Tag: force

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Communiqués

Almost dawn

Have you ever been alone in a house at night and thought you heard someone breaking in, and laid, awake and immobilised by fear watching moving shadows until day breaks and the ordinary objects of your home are no longer monsters? That is how I felt walking around the streets of downtown Cairo yesterday.

We arrived in Tahrir Square around 3 p.m. to find an army checkpoint at the entrance to the square from Qasr El-Aini Bridge formed by two tanks. Someone had scrawled Fuck Mubarak on the back of one. Soldiers checked bags and patted people down for weapons.

Beyond this a man stood holding a piece of paper above his head reading, “have some respect for yourself Mubarak and leave”. To the side of him men sweeped the ground and picked up litter, a sight I have witnessed numerous times in Tahrir Square and which never fails to move me; Cairo is a notoriously filthy city and littering is a huge problem; now here was one man picking up tiny bits of paper off the ground – he has reclaimed ownership and now he and the thousands of others sleeping, eating, singing and resisting in the square feel a duty to look after it and surrounding streets in a way the government never did.

Shortly after I arrived two jet fighters started circling overhead, flying so low that it hurt my ears. Some people cheered, others began chanting mesh meshyeen, mesh meshyeen [“we’re not moving”]. The message these jets were sending is unclear. Mubarak is an air forces man; were they expressing loyalty to him? Were they air forces jets or did they belong to the Presidential Guard? (a force composed of around 22,000 men which is reportedly fiercely loyal to Mubarak).

If the intention was to frighten people it didn’t work, nobody moved – and in fact most people ignored them – because they were too busy being amazing. Small groups have formed all over the square, some people have erected tents, some are standing on top of street signs waving flags, at night there are small fires around which people sit and discuss events. Waves of chants come from all directions and a sense of freedom and possibility pervades everything.

As soon as I arrived I realised why state media has ramped up the looting and pillaging rumours which on Saturday prompted protestors to leave Tahrir Square; it is a desperate effort to break spirits and get them out. People are not frightened of tear gas or bullets any more; the old tactics no longer work because they have discovered the strength of numbers, and of camaraderie. If this is in any doubt watch protestors force riot police to retreat in this incredible video. I hope Western leaders have seen it. This is how the supposedly politically moribund Arab street frees itself, Mr Bush.

There are no cars on the streets leading off Tahrir Square and everywhere there is anti-government graffiti. My favourite was “your last flight will be to Saudi, Mubarak” and “I want to see a new president before I die”. Most shops are still closed. Families and groups investigate the area, revelling in the open streets and clean air (another by-product of the uprising, less traffic). People are running the city with oversight from tanks and army jeeps stand guard on some street corners. The soldiers I have interacted with have all been incredibly polite and efficient, but alas some of them are a bit funny about people photographing their tanks.

The streets leading to the Interior Ministry are a scorched mess of twisted metal and broken glass. Protestors destroyed anything police they could get their hands on. Meanwhile police snipers and riot police shot protestors using live ammunition. People were still scared to approach the Interior Ministry a day after the battle because of the sniper issue.

Seeing these burnt out shells has been extremely gratifying. For three years I reported on cases of torture, disappearances and brutality at the hands of this institution. My heart sank every time I was with a male friend and we had to deal with a police officer on any level because I knew the outcome of that encounter would be decided by a million factors other than justice and rule of law.

We ran into a labour lawyer in Downtown who said hello and then left us saying, “I’m going to go and breathe in freedom”. For the first time in my life I walked down an Egyptian street yesterday and didn’t see a single policemen, not a single man in plain clothes with the crackling walkie talkie and the ability to casually change your life forever in a second. I was free.

Originally published at inanities.org

source: Almost dawn | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=169

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Features

Masks, or The Illusion of Power

The following text is a script for a participatory performance. Copies of the text are handed out to the audience and volunteers are asked to read aloud the questions that are underlined along with the performer. The script was first performed at the UCIRA conference State of the Arts at UCSD on 11/20/2010.

Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw materials are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils to the specifications laid down. –Ellwood Cubberly, Public School Administration, 1916 quoted in School is a Factory by Allan Sekula, 1980.

The students’ movement in California and around the US is a real opening for radical politics. It raises basic questions about what society has become and where it is going. I am a long-term critic of neoliberalism, I am convinced that this form of capitalism is totally unsustainable and unlivable. Since, however, it is squarely installed in the realms of knowledge, culture and information — since it is cognitive capitalism — it seems there is no more strategic point for opposition than the universities. That doesn’t mean that every point of opposition is not important, just that this one could become crucial if enough people would raise the basic questions of value, what’s society good for, how am I participating, which consequences does that have on others, etc. Those kinds of questions form the basis of the practical philosophy that interests me. –Brian Holmes in an interview by Michael Wilson  (http://occupyeverything.com/features/interview-with-brian-holmes-steps-toward-a-cultural-strategy/)

“a) The struggle for public education is a struggle against privatization throughout the economy, against the exclusions of the marketplace, and finally against an economy based on private resources.

b) The defense of staff and adjunct teachers is part of a program against the precaritization of workers’ lives in every sector.

c) The student (witness the recent revelations about the scope of student debt) is not a privileged case but a true subject of the market in its credit-fueled plunderings of the future — and the fight against capitalism will necessarily happen on campuses, among other places. –via facebook by Joshua Clover

“A school is a factory is a poem is a prison is academia is boredom, with flashes of panic.” -Joseph Brodsky


Thanks everyone for coming and thanks to the organizers of the conference. I would like to dedicate my time today to reflecting on my engagement – both individually and collectively – with the struggles around the meaning of public education over the past year and in doing so I hope to consider what I see as an unresolved tensions within this struggle that are both productive and debilitating. And those are, in part, the tensions around symbolic action and modes of engagement – The tensions that surround the meaning of public education when what constitutes ‘the public’ is itself a contested term full of the sorts of antagonisms that animate collective fictions. By focusing on the arc of my own involvement in this struggle I hope not to engage in a kind of narcissistic blow by blow of the last year or so but rather to re-examine my experiences in light of questions that faced and still face those of us who seek to link the struggles around public education with a broad social, political and economic climate and the ways that the university administration manages various forms of resistance to privatization.

