💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › for-a-university-against-itself.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:51:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: For a University Against Itself
Author: Filler Collective
Date: 2017
Language: en
Topics: university, university of pittsburgh, student movement, student power, students, pittsburgh, pittsburgh autonomous student network, pittsburgh student solidarity coalition, universities, communisation, anarcho-communism, autonomy, autonomous marxism
Source: https://fillerpgh.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/for-a-university-against-itself/

Filler Collective

For a University Against Itself

[]

Click here to view or print the imposed pdf of the zine.

Our material environment arranges life into a procession of neat little

rituals. All that is possible or desirable is administered according to

the routines built into Campus Life.

No one is quite sure why the lobby of Litchfield Towers is first and

foremost a place to glide through in passing, to dodge the solicitations

of student clubs, or to purchase coffee. Nor is there much reason to

question such fixtures of everyday life; these structures are simply

taken for granted as part of our unspoken consensus on reality.

And who really even gives a shit in the first place?

Well, try using a university space for even slightly different purposes

and you’ll find out pretty quickly. After all, there are people whose

paychecks are predicated on having to give so many shits that they will

physically retaliate against any breach in routine. But uniforms are

easy targets, rhetorically speaking. The relations encoded in the

blueprints of the places they are paid to defend, on the other hand, are

what reproduce normalcy.

For an education that liberates.

For a classroom that no longer spectates.

For house parties where Pitt students,

workers, and faculty can throw down together.

For a campus culture that terrifies Pitt’s board of trustees.

For a campus that celebrates life.

For a University Against Itself

Back in the spring of 2015, a couple friends brought hot food, some

boxes of clothing, toiletries, books and zines into the lobby of

Litchfield Towers to give away for free. This was the same school year

that the University of Pittsburgh’s administration decided to raise

tuition, organize a food bank for its students as a sort of half-assed

apology, and then jack up tuition a second time just a few short months

later. Needless to say, shit was getting rough for a lot of kids at

Pitt.

I thought using a student space to share stuff was a cool idea, so I

grabbed a few sweaters I could spare on my way out the door that

morning. But before I even made it to campus, our group chat started

blowing up.

My friends had been kicked out within half an hour of setting up. By the

time I got there, a Pitt cop was already chasing them out the door,

frantically squawking into his radio, flailing his free arm and

demanding they come back to face the consequences.

“Must fulfill duty to defend Law and Order,” said the robot in his head.

“Finally, some action!” thought the man behind the uniform.

The Task at Hand

Rather than deferring to age and experience, we can sharpen our

analytical skills through discussion groups, general assemblies oriented

towards communication as an end in itself, and more writing, theorizing,

and critique. These are the processes that enable a crew, a community,

or a distributed network of subversives to gain mutual understanding and

refine their analyses in order to speak precisely about what is

happening, what must be done, and—most importantly—how to do it. It is

essential to find the time and space to do this with people you trust,

whose analysis you also trust, and ideally who come from a range of

backgrounds and experience.

– “After the Crest: Part IV,” Rolling Thunder #11

This is not a populist appeal. Nor is this a program to be enacted by

some specialized minority of student organizers, “social justice”

activists, or would-be insurgents. This issue of Filler is about

starting a conversation.

In Pittsburgh, we’ve seen a small but exciting resurgence in everything

from reformist mass mobilizations to insurrectionary shenanigans. I have

no clue what might go down next semester, but some shit seems to happen

over and over again. There are patterns, if you’re looking for them;

Campus Life has a way of dissolving back into routine.

An effective analysis of our situation, and a healthy bit of

introspection and reflection on ourpersonal objectives, might offer a

vision for momentum. But no analysis is fundamentally correct, and

certainly no analysis is correct outside the context in which it is

conceived. A correct analysis is simply whatever interpretation of

social reality best informs our efforts to achieve a given objective.

Ideas and conflicts persist, but radical youth scenes, and therefore

coherent strategies, are as transient and short-lived as our attention

spans.

The conceptual frameworks proposed in this zine are meant to work in

tandem with the organizing that folks are already engaged in. The task

at hand is to figure out, for ourselves, how to conceptualize and

organize the University struggle: what entrances are we neglecting, and

where might we find points of departure from which to rekindle the

excitement we once felt? After all, the shit we pull off today will

determine both starting points and horizons for the next generation of

Pitt students.

This zine is also an attempt to contextualize Pittsburgh’s nascent

student movement, to frame the coming unrest in a way that just might

make some careerist liberal think twice before mentioning their time as

club president on a future résumé.

I) Stories We Tell Ourselves

Organizing has never meant affiliation with the same organization.

Organizing is acting in accordance with a common perception, at whatever

level that may be. Now, what is missing from the situation is not

“people’s anger” or economic shortage, it’s not the good will of

militants or the spread of critical consciousness, or even the

proliferation of anarchist gestures. What we lack is a shared perception

of the situation. Without this binding agent, gestures dissolve without

a trace into nothingness, lives have the texture of dreams, and

uprisings end up in schoolbooks.

– The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends

History under capital is a history of erasure, or else it would tell a

story far more personable than the presidents and cash crops so familiar

to students.[1]☭

Today in Pittsburgh, we learn how to reproduce the logic of the men who

stamped their names on lecture halls, museums, and libraries. Over a

century ago, but only a few miles up the road in Homestead, 19-year-old

Andrew Henry Striegel died as a partisan for the living wage: a gunshot

to the neck, delivered courtesy of two men also named Andrew and Henry.

What is lost in high school textbooks is no mere anecdote, but an entire

way of relating, being, and inhabiting that sidesteps the mediation of

capital: the urge to live and to act directly in accordance with one’s

understanding of the world.

But this is nothing new. History is written by the victors or whatever,

right? The histories told in the classroom are just the stories popular

culture prefers, an interlocking web of myths to explain the modern

world.

All of America’s fundamental myths—property, borders, nations, liberty,

debt, democracy—were born in acts of violence, are affirmed by violence,

and reality is now mediated through their logic. The mythology of the

University is no different.

The reemergence of an american student movement carries two discourses.

One is familiar; the other is older and emerges far less often. The

first is positioned within the march of progress, the student struggle

for peace and opportunity, heated debates in the “marketplace of ideas.”

It’s always returning to notions of civic duty and a generation’s

political awakening, to celebrations of American democracy with a push

from below. And it’s not just liberals or reformists that prefer this

discourse. Plenty of so-called radicals fester in nostalgia for the old

movement: the workerism of labor leaders, the naïve conservationism of

the Greens, the rebranded demands for all-too-familiar concessions

(whose benefits hardly last a decade before the economy is again

restructured to render them meaningless), or the fatalistic certainty of

an impending “final” crisis of capitalism. For these populist radicals,

the day will come when all of the single-issue campaigns finally merge

towards a swift and (relatively) peaceful transition into social

democracy. Progress and Democracy, the Bernie-Bro’s wet dream.

