18 NOVEMBER 2009.
The University of California is occupied. It is occupied as is the
Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and the Technical Institute of Graz;
as were the New School, Faculty of Humanities in Zagreb and the Athens
Polytechnic. These are not the first; they will not be the last.
Neither is this a student movement; echoing the factory occupations of
Argentina and Chicago, immigrant workers occupy forty buildings in
Paris, including the Centre Pompidou. There is still life inside
capital’s museum.
We send our first greetings to each of these groups, in solidarity. We
stand with everybody who finds themselves in a building today because
they have chosen to be, because they have liberated it from its
supposed owners — whether for the hint of freedom’s true taste, or out
of desperate social and political necessity.
This declaration and this action begin with contempt for those who
would use their powers to cordon off education, cordon off our shared
world, those who would build “opportunity” on the backs of others who
must inevitably be exploited. This is why it begins here in this
building with its Capital Projects, its Real Estate Services, its
obscenely named Office of Sustainability — it begins in the corridors
of accumulation, the core of the logic that privileges buildings over
people. But it also begins with love for those who would refuse such
enclosures, who are committed to the deed rather than the petition,
who are committed to deprivatization as an act. This antagonism cannot
be negotiated out of existence. We make no demands but the most basic
one: that our collective life shall admit no owner.
Whoever has watched the disease of privatization, precaritization, and
financialization spread through the University of California will not
fail to recognize it as the plague of neoliberalism insinuating itself
into every corner of the globe, every minute of our lives. In the most
recent revelation, we have discovered the obscene student fee
increases are being used not for education but as collateral for
credit operations and building projects. This is the Regents’ will. If
bonds aren’t repaid, the fees — that is, our days and years of work,
extending into an empty future — must be used for repayment.
There is a grotesque irony to this. Student fees are being securitized
and repackaged exactly like the toxic assets that triggered the latest
economic collapse. Four years ago it was subprime mortgages; now it is
“subprime education,” as Ananya Roy says. The very strategies and
schemes that bankrupted millions of lives, and that showed the
bankruptcy of the economic sphere — it is to these that the university
has turned for its salvation, even after such strategies failed
spectacularly. The Regents reveal themselves not simply to be
dishonest, venal, and indifferent; they are too stupid to learn the
most basic lessons of recent history. Or perhaps this is their idea of
solidarity: that all members of the university community (save them,
of course) must join the nation and the world in its immiseration,
must be battered equally by a nightmare economy built on real human
lives. We say to them: if you summon forth such solidarity, do not be
surprised when its power escapes you.
The arriving freshman is treated as a mortgage, and the fees are
climbing. She is a future revenue stream, and the bills are growing.
She is security for a debt she never chose, and the cost is
staggering. Her works and days are already promised away to raise up
buildings that may contribute nothing to her education, and that she
may not be allowed to use — buildings in which others will work for
less than a living wage, at peril of no wage at all. This is the truth
of the lives of students, the lives of workers (often one and the
same). This is the truth of the relation between them and the
buildings of the university, in the eyes of the Regents and the Office
of the President.
No building will be safe from occupation while this is the case. No
capital project but the project to end capital. We call for further
occupations, to pry our buildings and our lives from its grip. We call
for a different university, and a different society in which this
university is embedded. We call for a different relation between lives
and buildings. We do so freely. We are the power.
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