected on the night of the 21st, and vacating the building without charges after it was raided by police the following morning. At UC Davis, about fifty students marched into Mrak Hall on the afternoon of the 19th, their numbers rising to 150 through the afternoon, with dozens of supporters outside the doors. Eight hours and sixty riot cops later, fifty-two arrests ensued when those inside refused police orders to disperse. After spending the night at Yolo County Jail, they drove back to campus and occupied another building the next day, taking Dutton Hall for eight hours with a group of over one hundred, forcing the administration to call in riot police again before walking away.

In a word: between Nov. 18-Nov. 22 a “movement” became an occupation movement. But even in the midst of this explosive sequence, with its clear affirmation of tactical solidarity across campuses, no one could have anticipated the rupture that occurred at Wheeler Hall on November 20th.

III. Vortex: Wheeler

At 6:38 am on Friday morning, a post went up on Facebook: “UC Berkeley is Occupied. Wheeler Hall has been taken by students after Thursday’s vote by the UC Regents to increase fees by over 32%. After two days of marches, protests and rallies, students have locked down the doors against campus police while supporters have surrounded the building.”

At 6:38 am, the last item of this report was an effort at self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, only a few dozen supporters clustered around one side of the huge neo-classical building at the center of the Berkeley campus, watching the windows. But twelve hours later, when police finally broke through the occupiers’ barricades, citing forty people for misdemeanor trespassing and then releasing them without cuffs, they were greeted by a cheering, lamplit crowd of some two thousand people who had packed around police barriers all day.

In between, everything swirled in and around the still edifice of Wheeler. An occupation is a vortex, not a protest. Shortly after it had been locked down in the morning, police broke into the basement floor, beating and arresting three students on trumped-up felony charges. Occupiers then retreated to the second floor, barricading hallway doors with chairs, tables, truck tie-downs, U-locks, and ropes, and tirelessly defending the doors against the cops throughout the day. Outside, students pulled fire alarms, cancelling classes and vacating most of the buildings on campus. Support flowed to the occupation, drawn in part by the massive and disproportional police presence that gathered throughout the morning and swelled to hundreds of riot cops by the afternoon. Inside the building, police snarled threats at those on the other side—get ready for your beat-down—and pounded against the doors in a frustrated effort to break through the interior blockade. Outside—holding their ground against police attacks as the cops set up metal barriers around the building—thousands of students effectively laid siege to the building. Or rather, they laid siege to the besiegers.

There were various powers of resistance. Across the pedestrian corridor on the west side of the building, students and workers formed a hard blockade, sometimes a dozen rows deep, preventing any passage throughout much of the afternoon. On the hour, many students attempted to organize rushes against police lines around the perimeter, timed by the tolling of the bell-tower and organized by runners between corners of the building. At around 4:00pm, a column of sixteen riot police lined up at the southeast corner of Wheeler, marching toward the backs of the students and workers amassed at the barriers. A gathering crowd, drawn by cell phone communications and twitter feeds, fanned out to surround the advancing column, blockading a path along the east side of the building and locking arms around the cops until they charged a weak point in the chain, beating one student on the ground with batons and shooting another in the stomach with a rubber bullet. When later in the afternoon it became clear that the police would eventually break down the barricades on the second floor, self-organizing groups took up tactical positions at all possible points of exit—even those reportedly accessible by underground tunnels—blockading the loading bays of an adjacent building with dumpsters and forming a human barricade across the doors of Doe Library to the north of Wheeler.

To turn the campus into a militarized warzone was the choice of the administration and the police; but it was also an implicit taunt, a challenge from which students and workers refused to back down, making it obvious that they would not allow the occupiers to be spirited away to jail in handcuffs without a potentially explosive confrontation. As Berkeley grad student George Ciccarielo-Mahler’s particularly canny account of the day put it: “Let this be clear: if the students were arrested and carried out, there was going to be a fight. A riot? Perhaps (this much depended on the police). A fight? Mos def.”

This commitment of the crowd outside the occupation entailed a slight displacement that was audible in the chants of the crowd: from “Whose University?! Our University!” to “Who owns Wheeler?! We own Wheeler!” “Wheeler” is the proper name of this displacement, because the building that it designates became—in an unexpected instant stretched out through a morning, an afternoon, an evening—the site of a displacement of the opposition between a mass movement and the supposedly vanguardist tactic hitherto perceived as the fetish of a few ultra-left adventurists. A displacement, not a fusion. These poles persisted in pockets among the crowd, but their conflict was simply not what mattered on that day. Whether or not all interested parties might choose to describe the event in these terms, what happened was that a “we” numbering two thousand, surrounding the perimeter of Wheeler Hall, declared collective ownership not just of the “University” (an abstraction), but of a particular building, a concrete instantiation of university property. And when this happened the priority of factionalist politics that had defined the movement for the previous two months was shattered by the immediacy of an objective situation. A movement to “Save Public Education” had become indiscernible, within an unquantifiable durée, from a militant desire to communize private property.

