Over the next few days, we’ll be publishing pieces to highlight the work of some of the groups participating in the Cutting Class counterinfo network. We hope this will provide some clarity on where our crews are coming from and how that affects the way we have organized this project.
We also hope that these interview questions can provide a template for other autonomous groups to distill a collective understanding of their context and projects. If your crew finds these questions useful, write up a summary of your conversations and send them our way as a form of introduction! Cutting Class can be your platform, and we’d love to publish an interview with your crew and start collaborating—not just around CC but also with any other projects that these introductions might incite!
Today’s featured crew is the Filler collective from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Introduce your crew: what are some projects you working on, how long have you been around, where are you based, etc etc.
FillerPGH is a zine distro and counterinfo crew currently based in Pittsburgh.We’re basically just an informal collective of punks and writers who run a distro and claim the name Filler whenever it’s convenient.
Filler started in 2012 as a punk/hardcore fanzine, but has since grown into a platform for local anarchist scenes to share news, analysis, and other counterinfo. We write, design, and distro our own zines, and we usually table with cool zines from other projects too. You can visit our pdf archive and read or print our zines here. Our three most widely-distributed zines are The Relevance of Max Stirner to Anarcho-Communists, Destroy Gender, and For a University Against Itself.
Most of us currently go to / have graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, and so a lot of the content we get is affiliated with the autonomous student network and other youth crews. That being said, we’ve been actively trying to make the project relevant/useful for anarchists outside of the campus bubble.
The Big Idea is an anarchist collective that provides space for exploring radical ideas and putting them into action. The collective aims to foster a culture of resistance and mutual aid that celebrates individual and collective autonomy. Plus we have coffee and free wifi.
SCAM is a relatively new project that grew out of conversations between individuals from the Big Idea collective and the (now-defunct) Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition. SCAM is not an organization, it’s just the name for a specific (1) autonomous forum, (2) social media platform, and (3) anarchist network – meaning that anyone who participates can use the SCAM “brand” to suit their own project’s purposes. The forum uses a spokescouncil model that’s meant to be a space of encounter to encourage mutual aid and coordination, and is in no way a decision-making body.
Nightshade is a two–year–old anarcha-feminist collective dedicated to providing physical, digital, and written safer spaces for women and queer people, as well as engaging in direct action against the heteropatriarchy. Nightshade collective members hold monthly meetings and at least one community event per month. This month, Nightshade is hosting a benefit partyto raise money for Survived and Punished—a collective that supports people wrongfully incarcerated for protecting themselves against domestic abuse. Not all community events are parties. Last month, Nightshade hosted two events—a reading of “The Secret Joy of Accountability” by Shannon Perez-Darby from the zine-turned-book, “The Revolution Starts at Home” and a facilitated discussion called ’Let’s Talk About Sex…Work’ to initiate conversations about sex work from a feminist perspective.
What are some challenges you’ve faced (internal or external)?
Pittsburgh anarchyland is currently recovering from some serious repression and burnout. Over a year of consistent militant actions resulted in ~30 felony arrests. Two comrades served several months in prison (hit us up if you want to throw some $$$olidarity their way) and a few more are still tied up in legal battles. By the summer of 2017, state repression dovetailed with existing internal tensions, and the subsequent burnout was real.
In the coming weeks, Filler will be publishing a longer piece(s) about this through several projects, including Cutting Class. Here’s an *ahem* exclusive sneak peak:
“2018 marks five years since the resurgence of an autonomous radical youth movement at Pitt, three years since the Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition officially began flying black flags, two years since the organizations and crews affiliated with the autonomous student scene posed a real collective challenge to the populist-left’s monopoly on dissent, and over one year since the first coordinated Disorientation Week.
That first Disorientation Week sparked the brief and brilliant dumpster fire we refer to as “the” autonomous youth scene: a transient (yet genuine) expression of a collective “we.” At times, it felt like it was our first real glimpse of community, militancy, trust, repression, betrayal, and (attempted) accountability. It’s a declaration of “we” that weighs a bit heavy on the tongue these days.
Ten black blocs, 30-something arrests, and over a hundred felony charges later, it’s difficult to remove ourselves from the collective identity that “we” have developed over the past years’ struggles. The “we” used here is shorthand for the web of chance encounters that deepened as the autonomous youth scene grew. Filler most definitely cannot speak to the experiences of everyone in Pittsburgh’s autonomous youth scene. Consider this our contribution to a growing mythology of closure, a burial ritual for our own lingering nostalgia, a call for multiplicity.”
This resurgence in the local anarchist scene has broken down both social bubbles and social scenes.We’ve learned that we need more than the usual cycle of escalation and repression if we wanna rep the yinzurrection. We’d like to think that projects like SCAM and Nightshade (especially the second issue of their zine) reflect a broader learning curve in the Pittsburgh youth scene. To quote “PSSC is a SCAM,”
“[PSSC] 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 […] 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. ”
Photo: autonomous youth bloc turning up on election night on Pitt’s campus.