I warn you in advance that some listeners may find a certain naivete and redundancy in what follows but what I would like to say, without a hint of anti-intellectualism, is that I’m looking to avoid further mystification without oversimplifying the complexity of our predicament. I should also say by way of introduction something about my format. When I proposed this talk for the conference I was under investigation by Labor relations at UCR for my involvement with the website which announced Mark Yudof’s resignation last March. I’ve structured this presentation in an intentionally open ended way so that we might have a conversation and really use the experiences and questions that I present as a starting point. I don’t want to preach to the choir here and I do think that we have to ask difficult questions of ourselves so that as the administration puts the final touches on dismantling the UC system as we know it, this conference does not become hamstrung by hand wringing OR by patting ourselves on the back. The question is not only WHAT TO DO NOW but also how do we move from protest to action, from managed, reactionary politics towards spaces of potential?

On september 24th last year, after making a number of protest signs and teaching an abridged version of my web-based art class at UCR, I encouraged my class to attend the rally together which was beginning to form just outside of the art building. I had already spent a large portion of the class explaining the so-called crisis as I understood it then, the logic of the walk-out and I made what I thought was a rational appeal to my students: namely that the interests of staff, faculty and students were being undermined in the name of austerity and efficiency. This logic, I explained, could only be countered by a large demonstration of refusal. Most of my students wandered off sheepishly and the rally, though organized with good intentions and a sense of commitment, was poorly attended and felt more like a rehearsal than an event. Meanwhile other campuses saw rallies attended by thousands and the building occupations that have given this “struggle” such as it is, its real meaning and charge. One of the questions I faced was how to activate meaningful struggle on a campus that seemed and still seems almost oblivious to the gravity of the present-day dynamics of the university.

Between that September day and the regents meeting at UCLA in November was a crucial germination period in terms of my own thinking about what the stakes of this particular struggle represent. A teach-in in Berkeley – still available on youtube – set out very clearly that in fact everything was and is at stake. Wendy Brown, the renowned political scientist, suggested the legacy of prop 13 and 30 years of right wing propaganda have ushered in a political moment in which we risk absolutely every aspect of human experience being reduced to equations of dollars and cents. And I probably don’t need to tell all of you that we are fighting, to put it very bluntly, to stop the utter commodification of absolutely everything. The 50,000 students marching in London last week and the relatively timid actions in CA this week, are loud reminders that this is only the beginning of that struggle…

The day of the November regents meeting at UCLA last year was perhaps the decisive moment in my understanding of this struggle… I recall vividly walking between a large confrontational protest in front of the building where the regents were approving the 32% fee hike with students linking arms defiantly in front of cops in full riot gear. The scene was tense and vital but also predictable. Both the cops and those of us protesting had rehearsed our roles many time before… if not literally then in some cinematic, phantasmagorically inflected dream. On the other side of campus, students had occupied a building, issued a beautifully open statement, and renamed the building after two murdered black panthers bunchy carter and John Huggins. The space around the building was mysteriously quiet. I tried to enter but was not allowed in… I stood outside in solidarity and argued with the odd passerby who was willing to engage with me about the merits of the occupation. Towards the end of the day I drove home in the blank and contorted traffic of Los Angeles. Los Angeles, the place that Jason Brown describes as “a hellscape of ash and banality, a metastasizing agglomeration of darkness and pain, a fungal architecture engulfing the earth in erasures and hyperrealities…” So… when our actions become too rehearsed, we search for ways to re-animate our own sense of what constitutes collective, direct action. We try to shake off the distracted paralysis and the tormented mask. We look for ways to inject into our cynical narratives moments of off kilter gestures, we try to most of all to surprise ourselves. But on that November day I wrote: “Some say the economy is shattered. I say the economy shatters us all. At least for today. Today is an economy of shatters. Or, shattering, today is an economy of alternative economies.”

It was a desire to overcome the stale habits of protest, retaining of course a spark of that oppositional spirit, that led me to think about strategic ways to push the meaning of the struggle elsewhere… or everywhere. Conversations and communication with Marc Herbst, Cara Baldwin, Jason Smith, Caleb Waldorf, Sean Dockray, Micha Cardenas, Michael Wilson, Brett Stalbaum and Ricardo Dominguez gave me the impetus and the inspiration to buy the domain name markyufof.com and begin thinking “what to do?” How best to use this site and when? How best intervene in and interfere with the impoverished symbolic logic and economy of the university? How best to target those who turn a crisis of priorities into a budget crisis? How to extend the logic and spirit of the building occupations? How to “occupy everything?” as we decided to put it…
The thing that surprised me most on the morning of March 3, when yudof’s resignation site was made public was the speed with which events unfolded. Threads began to circulate on discussion boards:

– this is a gag, right. probably would be a good idea to hold the jokes for a while. too many jokers around who don’t know when something is not funny.(ucsd)

– This is funny. “I have decided to go back to school to study the history of social movements.” as if…

–Is this a joke? I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone? Is it April 1st?