Several of the occupiers would later refer to the “medieval” character of the tactical maneuvers that day: having retreated to an inner chamber, after their outer defenses collapsed, they ceded most of the building to the police. But the police were themselves enclosed by the barricades they had established to keep the crowd outside at bay. The space was constituted by a double barricade—by the barricades of the occupiers and the barricades of the police. This was the convoluted topology of the occupation: the space inside was opened up by being locked down (a refusal to let anyone in); the space outside was closed off by a state of siege (a refusal to let anyone out). There was an intimacy at a distance between these two spaces—the affective bond of a shared struggle—that communicated itself through the walls and through the windows, that crackled through the air around campus, that carried through a rainstorm in the early afternoon, that enabled the occupation to persist. That it was possible to hold the space inside, despite the immediate efforts of the cops to take it back: it was the concrete realization of this power that activated the energy and resistance of the crowd outside. That the material support of the crowd outside was unyielding, that it refused to be pacified or exhausted: it was this collective determination that empowered those inside to hold the doors throughout the afternoon. It became increasingly evident that the police—functioning in this case as the repressive apparatus of the administration—were effectively trapped between two zones over which they had no real control: the area outside their own barricades and the area inside the second floor doors defended by the occupiers.

This essentially powerless position—the reactive and isolated position of the police, and by extension the administration—was never more evident than at the end of the night, after the occupiers had been cited and released, after they had addressed their supporters through a megaphone, after the crowd began to disperse of their own accord. The barriers cordoning off the plaza outside Wheeler were withdrawn and the majority of the police began to file away, until two weak rows remained, guarding the building at the top of the steps, under the lights cast across the neo-classical façade. A languid crowd began to assemble at the bottom of the steps, just standing there, aimlessly, calming staring across the unimpeded space between them and the cops. A parent walked up with two children, perhaps four and six years old, casually pointing up toward the stationary soldiers of property. Everyone might have whispered the same thing at the same time: look how small they look, how sad and out of place and ridiculous.

The illusory power of the police throughout the day was in fact the power of the contradiction of which their presence was merely an index. It was the power of the people inside, the power of the people outside—the power of people, that is—to suspend the rule of property.

IV. Collateral Damage

Property is one of the knots that ties together multiple levels of the UC crisis, and that binds it with the larger crisis of the state and the global economy. Citing a twenty percent cut in state funding for the University, UC President Mark Yudof declared a state of “extreme fiscal emergency” in July 2009—a measure intended to legitimate and expedite a slash-and-burn approach of the administration to dealing with the budget shortfall. It has been the mantra of the UC administration over the past few years that the state is an “unreliable partner,” that the crisis of the California economy coupled with the refusal of the state government to prioritize support for public education necessitates a program of increasingly draconian cuts and austerity measures. And indeed, many within the university have accepted some version of this argument, urging students to direct blame for the crisis toward Sacramento and to acknowledge the economic “realities” of the moment: Proposition 13 has handicapped the capacity of the state to draw revenue from property taxes since 1978, and money for public services has dried up accordingly; the crisis of the university budget is part and parcel of a larger economic crisis effecting every sector in the state and taking its toll across the country. Why should the University of California claim any exceptional status?

It has become increasingly clear that such narratives don’t add up; both their credibility and plausible justifications for their acceptance slip away rapidly as one looks into the structure of the UC budget. A recent report on administrative growth by the UCLA Faculty Association “estimated that UC would have $800 million more each year if senior management had grown at the same rate as the rest of the university since 1997, instead of four times faster.” In other words, while UCOP continues to point to economic necessities and legislative priorities as the root causes of the crisis, it is a plain fact that the excessive and inexplicable growth of the administrative class itself accounts for the same amount of money—this year alone—as the budget shortfall.

