Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition:
Letter to the Editor of The Pitt News

(Originally published in The Pitt News)

---

To the Editor:

On the night of Nov. 17, at a non-violent anti-Trump protest, tuition-paying students at the University of Pittsburgh were forced out of the spaces that exist and are maintained solely for their use by brutal force wielded by police who are paid through these students’ tuition.

The action on Nov. 17 was initially planned by Pitt Against Debt to protest tuition hikes. After the election, it was decided that we can no longer pretend all of the issues that impact us are not connected. Pitt Against Debt, Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition, NightShade, Socialist Alternative, Pitt Students for a Democratic Society, the Autonomous Student Network, the Fourth Wave, United Students Against Sweatshops local #31, the Pitt chapter of the International Socialist Organization and several other groups came together to mobilize in explicit opposition to this system.

While marching through Oakland, students were goaded and teased by cops who made remarks to Pitt students such as “Too bad Trump is your president — what are you going to do about it?”

After reaching Litchfield Towers lobby, students had a speak-out focusing on sharing and celebrating our stories. After a speaker led them in a song, they left on their own accord to the quad. When word spread that a friend who had brought a PA system had been suddenly and unjustly detained, the group went back to Litchfield Towers. Police, in full riot gear, had blocked the main entrance, but students entered through the public side entrance of Litchfield Tower B.

Once in that space, between the guard desk and the main student mailroom, students began chanting, “Let him go.” Immediately and without any call for dispersal, plain-clothed cops began using force to remove students from the area and onto Litchfield Towers patio. Cops pushed their bikes into the building, shoving the bikes through the protestors. This resulted in students being pushed, shoved, hit with batons and intimidated with the threat of force. Students and community members sustained multiple injuries due to police violence. The police pulled and arrested two protesters — one of them a Pitt student — at random from the crowd.

Once students were on the patio, police continued to use force by pushing students on the ground and shoving their chests. One plain-clothed cop threatened students with a weapon.

It is unacceptable and intolerable that our University police — who we, as students of Pitt, pay for with tuition fees — would use excessive force and violence toward an unarmed, nonviolent, non-threatening protest. Through the use of force, police escalated the situation and violently removed students from their own University buildings.

This same night, five students were arrested in Texas for protesting in a similar situation. What happened here is not an isolated incident. This is part of a nationwide struggle against continuous oppression and repression and the rise of fascism.

As students at Pitt, with a common desire for freedom and justice, we must band together. We must demand that our University take responsibility for their violent police officers, their consent with oppressive systems, their tolerance of hate speech and their constant tuition hikes when the average Pitt student graduates with upwards of $30,000 in debt. We must demand that they take responsibility for the poverty wages that they pay their workers while members of the administration are paid upwards of half a million dollars. We must demand that their investment portfolio represent a sustainable and ethical future.

Our Dean of Students Kenyon Bonner issued a statement Nov. 18, condoning this police violence. This is absolutely unacceptable — our University should stand with students and protect the right to have our voices heard instead of defending the cops. We refuse to tolerate police violence on our campus and in our community, and we should hope that the dean of students would agree. Dean Bonner, we urge you to retract your statement and support Pitt students and our right to protest.

Signed,
The Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition

SUPPORT VICTORIA AND PHIL

DONATE HERE*

*The paypal donations are made out to the Big Idea Cooperative – the money will still be given to the anti-fascist arrestees. The Big Idea is a cooperatively-run radical bookstore in Pittsburgh, some of whose members are helping with the legal defense fund*

---

Let it be known that on the night of November 17th, tuition paying students at the University of Pittsburgh were forced out of the spaces that exist and are maintained solely for their use by brutal force wielded by policemen who are paid through the these students’ tuition.

Let it be known several of these policemen were not in uniform yet still brutalized and intimidated students with tear gas canisters, pistols, and batons, students who were literally just standing in the wrong place. Police snatched two people at random and slapped them with several felonies and misdemeanors. All funds from this campaign will go directly to the legal costs.

The Pittsburgh police endorsed Donald Trump; we all know why they were so prone to violence that night.

Whose interests are the police protecting?

---

---

The action on November 17th was initially planned by Pitt Against Debt to protest tuition hikes. After the election, it was decided that we can no longer pretend all of the issues that impact us are not connected. PAD, Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition, NightShade, Socialist Alternative, Pitt Students for a Democractic Society, the autonomous student network, the Fourth Wave, United Students Against Sweatshops local #31, the Pitt chapter of the International Socialist Organization, and several other groups came together to mobilize in explicit opposition to this system.

Youth today look toward a future deflated by ecological and economic collapse; a future where opportunity is postponed in light of the immediacy of debt, stagnating wages, and corporate oligarchy. A future where the promise of sustainability is found exclusively on billboards advertising “clean” coal, “green” skyscrapers, or hope, change, and vote; a future where even the most optimistic visions of climate change include mass migrations, displacements, and extinctions.

Youth today live in a reality of racist, misogynist, anti-queer, and colonial violence; a reality where our very identities become targets for both right-wing and state-sanctioned violence.

There is a fascist movement rising in the united states. Which side are you on?

We stand in unconditional solidarity with the two anti-fascists arrested that night. Only the State is guilty.

CLICK HERE for a print-ready pdf of the zine
Every Cook Can Abolish Governance (Part 1) can be read online here

---

From Occupation to Resistance

My opening shift and hangover are finally over. Time to get something to eat and have a smoke before I go back to close for another seven hours. The prep list is finally filled out and everything is mise en place¹, lunch rush is over, the manager is back at her desk taking an hour to reply to an email, and as I’m walking out the front door of the cult burrito chain, my co-workers are playing rock-paper-scissors to see who has to do dishes until I return. After playing catch-up and covering others all morning, I’m going to take an extra fifteen minutes.

These chain restaurants (fast food, fast casual, whatever) apply the logic of the prep list to all aspects of the kitchen. Labor hours and wages are budgeted and enforced by management; just as with the prep list, they punish for any “waste” and “excess” for any purpose. Did you have more work than taken into account by the prep list? Was your lunch/dinner rush busier than expected? Too many people called out and no one can make it in? Staying late to clean for an inspection the next day? Never are the prep list, the algorithms, the management, or anything with power criticized for the shortcomings of those in power. The crew just needs to work harder, everyone just needs to cover each other and everything will be okay. As if a kitchen that normally runs on five people can run on two or three as if it’s not a major change from the regular flow of work. As if any of us want to do the work of three people for the wages of one!

