A band of 0%ers within #OccupyOakland’s 99% allowed the encampment to distinguish itself nationally by declaring a commune. The import of this banner must not be underestimated. It signifies the passage from protest to resistance.
Obviously, “The Oakland Commune” refers to the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Shanghai Commune of 1927 and not to the private, hippy communes of Marin County and points north.
The Oakland Commune does not exist as a population or a group. It exists as a series of actions. Cultivating powers and capacities as collective positivities makes the Oakland Commune exist.
The Oakland Commune doesn’t grow by seducing public opinion in order to enlarge its membership. It grows by showing what it can do. The Oakland Commune can make Oscar Grant Plaza habitable for a large number of people; it can run a library; it can resist assault by the police; it can fight other factions in the 99% for the right to actively defend itself against state violence; it can retake the territory from which it had been evicted by the brutal force of the police; it can spark direct action by 0%ers as far away as New York City; it can declare a general strike.
The General Strike and the actions that will issue from it bear the potential to spread communization to other parts of the city, to enact many communes — within a re-imagined Oakland and beyond.
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Capacity means the power to care for a territory — to replace the organs of capital and the state with our own flows. The creation of positivities means learning how to do things so as to move beyond the need for government or private institutions. The commune does not need to co-operate with the city and state government to feed itself — they have proven their ability to feed themselves and the homeless. The commune does not need city workers to come in and clean Oscar Grant plaza, they have learned to keep it sanitary together. The commune does not need the Oakland police department for safety — together they have learned how to create a zone of safety in downtown Oakland, even at night. The commune doesn’t need permission to take back the plaza from the chastened mayor or from outsider activists supposedly committed to non-violence — they have learned to reclaim the territory together despite interference from Jean Quan and counter-revolutionary elements within the 99%. The commune doesn’t need external mediators for its various factions to make decisions — they have exercised their decision-making power so successfully that they have created the conditions for a general strike, with participating unions joining in; without the commune, organized labor would not dare to strike. These activities prove the power of the commune.
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We must not neglect our capacity to defend ourselves, our comrades and our territories. The Oakland Commune has started to develop these capacities. An internal dialectic between non-violent white activists and young men of color who face violence daily resulted in the dismantling of the fence around Frank Ogawa Plaza and the return of Oscar Grant Plaza. The passage from protest to resistance means not submitting to arrest or eviction notices. The will to resistance cannot be distinguished from the willingness to fight with police and with those who wield peace signs and arrogate to themselves the right to forbid combat. If some within the 99% tell us that the cops are our friends, and the police announce that they too are part of the 99%, then we must separate ourselves. Resistance does not mean passively submitting to the violence of capital’s attack dogs or acquiescing to arrest. As the communards have shown, resistance means struggle on all fronts.
The current series of occupations can be traced to anti-austerity activism in California two years ago. It should come as no surprise that the occupation would be re-imagined there again — in the form of a commune — and with intensified positivities.
Thinking tonight about Muybridge’s Horse in Motion and yesterday’s BART protest, i can imagine the BART cars, stopped on the platform, like so many (of Muybridge’s) discrete, static cells, separating workers on their rush hour commute. Once set in motion, the cells and their content blur into one continuous image: the vision of seamless progress—
—the vision (here J Crary) “compatible with the smooth surface of a global marketplace with its unbound pathways of circulation and exchange.” No wonder a drunk, teetering near the tracks, a black man, or any protestor threatening to disrupt this flow are met with speeding bullets and riot cops:
BART police (and all the sycophants of capital we see bemoaning the inconvenience of being ‘stopped’ from their rush-hour trajet as docile subjects) are meant to annihilate the very objects that make the space in between these cells visible—they protect the spectacle, the illusion that there is no homelessness, no economic interest in racism, no alternative to work, servitude and exchange.
July 16, 2011: Police pursue and shoot Kenneth Harding for evading a fare on a public bus in the Bayview district of San Francisco
A cell phone video starting seconds after Harding was shot several times in the back:
Police use another video to bolster claims Harding was armed. yet the “handgun” appears to be a cellphone. Later, police will describe the figure in striped hoodie as wearing a black hoodie.
Harding dies at 7 PM on the evening of the 16th, amidst claims by police that he had a gun, even though none was found on the scene and despite multiple witnesses who said Harding was unarmed.