The other discourse revolves around interpreting the social violence

that sustains Everything, seeking out opportunities for material

opposition and counterviolence. These kids orient themselves according

to the latest communiqués and spectacles of the global civil war—the

call-and-response discourse of Social War. Youth struggling against the

american University inherit war stories from those few generations that

figured out what the word “peace” really means, although their

historical moments have likely been interpreted beyond recognition.

While we can scrounge through the fractured bits of text, theory, and

counterculture that these kids left behind, these artifacts do little

more than hint at their movements’ key points of departure. Still, the

fragments of their stories that somehow survived history are at least

enough to inspire. For each retelling, it’s a question of improvising

the plot gaps needed to link the acts. Good improv is hard, but not

impossible. Sometimes all it takes to work out a strategy for momentum

is a contagious tactic, as the 2009 student movement proved by occupying

campus buildings all across California. But more often than not,

would-be insurgents are left recycling tactics without a broader vision

for sustaining disruption or infrastructure.

Of course, no single narrative is capable of telling the whole story,

and fixating on a single discourse risks suppressing improvisation.

Behind every discursive wave of Social War, from Santiago to Athens, are

the privatized ruins of failed social democracies. But the key point

here is that, ever since the movement of the 1960s, it’s the youth who

are improvising theories of change: rejecting routine, escalating

populist campaigns, pushing movements to their limits, writing their own

mythologies, and even forfeiting their lives to fend off both State and

fascist reaction.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among

people, mediated by images.

– Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Power, Routine, Legitimacy

The administration, the University, the student government, the

State—none of these institutions wield power.

Power is a relation, a social structure, a logic. It is both the

physical and the psychological force of routine, both the pigs’ monopoly

on the legitimate use of violence and the racialized colonial alliances

that so often complement it. Power is fused within the organization of

space; it is the way in which the flow of things and people (in that

order) is enforced and reproduced through infrastructural patterns,

ritualizing social hierarchies to the point that they become material

conditions. “Those in power” are simply the ones enforcing and

rationalizing the arrangement, or perhaps slightly adjusting it to

better suit the flow of capital.

Routine is a mechanism whose parts can be infused, even conflated, with

one’s identity; both the material organization of a space and its

accompanying roles and relations are dependent on popular, undisputed

participation and faith. We see this in the games of respectability and

professionalism played every day on campus. The dormitory resident

assistant is your age, but you will never be their peer. How could you

be? At any minute, they could receive an order to search your dorm,

summon armed men to detain you, get you thrown out of school.

Behind all power relations are a series of affirming images, reproduced

ad nauseum on billboards and social media, personalized in the

commodified identities sold on shelves and television shows, and

circulated by the institutions that assign and define roles and tasks.

From your dorm’s overzealous RA, to the cops that he called on the

stoners down the hall, “those in power” are really just fronting the

aesthetics of power. They would have us believe that theyown exclusive

rights over arranging and organizing the places we inhabit, or over the

deployment of violence to enforce those modes of relations. Look, they

have even the shiny badges to prove it!

The continued reproduction of the images, roles, and identities within a

given space is only stable so long as nothing interferes with the

rhythms of routine. Whether it’s a student refusing to put her cellphone

away in a San Antonio middle school, a young man suspected of

shoplifting cigarillos walking down a street in Ferguson, or a few dozen

Black youth hanging out at a public pool in a white suburb—any potential

disruption of the routine functioning of power relations within a space

threatens to destabilize the arrangement and function of that space.

Which is to say, disruption carries the potential to temporarily

rearrange and repurpose a space toward the production of subversive,

non-hierarchical power relations.

Since disruption cuts off the dominant relations at the point of

production, the social roles that have been granted “legitimate” uses of

force are employed as the first line of defense. The student questioning

her teacher’s authority is also questioning the relations encoded in her

school; the prospect of a suspected shoplifter making off with a few

dollars worth of merchandise warrants extra-judicial execution because

it challenges the sanctity of property; the presence of Black bodies in

a white space threatens a regime of segregation. Behind every identity

that categorizes and enforces ways of being, behind every arrangement of

space that directs and determines the relationships that comprise things

and people, is a latent violence. Disruption exposes this reality, but

it cannot experiment with new forms of life without the capacity for

self-defense, for counter-violence.

Exercising force is a tactical maneuver in the discourse of legitimacy.

The function and arrangement of a space (public school, convenience

store, white neighborhood) must encode a distribution of power that

considers the agents tasked with imposing it (cops, pigs, murderers) to

be legitimate. In the heart of the Empire, spectatorship translates as

passive compliance with the rules of the game, as deference to the

legitimacy of white supremacist and capitalist logic; in each of the

above examples, white police officers savagely attacked young Black

people with legal impunity. The aesthetic of power, then, is also the

aesthetic of legitimacy: legitimacy is white, he flashes a badge, he

wears a suit, he is a professional, he works within the parameters of

the law, he carries a megaphone, he is comfortable in his neon-yellow

marshalling vest, he is a man.

Genuine acts of resistance make no appeals to conventional legitimacy,

to the symbolic terrain of representation, to negotiation with those

fronting the aesthetics of power. Rather, genuine resistance leverages

force against the material structures that reproduce reality, in hopes

of opening new possibilities.

The academic life contains reinforcing counterparts to the way in which

extracurricular life is organized… academia includes a radical

separation of the student from the material of study. That which is

studies, the social reality, is ‘objectified’ to sterility, dividing the

student from life…

– Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement

Factory, Colony, University

The University is a knowledge factory, a think-tank expanding capital, a

colony in the service of Empire: a site of social control.

The University of Pittsburgh, and the surrounding Oakland neighborhood,

is a fucking police state. City cops, Pitt police, Carnegie-Mellon

police, Point Park police, Pennsylvania State police, and park rangers

all have jurisdiction here (and this doesn’t include rent-a-cops like

university security). The administration doesn’t even bother trying to

cover up the University’s colonial project; Pitt raises tuition every

single year, ensuring that each semester brings richer and whiter

students to Oakland. Meanwhile, its legion of pigs occupies the remnants

of the original Oakland community to stabilize the process. The colony

must grow in order to survive; everywhere, the public University is in

its death throes, self-cannibalizing in desperate hopes that the

commodification of knowledge, paired with the expansion of its consumer

base and labor force, might offset the crisis facing the traditional

reproduction of the working class.

