We are queer and trans. Our existence clashes against the gender binary, and its crushing grip which polices our bodies and threatens our safety. The ways that we live—relate to one another, dress, gesture, and dream—are all in inherent subversion to that binary, which seeks to classify, erase, separate, and homogenize us. In turn, we fight for spaces free from gendered expectations, places where we can function and thrive in peace.
These demands are no different than what any person or creature desires: We wish to be ourselves without falling victim to demonization, violence, or death.
Nightshade stands in solidarity with the autonomous actors freeing the University of Pittsburgh’s bathrooms from the gender binary. For years students have been petitioning Pitt to institute consistent and widespread all gender bathrooms. But we lost trust in the University’s ability to protect us long ago—let’s not forget when they allowed Milo on campus, or condoned Pitt police officers beating student protesters (meanwhile continuing to place students in years of crippling student debt), or the countless occurrences where they have neglected acts of sexual and gendered violence on campus. The University seeks to serve itself. Thus what is needed must be taken—not asked for.
All gender bathrooms are needed. Places so overtly reserved for “men” and “women” are unsafe for those of us who do not explicitly pass, or do not identify as such. We take pride in the glorious uniqueness of our bodies, our gender expression and our personal identities. We do not wish to conform to the boring roles broader society assigns to ”men” and “women,” and we see how that order directly upholds patriarchy.
The requirement to assimilate in order to fulfill the basic need of using a public restroom denies us the ability to be safely visible, hence continuing this process of erasure and setting the stage for increased gendered violence on campus. While recent “diversity” measures push professors to ask students for their pronouns, in denying the proposals for all gender bathrooms, Pitt holds the needs of its trans*queer students hostage, and is still an active agent forcing those students to conform to gendered expectations.
We will not be fooled – Pitt is a blatant and knowing enemy in our fight for trans-liberation.
Nightshade beckons the University to respond: Why are you, University officials, holding this basic need of your trans*queer students hostage?
What a shit show it would become if you were denied safe access to bathrooms…
Nightshade supports the autonomous actors taking matters of trans-liberation into their own hands. We should not need to assimilate to normative gender presentations in order to use the bathroom, and we stand against anyone who forces that upon us.
Gender is dead! Trans-queer liberation, not assimilation! All power to the imagination!
Statement received on 1/25/18
Stay tuned for updates & replies to right-wing statements.
Trigger warning for racism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, r*pe jokes, csa, and more.
It should come as no surprise that racism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, and other hateful ideologies have been festering at this colonist institution since its inception. However, in the past year, coinciding with the election of Donald Trump, these ideologies have been on greater display in our campus community. We’ve seenfascist postings all over, cops protecting anti-immigrant speakers hosted by racist student groups rather than undocumented students, arrests of nonviolent protesters, swastikas drawn on car windows in the snow, and countless more instances of fascist organizing on this campus. Many of these instances are anonymous or function with the backing of armed agents of the State (paid with our tuition dollars) to do their dirty work. It hasn’t been until now that we can put names and faces to some of the sources of hate at the University of Pittsburgh. In the past few weeks our collective of anti-racist, anti-fascist friends and organizers have been compiling various screen shots and other evidence that ties members of the Pitt College Republicans and alt-right publication Polis Media to disturbing memes, jokes, and genocide apologia as well as r*pe joke including ones targeting some of the most vulnerable members of society – children and incarcerated persons.
Update: An editor at Polis Media has taken down the website and all related accounts in an attempt to keep his name clean. We see you Sam Bleifer, AKA Bleifbart from The Unsafe Place.
Update 1/26 – Second Statement Received from @PittRacists
A lot has happened in the past 48 hours since the @pittracists page went up. Our proudest accomplishment was that Polis Media (formerly The Unsafe Place) has wiped itself entirely from the internet. Their Facebook, Twitter, and website all seem to have disappeared. Apparently the founder & former editor in chief Sam Bleifer, covering his own ass, took it into his own hands to erase his racist right wing publication from existence. Good riddance!
Before they could delete their posts we did get some screen shots of their bullshit statements. They accused us of being “radicals” & “extremists” for making public their own posts. Interestingly, editor in chief Arnaud Armstrong also said that he expects more screenshots to come forward so presumably he knows of more instances of his friends (and those he platformed at Polis) sharing neo-nazi propaganda.
We also got a response from the Pitt College Republicans. They claim that they were made aware of this screenshots “earlier this year.” The e-board of CR saw these screenshots last September and at least one of their officers (Devon Valinsky) was a member of the original groupme where the racist images were shared.
They also referred to the people called out on our account as “former members” when their last post on Facebook showed a picture of a meeting within the past week that featured both Kirk Briner and Devon Valinsky. They claim they were “reprimanded immediately” and have been “formally removed” from membership. However, they’ve know about these screenshots for months and have still been allowed at meetings and events. So the College Republicans must be referring to removing them immediately after they were publicly caught sharing racist propaganda, not after actually doing it.
They go on to whine about “violent leftists” and other antifascists. They reference anarchists threatening “local conservatives” with AK-47s. We agree that was nice to see some honesty out of the College Republicans for once as they are admitting that they consider Identity Evropa, a literal neo-nazi white supremacist organization founded by violent racist Nathan Damigo, a part of their category of “local conservatives” that advance “conservative values” like they do.
[PCR and Polis Statements can be read below]
specifically those who associate with the Pitt College Republicans & alt-right publication Polis Media have been involved in various secret groups where they share genocide apologia & other racist “jokes”
Julia wants to grow up to be a federal judge, presumably to lord power over people of color. Poor Julia, I hope this stuff never gets out! pic.twitter.com/a7ioBF0Y2I
First is from Arnaud Armstrong, former college republican, editor in chief of (the now deleted?) Polis Media, was in the groupme where racist messages were shared: pic.twitter.com/9ar6RKhYNg
the best part of this shit is that they are “expecting more to come forward” like how much Nazi shit have yinz been posting damn?? https://t.co/hme1JxTb0L
You do kind of have to wonder why so many pitt college republicans & their ilk have felt the need to block the @pittracists account… pic.twitter.com/zbnKSvlQQ2
Gotta love how they refer to Ident*ty Evr*pa – a literal neonazi group – as "local conservatives" in reference to this photo pic.twitter.com/rKCzMLmwyP
Here he is responding, “stop anon I can only get so erect” to a picture of the Pennsylvania flag mixed with the Nazi party flag that is captioned, “SOON.” pic.twitter.com/xTDJenHIfh
[Author’s Note: This piece is not an entirely finished/particularly refined and doesn’t reflect my conclusive thoughts regarding the theoretical framework I forward in it (although I read Wynter and Lacan together here, working out the tensions and transformative implications of the combination is not really the goal of this paper, and I mostly cite McGowan because he’s useful for this analysis). A friend involved with Filler requested that I submit it because of its relevance to the conversations in the Pitt community regarding student protest, and I have no intention of repeating the academic’s mistake of using activism for scholarly gain without attempting to give back. Although I’ve tried to make it a more readable for a non-academic audience, I am inexperienced when it comes to that kind of translation, (and it takes a bit more time than I have with finals season coming up). I would hope that you approach this admittedly imperfect piece as an opportunity to perhaps work through and frustrate the way that you might imagine the purpose of higher education, but that’s largely up to you. Side note for debate people: card this at your own risk (like c’mon, have at least some restraint).]