Read the report-back HERE.
What are some short and long-term objectives your crew has been working towards?
Counterinformation is communication, and communication is an end in itself. We’re not going to save the world (not that there’s anything about this civilization worth “saving”), but we might be able teach each other how to survive through the love and rage that grows in resisting it.
What do you think some of the major limits / major untapped possibilities for radical campus organizing are today?
Over the years, Filler has provided a platform for a variety of student voices. The only way to honestly discuss that question is to include them in the convo. We’ve compiled a selection of quotes from some of our personal favorite pieces below, which are divided into three broader themes:
Seizing and Repurposing University Space
The “Marketplace of Ideas” and Social War
Solidarity is a Weapon
TL;DR = There’s no unified “lesson” to take away, but one recurring thread is that students who work through the University framework end up compromising their politics. We have seen one too many radical organizations get recuperated after becoming / affiliating with University-sanctioned organizations. While organizing through the University can provide material benefits (beyond just funding and space), we think student crews should dedicate most of their organizing efforts to autonomous projects that operate outside the established University channels.
Not surprised at the administration’s routine disregard for student voices, we decided to continue our occupation of University space. Excited, scared and pissed, we brought flags, posters, zines, coloring supplies, books and snacks to a student study area on the second floor of the Cathedral of Learning. We sat down with confidence and declared that we were occupying the space. With comrades new and old, we plastered the walls with fliers, flags and art. We used the space for everything our teachers scolded us for doing in school: we shared food, played games, held political discussions and worked through interpersonal conflicts. After writing space agreements for our self-governance, we felt more at peace than we ever have walking the halls of our University.
An occupation is the realization of the threats we make through disruption. To occupy is to strike, to remove a material place from capitalist time and space, to derail alienated activity and ride its inertia off the tracks, to rip open latent contradictions in the fabric of consensus reality. When we occupy, we create a base from which to launch new negations, but more importantly a subjectivity that is actively experimenting with new forms of life.
Disruption, negation, experimentation, occupation — the suspension of routine and rhythm, the conversion of a thousand plagiarized, angst-ridden zines into something terrifying and new: the insurrectional desire to experience unmediated forms of life here and now, to live communism and spread anarchy. […] Elaborating insurrectionary potential requires more than blockading the flow of relations conducive to capital; it is a process of reorienting relationships and shared spaces towards the creation of new and transient collective realities. In other words, we must constantly recreate a “we” that isn’t a lie. […] Seriously, though. I sure as hell wasn’t radicalized after hitting up some student group’s meeting. I’m here because I’m still chasing the high from that first punk show in a squat house basement, that first queer potluck, that first renegade warehouse party, that first unpermitted protest, that first smashed Starbucks window.
Incite, Conspire, Diversify
Photo: Our generation’s first autonomous student bloc at Pitt Click HERE for the first report-back.
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!
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.
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. […]
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.
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.
[As soon as the disruption of the transphobe Reverend Scott Stiegemeyer began], self-appointed “peace police” within the body of “protesters” sprang into action, demanding that we sit down and continue to take Stiegemeyer’s bullshit while our trans siblings die every day through murder and suicide.
Those who stood up to oppose us played directly into the hands of the Reverend’s ilk. By presenting themselves as the “respectable” LGBT community, they took the side of the Reverend and the cops against those who were not willing to be silent in the face of the war against our trans bodies. They forget the war cry of ACT UP’s fight against AIDS during the 80’s and 90’s: Silence Equals Death. Only those “allies” who are not directly threatened by hate speech against trans people and the violence against us it engenders have the option to remain silent without potential deadly consequences. […]
Instead of joining our mutual enemies in attempting to snuff out our rage, we’d prefer you to accept our methods as equally valid to other forms of struggle so we can all take on our adversary in our own ways. We see you as potential accomplices in our liberatory project, and would much rather fight beside you than against you.
And I’d do it again. […] I would be astonished if either [cop] believed “disrupting a meeting” was an actual crime. The intention with which they bandied the phrase about was likely an attempt to make us fearful enough for our individual futures that we would comply with the questions they asked us about each other. Upon arriving at the station, my friend and I were led into an interrogation room. In an hour-plus conversation, the officers offered up such gems as “the Constitution is dead” and a lecture about my disrespect for the men and women who died defending my right to speech, the latter of which rang as hollow as the former did true while I sat handcuffed to a wooden bench for talking at the wrong time.
Photo: Trump visits Pittsburgh Click HERE or HERE to check out two report-backs from this action.
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…
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, 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.
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.
How can folks support your work?
Submit content, distro our zines, critique our zines, talk shit on/with us, email us your juicy intel, give us money – fillercollective [at] riseup [dot] net
Submit to the spectacle and follow us on social media:
Any closing thoughts / reflections from your crew’s conversation?
