The Emptiness of Liberal Morality

An interesting article, re-posted from uncivil procedure (the comments posted on the uncivpro site are also interesting to read). In it’s entirety:

Or why non-violence discourse is destructive.

There is a growing commentary critiquing the blind discursive commitment to non-violence that permeates many aspects of on-campus resistance in California. FN1 In the wake of the assaults on Chancellor Birgeneau’s on-campus mansion, the hegemony of non-violent discourse was threatened and some insight into where constituent interests lie was provided.

On the one hand, we have an administration committed to violence — monolithic in its hierarchy and monopolization of force. On the other, is a loose consortium of students, faculty, and workers with some intersecting interests and goals. The former, the administration, has a clear goal: to support the privatization agenda being forced down the student/worker/faculty throat by any means necessary. The latter group has no unified ‘plan,’ ‘goal,’ or consensus about what is possible.

Is the administration at UC Berkeley really committed to violence? Of course it is. The modern University system is fundamentally a system of political control. If human existence in the United States is structured through power relationships that originate in language, law, family, and other social constructions, then the University is strongly implicated as a powerful institution that defines these structures and enforces the interests of capital and the state. The structure of higher education is such that it mediates the conditions under which individuals can enter into the economic, productive, and social structures in society. The University represents the state’s continuing interest in regulating human life and developing people as a national resource. So is it surprising that UC Berkeley and its chancellor are willing to deploy the police, the office of student conduct (and threats of suspension, expulsion), and students’ academic success to enforce the policies created by President Yudof and the UC Regents which seem to be rubber stamped by administrators at every UC Campus.

While the UC system is quite willing to use any type of coercive force available to enforce policies, a debate is emerging within groups resisting the policies. Of course there are the general self-styled pundits and internet commentators who always know what the ‘best’ strategies are for people whom they share no sympathies or affinities, but who can always criticize. Those commentators are irrelevant. What is more distressing is the growing discontent exhibited by faculty as students and workers continue to respond to increasing UC initiated violence with escalating militancy.

Professor Wendy Brown, long involved with resistance to UC privatization, issued a statement on behalf of the UCB faculty, saying, “Neither round of violence is intrinsically justified and neither justifies the other. We (faculty) are not having debates. We’re condemning what happened at the Chancellor’s house just as we condemned the police violence outside Wheeler on November 20th.” This position amounts to approval of UC initiated violence because it ignores the more pervasive, consistent, and insidious violence perpetuated by UC policies and structures while raising the actions of a small group of individual demonstrators to the level of violence practiced by heavily armed riot police. Or this position shows that the Faculty is committed to the University as a system of social violence which directly benefits professional academics.

Even more disturbing, however, is the personal-opinion section of Professor Brown’s statement. She wholeheartedly swallows the UC administration’s line that the arrests were justified because students were planning a concert.FN3 While this interpretation is facially ridiculous, it is also demonstrably false.FN2 When police executed a secret operation to arrest students participating in a soft occupation of Wheeler Hall, they did so in a way that disregarded their previous agreements with students and purposefully attempted to undermine students’ academic success. The UCPD confiscated students’ belongings forcing some to miss their final exams and deadlines for assignments. They carted them off to jail for misdemeanor charges should lead to a citation and release. All of this was at the order of the Dean of Students Jonathan Poullard, a cowardly excuse for a student advocate, and Chancellor Birgeneau.

The UC showed its commitment to violence with the Friday morning arrests. They not only lied and cheated students out of their momentary liberty, but they implicated students’ life chances. The arrests were conducted in a way that potentially threatens students’ ability to successfully pass through the University system which implicates their social value to the state and capital. This is a policy and tactic that implicates the individual student’s complete exclusion from social participation. This policy is not limited to the surprise arrests. The Office of Student Conduct is busy issuing formal disciplinary investigations to students involved in all aspects of organizing on campus. What is emerging is a policy directed at excluding critical voices from the campus community, to ensure the uninterrupted functioning of the UC system as a form of regulation dedicated to maintaining human beings as resources for capital.

But this is something that Professor Brown (annual 2008 salary of $176,000) and her colleagues will find difficult to understand. To this class of professional academics, resistance to power and confronting state violence with militancy is something best left to social movements in non-Western states who provide a fertile ground for research and distant commentary. When the target of such resistance is an institution like UC, close to home and critical to faculty’s privileged social position, that support quickly drops off.

The effect, however, on the resistance movement as a whole is potentially severe. The discourse concerning violence in the local and national media is created by the UC administration and reinforced by faculty commentators. Student voices are essentially excluded from participating in the message. The media discourse is a process that discredits and excludes those students who are willing and able to put themselves at personal risk to oppose UC violence and, at the same time, creates an environment of fear, erecting a barrier to growing resistance and including new people. When the faculty, who were once styled as student allies, shows that they cannot be trusted to support students in the face of administration lies and violence, then it is harder and riskier for students to take necessary and militant action.