– Read it more closely…. and see links to “occupy everything ” , “destroy capitalism ” and the like……??Well done, authors! You had me going

– If ONLY it was true. And in this hyper-reality, who knows, who knows?

And it was only a couple of hours before I received an e-mail from the office of strategic communications at UCR, cc’d to the chair of the art department Charles Long:


Hi to both,
We have a problem. A Web site pretending to say that Yudof has resigned can
be traced back to Ken Ehrlich and the UC art department.

Anything we can do about getting that down?

We have one media request already and we are likely to see more….

Thanks, Kris

Kris Lovekin
Director of Media Relations
Office of Strategic Communications

The question of anonymity, or the potential for certain forms of digital masking, quickly came to the foreground. When I purchased the domain name, I chose not make the domain information private. This was a quick decision, not without consideration, but also not entirely cognizant of the ramifications of this choice. Even though the site was hosted through the BANGLAB server here at UCSD with the support and encouragement of Ricardo and Micha and Brett, a quick web search revealed me as the owner of the domain. As the gesture played out in the media, I was trying to strike a delicate balance: I did not want to claim sole credit for the project in a way that would take away from the idea of using yudof’s “power’ in the media and directing it towards the actions in support of public education scheduled for March 4. I also felt that the longer the gesture played ambiguously in the media, the more attention it would generate. In an effort to strike the right balance, when media relations asked me “if there was anything I could do about getting it down” I changed the domain registration to private and wrote back, saying that the site should no longer be connected to me or UCR. Later when the investigation was underway, and I went public asking for support and citing Ricardo’s idea of radical transparency, this caused some confusion. The fact is that I never explicitly denied my involvement, I simply attempted to mask it slightly in an attempt to give the gesture more legs.

The local chapter of the AFT, the union that represents lecturers and librarians across the campuses, was completely supportive and immediately and assertively working with me to end the labor relations investigation as soon as it began. Letters of support poured in from around the country and all over the world. As amazing as the showing of support was, the question quickly became: How to use the energy and organizing around the investigations and turn it towards a continued activation of the struggle to re-imagine public education? The administration seemed to be using investigations as a means to suppress dissent. Was the goal of the investigation meant to have a chilling effect on protest as much as it was to persecute my individual actions? Certainly potentially losing my job was consequence I could not take lightly – and the criminal investigation that ricardo, micha, brett and bang lab were facing even more so – but the investigations became a distraction from many people using creative energy and time from organizing, agitating and articulating ways forward in the face of a bureaucratic and managerial structure whose main purpose it seems is to reinforce the narrow logic of administration and by extension, capital accumulation for the few and massive debt for the many. In this way, the investigations themselves became mired in the machinations of endless memos, meetings, conference calls and corporate communications. There might be an argument to be made that if the university were so bogged down by endless investigations into similar activities, the bureaucratic structure might fall in on itself in some sort of Kafkaesque joke, but as we’ve seen, so far the university has proven remarkably fluent at maintaining high levels of managerial gravitas and public relations flim flam.

After one tense meeting and months of waiting, anticipation and silence from the administration, I finally in July received a counseling memo. I definitely need counseling of all sorts, but I couldn’t help wonder about the semiotic implications of declaring me the counseled one. I suppose it’s better than rehabilitated. The memo encouraged me, in the course of my research, to be careful to abide by University policy and cited two specific violations of that policy. One was impersonating a university official. Clearly satire is not impersonation. Second, I improperly used the seal of the university. The authenticating image that ironically enough reads “let there be light” is of course meant to be used after receiving proper approval and signifies the real in the domain of the University.

One of the most successful aspects of the gesture, admittedly quite limited in scope given the dynamics at hand, was that it forced the members of my department to have a series of difficult conversations about the website and ultimately come out in public either in support of me and the work (as most chose to do) or implicitly identify themselves as complicit with the corporate logic of the University. With some notable exceptions, in the last year faculty across the campuses have been remarkably complacent and uncreative in responding to this series of assaults on public education that have now resulted in a 40% fee hike, furloughs, layoffs, etc.. The question is why? Have faculty members either fully internalized the corporate logic of the university or do they imagine that they can hold onto whatever position thru this storm without causing a fuss? What else goes on in the minds of faculty members who are disengaged and silent?? Do faculty and students perceive engagement in the terrain of education as just another demand? Be more rigorous, more political, more engaged, funnier, more media savvy, more politically adroit, more sensitive to race, gender and sexuality. Since rebellion is packaged and re-packaged as a refusal to submit to demands, whether they are familial, cultural or political, do faculty and students imagine disengagement itself as a form of protest? Part of what I wanted to say with the website, either symbolically or otherwise, was that Yudof does not have power unless we reaffirm it. The mask he wears is one that we help sustain…. I had little faith that yudof or the regents or the stunted bureaucracy of the administration would respond favorably to protest… But masks are ambiguous. Unmasking power does not reveal some formerly unseen truth, it reveals hidden or partially eclipsed potential. Students and faculty absolutely have the potential to structure the terms of the battle and, again with a few exceptions, we have failed to do so… How then, playfully, absurdly or otherwise, to transform masks of power?

Now I would like to step back to ask a series of questions specifically in relation to the arts. Given that traditionally and historically images have always had a charged relationship to truth claims, how can we possibly frame or understand critical image making in relation to the utterly fragmented and spectacular information overload that is endemic to cognitive or cultural capitalism? As the cops and students compete to analyze video and photographs of tense standoffs are we once again, as artists, caught up in debates about the relativism of meaning in relation to images? Does the political landscape of the university itself become a series of abstract images?

