SAN FRANCISCO, California – On Thursday afternoon, some 30 students began a sit-in at the Conlin Hall building at the City College of San Francisco, Ocean Campus in response to the ongoing accreditation issues facing the college. Demonstrators have published a list of demands directed at Chancellor Thelma Scott-Skillman, including:
1. Call on the Board of Trustees to reverse all cuts to classes, services, staff, and faculty. Stop downsizing the mission of CCSF and promote equity.
2. Organize town hall forums at all campuses so that students can have their voices heard.
3. Make a public statement calling for Prop A funds to be used for education as voters intended. Call on City Hall to give CCSF a bridge loan until Prop A and Prop 30 funds become available.
4. Speak out against CCSF being put on “Show Cause” without prior sanction. Call on the Department of Education to take action to stop the ACCJC’s misuse of the accreditation process.
UPDATE: Demonstrators ended their sit-in the following day after agreeing to organize town hall forums. Read more.
CALIFORNIA – The new California Governor, Jerry Brown announced his intentions to cut $500 M from the UC, another $500 M from the CSU, and $400 M from the Community College system for the coming fiscal year.
The Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of San Diego expresses its staunch support and solidarity with the students, faculty, and workers at K-12 schools, community colleges, and California State University and University of California campuses. We stand with them in their call for a democratic and accessible educational system for all students. We stand with them in their actions that shine light on the debilitating budget cuts and damaging campus climates that highlight not only the decline of public education in California and across the country, but also the ways that low-income students, students of color, and non-traditional students are disproportionately affected and further disenfranchised.
No campus – private or public, secular or religious, working-class or upper-class, urban or suburban – is immune from these overt attempts to dismantle public education. We are all directly impacted by these unwise assaults. Community colleges, public universities, and private universities such as the University of San Diego rely on public high school students who comprise the majority of incoming freshmen. Almost all college students rely on state-subsidized financial aid packages, especially those that include Cal Grants, in order to attend college at all. Budget cuts weaken already marginalized academic programs and student services, such as Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies, LGBT centers, student retention and recruitment services, increased class size, and increased loans in financial aid packages. Weakened infrastructures also mean weaker departments and student organizations with which local communities can partner and collaborate.
We stand with our colleagues in defense of public education, not its privatization. We stand with them in protecting the integrity of education as a site for the regeneration and redistribution of intellectual, economic, and social resources, not increased socio-economic and racial stratification and terror. In light of this year’s 40th anniversary of the formation of Ethnic Studies, we stand together to honor the determination of our communities to transform public education into a means of liberation and sovereignty. We invite you to join us us in this important movement.
Department of Ethnic Studies
University of San Diego
DUBLIN, California – As of 6pm, around 70 of the 150 people arrested on the highway yesterday have been released. Those released at Santa Rita Jail on Broder Blvd. in Dublin need rides (now). Most of them have been charged with two misdemeanors and an infraction (obstructing traffic, unlawful assembly, failure to obey signs).
In California hundreds of rallies took place (more than listed below). Other good sources: SocialistWorker, Indybay.
(Feel free to comment with corrections. Last update: 10:10am mar.7.10)
University of California
UC Santa Cruz
5:00am: Students out blocking streets at the intersection of High & Western, Hagar and Coolidge, and the western entrance of campus effective shutting it down. Only people on foot can enter campus.
6:30am - High and Western
7:00am: Some people have been hit by cars breaking the picket line, breaking someone’s leg and hitting another 3 or so people.
Tan volvo plowing through strikers despite it was being let through slowly. The car accelerated as strikers were trying to control traffic flow traveling down High street.
8:00am: Campus administrators activated the CruzAlert messaging system with the following message “Please avoid both campus entrances due to safety concerns. Check web or 459-INFO at noon for update.” (source)
9:40am: Currently a rally is being held at the main entrance (i.e. the east entrance) with 250 participants. For a while 2 helicopters were flying above. The students blocking the intersection of High and Western have left after most of the workers were blocked from entering campus (it would appear some dining hall workers were able to get on campus, but many others were unable to get on campus). Many of the workers are now here supporting the students.
Earlier this morning, multiple students were injured by two separate incidents where cars rushed the strike line (one at the intersection of Hagar and Coolidge, and the second at the intersection of High and Western). The car at Hagar and Coolidge was tailgating a police car being let through, students then approached the vehicle to stand in front of it and tell them about the strike. The car hit the gas and drove into the mass, injuring a student’s leg, fortunately not broken. In the incident at High and Western, a tan volvo began accelerating into the crowd blocking the street, despite the fact that cars driving down High (away from campus) were being slowly let through. The volvo hit around 5 students, one student flipped over the hood of the car and over the top, breaking the rear window as the student fell off the back. As the volvo sped away, students kicked the car, denting it. Several cars and motorcycles have tried to slowly push through the crowd through out the day, but all failed. Rumors of other car incidents exist, but the others have yet to be confirmed.