The need for communism transforms everything. Through the need for communism the need for non-work moves from the negative aspect (opposition to work) to the positive one: the individual’s complete availability to themselves, the possibility to express themselves absolutely freely, breaking away from all models, even those considered to be fundamental and indispensable, such as those of production.

Alfredo M. Bonanno, Armed Joy

“Fucking watch it!” yells a man wearing clothes worth more than my yearly salary. Just let me smash bottles in the parking lot, asshole. I have fifteen minutes left to kill before they call me to come inside and stop being indignant, let me enjoy it. I step back to the curb and do what pissed off cooks do best: sit down.

Two years before I was in the same kitchen, somewhere further away. Doing the same shit for less pay, in a faster environment, with meaner management, and no smoke breaks on shift (unless you’re management). One day I clocked in for the mid-shift around ten, started the shift as normal. My coworker, the cashier this shift, was ten minutes late due to the bus schedule either arriving ten minutes late or before her child’s day care opened. That day the Area Manager (general manager of the general managers) was doing her monthly inspection, where she gets to blow off steam on crew members. As soon as the cashier arrives, the AM screams at her until she leaves the store. Myself and the rest of the crew were on-edge until the doors opened and we had no more time to worry.

Lunch rush approached, and I felt some beautiful combination of dread and fury brewing inside me. The AM went off for half an hour about “personal responsibility” and how “she had to do the same thing” as the recently fired cashier. She’s been a big mouth for awhile, we already heard those stories about her mom paying her rent and babysitting for her during those “tough times.” I couldn’t deal with anything I was feeling and decided I couldn’t just calm down.

The line goes through the door as the rush peaks. I walk over to the cooler, put my back to it, and slide down. The AM sees me and immediately gets red in the face screaming at me.

“What is this? A fucking strike?!”

“I guess so!”

Five minutes of back and forth screaming and the area manager agrees to rehire the mother she fired an two hours ago. Unfortunately, none of my coworkers joined in. Some thought I was absolutely out there to risk my job, some later thanked me and started talks of something bigger…

I walk back into the kitchen, say my hellos to the night crew who just came in, and relieve whoever was covering me at the dish pit. Unsurprisingly, no one kept it up after twenty minutes. Hard to blame them, we aren’t allowed to have to back door open and the industrial sized fan is more likely to knock you over than keep your cool.

Slowly I build up momentum again and start busting out dishes and keeping the back room tidy. The dish pit can only ever been caught up after the doors close, anything sooner is naive optimism. After awhile you need to accept it can’t be finished, and hope if someone needs something specific that they’re capable of cleaning it on their own. I put the plastic apron on the hook and head up to the front to back-up the grill cook during dinner rush. It goes by quickly, and during a lull in the action I make moves to make some food, steal a drink, and take my break.

During the first three or so weeks at this job, no one got breaks unless our “performances showed we deserved to have them.” If we didn’t get everything mise en place and swept clean before open, no one got to eat for the seven or so hours they were on the clock². Everyone in the crew hated it except the few who got the shorter shifts. Together we started taking our breaks at 10:30am on the dot every morning, despite pleas from the shift managers. Sometimes you just really want to be treated like a human being and have your needs met. Sometimes everyone around you feels the same way. After two weeks of taking back a half an hour a day, management decided to make it mandatory we all take breaks by at least 10:45.

Eventually it became common practice to just take break at 10:30 as long as your station was clean, regardless of how much of your share of the prep list you finished.

At this particular store, we ran a crew of five. Four working from 8-4ish, and two working 11-7ish, then night crew, with four working 4-12. Without the optimism of assuming everyone shows up, there are eight people working eight hour shifts. When each weekly (or bi-weekly) schedule comes out, the amount of money able to be spent on wages is represented as labor hours. Labor hours are wages put into ratio time and used to budget each store. Say the base wage is $9/hour, so each labor hour costs $9.

So if all eight people work eight hours at $9/hour, they spend sixty-four labor hours. But not everyone in the store works for the base wage. Shift managers make closer to $18/hour (two labor hours per hour worked) and kitchen managers closer to $13/hour (one and a half labor hours per hour worked). Five people work eight hours, using forty labor hours. One kitchen manager works eight hours, and two shift managers work eight hours each, using forty four hours.

Freedom is a destructive concept that involves the absolute elimination of all limits. Now freedom is an idea we must hold in our hearts, but at the same time we need to understand that if we desire it we must be ready to face all the risks that destruction involves, all the risks of destroying the constituted order we are living under. Freedom is not a concept to cradle ourselves in, in the hope that improvements will develop independently of our real capacity to intervene.”

Alfredo M. Bonanno, The Anarchist Tension

The schedule limits labor hours each day by expected production (the same algorithms that decide on what and how much is produced each day on the prep list). A total of eighty-four hours means nothing except when put in comparison with the limit of seventy hours a day. Never was there ever enough time to properly clean and close the store. Any time spent over the limit warranted an angry phone call from higher-ups, or worse reprisals.

Clocking back into work after my break, I sneak out the back to take out the trash bags. Every trip takes me about ten or fifteen minutes, I wanna enjoy this cigarette. There’s a nice breeze outside and it would be a shame if I missed it to wash dishes. I go in once again, sneak over to the bathroom, then return to the dish pit. The manager, one of my best friends at the store, comes over to help me bust out dishes before we close. They already did my prep work while I was outside, no patience I guess. We go back and forth scrubbing and rushing to scrape burnt rice out of pans. Once shit gets ‘reasonable’, they dip to go clean the other side of the back of house. Without them, I’d probably have to pretend to do it. Saves me having to lie once again.

