When: 10/1/90 at 12 noon
Where: Baytree Plaza, UCSC
A manifestation to express our anger that, on top of rising tuition costs and shrinking course availability, we have to pay tons of money for our books. We’re sick of getting ripped off. We’re sick of working and going into debt to pay for school. We’re sick of the whole fucking thing!
Come out and bring your friends!
The student is a privileged person in an underprivileged world of suffering, but only because she does not recognize her own boredom as a form of imprisonment, of torture. She is not only deadened to reality, she is also deprived of the consciousness of her own suffering. She accepts herself as ‘normal’, but it is only the normality of her repression that makes her like the rest of society.
The student movement is blind to itself: it does not understand the forces that push it into action, it cannot connect its struggle with its own life. 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. When the real struggle comes it will be easy to recognize because it will cut through all the bullshit in which we are 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, courtyards, 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 become 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 is the student within you.
-adapted from the black mask pamphlet, a little treatise on dying (courtesy of the new school comrades)
40 students sit-in at CSU Fullerton to protest budget cuts!
Close to 40 students ’sat in’ Pollak Library the night of Sept. 29 demanding to speak with an administrator or university official that could answer questions regarding how budget cuts were implemented and who decided which departments would cut how much.
They refused to leave the library until someone came to address their questions. If no one came before 9 p.m., closing time, they would remain in the library until they we’re arrested by Cal State University Fullerton Police, said a group member who refused to give his name.
note correction: not UCI, but CSU Fullerton
We Closed Down those Banks, Baby, in solidarity with our comrades in Pittsburgh
On Friday, September 25, the ATMs and doors of three banks in New Orleans’ French Quarter were sealed shut by the New Orleans Political Fashion Police. Fuck banks. So ugly.
These actions were in solidarity with the occupiers at UC Santa Cruz and our comrades in Pittsburgh. We also did this for New Orleans, in the initial phase of our project to expel capital from our beautiful home.
This ain’t no fall trend. Increasingly, righteously bad behavior becomes a part of our everyday routine. Thinking, talking, making – these things are insufficient in a society that co-opts any and everything except that which attacks directly.
There is no reason to be scared. You, too, can fight.
Dressed to kill,
The New Orleans Political Fashion Police
As a bus driver on the UCSC campus, I fully support this action. After watching the despicable “work” of Tom Vanni, Larry Pageler and Alisson Johnson attempt to destroy the campus transportation over the last year and a half, I am convinced that Blumencrawl is in deep with these corporate stooges. The only way to impress upon these cowards to show some integrity and grit is to show them that the majority of students and workers will have their voices heard. Bloomy’s voice box, Jim Burns, will tell you it’s for the survival of the UC system in an attempt to strike fear in voters minds. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, UC has billions in assets and this is the rainy day it was meant for. The kickbacks/influence peddlers have, for too long, been a parasitic influence on UCSC decisions. The city gets millions in revenue through a badly orchestrated contract with Metro where they double dip on student passenger fees and agreements between the city and the college are blatantly incestuous with UCSC keeping any stores, movie theaters, restaurants off campus in order to get the students into town to spend their money. They force freshman to be on a meal plan that is frequently unavailable. They have forced this situation through their blind ambitious greed and lies. If students hadn’t occupied McHenry Library in 1984, Nelson Mandela would still be in jail or dead. We forced UC to divest from South Africa helping to bring down Botha’s evil regime. Stand up and be counted. Stand with these students in solidarity. Stand up for the best public university in the world and support your friends, your peers, your courageous fellow students. You can be assured that myself and my fellow drivers here in Slugland are with you. Come on my bus and hand out flyers or just converse and get this conversation going. It is necessary. In Solidarity, Ken Keegan
A long-overdue link to that infamous, even dangerous pamphlet, which called for occupations. We answered that call.
“We must begin by preventing the university from functioning. We must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and class to a halt. We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours. Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are to be understood. This is the only meaningful position to take when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society. Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it.”
