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8/3/2019 Unexpected Sub Zine
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/unexpected-sub-zine 1/4
a few unexpected subjects of class struggle
notes on recent university strikes
An entirely new word is being put forward by an entirely new subject. It
only has to be uttered to be heard.
- Rivolta Femminile
Our universities are fraying at the seams. At schools throughout
California, across the UK and in New York, we’ve seen waves of protest
this November, including student walkouts and class cancellations
unimaginable a month ago. As I write, another UC strike approaches,
with others likely to follow over the coming weeks and months.
Our unsettled present is extraordinary, and unexpected. That much is
clear to all. But there are different kinds of surprise, different reasons for
shock. Some, particularly those speaking on national television, seem
surprised above all at the severity of police attacks on our bodies and our
encampments. They’re shocked at images of seated students casually
being pepper-sprayed, or at the unrelenting baton blows endured by those
of us who linked arms around a small circle of tents. How, they ask,could such violence be visited upon students, especially when they acted
non-violently, only wanted to set up a few tents, and issued little more
one that necessarily affects all workers. Accepting student debt is
accepting a class defeat...
Caffentzis here offers us essentially half of the story of how student loan
debt reproduces contemporary capitalist relations – the half pertaining to
the reproduction of labor-power. The other half of the story – the story of
how student debt enables the accumulation of capital – has been gradually
lled in over the past two years through a series of open letters written by
Robert Meister. Meister has shown how those who govern the university prot from rising student debt levels (both because student fees nance
lucrative building projects, and because university regents have a stake in
for-prot education rms), as well as how student debt – which now
exceeds a trillion dollars nationally – is increasingly bundled and
protably traded by the nancial services industry. Such debt now fuels
a speculative bubble that is threatened by the specter of mass student loan
default.
There are two ways that ongoing university struggles have begun to, and
could yet more effectively, counter the reign of student debt, and thusdirectly impinge upon the reproduction of capitalist relations: rst, by
halting increases in tuition, and even perhaps rolling tuition levels back,
we’d deactivate the primary cause of rising student debt burdens. At the
UCs, we’ve already effectively stalled tuition increases this year, and
seem to have turned back the 81% fee hike proposed by President Yudof.
Further strike actions would allow us to put on the agenda the reduction
of student fees. And second, by formulating and disseminating a call for
mass, coordinated student debt resistance, general assemblies in New
York and California have already encouraged hundreds of debtors to signa pledge of refusal, and thus have made possible a future debtor’s strike.
Ongoing university struggles could make thousands of student debtors
condent enough to brave default, knowing that legions of other debtors
in deance would have their back.
Given that these are the stakes of current university struggles, it’s not
terribly surprising that our strikes and encampments have been met with
such severe police repression. But each time we’re struck, we return
again, stronger than before. We’re new subjects of class struggle, uttering
unexpected words with ever more condence.
a.
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situations which presume that women will stay at home, to link
ourselves to the struggles of all those who are in ghettos, whether
that ghetto is a nursery, a school, a hospital, an old-age home, or a
slum. To abandon the home is already a form of struggle, since the
social services we perform there would then cease to be
carried out in those conditions, and so all those who work out of
the home would then demand that the burden carried by us until
now be thrown squarely where it belongs – onto the shoulders of
capital.... The working class family is the more difcult point to break because it is the support of the worker, but as worker, and
for that reason the support of capital. On this family depends the
support of the class, the survival of the class – but at the woman’s
expense against the class itself.... Like the trade union, the family
protects the worker, but also ensures that he or she will never be
anything but workers. And that is why the struggle of the woman
of the working class against the family is crucial (41).
What Dalla Costa and James indicate in this passage is that strikes in the
sphere of social reproduction, while similar to ‘conventional’ labor strikesinsofar as they directly counter exploitative forms of work discipline,
appear different from such strikes in two crucial, and seemingly
contradictory, respects – rst, that they seem to directly undermine the
survival of working class subjects, and second, that they carry with them
the promise of liberating the working class from the requirement to labor
in order to survive. If we translate this analysis into the university context
(something that Dalla Costa and James also do, at times, in their essays),
we can see certain resonances with recent student strikes. On the one
hand, such strikes appear self-defeating, as evidenced by the ubiquitousrefrain that a walkout in support of public education is a self-contradictory
gesture. How, we are asked, can one defend public education by refusing
to teach class or to attend lecture? On the other hand, such strikes appear
to promise the liberation of the student from her social and economic role:
such liberation would entail the abolition of student debt; the
decomposition of hierarchical relations between students, professors, and
university workers (which we saw hints of during the November 15 open
university); and ultimately the realization of her capacity to live free of
the requirement to work for wages.
What we saw with the open university at Berkeley on November 15, and
what we will likely see in coming days at Davis, was a form of learning
that we’ve drawn upon and revised in shaping our recent campus actions.
In Oakland, the image of the mass assembly was sutured with the term
“general strike” – each of us had seen the picture of the evening assembly
framed with the phrase: “strike while the iron is hot” – so, at UC Berkeley
and UC Davis, the moment our assemblies expanded beyond the
boundaries of our quads and plazas, we similarly called for general
strikes.