We finish whatever we can until there’s enough labor hours left for us all to piss for pay. Boss makes a dollar, we make a dime, that’s why we piss on company time. Then we clock out and step out for a cigarette together to commiserate the berating we’re going to get tomorrow morning for how sloppy everything is. I couldn’t care less, I don’t have to open tomorrow and I got to take an extra two hours break today. Going to the bathroom, taking out trash, sweeping outside, hiding out in the walk-in cooler, smoking a second cigarette, anything to increase the tension with management and reveal the absurdity of work.

So, when these gentlemen say, ‘You are utopians, you anarchists are dreamers, your utopia would never work’, we must reply, ‘Yes, it’s true, anarchism is a tension, not a realisation, not a concrete attempt to bring about anarchy tomorrow morning’. But we must also be able to say but you, distinguished democratic gentlemen in government that regulate our lives, that think you can get into our heads, our brains, that govern us through the opinions that you form daily in your newspapers, in the universities, schools, etc., what have you gentlemen accomplished? A world worth living in? Or a world of death, a world in which life is a flat affair, devoid of any quality, without any meaning to it? A world where one reaches a certain age, is about to get one’s pension, and asks oneself, ‘But what have I done with my life? What has been the sense of living all these years?’

Alfredo M. Bonanno, The Anarchist Tension

Lena Kafka

Footnotes
1) Mise en place = putting in place / everything in its place
2) Yes even double shifts

Inspiration/Further Reading
The Reproduction of Daily Life by Fredy Perlman
Work by CrimethInc.
Abolish Restaurants by prole.info

“No longer are we faced with Marx’s famous choice of socialism or barbarism; we are confronted with the more drastic alternatives of anarchism or annihilation”

– Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism

---

---

Our Lives are Too Precious to Wait

The votes are in, and the oppressed, the students, the workers, the poor, the undocumented, and (most importantly) you,  lost once again. As if we had any chance of winning their games;  everyone knows the house stacks the deck (and we don’t just mean at Rivers Casino). Every four years, the ruling class offers us two representations of different ‘factions,’ where the capitalists back their choice via campaign funds. Many capitalists will back both candidates, just to be sure each will meet their will (Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs, etc). Historically, the winner of the US presidential race is whoever raises the most campaign money.

This year was an exception. Most of the left, anarchists included, resigned themselves to another four more years of neoliberalism under Clinton. How could she lose? She ran a typical campaign, talking about pragmatic “solutions” and policies she’d put in place, against a Republican whose own party barely wanted. While not everyone can agree on everything he is – he’s been called a rapist, a white supremacist, a misogynist, a fascist – it’s  worth considering Trump’s insistence on jailing the opposition party leader (1). Not your typical presidential campaign mudslinging. CrimethInc writes,

Those on the Left who have persisted in the naïve belief that the right government could solve the problems generated by global capitalism are partly to blame for this situation. The Democratic Party was foolish to back an establishment candidate at a time when so many people are desperate, angry, and rebellious. In legitimizing the idea that America is or should be great in the first place, Democrats smoothed the way for Trump to promise to make it great once more. Every tax dollar good liberals paid to the government hoping it would care for the poor, sick, elderly, and underprivileged has built the juggernaut that will now roll across their civil liberties. Every law they continue to obey will aid and abet that process. And if the media outlets and politicians that decried Trump as the candidate of the apocalypse accept him now in the name of the democratic process, this only confirms their complicity.

The problem is democracy itself: the form of government that brought Adolf Hitler into office. In response to the polls, we assert that no one should have the right to rule over anyone else. Neither Donald Trump, nor Barack Obama, nor Mother Theresa could ever use such power for good. We have to create horizontal structures and autonomous movements that can meet our needs directly, rather than continuing to feed resources into structures that will be used against us for the benefit of a few.

There is plenty of liberal clickbait (2) whining over the failure of neoliberalism and the Clinton dynasty. We have no interest in repeating the mistakes of the liberal-left, or of helping the Democratic party get itself together so they can continue derailing social movements with piecemeal reforms and recuperating our desires. To hell with Hillary Clinton, to hell with Trump, to hell with capitalist democracy!

---

Say good night to the old neoliberal order, long live the new fascist order.

We are not the only ones to realize the sham of democracy. Only half of all eligible voters turned out, and passive refusal can be a precursor to active refusal. Millions across the United States know that our representatives do not represent us, that they cannot represent us.

Maybe the problem has to do with democracy itself. Honestly, when has it fully delivered on its promises? In ancient Athens, when women and slaves were prohibited from participating? In the days of the Founding Fathers, some of whom also owned slaves? Today, when everyone supposedly has a say but self-determination feels further out of our hands than ever?

We keep blaming specific politicians and political parties, as if it were just a matter of personal failings. But any system that doesn’t work unless the people using it are perfect is a bad system. What if some politicians really do mean well, but there’s nothing they can do? All the good intentions in the world won’t help if the structure is broken.

Beyond this passive refusal, there’s been a spark lit under the ass of the Left. Talk of guns, talk of organizing, talk of the same talk but louder and more passionate, and no talk of why now is the best time to reach the People/the Masses/they-who-must-be-organized. Somehow the Left thinks it can repeat what it’s been doing the past 8 years but with more urgency, and suddenly the problems of the past are gone. Pass around your reading lists, get together your reading groups again, sell your boring as fuck monthly papers that we only buy so you’ll leave us alone.

Even for a crowd that knows full well in advance what may be coming there is a first-mover problem which prevents the riot itself from being a straightforwardly intentional act; no individual or group can simply decide unilaterally to riot, unless the riot is already in process. This is why the immediate trigger very often appears as some relatively minor act of the police which unites a crowd in indignation against them; but such tipping-points do not come out of the blue – rather, they are themselves produced from some escalating dynamic, in which a crowd can certainly play an active role.

 – A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats, Endnotes #3

On the ‘other side’ of the Left, the spark is still lit except its being used for warmth rather than a way out of the dark. Some anarchists, marxists, all stripes of radicals have resigned themselves to another 4 years of the same, as if Trump does not mark a change in US politics. Much of what Trump ran on were things already running. Mass incarceration was started by Clinton, mass deportations have peaked to historic highs under Obama, and there’s no need for a wall since a fence has been built since the 90s (3). While all true, this stance ignores the overall movement that got Trump into power. It ignores the emboldened far-right getting more active over the past year or so. Neo-Nazis, the Klan, and White Supremacists trying to launch one National Front in Harrisburg earlier this month, the anti-fascist battle of Stone Mountain in Georgia, the Nazis who stabbed several anti-fascists out in Sacramento, and all the violent attacks against individuals.