As college students, we are told we should be grateful for being here. It’s our supposed salvation from a lifetime of wage slavery and misery, but it’s becoming very obvious that our future has already been looted by our present leaders. Most of us will spend most of our lives in debt, chained to commodities, working for things we’ll never own. We become students in order to sell our activity as complex labor, to become technicians of this vast capitalist machine we call ‘society’. That is to say, not because it’s the best possible use of our lives but because other means of survival have been foreclosed. Being a student, like being a worker or prisoner, is a social role defined by its relation to the reproduction of the economy of capital. Now we live like lost children, because capitalist society has no future: it is collapsing in on itself, and trying to take us with it. We are nothing, and to become anything at all we will have to take everything we need.
If one thing is brutally obvious, it’s that there is no point demanding anything from a system which is trying to eat us alive, or negotiating with rulers who will never see us as anything but numbers. From budget cuts at our schools to mass layoffs and foreclosures, from police murders on BART to the exploitation and persecution of migrants from the south, from the criminalization and incarceration of youth of color to political activists facing decades in prison, from the destruction of UCSC’s Upper Campus ecosystems to the giant plastic garbage dump in the middle of the sea, these ‘problems’ are all symptoms of a system based on private property and the police who enforce it. The solution cannot be granted to us by anyone: we have to build it ourselves by organizing autonomously, developing collective power and generalized self-management.
This won’t be easy. All our lives we have been trained to obey authority instead of to subvert and resist it and trust ourselves and each other.
We can only learn by doing. We can only find each other in struggle. We have begun.
WE ARE students, workers, unemployed; we are undocumented and on probation; we are sick of being ripped off by bosses and bullied by cops; we are the youth, we have no future, and we are power hungry.
WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS; YOU’LL NEVER BE ALONE AGAIN.
-an autonomous committee at occupied ucsc 
“YOU SHOULD FEEL WHAT I FEEL, YOU SHOULD TAKE WHAT I TAKE
In the spirit of March Madness, New York Fucking City announces a competitive occupation tournament to be enjoyed by all the grave diggers of the old world. It’s all ready started, the crisis is here and the time is right to tear it all down. We call it The Thing; the shit is real.”
University Occupations: France 1968, 2006; Greece 2006; NYC 2008-9
New School Occupation: Perspectives on the Takeover of a Building
Preoccupied: The Logic of Occupations
(all pdfs)
In the face of crisis as usual, individuals have come together not to protest. Not to ask for things from those who buy and sell our lives as abstracts. But to take what is ours. Capital has dictated our every interaction through alienation and competition for too long. Now with the cracks of capitalism ever salient, it is our time to rise with hammers in hand, smash the prison it has created and move together in action to create the future. There will be those who defend their privilege. We must make them fear the neck tie around their necks, for it is the noose of their destruction. There will be those who criticize action while sitting in a Starbucks blogging about “change” through voting. They will never be moved until the bricks come through the window shattering their world of lies.
It is inspiring to know that from the UK to New York City, from Denmark to California the people have had enough. We stand in solidarity with the UCSC occupiers and all those who rise up against the oppressive reality that is capitalism. When we want something we will take it… take it back from those who took it from us. We will destroy anything in our path to liberation, even ourselves. Kill the policeperson in your head and stand to fight. We will not be silent! We will not be passive! We will take action! The time has come for us to occupy our lives, occupy our schools, occupy our factories, OCCUPY EVERYTHING! The occupations in New York were not the sparks that ignited this fire, but the stoking of the flames that are burning capitalism in the here and now that is our history. Where there is fire… WE WILL CARRY GASOLINE! Burning today to build tomorrow.
From the Belly of the beast,
NYU
Some radical youth in Greece have translated the “Occupy California” communique into Greek and posted it on their blog. Fuck yeah!
Last winter Greece burned with the rage of exploited students, immigrants, youth, unemployed – a general insurrection of the dispossessed and disillusioned. This winter, it’s Cali’s turn.
Hollerin back at the rebels across the sea and around the world,
occupied ucsc
Doesn’t the Graduate Student Commons already belong to students?