Student Protest as Improper Enjoyment
RC
Introduction On the night of November 17th 2016 at the University of Pittsburgh, a coalition of different student groups led by Pitt Against Debt staged a non-violent protest against student debt and then President-Elect Donald Trump. According to a letter to the editor published by the Pitt News and written by the Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition (2016), the protestors began by marching through the University of Pittsburgh’s Oakland Campus until they had reached the lobby of a campus dormitory, Litchfield Towers, and had a “speak-out focusing on sharing and celebrating [their stories].” Throughout the march, the students were watched by university-affiliated police in full riot gear. After the police detained a student, a group of the protestors went back to the Litchfield Towers lobby and reportedly began chanting “let him go” (Pitt News, 2016).
The police then blocked the main entrance and began to use violent force to remove students from the area and onto the patio of the dormitory, arresting two protestors in the process. Accounts of the violent confrontation between the student protestors and the university-affiliated police sharply diverge; Bill Schackner and Andrew Goldstein (2016) of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette write that “violence abruptly broke out after protesters entered the Litchfield Towers dormitory complex on Fifth Avenue when University of Pittsburgh police ordered them to leave,” in contrast to the account above that claims that the protestors had first left the building and then returned after the detainment of their fellow student (Pitt News, 2016).
My interest in the protest is not to hash out the veracity of a specific account of the protest, but rather stems from what the reaction to the protest can tell us. The chain of events should sound familiar—student protest has been met with police brutality for centuries, if accounts of the University of Paris student strike in 1229 are to be believed. But in stark contrast to an event like May ‘68, where images of the protest would have to wait at least a day until being circulated for mass consumption through newspapers, a video of the protest was posted to Facebook within an hour or two of the event. The post demanded immediate response, accumulating hundreds of comments not only from Pitt students and alumni, but also from many conservative commenters who had no tie to Pitt. The vast majority of comments are either questioning or disparaging the student protestors, building an image of the protestors as “crybabies”, “spoiled brats”, and the like. The tropes invoked by commenters to justify the violence were not made in isolation—in the weeks after the election, similar rhetoric regarding student protests against Trump could be found across different new media platforms, from comment sections on Breitbart to Twitter and Youtube.
It’s useful to think here of Wendy Chun’s (2016) argument that the temporality of new media is defined by crisis (p. 71). Crises, as events that demand real-time decision making, become the essential grease on the wheels of the neoliberal economy of information, providing a constant stream of data input that shapes how we experience the Internet (p. 71). Think about how you might experience catastrophe in print newspapers: sure, you’re active in how you put together the pieces, but you aren’t really in control of the narrative—you are but one of many in an imagined mass community of faceless strangers the newspaper is targeting. But with algorithmically driven social media platforms like Facebook, news isn’t just distributed in the same package to faceless masses—it’s supposedly tailor made for YOU, and demands that YOU are constantly participating in conversations about the crises that erupt onto your screen.
The interactivity of the newsfeed conditions users to constantly respond and make sense of crisis after crisis, caught in a never-ending loop of adjusting their habits and beliefs to orient themselves in the imagined network of connections that make up how they perceive the world (p. 73). Images, videos, and articles that portray student protest as crisis are then moments that force you to make a semi-public (social media is where the private/public dichotomy breaks apart in the most confusing ways possible) judgment about the place of the university in how you imagine the connections in the political field in the United States. As of now, student protest is a constant fixture in political news coverage, providing a stream of crises that often come to stand in for broader anxiety that stems from the (relatively bipartisan) narrative of a crisis in campus free speech, often connected to (at best) mis-guided political correctness and overzealous student activists or (at worst) “SJWs,” “cultural Marxists,” and the “regressive Left.”
As such, the broader questions that this project seeks to answer is this: how do people imagine the relationship between the university and the field of American political discourse? And what can this imagined position tell us about the structural constraints upon what students can demand and how they can demand it in academic environments? And finally, what are the ethical protocols, the unconscious symbolic commitments, that lead us to imagine the university as such? The police violence against student protestors featured in the FaceBook video functions as a crisis that is perceived to demand the commenters ethical judgment. Using the theoretical lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis, I argue that these FaceBook comments reveal an investment in a fantasy of the campus as an apolitical space of private enjoyment. The invocation of tropes of safety, legality, disruption, and civility depoliticize student’s radical democratic demands by framing them as an improper form of enjoyment that breaks the unconscious ethical injunction to private enjoyment that structures the role of public institutions in racialized neoliberalism.
The paper is split into two parts. First, I articulate a theoretical framework through which to understand neoliberalism and its function in relation to desire. If you are a reader who doesn’t have a whole lot of time and is tired of reading a definition of neoliberalism for the umpteenth time, you can afford to skim this section until you get to the bit about desire. The second part begins with a short literature review regarding neoliberalism in higher education and then moves to an analysis of the comments. I have chosen four long comments that I think are representative of the comments that negatively read the student protestors (if you believe that this is insufficient or that I was cherrypicking the comments to make my argument, then you can always check out the video and the comments yourself). I conclude with a brief discussion of the possibility that student debt could be useful in traversing the fantasy of the apolitical campus.
Neoliberalism and Enjoyment
Neoliberalism is defined by David Harvey (2006) as “the first instance a theory of political economic practices which proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, free markets and free trade” (p. 145). Generally used as a descriptive term by those who seek to critique it, the beginnings of neoliberal thought emerge from the work of Austrian and Chicago School neoclassical economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludvig von Mises, and Milton Friedman in the early to mid-20th century (p. 146). These economists begin their work with the presupposition of individual liberty and freedom as the defining aspects of the subject and thus the basis of Western civilization; they hold those two values as what must be protected at all costs from the forces of historical contingency set in motion through the tumult of the first half of the 20th century (p.151).
Not only are individual liberty and freedom the defining aspects of subject as market actor, but these economists also claimed that the only mechanism by which they could be properly protected from the likes of both the fascists and communists would be through the expansion of the market and the shrinking of the state. Within this paradigm the state becomes a force that perverts one’s subjectivity through domination, with the only solution being the subordination of the state by the market that allows the intrepid entrepreneur an equal shot at maximizing their potential through a range of choices freely made as per the direction of their life. The primary role of the state is then as the institution that facilitates, rather than intervenes in, the mechanism of the market as guide to human action (Dean, 2009, p.11). The market is defined in opposition to the state in terms of choice; within the neoliberal framework, the market maximizes one’s freedom because of the incredible range of choices that one is presented with and the flexibility to choose whichever one aligns with one’s self-interest rather than the state’s imposition of choice by force of law (p.34).