Even more resonant, particularly for the occupation movement, has been the role of capital projects in the UC crisis. On August 6, the SF Chronicle reported that despite a supposed fiscal emergency that had forced layoffs, furloughs, and increased class sizes, UC had agreed to lend the state $200 million, money that would be paid back over three years at 3.2 percent interest and allocated to stalled capital projects. Money for construction projects, it seemed, was readily available where money for the educational mission of the university was not. In mid-October, Bob Meister, a UCSC Professor and President of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, published an exposé making clear the link between proposed fee increases and capital projects: since 2004, all student fees have been pledged by UC as collateral for bonds used to fund construction projects. UC retains an excellent bond rating, superior to the state of California’s, in part because that rating is guaranteed by rising student fees. Thus, reductions to state funding actually help the UC to improve its bond rating, because while state “education funds” cannot be used as bond collateral, private student fees can—and cuts to state funding provide a pretext for increased fees. On the list of priorities driving the substitution of private for public funding, “construction,” as Meister put it, “comes ahead of instruction.”

In light of such revelations, to hold that “Sacramento” is the primary source of the UC’s woes amounts to either naiveté or willful obscurantism. Not only are current reductions in state funding a drop in the bucket of UC’s total endowment—and nothing compared to the growing revenue of the university’s profit-generating wings—it is also the case that UC administration has powerful motives to both collaborate with the continuing divestment of state funding and to divert its own resources from spending on instruction. For many, this state of affairs is both obvious and unsurprising, and perhaps no one has articulated its stakes more plainly than Berkeley graduate student Annie McClanahan in an address to the UC Regents prior to their November 19 decision to pass the proposed fee increases. “I’m here today to tell you,” said McClanahan, “that when students and their parents have to borrow at 8 or 10 or 14% interest so that the UC can maintain its credit rating and its ability to borrow at a .2% lower rate of interest, we the students are not only collateral, we are collateral damage.”

V. Communization

The collateralization of student fees thus puts into question the very future of the university and the class-relations it is called upon to maintain. As elsewhere in our post-industrial economy, the massive personal debt required to keep the university and its building projects churning along indicate the unsustainability of current class relations over the long-term. Something has to break. If the weakness of the American economy was, in the years leading up to the financial collapse of 2008, exacerbated by the securitization of household debt via all kinds of exotic instruments, the situation is little different with students. UC’s bondholders bear nearly the same relationship to student borrowing as an investment bank bears to the homeowner underwater on her subprime mortgage. In both cases, the fiction of a “sound investment,” of a present sacrifice which will pay off in the future, occludes what is essentially a form of plunder, occludes a present and future immiseration which will, eventually, undermine the foundations of our consumer-driven society.

Given the UC’s propensity to favor construction over instruction, or more bluntly, buildings over people, it is hardly surprising that student activists would target those buildings as sites of resistance. The failed Berkeley occupation of the Nov.18 – the first day of the strike – targeted the Capital Projects and Real-Estate services offices, departments responsible for the construction and administration of all campus buildings. The statements which the occupiers released via a blog entitled Anti-Capital Projects clarify the terms of the struggle, suggesting that what is broadly at stake are two different visions of the use of space, and by extension, two different regimes of property. Or rather, property and its negation.

These texts fall in line with the broadly anarchist or anti-state communist perspective of the earlier occupations, in which the horizon of occupation, its project so to speak, leads far beyond the university. To the extent that occupation offers, hypothetically, the opportunity to remove a building from the regime of property—in other words, to abolish its status as “capital” and to cancel one’s subordination to owners and ownership—it forms a tactic little different than “seizure of the means of production,” one with a venerable history and a wide extension beyond the university. In particular, one thinks of workplace occupations and expropriations and housing occupations. With unemployment reaching staggering proportions and with millions of bank-owned and foreclosed homes standing empty, occupation seems like a tactic that is itself a strategy – a form of militancy that is not a means to an end but an end in and of itself.

But any such threat to property relations immediately invites conflict with the police. One also risks conflict with the larger mass of the student-worker movement and activist faculty, who are loath to extend the struggle beyond reform of the university. The radical stream within the student movement, on the other hand, sees the fight for increased access to the university as futile without situating that fight within a much broader critique of political economy. Even if achieved, present reforms of the UC will merely slow its eventual privatization, and the crisis of the university remains connected to a much larger crisis of employment and, in turn, a crisis of capitalism that permits of no viable solution. In other words, the jobs for which the university ostensibly prepares its students no longer exist, even as they are asked to pony up more and more money for a devalued diploma. The pamphlet which has become a key reference for the occupation movement – Communiqué from an Absent Future – signals these positions with its title. The prospective future of the college graduate is erased by the crisis of the economy, even as any alternative future made possible through insurrection is rendered invisible by capitalist cynicism. The future is doubly absent.