Also, earlier this morning a banner was hung over highway 1, stating “March 4 Defend Education!”
11:40am: While most of the protesters are at the main entrance and the west entrance, some of the protesters are at Hagar and Coolidge to watch out for supervisors forcing workers to trek up the long and steep hill to get to work. Supervisors began leading the workers up the hill past a handful of students in the intersection before the students could organize themselves. As more students came to support the other students in the intersection, they realized the workers and supervisors were already around 50 feet away up the hill to campus. So around 15 students ran up the hill to form a line to blockade the workers. The police arrived and dispersed the line, telling the students that they had made a “physical threat” on the workers. As the workers passed by, they shouted that there was no physical threat. So as the police returned to their vehicle, the students yet again ran up the hill the block the workers from getting further into campus. The police immediately turned around and approached the students to disperse them. However by now, the workers turned around and spoke to their supervisors claiming they couldn’t get through, the supervisors conceded and the workers were allowed to go home
1:00pm: Around 500 have rallied at the base of campus. Video below was taken around 12:45pm, the rally as of 1:15pm is still going.
1:55pm: Students are redistributing themselves around campus for maximum effectiveness. Around 60 people are at Hagar and Coolidge warning people that they may not be able to re-enter campus if they leave. They are also watching out for supervisors forcing workers to get onto campus still.
2:50pm: Strikers are now relaxing on the grass at the main entrance listening to a live band. The strike is mostly split up into three locations, Lower Campus (Hagar and Coolidge), Main Entrance (i.e. East Entrance), and the West Entrance.
3:20pm: Earlier story about a prius running into students and driving onto sidewalk at High and Western has been confirmed. At least one student broke some fingers when the car recklessly plowed through the crowd.
5:30pm: A general assembly starts
6:30pm: The general assembly decides to take the protest downtown.
7:11pm: 300 Students walk through Pacific Ave.
7:30pm: The students have rallied at the clock tower.
9:10pm: Students dissipate.
UC Berkeley
1:20pm: Around 1000 people walking down telegraph (currently crossed at 66 ave.) for a rally with students from community colleges, CSU’s, and elementary school folks at city hall in Oakland.
3:10pm:The march has reached Frank Ogawa plaza.
After the rally, protesters marched to highway I-880. Around 150 protesters were arrested.
7:00am: Most all of the ~40 arrested taken to North County Jail in Oakland out, charged with 2 misdemeanors and an infraction (obstructing traffic, unlawful assembly, failure to obey signs).
8:00am: Approximately 80 of the arrested at Santa Rita jail should start being released around 11am. They need rides!
12:50pm: Students at UC Davis have shut down the bus terminal and the main street in Davis.
1:12pm: Students march down Russell st. and are now shutting down the freeway.
3:10pm: One student has been arrested, dozens of others have been shot by rubber bullets. They are currently on the street near the offramp and have been given a deal from the police stating that they will release the student arrested if they leave the offramp now.
3:30pm: Police using pepper spray pellets!
4:00pm: Students walking back to campus.
4:30: Students march through buildings pulling fire alarms, and from there they returned to Russell and La Rue where they shut down the intersection for several hours.
UCLA
1:40pm: Soft occupation at Murphy Hall
2:00pm: correction, sit-in
6:20pm: Outside supporters have been lead to believe that students sitting inside will be arrested.
6:40pm: Sit-in protesters all released.
UC Irvine
1:50pm: Around 400 students are walking around campus urging others to join them in striking. According to OC Weekly, numbers increased to 800. One of the largest protests in recent campus history.
2:00pm: Students take to the streets and head towards freeway 73. Students clear one police line and continue down University Avenue.
2:34pm: Students moving back to campus after being stopped by police again. Police: “Immediately return to campus!”
2:50pm: Students gathering at Langson Library.
2:55pm: UC Irvine temporarily occupied with barricades at Langson Library. Students move to Gateway Study Center and lock down several doors before clearing out.
3:30pm: Students were unable to hold down the occupations, so they are now out and marching again.
3:45pm: Aldrich Hall, the admin building, was locked down with 15-20 police inside, so students held an impromptu general assembly in front of Aldrich.
Students blocking traffic on Campus Ave. (from local news)
UC San Diego
4:00pm: According to one source, 2000-3000 people, another source 1500-2000, (mostly students, with some teachers and parents) marched from Balboa park to the Governor’s Office downtown.
March 4 Banner Drop
UC Riverside
3:21pm: According to Daily Cal, somewhere near a 1000 students marching downtown.