The social organization of the University-Colony is a voluntary caste

system. The material reality of University infrastructure is sustained

by the constant reproduction of social roles: student, faculty,

employee, administration, campus police, etc. But those mythical

identities only exist in relation to the routines of the University. So

in order to ensure that social activity on campus is performed in

accordance with the proper University-prescribed identities, Pitt must

detach Campus Life from Pittsburgh life—the University “community” must

exist outside of the society that constitutes it. And even that

“community” is itself further divided into separate social groups, from

the academics to the service workers, each premised on a series of

affirming images. Pitt hoodies and student ID cards insist the spectacle

of Campus Life is not simply a ritualized social performance, but a

natural order.

So long as social interaction is directed by the logistics of the

neoliberal University—so long as the worker’s labor is converted into

the administration’s capital, or the student’s research and debt is

transformed into the school’s endowments and marketable reputation, or

the untenured professor’s job insecurity is realized as another

boring-ass slideshow and multiple-choice exam—all relationships will be

mediated by the caste system of Campus Life. So long as capitalists are

in control of the University, so long as the University is comprised of

capital, the University will oppress and exploit.

Campus Life is a frontline in the social war. Its pretensions of

colorblindness, gender equality, and academic liberalism are little more

than a smokescreen to cover up the fact that the University itself can

never be a neutral institution. A cursory glance at Pitt’s track record

is all we need to draw lines in the sand. The normalization and

legitimization of misogynist andtransphobic platforms, the Pitt Police’s

protection of sexist bro’s and subsequent harassment of queer students,

the administration’s utter inaction in response to campus rape

culture—this is not naive ignorance to the reality of conflict. This is

partisan activity.

To expand one example, Pitt will never seriously address campus rape

culture: not simply because acknowledging the routine violence of Campus

Life might detract from the school’s reputation and therefore its

income, but also because patriarchal violence is an integral part of the

functioning of the University-Colony. Without that constant violence,

and without the resistance to that violence being mediated by the

relations of Campus Life, the governance of gender cannot be enforced,

and patriarchy is left vulnerable to attack. Without that constant

violence, the capitalist University might lose out on a highly

profitable form of economic exploitation and social control. Some might

go so far as to interpret this violence as an unspoken

counter-insurgency strategy, where the brutal repression of half the

population is so normalized that any resistance, let alone offensive

militancy, is unthinkable.

The University is also a factory, and its owners control the means of

knowledge production.Neoliberalism insists on reifying education as a

product to be purchased, as a private commodity that can be divorced

from daily experience and public life. But, of course, Pitt is somehow

both public and private. And so some leftists desperately want to

believe that education is still a public good to be defended,

consequently ignoring the fact that all of the campus buildings (and

everything inside of them) are University property…

If Pitt owns of the means of education, then our performance of

“student” produces knowledge only as a marketable commodity. We don’t

perform research to better understand our world. We don’t go to class

for the sake of advancing, unpacking, and challenging our collective

knowledge. Pitt isn’t searching for answers to the crises of this

civilization. Finals week doesn’t mean shit. College is just work,

except that we fund our bosses and get paid in promises. Academic labor

is a glorified means of pushing the frontiers of specialization for the

sake of economic growth; everywhere, the University promises its city an

economic miracle that never materializes, swearing that the tech

students are ushering in their very own Silicon Valley. A financial

bubble to rationalize the campus bubble.

The true purpose of academic labor is obvious enough when we’re talking

about the students with “practical” majors. Geology, engineering,

environmental sciences? Training for the fracking industry. Economics,

biology, business? UPMC is the new Carnegie Steel. Some cling to the

liberal arts college as if it were the last outpost for receiving an

authentic education purely in the pursuit of knowledge. Forbes Magazine

calls the liberal arts degree the “hottest ticket” to the tech industry.

Each graduating class is the University-Factory’s latest upgrade to its

most popular product: the designer labor force. Nearly a decade of state

funding cuts can’t be balanced entirely through tuition hikes. Private

and corporate donors funded around 62% of Pitt’s budget in the 2015-2016

fiscal year (30% came from tuition and other fees, a meager 7-8% from

the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania). These donors, which include

corporations like Google and Chevron Oil, don’t shell out cash from the

good of their hearts. They want returns on their investments, and Pitt

prioritizes its funding accordingly. The University of Pittsburgh’s

state-of-the-art Chevron Science Center teaches us commercial sciences

that serve the interests of capital, not people.

Pitt’s annual harvest of designer workers is primarily recruited by the

same companies that funded their specialized education. The more

innovative graduates join the writers of the algorithms—becoming

programmers, city planners, UPMC specialists, engineers. The

entrepreneurs among them eagerly await the opportunity to commodify what

little remains outside of the economy, perhaps producing trendy apps for

couch-surfing, socializing, or sex.

But those jobs are reserved for the cream of the crop; the

infrastructure that once provided the conditions needed to support

middle class life now lies rotting across the Rust Belt. Capital doesn’t

know what to do with our generation, and so we’re sent to school for 30

years, locked away in prisons, or left to fight over menial jobs to keep

up with loan payments. The majority of us will graduate as indentured

servants. Our generation looks forward to settling the frontiers of

economic life, where we will labor in the newly colonized fields of the

service industry and the sharing economy. Bill Peduto eagerly prepares

East Liberty for the new residents Pitt promised him. Like their liberal

mayor, white hipster graduates mourn the postponement of the latest

Whole Foods and nod excitedly while watching Last Week Tonight with John

Oliver.

The ongoing evictions tearing across predominantly Black and working

class communities will never end so long as the University exists.

Radicals hardly obstruct this process. After all, Campus Life ensures

that malcontents only mimic the appearance of resistance. We end up

policing ourselves to build the legitimacy needed for the administration

to take us seriously, organizing as “student allies” to abstract

identity groups rather than fostering connections with individual

workers and faculty, substituting the aesthetics of our countercultures

for a concrete break from the images that reproduce Campus Life, working

long hours to make Pitt a progressive and democratic university…

Pitt not only accommodates the appearance of resistance, but depends on

it in order to stabilize the social groupings that make up the mythical

University “community.” The University needs its student labor force to

produce the kind of critical feedback that can reenergize and

relegitimize its project of technical specialization, capital

accumulation, academic centralization, and colonization.

To fight for a progressive and democratic University is to fight for a

more brutal and pervasive exploitation, and better ways to disguise it.

Fuck Reality

Until our actions break free from the logic of legitimacy and consensus,

until our struggles are oriented outside of all University-prescribed

myths – until we openly organize against the University – our anger will

be deflected and rerouted into more palatable channels for Campus Life

to accommodate.