Another great harm in this ridiculous focus on non-violence is the tacit approval of all kinds of state-sponsored brutality that slink below the high-minded and privileged pacifist discourse. The UC is presumed as inherently legitimate when it practices violence–a presumption that is occasionally rebutted–and students are presumptively de-legitimated when they deviate from the ‘proper student activist’ caricature. This image is painfully apparent in the aftermath of the attacks on the Chancellor’s house. The governor called participants terrorists, without knowing who did what or what actually happened. UC Berkeley announced the presence of a criminal element that must be excised from the student body like a cancer. Faculty unthinkingly signed onto these official positions, not even considering that the UC was lying or mischaracterizing the incident despite a proven track record of lies and spinning media messages. Subsequently, a faculty member who was actually there proclaimed that the administration was actually lying.FN4

The environment the becomes one where true resistance is crushed from all sides as students wonder how they can produce a response commensurate response to UC violence without breaking the unwritten rules of proper protest. The answer, of course, is that they cannot. The UC is proven to be just as volatile and violent as any other state apparatus, and any real confrontation can only devolve to violence. What is missing, however, is a true commitment to opposition as UC brings all of its resources to bear on crushing individual students in the hopes of crushing resistance in general. The UC is showing great skill at splitting and co-opting the different groups engaged in organizing against its policies. Allowing this to continue is a sure route to defeat.

The prescription to this problem is a refusal to identify as student, faculty, or worker and to align interests along these distinctions, which the UC relies on to force through its agenda. It is no longer possible to enter the struggle from an ‘objective’ standpoint. Adhering to objectivity is impossible, as the objective point of view originates from the very structures victimizing students and workers at UC. Any claim to non-partisanship is a commitment to supporting UC Privatization and state power generally. Truly remaking the UC system into a public and open institution will require great risk, great expropriation of space and property, and will elicit the most violent reactions from the UC Administration and the State of California generally. To think differently is to not only misunderstand power relationships and structure of social regulation, it is to stand on the side of state violence.

FN1: See Reflections on Kerr Hall and Behind the Privatization of the UC, a Riot Squad of Police.

FN2: Statement from the Student Advocate’s Office.

FN3: Disturbing but not surprising. Professor Brown was on the front line of the Wheeler Hall occupation accusing students of provoking police violence even as students were being brutalized for merely being present on the scene. Ali Tonak commented in Behind the Privatization of the UC, a Riot Squad of Police, saying:

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.

FN4: Statement from Daniel Perlstein, UCB Lecturer.

The full text of Wendy Brown’s email:

What a group of cops did on November 20th was beyond the pale and inexecusable. The students were non-violent; the police were violent.

What the hooligans did at the Chancellor’s house last night was beyond the pale and inexecusable. It is also unacceptable to say he and his wife were in no danger. I challenge you to say that when an angry chanting crowd is throwing rocks through your windows in the middle of the night.

Neither round of violence is intrinsically justified and neither justifies the other. We (faculty) are not having debates. We’re condemning what happened at the Chancellor’s house just as we condemned the police violence outside Wheeler on November 20th.

End of general faculty view. I will now give you my personal view of the arrests on Friday morning. In contrast to the peaceful and relatively responsible occupation during the week, some of the occupiers were planning a concert to which they hoped to draw a couple thousand people and which had no provisions for crowd control, fire regulations or substance controls. It could easily have resulted in anything from the whole building being trashed to kids being trampled to death. It was also likely to come into conflict with a final taking place in Wheeler Auditorium at 8 AM the next morning. The posters invited people to stay “until the cops kick in the door.” I don’t know what naivete or hubris or pure stupidity led the organizers of this event to imagine this was really going to happen. Frankly, between those plans and then the desperate cry to the faculty that went out to the faculty following the arrests– for bail, for assistance in reducing sentences, for rides back to Berkeley from Santa Rita, for retrieving backpacks from Wheeler, and for lenience on paper deadlines, I feel like we’re dealing with 10 year olds. It’s tedious, it’s infuriating and its wasting a lot of valuable time and energy while the greatest public university in the world is slipping away from us. It is also not lost on any of us that the number of students involved in this bullshit is remarkably tiny but that it has and will continue to drive away many other students who at one time were eager to become activists on behalf of the preserving the University of California. Indeed, what is striking in the anonymously forwarded garbage below is that there is not one mention of saving the university, only excitement about violence. The “cause,” if there ever was one, seems to have disappeared.

Wheeler 43 (nov.20)

BERKELEY – The charges against the Wheeler 43 have been dropped, however the charges against one person who was outside have not been dropped as of yet.

The Enemy Within by the La Ventana Collective

from: http://ventanacollective.blogspot.com/

The student is a state of being. It is a transitory state. It is a hazing; it is a rehearsal. It is a preparatory stage.

The student is a privileged person in an underprivileged world of suffering, but only because s/he does not recognize her/his own boredom as a form of imprisonment, of torture. The student is not only deadened to reality, s/he is also deprived of the consciousness of her/his own suffering. The student accepts this as “normal,” but it is only the normality of her/his repression that makes the student like the rest of society.

The student lives in a state of protracted infancy because it is the function of the University to train future, docile low-level functionaries. This state of protracted infancy is seen in the classrooms, where students sit quietly in military formation, accepting the nonsense professors spew. The student is there, content and misguided, believing that the classroom is a setting for some privileged and serious learning. Thus the student eagerly accepts the traditional teacher-student relationship.

It is in the University where submissiveness is ingrained ever more easily. Such inculcations formerly had to be forced upon the white-collar workers; now they are easily absorbed and passed along by the mass of future low-level functionaries. Students are being trained for jobs comparable to those of 20th century skilled workers; except, back then, skilled workers never expected promotions.

The student clings to the crumbling prestige of the University, and, in comparison to the former level of general bourgeois culture, the machine-made specialized education is just as profoundly debased at the intellectual level because the modern economic system requires the mass production of uneducated workers who have been rendered incapable of thinking—like domesticated cows.