UC Santa Barbara
According to one commenter:
12:00 noon rally at UCSB Arbor plaza draws 1000+ students, workers, teachers, biggest rally in UCSB’s recent history
1:30 PM – Rally heads downtown, most people use free bus service while about 50 take part in a Critical Mass ride downtown
3:40 PM – UCSB students, students and teachers from other schools gather at De La Guerra Plaza downtown, ~500 people take State St. for an unpermitted march down State.
4:00 PM – March has turned around and marches back up State, grows to ~1000 as it passes De La Guerra Plaza again. State St. is totally clogged with a massive march.
4:30 PM – Marchers arrive at the courthouse for a rally, with speakers including students, faculty and local politicians. Crowd disperses following the rally.
(special thanks to coyote)
UCSB ~4pm
California State University
San Francisco State University
They held a rally that ended at 2pm with 500 people. The rally later turned into a dance party. Another party is going to be held Thursday night at 10pm at Malcolm X plaza.
San Francisco (General)
According to Socialist Worker, [20,000+] people are protesting at the civic center.
CSU Northridge
DailyCal says that a Rally with thousands come out for a “funeral service”. While Socialist Worker is stating that nearly 6000 come out for a protest in Northridge resulting in at least one injury and several arrests. Protesters are apparently waiting outside the jail.
According to one commenter:
A few of us started organizing for the day around 10AM; making posters, mostly.
Around 11:30AM, we ran screaming for a walk-out with noisemakers/pots/bullhorns throughout various campus buildings. A lot of people joined us and we marched to a nearby busy intersection (Nordhoff/Reseda). There was an invasion through the library and some more buildings with a long line of people calling for a walk-out.
We met back at the busy intersection and invaded the center…police came soon and cleared up the streets. A few people refused to move. A couple local news stations came to report, and the occupation of the middle of the street continued.
Around 2:30PM, we went back to campus and gathered a huge crowd on the Oviatt Library quad.
At 3:45PM, we began the march with CSU Channel Islands students/faculty. We all took to the streets and marched around campus.
By 6:30PM, enough of us had begun an occupation of yet another intersection (Reseda/Prairie). This was when police threatened to arrest due to “unlawful assembly in the streets” and “trespassing.” A little while later, they began to threaten tear gas. Two people got arrested so far.
By 7:30PM, five people had been arrested and one of our professors, 74-yr old Dr. Olsen, was knocked down and her arm stepped on by the police. She’s currently at the hospital.
By 8:00PM, we invaded the space outside the library and talked to the media, reorganized, and planned for a press conference March 5th (today). Word started to go around that the students who got arrested were getting booked/released.
Summary ? Huge misrepresentation by the media. Police not the nicest of nice. Lots of people from the surrounding community made this CSUN protest big. Anger at our president for misrepresenting what happened last night through her statement. Good energy going around those who were part of the event; plans of having CSUN fund buses for the March 22nd rally at Sacramento.
According to the blog EastsideLA, a March 4 rally started at CSULA which later traveled through parts of Los Angeles, through areas like Little Tokyo. Sometimes the marchers were on streets, other times they were corralled by police to stick to the sidewalks. EastsideLA remarked how controlled the march felt, from both police and some organizers. They also commented how elements of the march were joyous and fun as such a protest should be. Crowd estimates appeared to be a little over a thousand.
Around noon, students, staff and faculty participated in a walkout and marched from either end of campus to a rally in front of the Student Center. A few hundred people attended the rally. Some student bands played throughout the day while students danced to the music. Student, staff, and faculty members spoke about cuts to public education and related issues, from spending money on wars and prisons to the systemic injustice that prevents so many people from attaining higher education.
In the evening, some of the protesters from campus went to a community rally at Colton Hall (the sight of the first public school in California) in downtown Monterey. They joined people from local community colleges, K-12 schools, and members of various labor unions.
We got all these corporations erasing education
standarized testing placement exam evaporation
this is no exaggeration; let’s get rid of this abberation!
Student Occupation- it’s now ours for the taking
what should have been all along, this is democracy in the making
not a fire evacuation or a sly accusation
THIS IS NOT A DRILL, now you know were not faking
aint gonna hide under desks of leave the classrooms vacant
just teach-ins reclaiming the history you were debasing
free food with Food Not Bombs special catering baking
Love and knowledge; it’s a collage at City College
all the cultures reconnecting and solving the problems from the bottom
[Chorus]
[i]Put your hands in the air if you want books not war
Democracy (what?),Tthat’s what the people is for!