The interlocking series of myths, the University power structure and its

relations, the spectacle of Campus Life that obscures the power

structure—these all constitute consensus reality. Consensus reality is

more than just the ways of relating that reproduce heteronormative

patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, state control, specieism, and

the myriad other hierarchies that constrain and destroy life. It is also

“the range of possible thought and action within a system of power

relations… enforced not only through traditional institutions of

control—such as mass media, religion, and socialization—but also through

the innumerable subtle norms manifested in common sense, civil discourse

and day-to-day life” (Terror Incognita11).

It doesn’t matter what you think so long as you behave, so long as your

sense of the possible and your experience of desire does not break with

the popular consensus. “Consent discourse presumes that what we want is

knowable and can be articulated within the framework of our shared

reality” (Terror Incognita 16).

Face it, our reality offers nothing to those seeking liberatory social

change. Pitt’s consensus reality offers desires (potential courses of

action, wants, needs, ways of defining and creating value) that serve

only the interests of the University, of neoliberal capitalism. Nothing

new can be built, let alone conceptualized, so long as those in power

administer the frameworks in which we experience, express, and define

our desires. If we have any hope of connecting our own stories to the

growing web of insurgent realities waging social war against this

reality, consensus must fracture into open conflict.

It follows that Campus Life can only be subverted in a situation of

seductive and genuine participation, where the desire to act shatters

the passivity and mediation of consensus reality. Should a number of

folks at Pitt find a reason join conflictual spaces that negate Campus

Life, which is to ask should they conceive of reality as a collaborative

project, as participation in an ongoing war between autonomy and social

control, how many might never fully return to their normal routines?

Near-life experiences are addictive in that way. Suddenly, momentarily,

Campus Life’s professional titles like “undergraduate,” “professor,” or

“janitor” might be seen for what they truly are: barriers to forming

relationships with others on your own terms, prescriptive categories

constricting your capacity to define yourself, for yourself. Permits and

property laws might no longer meet the collective consensus requirements

needed for their reality to continue getting in the way of potential

good times. Grades, bills, and three-day study sessions at the library

might stop fucking with what were supposed to be the “best years of your

life.”

Seriously, though. I sure as hell wasn’t radicalized after hitting up

some student group’s meeting. I’m here because I’m still chasing the

high from that first punk show in a squat house basement, that first

queer potluck, that first renegade warehouse party, that first

unpermitted protest, that first smashed Starbucks window.

For conflictual spaces to be truly dangerous, they must constitute a

point of participatory, horizontal connection between as many social

margins as possible. This requires mobilizing people beyond your social

caste within the University-Colony, subverting the spectacular relations

of Campus Life, and actively reorienting struggle in a way that violates

consensus reality. Put another way, an effective conflictuality

essentially breaks the spell, as a young militant told the cameras in

Seattle ‘99. The broader social war is already raging beneath the

fragile peace of consensus reality.

Last November, a student-led march ended with a brief occupation of the

Litchfield Towers dormitory lobby. We seized a space that exists

explicitly for our use, that is maintained through our tuition, and we

briefly repurposed that space to suit our needs. We left the lobby

peacefully, singing,

Don’t walk in front of me I may not follow,

Don’t walk behind me I may not lead…

As people left, cops detained one kid from a crew that was trying to

prolong the occupation by setting up a sound system from behind

makeshift barricades of couches and tables. The march returned to the

lobby to ensure the student’s safe release, and within seconds the

University police brutally attacked the few protestors that made it back

inside. The pigs even charged a student with felony trespassing on her

own fucking campus.

That night ended with radical questions circulating beyond our

countercultural bubble for the first time in recent memory: Do the Pitt

Police really have the right to beat the students they’re supposed to

protect? Wait, don’t we pay to use that building? Well shit, do the

police even have the right to dictate how students use our campus in the

first place?

The following Monday, the crisis of legitimacy reached new heights. A

broad coalition of campus organizations called for a last-minute rally

at the site of the previous week’s police violence. That morning, the

administration sent out a text message and an email to every student

enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, warning them about the

demonstration. On Towers patio that afternoon, nearly the entire Pitt

police force, many donning masks, manned a militarized zone that

separated students from the dormitories we pay to maintain. Inside the

lobby, the Pitt administration cowered behind their armed guards.

Outside, a small crowd of about 50 students, along with a few faculty

members and Pitt workers, refused the admin’s sheepish request for us to

send a single representative inside for a dialogue with the

administrators. Instead, we proposed they come out and join us in the

cold, where they would have no opportunity to control us by appointing

and manipulating a leader.

The crisis of legitimacy, no longer abstract, was reified in the guns

and batons that prevented students from entering the very building many

of us call home.

Disruptions, undertaken individually or collectively, can become a force

of negation. Disruptions are a threat on the assembly line, in the

streets, in the lecture hall; anywhere the logic of capital administers

the structure of space. But disruptions are not enough. As Franz Kafka

reminds us, “From a certain point onward, there is no longer any turning

back. That is the point that must be reached.”

An occupation is the realization of the threats we make through

disruption. To occupy is to strike, to remove a material place from

capitalist time and space, to derail alienated activity and ride its

inertia off the tracks, to rip open latent contradictions in the fabric

of consensus reality. When we occupy, we create a base from which to

launch new negations, but more importantly a subjectivity that is

actively experimenting with new forms of life.

Disruption, negation, experimentation, occupation — the suspension of

routine and rhythm, the conversion of a thousand plagiarized,

angst-ridden zines into something terrifying and new: the insurrectional

desire to experience unmediated forms of life here and now, to live

communism and spread anarchy.

In a university that also operates within (and maintains) consensus

reality, orienting action as a search for conditions that might solidify

and circulate anti-capitalist relationships is more than mere

prefiguration. It ensures the reproduction of alternative social ties,

spaces, ideas or desires as an offensive tactic. It is an attack on

isolation: an opportunity to share our experiences with one another, to

celebrate our differences, and to expose the real lines being drawn in

the social war. Elaborating insurrectionary potential requires more than

blockading the flow of relations conducive to capital; it is a process

of reorienting relationships and shared spaces towards the creation of

new and transient collective realities. In other words, we must

constantly recreate a “we” that isn’t a lie.

The crisis sparked by the brief occupation of the Litchfield Towers

lobby drew lines in the sand, and suddenly kids from both populist and

autonomous scenes found themselves sharing a declaration of “we.” The

front page of the Pitt News read, “Students, administration clash over

Thursday night protest.”

The front page of the Pitt News read, pick a side.

It’s been two years since the fabric of Pitt’s consensus reality really

started fraying. In April of 2015, 78 Pitt faculty signed a letter

protesting neoliberal-Playboy Chancellor Gallagher’s call for “Making an

Impact Through Commercialization.”