The radical or anti-reformist position within the movement has often insisted upon a refusal of demands as the rationale for occupation—upon a refusal to negotiate one’s departure from the occupied building on the basis of concessions won. If any winnings are likely to be mooted, in the long-term, by overwhelming economic forces, then occupation is less potent as leverage for negotiation than as a practical attempt to remove oneself, to whatever degree possible, from existing regimes of relation: to others and to the use of space. The occupiers, in this sense, refuse to “take what they can get.” They would rather “get what they can take.” (This is how some fellow travelers in New York, participants in a series of inspiring occupations last year, have put it). An occupation is not a token illegalism to be bargained away in exchange for whatever modest demands the authorrities are willing to grant, since this only legitimates the existing authorities in exchange for whatever modest demands those authorities are willing to grant. Demands are always either too small or too large; too “rational” or too incoherent. Occupations themselves, however, occur as material interventions into the space and time of capitalism. They are attempts to “live communism; spread anarchy,” as the Tiqqun pamphlet Call (an influential text for the occupation movement) puts it. This slogan was written on all of the chalkboards during the Nov. 20th occupation of Wheeler.

The communiqué and some of the other texts associated with the autumn occupations link up with what is often referred to as the “communization current” – a species of ultraleftism and insurrectionary anarchism that refuses all talk of a transition to communism, insisting, instead, upon the immediate formation of “communes,” of zones of activity removed from exchange, money, compulsory labor, and the impersonal domination of the commodity form. Communism, in this sense, is neither an endpoint nor a goal but a process. Not a noun but a verb. There is nothing toward which one transitions, only the transition itself, only a long process of metabolizing existing goods and capitals and removing them from the regimes of property and value. Judged in relation to such a project, the occupations of the fall are modest achievements – experiments with a practice that might find a fuller implementation in the future. There is an exemplary character to the actions – they are attempts to generalize a tactic that is also a strategy, a means that is also an end. But can the tactics elaborated within the university escape its confines and become generalized in the kinds of places – apartment buildings, factories – where they would become part of an extensive process of communization? In a sense, the byline of the movement – occupy everything, demand nothing – is prospective; it imagines itself as occurring in an insurrectionary moment which has not yet materialized. This is its strength; its ability to make an actual, material intervention in the present that fast-forwards us to an insurrectionary future. Beyond such a conflagration, there is really no escaping one’s reinscription within a series of reforms and demands, regardless of the stance one takes. Only by passing into a moment of open insurrection can demands be truly and finally escaped.

The prospective dimension of the earlier positions is confirmed by the fact that both the Nov. 20th Berkeley occupation and the Santa Cruz Kerr Hall occupation, the successor occupations, did have a list of demands – demands which had a certain tactical logic in developing solidarity, and expanding the action, but that also suffered from the problems of scale, coherence and “achievability” that plague the demand as form. Nonetheless, what happened in both those instances was a massive radicalization of the student body, a massive escalation, one that was hardly at all countered by its superscription inside this or that call for reform. At Kerr Hall, the fact that the occupiers asked the administration for this or that concession was superseded, in material practice, by the fact that they had, for the moment, displaced their partners in negotiation: while they negotiated, they were at the same time in the Chancellor’s office, eating his food, and watching videos on his television. They did in fact get what they could take, and when the moment came, they didn’t hesitate to convert the sacrosanct property—the copy machines and refrigerators—into barricades.

VI. We are the Crisis

Some writers have concluded that the sweep of the fall’s events presents a dialectic between the “adventurist” action of small groups, and the back-footed, reactive discourse of those who want to build a “mass democratic” movement, the final synthesis of which can be found in the “mass actions” undertaken by hundreds in November. This seems false to us since, in retrospect, the smaller actions resolve into the many facets and eruptions of a singular “mass movement” dispersed in time and place. The smaller actions were what it took to build up to something larger. Again: it is not a question of choosing between these two sides, nor of synthesizing them, but rather of displacing the priority of this opposition. The real dialectic is between negation and experimentation: acts of resistance and refusal which also enable an exploration of new social relations, new uses of space and time.