Many of our friends are torn between repeating the same failed activities, or just ceding more ground to the far-right thinking they’re no different from neoliberals. Maybe we need new friends outside the Left to deal with this ever changing political terrain.

---

The Left is Dead, Long Live the Post-Left!

The secret is to really begin.
–At Daggers Drawn

We could go on again about how the lines have been drawn, but this is obvious every time they are crossed or redrawn (4).­  It has never been about who has the right ideas or comes from the right background, revolution can only be made by those who revolt (5)! Movements can not survive being ideologically homogenous, movements survive by continuously being able to refresh itself with new ideas and tactics. We can not maintain momentum only working alongside those who use the same language as us, who use the same coffeeshops, and have the same haircuts. We learn this lesson every time the streets are taken back.

You are waiting for the revolution! Very well! My own began along time ago! When you are ready — God, what an endless wait! — it won’t nauseate me to go along the road awhile with you!

– Renzo Novatore

---

Reportback from the Yinzurrection (11/8-9)

From “You Can’t Stop the Revolution, Late-Night March Against Trump“:

“To the hundreds of kids that spontaneously gathered in opposition to a Trump presidency last night, we’ve spent our entire college careers looking for you! It figures that we’d meet only briefly, sharing no knowledge of each other outside of a collective moment of militant passion and defiance. We don’t know where you hang out, or what you do for fun, or how you balance the uncertainty of the future with the anxiety of the everyday. But we want to. We hope that someday soon we’ll find each other again, if only to enjoy another chance at cheering each other on as we confront the political manifestation of a Fox News article’s comments section.
[…]

We could take over the lobby of Posvar and convert it into a Free Store, where we would share and exchange textbooks, toiletries, clothes, food, ideas, tactics, strategies. We could throw parties in Market, taking turns cooking free food for students, workers, and faculty alike, and then doing our own damn dishes afterwards. We could finally unclench our fists and pass around a fat-ass blunt on the rooftops of a newly autonomous dormitory, because this really could be our campus if we keep creating more situations that attract those that are ready to fight. If only for a few days, we could create another world here and now, become the long-awaited, uncontrollable crisis of priorities that forces those in power to make real changes—like students are doing in Montreal, Santiago, London, Oaxaca, Athens, Paris, Rome…

In the meantime, we look forward to screaming our hearts out by your side, laughing and crying because holy shit those ignorant fuckbois preaching hate actually won…”

Make America Great Again???? pic.twitter.com/XQW2935NEo

— The Fourth Wave (@the_fourthwave) November 9, 2016

---

Reportback from the East Liberty/Shadyside march (11/9)

Account from a straggler: I arrived at the march late, when the crowd had just taken the streets. Apparently they had gone for a walk already and came back to tell the cops how they feel. The crowd takes off, snaking around the neighborhood, the police stand with some distance to the protesters until around 9:30 when a few calls for the crowd to disperse comes from some police loudspeaker. The crowd mostly responds with laughs and snarky comments, how are you gonna disperse a crowd that hasn’t broken the law? The crowd turns the corner from South Graham to Centre Ave, when police in riot gear take up the front line of police.

Without warning, two smoke canisters were dropped in-between the riot police and protesters, who were corralled into the parking lot adjacent to Wendy’s. Words get exchanged between police and the crowd, and bystanders and police. Police start telling people around to go away as if nothing just happened.

“Can you believe this is happening in Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh! Police using gas in our city,” someone walking by said to me (6). Yeah, I can believe it, the police union backed Trump. I just didn’t expect it to be tonight of all nights. Cameras are out as half the bystanders start live streaming. After a tense ten minutes, the crowd breaks out through the Wendy’s parking lot and continues to snake around police cruisers. Myself and few others gather together and get distance from the rest of the march, fearing another kettle attempt. The march ends where it began, and we wait to see if any of our loved ones and comrades got snatched. Thankfully everyone got away and no arrests were made tonight.

---

Hillman Library Banner Drop 11/10

Yesterday, November 10th, three pissed-off queer women set out to do a banner drop and protest outside of the Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh. The banner read “Unite Against Fascism// Fuck Trump.” Two of us stood on the balcony behind the banner giving speeches and starting chants while a small crowd assembled below.

“We have to stop letting these fuckers control our lives. It may feel like we’ve lost, but we were never made to win. This government, this country, this society cannot survive without widespread violence and oppression… We can protect each other better than any policeman, government or authority. This is not about Trump, this is so much bigger than that!”

There were about 10 people chanting with us here and there, a handful of trump supporters shouting “Build the Wall,” and plenty of police.

Less than ten minutes in, a few police officers approached the people with the megaphone demanding that they take the banner down. They refused. As officers started gathering behind the banner, we started chanting “show me what a police state looks like,” followed by a few voices echoing “this is what a police state looks like,” and “Stand up, stand up, we want freedom, freedom, tell those racist-ass cops we don’t need em, need em.”
Around this time, a person who appeared to be a detective hand picked someone from the crowd who was not directly involved in the protest and ID’d them. Shortly after, a few officers took the banner down.

The three of us set out to do this spontaneously, not knowing how to do anything except act in the face of the fucked up reality that still feels like a dream. We didn’t want to lose any organizing traction that we seemed to have gained through the unfortunate circumstances, we wanted to maintain the energy of a pissed off campus, ready to revolt, that we witnessed the few nights before. We wanted to attract comrades, motivate people and make connections, and unite students on our campus against fascism. While we certainly had some supporters, and some people threw up their fists while passing, we were also met with plenty of head-shakes and laughs.

But what this action really gave us was an important reminder about surveillance. As the crowd was standing below, uniformed officials started photographing our faces, writing down our information and pointing microphones at us. A non-uniformed individual approached one of the people who was using the megaphone, asking questions about the protest and previous protests that happened that week, while someone in a uniform less than 10 feet away pointed a cell-phone at them. An undercover? Who can say.