Keeping knowledge free is in our own professional self-interest. The

open and free exchange of research and data is essential to advancing

scientific knowledge, and commodification threatens this fundamental

principle of scientific inquiry…

In addition, universities are increasingly subject to pressure from

their corporate “partners” to manipulate, suppress or simply avoid

research that counters the interests of those who fund it…. We must be

prudent in devising strategies for the production and dissemination of

knowledge that maintain intellectual integrity, are inclusive rather

than exclusive, and that create opportunity for and empower all members

of our communities.

The university is one of the few places where our society might find

leadership in developing the ideas and models we need to re-orient

society in ways that can help to ensure that everyone today and in

future generations can share in the benefits that so many of us at Pitt

enjoy.

In 2017, our teachers are no longer on the defensive. The faculty and

graduate students areboth organizing with the United Steelworkers, with

many comrades among them. But in order for these efforts to force a

rupture that reveals the social war raging behind every new Starbucks

and tuition hike, radical agitation should also shift to the offensive.

The discourse ofProgress and Democracy is especially dangerous after the

election of Donald Trump. Radicals working within reformist groups need

to exploit the heightened polarization and emphasize an anti-fascist

framework if they want to prevent liberals and Trump-collaborators from

pacifying these campaigns. The radicals on the outside need to

familiarize themselves with the new social terrain, identify

opportunities for militant disruption, constantly reevaluate their ideas

of autonomy, and develop a broader strategy for circulating alternative

social ties and desires. If we can’t generalize such a conceptual shift

soon, popular consensus will normalize not only the Trump regime, but

also the impending escalation of reactionary violence and State

repression.

On our end, student-faculty and student-worker solidarity efforts are

almost exclusively defensive, not to mention predicated on the

relationships between self-appointed representatives of abstract

identity groups. Fighting for specific reforms that could help our

friends survive in the short-term is no substitute for finding ways to

meet those needs ourselves: a gradual accumulation of concessions will

never outpace the march of neoliberalism and the resurgence of fascism,

let alone offset the rising cost of living. Conventional approaches like

“raising awareness” about issues like union neutrality, the far-right,

shitty wages and tuition hikes are crucial in base-building, and they

could potentially present a counter-narrative to the administration’s

justifications and propaganda. But waiting around for the University to

fuck up on its own isn’t going to start the insurrection.

“If you want to force a change,” Milton Friedman advised his Chicago

Boys, “set off a crisis.”

II) Dead Ends

The same people who practice “critique” are also the most susceptible to

cynicism. But if cynicism is simply the inverted form of enthusiasm,

then beneath every frustrated leftist academic is a latent radical.

– Communiqué from an Absent Future

There is a peculiar grasp of method in the student organizing scene: the

student group, the coalition, the teach-in, the petition, the

letter-drop, the buttons and felt squares, the op-eds, the one-on-ones,

the classic A-to-B march around Oakland, the discourse of accessibility

or of buzzwords (intersectionality, systemic, anti-oppression, safe(r)

space, self-love, revolutionary, collective liberation, community,

consensus). Yet despite all of the base-building and the

“meeting-people-where-they’re-at,” student groups at Pitt rarely break

out of the initial education/negotiation stage of a campaign.

Each year’s new organizational leadership is drawn from that small base

of students who spent their time as underclassmen slowly building their

organizer cred: attending panel discussions and meetings, doing grunt

work like flyering or gathering signatures, and then (maybe) hitting the

streets during the occasional national mobilization. And each year the

new board members, steering committees, core collectives, presidents,

and “philanthropy chairs” mount their pylons of networking in-crowds and

NGO internships only to gape helplessly at the massive turnover of the

next semester.

For the student radicals working within reformist organizations,

campaign strategies are inherited from the upperclassmen that bought

them beer back when they first got involved. It’schic to vaguely

identify with anti-fascist and feminist politics, but some organizers

cringe at –isms and are always sure to lecture newcomers on why it’s

alienating to reference political theory. The only acceptable discourse

is that of Progress and Democracy, which offers few tools for critiquing

reform campaigns, but plenty of buzzwords for drafting petitions.

For the students who don’t try to disguise their analysis in the

language of bourgeois populism, an unrelenting emphasis on

intersectionality, autonomy, and horizontalism is the only authentic way

forward—although nobody’s quite sure what these things look like in

practice. This crowd is often lazily defined as the millennial

activists; youth who conflate “organizing” with a directionless activism

that is marred by ideological purity, adventurism, and (an admirably

merciless) militancy. It’s a tired critique, but it definitely rings

true whenever our organizing efforts and direct actions are oriented

towards public visibility, rather than their emotional and material

impact on both the community we long to build and the reality we

despise. Besides, if the goal of an action is purely symbolic or

designed to attract media attention, it ends up being little more than

an impatient and unsuccessful populism (see: Democracy Spring).

Whatever way you spin it, student radicals in Pittsburgh are

experiencing a degree of strategic polarization comparable to the

tensions within highly mobilized campuses. One camp is acting out the

politics of a populist routine, the other performs a pseudo-radical

spectacle: one is base-building around modest demands without ever

actually escalating, the other rides shotgun to trending hashtags from

the latest revolt; one is checking off boxes on the never-ending list of

“somethings” to accomplish before the final crisis of capitalism, the

other desperately reblogs every adventurous breach in the anxiety of the

everyday.

That being said, this section is not intended to define these tensions

within some false dichotomy of “activists” versus “organizers,” or

“autonomists” versus “populists.” Rather, I hope to challenge radicals

working within one or both of the two most prevalent discourses

(Progress and Democracy and Social War), to critically evaluate their

relationships to the organizational frameworks, identities and desires

produced by consensus reality. We won’t build momentum through the

reconciliation of abstract tendencies, but there’s a chance things might

start rolling if frustration can be articulated as the need for

experimentation, or if the struggle to get out of bed nurtures a spirit

of negation.

Critique illuminates all the errors of a society that its managers have

overlooked. It is the perfect interlocking mechanism of stagnation,

stunting the growth of burgeoning, subjective revolt by offering one a

whole buffet of irresistible, irrelevant options for “change.” A release

valve for intellectual dissonance, critique today resembles the

state-sponsored “strikes” of communist countries, where the desire for

resistance is satiated by a regimented diet of acceptable means of

conflict, supervised by its very enemies.

– Preoccupied: The Logic of Occupation

The Populist

It’s true that the populist camp’s suspicion of ideology is a positive

development. The tragedy of the 1960s is often told with fingers drawn

at Maoist vanguards or lifestylist dropouts and escapist communes. But

at least in the ‘60s you could generally figure out what the fuck it was

that the people working with you really believed in. The problem today

is that just about every populist, reform-oriented student group is a

“Big Tent” organization, except that instead of involving the

coordinated effort of multiple theoretical tendencies, there’s just a

vague political spectrum that goes from “sorta liberal” to “hella

radical.” With this in mind, it makes sense that the default discourse

for most student groups is that of Progress and Democracy.