An artist whose own work is instructive in thinking through these problems is Allan Sekula. In particular his 1978 project School is a Factory points out some of the historical remnants of critical image making in relation to the politics of education. As a scholar of photography and an image maker, Sekula uses sophisticated prose to situate and problemitize his own photographs, relying on language to lift images out of the abstract and ambiguous space in which they circulate culturally.

Part of Sekula’s strategy in school is a factory is polemic, perhaps one that underestimates the complexities and nuances of power, for strategic ends. And here I will quote Sekula at length:

We have been led by the champions of corporate liberalism to believe that schooling and the media are instruments of freedom. Accordingly, these institutions are seen to fulfill the democratic promise of the enlightenment by bringing knowledge and upward social mobility within reach of everyone, by allowing each individual to reach his or her own limits. This ideology hides the relentless sorting function performed by school and the media. Both institutions serve to legitimate and reproduce a strict hierarchy of power relations, tracking individuals into places in a complex social division of labor while suggesting that we have only ourselves to blame for our failures. School and the media effectively situate most people in a culture and economy over which they have no control, and thus are mechanisms by which an “enlightened” few promote the subtle silencing of the many.


School and the media are inherently discursive institutions, sites within which discourse becomes a locus of symbolic force, of symbolic violence. A communicative relation is established between teacher and student, performer and audience, in which the first part, as the purveyor of official “truths,” exerts an institutional authority over the second. Students and audience are reduced the status of passive listeners, rather than active subjects of knowledge. Resistance is almost always limited only to the possibility of tuning out. Domination depends on a monologue of sorts, a “conversation” in which one party names and directs the other, while the the other listens deferentially, docilely, resentfully, perhaps full of suppressed rage. When the wholly dominated listener turns to speak, it is with the internalized voice of the master. This is the dynamic of of all oppressions of race, gender and class. All dominating power functions semiotically through the naming of the other as subordinate, dependent, incomplete as a human being without the master’s discipline and support. Clearly such relationships can be overthrown; the discourse of domination finds its dialectical antagonist in a discourse and practice of liberation. Like home, factory, prison and city streets, school and the media are sites of an intense, if often covert, daily struggle in which language and power are inextricably connected.

Sekula’s positioning of education as central to “the sorting function” under capitalism echoes the current demand that we understand the fight for public education in the broadest possible context. Do we defend public education in its current problematic form or do we see the organizing around public education as an opening for an other kind of politics? Certainly we can also draw on Sekula’s strategy here to produce an engaged critique. The work in question was made while Sekula was teaching at a southern CA community college and part of its success and long term meaning is based on his own self implication: For Sekula this is not a detached analysis, but a provocation. A set of questions about institutions from within.

In context, this kind of politically minded artistic work constitutes a move from representation to engagement. While many readings of most so called political art might justifiably render an artwork a simple illustration of nuanced political questions, Sekula’s work demonstrates the potential to imagine forms of artistic engagement that oscillate across aesthetic, subjective and social spheres. Sekula’s practice circulates around the documentary form; while the gesture of a satirical website that plays with the conventions of authenticity is situated in the domain of hyperreality (or whatever other awful term we’ve come up with to describe the contemporary digital landscape). Sekula’s work and this gesture, as different as they might be, both traffic in forms of text and image making in which verifiability and abstraction are central. At the end of the essay that accompanies these images, it is precisely forms of abstraction that Sekula critiques.

There is first the abstraction inherent in what he calls the “supposedly realistic world picture of a bureaucratic, commodity centered society: the abstraction that emerges from the triumph of exchange value over use value, and so on.” And secondly, the abstraction that emerges from the separation of aesthetic culture from the rest of life, the imagined freedom of the disengaged play of signifiers. Against these forms of abstraction, Sekula argues for a kind of political geography. What does this political geography look like? Analyzing the interrelated dynamics of intellectual labor, cultural capital, the rise of a managerial class inextricably linked to the politics of education, Sekula’s designation of political geography is a prescient identification of the territory we currently inhabit. Produced at around the time of prop 13 and before the Reagan era set in, the work stands as both a critique of and a warning against the surge of cognitive capitalism witnessed since the time of it’s production. If Sekula seeks to move from representation to engagement through contextualizing his photographs with text, there are certainly other and perhaps more complex ways to consider engagement. So too must there be other ways of engaging the political geography of the university than creating a satirical website announcing the resignation of a corporate bureaucrat. Far from an exemplary example of a nuanced engagement with the political geography of the University, the yudof website represents an experiment: an attempt to find a form for that kind of engagement.

Directly connected to my teaching digital media the gesture was created at a time when many in the university are re-considering pedagogical strategies. If we are to fundamentally engage the political geography of this place – where we teach, study, learn, socialize, do research, and so many other things – we might begin by asking What constitutes our own assumptions about pedagogy? And how might we continue to integrate experiments in pedagogy into our efforts to dismantle the logic and the structure of a university that does not prioritize education in the broadest sense of the word.

2010 ken@kenehrlich.net

Categories
Communiqués

Forced Heavy-Handed Eviction of University of Birmingham Occupiers

source: http://birminghamstudentsagainstcuts.blogspot.com/2011/01/forced-heavy-handed-eviction-of.html

Last night students determined to remain in occupation and create an area for free and constructive debate, were removed by excessive force by university security assist by the police.

I’m proud to say the student involved remained peaceful in spite of personal injuries and very distressing scenes.