When we first came to Pitt, we had to reinvent the wheel when it came to spreading anarchy, and we made a fuckton of mistakes along the way. We’re stoked to be connecting with other youth projects, and honestly should have tried to sooner. We’re also stoked to hash out some ideas around intergenerational infrastructure and communication, because there’s always the possibility that Oryx and Crake accurately depicts the whole “no global future” collapse: the University is both a gatekeeper to the means of survival and an enemy as formidable as the state, and will be for the rest of the forseeable futures / protracted collapse.
And never forget that cringing is an affective bond, because maybe the real insurrection was the friends we made along the way 😉
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.
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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
Originally posted to It’s Going Down by an anonymous participant in the autonomous student network on November 18th, 2017
This time last year, comrades took to the streets of Oakland, Pittsburgh to express anger over Trump’s election and demand an end to tuition hikes and student debt. Campus and City police responded to our action by kettling us in Tower’s lobby, beating us with batons, threatening us with police dogs, pointing rubber bullets at our faces and ultimately arresting two march participants. The school condoned the police violence, congratulating the cops for maintaining University order. For simply wanting a more just school and society, the University enacted an assault on our bodies, minds, and spirits.
But we already knew the University to be fundamentally positioned against our free existence. We’ve seen the campus police stop and ID comrades for nothing more than dyeing their hair, piercing their bodies or kissing their queer partners. We’ve seen them harass students at Black Lives Matter protests and die-ins. The brutality that took place in Tower’s was just further affirmation that the University is a colonial machine that exists to uphold the capitalist State.
As anarchists we challenge any institution that perpetuates classism, racism and gendered violence. So we turn to our University and question the rising tuition which inhibits so many lower income students from attending school, the overwhelming whiteness of our student population, the failure of the school to hold anyone accountable for enacting violence against women and those of marginalized genders. Our questioning leads us right back to what we’ve always known: our school exploits its students and workers in order to maintain its institutional authority and wealth, and the Pitt Police force is the University’s private army that protects it from being penetrable.
So we demand change. We demand a world without police so we can create a world for each other, so we might be able to gather and grow with one another in a less alienating way.
Tuesday, November 14th, 2017, a small group of us entered the Chancellor’s office and stated that we would not leave until the Chancellor met our list of demands. We sat together on the floor of the office and read zines to one another while comrades stood outside the office doors telling fellow students what was happening. After less than ten minutes, security guards and police arrived and removed us from the office. After checking our student IDs, they told us that we were banned from all campus offices.
Not surprised at the administration’s routine disregard for student voices, we decided to continue our occupation of University space. Excited, scared and pissed, we brought flags, posters, zines, coloring supplies, books and snacks to a student study area on the second floor of the Cathedral of Learning. We sat down with confidence and declared that we were occupying the space. With comrades new and old, we plastered the walls with fliers, flags and art. We used the space for everything our teachers scolded us for doing in school: we shared food, played games, held political discussions and worked through interpersonal conflicts. After writing space agreements for our self-governance, we felt more at peace than we ever have walking the halls of our University.
Initially, campus police harassed us and repeatedly asked us to leave. They claimed we were singing too loud, disrupting the University’s normal flow of business. Essentially, they admitted that we were accomplishing our task. We ensured that there would be no business-as-usual that day.
When we told the police we wouldn’t leave the space, our desires grew into direct subversions of the system that has controlled us our entire lives. The police stared at us, not expecting anyone to refuse their command. We were able to say “no” with ease because the majority of the group was white, privileged variously under the social order. Our ability to refuse the police must be problematized by race, since our whiteness allows us to chip away at the hegemony of police power from a position of relative safety.
We know that our white comrades are not the primary target for policing. The violence of policing stems from the white supremacy and colonialism that built this country, and is continuously more devastating and prevalent in communities of color than in the lives of white people. We are enraged that police routinely terrorize students of color on our campus. We see the need for more dialogue on race and the role it plays in our theory and practice. Our actions are intended as acts of solidarity and resistance in the broader movement against police led by anarchist comrades and communities of color.
We occupy in hopes that all students can feel empowered to organize and resist autonomously; in hopes that one day we will occupy the entire University, and finally set it free.
By continuing to occupy, we undermined the police’s normal ability to rule spaces unchallenged. The space quickly became centered around sharing—students donated cookies, sleeping bags and pillows on their way to class. We played games, created art and invited people into conversations about the violence of policing and the capitalist hegemony inherent in the University. We experienced a free flow of resources and ideas, and remembered that we can create joy through vulnerability and trusting that we are capable of caring for one another.
We had intentions of sleeping in the space, but at 11 PM the Dean of Students led police in to the remove us. This was another reminder that the police and school administration serve each other, and that the force maintaining order within the University is the fear of violence and retribution. When the Dean of Students gave us the choice to leave, many cops stood behind him, reinforcing his words with the threat of their arms.