The shooting happened in the context of the Bay Area’s long history of police racism. Kenneth Harding was an African American shot in the black neighborhood of Bayview .
Another Black man – shot down in the street like a mad dog by occupation forces paid for by our tax dollars and 456 years of dehumanization – I read accounts of the incident and wonder: What is this young man’s name? Who are his people: family, friends etc.? Does he have a mother? Does she know her son is dead?
July 16-17 (overnight) Demonstrators respond to the murder, briefly occupying streets in Bayview and the Mission.
The angry, but mostly controlled crowd gathered near 16th and Valencia streets and walked through the Mission and Bayview around 1 a.m. Sunday morning. Police said there were reports of garbage being thrown into the street and several newspaper racks being overturned, but they made no arrests.
The demonstrations keep local Bay Area media focused on the shooting. KCBS quotes a woman saying “They’re rioting because people are pissed.”
A flyer distributed at the protest declares war on the police: In reporting this we hope to make it obvious: we will no longer allow the police (regardless of what badge they wear) to murder us in the streets. When they kill, we will respond with force. These two marches along with the burgeoning revolt in Bayview are only a beginning. We do not care about their attempts at justifying themselves. In each of these killings they claim that their lives were in danger. We say they lie, but honestly don’t care either way. As the State has removed any illusion that it exists to serve or protect people, we can see clearly that it exists only to push us into prisons and to shoot us in cold blood. Two single dollars are worth more to them than our lives. The very existence of the police clearly endangers all of us, and we won’t be safe until they are destroyed.
Meanwhile, the SFPD issues the following statement:
Information is still preliminary. The officers detained a 19 year old male suspect on the Muni light rail platform. This suspect then ran from the police officers who pursued him on foot. It appears that the suspect was armed with a gun and fired at the pursuing officers. At least one of the officers returned fire, in self defense, wounding the suspect. The suspect was transported to the hospital with life threatening injuries. He was pronounced deceased at 7:01 p.m.
The Police and the State consistently justify their systemic racist violence by saying they are protecting women. Patriarchy, the dominance of men over women, happens everywhere in our society, but the state tries to convince us that Black men are the main perpetrators. This racist lie helps the state justify their violent control over “uncontrollable” communities. Patriarchy is one of the overarching structures of our world and therefore we should not be surprised that any man has a past that includes violence against women. The police’s shooting of Harding is one instance of the way the state terrorizes a community that is a threat to the current social order, that has been historically attacked and barred from access to stable employment, etc… Its no longer politically correct to lynch Black men, but the police can shoot down Black and Brown people in the street and justify it through demonizing them.
The New York Times finally publishes a piece about Harding’s murder. The story assumes the police told the truth and frames SFPD Chief Suhr as the beleaguered hero of the story, among other bits of disinformation.
July 25: According to @mrdaveyd on Twitter®: Hardings family holds press conference with lawyers at the offices of John Buris, run down the police department’s shifting story, point out fallacies in official statements, the Buris law office formally requests all SFPD evidence, family demand evidence be made available to public, address Harding’s suposed criminal background and refute the claim Harding was “on the run.” Oscar Grant’s uncle and a dozen community leaders at press conference. Harding was enrolled in a Seattle community college. He was in the Bay Area to meet with a music manager. Harding’s brother owns a San Francisco record lable. Witnesses have contacted Buris law office contradicting SFPD claims and stating Harding was left bleeding on the ground for 30 minutes. The nearest firehouse was 7 Blocks away, but paramedics did not come for 30 minutes. Witnesses establish a timeline.
Fly Benzo arraignment and action “tentatively” delayed until Thursday July 28th.
July 26: Charges dropped against Fly Benzo. Police repeatedly delay his release.
July 27: Early AM: Fly Benzo released after crowd at Hall of “Justice” dissipates.
July 28: Press conference about DeBray Carpenter, AKA Fly Benzo, Noon. SF City Hall.
The people of the bay area will not accept serial summary executions by police. Further actions to come.