This report is compiled by testimonies of a UCU representative present and three students who are pressing charges of assault but, wish to remain unnamed for now. During the period 18:30-19:00 students were removed from the maths-physics bridge, where on their first day back at university they had immediately re-occupied the university.

Please read the below testimony, it is most accurate we can provide, we have started a petition against the use of force on peaceful protestors and in support of the occupation calling on the university to take a more enlightened approach in the future, to protect its students and its reputation.  As one student describes,

We were directly in front of the door. The guys inside undid the d-lock and tried to get us in and lock it before security could gain access. At this point, all hell broke loose. I was the first one in and another guy was behind me, we tried to get him in but one of the security guards had him in a headlock, strangling him, we tried to from another human chain to get him in but they got him to the floor, he was completely restrained and i witnessed another security guard assault him because he could. Another girl got punched to the floor by a security guard and they tried to drag her and me out. Another girl got a completely unprovoked punch to the chest which I think knocked her to the floor (I saw the same security guard try to apologize to her after)

Another student tells a very similar story of the start of the violence by university security and police.

I saw the doors to the occupation open to allow further students inside, whereby the 3 security staff took the opportunity to wrench their way in too. I stood and linked arms with 2 other men to create a human blockade in peaceful protest, at which point the tables were kicked towards us, and I was headbutted by a police officer, causing my lip to bleed and substantial swelling. At this point, when being forced against the wall by the police officer and told to ‘stop’ (at this point I was bleeding from the face) I left the building in a very shaken state.”

Video taken in the immediate aftermath as the last students are being pushed out shows a female student in a very distressed state describing this happening to her can be found on youtube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzVwdfFmes

Another describes the view of the action from further back in the room:

I saw the doors open to let more students in, then the security barged in, i kinda blanked for a bit, and then remember being behind one of the girls (brown hair, pony tail, black trousers and black long cardy) when one of the guards pushed her backwards stretching her back and then punching her, and then claiming he’d done it because she was trying to ‘damage his equipment’ which she blatantly wasn’t. At this point i took a step back from the situation as I get panic attacks and knew I wouldnt be any help if I suffered one.”

A UCU representative, describes his attempts to gain access to the corridor outside the occupation so he could watch a impartial advisor and what he saw and heard from his position.

I decided from that point (in consultation with two other UCU branch officers) that a UCU member should stay around the site of the occupation in order to provide some observation, which seemed particularly necessary in the light of the intransigence on the side of the University, and the ominous sounding ‘other measures’ that the University was apparently inclined to employ to secure an eviction.

I waited outside for about an hour. One member of security staff had told me earlier that the occupation would not be permitted by the University to go on beyond 5pm. At around 5pm, someone who appeared to be a University manager arrived with a number of security guards. I and a few other observers waiting outside thought this might be the sign of the forthcoming eviction, so we followed them to the door of the occupation. As we waited outside, we were told that we needed to clear the area. I explained that I was a member of staff and that I was concerned that an observer needed to be present during the eviction. A policeman informed me that I was not allowed to stand on the stairs, or at the back of the corridor (away from the occupation room) as there was an incident happening. I repeated that I was concerned about how the eviction would proceed, and for the safety of the students inside, but was absolutely denied permission to wait and observe and was informed that I had no reason to be concerned as the police would ensure that no-one was hurt. I was subsequently told to leave, first the stairs, and then the entire Watson Building.

I subsequently discovered that one student had already by this point been involved in an altercation with the police, which apparently involved a policeman kneeling on the back of a student lying on the floor. This was witnessed by a member of staff (and UCU member), who repeatedly insisted (to no avail) that the policeman stop.

I waited outside the Watson Building with a group of students. A small number of the members of the occupation began to leave the occupation for various functional reasons (one left to speak with the press, another left to empty the bucket that the students had been forced to use as they were still denied access to the toilet), and these leaving students also joined us outside.

At about 7pm we could hear screaming and shouting from inside the building. Two students stumbled outside the building in a very distressed state – one claiming in a very distressed manner that he had been headbutted by a policeman as the police and security guards sought to enter the occupied room. The student’s lip was bleeding and very swollen. I reported this to the security guards waiting outside the Watson Building and asked if they were about to do anything to help the student. They refused to assist and informed me that the police were inside the building if I felt something should be done. This student proceeded to inform the police, by phone, that he had been assaulted.

The first student quoted continues with a description of the continuing violence and then loss of property:

I remember getting dragged the floor, I think a guard tried to get me in a lock but i wriggled my way out. I was also screaming at the guys that they were strangling the guy in the headlock and killing him. I stood there for a while and when I turned my back to walk away and this was when toothless guy lunged at me, grabbed my hair and yanked me back, very painfully. In someone else’s words “he really went for you with his face snarling… I also saw him pacing about like he was gonna rip someone’s head off before his boss sat him down in a chair”. This same guy got sat down by his boss and told to be calm, he has serious anger problems.

I also witnessed one guard punch a girl to the floor, punch another in the chest (he tried to apologise to her after). We started packing up and security were throwing all our stuff away, they tried to take someone’s laptop but didn’t manage, the one who had punched the girl in the chest threw away a d-lock so lord knows what else he might’ve thrown away when we weren’t looking. They confiscated a £500 projector claiming it was theirs and also took someone’s speakers claiming it was theirs.

The UCU rep describes the exit of the remaining students some 30 minutes later.

About 30 minutes later the students exited the room. Reports from the students were that they had been treated very heavy-handedly indeed. One student reported that she had been punched in the face, another reported that she had been pushed across the room, and it was reported that another had been grabbed around the neck and dragged out of the room. One of the students who left the occupation was very visibly shaken and needed considerable consoling. All of the students were very upset and visibly shaken by the eviction.