We decided not to occupy the inside of the Cathedral yesterday after receiving critiques about our strategy claiming that there is nothing radical about white people occupying space—white people have been taking and occupying space from the inception of this country. We take these critiques seriously and know that there are many more ways to center racism and the role of white supremacy in our politics and organizing. It is important that we continue to take time to slow down and listen to our friends as maintaining relationships and staying accountable to our broader community feels more important than sticking to a strict strategy that aligns with our political ideals.
Instead of occupying the space yesterday, Wednesday, we handed out 70 burritos and many zines with comrades from Food Not Bombs in efforts to strike up conversations with other students about anarchism, police violence and the politics of free food. This was an act of defiance in its own right. We have been harassed in the past for trying to set up Food Not Bombs and share fairs on campus grounds. The distribution of food is not permitted on campus, and our share fairs were seen as ‘demonstrations’ instead of movements towards mutual aid. But we will continue to provide for each other in the ways that the University will not.
Other crews did banner drops to keep up the spirit of dissent.
Even if our occupation lasted for only 15 hours, the power of that brief departure from daily life will fuel our fight against all that suffocates our autonomy. For a moment, we created a space where the authority of the University fell away and we could answer to the needs of the students by our own collective means.
This is one perspective of the many people who participated in the occupation. Different analyses may come.
-Steel City Autonomous Movement (SCAM) // Autonomous Student Network PGH
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.
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.
Our material environment arranges life into a procession of neat little rituals. All that is possible or desirable is administered according to the routines built into Campus Life.
No one is quite sure why the lobby of Litchfield Towers is first and foremost a place to glide through in passing, to dodge the solicitations of student clubs, or to purchase coffee. Nor is there much reason to question such fixtures of everyday life; these structures are simply taken for granted as part of our unspoken consensus on reality.
And who really even gives a shit in the first place?
Well, try using a university space for even slightly different purposes and you’ll find out pretty quickly. After all, there are people whose paychecks are predicated on having to give so many shits that they will physically retaliate against any breach in routine. But uniforms are easy targets, rhetorically speaking. The relations encoded in the blueprints of the places they are paid to defend, on the other hand, are what reproduce normalcy.
For an education that liberates. For a classroom that no longer spectates. For house parties where Pitt students, workers, and faculty can throw down together. For a campus culture that terrifies Pitt’s board of trustees. For a campus that celebrates life.
For a University Against Itself
Back in the spring of 2015, a couple friends brought hot food, some boxes of clothing, toiletries, books and zines into the lobby of Litchfield Towers to give away for free. This was the same school year that the University of Pittsburgh’s administration decided to raise tuition, organize a food bank for its students as a sort of half-assed apology, and then jack up tuition a second time just a few short months later. Needless to say, shit was getting rough for a lot of kids at Pitt.
I thought using a student space to share stuff was a cool idea, so I grabbed a few sweaters I could spare on my way out the door that morning. But before I even made it to campus, our group chat started blowing up.
My friends had been kicked out within half an hour of setting up. By the time I got there, a Pitt cop was already chasing them out the door, frantically squawking into his radio, flailing his free arm and demanding they come back to face the consequences.
“Must fulfill duty to defend Law and Order,” said the robot in his head.
“Finally, some action!” thought the man behind the uniform.
Art by Tild Eath
The Task at Hand
Rather than deferring to age and experience, we can sharpen our analytical skills through discussion groups, general assemblies oriented towards communication as an end in itself, and more writing, theorizing, and critique. These are the processes that enable a crew, a community, or a distributed network of subversives to gain mutual understanding and refine their analyses in order to speak precisely about what is happening, what must be done, and—most importantly—how to do it. It is essential to find the time and space to do this with people you trust, whose analysis you also trust, and ideally who come from a range of backgrounds and experience.
– “After the Crest: Part IV,” Rolling Thunder #11
This is not a populist appeal. Nor is this a program to be enacted by some specialized minority of student organizers, “social justice” activists, or would-be insurgents. This issue of Filler is about starting a conversation.
In Pittsburgh, we’ve seen a small but exciting resurgence in everything from reformist mass mobilizations to insurrectionary shenanigans. I have no clue what might go down next semester, but some shit seems to happen over and over again. There are patterns, if you’re looking for them; Campus Life has a way of dissolving back into routine.
An effective analysis of our situation, and a healthy bit of introspection and reflection on our personal objectives, might offer a vision for momentum. But no analysis is fundamentally correct, and certainly no analysis is correct outside the context in which it is conceived. A correct analysis is simply whatever interpretation of social reality best informs our efforts to achieve a given objective. Ideas and conflicts persist, but radical youth scenes, and therefore coherent strategies, are as transient and short-lived as our attention spans.
The conceptual frameworks proposed in this zine are meant to work in tandem with the organizing that folks are already engaged in. The task at hand is to figure out, for ourselves, how to conceptualize and organize the University struggle: what entrances are we neglecting, and where might we find points of departure from which to rekindle the excitement we once felt? After all, the shit we pull off today will determine both starting points and horizons for the next generation of Pitt students.