Following Sylvia Wynter’s (2014) archival and rhetorical scholarship on the origins of our present struggles, I think neoliberalism should be thought of as the currently hegemonic iteration of a much older structure of desire: coloniality, or the logic of racial difference that undergirds the world produced by capitalist, colonial modernity. For Wynter, coloniality is stitched together by the overrepresentation of an idealized figure of White Western Bourgeois Man as the primary metaphor for what it means to be human, defining the anti-Black and settler colonial contours of being, truth, power, and freedom that render the world coherent ( p. 21). And for non-academics, that line probably sounds like the kind of ridiculous sophistry that unnecessarily complicates and obscures what I mean. But think of it more like this: Wynter’s argument is that whenever people (especially those in the global middle class) invoke a universal idea of what it means to be human, they rely on the definitions and conceptions of the human that could be provincialized to Western modernity in its encounter with the Americas. Western political thought needed a way to work around the pesky ethical issue posed by slavery and native genocide, two necessary conditions for the existence of modern America, and its solution was to pretend as if black people and indigenous folks were less than human by nature, trapped by their own flesh. Wynter indicates that it is dangerous to act like saying “we” or “everybody” is something neutral and grounded in common-sense, when in fact the patterns of belief that they commit to are a product of the contingency of historical violence rather than transhistorical truth.
Wynter furthers that in global racialized neoliberalism, the subject (or the concept of the universal agent) that stands in for Man is homo oeconomicus, the rational market actor biologically determined by evolution to freely pursue their self-interest. And here is where I will resist the oft-touted charge of “post modern relativism” (whatever people mean by that): Wynter is not claiming that biology doesn’t matter, nor that it’s all just words—but rather, drawin on neuroscientific research on the co-evolution of language with the human brain, that the grounds for a new humanism, a non-modern universalism, lies in the recognition that the human is a resonance between bios and mythos, story and flesh. Neoliberal multiculturalism, with its respectable celebrations of all ethnic difference, represses the racialization of homo oeconomicus, although it becomes obvious when measured in terms of racial disparities in the market distribution of formerly public goods such as housing, healthcare, or education (Goldberg, 2009). The global middle-class is thus an ethnoclass, where class status helps determine one’s proximity to whiteness and distance from blackness. Racism shifts from a formal code of the state to the informal code of private preferences of the market, muting claims to structural racism by directing the focus of anti-racist efforts towards individual bad actors expressing misinformed private beliefs.
Homo oeconomicus is then based on the fantasy that the self-interested market actor can rationally derive its own desire, and the world of social relations created as a result are a pre-destined product of natural market equilibrium. I turn to Lacanian psychoanalysis here as a theoretical lens that might allows us to better understand the structure of desire that results from this fantasy in the symbolic structure of coloniality. Jacques Lacan is often seen to turns Freudian psychoanalysis on its head—rather than having biologically determined “true” desires that people repress to be allowed into the community, Lacan claims that our entrance into language produces desire. Language translates our needs, like hunger and thirst, into articulated demands that express what we want so that others can recognize our desire. But something is lost in that translation as the symbolic order of language constantly gets in the way of you articulating exactly what it is that you want. Think about how people stop in the middle of a conversation to “search” for the words that could enable them to express themselves; in that moment, there is an obvious disjunction between the words we must use and the things we want. Your desires, and the demands that erupt from them, are always partially pre-figured—you are thrown into a language that pre-existed you, and as it must be shared, it can never be your own. It is at the same time both alien and familiar, and the price for entrance into communal shared reality is a fundamental disconnect from the world.
Desire is structured around the lack, his term for the cut between subject and object that is inaugurated in our entrance into language. Lacan articulates three different registers of subject’s experience: the Imaginary, or the realm of fantasy in which the subject imagines their relation to the object; the Symbolic, or the linguistic economy of signifiers that determine the position of the subject and the object in discourse through the movement of meaning through tropes like metaphor and metonymy; and the Real, or the unsymbolizable contingency of mind-independent reality that intercedes to break apart the other two registers. These three registers are caught in messy entanglements, and each one is at play in the production of the subject’s desire. The subject is constituted around a drive to enjoy repetition of its failure, a painful enjoyment that Lacan terms jouissance, because without habitual misrecognition of the object of our desire in fantasies that breakdown because of the Real’s introduction of gaps in the symbolic, we could not sustain the fantasy that we have agency.
If the assumption that “self-interest” and “rationality” are co-terminous is wrongheaded, then what are the grounds for homo oeconomicus? If the subject is to maximize their self-interest through freely made choices, it must know its own desires—from whence does it find its bearings? Todd McGowan (2004) claims that the advent of capitalism, read through Sylvia Wynter as coloniality, begins to change the hegemonic structure of desire in Western civilization (p. 1). Feudal structures of desire were generally based on prohibitions and taboos derived from tradition. But the advent of capitalist, colonial modernity in the form of the Enlightenment changes that structure, shifting the ethical imperative of prohibition (“do not enjoy!”) to the ethical injunction to enjoy by pursuing your rational self-interest (p. 5).
Following Alenka Zupancic’s (2000) claim that the Enlightenment’s ethical imperatives are the manifestation of the Freudian superego that subjects identify with to enter into society, the ethical imperative of Man as homo oeconomicus is to pursue proper modes of private, individuated enjoyment. Not enjoying ones’ newfound freedom where nothing is prohibited (only regulated) entails not that something is wrong with the world, but rather with the subject themselves—being unhappy is your fault for not learning to properly enjoy (McGowan, p. 22). Enjoyment becomes a private enterprise, where the market’s influence on desire through the symbolic pre-figuration of consumer goods and lifestyle choices is repressed through the fantasy of endless enjoyment (p. 65). The imperative to enjoy then becomes the basis for social activity in a neoliberal society where the subject’s constant misrecognition of desire is buried under the command to demonstrate one’s humanity through enjoyment. This ethical injunction of is the condition for rendering punishment upon those whose enjoyment is rendered improper or criminalized in coloniality’s sorting of the selected and the dysselected in terms of proximity to Man. For further discussion of the differentiation of enjoyment, I would suggest engagement with scholars who interrogate how modernity constitutes the ethics of desire and freedom in terms of slavery, settler colonialism, and imperialism, such as Sadiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Lisa Lowe, and Shannon Winnubst.