NO. The GSC makes a mockery of the very idea of student commons. What do we really have? We have some study rooms and a lounge with a Wii. Undergrads don’t even have access to that. Don’t be fooled: we have nothing – no public space, no community space, no organizing space. The GSC is NOT an authentic student space. It is an exclusive clubhouse that appeases graduate students while dividing the student body along the lines of status.
Elsewhere in the world it’s quite common for universities to contain autonomous student spaces that are owned, controlled and used entirely by students. make no mistake: these spaces were never given, they were taken. What power and resources students control was won by struggle. The spaces they own now were won by radical student movements in the 60s and 70s – by occupations. Now, these autonomous zones are critical spaces for community, activism, and the free flow of ideas.
Maybe it’s hard to imagine students owning and controlling a space within this university. In fact, the idea of autonomous student space conflicts with every aspect of how the university works. This is the real point – the university system, as it exists today, is incompatible with anything resembling real community, autonomy, democracy.
Many will claim that we are occupying space that belongs to the grad students, but this is just not true. This building is owned by a bank; grad students fees pay for a mortgage that was purchased from the UC. This is what we’re talking about. We find ourselves so far down in the pit of privatization that even students space must be bought on the market and financed with a payment plan. Thus, our project of occupying the GSC is inherently related to the larger project of liberating and transforming the university and society.
A student-controlled space at UCSC is unrealistic. But the very fact that it is so unrealistic highlights how very fucked we are. How completely bureaucratized, corporatized, and privatized this university. The impossibility of truly autonomous student space within this university highlights the fundamentally alienating, isolating and ultimately controlling nature of our educational system.
This occupation is a first step; it is not the end. We will not transform the university solely occupying the GSC. However, we have taken one concrete step towards taking back our university. Whether it is held in occupation, evacuated, or transformed into public space, something has begun here at UCSC. It’s time for students to question every aspect of the university and the social space that surrounds us. It’s time to start discussions about what needs to be done, how it is to be done, and why it is to be done. It’s not time to apologize for taking over their clubhouse. It’s time to escalate.
Solidarity from London, UK
The Goldsmiths branch of University College Union (UCU) in London, UK wishes to express our support for staff and students who have walked out to protest the cuts, tuition fee hikes and denigration of workng and learning conditions at the University of California, as well as those at the University of California Santa Cruz who are occupying one of the buildings on campus.
The issues you are dealing with in California (massive cutbacks to education and public services, the marketisation of education, the destruction of access to education for all but the most privileged)are global issues, as we are also experiencing them on this side of the Atlantic.
The fact that you have taken such a bold stand is inspiring, and also will hopefully encourage others to both take action, and also to ask some very urgent questions about what we want education to be.
Solidarity, all the best and good luck
Goldsmiths University College Union
London, UK
homepages.gold.ac.uk/ucu/
Letter of Support from Democracy Insurgent at University of Washington
To occupiers of UCSC and participants in the walk-outs and other actions in the UC schools:
We at the University of Washington stand in solidarity with you. We are custodians, tradesfolks, graduate students, unemployed youth, undergrads, recent graduates, staff; we are women, people of color, immigrants, persons with disabilities, and queer folks.
As we work to build a strong movement against abuse and retaliation to working folks here at the UW, we draw enormous strength from your actions. At UW, we who have been affected by targeted abuses which have been legitimized by by budget cuts and we upon whose backs the rich are getting richer in this time of economic “crisis”, are fighting back with a vengeance. We know we are getting to something because we have been targeted by the administration, who have used Police to target activists, workers, and journalists in order to attempt to silence us as they continue to cover up racist and patriarchal attacks. We will not be silenced; we will only raise our voices.
Your actions have shown that must stand up to a system that uses crisis to push forward oppression; that must unite for common goals across job descriptions and divisions the University enforces us to keep us docile; that we must refuse to participate in the oppression of the state and of the University.
We support you as you fight, and stand with you in your actions.