This zine is also an attempt to contextualize Pittsburgh’s nascent student movement, to frame the coming unrest in a way that just might make some careerist liberal think twice before mentioning their time as club president on a future résumé.
~ I ~ Stories We Tell Ourselves
Organizing has never meant affiliation with the same organization. Organizing is acting in accordance with a common perception, at whatever level that may be. Now, what is missing from the situation is not “people’s anger” or economic shortage, it’s not the good will of militants or the spread of critical consciousness, or even the proliferation of anarchist gestures. What we lack is a shared perception of the situation. Without this binding agent, gestures dissolve without a trace into nothingness, lives have the texture of dreams, and uprisings end up in schoolbooks.
– The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends
History under capital is a history of erasure, or else it would tell a story far more personable than the presidents and cash crops so familiar to students.[1]☭
Today in Pittsburgh, we learn how to reproduce the logic of the men who stamped their names on lecture halls, museums, and libraries. Over a century ago, but only a few miles up the road in Homestead, 19-year-old Andrew Henry Striegel died as a partisan for the living wage: a gunshot to the neck, delivered courtesy of two men also named Andrew and Henry. What is lost in high school textbooks is no mere anecdote, but an entire way of relating, being, and inhabiting that sidesteps the mediation of capital: the urge to live and to act directly in accordance with one’s understanding of the world.
But this is nothing new. History is written by the victors or whatever, right? The histories told in the classroom are just the stories popular culture prefers, an interlocking web of myths to explain the modern world.
All of America’s fundamental myths—property, borders, nations, liberty, debt, democracy—were born in acts of violence, are affirmed by violence, and reality is now mediated through their logic. The mythology of the University is no different.
The reemergence of an american student movement carries two discourses. One is familiar; the other is older and emerges far less often. The first is positioned within the march of progress, the student struggle for peace and opportunity, heated debates in the “marketplace of ideas.” It’s always returning to notions of civic duty and a generation’s political awakening, to celebrations of American democracy with a push from below. And it’s not just liberals or reformists that prefer this discourse. Plenty of so-called radicals fester in nostalgia for the old movement: the workerism of labor leaders, the naïve conservationism of the Greens, the rebranded demands for all-too-familiar concessions (whose benefits hardly last a decade before the economy is again restructured to render them meaningless), or the fatalistic certainty of an impending “final” crisis of capitalism. For these populist radicals, the day will come when all of the single-issue campaigns finally merge towards a swift and (relatively) peaceful transition into social democracy. Progress and Democracy, the Bernie-Bro’s wet dream.
The other discourse revolves around interpreting the social violence that sustains Everything, seeking out opportunities for material opposition and counterviolence. These kids orient themselves according to the latest communiqués and spectacles of the global civil war—the call-and-response discourse of Social War. Youth struggling against the american University inherit war stories from those few generations that figured out what the word “peace” really means, although their historical moments have likely been interpreted beyond recognition. While we can scrounge through the fractured bits of text, theory, and counterculture that these kids left behind, these artifacts do little more than hint at their movements’ key points of departure. Still, the fragments of their stories that somehow survived history are at least enough to inspire. For each retelling, it’s a question of improvising the plot gaps needed to link the acts. Good improv is hard, but not impossible. Sometimes all it takes to work out a strategy for momentum is a contagious tactic, as the 2009 student movement proved by occupying campus buildings all across California. But more often than not, would-be insurgents are left recycling tactics without a broader vision for sustaining disruption or infrastructure.
Of course, no single narrative is capable of telling the whole story, and fixating on a single discourse risks suppressing improvisation. Behind every discursive wave of Social War, from Santiago to Athens, are the privatized ruins of failed social democracies. But the key point here is that, ever since the movement of the 1960s, it’s the youth who are improvising theories of change: rejecting routine, escalating populist campaigns, pushing movements to their limits, writing their own mythologies, and even forfeiting their lives to fend off both State and fascist reaction.
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
– Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Power, Routine, Legitimacy
The administration, the University, the student government, the State—none of these institutions wield power.
Power is a relation, a social structure, a logic. It is both the physical and the psychological force of routine, both the pigs’ monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and the racialized colonial alliances that so often complement it. Power is fused within the organization of space; it is the way in which the flow of things and people (in that order) is enforced and reproduced through infrastructural patterns, ritualizing social hierarchies to the point that they become material conditions. “Those in power” are simply the ones enforcing and rationalizing the arrangement, or perhaps slightly adjusting it to better suit the flow of capital.
Routine is a mechanism whose parts can be infused, even conflated, with one’s identity; both the material organization of a space and its accompanying roles and relations are dependent on popular, undisputed participation and faith. We see this in the games of respectability and professionalism played every day on campus. The dormitory resident assistant is your age, but you will never be their peer. How could you be? At any minute, they could receive an order to search your dorm, summon armed men to detain you, get you thrown out of school.