These two poles can’t be separated out, since the one passes into the other with surprising swiftness. Without confrontation, experimentation risks collapsing back into the existing social relations that form their backdrop – they risk becoming mere lifestyle or culture, recuperated as one more aestheticized museum exhibit of liberal tolerance toward student radicals. But to the extent that any experiment really attempts to take control of space and time and social relations, it will necessarily entail an antagonistic relation to power. This was evident when, during the week before exams reserved for studying (Dec. 7-11), Berkeley students marched back into Wheeler and held an open, unlocked occupation of the unused parts of the building, negotiating an informal agreement with the police and administrators, plastering the walls with slogans, turning classrooms into organizing spaces, study spaces, sleeping spaces, distributing food and literature in the lobby, and holding meetings, dance parties and movie-screenings in the lecture hall. This attempt to put the building under student-led control turned out to be too much for the administration, and early in the morning of Dec. 11, the last day of the occupation, 66 people were arrested without warning as they slept. That same evening, in response, a group marched on the Chancellor’s house carrying torches, destroying planters, windows, and lamps. What was originally conceived as a largely non-confrontational action quickly became highly confrontational. There is nothing new without a negation of the old. By the same measure, even if the people occupying Wheeler on Nov. 20th had little time to reinvent their relations, inasmuch as they spent most of their time fighting the cops for control of the doors, what emerged was a structure of solidarity, of spontaneous, self-organized resistance that obliterated any distinction between those inside and those outside, and that passed, by way of political determination, through the police lines meant to enforce this barrier. There is no negation of the old which does not provoke the emergence of something new.

Project Disagree; Academy of Refusal; Research & Destroy; Anti-Capital Projects: the rhetoric of negation conforms to the topology of the blockade, the barricade. We Want Everything; Like Lost Children: and this negation opens onto a space of uncertain drift—a dérive—whereby a desire for totality gives way onto the navigation of the not-all. We are the Crisis. This is the only sense in which one might affirm a “movement.”

Nous Sommes le Pouvoir, the slogan of May ’68, foregrounds the capacity of the “we,” the positive power of solidarity. We Are The Crisis would seem to cede some of this power, indexing the being of the we to catastrophe, and thereby to a degree of powerlessness: to conditions that are out of control, precisely beyond the measure our capacities. We Are The Crisis inscribes the “we” as both symptom and prescription, without attempting to evade their entanglement. And this entanglement—our condition—poses a problem for power per se. Nous Sommes le Pouvoir speaks from and for collective capacities; We Are the Crisis writes the collective that resists, that experiments, into the crisis of capital: into objective conditions. But if we recall that, etymologically, “crisis” means discrimination, decision, then the slogan is stripped of any teleological determination of the “we” as simply an “expression” of the economy.” To decide upon the we, upon the collective, as both symptom and prescription, within and against the objective conditions of capital: this is the vector of decision along which the current occupation movement attempts to push those objective conditions toward a breaking point.

Via Occupy California:

Occupy Everything Fight Everywhere Strike March 4!

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

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

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

We call upon all Bay Area students, teachers, and workers to unite on March 4 to march from Berkeley into downtown Oakland. We encourage all those in the Bay Area to organize actions alongside and in support of the occupation movement, so that March 4th becomes a day of blockades, sit-ins, mass marches to the streets and freeways, a day for reclaiming public spaces and institutions. In solidarity with hundreds of occupied schools and workplaces across the globe, we seek to make March 4th an international day of action demonstrating our collective resistance.

Why Direct Action?

We understand clearly that decades of rallies and petitions have not and will never be enough. We have already witnessed the violent extremism and radicalism of the other side: behind every fee increase, a line of riot cops. Behind every call for “dialogue,” the threat of prison. Behind calls for “shared public sacrifice,” millions in obscene raises and bonuses.

Governor Schwarzenegger’s recent proposal to tie public education to privatized prisons has accompanied the authorization of mass student arrests, the labeling of student activists as “terrorists,” and the accelerating militarization of California from its public campuses to its patrolled borders.

The state’s decision has also revealed the power and effectiveness of direct action to turn the tide against the corporate and financial interests, the lobbyists and politicians, who have used the crisis to enrich themselves while destroying or privatizing fundamental public goods like education and health care.

Public Education Versus Private Prisons: A False Choice

As more and more jobs are lost and homes foreclosed, an entire generation has been reminded that those who work do so at the expense of others who are barred from doing so. The availability of scarce future jobs depends upon the forced subtraction of a portion of the population from the work-force. This is the web of relations in which we work and study; this is the truth of a profoundly racist, neoliberal society whose logic education reproduces, alongside prisons, in the name of “meritocracy” or “a better life.”