What we know is that we’re being watched. Many of our friends or random students whose appearances fit the state’s idea of what a student protester looks like have been stopped and IDed, emailed, called and photographed. The police have been more and more aggressive since Trump’s election, which we shouldn’t be surprised by. This is state repression. If we ever had freedom (we didn’t), we certainly won’t now. It is more important now than ever to remember that we are being surveilled, and it is are important now than ever to resist, revolt, hold hands and fight back.

---

Fractions and Factions Run Deep

After the anti-Trump march on the 9th, Mayor Bill Peduto was reprimanded by the president of the police officers’ union for yelling at police officers and the commander for using smoke canisters.

“Police were there trying to keep control of a situation that was potentially spiraling out of control. They acted appropriately, and the mayor intervened. And in my opinion, that was unprofessional. and and dangerous,” Bob Swartzwelder said.

A little anxiety after four police officers were injured during the anti-Trump protests back in April. 

“These were kids that were marching and demonstrating the First Amendment of this country, and there was no need to use smoke and there was no need to use helmets,” Peduto said.

Peduto also admitted that he told officers on Wednesday, “If you think it was bad under Cam, it’s going to get worse.”

Looks like the mayor has a soft spot for soft policing strategies, unlike the police union that endorsed the candidate the crowd was against. Whatever happened to police chief Cameron McLay anyways?

Pittsburgh Police Chief Cameron McLay said he would step down on Tuesday (Nov. 8th), weeks after the union representing his department’s active and retired officers held a vote of “no confidence” in him.

Mayor Bill Peduto appointed McLay in September 2014 to head the Pittsburgh police force and work on improving relations between the department and the city’s many minority residents.
[…]
In speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in late July, McLay called for reforms of the criminal justice system to bring about greater fairness in policing across the country.
“Without question, the criminal justice system has had a disparate impact on our communities of color,” McLay said in his speech. “We can respect and support our police officers while at the same time pushing for these important criminal justice reforms.”
[…]
In September, the union representing the Pittsburgh’s 900 police officers and 900 retired officers cast a majority “no confidence” vote on McLay’s ability to lead the department.

The Post-Gazette writes,

Officer Swartzwelder said 459 officers — a little more than 60 percent of those who were eligible — voted on the no confidence issue. Of those 459 officers, 421 said they did not have confidence in Chief McLay. Sixteen officers indicated they do have confidence in the chief, and 22 abstained.

“We needed somebody, as Chief McLay called it, the wrecking ball chief to come in and be able to build reform and that helped to pave the way to where we are now with a data driven police force, a community relations police focus of community policing,” Peduto said.

And let’s not forget back in January 2015, McLay had his picture taken holding a sign saying “I resolve to challenge racism @ work #end white silence.”

The photo sparked outrage and accusations from some, including Pittsburgh police union president Howard McQuillan. “The chief is calling us racists. He believes the Pittsburgh Police Department is racist. This has angered a lot of officers.”

We don’t miss McLay. We don’t buy Peduto’s political posturing. However, the growing ideological schism between the police and the State is worth noting, as it’s not isolated to Pittsburgh. To do what we do best and quote CrimethInc yet again,

In response to the uprisings of the past few years, we are seeing police—and the subset of middle-class America from which many of them are drawn—beginning to conceive of their interests as distinct from the rest of the state structure. In 2011, during the peak of Occupy Oakland, Mayor Jean Quan wrestled with the Oakland Police Department, which repeatedly asserted a contrary agenda. Something similar occurred between the NYPD and Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York City last winter, when New York City police carried out an unofficial strike demanding more unconditional support from the government—in effect, demanding the freedom to employ violence with impunity. After the Baltimore uprising, there was a lot of grumbling among Maryland police who blamed their superiors for not permitting them to use more violence against demonstrators.

This kind of frustration could give rise to new racist movements that will understand themselves as needing to take the law into their own handsin order to maintain law and order and defend private property. Something similar has occurred in Greece with the emergence of the fascist party Golden Dawn, which now counts a great part of the country’s police officers in its ranks. That makes it especially ominous that the Oath Keepers, a paramilitary organization of former policemen and soldiers, have made repeated appearances at demonstrations in Ferguson.

We see a political landscape that has always been defined by factionalism and faux-unity through nationalism. We see the election as a spark that reveals this factionalism to those of us who aren’t perpetually pissed off. Let’s turn this spark into a wildfire. Across the United States riots, walkouts, vandalism, highway blockades, and refusals have taken place in almost every metropole (New Orleans, Philadelphia, DC, Kansas City, New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Austin, Minnesota, we could go on). As always, we (the ones who turn the “not our president!” chants to “no one is our president!”) must keep up the tension and coordinate together. Not that any affinity group or organization should be subordinate or responsible to another, but to turn our spontaneous refusals and blockades into a unified revolt.

Not whether we accomplish anarchism today tomorrow or within ten centuries, but that we walk towards anarchism today tomorrow and always.

– Errico Malatesta, Toward Anarchism

For a university against itself,
Pittsburgh autonomous student network & Friends

Footnotes:
1: As if we could call the Democrats “opposition”, but the threat of jailing political opposition should alert everyone.
2: Let’s be honest, The Guardian is only good every now and then.
3:The wall Trump means does not have to be physical though. White nationalism and national trade-protectionism, two of main planks of the Trump platform, thrive on xenophobia and concessions to the white American working class.
4:Unless you’re among the classes who either don’t feel the violence of capitalism’s restructuring or are the new rising class of restructuring.
5: Must be noted that revolt is not just taking the streets. Revolt is personal and collective. Revolt is healing, love, rage, all kinds of cathartic expressions. Beyond retaking the streets and blocking traffic, we must care for each other. Collective dinners, venting sessions, bonfires, how that takes shape is up to you.
6: It should be noted that at the time, bystanders and passersby thought the police dropped tear gas not a smoke cannister.

There is no denying the severity of our situation. The systemic and violent oppression of women, people of color, the LGBTQ* community, the 99%, neurodivergent folks, and countless other marginalized identity groups is about to escalate. It’s time we escalate in return.