Behind all power relations are a series of affirming images, reproduced ad nauseum on billboards and social media, personalized in the commodified identities sold on shelves and television shows, and circulated by the institutions that assign and define roles and tasks. From your dorm’s overzealous RA, to the cops that he called on the stoners down the hall, “those in power” are really just fronting the aesthetics of power. They would have us believe that they own exclusive rights over arranging and organizing the places we inhabit, or over the deployment of violence to enforce those modes of relations. Look, they have even the shiny badges to prove it!
The continued reproduction of the images, roles, and identities within a given space is only stable so long as nothing interferes with the rhythms of routine. Whether it’s a student refusing to put her cellphone away in a San Antonio middle school, a young man suspected of shoplifting cigarillos walking down a street in Ferguson, or a few dozen Black youth hanging out at a public pool in a white suburb—any potential disruption of the routine functioning of power relations within a space threatens to destabilize the arrangement and function of that space. Which is to say, disruption carries the potential to temporarily rearrange and repurpose a space toward the production of subversive, non-hierarchical power relations.
Since disruption cuts off the dominant relations at the point of production, the social roles that have been granted “legitimate” uses of force are employed as the first line of defense. The student questioning her teacher’s authority is also questioning the relations encoded in her school; the prospect of a suspected shoplifter making off with a few dollars worth of merchandise warrants extra-judicial execution because it challenges the sanctity of property; the presence of Black bodies in a white space threatens a regime of segregation. Behind every identity that categorizes and enforces ways of being, behind every arrangement of space that directs and determines the relationships that comprise things and people, is a latent violence. Disruption exposes this reality, but it cannot experiment with new forms of life without the capacity for self-defense, for counter-violence.
Exercising force is a tactical maneuver in the discourse of legitimacy. The function and arrangement of a space (public school, convenience store, white neighborhood) must encode a distribution of power that considers the agents tasked with imposing it (cops, pigs, murderers) to be legitimate. In the heart of the Empire, spectatorship translates as passive compliance with the rules of the game, as deference to the legitimacy of white supremacist and capitalist logic; in each of the above examples, white police officers savagely attacked young Black people with legal impunity. The aesthetic of power, then, is also the aesthetic of legitimacy: legitimacy is white, he flashes a badge, he wears a suit, he is a professional, he works within the parameters of the law, he carries a megaphone, he is comfortable in his neon-yellow marshalling vest, he is a man.
Genuine acts of resistance make no appeals to conventional legitimacy, to the symbolic terrain of representation, to negotiation with those fronting the aesthetics of power. Rather, genuine resistance leverages force against the material structures that reproduce reality, in hopes of opening new possibilities.
The academic life contains reinforcing counterparts to the way in which extracurricular life is organized… academia includes a radical separation of the student from the material of study. That which is studies, the social reality, is ‘objectified’ to sterility, dividing the student from life…
– Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement
Factory, Colony, University
The University is a knowledge factory, a think-tank expanding capital, a colony in the service of Empire: a site of social control.
The University of Pittsburgh, and the surrounding Oakland neighborhood, is a fucking police state. City cops, Pitt police, Carnegie-Mellon police, Point Park police, Pennsylvania State police, and park rangers all have jurisdiction here (and this doesn’t include rent-a-cops like university security). The administration doesn’t even bother trying to cover up the University’s colonial project; Pitt raises tuition every single year, ensuring that each semester brings richer and whiter students to Oakland. Meanwhile, its legion of pigs occupies the remnants of the original Oakland community to stabilize the process. The colony must grow in order to survive; everywhere, the public University is in its death throes, self-cannibalizing in desperate hopes that the commodification of knowledge, paired with the expansion of its consumer base and labor force, might offset the crisis facing the traditional reproduction of the working class.
The social organization of the University-Colony is a voluntary caste system. The material reality of University infrastructure is sustained by the constant reproduction of social roles: student, faculty, employee, administration, campus police, etc. But those mythical identities only exist in relation to the routines of the University. So in order to ensure that social activity on campus is performed in accordance with the proper University-prescribed identities, Pitt must detach Campus Life from Pittsburgh life—the University “community” must exist outside of the society that constitutes it. And even that “community” is itself further divided into separate social groups, from the academics to the service workers, each premised on a series of affirming images. Pitt hoodies and student ID cards insist the spectacle of Campus Life is not simply a ritualized social performance, but a natural order.
So long as social interaction is directed by the logistics of the neoliberal University—so long as the worker’s labor is converted into the administration’s capital, or the student’s research and debt is transformed into the school’s endowments and marketable reputation, or the untenured professor’s job insecurity is realized as another boring-ass slideshow and multiple-choice exam—all relationships will be mediated by the caste system of Campus Life. So long as capitalists are in control of the University, so long as the University is comprised of capital, the University will oppress and exploit.