Enjoyment in the Protest
My argument here is that the ethical imperative of neoliberal pedagogy is oriented around proper and improper modes of enjoyment. Already a central institution for the production and reproduction of coloniality as a regime of truth and founded with profits from slavery on stolen land, the antagonisms within the pedagogical practices of higher education further shift with the emergence of neoliberalism. Henry Giroux (2010) writes that the economic neo-Darwinism of neoliberal pedagogy “places an emphasis on winning at all costs, a ruthless competitiveness, hedonism, the cult of individualism, and a subject largely constructed within a market-driven rationality…[it] strips education of its public values, critical contents, and civic responsibilities.” (p. 185). Higher education faces both a crisis of legitimacy with ever more students taking on massive student debt in the desperate hope for a job in a market of shrinking opportunity; the curriculum now must meet the needs of the market (Bousquet, 2008). The ‘college experience’ is marketed as a consumer choice, with students produced as compliant individualized subjects who are taught to manage the brutal effects of neoliberal precarity and anxiety through depoliticized therapeutic education (Firth, 2014; Amsler, 2010). Critical pedagogical practices are chastised as causing discomfort and confirming the stereotype of the university as hotbed of liberal indoctrination (Wilson, 2015). Struggles against anti-Blackness/white supremacy are met with lipservice in the form of diversity discourse that substitutes the superficial reforms of liberal multiculturalism for structural changes in both the faculty and student bodies, downplaying the deep cut of social inequalities (Kymlicka, 2013).
I think that the common thread in this literature indicates the veracity of McGowan’s argument—if higher education is figured as a consumer choices to prohibit the politicization of the student body, then learning becomes a practice of private enjoyment. Students isolate themselves in the imaginary register, fantasizing about the potential their jobs might bring in new modes of enjoyment (McGowan, 2004, p. 148). Political questions are a disturbance to one’s inner private life of enjoyment; the only political issues that are worth taking up are those in which personal private enjoyment is at stake such as with the 3000-strong student protest against an alcohol prohibition Michigan State University (p. 150). Student protest then makes more sense in the 60s university campus that is characterized as one of prohibition, with students rights under threat (Altbach and Cohen, 1990). Prohibition as demand makes apparent the experience of dissatisfaction the sacrifice of enjoyment, leading the inadvertent side effect of politicization through a desire for a change in the structure of a repressive social order (McGowan, 2004, p. 138).
In the neoliberal university, the valorization of free speech norms and student choice allows students to feel political as long as they don’t step out of bounds. Note the ever multiplying number of politically oriented student groups, each centered on a specific set of goals that are not meant to overlap and instead provide a safe outlet for the desire to be political. These organizations can be housed in student government organizations, and you can be as radical as you as want as long as you don’t act in such a way that would significantly disturb the status quo, which is a strange shift when put in contrast with previous student agitation centered on questions of radical political change in the university structure. Student and faculty resistance that politicize the space of the university through anti-racist class struggle are met with vociferous backlash from the American public that university administrations are loath to participate in, as evidenced by the lack of administration defense of professors like Dr. Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, Dr. George Ciccariello-Maher, and Dr. Dana Cloud. And I will admit that any criticism of this piece that points out the lack of a productive and nuanced discussion of campus political groups I support is well-warranted; I am bracketing that discussion to put a focus on how administrations and the American public, especially right-wing new media users, approach enjoyment in the university. Desire for change is instead channeled through politics as private enjoyment, figured as an interesting side effect of campus culture, a quirky consumer choice to modify the ‘college experience’ to one’s own tastes.
This structure of desire is not one that is pre-given by biological necessity, but requires constant maintenance through the reinforcement of the socio-symbolic coordinates that shape subjects conscious perception of the world. Crises on new media force subjects to draw upon the unconscious to make ethical judgments moment to moment. In these moments, the symbolic order works as a reserve of argumentative fragments for when the subject must speak of what they think of what’s happening in the moment; and this is not to say that there is no agency in these moments of judgments, but rather that any choice is a kind of recombination of previous argumentative fragments. The video of the violence and brutality where the police push and shove students is made sense of through the structured invocation of a series of tropes regarding legality, civility, and the meaning of pedagogy. And so, what is the construction of enjoyment in academic space that is used as argumentative resource in the online conversations about the protest?
Let’s begin with how student protestors are figured as subjects who do not know how to properly enjoy academic space. The political demands of the student protestor are constructed as indicating excess enjoyments, where the motive for protesting is entitlement to space. One comment reads:
Keep crying and feeling entitled young America. The law is the law. During all of my encounters with a police officer they have never been rough with me. I wonder why. Oh yeah that’s right, I do what they say when they say it! Duh! How dumb of me to forget! Fucking kids now a days throw a big hissy fit if something doesn’t go their way or they don’t get what they want. The Rolling Stones said it best, you can’t always get what you want. About time these kids realize that or they will live an angry unhappy life. (Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition, 2016).
Violence is justified against student protestors because they improperly enjoy; political demands here stem from the desires for private enjoyment and an excess of enjoyment in the form of entitlement. It is fine to have private desires for change, but to mobilize that in protest becomes grounds for punishment. Dissatisfaction with the status quo is not political but rather is the product subject’s own inability to properly access private enjoyment. One does not deserve violence as long as one does not feel ‘entitled’ or if one does not ‘throw a big hissy fit’ if they don’t get what they want. The law becomes the limit to enjoyment; rather than prohibition of enjoyment, it is facilitator that is meant to maximize proper private enjoyment. ‘Young America’ stands in for the student protestor, who protests because of a sense of ‘entitlement’ to excess enjoyment in academic space in the form of politics. This reappears in the tie between the private enjoyment of other students in relation to the enjoyment of the protestors.
Looks to me like they were occupying a residence hall. You mean to tell me every protester there was assigned to that hall? Also really inconsiderate; I get that y’all need to hate Trump, and the only way to justify it for y’all is to protest and cry, but some responsible students were probably studying and relaxing, and you were ruining that environment for them…or do you not care about safe spaces? (PSSC, 2016)
The protest is not read as a demand to end the injustice of student debt, a central focus of the protest, but rather as ‘crying’ because the protestors do not enjoy Trump. The student protestor as ‘crybaby’ is frequently invoked in the conversation, tying the expression of political demands to the expression of one’s preferences. Crying is then a infantilization of the protestors in an effort to figure them as accessing an excessive enjoyment that disrupts the enjoyment of other students—they metaphorized as children who demand too much. Responsible enjoyers use the space to ‘study’ and ‘relax’, not to use the implications of what is learned to ‘ruin’ the academic environment political demands. To be apolitical is to be civil; the rough ground of politics is outside of the bounds of proper enjoyment. Studying is not to serve political ends. This becomes a common thread in several of the comments; violence is justified because disruption of other student’s enjoyment.
This isn’t “your” campus. You were a fraction of 100 of thousands of students who also pay to be there for and education. Other students may have felt threatened by your actions. Stay in the streets and say what you want, sit where you want that is your right. Disruption of this kind, inside a building is putting the safety of others in harms way. Since the election, students have been barricaded in halls by other students against their will as well as physical disruption to other students by your aggressive behavior. You are threatening your own peers by fear mongering. There have been protests and marches done peacefully, yours wasn’t one of them. And went stating an opinion that you disagree with your answer is “fuck you”. Shaming other people that voted for the same candidate you did. And comparing your behavior to MLK and Vietnam protests…really? (PSSC, 2016)
Disruption of private enjoyment is here found in aggression and physical location of political demands; the political demand is again figured as an expression of one’s right to private enjoyment, but the threat posed by that private enjoyment to other students who ‘also pay’ to be there for ‘education’ ensures that this is excess enjoyment. The highest sin in the society of enjoyment is to disrupt the social bond crafted through the imperative to enjoy; protest is only valid if it is based in the individual’s personal expression, not in democratic contestation with other students that might be against their will. Disruption of the status quo is the limit of private enjoyment.