---

---

Late last night, around a thousand Pitt students and Pittsburghers flooded into the streets. Some of us answered The Fourth Wave‘s call to action, others gathered spontaneously. We built barricades to obstruct the police tails. We attempted to occupy the Cathedral of Learning and Hillman in order to shut down campus and create a hub for organizing sustained resistance. We wrote this shit mad drunk at 5am because fuck this noise about “tolerance” – it’s time to revolt!

We are three pissed off queers, and we do not speak on behalf of anyone but ourselves. We hope that many, many more of you release statements, communiqués, strategic proposals, and calls to action so we can build a dialogue and figure out where we go from here. That 1am march was lit af, but we have work to do. Change is not a television show where two racist millionaires desperately try to convince their audience that the other is more racist. Change is not a woke-ass facebook post. Change is a rupture in the spectacle of what they call peace.

To Our Friends,
To the hundreds of kids that spontaneously gathered in opposition to a Trump presidency last night, we’ve spent our entire college careers looking for you! It figures that we’d meet only briefly, sharing no knowledge of each other outside of a collective moment of militant passion and defiance. We don’t know where you hang out, or what you do for fun, or how you balance the uncertainty of the future with the anxiety of the everyday. But we want to. We hope that someday soon we’ll find each other again, if only to enjoy another chance at cheering each other on as we confront the political manifestation of a Fox News article’s comments section.

But we also hope to know you by more than our shared practices of self-defense and intolerance of bigotry. Imagine what we’re capable of should we meet again on our own terms? The administration and its police recognize the threat: that’s why cops have been profiling and harassing any students that even look like they might oppose Trump, that’s why Vice Provost & Dean of Students Kenyon Bonner sent out a super sexy photo of himself with a plea for students to tolerate the rise of fascism. There’s a question that they’re scared we might ask: what if instead of endlessly talking about tuition hikes and their inherent racism and classism, or the terrible wages of Pitt workers and adjunct professors, or Pitt’s investments in environmentally destructive industries, or the administration’s utter inaction in the face of campus rape culture, or the fact that this election is trash… what if we instead decided to do something about it ourselves? No more dead-end negotiations and debates, no more polite “thank-you’s” for the free t-shirts and the new recycling bins and the years of indentured servitude spent working off student debt and the promise of a stable life in a perpetually shrinking job market, no more wishing Bernie was here to save us. What if we started taking concrete steps towards actual fucking revolution?

We could take over the lobby of Posvar and convert it into a Free Store, where we would share and exchange textbooks, toiletries, clothes, food, ideas, tactics, strategies. We could throw parties in Market, taking turns cooking free food for students, workers, and faculty alike, and then doing our own damn dishes afterwards. We could finally unclench our fists and pass around a fat-ass blunt on the rooftops of a newly autonomous dormitory, because this really could be our campus if we keep creating more situations that attract those that are ready to fight. If only for a few days, we could create another world here and now, become the long-awaited, uncontrollable crisis of priorities that forces those in power to make real changes—like students are doing in Montreal, Santiago, London, Oaxaca, Athens, Paris, Rome…

In the meantime, we look forward to screaming our hearts out by your side, laughing and crying because holy shit those ignorant fuckbois preaching hate actually won…

[our lazy asses reworded most of this from “Fascist Scum, Off Our Campus!” after last night’s events…hopefully other people will take the time to write something original]

[photo cred to The Pitt News]

 

Originally posted to End The Institution! Convergence

---

Time to get the ball rolling….

We live in a civil war, fought on numerous social terrains. The opposing forces are well supplied with weapons from the establishment and their grounding hegemony. While we are skeptical of naming a core actor, in our own location this hegemony is built around West Virginia University and the spectacle it maintains.

While WVU promotes its #RespectfulMountaineer campaign as a patronizing reaction to the police-instigated Baylor Riots of 2014, it turns a blind eye to the systemic rape of women on campus . The Greek system, as on many other campuses, is allowed to run a campaign of social terror on women, queers, and anyone else not interested in their creepy bourgeois rituals and violent masculinity. Our current living situation is abysmal. Rents are skyrocketing and absentee landlords let houses fall into complete disrepair. The university flows public money into private hands and raises tuition for poor appalachian students every year. So what are we to do? Ask them for better policies, run for student government, or maybe even write up a petition?

We reject this completely.

We do not expect anything of the institution that we combat. This is not some idealized “conversation” occurring in a neutral space, a debate in an old french salon between two good citizens. We understand the immense powers of WVU and refuse to engage in a rigged conversation because of our own poor experiences and the well-documented experiences of others in this struggle.

No conversation on rape will end rape on campus. No conversation on gentrification will end the trend of rising rents. No conversation on police brutality will end police brutality. The only way forward is pointing out the perpetrators and destroying the apparatuses that allow for this to occur.

Who are these perpetrators? Landlords, frat bros, college administrators, cops, gentrifying entrepreneurs and the whole rotten lot. We know the buildings and spaces these people occupy. We know the property they own and the institutions they maintain. So we propose, what if it is time to go on attack?

Yet, to go on the offensive, to establish a forward stance, we have to make contact with others who also recognize their enemies. Abolition is on the table across our milieu; it applies as much to prisons as it does to the grand university. So many of us have been scarred by the institution of the university, it is paramount for us to organize this attack while proposing new forms, experiments, and alternatives. To this end, we are calling for a convergence of interested parties in April 2017 so we can discuss the next steps for people invested in ending the institution itself.

So we have to ask “which side are you on?”

[Trigger Warning – discussion of sexual assault, racist violence, anti-queer violence]

---

Weeks after Trump kicked off his campaign by falsely alleging that Mexican migrants are criminals and rapists, two brothers in Boston beat a 58-year-old houseless Mexican national with a metal pole, pissing on his limp body when they were done. “Donald Trump was right,” they explained to the police, “all these illegals need to be deported.”

Instead of condemning that brutality, Trump excused it by saying “people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again.” But the problem is less about Trump, and more about the ideological mobilization that has put him in the position to legitimize, and thus encourage, such overtly racist, violent, and proto-fascist tendencies.

– PGH Student Solidarity Coalition (PSSC), in Reality isn’t Safe

---

Fascist Scum, Off Our Campus!