Put your hands in the air if you want books not war
Democracy (what?), That’s what the people is for![/i]
Grass Roots, we’ve all got em- in the soles of our feet
and the souls that is a part of every energy being
every day they working hard to try to tear up your dreams
racism on the radios and consumerist bling
but now it’s time to shine and let freedom sing
The future is now; we’re the ones here to claim
The Rosenberg Library? I say it’s time to rename it-
repaint it like all the murals that made the Mission famous
aint gonna let a business suit calm us down or try to tame us
we’re WILD and free; we love it can you blame us?
Sorry Swarzinagger but we broke out of the cages
with solidarity K through 12 and all ages
[Chorus]
[i]Put your hands in the air if you want books not war
Democracy (what?),Tthat’s what the people is for!
Put your hands in the air if you want books not war
Democracy (what?), That’s what the people is for![/i]
Textbooks is now free; take copyrights off of pages
Don’t need leaders or sages to mold our consent
when our rights is threatened it’s our time to dissent
throw up your middle finger to this one-party government
I didn’t vote for this war; I say you bring back our men
That’s my word and it’s as sure as the ink in this pen
that causes hysterics with these lyrics to throw me back in the pen
but I’ll do it again; a no compromise kinda guy
we comprised a bee storm after you swapping us like flies
like a video game set to unlimited lives
the people never give up and they infinite as the skies
We took off your disguise and blocked your deflectors
The board of directors is just a horde of rejectors
aint gonna listen to us until we unite as protectors
Call out to all sectors; we’re here and we’re permanent
The powers that be; you better be learning from it
We’re sick of your greed and sick of your rules
you wanna gut education well…
you about to get schooled!
We ‘ve taken over the Student Services Building. We started on the bottom level, turning a meager rally into a protest-party on the inside.Students are chanting, singing, dancing. The energy moved upstairs to the second floor where a folk group is performing right now. Downstairs another band is about to play. We are holding space and reclaiming it as ours. We will not leave!
The local media showed up for the rally outside but left before we went inward. Channel 12 and other local media sources watched as the president of our school spoke. Students were the real stars, the expression of solidarity was fantastic. Food not bombs came out to feed everyone that was hungry, we screened the occupation of wheeler hall so passerbys could connect with the struggles in the west. Students are making noise!!!!, and celebrated our ability to come together. It’s more than just tuition hikes and budget cuts,
California – A new zine is now available from the Gathering Tempest. It discusses the general strike, March 4th, occupations and more. The first issue is available here.
“The non-symbolic nature of the S.F. State strike was likewise reflected in the tactics, which carefully avoided the usual ritual seizure of buildings and planned confrontations with police. Instead of “living the revolution” inside an occupied building for a brief apocalyptic period culminating in a Big Bust… the TWLF [Third World Liberation Front] opted for a “protracted struggle,” closing the campus and keeping it shut down not by simply impairing normal campus activity, but by making it totally impossible.”
—James McEvoy & Abraham Miller, “On Strike…Shut It Down” in Black Power & Student Rebellion: Conflict on the American Campus (1969)
The parting words of After the Fall–at once both a summation and a call–present the occupations in the past 6 months as a “vulgar and beautiful” destabilizing force within a larger arena of forces, at times nomadic and imperceptible, at other times spectacularly, with declarations and attitude.
Still, the finale of welfare state social services, the numbing terror of disaster, displacement, the colonial politics, the social death of civic life, the logic of representation, the endless reproduction of modern misery, the absent future, the crises of capital, the Afghan offensive, the government in a box–none of this deserves the elegance of any of the words we printed in this publication. They deserve a swift, merciless street fight.
Quickly now. After the Fall.
I.
We will not be free when we are educated, we will be educated when we are free.
PISACANE, 1857
Society has reached the stage of potential mass unemployment; and mass employment is increasingly a manipulated product of the state and state-like powers that channelize surplus humankind into public works, including armies and official or semiofficial political organizations, in order to keep it at once alive and under control.
LEO LÖWENTHAL, UC BERKELEY PROFESSOR, 1949.
Before the Fall we felt it briefly, in each hour and a half interval: the ten minute grace period between classes, waiting for a lecture to begin, assigning ourselves one uncomfortable chair amongst 130 other uncomfortable chairs, and so began the telling of human History—grand, anecdotal, scientific, relevant or apropos of nothing. And just as we felt this loss, it disappeared. So we laughed, we fell asleep, we posed calculated questions, we watched a bald man every three days in a nice shirt pacing back and forth in an auditorium, the lights went dim, the lights came up, we collected ourselves, ate potato chips and a sandwich. We are kept alive, vaccinated, some even plump, yes, but we feel our surplus status. Excess. Excessive. This excessiveness animates our underlying dissatisfaction. That we do not matter: our private morals, decisions, attitudes, preferences, manners—that we are kept so absorbed, busy forever arranging these abstractions into purchases, identities, further abstractions on the future, sacrosanct opinions on the past. We are governed by the abstraction of the future and a grand or alternative History, sure, but we are also governed by these abstractions of the present.