Regardless of one’s place in the spectrum, the ambiguous and moralistic

populism surfacing alongside the Progress and Democracy discourse is now

developing as an ideology.

The populist, much like their cultural mirror in the hipster, is quick

to shed or appropriate new political aesthetics, shrugging off any

attempt at classification with the flick of a hand-rolled cigarette. The

absence of any theoretical framework or clear ideological affinity

within student groups leads many organizers to act out populism as a

sort of cautious defeatism, often under the guise of being “realistic”

or “patient.” Populism is encouraged by the Unions and NGOs that assign

demands to student front-groups, administer the organizing frameworks,

and then recruit and fund young radicals. This practice is typically

rationalized with talk of building power through a gradual procession of

concrete “wins” and creating accessible, entry-level political spaces.

Such arguments ignore the reality of the situation: most student

organizations are reproducing the logic of capital.

Not merely capitalist logic, like equating brand recognition with public

support, or choosing tactics based on the input of popular opinion

(read: market research), but the logic of capital. The organizational

leadership determines and enforces the character of the individual

organizers’ productivity, extracting surplus value from their activism

in the form of social capital, brand recognition, and financial

donations or grants. The organizers’ productivity itself is valued

according to event turnout, or by the sympathy that the student group

wins from the administration (which is to say, the organizers’

efficiency in siphoning the inclinations of individuals into an agenda

the student group controls). But most of all, the logic of capital

emphasizes its own never-ending reproduction, of the definition of

“activism” as it exists within the confines of Pitt’s consensus reality.

Reformist organizations are ultimately conflating quantifiable “wins”

and concessions with building movement momentum, conflating the range of

possible reforms granted by the discourse of Progress and Democracy with

the process of improving material conditions. Consequently, radicals

working within the populist camp face a much higher risk of being

co-opted; many end up adopting populism as an ideology, rather than

using it as an accessible discourse for organizing conflictual spaces

and materially supporting the people that inhabit them.

At Pitt, each and every student group is competing for our

participation. Students really don’t have much free time, so of course

it’s easier to focus on the things that are immediately accessible.

Genuine concern for the working conditions of the people who create the

products we consume translates into pressuring the administration to

divest from this or that unethical company, or perhaps into individual

choices like shopping fair-trade. But are these viable solutions? Now

that the campus bookstore has a friendly face, the University can resume

profiting from its brand name and new progressive image, and the

“ethical” companies can continue selling their particular brand of green

capitalism. Having a clean conscious is far too often a luxury that

comes with the kind of price tag few can afford, although taking out

loans is always an option. Good intentions are sabotaged by reality.

Time constraints force student radicals to narrow our rage into a single

issue, or else risk overextending ourselves and sacrificing our mental

health. After we’ve chosen a focus, reformist groups shape and mold that

rage into a passionate-but-reasonable simmer in order to appeal to a

broader audience. Each single-issue organization must specialize its

labor force, lest its workers distract from the campaign narrative, or

(god forbid) start assuming tasks that are generally reserved for the

top-dog organizers, such as making PR decisions, organizing meetings and

actions, networking with other groups, and writing propaganda pieces.

Sound familiar? That’s because it’s the same logic of our neoliberal

education. Students’ skills are specialized during a point in our lives

when we should be exploring our interests in ways that aren’t predicated

on utility or dictated by specialists. I’m not trying to suggest there’s

something inherently wrong with becoming skilled in a field, or

committed to winning a demand, and it’s not like students have spare

time to dedicate to every hobby we entertain. But just as students

cannot keep ignoring the ways in which our education is centralizing

knowledge production and training us for participation in the capitalist

economy, the radicals working for populist organizations cannot keep

ignoring the ways in which reformist campaigns are centralizing agency

and training organizers for careers in the non-profit industrial

complex. The liberal tendencies within student groups are dangerously

close to monopolizing dissent on campus, and the populist discourse of

Progress and Democracy is turning well-meaning radicals into another

specialized class of students telling other students what to say and how

to act.

Seriously, are there any radicals working in the populist camp that

haven’t been lectured by some condescending liberal about cuss words and

respectability? Hasn’t everyone heard an older, more “experienced”

organizer exaggerate a sigh before vapidly explaining the difference

between essentialist abstractions?

Between the “ill-timed” actions that are too

disruptive/confrontational/alienating, and the merits of more

“strategic” tactics, such as symbolic protest or asking super

toughquestions;

Between the events and meetings that are too broad or open-ended, and

those that are building the movement (or rather, their organization);

Between the “good allies” passively following the instructions of a

certain identity group’s self-proclaimed “leaders” (as if everyone

within that identity has the same interests and beliefs as those that

speak on their behalf), and the “bad allies” actively prioritizing

social and political affinity?

Let’s not even bring up the violence vs nonviolence dichotomy…

The problems with the populist camp only amplify with scale. At the

individual level, populist frameworks for activism and organizing do

little to challenge the desires and social roles allowed by the

University’s consensus reality. At the organizational level, the student

group is structured by the relations of capital and thus depends on the

perpetual specialization, reproduction, and exploitation of labor-power.

The discourse of Progress and Democracyproduces a populism that is both

ideological and anti-theoretical, confining student groups to reformist

narratives whilst depriving the radicals within them of the ability to

collectively evaluate their efforts in relation to a broader vision for

revolutionary change. When viewed as a whole, it’s clear that there is a

widespread deference to the sorts of actions, decision-making processes,

people, and ideas that are perceived to be “legitimate” within the

campus Left; meaning that the majority of student-led

campaigns—successful or not—do little to disrupt the Spectacle of Campus

Life, cultivate actively (as opposed to passively) desiring individuals

and collectivities, or subvert the myths that uphold Pitt’s consensus

reality. The heteropatriarchal / white-supremacist / neoliberal

University’s ongoing colonization of social and economic life remains

unchallenged at best, reenergized and relegitimized at worst.

We seek to push the university struggle to its limits. Though we

denounce the privatization of the university and its authoritarian

system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms. We demand not a

free university but a free society. A free university in the midst of a

capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it serves only as

a distraction from the misery of daily life. Instead we seek to channel

the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into a declaration of

war.

– Communiqué from an Absent Future

Reactive Autonomy

The emergence of an autonomous scene at Pitt is not the result of the

spontaneous self-organization of radicals. In this early stage, it is a

reaction-formation to the alienation of both Campus Life and the

Populist Left.