The University is, in fact, a training ground for future docile, submissive workers. On these training grounds, the student unashamedly lives an overt childish existence. The tighter authority’s chains shackle the student, the freer the student believes s/he is.

The University has become an institution for organizing ignorance; “high culture” disappears at the same rate as the school assembly lines produce professors; professors are scum and most would be jeered at in any high school classroom. But the University student is oblivious to all of this and continues to listen obligingly to the masters; the student consciously suspends all critical judgment so as to wallow in the mystical state of being a student—someone seriously committed to learning serious things—and hopes thereby to learn the latest “truths” and repeat them as her/his original thoughts.

The future revolutionary society will condemn everything that takes place today in lecture halls and classrooms as nothing but noise, verbal pollution. The student is already a very bad joke.

Students live a poor existence. Student poverty—both material and emotional—is more extreme than that of the proletariat’s. However, this poverty is temporary and not comparable with the miserable existence of society’s poor. Because student poverty is only temporary, and because being a student is too temporary and detached from the historical process, the student accepts the poverty without resignation. The student wallows in it, thinking that the approaching future will compensate. However, the student will only discover an endless, inevitable mediocrity.
The student movement is blind to itself because it is detached from the rest of society; it does not understand the forces that push it into action; it cannot connect its struggle to its own life. (The issue is not about incompetent state and school administrators and the severe budget cuts. Recovering funds will not solve the University’s perpetual problems.) The student movement seeks ‘demands’ everywhere, but because students cannot see the absurdity of their own lives and their own imprisonment, they cannot begin to imagine what the struggle is for.

The deaths of students who struggle all over the world for liberation reveal the poverty of the U.S. student movement and the superficiality of its own struggles.

When the real struggle comes, it will be easy to recognize because it will cut through all the bullshit in which the student is trapped. (It knows its objectives. Its tactics are clear. It moves with confidence.)

We begin by killing the enemy within us and within our friends with whom we share our classrooms, homes, and beds. We come together in small bands with those we have learned to trust, occupying everything that represses us, taking back the schools, the streets, our lives.

The function of the student movement must be something other than making demands of the University, but to destroy the existence of the student as a distinct social role and character structure. More eager for grades than knowledge, more eager for a “good” job than to live without dead time, the first enemy of the student is within you.

The student however should not alone be singled out for student passivity is only the most obvious symptom of a general state of affairs where each sector of social life has been subdued by a similar imperialism.

Update on Vienna Eviction

from unsereuni:

Occupation at the Auditorium Maximum in Vienna Evicted – Education Protests Continue

While other occupied universities in Austria are successfully finding political solutions, the rectorate at the University of Vienna has evicted the occupying students.

After two months of occupations and with a political solution within reach, the rectorate at the University of Vienna ordered the eviction of all occupied premises in the main building of the university, including the auditorium maximum (Audimax). Around 150 people left the building peacefully after the eviction was served by police at 6.12 AM. The occupying students are disappointed by the rectorate’s course of action, they condemn evictions as a replacement for finding a political solution to the problems in the education system. (read more)

Keep Building Brown

Students are The University’s reason for being. Without students – workers training in specialized forms of labor to fulfill specialized roles – the society in which we live could not continue. We are its future, and, already their diligent workers, its present. So we work, together with the faculty and staff, to reproduce the status quo. And without any particular reason but momentum, we keep on keeping on, day after day. Sure, some of us are more productive than others – and that’s what college is about: finding your place in the division of labor, picking your path, and gathering skills to make you a more effective cog in the machine. (read more)

Communiqués from the Valley

Assembled by our friends at Modesto Anarcho:

Vienna Evicted!

sent to us from a comrade (edited):

Today, December 21st, 2009, the occupation of the biggest lecture room at the University of Vienna has been evicted due to the actions taken by police and security staff. At that time, 6.30am, there had been about 20 students and about 80 homeless people inside the rooms.

All occupiers moved to C1, a squatted space at the campus, for a big assembly. At the moment protests are being organized there.

In the meantime, one of five occupied rooms at the Academy of Refusal (formerly Academy of fine arts, Vienna), has been evicted by academy staff as well.

Both evictions have been directed by the headmasters, Georg Winckler (university of vienna) and Stefan Schmidt-Wulffen. Through these actions, they reproduced a patriarchic, undemocratic and hierarchic system.

THE PROTESTS CAN NOT BE ENDED THROUGH POLICE ACTIONS!

DEMONSTRATION TODAY, 16:30. WE MEET AT THE UNIVERSITY CAMPUS, C1!

Police Strategy & Photos from SFSU occupied

On the morning of December 9th, students at San Francisco State University occupied the business building on campus. Throughout the day and that evening, students on the outside stayed with linked arms in front of the door waiting for police to arrive. Early in the morning on December 10th, the police arrived in riot gear. Here are some photos (page 1, 2, 3) from the night and the morning of the arrests and map of how the police moved in on the building.

Final Moments in Wheeler Hall (11/20)

Here’s a video (16min) from the final moments inside Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley as everyone was being arrested on November 20th, 2009.

Croatian Cookbook

On April 20th, 2009, nation wide occupations began in Croatia. For 35 days the Faculty* of Humanities and Social Sciences (Filozofski fakultet) in Zagreb was occupied (and again in November for two weeks). Some individuals involved created an occupation cookbook that is in the process of being translated. The first portion of it is now available at the Slobodni Filozofski website.