That is the crisis, a lost faith in an inhabitable future, that the work ahead is as limited as the work in place now: the absent future, the dead future, the unemployment, the anxiety. For an economy that so often drains meaning from the immediate present for an imaginary future, a loss of faith is crisis. A surplus population of students, writers, photographers, freelancers, philosophers, social theorists without a doubt—but also increasingly of engineers, scientists, lawyers, businessmen, politicians. The economy that animates the university is an engine that produces irrelevance. That the economy itself provokes such a crisis of faith is testament to its own inner operating procedures, and perhaps to its own grinding contradictions.
And yet in the Fall something broke. Students and staff made a different claim on the university. We were not convinced that a dead future could be renegotiated through a “New New Deal.” We were not easily chaperoned to the endless deferral of “Sacramento,” we did not hide from the rain, we did not quietly suffer the eclipse of the university by the county jail system. Our faith in a future abstraction was not renewed; it was replaced by faith in one another in the present.
II.
The movement should exist for the sake of the people, not the people for the sake of the movement.
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE, 1956.
Secure at first food and clothing, and the kingdom of God will come to you of itself.
GEORG W.F. HEGEL, 1807.
To put forth empty slogans to “Save the University” in a moment of student occupations is as misguided as calling to “Save the Prison” in a prison riot—redemption in this case would be to restore the status quo: the exclusions and incarceration, the slamming gates of the university and the warehoused social death of the prisoner.
They function as opposite poles on a spectrum of class reproduction. The university—an arm of the economy and state—in all of its exclusions and exclusivity, its funding schemes and governance, is bound to and dependent upon the prison. Certainly this was momentarily evident when we snuck a glance behind the theater of scripted rallies and petitions and discovered the batons and tasers of riot cops, county jail and county court, and a multimillion dollar administrative public affairs media campaign aimed at criminalizing students. In this way there is no “outside” to the university: there are no “outside agitators” as the public relations office declares. For us the only outside agitators are the administration, its police, capital and the state.
During the Fall, students occupied in order to cast the administration, its police, capital and the state as the outside—to reconfigure the sides—the “insides” and “outsides”—of a struggle. We knew fundamentally there was no ‘outside’ to the university—the university is yoked to San Quentin, computer factories in China, deforestation in Indonesia, mineral mining in the Congo, nuclear energy in Russia, green capitalism in Sweden, coffee houses on Telegraph, intellectual property rights in India, coked up hipster parties in Echo Park, and weed farms in Mendecino. Perhaps this is the university’s appeal as well. It is a world. Everywhere, connected to everything.
So we thought it was a matter of subtraction: to take ourselves and these buildings with us to transmit a message that “We will get what we can take,” that “Everything belongs to everyone.” Among some, the reaction was predictable. “Only children can take everything.” “We must all make sacrifices.” “Our leaders are doing their best and making difficult choices on our behalf.” Another world is unpopular. And yet we found, despite mistakes and despite successes, that another world was recharting the global map: solidarity messages and actions from Pakistan, Japan, Ireland, Germany, Austria, South Africa, Chicago, New Orleans, New York City.
And now we move outwards, towards the ways in which the university is maintained: compulsory labor, the rented homes of university students and workers, the police violence in these neighborhoods. We gravitate towards the Miwok tribe in Stockton, CA who in January this year occupied their headquarters after being served eviction papers. We gravitate towards the January 21st attempted occupation of a Hibernia Bank in downtown San Francisco in a struggle against homelessness, the occupation of Mexico City’s National University in the late 90s, the 2009 summer-long Ssangyong auto plant workers’ occupation in South Korea. We gravitate towards the young people who last year set fire to downtown Oakland to show they were still alive, to reveal a spark of their own relevance in the shadow of the police execution of Oscar Grant Jr. and so many others. We recognize ourselves in them. For all of our apparent differences, how we have been classified and filed under the logic of capital, race, gender, citizenship, ad nauseam, we know these categories do not guarantee a politics– we know our differences and commonalities are more complex than what is allowed in this world. Our faith is sheltered there, housed in mutual recognition, in building-seizures and confrontations.
III.
The present, due to its staggering complexities, is almost as conjectural as the past.
GEORGE JACKSON, 1971.
Over the past semester an important set of critiques were leveled at actions we gesture toward throughout this paper and any group engaged in direct action. The editors of this paper hail from different social movements and moments and frequently disagree. We cannot write a collective statement with positive prescription. What we do know is that all liberatory social movements benefit from the destabilization of the university as an institution, as both a dream factory of class mobility and an engine of profound inequality.