1. Yes, it is your right to protest.
2. But really, in Towers Lobby? That’s just a disturbance to the 99.9% of students that need to walk through that area that aren’t protesting with you.
3. The police are required to ensure safety of the majority. Y’all were not the majority.
4. Sure, the way some of them acted were brutal. BUT, if you would have OBEYED their requests, they wouldn’t of removed you from the lobby (mind you so the MAJORITY OF US could continue on with our lives as normal) with force. They were yelling so you could hear them. They pushed and pulled because you weren’t evacuating like they asked.
5. Peaceful protests happen all over the world every minute, and you don’t hear about them. Why? BECAUSE THEY WERE PEACEFUL.
6. They managed the protest that walked down fifth and Forbes very well, so you can’t tell me they do they aren’t fair and just and doing their job for your protection. (PSSC, 2016)
Here we find the completion of neoliberal logic in the understanding of what the role of the police in the university system. The police are here to facilitate learning in safety rather than to prohibit speech. Peaceful protests are good because they are not heard; the subject can find enjoyment in political demands as long as the work of democracy can be avoided. The actions of the police are instantly rationalized as justified in the face of threatened private enjoyment; pushing, pulling, and yelling are all benevolent when done through the work of a superego who does not demand anything of his subjects but that they enjoy themselves properly.
The hysterics of the small majority are never to be read as something to engage, but rather is understood as talk with no expectation of response. Disobeying the police is a sign that the student protestor has misunderstood the actual purpose of the academic space. The student protestor does not understand that the university is in fact meant for the comfortable and safe process of learning so that one can enter into the market a whole and emotionally stable worker who does not express dissatisfaction with the status quo but rather learns to relieve any anxiety through private enjoyment that does not encroach on the enjoyment of others. As McGowan writes, “the only political issue worth taking up is one in which my private enjoyment is at stake.” (148)
Conclusion
To draw my argument to a conclusion, the ethical justifications for the crisis of police brutality directed against student protestors is a product of neoliberal society’s imperative to enjoy, wherein private enjoyment is the ethical injunction by which the student body must live, or otherwise expect punishment. The university is crafted as an apolitical space, where political engagement is only an option as long as it is figured as a consumer choice that does not disrupt or antagonize other student’s private enjoyment. But I do not think that this means there are no grounds for student resistance. Racialized neoliberalism is fueled by contradictions, with one of the most apparent being student loan debt. As put simply by one of my fellow students who has since graduated, ‘you go to school to be able to afford to go to school.’ Student loan debt is an incredible achievement in the instantiation of market logic in higher education; as Chris Masaino (2012) writes “education, among other things, is conceived as a form of “human capital” rather than a social good, an investment security for one’s personal economic portfolio rather than the foundation of democratic citizenship. Student debt — the price one must pay in order to gain access to the possibility of upward mobility — is now one of the most risky investments in that portfolio.” Mobilizing these kinds of contradictions, these gaps and tensions in the symbolic structure of coloniality, is no panacea—I would not be surprised by the incorporation of such a struggle into the redemptive arc of progress upon which the University reproduces itself. But to use it as a topoi, as a commonplace that could begin a conversation that moves towards radicalization, could perhaps be a way forward. Such encounters could start with student debt as a metonym for the more general use of debt as part of a politics of disposability that finds its bearings in turning points in coloniality like the Zong massacre, where 133 slaves were sacrificed to cash out on the insurance on the “cargo.” But as I am quite inept at praxis, and would rather not pretend like I’m some kind of organizer that knows what they’re doing, I will strategically end this paper here before I write something that puts me in a bind.
Bibliography Altbach, P. G., & Cohen, R. (1990). American student activism: The post-sixties transformation. The Journal of Higher Education, 32-49.
Amsler, S. S. (2011). From ‘therapeutic’to political education: The centrality of affective sensibility in critical pedagogy. Critical Studies in Education, 52(1), 47-63.
Bousquet, M. (2008). How the university works: Higher education and the low-wage nation. NYU Press.
Firth, R. (2014). Somatic pedagogies: Critiquing and resisting the affective discourse of the neoliberal state from an embodied anarchist perspective. ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 16(4), 121-142.
Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Springer.
Giroux, H. A. (2010, June). Bare pedagogy and the scourge of neoliberalism: Rethinking higher education as a democratic public sphere. In The Educational Forum (Vol. 74, No. 3, pp. 184-196). Taylor & Francis Group.Goldstein, A. & Schackner. B. (2016).
“Pitt Protest Ends With Arrests At Dorm”. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved December 3 2016. http://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2016/11/17/Another-protest-under-way-in-Pittsburgh-as-faculty-at-Pitt-Point-Park- call/stories/201611170240.
Harvey, D. (2006). Neo‐Liberalism as creative destruction. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 88(2), 145-158.
Kymlicka, W. (2013). Neoliberal multiculturalism. Social resilience in the neoliberal era, 99-125.
“Letter To The Editor – The Pitt News”. (2016). The Pitt News. Accessed December 3 2016. http://pittnews.com/article/114107/opinions/letters- to- editor/letter-to-the-editor-121/.
Maisano, C. (2012). “The Soul of Student Debt.” Jacobin. Jacobinmag.com. Retrieved 10 December 2016, from https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-soul-of-student-debt/
Police brutalized and arrested several… – Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition – PSSC | Facebook. (2016). Facebook.com. Retrieved 27 November 2016, from https://www.facebook.com/pittsburghsolidarity/videos/10862704014859 01/?pnref=story
After a four-year run, our coalition of radical student crews and organizations was formally dissolved on Wednesday, November 1st. We originally began collaborating because we were sick of wasting our time seeking legitimacy through the dead-end channels provided by the Pitt administration and their police. But as much as we liked to position ourselves as inhabiting a space somewhere outside of Campus Life and its toxic social institutions and useless reformist activism, we now realize that we were merely carving out niche spaces within it.
The Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition is dissolving in order to further decentralize and diversify organizing efforts, and to grant greater socio-political agency to the participating crews and organizations. Despite our best intentions, PSSC became an umbrella organization that assimilated (and sapped energy away from) the independent formations that comprised it. And so rather than continue to work together as a student coalition, we decided to re-prioritize our individual projects, crews, and organizations. But we’re not exactly breaking up! We still want to coordinate projects and share access to media platforms, but the PSSC general assemblies were definitely not the right forum for that.