Under Campus Life, each layer of alienation is turned into a private war

with boredom, anxiety, and misery. The Pitt employee’s creative power is

wasted on a 40-hour week of swiping IDs for students who will never

learn his name. The adjunct professor must compete with her colleagues

for a position, and even if she lands the job she’s not sure if she’ll

be able to put food in her kid’s lunchbox. The student, perpetually

intoxicated (if not through substance use, then through the countless

other opiates sold to us), ironically satirizes and downplays the

desperation underpinning their every attempt to balance life

priorities—to finish class assignments, to keep in touch with distant

relatives and loved ones, to calculate just how many hours of their life

they must sell just to pay off their loans, to grapple with the scale of

just how fucked we all are, to feel intimacy beyond the games of social

capital and political manipulation. Everywhere, a quiet resignation to

routine.

To be politically engaged, to root for one brand of elite interests

against another, is no less a resignation to routine than going to work

in the morning. To organize for University reform, to beg for the

privilege to play faithful advisor to the administration’s strategic

plan, is more of an endorsement of neoliberalism than an indictment.

Last year’s “strategic forums” once again channeled student anger into

mediation, representation, and routine. The potential for a multi-front

confrontation with the administration was outright squandered by a few

prominent organizers, who leaped at the opportunity to represent the

student body as student-advisors to Pitt’s strategic plan. In response

to the populist left’s blatant complicity with these self-appointed

student leaders and the administration’s recuperative efforts and

propaganda, a few small crews of students broke away from their student

organizations. Some of us opted to call for an alternative, autonomous

“student action forum.” We thought the forum would create a space for

students to discuss and self-organize around the issues closest to them.

The forum was a flop (someone please remind me to at least hit up like a

facilitation training or something before I ever try to call another

general assembly), but it was also a turning point.

Autonomy attracts us because we’ve seen its potential to transform one’s

sense of individual and collective power, to seduce spectators into

active participation: its potential to inspire others to search for

liberatory experiences and projects on their own terms. But autonomy is

also a process. It requires intentionally theorizing and experimenting

with our conceptions of autonomy in order to determine what practices

will result in the active provocation, solicitation, and circulation of

contradictory and complementary insurgent desires. Without continual

experimentation and negation, without an intention that goes beyond

“fuck that liberal bullshit,” we become passive consumers of the

aesthetics and practices associated with autonomy, all the while

reproducing the same relationships and arrangements of space that

centralize power, agency, and legitimacy. In other words, we can cling

to “spontaneity,” “horizontalism,” or “self-organization” (abstractions

likely passed down from Occupy) all we want, but these words are

practically meaningless until we start to facilitate spaces that provide

the skills, platforms, tools, dialogue, material and emotional support

required to inspire and nurture spontaneity, horizontalism,

self-organization, autonomy.

The radicalism in our autonomous scene is reactionary primarily because

it fails to break from the frameworks we are reacting to. Just because

Pitt doesn’t recognize our crews as legitimate student organizations and

none of us have “club presidents” doesn’t mean anything’s changed. The

reactionary autonomist stagnates with their radicalism as an aesthetic;

they parade their consensus processes, rowdy actions, militant rhetoric,

nominally non-hierarchical meetings, and discourse pissing-contests in

order to disguise the fact that they are reproducing the same organizing

styles found in the populist camp, albeit with a sexier attitude.

If you think I’m projecting, that’s because I am.

How I became an organizer and started hurting people I care about.

Four years ago, my first real week spent “organizing” on a campaign

ended with a series of banner drops that were timed to coincide with an

SEIU strike. Shortly after, the more “experienced” student organizers

suddenly stopped working with me. I found myself on a sort of unspoken

blacklist after word got out that I allegedly dragged barricades into

the street and vandalized University property with labor slogans. It was

my first real mobilization; I honestly had no fucking clue what the word

“escalation” implied, or how my actions might have made the campaign

look bad. All I knew was that I wanted Something to happen, and that my

decision to act on that desire managed to piss a good number of people

off.

I still tried to be involved; I kept turning up at meetings long after I

had stopped participating in any meaningful way. The older organizers

gave me the cold shoulder, and I would leave early to cry alone in my

dorm, or to smoke weed with you under the bridge in Schenley.

I don’t know where I’d be now if we hadn’t found each other. Like me,

you were alone, stoned, and binge-watching that super dope first season

of Vice on HBO. We rolled into every Free the Planet meeting high off

our asses, even though we felt pretty unwelcome showing up there

anymore. We spent most nights together, smoking by the Shrine under the

bridge, throwing illegal bonfire parties on the lake by the train

tracks, hitting every basement show at Bates Hardcore Gym, tripping face

– sometimes twice a week – on Flagstaff Hill, passing around that grimey

notebook I eventually scanned and printed as the second issue of Filler.

I still remember holding your frostbitten hands as we climbed down from

the roof of Towers Lobby; fifteen minutes spent fumbling with frozen

wire, trying to drop our first banner together in the middle of a

blizzard.

Months after the coalition splintered back into its original

organizations, we realized we were still admins of the Facebook page. We

hijacked that shit and told ourselves that we’d use it to organize

differently, that we’d encourage militant action instead of shaming it,

that we’d push the student movement toward the attack. We called for the

first explicitly anti-capitalist march on Pitt’s campus since Occupy

imploded, and all 40 of us marched for two blocks down the sidewalk…

Some older Pittsburgh radicals took notice, but despite their help we

still had no idea what the fuck we were doing. We stagnated as those

angry kids yelling on street corners, we fractured after our “formal”

accountability processes proved worthless. We dedicated the weight of

our emotional energy to the mere maintenance of our tiny organization

before burning out one by one… by the end of the semester, we all

retreated back into our respective countercultures.

We don’t talk much anymore, but it’s still comforting to read through

the goofy shit you wrote in our notebook,

People come and go, it’s never going to change.

But those times were still fun, and probably really strange.

By the end of 2014, I was slowly plugging back into the populist scene,

albeit as part of a different student group. This time, I took their

organizing trainings to heart, convinced that our failure to organize

autonomously stemmed from a lack of organizational formality. I began

rehearsing my interactions with people to the point that they were

script-like, my voice echoing the cold, indifferent speech I picked up

while attending countless meetings. I complied with every request to

bottomline bullshit tasks; I found myself competing with the other

underclassmen to get the most petition signatures in hopes that the

older organizers might take my politics seriously.

It wasn’t all that long before a new “we” broke away once more to

organize autonomous action, yet by that point I had already turned into

a “serious” “organizer.” We threw benefit parties, but I stressed over

attendance numbers and the zine table instead of enjoying myself and

catching up with friends. We called for general assemblies hoping to

inspire intersectionality, or to present alternatives to the

administration’s “strategic forums,” but really I just wanted everyone

else to adopt my proposals and integrate their work into my own vision

for a student union. We organized Share Fairs and Really Really Free

Markets to build community and practice mutual aid, but I secretly

valued people for the material items they contributed instead of the

energy they brought to the space. We wiggled our hands in all the

gestures of consensus process, but it was always the same people

proposing ideas and facilitating the meetings. I adopted all the

aesthetics of radicalism only so I could pretend that I was creating

space instead of taking it.