A social movement is a counter-force within an arena of power. At its best a counter-force destabilizes that arena and creates social and political openings, in the moment and in its wake. The longer a crowd exists the more dangerous it becomes. It’s there, in those openings, that we find fertile ground for broad and interpersonal solidarity, trust, dreams of the future, collective desire for anything. That is where we build our positive prescription, our visions. Meaningful, useful dreams are only dreamt in struggle, in the spaces opened and left behind by the fight.
The Fall was that kind of moment—a reemergence of new and old formations shaped around new and old realities and ideas. The creation of tactical and strategic openings. The real, if momentary, blockage of institutional policy and systematic violence. The necessary polarization; the flowering of new solidarities and the nourishing of the old; the possibility of generalized direct action, social ruptures; students and all the rest living in a more meaningful present instead of an institutionally-imposed, indebted future. Those currently in power want nothing more than the reproduction of stability and unquestioned legitimacy, the guarantee of an unchallenged control that lasts forever, the disparities each of us have tried to fight as though they were separate and separable catastrophes.
And so after the Fall we are left with some openings: March 4th is one among many. We’ve built, seemingly by vulgar and beautiful chance, a party. The occupation. The mob. A mobile force. A machine. This is to say many of us are you, and likely many of you are us. We are all bound together merely by inhabiting the same arena; many of “us” are people of color, queers, counter-settlers, 1st generation college students, service industry workers–traumatized, beat down, brilliant, and tender.
After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California is now available as a pdf for download and for viewing on-line at issuu. We have also posted the original conclusion of the publication No Conclusions: When Another World is Unpopular for you to read on-line and repost widely. 10,000 copies of After the Fall, a 44 page compilation of texts that emerged from the struggles on California Campuses in the last months of 2009, were released on Valentine’s day. They have all now been distributed to various sites across California and the world and the stacks that cluttered a living room have dwindled to a few bundles to be handed out locally.
Individual copies can still be obtained through Little Black Cart for the price of shipping and handling. We can also help put people in contact with those in their regions distributing the paper, to the best of our abilities. Please email paper@afterthefallcommuniques.info for more information.
Our decisions to embark on this project came from a collective desire to experiment with print as a weapon for the struggle we currently find ourselves in. While much of the writing published in After the Fall was previously available on-line, we felt that the act of compiling it into one place, formatting it for maximum accessibility and readability, and distributing 10,000 printed copies hand to hand was an exercise worth pursuing. After the Fall spans a range of styles and ideas to emerge within this ongoing moment and does not adhere to any singular political goal. In releasing this compilation, we aim to extend the reach of these ideas far beyond their original circulation among the blogs as well as to strengthen our resolve and tighten our individual connections with one another. After four days, that initial phase of our distro has been completed and we are now excited to bring this print project back into the digital realm with the release of the PDF.
Please note that we designed this document with its tabloid web offset print format in mind and thus the PDF is not sized or built to be easily printed on a home printer. Each page is slightly smaller than 11×14″ and the type is set in 10pt Bembo over 12pt leading which means that it will be hella small if you try to reduce it down to a standard 8.5×11″ sheet. It can be read easily online with issuu’s reader and if you do decided to download it and print it out we recommend you center it on an 11×17″ sheet and print it front to back. This PDF does not include the two color poster pullout that is included in each printed copy.
We look forward to hearing your comments and meeting you on the barricades as we continue on towards March 4, the summer and beyond.
The original introduction to the paper, We are the Crisis, can be read here. And we have also made a special March 4 edition of the pullout poster available for download and distro here.
Today, around 40 students, faculty and staff met to discuss how Cabrillo College is going to get involved in the movement to defend public education.
There were a variety of political perspectives represented, but there was near-unanimous support for the March 4th Strike and day of action against the budget cuts in the CA public education sector. So far, collective disruptive action is the only thing that has gotten any kind of response from the school administrations and the state government.
Details remain to be worked out. There will be another meeting next week at the same time and place, 2:30pm on Thursday 2/18 in Room 1091 (behind and below the library). There will also be tabling in the quad hopefully every day leading up to March 4, handing out flyers and information and talking with people.
SAN FRANCISCO, California – Students at the City College of San Francisco are holding a study-in/open occupation. From their website:
Last semester, our Library hours were cut by 3 hours, threatening our studies. Join us as we keep the doors open, restoring our hours lost to the draconian cuts to our education.
ORGANIZE to fight the budget cuts and defend public education!
From kindergarden to grad school, public education in California is being dismantled under the excuse of the budget deficit and the recession. Each year, our state’s government sends more people to prison and fewer to college. These backward priorities will only intensify the economic crisis and the difficulties we are all facing.
We can not and will not take this lying down! Resistance has been growing across the state, as students and workers in the public higher education system have organized collectively to strike, protest and occupy at their campuses. Only grassroots power will prevent the current crisis from becoming a complete social disaster. Please join us to discuss how students, staff and faculty at Cabrillo can become part of this momentum, and specifically how we will participate in the March 4 Education Strike.
We are the Crisis!
General Assembly: Thurs., Feb. 11
2:30pm @ Room 1091
cabrillosolidarity.wordpress.com
(check website for alternate location in case of rain)
Occupy Everything Fight Everywhere Strike March 4!
The call has gone out. On March 4th, students, workers and teachers throughout the nation and across the globe will strike. Pre K-12, adult education, community colleges, and state-funded universities will come together in an international Strike and Day of Action to resist the neoliberal destruction of public education in California and beyond.
We stand beside all who wish to transform public education, and we seek to advance the struggle by generalizing the tactic that has, by far, been the strength of the movement: direct action.
In keeping with the spirit of March 4th, we call upon everyone, everywhere, to occupy everything—from collapsing public universities and closed high schools to millions of foreclosed homes. We call on all concerned students and workers to escalate the fight against privatization where they are, in solidarity with the California statewide actions. We envision a network of occupied campuses in multiple states across the nation.
We call upon all Bay Area students, teachers, and workers to unite on March 4 to march from Berkeley into downtown Oakland. We encourage all those in the Bay Area to organize actions alongside and in support of the occupation movement, so that March 4th becomes a day of blockades, sit-ins, mass marches to the streets and freeways, a day for reclaiming public spaces and institutions. In solidarity with hundreds of occupied schools and workplaces across the globe, we seek to make March 4th an international day of action demonstrating our collective resistance.
Why Direct Action?
We understand clearly that decades of rallies and petitions have not and will never be enough. We have already witnessed the violent extremism and radicalism of the other side: behind every fee increase, a line of riot cops. Behind every call for “dialogue,” the threat of prison. Behind calls for “shared public sacrifice,” millions in obscene raises and bonuses.
Governor Schwarzenegger’s recent proposal to tie public education to privatized prisons has accompanied the authorization of mass student arrests, the labeling of student activists as “terrorists,” and the accelerating militarization of California from its public campuses to its patrolled borders.
The state’s decision has also revealed the power and effectiveness of direct action to turn the tide against the corporate and financial interests, the lobbyists and politicians, who have used the crisis to enrich themselves while destroying or privatizing fundamental public goods like education and health care.
Public Education Versus Private Prisons: A False Choice
As more and more jobs are lost and homes foreclosed, an entire generation has been reminded that those who work do so at the expense of others who are barred from doing so. The availability of scarce future jobs depends upon the forced subtraction of a portion of the population from the work-force. This is the web of relations in which we work and study; this is the truth of a profoundly racist, neoliberal society whose logic education reproduces, alongside prisons, in the name of “meritocracy” or “a better life.”
Prisons and schools are the last remaining spaces in our society where individuals rendered superfluous by contracting job and housing markets gather together for years at a time. Schools and prisons house the “privileged” or the “pathological.” The university produces the wage earner-to-be, with skills financed by a lifetime of debt. Prisons are a home of last resort for those unable to pay the steep price of admission for job training, certification, and the right social networks.
The Governor’s zero-sum proposal pits various sectors of the population against each other for diminishing resources, for the right to die slower or faster. It is a false choice and we reject it. This crisis cannot be solved, only magnified, by distributing violence and misery among scapegoated populations: immigrants, prisoners, the “urban poor,” and now, students and youth in general.
The Crisis Is General. So Too Is The Resistance
To occupy a building, to defend it against the police, to shut down a city, is to subtract ourselves as much as possible from the property relations that govern our relationships to each other—from the enclosure of knowledge and skills within dwindling job markets and hollowed-out institutions; from the enclosure of universities within admissions policies which crowd out students and workers of color through exclusionary logics of race, class and citizenship; from the enclosure of tuition within capital projects financed by student and worker debt; from the enclosure of work within the wage relation which clearly cannot meet the basic human needs of the vast majority of us.
Students from Napa Valley College intend to occupy their college quad via a camp out. The campout will be a demonstration against the budget cuts to education that have resulted in increased tuition, cut classes, teacher layoffs, and even the closure of high schools. These budget cuts are due to the economic recession we are in which is a product of capitalism.
This campout and occupation will also be solidarity with the students from UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley, at CSU Fullerton and CSU Fresno that have held similar demonstration. The imaginary committee stated that “A movement of occupations has been building.” http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/11/14/18628664.php.
We recognize the trend and seek to continue it! The campout starts November 30 in the quad at the Napa Valley College located at 2277 Napa Vallejo Hwy! We intend to occupy until the semester ends.
Feel free to join us November 30! We encourage everyone to organize similar demonstrations and their own campuses! Let’s empower ourselves! Let’s keep the momentum going!
The Regents of the University of California voted, at UCLA, on 32% fee increases for students from November 17 – 19. (The CSU trustees are also meeting on these dates). Students through out the state of California are in an uproar.
UC Santa Cruz: over 500 students are occupying the Kresge Town Hall as of 3:45pm, Wednesday.
the details: hundreds of students rallied at the two entrances to campus shutting it down for several hours. Another group of 300 students entered into the Kresge Town Hall to create an organizing space around the budget cuts. Later in the evening, students at the entrances joined the others in the Kresge Town Hall. Currently, the space is being used to plan further actions.
UPDATE: As of 3pm, Thursday, UC Santa Cruz’s main administrative building,Kerr Hall has been occupied. Check out this indybay article!
Thursday 5:45pm: still occupied, discussing the night.
Thursday 6:30pm: Alma Sifuentes, Dean of Students has arranged to not call the police (the time frame is unclear) as long as students remain non-violent and do not create physical barricades.
Thursday 6:50pm: The administrators refused to provide a written-copy of the previous agreement.
Friday 12:00am: Students are still in Kerr Hall (~200-300) and another 50 students are in the Kresge Town Hall watching revolutionary films. Kerr Hall is absolutely packed, there is very little space to even sit down in!
Friday 9:00am: All is well. A rally at noon is planned in front of Kerr hall
Friday 4:00pm: No police action imminent, however such has been implied by e-mails sent from administrators. The Academic Senate is meeting and have been discussing the fee hikes, the issues around child care at UCSC, and the occupations. The administration has also cut off internet access, in both wireless and wired forms, which not only potentially demonstrates the administration’s attempt to silence occupiers, but has very realistically damaged student journalists’ ability to report information and upload relevant videos online.
Friday 4:50pm: A correction, a single internet connection appears to be available in Kerr Hall.
Friday evening: The administration has cut off internet completely. The occupiers have edited their demand list for a more immediate satisfaction, the new demands are listed below (the old demands are still available as well)
Friday Noon Rally – Part 1:
Friday Noon Rally – Part 3:
Friday Noon Rally – Part 5:
Friday Noon Rally – Part 7:
Saturday ~1:00pm: students are in negotiations with administrators. The buildings are still be held. No police presence.
Friday ~8:00am: Students are barricaded in a classroom or floor, while police attempt to pepper spray through the doors. Students are making announcements from the windows. They need outside support!
Friday ~9:15am: About a 100 students have gathered outside to support the students inside. They need more supporters! The police are responding violently against the occupiers!
Friday ~11:00am: from indybay: Police keep attacking to get in, but the doors are holding strong. Outside a solidarity demonstrator was arrested.Cops sprayed pepper spray through doors earlier and injured an occupier with a baton.
If you can get to UCB now, please come and show support!
Friday ~2:45pm: According to one source, students are in negotiations with police or administrators. They have been given a choice of either having amnesty for all the occupiers or that the approximately 38 workers recently fired are rehired.
Friday 5:10pm: SWAT team is moving in on the barricades!
Friday 5:17pm: SWAT has broken the barricades and are arresting students!
UCLA, 14 students arrested earlier. UPDATE (8am Thurs): UCLA was occupied
the details: students at UCLA held a “crisis fest” on Wednesday night. At 12am, students go and occupy the campbell hall and rename it the Carter-Huggins Hall, after two black panthers that were murdered in the building. As of this morning the building is still occupied.
Thursday 7:00pm: UCLA has ended their occupation, with 100 people, peacefully.
SFSU held a sit-in, that has now ended. See Indybay.
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City College of San Francisco, 500 students walked out in solidarity on Wednesday. See Indybay
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UC Davis is occupied!
Thursday ~6pm: UCD is still occupied. However students are not being allowed enter. Mrak hall is being surrounded by police and helicopters.
Thursday 7:10pm: UCD police are coming into the occupation. Students have linked arms
Thursday 7:48pm: UCD police are arresting approximately 100 students. This has been confirmed. This was their message to us as they were being arrested:
“This is the end of the beginning. We’ll get out of county lock up and come right back!”
Friday 10:10am: A total of 52 people were arrested, including one professor. They were held for 14 hours in lock up. They’re out now and most of them are doing okay. One student was falsely charged with assault and battery, the rest were charged with trespassing. CNN has been running video clips of police brutality all morning. Their sentiment this morning was to get back to campus and continue fighting back!
UPDATE:
Friday 2:30pm: UC Davis occupy/sit-in at Dutton Hall
Friday ~7:00pm: police disperse students at Dutton Hall
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CSU Fresno: is occupied!
Friday ~7:20pm: ~100 students entered their library & occupy it. Details at indybay.
occupy california 