In centering the student identity and its socio-geographic limitations, we effectively sidelined our non-student friends and comrades and self-isolated our struggles; in imagining ourselves and our scene as somehow being exterior (and superior) to Campus Life, we self-sabotaged our efforts to organize around student issues. As a result, we spent most of our energy organizing according to the artificial relationships and interests imposed by the University, or trying to construct “alternative” scenes with the same building blocks that Campus Life provided. But we cannot hope to build a movement by hopping back and forth between cookie-cutter countercultures, half-ironically adopting the aesthetics and politics of a given scene until we’re left with the choice between complicity in the guise of left unity, socio-political posturing, and dropping off to watch as another scene falls out of fashion. As aspiring truants, we must experiment with all available means of disrupting the routes by which Campus Life follows us into our spaces and relationships. Therefore, we can no longer passively identify with the infantalizing range of behavior and thought permissible to “students.”
Our truancy is oriented against the University as a site of separation – the separation of students from other youth, of students from faculty, of students from community, of education from public life, of the individual from self-identification/determination, of thought from deed. We recognize that we cannot take down the university-colony without fighting alongside the rest of the city: alongside our friends who never fucked with colonial education, our peers who are getting paid poverty wages by the university-factory, our neighbors who are being pushed from their homes by the rising cost of living, the land that is continuing its generations-old resistance to the economic crosshairs of corporate education.
In collaboration with autonomous radicals from across the city, we decided (in what will hopefully have been our last large-scale consensus decision) to participate in a new coordinating formation, the Steel City Autonomous Movement.
SCAM will utilize a spokescouncil model in order to encourage decentralization. The spokescouncil is a forum for mutual aid and coordination, not a decision-making body. Any individuals, crews, or organizations that have a relationship to the movement will be able to attend spokescouncils, share platforms for communicating and disseminating information, and volunteer to join the infrastructure crew. The infrastructure crew is responsible for bottom-lining at least two spokescouncils every month (one off campus, one on campus), inviting / screening / vouching attendees, throwing social events (public and private), and compiling the weekly event rundowns. Anyone participating in the infrastructure crew is empowered to use the SCAM brand/platform to promote their own events/workshops and endorse events as SCAM, without the need for consensus – SCAM is not an organization, it’s just the name for a specific autonomous forum/platform and therefore can be claimed by anyone that participates in it. The infrastructure crew will meet once a month for a tekmil to ensure shit doesn’t centralize into an organization and that no one’s acting fucked up or some shit.
Our friendships, houses, projects, crews, and organizations could be so much more than an edgier version of Greek Life. So fuck politics. Fuck professionalism. Fuck only building relationships with other students. Fuck living as if we aren’t witnessing the collapse of an empire.
We call on students and youth everywhere to join us in bursting the campus bubble. Let’s use our position as students to scam the University, just as it’s scammed us. Let’s take some time to venture off campus, chill in unfamiliar places, make dangerous friends. Let’s invite Pittsburgh back into Oakland. Let’s become ungovernable.
We give our deepest condolences to Alina’s family, friends and loved ones during this challenging time.
On the morning of Sunday, October 8th, 2017, Matthew Darby murdered his ex-girlfriend, Alina Sheykhet in her Oakland home, according to District Attorney Stephen Zappala. Sheykhet was a 20-year-old Pitt student studying to become a physical therapist.
Just days before Alina’s death, she stood before a local judge and detailed the ways Matthew had previously abused her. She filed and received a Protection from Abuse order (PFA) against Matthew that day.
Alina complied with state protocols to keep herself safe. And her ex still killed her.
The law said Alina was safe. Yet, her death proves how vulnerable she remained. This contradiction makes clear what many of us already know: the state cannot and will not ever protect women from gender-based violence.
The state has no real interest in protecting women or others of marginalized genders. State apparatuses feed off of the decimation of femininity. State-related institutions like Pitt, where Alina conducted her daily life, actively subordinate women and gender variant employees, professors, workers and students. They do so to ensure that Pitt’s administration and highest paid positions remain dominated by cis-gendered men. Every day, the University shows those of us like Alina, that society is built on gender-based violence – and the institutions need it to stay that way.
The State, the University and their ensuing cultures keep women and those of marginalized genders in a constantly vulnerable position. Alina’s death is a tragic and extreme manifestation of the culture of patriarchal domination that creates daily acts of violence against women and those of marginalized genders.
Even though the state does not protect women, it maintains its power by crafting an image that it does and that it can. When women believe that they must rely on the state for protection, they don’t organize independent and autonomous methods to defend themselves. By uplifting the state as a protector, public opinion criminalizes women and trans folks who act in self defense against gender based violence, as happened in the case of CeCe McDonald. The logic goes: If the state claims it protects women with benevolent laws, any act to defend oneself outside of those laws is too extreme and too aggressive and thus should be seen as criminal and dangerous. Once this mindset is adopted by the public, the state is able to use this logic to incarcerate women and those of marginalized genders whenever they defend themselves against gender based violence.
Thus, the state needs to promote itself as a protector to become a hidden but active aggressor in the war against femininity. In this situation, women and people with marginalized genders have no way to defend themselves against acts of patriarchal supremacy. They can’t rely on the state and they can’t rely on themselves. Suddenly, the state and other individuals who rely on the institutionalized supremacy of cis-men have all the power to enact war on women and those of marginalized genders without fear of opposition.
Alina’s death shows clearly that the state cannot and does not protect women from violence. In efforts to encourage the public to keep trusting in the benevolence of the state, propaganda outlets are scrambling to keep promoting the state as a protector of women. Broadcasts assure the public that pending legislation will tighten the restrictions of PFAs. Articles write about the years of jail-time that Matthew will serve. Yet, more legislation and more jail-time will not solve the ubiquitous patriarchal violence that led to Alina’s death.
Instead, those of us with marginalized gender identities must defend ourselves. The state betrays us, the University betrays us, brothers and fathers betray us, friends who benefit from gender privilege betray us. We can only fight the war against femininity if we fight it ourselves and for ourselves. We must create collectives of women and those of marginalized genders that actively fight against manifestations of patriarchal violence. We must build a counter-culture of care, autonomy and horizontalism, that opposes the University’s production of patriarchal domination. Together, with trusted allies, we must all oppose the idea of the state as any sort of protector.
Let’s not let Alina’s death be in vain. Let’s fight for a world where no woman or person of a marginalized gender must die from gender-based violence.
Pittsburgh doesn’t have a police brutality problem. We have a police problem.
This problem won’t be solved by internal investigations, desk duty, body cameras, or – can you imagine? – community outreach, de-escalation training, and disarmament.
It will only be solved by the total abolition of the entire state security apparatus – cops and cameras, batons and bombs, prisons, armies, mass surveillance, and drone strikes. Nothing less will do in service of total liberation.
***
A viral video, captured on a civilian’s cell phone outside the PPG Paints Arena, spread Pittsburgh’s shame and the events of September 19th across the web. Five cops, one victim. His face bashed against the hard concrete again and again and again. Torrents of profanity from the cops. One screams “don’t resist” at the man lying limp on the ground.