I then watched as the policeman who was reported to have headbutted a student was questioned by the same student who was making this allegation as to why the policeman had chosen to act in this way. The policeman claimed that he had not in fact headbutted the student, but rather that the student had presented an obstacle to the policeman in the policeman’s attempt to access the occupied room, and that ‘if my head happened to make contact with yours’ that was unfortunate but it wasn’t a headbut. When the same student asked whether he could report this incident to one of the other policemen he was subsequently denied this demand on the grounds that it wasn’t ‘procedural’ for an accompanying policeman to receive such a report.

In the light of these events it seems to me that it would have been highly advisable for the University to permit an observer to these proceedings, particularly if it transpires that a dispute occurs with the University, police and students each having different accounts of the eviction process.”

This was not the limit of the violence by security; additional attacks are reported earlier in the day reports on which are being complied now.

Categories
Communiqués

Spring 2011 Statement: Lines of Demarcation

At reclaimuc.blogspot.com:

From Lines of Demarcation [PDF here]:

Many of us are looking back right now at the sets of actions that trace student/worker/faculty opposition to the programmatic final neoliberalizing of the university. We have engaged in various actions over the course of the last two years, some of which we have seen the immediate effects of and some whose effects we have not been able to see or anticipate. Those actions in the second group are the source of much anxiety; we wonder if they have been a waste since they appear not to have advanced anything. We should remember that actions have a dispersed life and bear on our moment in many ways. One way that we can understand this is by the effects that we can see in the actions of our enemies. The administration is shaken. This is evident by the unprecedented police presence on our campuses after the Regents’ meeting. They are trying to forcibly enter our meetings, scare us with heavy handed legal consequences. Collectively, we are students, faculty, student-workers, and service workers, we are the classes that make the university, we provide the labor that it uses as capital and cache in its attempt to sell the university as a commodity. They hold us in precarious positions and divide us from one another through bureaucratic distinctions like job titles and degree designations. They pit us against each other, making us think that we have to fight each other for resources. This is a lie. They know that we produce, collectively, the product that they sell and profit from. They keep our wages down and our ability to determine the university by keeping us from aligning with one another. We have learned in the history of our actions that we are already aligned. When we act together, as we have, they cannot stop us. The problem emerges when we are again divided by our fear: fear of sanctions, fear of violence, fear of future retribution. We must not let this be the case. We must remain in solidarity.

It may be easy to feel depressed about the lack of apparent wins, but our actions have had consequences. Now is the time to push those consequences to the conclusions that we want. Let’s not let the round of repression from the university, the police, and their allies keep us from reconfiguring the spaces that we live and work in. We are angry at the wave of arrests, home ‘visits’, police standing guard on our campuses, sending students to jail, and charging them with ‘serious’ crimes.

The convention of looking backward as one begins something new only reveals what is normally concealed; the past can only exist in the present. We look to the past to get a sense of what to do in the present, but the present is opaque to us too. The present is the name that we give to what has just happened. To be concerned with the present in this way is to think ideologically about what is possible. We can and must thinkwith the conjuncture, not about it. The present that we occupy is under construction at every moment in the sense that we produce the narratives of our actions that give them meaning. We live here. We live now. We act in the relations that we live in if we do this, we move against ideological separation and we move in solidarity. This is to say: they are afraid; if we were not threatening, they would not push back with this force; however, their fear alone isn’t a win and it doesn’t mean that they can’t hurt us. Let’s push the situation further. We should begin to disrupt every aspect of business as usual. Engage in every tactic that brings the university to a halt. Solidarity means that we act in concert but not in unification. We should have one demand: the control of the place that we both produce and are produced by. We must do everything we can to disrupt every process that forces us to produce our own debt and hold us accountable for it. Shut down the processes that are mobilized to keep students and workers from controlling the university. Let’s realize the relations that capital tries to conceal from us. Categories of hierarchy (graduate students, lecturers, adjuncts, undergraduates, faculty, staff, service workers) though material, conceal the ways in which we are all precariously situated in the institution that we make.

WE WANT EVERYTHING * WE WILL NOT COMPROMISE WITH ADMINISTRATORS OR POLICE * DISRUPT * OCCUPY * STRIKE * TAKE OVER * SHUT DOWN * BARRICADE EVERYTHING // OCCUPY EVERYTHING




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FAULT LINES & SUBDUCTION ZONES: The Slow-Motion Crisis of Global Capital

The housing-price collapse of 2008, the credit crunch, the bank failures, the downswing of the world economy, the fiscal crisis of the sovereign states, all have been expressed as wild gyrations in the global circulation of information, attention, emotion. Everything undergoes tremendous acceleration at the crucial moments, before the wave recedes into a blur. We are sure that beneath the surface agitation, something has really changed. Institutions have been destroyed. The course of individual lives has dramatically shifted. The composition of the social classes has been altered in depth. For the first time since the 1970s, the continuity of the American way of development appears uncertain. Yet people find their surrounding environments exactly the same; while world leaders call for just one thing, a return to normal.

Amidst the paralysis of public debate, questions arise for those who can neither forget, nor clearly remember. How do we perceive social change? How do we grasp the facts that will prove decisive in the future? When will the surging wave return again? How do our own lives make a difference to the slow-motion crisis of global capital?

