A good piece from studentactivism.net placing the protests of March 4th in a social and historical context. Liberal confrontational protest anxiety disorder appears to be untreatable. Yusef, in a comment to my post on Tuesday, asserts that the actions of the Obama administration mean that reformism is off the agenda. If so, liberal discomfort is going to get markedly worse, as protests, fueled by the proletarianization of the middle class and the sub-proletarianization of the working class, become more and more intense.

Even mildly reformist economic measures like reducing the costs of student loans and the creation of a public health insurance option to make such insurance marginally more affordable are difficult, if not impossible, to implement. It appears that the crisis currently engulfing global capitalism is such that not a dime can be spared for anything other than capital accumulation. So, past measures, such as those associated with the New Deal and Great Society, are off the table. Greece, here we come?

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Education, Europe, Global Recession, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

As I live in Sacramento, and co-host a public affairs program on KDVS 90.3 FM, the UC Davis campus radio station, I am in a fairly good position to comment upon the eruption of student protest after the UC and CSU systems substantially increased fees and reduced class offerings. After the protests in the immediate aftermath of the fee increases in late November, and the subsequent ones that took place last week, I had the opportunity to interview students who participated in them.

My impression is that the protesters are disproportionately women and people of color, and that they have taken prominent roles in the movement, contributing significantly to its radicalization. This makes sense. Many of them have entered the UC and CSU system through admission preferences that favor people from lower middle class and lower class backgrounds, preferences put in place after Proposition 209 eliminated any consideration of race in admissions. They have a strong awareness of the consequences resulting from the evisceration of health, education and welfare programs in the communities from whence they came.

Many of them are also students in the liberal arts and social sciences, parts of the university that are no longer in favor because of their perceived lack of economic utility. Such students have developed the capability of placing their experience within a theoretical context, one that draws upon ethnic studies, women's studies and sociology. Beyond, this, one hears echoes of Guy Debord and Naomi Klein in their comments, especially in relation to the colonization of the university as part of a broader colonization of of everyday life and the urgency of challenging the depoliticalization and depersonalization associated with the capitalist spectacle.

Marx is therefore a feature of the movement more in terms of their experience than in theory and practice. The students are acutely aware of what Marxists would describe as the proletarianization of the middle class. They recognize that they are being required to pay huge sums of money for an education that will qualify them for jobs that pay less and less. Upon leaving school, they will be shackled by student loan debt for years. Some, as noted in a comment to one of my earlier posts on this subject, are being forced to choose between having enough food to eat and paying for the cost of their education. They are, in effect, in the forefront of this proletarianization process, and they are just beginning to resist it.

Of course, this is not true of all students. Protesters on March 4 encountered a class divide between themselves and students from wealthier backgrounds who objected to the disruption of school. There is a class conflict emerging in the university that mirrors the larger struggle occurring outside of it. Protesters have already established connections with unions and educators in the K-12 system. Not surprisingly, neither the faculty nor the administration within UC have been very helpful, although it may be different in CSU. Both are so bound to the university as an institution, and the neoliberal assumptions upon which it operates, that they are incapable of providing meaningful assistance.

If forced to characterize the movement, I would say that it is an ideologically liberal one increasingly relying upon anarchist practice. It is liberal, because the emphasis is upon increasing social mobility through the restoration of financial support for existing educational institutions, although the activists themselves have extensive backgrounds in past efforts in furtherance of women's rights, gay rights, immigration rights and anti-imperialism. They recognize the interrelationship of these issues with what is transpiring within the university and state government. Racial incidents at UC San Diego and UCLA confirmed their perspective and provided an unanticipated synergy for their efforts by interweaving themes of economic exclusion and racial intimidation. But it appears that most students participating in the protests are motivated primarily by the recognition of their proletarianization arising from the fee increases.

The movement finds itself compelled to adopt anarchist practice because of the inflexibility of decisionmakers that could, if they wanted, address their concerns. Anarchism has been the predominant organizational approach on the left on West Coast for nearly 20 years, as demonstrated through the direct action associated with radical environmentalists, the global justice movement that took over the streets of Seattle in 1999 and the shutdown of the financial district in San Francisco upon the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Student activists, well versed in this tradition, are utilizing horizontal methods of decisionmaking when undertaking actions and engaging in outreach. It is consistent with their belief that it is essential to provide a voice for people that have historically been denied an opportunity to shape their lives and the world around them.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Education, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Racism

They're here:

Austin, Texas: February 18, 2010

Washington, D. C.: March 6, 2010

How many more before the end of the year?