The Occupation Cookbook or the Model of the Occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb

*i.e. Department

Reflections on Kerr Hall (by student participants)

an amazing article from Anti-Capitalist Projects:

In the aftermath of the November occupation of Kerr Hall at UCSC there has been a storm of writing and discussion as both supporters and critics have rushed to represent the unprecedented events and imbue them with political meaning. The administration said what everyone knew it would say – that the participants went beyond the bounds of civil protest, that they deprived the university community of its rights, et cetera. We are neither surprised by nor interested in their rhetoric. More important to us have been the conversations developing within the movement itself, some of which we fear threaten to distort the real content of the occupation and drain it of its radical potential. As participants in the Kerr Hall events we want to set the record straight about a few misconceptions and also challenge a particular kind of political logic that has surfaced from some quarters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UC 8 update

BERKELEY – Press conference from indybay about the 8 arrested individuals from the Friday evening march. (press conference from December 15)

the UC/CSU 222

CALIFORNIA – Since at least October 15, 2009, 221 protesters/occupiers have been arrested around fighting budget cuts and tuition increases at the University of California & California State University systems (and another 1 charged, but was never arrested. A total of 222 facing legal charges).

Oct.15 – 1 arrested and another charged at UCSC

Nov.18 – 14 arrested at UCLA

Nov.19 – 52 arrested at UCD, 2 more arrests at UCLA

Nov.20 – 44 arrested at UCB

Nov.24 – 1 student arrested at UCI

Dec.10 – 33 arrested at SF State University.

Dec.11 – 66 arrested in the morning at UCB. Another 8 arrested that evening at UCB

(some of this is sourced from www.studentactivism.net) See our timeline for more information on the arrests. Please comment for corrections.

Of Many Tasers and Batons, a Few Torches and Rocks, and the Way Forward: A Statement by a UCI graduate student

Of Many Tasers and Batons, a Few Torches and Rocks, and the Way Forward

The actions and arrests that occurred on Friday night at Chancellor Birgeneau’s residence have provoked a moment of pause and recalibration among those of us involved in the anti-privatization movement in UC. The facts about what happened that night are unclear. No charges were filed at the arraignments of those who were arrested and held in jail for four days on bail of $132,000. It would seem that, at the moment, there is no evidence to support the accusations of multiple felonies for which they were detained.  At a time when people are considering the initial rush to judge and condemn, we should remember that lives are ruined by police accusations that those inside and outside the movement circulate as fact.  Let us take this opportunity to affirm absolutely that the reaction to last Friday’s events must take place as a conversation among those who have been engaged in the defense of public education in California: the workers, students, and faculty who have risked much in pursuit of overturning the policies approved on November 19^th at UCLA. The current UC President Mark Yudof, enabled by the tacit support of Chancellors, implemented the endgame of a process that will see our libraries close at 8 pm., our campus workers fired, and public education increasingly become a commodity for the wealthy to purchase. These offices are now engaged in a dishonest and insulting rhetorical game of misdirection that encourages students to address their rage to an abstraction called “Sacramento” in lieu of directing it at the flesh and blood people – Governor, UC Presidents, Regents and Chancellors — who penned, signed, and excused this gross betrayal of California public life.  Part of this campaign to misdirect the message of the movement was the governor’s supremely irresponsible labeling of the actions of a few protestors on Friday as “terrorism,” equating the smashing of planters and the throwing of rocks at windows with acts of mass murder. One need not condone the vandalism that occurred at Chancellor Birgeneau’s on Friday night to condemn this abuse of language and logic and to worry about its dangerous effects. It would be laughable if not for the fact that such political posturing has material consequences for the lives of individuals and movements. We now know that there is insufficient evidence to charge those held in jail with vandalism, let alone to support the charges made by the Governor and the Chancellor’s office. We add this to the list of good reasons to mistrust reports issued by Chancellor Birgeneau and his Public Relations spokesperson Dan Mogulof. After the occupation of Wheeler Hall on November 20^th, Mogulof claimed that those inside the building were not Berkeley students. There was no reason for the Chancellor and Mogulof to believe this and so we are left to assume that this was misinformation knowingly circulated. In an impromptu press conference held in front of Sproul Hall on Saturday, Mogulof affirmed again and again that the arrests at Wheeler early Friday morning were made in order to “prevent at all costs a scene like the one on November 20^th.” This statement, heard by faculty, students and workers who were present, confirms that contrary to the Chancellor’s official statements of concern, these arrests represented a tactic in the effort to suppress student activism at Berkeley. If Mr. Birgeneau was simply concerned with clearing the building, certainly police would have issued an order to disperse to each of the occupants and allowed students the choice to take a civil disobedience arrest, or to leave. We are left to assume that the spectacle of students hand-cuffed in the rain was a PR goal for the Chancellor. Let’s not allow the public response to Friday’s action, whatever the facts turn out to be, to further excuse a policy of student intimidation that was underway prior to acts of property damage and intimidation. Let us not forget who perpetrated the previous violence on our campuses this year, and on whose orders. I urge the faculty, if they are uncomfortable with any tactic or ideology connected with this student movement going forward, to resist relying on spokespeople who have circulated lies. Ask a student what the environment was like in Wheeler prior to the mass arrests. Ask a student what students and workers are saying about the vandalism at the Chancellor’s house and how it has affected student activism as a whole on campus. Given the complete exoneration of those arrested we should vow to  remember next time that while activists remain in jail, the in-house conversation can be nuanced and critical but the public comment should strive for solidarity and at all costs should avoid circulating the unverified (and in this case utterly, absurdly false) claims of the administration and the police. Faculty need not condone the acts of the few in order to express concern for the wrongfully jailed and renew a commitment to the mission and tactics of the larger UC-wide student movement: to resist the long pre-meditated and ideological policy of Governor Schwarzenegger and his appointee Mark Yudof to replace a public trust with a private concern and to take money out of the pockets of poor, working and middle class students and workers and put it into the pockets of the wealthy, their own and those of their under-taxed class mates.