In his new book, The Enigma of Capital, David Harvey makes an important remark: the major crises of the capitalist system – like the Great Depression, the stagflation of the 1970s or the current deflation of the financialized economies – are never really “resolved.” Instead, the determinants of the crisis are shifted around to new places within the system, masking persistent instabilities and sowing the seeds of future upheavals. This means that the key components of the present social order – its technologies, organizational forms, labor relations, monetary instruments, its claims to rationality, security, justice etc. – all derive from the stopgap measures of the 1970s-80s, introduced to alleviate the last major downswing. But it also means that current chaos of the global markets will lead to further crucial shifts in the dynamics of social existence, with long-term outcomes that will inevitably be conditioned by the particular paths taken over the next decade or two. Such shifts in the compass of society do not only arise from decisions at the top. Instead they result from interactions between distinct and semi-autonomous “activity spheres,” of which Harvey names seven: “technologies and organizational forms; social relations; institutional and administrative arrangements; production and labor processes; relations to nature; the reproduction of daily life and of the species; and ‘mental conceptions of the world.’” Capital, for Harvey, plays the mediating role: “The relations between the spheres are not causal but dialectically interwoven through the circulation and accumulation of capital.”

Harvey’s work coincides in a number of ways with with the research program developed by Armin Medosch and myself, as a vehicle to investigate the dynamics of the crisis. Like him we are interested in the contradictions that can lead to the break-up of a more-or-less coherent phase of capital accumulation. That implies a concerted study of the phases themselves. One of our departure points is a chronological analysis of industrial development into “long waves” unfolding over roughly fifty-year spans, marked by successive phases of emergence, expansion, contraction and decline (or spring, summer, fall and winter phases). The long waves are themselves continually punctuated by shorter, sharper oscillations, generally known as business cycles, which occupy the newspaper headlines. Nonetheless, only these longer spans indicate the time frame within which something like a phase or a period can take form. The hypothesis of the long waves, launched by the statistical observations of Nikolai Kondratiev in the early 1920s, has been made more robust by the so-called “technological innovation school” which associates each wave with a group of major innovations around which economic growth is structured, thus giving rise to successive “ages”: the age of water-powered textile production; of steam and railways; of electricity and steel; of assembly line mass production (“Fordism”); and finally the present age of microelectronics and computer networks. Of course we’re aware that each of these five ages do not simply replace all that has gone before, as though starting each time from a clean slate. Instead they are layered onto each other one after the other, via the major periods of infrastructural development whereby the industrial societies seek to resolve the problems of excess capacity and shrinking markets, or what Harvey calls the “capital surplus absorption problem.”

Long waves of technological development provide us with a temporal framework in which to observe the development of crisis tendencies. Taking a further cue from the French “Regulation School” economists, we propose that the major phases of development should not be conceived in merely industrial or economic terms, but rather as “technopolitical paradigms” which embed each set of technologies and organizational forms within a cultural and institutional mix, while still allowing for the proactive role of specific political forces in the shaping of each period. Here we refer directly to the innovation-school theorist Carlota Perez, who points to at least some of the political and institutional factors that can help a long wave of technological development to consolidate itself and reach what she calls its “maturity phase”; but we also refer, as she does, to the constitution of scientific paradigms as studied by Thomas Kuhn. Finally, we draw on Giovanni Arrighi and the world systems theorists to understand the rise, expansion, decline and displacement of hegemonic centers in the geographical dynamics of capital. It is here that the images of “fault lines and subduction zones” – also referring to earlier research in the collaborative seminar “Continental Drift” – take on all their contemporary meaning. It should be stressed that all of these aspects feed directly into lived experience. By analyzing in detail the different facets that make up the current technopolitical paradigm, we hope to describe the texture and dynamics of the present period, to show how it emerged from the contradictions and decline of the previous one, and to identify in advance the weaknesses and bifurcations that will again throw the system into a prolonged period of chaos. The point is to seek a number of different pathways through this upcoming period of chaos.

Harvey enumerates seven “activity spheres” whose co-evolutions account for the crisis-prone dynamics of capitalism. We have adopted an analogous approach, which consists in a somewhat larger number of analytic categories into four broad fields: Productive Process, Integrative Processes, Global Protocols and Agents of Change. The first group includes the leading technologies of a given period, the energy sources that power them, the organizational forms that structure their production and the strategies of distribution and financing that bring them to market – in short, the most obviously “capitalist” aspects of the social order. The second group of analytic categories is derived from the Regulation School and from Karl Polanyi’s description of the ways that supposedly self-regulating markets are embedded in an institutional mix. These “Integrative Processes” include the wage relation between capital and labor and the forms of consumption and usage, as well as the core values and the legal and administrative devices that structure daily life; all of which mark the greatest subsisting areas of national, regional and ethnic divergence in an otherwise unifying world. The third group, “Global Protocols,” encompasses what Harvey in his new book refers to as the “state-finance nexus,” i.e. the international commercial and monetary order along with the border regimes and acts of sovereign military power that enforce such an order. Here, however, we also include what could be called an “epistemic regime,” which refers to scientific, legal and administrative norms and standards that have attained transnational validity at any given period, thus contributing to set the overarching parameters of a technopolitical paradigm. Finally, with the category “Agents of Change” we refer not only to the corporate and national innovation systems that drive technical change, but also to the subcultures, oppressed groups, entrepreneurial elites, revolutionary and mafia networks, and last but not least, the artistic and political vanguards that come to disrupt current forms of organization and introduce new inventions and values into the world.