Still, this new scene had real momentum, and it was only a matter of

months before some of us started conspiring to escalate a populist

march. The escalation was part of our plan for a series of autonomous

interventions in the 2016 United Students Against Sweatshops

convergence, which the Pitt chapter was putting in hella work to host

that year. We thought the convergence presented an opportunity to push a

national organization, with chapters on dozens of campuses, in a more

radical direction… but also, like, personal politics. After the populist

radicals found out about our plan, they invited me to the organizing

meetings for the big march. Finally! I had been given a seat at the

table. People were taking our mess of an informal coalition seriously! I

didn’t even mind when I noticed that the list of participating

organizations printed alongside the meeting minutes concluded with

“oogles” where it should have read “Pittsburgh Student Solidarity

Coalition.” I mean, shit, that was pretty funny.

But then the professional organizers started telling me what they needed

“my” “organization” to do, and somebody gave me a clipboard. Which was,

of course, the last thing my ego needed. When the big day came, I

indulged my newfound legitimacy and took my place alongside the other

march marshals. Clipboard in hand, I micromanaged each step my friends

took, hoping to control every beat of the march so I could pull off a

pointless escalation that was, in all honesty, motivated more by

personal politics than a strategic vision. When the time came for the

autonomous crews to escalate, no one followed the plan, because by then

it had become myplan. I was too busy sulking to notice the circle of

young radicals forming around the Food Not Bombs shopping cart. I didn’t

recognize it at the time, but free food and a black flag did more to

spark an autonomous scene than a strictly choreographed extra fifteen

minutes in the streetever could have. Most of those kids are now close

friends and comrades.

It is not a question of choosing between these two sides, nor of

synthesizing them, but rather of displacing the priority of this

opposition. The real dialectic is between negation and experimentation:

acts of resistance and refusal which also enable an exploration of new

social relations, new uses of space and time.

– “We are the Crisis” in After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied

California

Incite, Conspire, Diversify

The autonomous scene has grown exponentially since the USAS convergence.

There’s no sense in constructing some fancy framework for analyzing our

interpersonal relationships, as my use of the phrase “autonomous scene”

is simply shorthand for a series of overlapping networks (of

organizations, informal crews, circles of friends, accomplices,

codefendants, bitter enemies) that are, to varying degrees, coalescing

outside of the mediation of University-affiliated student groups or

political parties. The “autonomous scene” is an intentionally vague

phrase, and it’s far bigger than any of the various acronyms we use to

form social clusters within it.

Our anxiety, boredom, and misery inhabit a critical historical moment.

Our relationships are indisputably militant, as every time we manage to

really, truly connect with someone, it’s because our realities merged

along some plane of revolt against isolation, mediation, domination,

control. Even the administration can’t ignore that “we” are

experimenting with the communization of our segregated realities—that

“we” are learning how to, if only briefly, create autonomous spaces in

which there really is a “we.” And we want more.

If defining the scene in concrete terms risks suppressing its potential

to nurture relationships that don’t fit neatly within Campus Life, then

how can it be critiqued? Without a clear picture of what counts as being

a part of “the” autonomous scene, without formal specialization or

hierarchy, how can we generalize a shared perception of our situation?

What sort of frameworks for decentralized coordination can extend beyond

our immediate social circles, when we struggle to do so even on a scale

as small as Pittsburgh’s radical youth scene?

The social war is already all around us. It’s not a question of merging

the various social and political circles into some unified campaign, but

of facilitating the realization of mutual desire.

Find each other, because the Something we’re waiting for is never going

to happen unless we become Something. If each of us acts on our own

ideas and desires, a shared perception of our situation is temporarily

understood every time we act collectively—every time we create spaces,

projects, and experiences together. Which is really just a roundabout

way of saying,what you do or don’t do makes all the difference.

In California, the kids spray-paint We are the Crisis on the walls of

occupied lecture halls. In Greece, they write We are an Image from the

Future.

What could “we” be?

“We aren’t revolutionaries, but we are the revolution.

And sometimes I think that the whole movement is just me and you…”

Appendix

There is at least one practice worth prioritizing and refining. Healthy

doses of introspection, taken alone or with the guidance of trusted

comrades, might be a step in the right direction. Some questions I find

myself habitually returning to:

What are my short-term and long-term objectives? What are the first

steps, and how can I take them while staying true to my beliefs?

Does my current project require bringing in, training, or even

radicalizing new people? Or can it be better accomplished with a few

close friends who are already on the same page?

Am I making time and space to hear my comrades’ criticisms, to learn

together, and to unpack each other’s shit?

Is this crew/organization a closed collective with a formal process

for integrating and welcoming new people? Should there be a separation

between public events and collective meetings? What sort of decisions

are made in these spaces, and how are they made? Is everyone in the

crew/organization participating in planning the next public

meeting/event, and if not, what’s the difference between being a member

and part of the general public? Are there informal hierarchies that

negatively impact the participation of others? Yeah, no shit there are,

so what are you going to do about them? What’s the most strategic way to

address them?

When was the last time I revised my personal theory of change? How can

my crew and I intervene in campaigns that seem to be stagnating? Are my

organizing efforts, actions, and events actually getting me closer to

any of my objectives?

Is my crew prioritizing its abstract “organizing” work or its

participation in an organization/campaign over its capacity to

emotionally and materially support the people that comprise it?

If my crew for this project is just me and two friends, is there

consensus on whether it’s actually necessary to form or participate in a

formal organization? How is everyone doing on, like, an emotional level?

Maybe it’s time to just chill and enjoy each other’s company for a bit?

Am I building affinity through trust and compassion? If not, how can I

create space for healing?

Am I having fun? Am I getting enough sleep? Am I falling into the trap

of capitalist conceptions of productivity?

[1] ☭ So, what is capital? Fredy Perlman defined capital as, “…at once a

name for a social relation between workers and capitalists, for the

instruments of production owned by a capitalist, and for the

money-equivalent of his instruments and ‘intangibles,’ …” Capital is a

social relation that necessitates the use of things in a specific way,

and it is those things in so far as they are directly reproducing this

social relation in the process of value accumulation. As Marx emphasized

in the Grundrisse, capital must be understood as a process. Marx defined

capital variously as “a social relation of production,” “value in

process,” “a Moloch,” “accumulated labor,” and most poetically as “dead

labour which, vampire like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives

the more, the more labour it sucks.” – Jan D. Matthews, An Introduction

to the Situationists