In Solidarity,

Emma Heaney

UC-Irvine Graduate Student, Department of Comparative Literature

UC Berkeley 8

BERKELEY – Eight people were arrested on the night of December 11th, leaving the area of the UCB Chancellor’s mansion. This is an update on their case, from our comrades at ouruniversity:

3:15 p.m. Here are a few points made by John Viola, from the National Lawyers Guild, who was representing at least one of the students charged, forwarded from a student inside the courthouse: The DA has decided not to charge the eight people who were in for felony charges at this point and they will be released later tonight.  We need to continue to follow these cases.  We want the charges dropped and for there to be no academic charges brought against the students.

Letter from Student Advocate’s Office on Friday morning arrests

Reposted from liveweek.net

Note: This is a leaked draft-form of a letter that SAO plans to release soon. The final version could potentially be quite different from this draft. As such the language in this document does not represent the views of the SAO

The Student Advocate’s Office (SAO), a non-partisan and executive office of the ASUC, is deeply concerned with the circumstances surrounding the university arrests of 66 individuals, including approximately 40 students, from Wheeler Hall on December 11, 2009.

While we do not condone conduct that threatens the safety of the campus community and recognize that the planned unauthorized concert lacked the necessary safety precautions, we believe the administration did not adhere to procedures that were in the best interest of students. The following is a statement that addresses our concerns:

Following the arrests of students involved in the week-long “Open University” protests, UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof stated in a university press release that “there had been an understanding of access to certain areas and [the protestors] began to violate those understandings.” He continued by stating that the arrests were made “once the group refused to reconsider plans to hold an unauthorized all-night concert in an academic building.” However, when members of the SAO met with Dean of Students Jonathan Poullard out of concern for the arrested students, he provided reasons for the arrest that were not in line with the university’s public statements. Dean Poullard acknowledged that the university’s call for police intervention was not initially linked to the concert, but rather had been discussed earlier that week before the concert had even been planned. His statements indicated that the arrests were intended for the last day of the “Open University” protest to prevent students from mobilizing and moving their activities to a different building on campus, which would further increase costs to the university. Considering that the arrests were premeditated and not solely for the purpose of preventing a disruptive and illegal concert as the university has alleged, the SAO firmly believes that the method and mode of police intervention were misleading and misguided.

The premeditation of police intervention calls into question the validity of the administration’s attempts to communicate with student organizers.

Throughout the duration of the “Open University” protests, spokespeople from the administration met with student organizers. At the same time, university officials were engaged in dialogue to plan the arrests of the protestors. Dean Poullard stated that the arrests in Wheeler would have taken place the first night of the protests had police action been strategically and economically feasible. The intentions of the administration must be called into question. The efforts to negotiate with the protestors were conducted in bad faith, leading students to believe that there was room for collaboration and two-way communication when the administration had intended to move forward with pre-planned unilateral actions from the beginning.

The lack of an immediate dispersal warning was unfair and could have seriously jeopardized particularly vulnerable groups of students.

The university had warned individuals in Wheeler Hall of legal and student code of conduct violations for four nights without taking any measures to enforce those warnings until the arrests that Friday. The routine nature of those warnings gave many students the false impression that their actions were an acceptable form of protest that was tolerated by the administration. This tacit agreement led many students to participate in the events who would otherwise have avoided Wheeler Hall had they anticipated the risk of severe punishment. The routine warning was administered at roughly 10 p.m. Thursday with a 6-7 hour gap before the arrests were made at 4:30 A.M. the following morning.

This large span of time between the last warning and the arrests ignores the possibility that some of the students present at 4:30 a.m. had not heard the warning. While the university states that its primary concern was preventing any disruption that could have been caused by the concert, it is unreasonable to insist that students present in Wheeler Hall at 4:30 A.M. would be the same attendees at the concert that was scheduled for 8 P.M. or involved in its planning.

A significant number of students came to Wheeler Hall primarily to study and most were asleep at the time of the arrests. The drastic shift from treating students as peaceful protestors for four days to hostile occupiers on the fifth was unnecessary and showed callous disregard for student well-being. Beyond creating a criminal record for these students, the university’s actions will also result in the creation of conduct records that will have negative implications on the students’ academic careers.

Further, by not giving an immediate dispersal warning, the university failed to assess the extreme safety hazard that their actions posed to any AB540 or international students on site. Legal charges against any student under either category could have put the students at serious risk of deportation. Administrators did not take into account these potentially dire consequences.

The response to the “Open University” protests demonstrates the administration’s adversarial attitude towards student protestors.

The jarring discrepancy between university press releases and actual administrative plans to end the protest shows great irresponsibility on the administration’s part. This failure to correct inaccurate information released to the public has misrepresented the indicted students’ behavior. It avoids any formal recognition that there was a distinct level of premeditation and an egregious lack of sincere communication between student protestors and the administration leading up to the arrests. The SAO believes that the administration must uphold responsible procedure to address student conduct and take clear steps towards creating safe and respectful spaces for dialogue with the student body.