Resistance to school-sanctioned bigotry at the University of Pittsburgh

What’s the purpose of free speech, if not to foster a world free from oppression? Fascists oppose this vision; thus we oppose fascism by any means necessary.

– “Free Speech FAQ“

In the past two weeks at Pitt, we’ve shared ghost stories around campfires that we sparked with stolen electoral campaign signs from all political parties. We’ve cried in front of strangers and cheered each other on as we took turns shouting down the Pitt College Republicans outside of the library. We’ve kicked racists, sexists, and queer-phobes out of Halloween parties with both intelligent arguments and the occasional fist. We’ve graffiti-bombed racist propaganda and flipped over the tables of pro-Trump canvassers. We’ve seen glimpses of the future that’s offered to us, and then stumbled into an alleyway to piss all over it.

“We” don’t necessarily remember all of these stories, share a political disposition, or even know each others’ names. “We” is just a name for this sudden, transient inclination towards defiance, or some shit like that. Filler has heard a lot of inspiring anecdotes over the past few weeks, but we’ve also noticed that the far-right students at Pitt have monopolized the narrative over what is happening. On Halloween, we heard about yet another entirely spontaneous action and decided we’d try our hand at unpacking the situation. “We” don’t speak on behalf of anyone except those that resonate with our interpretation of their actions. To our friends we don’t yet know: keep turning shit up!

First things first: “But what about free speeeeech” is a hollow, vapid, bullshit argument against shutting down Trump supporters.

“Free speech” means the federal government cannot censor your speech; it does not mean consequence-free speech, and it’s a kind of just a sick joke anyway when we live in a society where nearly all media is controlled by the same corporate elite that bought out our government.

But that’s besides the point. What started last week with a few kids and a flipped table is now a recurring breach in the banality of midterms, personal drama, and social media echo chambers. On Monday, the haze of a Halloween hangover gave way to a brief moment of catharsis, of latent tension rising to the surface; a potential to confront more than just a racist student group, but also the larger framework of how we conceive of social change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEJS0ShXBck

Change is not a television show where two racist millionaires desperately try to convince their audience that the other is more racist. Change is not a woke-ass facebook post. Change is a rupture in the spectacle of what they call peace.

To the Fence-Sitters and the Liberals,
No idea exists in some academic bubble. If the alt-right / far-right platform is not confronted, their hate speech and ignorance will be perceived as legitimate discourse—or worse, normalized. Last February in the WPU ballroom, rightwing students applauded as Milo Yiannopoulos claimed that rape culture doesn’t exist, that unwanted groping is just “normal human sexuality,” that the actual definition of assault is a liberal conspiracy. As of October, the well-documented sexual violence of their presidential candidate is now justified as “locker-room talk”—normal sexual behavior. We’re barely scratching the surface here. Let’s keep the pressure on, or else their rhetoric and actions will only continue to embolden and rationalize the already-existing violence of campus rape culture, racism, and anti-queer hate.

If Trumpers continue to embolden, politicize, and publicly organize the assholes that think that shit’s ok, then they might build the material force needed to turn their ideas into reality. With enough numbers, they could work to keep undocumented students out of the classroom, undermine police accountability efforts, ban practicing Muslims from campus grounds, discredit survivors of assault, push survivors out of school by eliminating safe spaces and trigger warnings, deny trans students what little they have gained… maybe even get a fascist elected to the presidency. 

As the kids at UNC remind us,

“Debate only has meaning when we are prepared to act on our beliefs, to take risks beyond those of the classroom… Debate has substance when it occurs in an honest context that reflects the daily, physical conflicts occurring inside and outside of the University. Discussion and critique must be imbued with the urgency of real life.”

This is why we’re seeing debates on Pitt’s campus around issues of speech, the election, capitalism, the environment, white supremacy, patriarchy, and borders grow in depth and analysis ever since the confrontations. It’s happening in between classes, at Halloween parties in South O, on Towers Patio, all across campus; finally, people are starting to give a shit about just how fucked up the global political climate is. Hell, this wave of debates almost broke through the routine of passive-aggressive irony found on forums like Overheard at Pitt and r/Pitt.

To Our Friends,
To the dozens of kids that spontaneously gathered in opposition to the Trump table outside Hillman, we’ve spent our entire college careers looking for you! It figures that we’d meet only briefly, sharing no knowledge of each other outside of a collective moment of (possibly cringe-worthy) passion and defiance. We don’t know where you hang out, or what you do for fun, or how you balance the uncertainty of the future with the anxiety of the everyday. But we want to. We hope that someday soon we’ll find each other again, if only to enjoy another chance at cheering each other on as we confront the political manifestation of a Fox News article’s comments section.

But we also hope to know you by more than our shared practices of self-defense and intolerance of bigotry. Imagine what we’re capable of should we meet again on our own terms?

The administration and its police recognize the threat: that’s why cops have been profiling and harassing any students that even look like they might oppose Trump, that’s why Vice Provost & Dean of Students Kenyon Bonner sent out a super sexy photo of himself with a plea for students to tolerate the rise of fascism. There’s a question that they’re scared we might ask: what if instead of endlessly talking about tuition hikes and their inherent racism and classism, or the terrible wages of Pitt workers and adjunct professors, or Pitt’s investments in environmentally destructive industries, or the administration’s utter inaction in the face of campus rape culture, or the fact that this election is trash… what if we instead decided to do something about it ourselves? No more dead-end negotiations and debates, no more polite “thank-you’s” for the free t-shirts and the new recycling bins and the years of indentured servitude spent working off student debt and the promise of a stable life in a perpetually shrinking job market, no more wishing Bernie was here to save us. What if we started taking concrete steps towards actual fucking revolution?

