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Title: We Are Still Here
Author: Anonymous
Date: 2009
Language: en
Topics: academy, class struggle, indigenous
Source: Retrieved on December 9, 2009 from http://occupysfsu.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/we-are-still-here/

Anonymous

We Are Still Here

To those disaffected and affected by the budget cuts.

To those laid-off faculty who have been sent off this campus because

Robert Corrigan values his six-figure income more than your pedagogy.

To those workers, always the unseen heroes who are the first to take the

sacrifices.

To those janitors, who were denied from doing their jobs because of us.

We do this for you.

40 years ago on this campus, San Francisco State College gave in to the

demands of the 5-month Ethnic Studies strike, which gained valuable

educational and economic opportunities for all Black and Third-World

people. Self-determination for people of color was the word of the day,

and although concessions were made, the struggle for self-determination

of the working-class has not ended, but is going through a new phase of

global class struggle intensified by the polarization of capital and

labor.

Also 40 years ago, Indians of All Nations took a famous federal property

known as Alcatraz Island, or The Rock, and again occupied the land that

Lakota Indians had taken years prior unsuccessfully. The organizers,

American Indians from tribes all across the continent, included young

Richard Oakes, a Mohawk SF State student. The occupation lasted 19

months, whereby the IAN demanded a new American Indian Center on the

unused surplus property, created a Bureau of Caucasian Affairs to deal

with the white man, and purchased the island with feathers and beads

worth more than the money paid to the native inhabitants of Manhattan

Island by colonialists.

We Are Still Here

The legacy of the militant student and working-class movements of the

1960’s lit the revolutionary consciousness of the globe, from the

Latin-American workers’ struggles to the anti-colonial uprisings in

Africa, and back home to the Black Panther Party in Oakland and the

Third World Liberation Front. These movements challenged not only the

dominant capitalist hegemony through class struggle, they spread new

ideas of how to struggle.

Universities worldwide, like those in Austria, in Greece, Germany and

our comrades across the bay at UC Berkeley have recently used the tactic

of occupation as a means to challenge bourgeois property relations,

where not production but knowledge and ideas are socially produced but

privately appropriated for the ruling class, which categorizes and

divides the working-class into hierarchal constructions that reproduce

our high-level managers at the UC’s, our technical workers at the CSU’s,

and the lower layers of the proletariat left to the crumbs of a

community college education meaningless in this capitalist crisis; great

training for the workplace, where the administration becomes the

corporate board, the professor becomes the boss, and the tailist union

bureaucrats become...well, I guess some things stay the same. The

student is the worker, adding use-value to her education for future

exploitation and extraction of surplus-value.

Although occupation, or reclaiming space, is not a historically new

idea, it is a new form of struggle for many of those disillusioned with

the promises of lobbying, those too tired of petitioning “our” elected

leaders, those who have lost all faith in politics as they know it. As

direct actions like these redefine socially-acceptable modes of protest,

occupations themselves redefine the power-relations at the site of

struggle. We are occupying because we understand that the budget cuts,

which are manifestations of capital in its search for untouched

investment and the prospect of profits, are enforced through our

consent, through our submission, when we focus the gaze of rebellion at

the self-imposed sites of bourgeois political debate and conflict like

the Capitol Building in Sacramento, or even its local subsidiary office

labelled Administration Building at every elementary school, at every

junior high, every high school, every college and university.

Our power as working-class people does not reside in the uneven and

rigged political game where winners are chosen by their capacity to

pacify those who wish to change the system, by their capacity to coerce

the oppressed into rolling the dice one more time for the sake of

chance: the opportunity that this time, maybe this time, change can come

peacefully for the benefit of those subject to endless waves of

unemployment, for the benefit of those faced with the racism of the

workplace, for the benefit of those attacked by sexism and homophobia on

the streets. The reclaiming of space that is occurring as we write this

statement is a challenge to the assumption that politics and the power

of political control is only suited for white-male representatives in

black suits. The real power exists here, at the site of exploitation, be

it the school or the workplace. We plant the seeds of these institutions

as workers, students, staff, and faculty, constantly maintaining and

watering them, looking after them as a gardener takes after hir garden,

but we are not allowed to enjoy the fruits of that labor. This is the

contradiction exposed.

By redefining and reclaiming these spaces, we expose the true violent

nature of our society. After escalated police violence on the UC

campuses in Los Angeles and Berkeley, student occupiers rightly

proclaimed that “behind every fee increase, a line of riot police.” In

this structure, the Business Building of San Francisco State University,

usually occupied by financial advisors for war-profiteering companies,

there is no business as usual. Outside, the invisible hand of the market

is holding a gun, revealing itself to us with a badge emblazoned “UPD”.

The act of occupation is violent because it is a threat; we are not

those who wield weapons, we are not those who possess the means to

subordinate people to not just physical violence, but the psychological

violence that disempowers us to believe that we do not have the power to

resist and fight back.

Then again, We Are Still Here