Campus Life is a frontline in the social war. Its pretensions of colorblindness, gender equality, and academic liberalism are little more than a smokescreen to cover up the fact that the University itself can never be a neutral institution. A cursory glance at Pitt’s track record is all we need to draw lines in the sand. The normalization and legitimization of misogynistand transphobicplatforms, the Pitt Police’s protection of sexist bro’s and subsequent harassment of queer students, the administration’s utter inaction in response to campus rape culture—this is not naive ignorance to the reality of conflict. This ispartisan activity.
To expand one example, Pitt will neverseriously address campus rape culture: not simply because acknowledging the routine violence of Campus Life might detract from the school’s reputation and therefore its income, but also because patriarchal violence is an integral part of the functioning of the University-Colony. Without that constant violence, and without the resistance to that violence being mediated by the relations of Campus Life, the governance of gender cannot be enforced, and patriarchy is left vulnerable to attack. Without that constant violence, the capitalist University might lose out on a highly profitable form of economic exploitation and social control. Some might go so far as to interpret this violence as an unspoken counter-insurgency strategy, where the brutal repression of half the population is so normalized that any resistance, let alone offensive militancy, is unthinkable.
The University is also a factory, and its owners control the means of knowledge production. Neoliberalism insists on reifying education as a product to be purchased, as a private commodity that can be divorced from daily experience and public life. But, of course, Pitt is somehow both public and private. And so some leftists desperately want to believe that education is still a public good to be defended, consequently ignoring the fact that all of the campus buildings (and everything inside of them) are University property…
If Pitt owns of the means of education, then our performance of “student” produces knowledge only as a marketable commodity. We don’t perform research to better understand our world. We don’t go to class for the sake of advancing, unpacking, and challenging our collective knowledge. Pitt isn’t searching for answers to the crises of this civilization. Finals week doesn’t mean shit. College is just work, except that we fund our bosses and get paid in promises. Academic labor is a glorified means of pushing the frontiers of specialization for the sake of economic growth; everywhere, the University promises its city an economic miracle that never materializes, swearing that the tech students are ushering in their very own Silicon Valley. A financial bubble to rationalize the campus bubble.
The true purpose of academic labor is obvious enough when we’re talking about the students with “practical” majors. Geology, engineering, environmental sciences? Training for the fracking industry. Economics, biology, business? UPMC is the new Carnegie Steel. Some cling to the liberal arts college as if it were the last outpost for receiving an authentic education purely in the pursuit of knowledge. Forbes Magazine calls the liberal arts degree the “hottest ticket” to the tech industry.
Each graduating class is the University-Factory’s latest upgrade to its most popular product: the designer labor force. Nearly a decade of state funding cuts can’t be balanced entirely through tuition hikes. Private and corporate donors funded around 62% of Pitt’s budget in the 2015-2016 fiscal year (30% came from tuition and other fees, a meager 7-8% from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania). These donors, which include corporations like Google and Chevron Oil, don’t shell out cash from the good of their hearts. They want returns on their investments, and Pitt prioritizes its funding accordingly. The University of Pittsburgh’s state-of-the-art Chevron Science Center teaches us commercial sciences that serve the interests of capital, not people.
Pitt’s annual harvest of designer workers is primarily recruited by thesame companies that funded their specialized education. The more innovative graduates join the writers of the algorithms—becoming programmers, city planners, UPMC specialists, engineers. The entrepreneurs among them eagerly await the opportunity to commodify what little remains outside of the economy, perhaps producing trendy apps for couch-surfing, socializing, or sex.
But those jobs are reserved for the cream of the crop; the infrastructure that once provided the conditions needed to support middle class life now lies rotting across the Rust Belt. Capital doesn’t know what to do with our generation, and so we’re sent to school for 30 years, locked away in prisons, or left to fight over menial jobs to keep up with loan payments. The majority of us will graduate as indentured servants. Our generation looks forward to settling the frontiers of economic life, where we will labor in the newly colonized fields of the service industry and the sharing economy. Bill Peduto eagerly prepares East Liberty for the new residents Pitt promised him. Like their liberal mayor, white hipster graduates mourn the postponement of the latest Whole Foods and nod excitedly while watching Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
The ongoing evictions tearing across predominantly Black and working class communities will never end so long as the University exists.
Radicals hardly obstruct this process. After all, Campus Life ensures that malcontents only mimic the appearance of resistance. We end up policing ourselves to build the legitimacy needed for the administration to take us seriously, organizing as “student allies” to abstract identity groups rather than fostering connections with individual workers and faculty, substituting the aesthetics of our countercultures for a concrete break from the images that reproduce Campus Life, working long hours to make Pitt a progressive and democratic university…
Pitt not only accommodates the appearance of resistance, but depends on it in order to stabilize the social groupings that make up the mythical University “community.” The University needs its student labor force to produce the kind of critical feedback that can reenergize and relegitimize its project of technical specialization, capital accumulation, academic centralization, and colonization.
To fight for a progressive and democratic University is to fight for a more brutal and pervasive exploitation, and better ways to disguise it.