In struggle,
Democracy Insurgent
University of Washington
Seattle, WA
d.insurg@gmail.com
nobudgetcutsuw.blogspot.com
Today, Sept. 26 the Defend our Education group held a planning meeting
with over a hundred educators, students, and staff representing UCs,
CSUs, Community Colleges, and K-12.
The occupation statement from Santa Cruz was read in part to the
assembly. The Assembly voted overwhelmingly to endorse the Santa Cruz
occupation.(all in favor except for 2 abstentions)
“Defend Our Education” was a meeting held at San Francisco State
University. The meeting was called to organize CSU, UCs, K-12 and
Community Colleges against the cuts in education. At the meeting, a
number of actions were proposed and endorsed. The Santa Cruz
occupation was the major ongoing action that was endorsed by the
group. Another outcome of the meeting was to participate and prepare
for a massive turnout for the upcoming Oct. 26 conference at UC
Berkeley, during which plans will be made for major concerted
collective action to fight the dismantling of public education.
We, students of the City University of New York (CUNY), share the struggle with the students of UC Santa Cruz and the wider California State edufactory. In New York State just as in California, politicians (state) and business (capital) have seized the crisis for their own advantage. Among the host of vicious attacks on the poor and oppressed that have been caused by this crisis, the neoliberalization of the university has been extended and deepened through defunding our education and reverting our schools to places that are only accessible to the wealthy and privileged.
At CUNY, we have a long history of struggle. In 1969, Black and Puerto Rican students, joined later by asian and white students in solidarity (all of whom had to battle groups of white student “scabs” attempting to go to school), lead an occupation of City College (the flagship college within CUNY). The occupation and concomitant strike forced open the doors of privilege and won Open Admissions for all of CUNY, extending access to a tuition-free university, and established Black and Puerto Rican studies programs at many schools. This occupation ushered in a momentous shift in the race and class composition of CUNY’s student body and radically transformed CUNY into an institution enrolling students predominantly from communities of color and the working class. These changes embodied the struggle against the Keynesian University: rather than solely focusing on the training of future wage-workers, the university also became a space for self-determination and community-development for those most subjugated by oppressive power structures.
These gains have been under attack ever since. In New York, the fiscal crisis of 1975 was manufactured as a way to restore capitalist class power (the rate of profit, the imposition of forced work, the logic of the commodity-form) and one of the first targets was CUNY, where in 1975 tuition was charged for the first time in the history of the institution (something which must be understood as connected to the movements of 6 years prior).
Today, in the aftermath of this global financial crisis, capital (and the state) is again attempting to force us to pay for their crisis of control, their falling rates of profit and the evaporation of their stock portfolios (a black hole of fictitious capital). At CUNY we face continued city and state defunding, tuition increases, closed tenure-track searches, cancelled classes, and adjunct lay-offs.
Our response to the current crisis: OCCUPY NOW! Occupation not only forced open the doors of CUNY to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, but it saved the spaces that students of color fought for through decades of struggle, including schools such as Hostos, Medgar Evers, and York, which the City threatened to close during the 1970s fiscal crisis. Occupation also successfully prevented or reduced tuition increases in the 1980s and 1990s. And today, students at universities throughout the world chant, “The University Will Not Pay For Your Crisis.” Struggles and occupations circulate from Santa Cruz to New York, France to South Africa, Italy to Finland, Croatia to England, South Korea to Greece.
We do not wish to save the existing social contract; rather we fight for an explosion of the current conditions. We seek to liberate (or destroy!) the university-space in order to affirm our collective responsibility we have to one another, across all identities, to destroy the systems which pull us apart that oppress some in favor of others.
Occupation is an intervention, with the explicit intention of rupturing the existing flows of power in order to upend social relations, restructure them, and transform the spaces we occupy into a world that we desire.
Occupation recognizes we are the antagonism, we have the momentum, we can refuse, we can fight. And we are strong. And they will come to know that as we come to know it.
We dance in solidarity with our Santa Cruz comrades and return to the demand to claim these university-spaces as our own, as everybody’s, as social space.
We shall dance on the grave of the neoliberal university.
In Solidarity,
Students of the City University of New York