Labels: Political Violence, Sub-Proletarianization of America

For more information, consider the following links:

Students and Education Workers Gear Up for March 4th (an indybay summary of student protests around California this week)

March 4 (updates posted throughout today by occupy california)

CSU Fullerton Occupied (Reclaimed)! (a report on the occupation of the Humanities building at UC Fullerton and the students explanation for this action)

Freeway Closure in Oakland (an article from the SF Gate)

Protests Throughout Southern California (an article from the Los Angeles Times)

CHP Officers Prevent Freeway Closure in Davis with Batons and Pellet Guns (an article from the Sacramento Bee)

March, Walkout, Rally and Sit-In at California State University, Fresno

The extent of the protests will only become known in the coming days. Meanwhile, according to the Times, a potentially large rally and march was anticipated at UCLA around 5:30pm.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Education, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Sacramento

Teachers won't accept new duties without pay to improve school test scores? Fire them, fire ALL of them.

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions

Last November, I posted about the protests that erupted within the UC system over registration fee increases of 30%. Police struck students with batons and tasered them during protests during the regents meeting in Los Angeles where the fee increase was approved on a bipartisan basis. Students thereafter barricaded themselves within buildings at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis. As students occupied Wheeler Hall on the campus of UC Berkeley for approximately 15 hours, a large crowd of students, UC staff and the public generally rallied in their support, and prevented their forcible, potentially violent arrest, by UC police.

The protesters positioned themselves within the social framework of opposition to the imposition of neoliberal policies within California, policies that result in incomprehensible increases in salary and benefits for people like UC President Mark Yudof and the newly hired Chancellor of UC Davis, Linda Katehi, while classes are cut, class sizes increased and students required to pay substantial increases in fees during one of the worst recessions in US history. Meanwhile, rank and file state workers experience 15% pay cuts, while judges complain about the closure of the courtrooms one day a week. In California, the more you make in the public sector, the more immune you are from participating in the sacrifice being imposed by the Governor and the Legislature.

Now, the students are back, as shown here and here and here and here, having performed significant outreach into the community, especially in the East Bay. Not surprisingly, the faculty at UC Berkeley, as it was during the occupation of Wheeler Hall, is scared the protesters will take control of the movement away from enlightened minds like them. UC Berkeley Academic Senate Chair Chris Kutz sent out the following e-mail in advance of the planned protests:

Dear all,

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

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

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

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

thanks,
Chris

Need I expend the time and effort deconstructing the arrogance and elitism on display in this e-mail by Kutz, the condescension, the assumption that they know best, and that the students should, as they are instructed to do in the classroom, take direction from them?

Clearly, there are some among the faculty at UC Berkeley that have learned nothing from the Wheeler occupation. As stated by the occupants of one of the students in the crowd outside the building that day:

In speaking with more than a dozen of the occupiers, one sentiment above all was expressed regarding the role of many faculty that day: a deep sense of betrayal. As one occupier told me: we asked the faculty to mediate and to negotiate with the administration as a way to get our demands out, but apparently they interpreted this as a call to negotiate with us so that we would leave the building. In fact, many of those mediating--be they faculty, ASUC officials, and leaders of student organizations--were self-appointed and drawn almost unanimously from the ranks of those who had opposed the tactic of occupation to begin with. And this would show: according to many of the occupiers, these mediators, in focusing their attention on calming the crowds outside and encouraging the occupiers to leave, had effectively performed a policing function that protected the administration from the protesters.

Ali Tonak, a UC Berkeley graduate student, summarizes the feeling that many expressed:

They have a warped understanding of how power works. They think that calming people outside was keeping the people inside safe, when it was really the opposite: the only thing that was keeping the folks inside safe was people being rowdy outside. In the end, the negotiators were doing the job of the state.

No doubt, the anxiety of people like Kutz, and George Lakoff, the pioneer of a liberal linguistics that has failed in its expressed intention to transform the American political discourse, have been intensified by the following statement by The College of Debtors in Defiance, evocative of Reclaim the Streets:

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

--John Galen Howard, 1913

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

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

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

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

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

ESCALATE-OCCUPY-RECLAIM

Signed,

The College of Debtors in Defiance.

If liberals like Kutz and Lakoff wanted to play a constructive role in the March 4th protests, they would adopt the following principles of unity with protesters across the political spectrum, as many groups who opposed the the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver did:

ORN Solidarity and Unity Statement

Statement circulated and endorsed in February, 2009
by Olympics Resistance Network

We are aware that there is wide-spread opposition to the 2010 Winter Olympics. This ranges from those who are opposing the negative impacts of the Games to those who seek to boycott the Games; from those who desire to raise public awareness about the Games to those who choose to engage in direct action against the Games and its sponsors; from those who are concerned about single issues surrounding the Games to those who are concerned about the overall impact of the Games.