When I talk about the current crisis with people who use universities, I like to find out what they want, so I ask questions. Since I can’t imagine a level of funding that would make the education industry tolerable under capitalism, I ask how we can imagine simultaneous occupation of and withdrawal from school. Common university ideology makes us feel that our work is a labor of love, yet resentment and fear fill our days. Exhaustion grips us to such an extent that we have no choice but to withdraw, but rather than fleeing into our families, the latest 3D entertainment or the hippest new bar, perhaps we could collectively seek refuge in an autonomous school we might tolerably call our own. Perhaps such a university could somehow open a future.
I ask soft questions at first, leaving more difficult issues for others to ask in discussion. Starting with our immediate desires for working and learning allows a group to wonder about the kind of world an autonomous university needs and might help to produce. Almost always, someone, usually an undergraduate, wants to know how militancy can become part of education and how a school might become a dynamic seed of revolutionary change. Someone else, usually a faculty or staff member, usually asks what sorts of change would be needed so that a parent who needs time wouldn’t have to worry about child care. In order to answer that question, the group has to imagine radical restructuring of what it means to live and work at a school.
All of these questions ask how we can imagine a university independent of the state and designed by our desires: a communized school. Most people think this crazy at first. Then they start to fantasize. The gap between what they really want and what they currently have to do to participate in universities starts to educate us about the challenges we face. More importantly, our fantasies could be realized if we stopped attending to our masters. Our bosses say that outside of science and business education, the university doesn’t produce anything worth paying for. I choose to take them at their word and suggest we let them try to live without us.
1) Why are we interested in continuing to work in universities as they are?
If we remain at our jobs for our paychecks, let’s admit it. Compensation for students, staff and faculty dwindles every year while our workload increases. Recently, group of department heads at my institution proposed unpaid furloughs and increased teaching loads to help solve the schools financial woes. Such an offer assumes that we love teaching and learning. Surely we do, but we can also imagine ways to act on that love other than by rendering ourselves daily to an institution that betrays the very premises of education and makes every creative act painfully frustrating. We must sort aspects of our current situation that we value from the conditions that revolt us.
2) How can temporary autonomous schools be made more stable without becoming institutions?
We can think of many examples of temporary autonomous zones within and around universities: reading groups, support forums, certain kinds of exhibitions, self-funded film series, informal athletic communities etc., etc. Historically, in times of extreme hardship such as the Russian revolution, classes taught by figures like Lev Kuleshov became autonomous zones because there weren’t any institutions to receive support from. The glories of 1920s Soviet cinema emerged from Kuleshov’s winter classes in a roofless room without a projector, camera or film stock. One might also think of the Bahktin Circle from which works emerged as powerful as Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Marxism And The Philosophy Of Language, and The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. After the revolutionary the period, what had been autonomous became institutional once again. How can we learn and live without reifying ourselves and reproducing our current hardships within yet another system?
3) What role does accreditation play in what we do?
People often tell us that even if we could occupy the buildings of a university and build our own curriculum there, we would lack legitimacy. Accreditation mostly serves as a sign that a school can legitimately create a hierarchy of job candidates for employers. As labor at all levels become increasingly precarious, a degree and a high GPA become increasingly expensive but illegitimate commodities. If jobs don’t exist, a degree can’t help us get them. The idea that education aims at employment lacks any legitimacy in the first place. Many faculty members got into the business partly out of a profound discomfort with the lived experience of capitalism. We all must eat and care for our children. Can we imagine a way to do so and have the world respect us without serving as a motor of social reproduction in a system that makes so many of us want to flee?
4) Would autonomous universities evaluate learning?
An autonomous university might not have grades. Perhaps the faculty would be able to acknowledge that they learn as much as the students do. Perhaps the students would be able to be open and honest about what they get out of their experiences at the school. Like accreditation, grades serve to differentiate the labor force while rendering future workers servile. To add insult to injury, of all the onerous tasks current universities demand, those who do it complain about grading the most. We can think of more productive forms of feedback.
5) How can the exploitative character of self-administration be corrected?
Aside from the utterly unnecessary managers, underpaid women do most university secretarial work. In the late 1980s and the 1990s universities used personal computers to shift some of the administrative burden onto faculty members without compensating them for the work. Teachers became more exploited and many secretaries became unemployed. Today’s institutions oblige faculty not just to print out their own syllabi and do their own accounting, they also require teachers to use poorly designed web-based learning software for every class and help build the departmental websites, creating more work while salaries get reduced. Perhaps in a university we could call our own, administration would take a different form.