We could take over the lobby of Posvar and convert it into a Free Store, where we would share and exchange textbooks, toiletries, clothes, food, ideas, tactics, strategies. We could throw parties in Market, taking turns cooking free food for students, workers, and faculty alike, and then doing our own damn dishes afterwards. We could finally unclench our fists and pass around a fat-ass blunt on the rooftops of a newly autonomous dormitory, because this really could be our campus if we keep creating more situations that attract those that are ready to fight. If only for a few days, we could create another world here and now, become the long-awaited, uncontrollable crisis of priorities that forces those in power to make real changes—like students are doing in Montreal, Santiago, London, Oaxaca, Athens, Paris, Rome…

In the meantime, we look forward to screaming our hearts out by your side, laughing and crying because holy shit those ignorant fuckbois preaching hate are actually real people, wtf??

To Our Enemies,
To the Trump supporters and other fascists: there’s no point in mincing words.What’s most upsetting to us is that Trump is not acting outside of the ideology and practice of the liberal establishment. With every headline scandalizing his latest xenophobic comment, the Obama administration sets a new world-record in deportations. After every Republican’s warmongering, Washington expands the scope of the surveillance state. Every racist right-winger is matched tenfold by both the Clinton and Obama administration in mass incarceration and prison slavery. The neoliberal restructuring of the economy is increasingly leaning towards self-employment within the service and sharing economy, the techies are invading Pittsburgh, and yet somehow y’all don’t think the Democrats are capitalist enough for you?

We have two different visions of the future, and they are in direct conflict with one another. Y’all can snitch to the cops all you want—we’re not gonna stop disrupting your shit and kicking you out of parties.

To the editors of the new right-wing campus newspaper, the Maverick: Really? An Ayn Rand book review? And you call us cringey.

To the Pitt administration and the Pitt Police: Last December, a couple friends brought hot food, some boxes of clothing, textbooks, and zines into Towers lobby to give away for free. They were kicked out within half an hour of setting up, and Pitt Police tried to grab and interrogate two of them.

A Pitt cop chased everyone out the door, frantically squawking into his radio, flailing his free arm and demanding they come back to face the consequences. At the time, these friends lived in Towers. They had set out to use a communal student space to help their classmates, and they were greeted with the threat of police violence. 

Last February, the Pitt College Republicans hosted Milo Yiannopoulos with the aid of University funding and the armed protection of the Pitt Police. Milo is the de facto spokesperson of the “alt-right,” a white nationalist movement. Twice in the past week, supporters of a racist, misogynist, xenophobic presidential candidate called the cops on students, and the police were more than happy to profile and detain queer students, seize their IDs, and then present the seized IDs to the Republican organizers.

these trump bros can't table without having to call the cops to come save their asses every time lmao #FuckTrump #antifa

— SCAM 🏴 Pittsburgh (@scam_pgh) October 31, 2016

https://twitter.com/antigone1997/status/793161195536674816?lang=en

This comes as no surprise considering both the national and Pittsburgh local of the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Trump. Of course the occupying forces of white supremacy will conspire with the fascists on campus, build files on leftist and anarchist student organizers, and repress counter-hegemonic social movements. But many of us are disappointed in the administration’s  apparent endorsement of alt-right and fascist organizing on campus, and those of us in the autonomous student network have lost all patience.

After Trump came to Pittsburgh last April, some friends released a communiqué that might contextualize the recent confrontations on Pitt’s campus. There is a global civil war unfolding, from the streets of Paris and Santiago to the warzones of Rojava and Standing Rock. We fully intend to put Pittsburgh on the front lines.

It is our belief that recent events have marked a shift in the political struggle of this country. More and more of the populace has fled mainstream political forces for “outsiders” seen as on the fringe, such as Trump and Bernie Sanders. We see a demarcation developing between the Left and the Right – between those who support corporate control of resources, the expulsion of non-Whites, and increased police militarization for urban pacification, and those who support individual autonomy, collective ownership of resources, and racial and socioeconomic justice…

As we saw inside Trump’s campaign event in Chicago, on the streets of Minneapolis, and in downtown Pittsburgh the other night, militant physical conflict between these two forces – between those who wish to maintain white supremacy, and those who wish to see its abolition, has come into the open and forefront of American political discourse. We see an opportunity here to forcefully attack both the dominant American political structures while at the same time fighting back the far-Right tendencies that we see with Donald Trump’s rise to political fame.

It is our hope that the threat posed by the white supremacist Right, as well as the exploitation of the opportunities that we speak of, can help our movements to more clearly place ourselves in the struggle for liberation. Militant self-defense from authoritarianism can help grant us the individual and collective autonomy necessary for any liberatory revolt to occur. We see this as a time for libertarian anti-capitalists to learn to take seriously the threat posed by the new Right and to take the steps necessary to forcefully fight the structures of white supremacy. This is not a time for the introspection and critical self-reflection of the popular anti-racist praxis, but a time for mutual self-defense and collective force against the American white supremacist system of apartheid.

The time has come to Burn the American Plantation.

---

Further reading:

The Divorce of Thought from Deed (UNC)

Written by students at UNC in the fall of 2009, The Divorce of Thought from Deed is a story about sustained student resistance to a racist campus organization called YWC, or Youth for Western Civilization. After a militant anti-racist campaign, the group was essentially driven off campus – despite the University’s best efforts to protect it for the sake of “free speech”.

On a most basic level, this piece asserts that the equality of actors intrinsic to the “marketplace of ideas” is a myth only made possible by the illusion of the University’s separation from the rest of society.

Filler #4 (Pitt)

The fourth issue of Filler explores the growing resistance to the patriarchy at Pitt and covers a lot of the same shit as this piece, but in greater depth.

“Why ‘No Platform’ is still relevant: the trouble with liberal ‘anti-fascism’” (LibCom.org)

An excerpt:
The other side of the coin, in terms of why anti-fascism cannot be boiled down to a battle of ideas is that fascism is an ideology rooted in violence. It is hard to reason with those kicking your head in or gunning you down as you run for your life. And of course it is the white, middle class liberal advocating freedom of speech for Nazis who is least likely to be on the receiving end of such attacks.

Bad ideas ought to be challenged, yes, and giving the state a mandate for repression is a bad idea in any case. However, this is not an argument against no platform but one in favour of it.

If this seems counter-intuitive, it is because outside of militant circles the concept of no platform has been boiled down to simply not letting Nazis air their views. To liberals, this means censorship. In practice, however, no platform is so much more – namely, direct action that prevents fascists from gaining a platform to organise.