Giving Officer Andrew Jacobs desk duty was more than just a moral error on the part of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police. They named the most violent cop in the video and gave us the name of the person responsible. Voter registration records gave us the address of the only Andrew Jacobs in a fifty-mile radius of the city. We spread the word to close friends and accomplices – offline, via text and in person. We made signs and flyers and brainstormed chants.
A group of around ten assembled downtown and took the train to Mount Oliver, meeting three of our friends waiting at the station near the cop’s house and a few more parked up the street. All told, over 15 people gathered on the night of October 2nd to condemn this bastard in blue. Standing on the sidewalk, we passed around a megaphone and chanted in what amounted to a half hour of targeted disruption.
At one point, a woman screamed at us from a neighboring window. We screamed back – “Police are violent! We will not be silent!” Her husband emerged and slowly crossed the street towards us. Our chants wavered. He was aggressive, but not hostile. His kid was trying to sleep. We apologized and expressed sympathy before asking if he knew his neighbor was famous. He didn’t. “It’s not a tight-knit community,” were his words. Once we told him who lived two houses down, he begrudgingly granted our request for a few more minutes. One friend gave a speech – “If Black lives don’t matter, no lives matter.” A few more chants and then we split.
It’s good we left when we did. Our walk back to the train station was interrupted by two squad cars – buddies of Officer Jacobs, no doubt. Had we still been chanting when they arrived, we would surely have been subject to greater harassment. Lucky us. Curious cops just asked some friends a couple questions before escorting our group the remaining twenty feet to the station. We caught our ride, made it downtown, and went our separate ways.
***
A friend, a little late to the party, drove by the house a few minutes after we left. A uniformed cop stood in the front yard patting a visibly distraught Andrew Jacobs on the back. Mission accomplished.
Cops aren’t afraid of their fellow cops, of their bosses, of courts or prosecutors or legislatures. But they’re afraid of us. A little research and some word of mouth is all it takes for us to bring the fight from our neighborhoods to theirs. Organizing against police violence challenges the separation of people from political power, the social logic of the badge made material by the physical force of the baton. Power insulates individuals from the consequences of their actions. This power must be seized through collective action and abolished, disorienting the powerful by rejecting the justification for their every misdeed.
We have a message for Officer Jacobs, for the cop comforting him, for the four who followed us home, for the four who assisted his brutality, for every Pittsburgh cop who thinks being the law makes you above the law:
You have names and numbers, just like us. Just like us, you have homes that can be surveilled, neighbors that can be turned against you, communities that will reject you if the alternative becomes too costly. Just like us, your actions have consequences.
Activists accept targeted retaliation as a basic fact of their work. It’s time the police reckon with something similar.
“When friends and neighbors are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!”
In the classroom,
on the job,
in the dorms,
on the patio,
in Schenley Park… EVERYONE HATES A SNITCH
Hey fam, it’s cool, we Didn’t See Shit.
The University of Pittsburgh is full of snitches, from the tough-guy RA who takes his job too seriously, to the bigots who knowingly out queer folks and put them at risk. We’re sick of seeing good kids get expelled, arrested, or otherwise screwed over because some holier-than-thou bootlicker decided to fuck up someone’s life; because some snitch reported a graffiti artist, or tipped off a Pitt employee about a darknet mail order, or called the cops on students for flyering and promoting events without a permit, or chose to be an asshole of an RA and actually conduct a random dorm search, or ratted out a student who stole the textbooks they couldn’t afford…
Want help dealing with a rat? Send the Didn’t See Shit Crew an email detailing the nature of the incident (no incriminating details, please!), the informant’s motive, and your desired course of action. We will work with you to figure out how to best discourage this sort of toxic behavior, support any folks who are facing legal or school repercussions, and, if necessary or requested, facilitate retaliatory dialogue.*
If you reported the snitch, you call the shots. You don’t even have to name names – there’s plenty of ways to discourage snitching, and we’ll be there to offer resources and support as you work out just what you want to do. Hell, you don’t even need to participate – just tell us what you would like to see happen if you don’t want to do it yourself!
Snitch-shaming: Sometimes the best way to discourage toxic behavior is to draw attention to it.
Legal support: So someone narced, and now you or your friends are facing charges. If you haven’t been through the system before, it can be disorienting as hell. Depending on the situation, we can help find lawyers, offer insights from our own run-ins with the law, organize fundraising events, and more.
Unsolicited interviews: We know people who’d love to meet (or surprise) a snitch. Based on your input, interviews can be conducted in a friendly or an aggressive manner, from educational conversations oriented towards healing broken relationships to outright condemnation, from intensive Q&A’s that are recorded and publicized to *ahem* intimate conversations in dark alleyways.
Help design media: Don’t want to make things personal and call out a snitch, but you still want to call the bullshit as you see it? We’ll help give your marijuana legalization flyer that eye-catching makeover it deserves! We’ll help spread your “Decriminalize File Sharing!” petitions around campus! We’ll write an op-ed in solidarity with your friend that got expelled for scanning and distributing shoplifted school textbooks so that people could afford their education!
Probably more!
*Disclaimers:
Reporting sexual harassment or assault is not snitching. If you contact us complaining about someone who “snitched” on your creepy friend for creeping, we’ll creep on you.
To the survivors of harassment and assault that don’t want to get the school or the cops involved, we’d encourage you to contact Nightshade, an anarcha-feminist crew that’s fighting the Pitt patriarchy.
The Didn’t See Shit Crew does not participate in any action. We merely pass the message along to folks that are interested in supporting people that are ready to start snitching on the snitches!
Submission from the Queer Coffee Run crew, received on September 21st, 2017.
On Wednesday morning, we dropped two banners at the University of Pittsburgh. They read, “From Pitt to Georgia Tech: Disarm the Police, Arm Your Desire” and “Solidarity with St. Louis and Atlanta: Fuck the Police.” The first was hung from student dorms, the second from condemned housing near campus – we hope the symbolism is clear. Later that night, after campus police arrested a student protestor during coordinated disruptions of a right wing “debate” on immigration, we linked up with two other crews to beautify campus with chalk and flyers [just a heads up, the link is from a right-wing student news site, and it’s kinda hilarious]. Another crew from the autonomous student network tells us they also tagged and wheatpasted the Oakland area on Tuesday night.
We are deeply saddened and angered by the murder of comrade Scout Schultz by Georgia Tech campus police. As a small crew of radical queer youth and accomplices, we recognize that Scout could have been any one of us. We too struggle daily with and against our mental health; we take these actions as part of that struggle. We will continue to answer the calls to fight in Scout’s memory [1,2, 3, 4], one of which reads:
To anyone who is enraged, grieving, or who stands against the police and the murderous system they protect, we call for actions in solidarity with our fight here in Atlanta. To anyone who is fighting for liberation: in the coming days, fight with Scout’s name on your lips, on your banners, and in your hearts.