Despite our differences in analysis and strategies we believe we have a significant opportunity to come together and voice our opposition to the 2010 Olympic Games, and to find ways to support each other in our complementary efforts to expose this two-week circus and the oppression it represents to many communities and sectors.

This is especially true since police and security forces already have and will continue to surveil, target, infiltrate, repress, and attempt to divide our movement. We realize that we may have many differences in analysis and tactics and such disagreements are healthy. However we believe such debates should remain internal and we should refrain from publicly denouncing or marginalizing one another especially to mainstream media and law enforcement. In particular, we should avoid characterizations such as bad or violent protestors. We respectfully request that all those in opposition to the 2010 Olympics maintain our collective and unified commitment to social justice and popular mobilization efforts in the face of massive attempts to divide us.

Therefore we are calling for endorsements on the following basis of unity:

• We express our collective critique of and opposition to the negative impacts of the 2010 Olympics.

• We do not need to fully agree or stand by each other’s tactics or ideas, although we may have much to learn and understand from one another.

• We will refrain from publically denouncing or marginalizing other groups to mainstream media and law enforcement.

Please share this statement with others.

Instead, the UC Berkeley faculty members who follow the lead of Kutz continue to insist, as they did during the Wheeler occupation on November 20th, upon doing the job of the state, and sowing confusion as to whether they will be present during protests on behalf of the participants, the UC Berkeley administration or the police.

Perhaps, even they don't know what they want to accomplish, or, even worse, this is their expressed intention, to dissuade people from engaging in what Kutz pejoratively describes as occupations, actions, and more confrontational kinds of campus protests by deliberating manipulating such uncertainty. Because, don't you know, the worse thing that people can do is engage in confrontational kinds of campus protest, and if the protests get out of hand, well, they just might have to begrudingly pull out their cell phone and call the police to tell them what is happening. Personally, my sense is that protesters should stay as far away from the Casque bleu as possible on Thursday.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Global Recession, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

Finally, some members of SEIU are rebelling against the autocratic trade unionism of Andrew Stern:

In a striking blow to SEIU’s national leadership, the reform “Change 1021” slate defeated Stern appointees and won all of the major offices and near total control of the Executive Board. It was the first election since SEIU’s International Executive Board merged ten California locals into one three years ago, creating one of the union’s largest primarily public employee locals. Longtime SEIU reformer Roxanne Sanchez won the top position of President in a landslide (3054-1458), Sin Yee Poon defeated Stern appointee Damita Davis-Howard 2141 to 1445 for the key position of Chief Elected Officer (akin to Executive Director), and controversial incumbent James Bryant was defeated by Alysabeth Alexander for Political Action Chair.

The one-sided outcome follows staggering SEIU defeats at Santa Rosa Memorial and Kaiser Sunset Hospitals, and reflects growing worker opposition to SEIU’s increasingly top-down, undemocratic approach. SEIU 1021 will now become part of the growing movement toward more democratic unionism in California, joining UNITE HERE, NUHW and other unions in promoting this trend. As Sanchez put it after the victory, “workers will now have real power in this organization that they did not have before.”

While SEIU 1021’s reform slate was expected to do well, few anticipated an electoral tidal wave that would sweep out of office the entire team SEIU President Andy Stern appointed to leadership over three years ago. Campaign reports indicated widespread member hostility toward SEIU’s leadership, with many members not voting in the election – only 5360 ballots were cast out of 42,000 eligible – because they lacked hope in the prospect for change.

Well, the times are about to be changing at SEIU 1021. The winning slate will not be content rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic; this is a veteran group that knows that SEIU 1021’s success requires bottom-up, democratic unionism, and it will not deviate from its mission to empower workers. (Disclosure: Both newly-elected President Sanchez and Political Action Chair Alexander are employees of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which I head and is the publisher of Beyond Chron.)

It is hard to overstate the importance of this. SEIU is the largest union in the US, with a top down, corporatized model of unionism that operates not only to the detriment of its members, but to the interests of workers generally. A revitalized SEIU could serve as a center of resistance to the predations of capital within the US economy, and shatter the political duopoly in Washington, D. C. But, while we are from from that today, we have some cause for optimism, an optimism that had no factual basis six months ago.

Labels: Global Recession, Neoliberalism, SEIU, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions