unexpected subjects

8/3/2019 Unexpected Subjects

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a few unexpected subjects of class struggle

notes on recent university strikes

An entirely new word is being put forward by an entirely new subject. It

only has to be uttered to be heard.

- Rivolta Femminile

Our universities are fraying at the seams. At schools throughout

California, across the UK and in New York, weve seen waves of protest

this November, including student walkouts and class cancellations

unimaginable a month ago. As I write, another UC strike approaches,

with others likely to follow over the coming weeks and months.

Our unsettled present is extraordinary, and unexpected. That much is

clear to all. But there are different kinds of surprise, different reasons for

shock. Some, particularly those speaking on national television, seem

surprised above all at the severity of police attacks on our bodies and our

encampments. Theyre shocked at images of seated students casually

being pepper-sprayed, or at the unrelenting baton blows endured by those

of us who linked arms around a small circle of tents. How, they ask,could such violence be visited upon students, especially when they acted

non-violently, only wanted to set up a few tents, and issued little more

than anodyne calls for universal public education?

Without question, we reply, the violence was severe, disproportionate, and

hideous. Many of us are still hurting, and those videos are sickening. But

those with whom Ive spoken, those who endured violence, arent

particularly surprised at what they faced. After all, its all happened

before. At every single anti-privatization protest thats occurred in

northern California since the fall of 2010, university police have shot

pepper spray at students. Last year, a cop pulled a gun on a group of us.Our friends have had their hands crushed on police barricades, their ribs

bruised and fractured by baton blows on the highway, and their

partially-clothed bodies dragged from sleeping bags at ve in the

morning, rst into the cold air and then to cold cells.

We knew what they were prepared to do to us. We just didnt know

anyone would care this time. And neither did our assorted chancellors

and police chiefs, who treated the initial round of protests in the same

viciously perfunctory way theyve treated other, recent actions. They

are now shocked at mounting calls for their resignation; while we are

surprised by and at times unsure how to use -- our mounting collective

power.

***

In navigating the current sequence of university protest, weve leaned

heavily on each other, and have looked for words, however imperfect,

from other sites of struggle. In particular, students in the bay area have

followed, and have joined, recent uprisings in Oakland, from the streetactions in response to the police murder of Oscar Grant, to the

mobilizations this fall in defense of the Oakland Commune. When the

encampment at Oscar Grant Plaza was raided last month, dozens of

university students participated in the march back to the Plaza,

enduring waves of tear gas, ash grenades, and rubber bullets. The

following day, we joined thousands in retaking the Plaza and declaring a

city-wide general strike for the following Wednesday. During the strike,

students marched down Telegraph from UC Berkeley, and then, with tens

of thousands, marched to shut down the Oakland port.

These mobilizations in defense of the Oakland Commune gave university

students a striking vocabulary of resistance, a repertoire of text and image


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that weve drawn upon and revised in shaping our recent campus actions.

In Oakland, the image of the mass assembly was sutured with the term

general strike each of us had seen the picture of the evening assembly

framed with the phrase: strike while the iron is hot so, at UC Berkeley

and UC Davis, the moment our assemblies expanded beyond the

boundaries of our quads and plazas, we similarly called for general

strikes.

Its worth asking, however, just how general these strikes have been, andrelatedly, whether our strike calls have been properly-tailored to their

political moment. Some on the left have accused us of misusing the term

general strike, of diluting the meaning of the phrase insofar as

absenteeism hasnt been universal. Their point is well taken, of course:

we havent yet organized a full-scale shutdown of a city or sector of social

life. Many in Oakland went to work on November 2, while nearly all

university employees (excepting instructors) carried out their jobs on

November 15. Nevertheless, these strikes have been remarkably wide-

spread and effective; theyve blocked, for a time, the operations of

particular industries and institutions. And our repeated use of the phrasegeneral strike seems to have enabled, and rendered legible, certain

important dimensions of these events dimensions that other terms (i.e.

shutdown, blockade, boycott, or student walkout) would have failed to

capture or set off.

To call a strike general is to give it a predication that puts off, or qualies,

all particularizing predications it might otherwise be given. A general

strike is not a strike carried out by a clearly-demarcated body of workers;

its not called in order to effect some particular change of policy oreconomic practice; in terms of tactics, the general strike is

promiscuous, embracing ying pickets, occupations, wildcats, mutual aid,

and widespread sabotage. A strike is general only if its limits are

unsettled, expansive, indistinct: if it gives birth to unexpected subjects and

sites of struggle.

Our recent strike actions are perhaps most notable for their expansive

quality, for how theyve inspired and enabled surprising lines of struggle.

In calling for a general strike throughout the city of Oakland, for

instance, those gathered at Oscar Grant Plaza didnt necessarily knowthey were calling for the shutting down of Oaklands port, since the

shutdown was planned in the days following the strike resolution. Nor

did they know that, a few weeks after the successful port action, a new

call for a general west coast port shutdown on December 12 would be

crafted and endorsed by assemblies from Portland to Los Angeles. The

call for a citywide general strike released a contagion at the ports that has

not yet subsided.

A similar logic of contagion has animated recent university struggles. On

November 9 a statewide day of action for public education university

police attempted to repress with force a small encampment at UCBerkeley. Students (and a few faculty members) formed soft blockades

around the tents and endured two rounds of severe baton blows. While

the tents were ultimately taken from us, our numbers grew throughout the

day and we were able at night to hold the Sproul steps and plaza space

enough for a mass general assembly. There, we called a November 15

general strike of higher education a call that was taken up, to an uneven

degree, at other university campuses. Students at UCLA established an

encampment, while those at Davis held a mass rally on the 15th, which

led into an extended building occupation. When they were forced out of

the building, they established an outdoor encampment. The images of Lt.Pike casually pepper-spraying students as they surrounded this

encampment have gone viral, just as the general strike call issued last

week by the Davis assembly has set off a rash of solidarity actions

throughout the state, set to intensify in the coming days.

Both Berkeley and Davis general strike calls have been criticized for

casting too wide a net. Why not call for campus-wide, rather than

system-wide, strikes, weve been asked? While it would be easy enough

to simply say in response that the expansive calls have enabled a kind ofcampus-to-campus relay that may have been foreclosed by more

narrowly-tailored calls, its also worth noting that narrower calls might

have fractured our assemblies. At Berkeley, an initial call for a

system-wide UC strike was challenged by CSU and community college

students, who pushed for an expansion of the call to all of higher

education. Similarly, students from other UC campuses edited the strike

call so that it would be more legible on their home campuses, while

activists with Occupy Oakland worked to compose a supplementary call

to encourage east bay residents students and non-students alike to

march up to UC Berkeley for the November 15 general assembly. Whatthese anecdotes reveal is the cross-sectoral heterogeneity of our

assemblies a heterogeneity that effectively disallows more conventional,


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narrowly-focused strike calls.

The openness of our assemblies and encampments to all is a large part of

what makes them politically effective. Not only does this openness

compel those who keep up the encampments to face the need for ever

more complex forms of mutual aid, thus allowing our encampments to

become actual sites of social reproduction, this openness also strengthens

regional solidarities. The lesson of the 1969 TWLF strike at UC Berkeley

which succeeded only when east bay municipal workers initiated asympathy strike is that student movements are most effective when they

are supported by, and coordinated with, social struggles outside the

universities. Campus administrators are aware of this fact, and work

assiduously to re-assert, through various disciplinary techniques, the

political disarticulation of students from non-students. Most recently, at

UC Berkeley, weve been informed by our chancellors that we might be

able to keep a few tents up on Sproul if we can gure out a way to ensure

that only students will sleep in them. Weve yet to honor this grotesque

declaration with a response.

Our insistence that occupations remain open to all and that everybody

should have the capacity to reproduce their lives, free of nancial

exchange, within and beyond the bounds of our campuses, is not

capricious; rather, this insistence is aligned with the politics of recent

university struggles, insofar as these struggles have challenged

prevailing, privatized regimes of social reproduction. Its worth

remembering, for instance, that one of the demands advanced by the

Wheeler occupiers in November 2009 was that the university renew its

essentially rent-free lease with the Rochdale student housing cooperative.Or that a recent makeshift tent on the lawn in front of Sproul Hall bore a

sign that read: affordable student housing. Ours is a nascent struggle

for autonomous social reproduction, and as such, it shares much with

revolutionary feminist movements.

In The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community,

Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James call for strikes in the sphere of

social reproduction, rolling refusals of unwaged domestic labor that bear

certain resonances with recent university strikes and occupations:

We must get out of the house; we must reject the home, because

we want to unite with other women, to struggle against all

situations which presume that women will stay at home, to link

ourselves to the struggles of all those who are in ghettos, whether

that ghetto is a nursery, a school, a hospital, an old-age home, or a

slum. To abandon the home is already a form of struggle, since the

social services we perform there would then cease to be

carried out in those conditions, and so all those who work out of

the home would then demand that the burden carried by us until

now be thrown squarely where it belongs onto the shoulders of

capital.... The working class family is the more difcult point tobreak because it is the support of the worker, but as worker, and

for that reason the support of capital. On this family depends the

support of the class, the survival of the class but at the womans

expense against the class itself.... Like the trade union, the family

protects the worker, but also ensures that he or she will never be

anything but workers. And that is why the struggle of the woman

of the working class against the family is crucial (41).

What Dalla Costa and James indicate in this passage is that strikes in the

sphere of social reproduction, while similar to conventional labor strikesinsofar as they directly counter exploitative forms of work discipline,

appear different from such strikes in two crucial, and seemingly

contradictory, respects rst, that they seem to directly undermine the

survival of working class subjects, and second, that they carry with them

the promise of liberating the working class from the requirement to labor

in order to survive. If we translate this analysis into the university context

(something that Dalla Costa and James also do, at times, in their essays),

we can see certain resonances with recent student strikes. On the one

hand, such strikes appear self-defeating, as evidenced by the ubiquitousrefrain that a walkout in support of public education is a self-contradictory

gesture. How, we are asked, can one defend public education by refusing

to teach class or to attend lecture? On the other hand, such strikes appear

to promise the liberation of the student from her social and economic role:

such liberation would entail the abolition of student debt; the

decomposition of hierarchical relations between students, professors, and

university workers (which we saw hints of during the November 15 open

university); and ultimately the realization of her capacity to live free of

the requirement to work for wages.

What we saw with the open university at Berkeley on November 15, and

what we will likely see in coming days at Davis, was a form of learning


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that emerged out of our collective refusal to participate in ofcial

university schedules. Our strike gave us time to meet together and to

discuss, without the usual formalities or hierarchies, theoretical questions

of direct relevance to our lives. This experience conrmed for us the

falsity of the notion that a strike in support of public education is self-

contradictory now we know from experience that a better form of

education is possible, that it lingers in the shadows of our universities, and

that only through concerted strike actions will it reemerge.

If the open university made apparent the fact that we dont need grades or

rigid course schedules in order to learn, in doing so it implicitly showed

what these administrative forms accomplish: the sifting, training, and

credentialing of future workers. Of course, weve known this about the

universities, at least unconsciously, since the student movements of the

1960s, during which activists insisted that universities existed to train the

next generation of technocrats and managers, and thus to enable the

reproduction of capitalist social relations. This reproductive function of

the university has itself been reproduced into the present, to be sure, but

now there is another, more direct and consequential way thatuniversities reproduce capitalist social relations namely, through the

saddling of students with massive debt burdens. As George Caffentzis has

recently argued (in writing as well as at a workshop he convened at the

Occupy Cal open university):

Student debt is a work-discipline issue because it represents a way

of mortgaging many workers future, of deciding which jobs and

wages they will seek and their ability to resist exploitation and/or

to ght for better conditions. The overarching goal of capital withrespect to student loan debt is to shift the costs of socially

necessary education to the workers themselves at a time when a

world market for cognitive labor-power is forming and a

tremendous competition is already developing between workers.

Employers refusal to massively invest in education in the US

is not, in fact, a misreading of its class interests as theorists like

Michael Hardt maintain. It is the result of a clear-cut assessment of

the new possibilities opened up by globalization, starting with the

harvesting of educated brains as well as muscles from every part of

the world. Capitals strategic use of student loan debts to enforcea harsher work-discipline and to force workers to take on more of

the cost of their reproduction makes the struggle for debt abolition

one that necessarily affects all workers. Accepting student debt is

accepting a class defeat...

Caffentzis here offers us essentially half of the story of how student loan

debt reproduces contemporary capitalist relations the half pertaining to

the reproduction of labor-power. The other half of the story the story of

how student debt enables the accumulation of capital has been gradually

lled in over the past two years through a series of open letters written by

Robert Meister. Meister has shown how those who govern the universityprot from rising student debt levels (both because student fees nance

lucrative building projects, and because university regents have a stake in

for-prot education rms), as well as how student debt which now

exceeds a trillion dollars nationally is increasingly bundled and

protably traded by the nancial services industry. Such debt now fuels

a speculative bubble that is threatened by the specter of mass student loan

default.

There are two ways that ongoing university struggles have begun to, and

could yet more effectively, counter the reign of student debt, and thusdirectly impinge upon the reproduction of capitalist relations: rst, by

halting increases in tuition, and even perhaps rolling tuition levels back,

wed deactivate the primary cause of rising student debt burdens. At the

UCs, weve already effectively stalled tuition increases this year, and

seem to have turned back the 81% fee hike proposed by President Yudof.

Further strike actions would allow us to put on the agenda the reduction

of student fees. And second, by formulating and disseminating a call for

mass, coordinated student debt resistance, general assemblies in New

York and California have already encouraged hundreds of debtors to signa pledge of refusal, and thus have made possible a future debtors strike.

Ongoing university struggles could make thousands of student debtors

condent enough to brave default, knowing that legions of other debtors

in deance would have their back.

Given that these are the stakes of current university struggles, its not

terribly surprising that our strikes and encampments have been met with

such severe police repression. But each time were struck, we return

again, stronger than before. Were new subjects of class struggle, uttering

unexpected words with ever more condence.

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unexpected subjects

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