Free Carwil James!

BERKELEY – 8 people were arrested after the concert/riot on Friday night in support of the 66 (or more) arrested folks at Wheeler Hall earlier that morning. Not to speak for any individuals involved or simply present at the riot, it should be clarified that it’s unclear who actually participated in property destruction, people were arrested leaving the scene not during any acts of vandalism. As such, any charges at this point seems to be a part of a witch hunt; not every person of the 80 people marching that night damaged something. Despite any property destruction, the march was supporting the individuals arrested that morning under unjust conditions, so people’s presence shouldn’t equate to being complicit. People are rightfully outraged by the administration’s actions at Wheeler Hall (both on November 20th and December 11th).

Some people have created a support website for one of the arrested individuals at the riot, Carwil James. This is from the website:

Carwil James and 7 other people were arbitrarily arrested on Friday following a rally, concert, and march at UC Berkeley. They were there in solidarity with those arrested that morning during a violent police crack-down inside of Wheeler Hall. Everyone there was supporting affordable and accessible higher education.

Carwil is currently in jail and has an arraignment hearing on Tuesday. It is uncertain what he will actually be charged with but the current charges are very serious and may lead to a long and expensive trial.

FREE CARWIL!

Carwil James and 7 other people were arbitrarily arrested on Friday following a rally, concert, and march at UC Berkeley. They were there in solidarity with those arrested that morning during a violent police crack-down inside of Wheeler Hall. Everyone there was supporting affordable and accessible higher education.

Carwil is currently in jail and has an arraignment hearing on Tuesday. It is uncertain what he will actually be charged with but the current charges are very serious and may lead to a long and expensive trial.

What you can do to help get Carwil out of jail and keep him out:

1) Attend his arraignment hearing this Tuesday at 2:00PM in Oakland.

2) Donate to his legal fees: his bail is currently $135,000 and we need to raise $25,000 for legal expenses.

3) Lend to Carwil’s bail money fund

4) Sign up for updates

Much of what is said here can be said of the other individuals arrested. Here is the information we have so far about people’s arraignments (so please come, be present, and support these folks):

Zachary Bowin – ?

Angela Miller – 12/15/09, 9a, Dept. 112, Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse (source: Inmate Locator)

Julia Litmancleper – ?

John Friesen – 12/14/09, 2p, Dept. 112, Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse (source: Inmate Locator)

Donnell Allen – 12/15/09, 2p, Dept. 112, Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse (source: Inmate Locator)

David Morse – 12/15/09, 2p, Dept. ?, Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse (Source: David)

Laura Thatcher – 12/15/09, 2p, Dept. 112, Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse (source: Inmate Locator)

Carwil James – 12/15/09, 2p, Dept. 112, Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse (source: Inmate Locator)

(the date/time is their arraignment)

Don’t give Birgeneau a free pass to shut down student organizing

this is a pretty good article

The administration wants to impose a specific topology on the student movement, pressuring all students to affirm their belonging to one area of the map and not another. The governor has adopted the Bush language of terrorism to demonize the movement that his own gutting of public education created, and the administration has invoked the Bush doctrine of pre-emption to justify police raids and mass arrests even in the absence of criminal activity or evidence thereof. Students should not allow the administration to set parameters on discourse or action. If such parameters are to exist, they should be created by students with common aims and not by the administration when it exploits events like these for its own sake.

In forging a new language of political engagement and action, students will face vigorous resistance from the powers that be. Minor events like today’s, involving few students, will be characterized by administrators and cooperating media as flash points marking the ominous direction of the student movement at large. Incidents where police deployment was so clearly inappropriate will be let aside as incidents like these are foregrounded to justify future police presence and action against protesters. Everybody will pay attention to violence against the Chancellor, even as the Chancellor orders violence against student strikers acting well within their rights. (read the entire article)

Torchlit Evening with Birgeneau

“Everybody throw your lighters up, tell me y’all finna fight or what?” -The Coup 

It is no secret that the kids are pissed. Since September, we’ve carried out over a dozen building takeovers of varying scale and intensity on California campuses, and during the Days of Action against Cuts and Hikes in November, students in Berkeley and LA actually fought police. In the past few days, evictions of occupied spaces at SFSU and Berkeley by the armed agents of the state and academy can only represent the future of this form of education. Last night, we marched to war and for once didn’t wait for the enemy to strike the first blow. 

Everyone can follow the thread connecting these events. The police action towards students in the past few months could be accurately called “extraordinarily frightening and violent” as Birgeneau whined of the ruckus that woke him last night. As a leading beacon of the capitalist media recently observed, “Whether you’re an oppressive foreign dictatorship or an American state in the process of committing fiscal suicide, you know you’re losing the public relations battle when encounters between armor-clad riot police with truncheons and college students are broadcast on TV.” Despite the liberal overtones, Newsweek exposes some important points. The dictatorship of capital is indeed performing an ensemble suicide, and as we are its captives, our will to live can only be expressed through revolt — refusal, negation, and the unleashing of unlimited human strikes. As students, we are supposed to be the embodiment of society producing its own future, but this society has no future; there will be no “return to normal” and we must find ways to inhabit this reality. From Berkeley to Greece and back around the other side, we are in civil war. This is the basis of modern life, and it is high time we illuminate this fact for any who remain confused. 