graphic by Armin Medosch at The Next Layer

What we’re attempting is a synthesis of some major forms of social, economic and cultural analysis on the Left, in order to respond, during this moment of suspended crisis, to what Harvey calls “the enigma of capital.” The phrase is a strong one, and interestingly, it does not receive any explicit elaboration in the book. For my part, I’d formulate the riddle like this: How does the process of capital accumulation continue to make us who we are, despite its deep contradictions and recurrent breakdowns, and despite all the desires and efforts to overcome it and to steer society in some fundamentally different direction? No doubt it is on the eve of the great turning points, particularly those involving major wars and other disasters, when the juggernaut of capital accumulation appears most unstoppable and most deadly, that such an enigma takes on all its disturbing force. You may have noticed that the “activity sphere” which Harvey dubs “relations to nature” has no single place within our four broad fields of inquiry. This is because in the age of hyper-production, frenzied resource extraction and unchecked global warming, when ecological imbalances have arisen as a new central contradiction within capitalist accumulation, the relation to nature stands out as an essential factor within every field of human activity. The enigma of liberation is how we can cease to be what we always were, to find some other collective pathway for social development. Yet it would be naïve to think that capitalism is on the verge of some apocalyptic self-dissolution, or that a sixth technopolitical paradigm will not emerge after the decline of the present one. What we need is not eschatology (the science of final days) but instead, a strategic understanding of social complexity that can lend positive force to the diverse forms of human agency.

David Harvey ends his book with a chapter entitled “What is to be Done? And Who is Going to Do It?” Originally presented at the World Social Forum 2010 in Brazil under the title “Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition,” the text examines the currently existing forces of resistance in order to formulate a “co-revolutionary” strategy of transformation operating across the dialectically interconnected spheres of capitalist society. Rather than maintaining or abandoning a working-class position, rather than taking up an anarchist, feminist, post-colonial, indigenista or progressive middle-class stance, he approaches contemporary society as a mosaic of repressive constraints and revolutionary possibilities, where each specific form of resistance or sectoral alternative is dependent on awareness of and active collaboration with the others. The Old Left notion of a vanguard party leading a single class at the cutting edge of capitalist development has totally disappeared, without any depreciation of the role of organized labor. What’s being broached here is an understanding of the potential for solidarity in multiplicity. The initial delivery of the talk at the Social Forum and its wide distribution on the net before the publication of the book express the desire of a great leftist intellectual to find new ways, not only of delivering a message, but above all, of opening up collective capacities of perception and expression. As though the prelude to any co-revolutionary strategy was a process of radical co-education.

This is what interests me today. How to knit together the disparate strands of resistance to the current mode of social development? How to regain a strategic mode of thinking on the Left? How to develop cultural forms which can support political engagement and activism through the expression of a sharable and enabling – rather than paralyzing – framework of understanding? These are obviously not questions which any one group can answer. What has been happening recently, and indeed, over the last decade and more, is a multiplication of experimental spaces of learning and action, in which aspects of the social/ecological question are brought into existential focus by people who have specific issues. Many activist campaigns have been developed whose importance should not be minimized, even in these dark days after the bank bailout and the rebooting of financially driven globalization, the failure of the climate summit in Copenhagen, the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, etc. Yet despite important moments of convergence at local, national and transnational levels, clearly the coordinating capacities of the Left are radically insufficient when it comes to addressing the slow-motion crisis of global capital, and embracing the opportunities it offers. Is this not due to the absence of a philosophical and strategic horizon, where a powerful utopian vision combines with a concrete grasp of the many partial and sometimes internally contradictory steps that are needed to get anywhere? The point is not that we missed the opportunity of the 2008 meltdown and failed to impose any re-evaluation of the basic tenets of neoliberalism, because that’s water under the bridge, what’s done is done. Rather, the point is that much like the sudden melt of the Arctic ice in 2007, this last set of wild gyrations in the world economy signals the outset of a longer, slower crisis that will undoubtedly last for well over decade, before some new and perhaps extremely tenuous equilibrium is found. Now is the time to begin collaborating on a shared strategic framework – and really, on a new kind of common sense – that can help to coordinate the efforts of egalitarian ecological and social justice movements across a tumultuous period of systemic change that everyone will have to live through and face in the flesh.

Overarching goals don’t exclude specific acts. Over the course of the next year I will be participating in relatively small collaborative seminars in order to develop the ideas outlined here, and above all, to find clues for the elaboration of a radical pedagogy that is capable of putting abstract ideas to work in real contexts, with diverse groups of people. In a period when alternative and oppositional thinking is on the verge of being literally kicked out of public universities, the practice of collaborative pedagogy is itself a strategic concern. It is shocking and dismaying to realize – as we often had the opportunity to do over the last two years – that there presently exists no alternative school of economics, including the centrist Keynesians, that can effectively challenge the delirious and discredited dogma of neoliberalism, at least not in the USA. But an ecological-egalitarian science of social development will not spring full-blown from today’s free-market universities. It will need both an overwhelming desire from the public for something more humane, and a very clear and widely distributed consciousness of what actually exists, which is where the detailed analysis of our excessively complex society has its necessary place. By collaboratively examining the constitution of neoliberal society in all its different aspects, and by allowing oneself to feel its immense and unbearable power to make us what we are today, we might begin to find the inflection points where that social order is already breaking down and sliding irrevocably toward a new configuration. The important thing is to find ways of guiding, at least to some degree, the chaotic processes of change that are clearly coming.


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— Next Seminar: Baltimore, August 7-8:

http://faultlines.redemmas.org

— Initial project texts:

http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/four-pathways-through-chaos

http://thenextlayer.org/node/1211

–Previous seminar notes (first two pathways):

–A couple of background texts:

http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en

http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/is-it-written-in-the-stars

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