It’s worth asking, however, just how general these strikes have been, andrelatedly, whether our strike calls have been properly-tailored to their
political moment. Some on the left have accused us of misusing the term
general strike, of diluting the meaning of the phrase insofar as
absenteeism hasn’t been universal. Their point is well taken, of course:
we haven’t yet organized a full-scale shutdown of a city or sector of social
life. Many in Oakland went to work on November 2, while nearly all
university employees (excepting instructors) carried out their jobs on
November 15. Nevertheless, these strikes have been remarkably wide-
spread and effective; they’ve blocked, for a time, the operations of
particular industries and institutions. And our repeated use of the phrasegeneral strike seems to have enabled, and rendered legible, certain
important dimensions of these events – dimensions that other terms (i.e.
shutdown, blockade, boycott, or student walkout) would have failed to
capture or set off.
To call a strike general is to give it a predication that puts off, or qualies,
all particularizing predications it might otherwise be given. A general
strike is not a strike carried out by a clearly-demarcated body of workers;
it’s not called in order to effect some particular change of policy or economic practice; in terms of tactics, the general strike is
promiscuous, embracing ying pickets, occupations, wildcats, mutual aid,
and widespread sabotage. A strike is general only if its limits are
unsettled, expansive, indistinct: if it gives birth to unexpected subjects and
sites of struggle.
Our recent strike actions are perhaps most notable for their expansive
quality, for how they’ve inspired and enabled surprising lines of struggle.
In calling for a general strike throughout the city of Oakland, for
instance, those gathered at Oscar Grant Plaza didn’t necessarily knowthey were calling for the shutting down of Oakland’s port, since the shut-
down was planned in the days following the strike resolution. Nor
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did they know that, a few weeks after the successful port action, a new
call – for a general west coast port shutdown on December 12 – would be
crafted and endorsed by assemblies from Portland to Los Angeles. The
call for a citywide general strike released a contagion at the ports that has
not yet subsided.
A similar logic of contagion has animated recent university struggles. On
November 9 – a statewide day of action for public education – university
police attempted to repress with force a small encampment at UCBerkeley. Students (and a few faculty members) formed soft blockades
around the tents and endured two rounds of severe baton blows. While
the tents were ultimately taken from us, our numbers grew throughout the
day and we were able at night to hold the Sproul steps and plaza – space
enough for a mass general assembly. There, we called a November 15
general strike of higher education – a call that was taken up, to an uneven
degree, at other university campuses. Students at UCLA established an
encampment, while those at Davis held a mass rally on the 15th, which
led into an extended building occupation. When they were forced out of
the building, they established an outdoor encampment. The images of Lt.Pike casually pepper-spraying students as they surrounded this
encampment have gone viral, just as the general strike call issued last
week by the Davis assembly has set off a rash of solidarity actions
throughout the state, set to intensify in the coming days.
Both Berkeley and Davis’ general strike calls have been criticized for
casting too wide a net. Why not call for campus-wide, rather than
system-wide, strikes, we’ve been asked? While it would be easy enough
to simply say in response that the expansive calls have enabled a kind of campus-to-campus relay that may have been foreclosed by more
narrowly-tailored calls, it’s also worth noting that narrower calls might
have fractured our assemblies. At Berkeley, an initial call for a
system-wide UC strike was challenged by CSU and community college
students, who pushed for an expansion of the call to all of higher
education. Similarly, students from other UC campuses edited the strike
call so that it would be more legible on their home campuses, while
activists with Occupy Oakland worked to compose a supplementary call
to encourage east bay residents – students and non-students alike – to
march up to UC Berkeley for the November 15 general assembly. Whatthese anecdotes reveal is the cross-sectoral heterogeneity of our
assemblies – a heterogeneity that effectively disallows more conventional,
narrowly-focused strike calls.
The openness of our assemblies and encampments to all is a large part of
what makes them politically effective. Not only does this openness
compel those who keep up the encampments to face the need for ever
more complex forms of mutual aid, thus allowing our encampments to
become actual sites of social reproduction, this openness also strengthens
regional solidarities. The lesson of the 1969 TWLF strike at UC Berkeley
– which succeeded only when east bay municipal workers initiated asympathy strike – is that student movements are most effective when they
are supported by, and coordinated with, social struggles outside the
universities. Campus administrators are aware of this fact, and work
assiduously to re-assert, through various disciplinary techniques, the
political disarticulation of students from non-students. Most recently, at
UC Berkeley, we’ve been informed by our chancellors that we might be
able to keep a few tents up on Sproul if we can gure out a way to ensure
that only students will sleep in them. We’ve yet to honor this grotesque
declaration with a response.
Our insistence that occupations remain open to all and that everybody
should have the capacity to reproduce their lives, free of nancial
exchange, within and beyond the bounds of our campuses, is not
capricious; rather, this insistence is aligned with the politics of recent
university struggles, insofar as these struggles have challenged
prevailing, privatized regimes of social reproduction. It’s worth
remembering, for instance, that one of the demands advanced by the
Wheeler occupiers in November 2009 was that the university renew its
essentially rent-free lease with the Rochdale student housing cooperative.Or that a recent makeshift tent on the lawn in front of Sproul Hall bore a
sign that read: “affordable student housing.” Ours is a nascent struggle
for autonomous social reproduction, and as such, it shares much with
revolutionary feminist movements.
In The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community,
Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James call for strikes in the sphere of
social reproduction, rolling refusals of unwaged domestic labor that bear
certain resonances with recent university strikes and occupations:
We must get out of the house; we must reject the home, because
we want to unite with other women, to struggle against all