It’s worth noting that last night, the activist-mediators and movement-bureaucrats who have behaved as volunteer deputies so many times in the past few months were nowhere to be seen. This was neither peaceful nor a protest; the time for dialogue is over. The path of reform and representation is our target as much as the sphere of academic production itself. Birgeneau was right, we are “criminals, not activists”: we are no longer kept obedient by the myth of peace as our normal condition. We must wonder as well about the people who cleared obstructions from the street in the wake of the march – streets used minutes later by police who attacked the mob and arrested 8 comrades on extreme and absurd charges. A reminder to everyone: solidarity means attack! 

The rage that was loosed upon the chancellor’s disgusting palace was not only well-deserved, but a long time coming and should not by any means stop there. Not until every knowledge-factory grinds to a halt and every rich man’s house is either squatted or burned to the ground.

PERFECT STORM: The general strike and the eclipse of unionism

from the gazuedro collective:

“Recognizing the diversionary nature of the union structure as it exists now, workers must deny its role as the effective voice of the movement.  Workers must reclaim responsibility, determine their collective voice, and redefine class consciousness according to a shared identity.  Workers must construct a counter-narrative to the dominant explanation of economic crisis, denaturalizing the accepted story of recession as explanation of injustices.  What we need is a re-articulation of the working-class identity.” (read more)

UCB sparks

BERKELEY – As planned, the hip-hop show with Boots Riley and several other bands performed Friday evening, December 11th.

People met on the steps of Wheeler Hall at around 8pm, many spoke out against the actions the Chancellor had taken and some spoke about the SF State occupation and the solidarity they have with the UCB occupiers. Together, they marched through the rain to a local housing co-op.

marching to the concert, leading the march with a flare

The artists, including Boots Riley, played until 11pm to a crowd of about 150. The artists expressed their support and solidarity with the occupations and discussed the need to fight capitalism and systemic oppression. As the show concluded, a march to campus formed in response to the police repression at Wheeler Hall earlier that morning*.

*Around 6am on Friday morning, around 66 occupiers were arrested, despite no warning for dispersal. When the police entered Wheeler Hall, they locked the door. Many were asleep or simply preparing for finals.

where the Wheeler 66 were taken

Earlier in the evening, some of the arrested people spoke to the crowd describing the police coercion and humiliation they suffered despite the peaceful nature of the occupation.

As the protesters marched from the concert, they made makeshift barricades and obstacles (mostly from trash cans) for vehicles attempting to drive through the crowd. The march quickly turned into a small riot, taking the streets and blocking traffic. At one point a car irritated with the marchers, sped through the crowd carelessly, hitting an individual (although, no one suffered any apparent harm). As the crowd approached the entrance to campus, some lit torches. They approached the Chancellor’s residence on campus and began smashing lights, damaging windows, and breaking pots.

The Chancellor, although not the sole contributor to the crisis we face now, was directly involved in the unjust arrests of Wheeler Hall in the morning and continues to threaten the futures of the stakeholders of the University of California, Berkeley. He is neither a mastermind nor a figurehead, but does stand as a powerful and influential individual that refuses to accept both the project that Live Week attempted to create and the fact that he shares a part of the blame, no matter who he can point his finger at. The crisis isn’t a new phenomenon given birth by the economy, the legislators, the regents, the UC office of the president, or the campus administrators, this is a crisis formed by the status the system attempts to maintain. As the events unrolled during the evening, it was clear that many are aware of the lack of faith the Chancellor has for the students and many have become aware of the power that individuals have, due to promise that Live Week fulfilled, to create a space for people to come together.

Although some may attempt to paint the evening as a night of petty violence, this event reveals a refusal to accept the university’s actions and the physically violent police repression in passivity. The property damage incurred may seem ruthlessly aberrant and scarring on a university already suffering budget woes, but the damage incurred by the silencing of stakeholders Friday morning exceeds beyond any value the university can place on some broken glass and ceramics. The University of California is a model public university that the world watches and the actions it takes reverberates to communities outside simply the current students, workers and faculty. The dignity and security of individuals through out California, and the world, is being crushed due to the decisions made here.

Euclid Ave

on the corner of Hearst and Euclid

Corner of Hearst & Euclid as a car u-turns to detour

trash cans strewn about Hearst

another shot of the corner of Hearst & Euclid

someone picks up a trash can over their head

The first torch lights up, Hearst

more torches

torches as rioters enter campus

broken lampost

torches at the base of the stairs to the Chancellor's residence

damaged window of the Chancellor's residence

smashed pottery at the steps to the house

UCB Live Week Arrested

BERKELEY – Students were arrested in the early morning Friday at occupied Wheeler Hall.

CONCERT is still on for tonight! Come out!

UPDATES below:

around 8am, arrested occupiers

1:00pm: Some occupiers have been released. 15 occupiers are still being held, some for a $25,000 bail.

1:05pm: UCB press spokesman, Dan [Magulof], is speaking protesters about the arrests.

“

UCB Spokesperson, Dan Magulof

Dan Mogulof, Face of UC PR, says “Chancellor approved arrests. Issue was hip hop concert flyer saying ‘Party until cops kick the doors down.’ And keeping order on campus during finals week.”