Prisons and schools are the last remaining spaces in our society where individuals rendered superfluous by contracting job and housing markets gather together for years at a time. Schools and prisons house the “privileged” or the “pathological.” The university produces the wage earner-to-be, with skills financed by a lifetime of debt. Prisons are a home of last resort for those unable to pay the steep price of admission for job training, certification, and the right social networks.

The Governor’s zero-sum proposal pits various sectors of the population against each other for diminishing resources, for the right to die slower or faster. It is a false choice and we reject it. This crisis cannot be solved, only magnified, by distributing violence and misery among scapegoated populations: immigrants, prisoners, the “urban poor,” and now, students and youth in general.

The Crisis Is General. So Too Is The Resistance

To occupy a building, to defend it against the police, to shut down a city, is to subtract ourselves as much as possible from the property relations that govern our relationships to each other—from the enclosure of knowledge and skills within dwindling job markets and hollowed-out institutions; from the enclosure of universities within admissions policies which crowd out students and workers of color through exclusionary logics of race, class and citizenship; from the enclosure of tuition within capital projects financed by student and worker debt; from the enclosure of work within the wage relation which clearly cannot meet the basic human needs of the vast majority of us.

On March 4, ESCALATE—OCCUPY—RECLAIM

Holy crap. Guess how Schwarzenegger wants to do that prison privatization thing:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Monday that the state could save $1 billion by building and operating prisons in Mexico to house undocumented felons who are currently imprisoned in California.

The governor floated the idea during an appearance at the Sacramento Press Club in response to a question about controlling state spending. His speech came on the same day that changes in prisoner parole and credits for time served took effect.

"We pay them to build the prisons down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in a prison. ... And all this, it would be half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons," Schwarzenegger said, predicting it would save the state $1 billion that could be spent on higher education.

About 19,000 of the state's 171,000 prisoners are illegal immigrants, according to the most recent statistics available online. The state spends more than $8 billion a year on the prison system.

Aaron McLear, spokesman for the governor, said later that Schwarzenegger's comments did not represent a concrete proposal, but "a concept somebody mentioned to him" and he could not say where the governor came up with the $1 billion figure.

The governor's statements seemed to catch his prisons chief off guard. Matthew Cate, secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said it was not a proposal the department was pursuing and he assumed it was an extension of Schwarzenegger's call to privatize some of the state's prison operations.

Some reflections on the Schwarzenegger's recent proposal:

The only possible solution to salvage either of these institutions for capital is to privatize them. It is here that capitalism as the unbridled negation of human existence shows its face; these two sites which are already situated to mold individuals to their social roles will be put under the rule of the most cutthroat calculus—quality will never outstrip quantity within the capitalist mode of existence. Students are merely collateral for construction loans, and a gamble on productive jobs in the future; prisoners are those without a legitimate place in the process, except as a reserve labor force (and object of prison corporations; let’s not forget prison labor as well, the latest form of slavery). And in order to create new forms of value, there must be a simultaneous devaluation of a particular sector of society. The university is thus being redesigned as a glorified vocational school, producer of complex labor powers for a privileged few, and an outsourced research and development division for state and corporate agencies to which it is ultimately the appendage. Its future can only be ever-more null and quantitative existence for its ever-more restricted pool of students: there must necessarily be those who are excluded access from the university, in order for the degrees it produces to be worth anything.

The opposite pole of social reproduction is found in the prison system, where individuals are actively being made useless. The prison is no longer meant to be a place to rehabilitate individuals, but a dead end in which the individual’s nullity in everyday life comes to its logical conclusion. As jobs become scarce, foreclosed homes are left unoccupied, and the prisons become the only place in which the growing number of people without a tenable capacity to produce value can be safely placed. It is this devaluation of living labor—“the crisis of a period in which capitalism no longer needs us as workers”—which underlies the crises of the prison, the university, and so much more. Socially condemned individuals are to simply to be warehoused and contained at all costs, healthcare be damned. Imprisonment is exclusion taking total form, one which marks even those who depart from its walls, still to be denied inclusion in the legitimate economy through the loss of employment, education and housing. (Much like immigrants who are finding themselves increasingly imprisoned and deported.) The prison as a form of mass containment and social control originated as the debtors’ prison; we still speak of prisoners “paying their debt to society.” Now students and workers are facing more debt than ever before: our whole society is a debtors’ prison. Meanwhile, the extension of parole regimes, house arrest, and generalized surveillance may be another means not just of reducing the cost of prisons, but bringing them into ever closer convergence with the rest of daily life (or rather, vice versa).