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?”

Filler received this message from a newly formed crew of radical youth living just a few hours away in Morgantown, West Virginia (you know, WVU town). We’re looking forward to hearing more from them, and especially looking forward to throwing down together when shit gets real! Check out their tumblr HERE.

Just south of Pittsburgh, in the college town of Morgantown West Virginia, the Morgantown Ultra Left Network is being formed. We have lived and worked here for some time now and have made the decision to strike out on our own. While we have had successes, we collectively made the decision to break out after many bad experiences trying to work with authoritarian leftists. At the time, “left unity” was what brought us together. Quickly that fell apart and became just another shell for old school Marxist-Leninist party building and movement stealing.

This is a new chapter for us and the Appalachian region. As we fight the rising fascism in West Virginia, gentrification in all its major cities, over bearing local and state police forces, privatization of education, and the extractivist regime, we send out a call to all fellow travelers who want to be involved in liberating Appalachia and building a better world. Our Appalachia is not romanticized: we live on colonized land, racism and the erasure of Black Appalachians continues, transphobia and homophobia is institutionalized. We have much work to do, but it’s worth it. We hope this message finds you well!

-Morgantown Ultra Left Network (MULN)

MORGANTOWN ULTRA LEFT NETWORK

It’s time for the big reveal!

There is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another… There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. 

– Gilles Deleuze

This group was born from lessons learned. The big tent doesn’t seem to work so well, it falters under the strain of bad faith and bad tactics.

Instead of speaking to our truth, we are forced to build consensus. But consensus doesn’t work in these conditions. It just leads to concessions.

Capitalism has evolved beyond the need for orthodox Marxism.  Marx is a friend and a teacher to the left, but is not its master.  The Earth has changed since the 1860s, and the left will either evolve or become just another means of control for the subjugated “masses.”

The libertarian strains of socialism have offered a viable alternative to rigid Marxian dogma since the latter’s inception and continue to do so today.

Governments lie and cheat, steal and kill, just like capitalists and racists and authoritarians of all stripes.  If any dialectic can signify the totality of history, it must be based on authority and subjugation, but this only indicates how vacuous the terms become here.

We are derided as life-stylists and petit-bourgeois, and at the same time called reformists. The work we value is put down as idealist and childish. Our values of building socialist space, being honest, and horizontalism have been abused and co-opted for authoritarian aims.

It is not possible to work and live like this any longer.

We have to venture on a new path, independent of authoritarianism and inter-community subjugation. Let us develop something new together!