2:43 pm: Santa Rita update:76 total arrested. 7 have been released. For the moment only charged with trespassing. All released by 3pm

4:00pm: At the University’s request every one of those arrested who did not have outstanding warrants or other criminal issues(64 of 66 arrested) are now being cited and released.The bail requirement has been dropped. As a result only two people will remain and/or need to post bail.  Dan Moguluf said: “your questions and comments played a role in this outcome.”

65 Arrested at Freeler Hall

Call this number and demand UCPD to release names of arrested

(510) 642-6760 phone
(510) 643-4655 fax
ucpolice@berkeley.edu

PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION
UC BERKELEY “OPEN UNIVERSITY” RAIDED BY UC POLICE, 65 ARRESTED

Contact: Elias Martinez (559) 999-4964 and Ianna Owen (570) 977-0487

This morning, on the fifth and final day of a weeklong “Open University” held at UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall, University of California Police stormed into the building around 5am, arresting 65 people without provocation, witnesses said.

“People were not given a final warning – police burst in while people were sleeping and immediately started locking doors and arresting people. Many students have papers due today, and finals to take starting tomorrow,” said Elias Martinez, an undergraduate from Political Science. “There had been cops in here all week, they were acting like it was okay. We had no idea.”

The police raid at UC Berkeley came one day after students participating in an occupation at San Francisco State University, also railing against budget cuts to public education, were arrested by SFSU Police at 3am.

Douglas Virgos, an undergraduate student, spent the night in the UC Berkeley building but then left on a food run in the early morning. “I got back and saw that the police had put handcuffs on the doors. I was there all night and never heard police tell us we had to leave.”

Students and faculty supporters who gathered on the scene shortly after raid alerts went out say they saw the students, some of them without shoes and wearing only their underwear, being loaded onto Alameda County Sheriff’s buses headed to Santa Rita Jail in Dublin.

“We’ll be shuttling people out there all day on caravans to do jail support and camp out there until the protesters are released,” said Melissa Barker, an undergraduate of Interdisciplinary Studies and parent. “The fact that the cops drove 65 people all the way to Dublin makes me think that the charges will be way more than misdemeanor trespassing. We’re worried, but we’ll do everything it takes to support our folks. We’ll be there all weekend if it takes.”

Students have been holding public events, including teach-ins on the UC budget, study-ins, and live music shows as part of a “Live Week” of “Open University” events since Monday.

The week of events was scheduled to end with a free concert in Wheeler Hall, where the Oakland-based political hip hop artist, Boots Riley, would perform tonight.

“We are going to proceed with the event today, and this show will be larger than ever. We’ll continue to organize with students from other schools and build a worldwide movement of students fighting to retain and expand public education,” said a student who didn’t want to give their name for fear or university reprisals. “The police attack only makes us angrier.”

from Live Week

Live from Occupied California

Friday, Dec. 11

Occupied Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley

8:00pm – Boots Riley from The Coup

Live from the Heart of the Open University – We Reclaimed Wheeler Auditorium and we gonna throw a party to celebrate!

Featuring Boots Riley of the Coup with special guests Roberto Miguel, Shiney Things, & Masters of the Universe. After the show, we’ll keep it going with DJs and a DANCE PARTY all night long.

This Event is Not Just Free, it’s LIBERATED (the best kind of free).

San Francisco State Occupied

SAN FRANCISCO – the business building at San Francisco State University has been occupied at approximately 5 to 6am, Wednesday, December 9th. (see their site: occupySFSU)

By redefining and reclaiming these spaces, we expose the true violent nature of our society. After escalated police violence on the UC campuses in Los Angeles and Berkeley, student occupiers rightly proclaimed that “behind every fee increase, a line of riot police.” In this structure, the Business Building of San Francisco State University, usually occupied by financial advisors for war-profiteering companies, there is no business as usual. Outside, the invisible hand of the market is holding a gun, revealing itself to us with a badge emblazoned “UPD”. The act of occupation is violent because it is a threat; we are not those who wield weapons, we are not those who possess the means to subordinate people to not just physical violence, but the psychological violence that disempowers us to believe that we do not have the power to resist and fight back.

occupy SFSU, read more

livestream is down now. Text Updates below:
(Updates from sources on the ground. Latest update: 4:00am dec.10)

8:50am: occupation of the business building is still going. About 30-40 students inside the building, and another 50 outside. The response from students seem to be positive as students are just arriving for classes.

early wednesday morning. sign reads "no business as usual"

SFSU occupiers

10:20am: the building is still occupied. Approximately 80 students are on the outside in support. Apparently little contact between the people inside and the people outside.

SFSU business building locked down

10:40am: No major police presence yet. So far only 2 police officers are present.

1:50pm: No real news to report. According to the occupySFSU twitter feed, they released copies of their demands from the rooftop, but we have been unable to find a digital copy of the demands. The building is still locked down and supporters are still present outside.

9:07pm: The building is still locked down. There are about 20 students at each entrance with linked arms (4 entrances). A dance party has begun at once of the entrances.

1:00am: The building is still locked down. About 80 students are still present, many of them still dancing.

~4:00am: police break into the business building and arrest individuals inside. Some students outside linking arms were also arrested. Other supporters followed the arrested individuals onto the street, 19th avenue. 19th avenue is blocked off for an hour by the police/students. Eventually the police (in riot gear) leave the street allowing vehicles to approach the students sitting in. The police announce that the arrested individuals are only going to be cited/ticketed then released, but can only do so once supporters vacate the street. The protesters leave the street and some march over to a parking lot where the arrested individuals are being held. The last student is released around 6am.

more photos from indybay.