We are also enraged, but unsurprised, by the continued impunity of racist police in St. Louis. Rest in Power, Anthony Lamar Smith.
We’re profoundly inspired by the uncompromising militancy of the resistance in both these cities. There is no dialogue to be had with those who continue to write our murderers’ paychecks, nor are there negotiations to be made with the forces of hetero-patriarchal white supremacy, capitalism, the state – Power.
Maybe you missed this, but you’re not in a dialogue. Your views are beside the point. Argue all you want—your adversaries are glad to see you waste your breath. Better yet if you protest: they’d rather you carry a sign than do anything. They’ll keep you talking as long as they can, just to tire you out—to buy time.
They intend to force their agenda on you. That’s what all the guns are for, what the police and drones and surveillance cameras are for, what the FBI and CIA and NSA are for, what all those laws and courts and executive orders are for. It’s what their church is for, what those racist memes are for, what online harassment and bullying are for. It’s what gay bashings and church burnings are for.
This is not a dialogue. How could you be so naïve? A dialogue—from which some of the participants can be deported at any time? A dialogue—in which one side keeps shooting and incarcerating the other side? A dialogue—in which a few people own all the networks and radio stations and printing presses, while the rest have to make do with markers and cardboard signs? A dialogue, really?
You’re not in a dialogue. You’re in a power struggle. All that matters is how much force you can bring to bear on your adversaries to defend yourself from them. You can bet that if you succeed, they will accuse you of breaking off the dialogue, of violating their free speech. They will try to lure you back into conversation, playing for time until they need no more stratagems to keep you passive while they put the pieces in place for tyranny.
This isn’t a dialogue—it’s a war. They’re gambling that you won’t realize this until it’s too late. If freedom is important to you, if you care about all the people marked for death and deportation, start taking action.
The early bird avoids the cops, Queer Coffee Run – Autonomous Student Network [QCR-ASN]
REST IN POWER, SCOUT
IT’S A SIN TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
“Love and Rage to student rebels at Georgia Tech – RIP Scout – Fuck Cops (A)”
ClickHERE to learn how to support Georgia Tech student rebels.
Detractors on the Right claims that they are the only ones opposed to identity politics, but time and time again, we have seen that they are simply promoting another reactionary flavor. On the Left, many people instead push for a diversity of identities to be represented within capitalism. For those that want the destruction of all forms of domination, we must ask if there is an alternative. But what would that look like, and is it possible to push towards something that conceivably we cannot have a blueprint for? What does this mean for our day to day lives as well as how we struggle, organize, and build collective power?
In this episode, we caught up with several people involved in the Filler Collective, to talk about the concept of Gender Nihilism. In short, we ask if it is possible to understand gender and overcome it in a way that goes beyond liberal notions of inclusion within the dominant system. Is a genderless world possible, and what does fighting for one mean for those living in one where gender norms and roles define all aspects of our lives?
This report back is meant to show how protest marshals, imposed structure and hierarchically organized groups can prevent cohesive direct action, organic resistance, and collective decision making.
On July 6th, 2017, an attempt to escalate an action regarding an incredibly pressing issue was co-opted by socialists. During rush-hour traffic, about 40 people gathered to participate in a direct action against the Medicaid cuts and “Trumpcare.” Elderly people, disabled people, trans people, a few anarchists and plenty of socialists came together to stage a die in outside of Senator Pat Toomey’s office.
In the pouring rain, we blocked a busy intersection downtown, while laying in the street with tombstones symbolizing the deaths that Trumpcare may cause. While those who could were lying in the rain, 15 marshals in bright orange jackets, most of whom belonged to the DSA or Socialist Alternative (a top-down, nationwide organization that campaigns for policy reforms and is very eager to sell you their newspapers) scrambled to find people to order around. There was some confusion in the crowd that was seemingly caused by the unnecessary visual dichotomy of those with authority (orange vests) and those allegedly without it, (due to their lack of orange vests). Despite this, the die-in was a beautiful and powerful spectacle. After being told to get up, still charged with some adrenaline and energy, the crowd felt that the action shouldn’t be over. Led by elderly and disabled people, the crowd filtered into a lightly trafficked street. While beginning to start up chants, we heard shouts from the self designated marshals to stop the march. Even though there was absolutely no police presence, “leaders” with megaphones and socialist t-shirts shouted “You’re going to get arrested!,” ordering non-affiliated individuals to stay on the sidewalk.
Naturally, authoritative commands from socialists in bright orange jackets split up the once unified crowd of people. But many of us were determined to go on. Among the crowd that kept marching were the most vulnerable people, as well as the people who were most likely to be affected by the new potential legislation: a person in a wheelchair, a person with a walker, a cancer survivor, many elderly people, and a handful of young people unaffiliated with any party. Trailing behind on the sidewalk yelling at us were the young, able-bodied members of Socialist Alternative and the DSA insisting that our marching and chanting was not worth the risk of arrest by the invisible police presence. While urging people that arrest was unlikely, an elderly woman annoyed with the crowd’s hesitance said to a friend of mine “I came out here for a protest, what the hell is this?” It was bureaucratic bullshit and an amazing example of imposed hierarchies thwarting the ability and power of natural, collectivized direct action. The members of SA and the DSA, with their megaphones, fancy jackets, and fancy well-printed signs were able to garner the support of more than half of the march. In the end, about a dozen people stuck with it. The risk seemed pretty low since there was not a police car in sight, and no calls for dispersal, despite the socialists’ warnings. Perhaps it’s worth noting that even if there was a threat, a few people were prepared for arrest when going into the action, but could not even gain contact with the city police due to the aggressive over policing of the socialist marshals. While turning the corner to reach the starting point of the action, many of those still marching spoke of staging a sit-down occupation of the lobby of Pat Toomey’s office building. On the sidewalk, trailing just behind us were the frazzled socialists and their manipulated squad of people. Before we were able to enter the building, Socialist Alternative demanded that they be heard once again. At this point in time, they announced their official withdrawal from the action. “I gotta protect my people,” one member said. By the time they were done collecting their signs and megaphones, a singular police officer entered the building and assisted the lobby staff in locking the doors. The rest of us looked in each other’s eyes, defeated and fucking pissed off.
I actually pity the activists working under the authority of Socialist Alternative and similar organizations. They simply follow orders and conform to pre-established structures, which blinds their ability to see the reality of a situation. It prevents them from thinking for themselves, participating freely and experiencing that magic rush that comes from organic, collective power. And anyways, people who are manipulated, manipulate people, it makes sense.
It could be cool to have a discussion about what happened during this day, but members of Socialist Alternative spend more time selling their organization than talking with people about any campaign, ideology or personal/political matter. If they were to spend less time desperately trying to get me to sign an email list or a buy a paper, perhaps we could have meaningful conversations that would prevent things like this from happening. Perhaps we could have mutual respect and it would actually mean something when they repeat words like “comrade” and “solidarity.”