Fuck Reality
Until our actions break free from the logic of legitimacy and consensus, until our struggles are oriented outside of all University-prescribed myths – until we openly organize against the University – our anger will be deflected and rerouted into more palatable channels for Campus Life to accommodate.
The interlocking series of myths, the University power structure and its relations, the spectacle of Campus Life that obscures the power structure—these all constitute consensus reality. Consensus reality is more than just the ways of relating that reproduce heteronormative patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, state control, specieism, and the myriad other hierarchies that constrain and destroy life. It is also “the range of possible thought and action within a system of power relations… enforced not only through traditional institutions of control—such as mass media, religion, and socialization—but also through the innumerable subtle norms manifested in common sense, civil discourse and day-to-day life” (Terror Incognita11).
It doesn’t matter what you think so long as you behave, so long as your sense of the possible and your experience of desire does not break with the popular consensus. “Consent discourse presumes that what we want is knowable and can be articulated within the framework of our shared reality” (Terror Incognita16).
Face it, our reality offers nothing to those seeking liberatory social change. Pitt’s consensus reality offers desires (potential courses of action, wants, needs, ways of defining and creating value) that serve only the interests of the University, of neoliberal capitalism. Nothing new can be built, let alone conceptualized, so long as those in power administer the frameworks in which we experience, express, and define our desires. If we have any hope of connecting our own stories to the growing web of insurgent realities waging social war against this reality, consensus must fracture into open conflict.
It follows that Campus Life can only be subverted in a situation of seductive and genuine participation, where the desire to act shatters the passivity and mediation of consensus reality. Should a number of folks at Pitt find a reason join conflictual spaces that negate Campus Life, which is to ask should they conceive of reality as a collaborative project, as participation in an ongoing war between autonomy and social control, how many might never fully return to their normal routines? Near-life experiences are addictive in that way. Suddenly, momentarily, Campus Life’s professional titles like “undergraduate,” “professor,” or “janitor” might be seen for what they truly are: barriers to forming relationships with others on your own terms, prescriptive categories constricting your capacity to define yourself, for yourself. Permits and property laws might no longer meet the collective consensus requirements needed for their reality to continue getting in the way of potential good times. Grades, bills, and three-day study sessions at the library might stop fucking with what were supposed to be the “best years of your life.”
Seriously, though. I sure as hell wasn’t radicalized after hitting up some student group’s meeting. I’m here because I’m still chasing the high from that first punk show in a squat house basement, that first queer potluck, that first renegade warehouse party, that first unpermitted protest, that first smashed Starbucks window.
For conflictual spaces to be truly dangerous, they must constitute a point of participatory, horizontal connection between as many social margins as possible. This requires mobilizing people beyond your social caste within the University-Colony, subverting the spectacular relations of Campus Life, and actively reorienting struggle in a way that violates consensus reality. Put another way, an effective conflictuality essentially breaks the spell, as a young militant told the cameras in Seattle ‘99. The broader social war is already raging beneath the fragile peace of consensus reality.
Last November, a student-led march ended with a brief occupation of the Litchfield Towers dormitory lobby. We seized a space that exists explicitly for our use, that is maintained through our tuition, and we briefly repurposed that space to suit our needs. We left the lobby peacefully, singing,
Don’t walk in front of me I may not follow, Don’t walk behind me I may not lead…
As people left, cops detained one kid from a crew that was trying to prolong the occupation by setting up a sound system from behind makeshift barricades of couches and tables. The march returned to the lobby to ensure the student’s safe release, and within seconds the University police brutally attacked the few protestors that made it back inside. The pigs even charged a student with felony trespassing on her own fucking campus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZEZciB98Tc
That night ended with radical questions circulating beyond our countercultural bubble for the first time in recent memory: Do the Pitt Police really have the right to beat the students they’re supposed to protect? Wait, don’t we pay to use that building? Well shit, do the police even have the right to dictate how students use our campus in the first place?
The following Monday, the crisis of legitimacy reached new heights. A broad coalition of campus organizations called for a last-minute rally at the site of the previous week’s police violence. That morning, the administration sent out a text message and an email to every student enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, warning them about the demonstration. On Towers patio that afternoon, nearly the entire Pitt police force, many donning masks, manned a militarized zone that separated students from the dormitories we pay to maintain. Inside the lobby, the Pitt administration cowered behind their armed guards. Outside, a small crowd of about 50 students, along with a few faculty members and Pitt workers, refused the admin’s sheepish request for us to send a single representative inside for a dialogue with the administrators. Instead, we proposed they come out and join us in the cold, where they would have no opportunity to control us by appointing and manipulating a leader.
The crisis of legitimacy, no longer abstract, was reified in the guns and batons that prevented students from entering the very building many of us call home.
Disruptions, undertaken individually or collectively, can become a force of negation. Disruptions are a threat on the assembly line, in the streets, in the lecture hall; anywhere the logic of capital administers the structure of space. But disruptions are not enough. As Franz Kafka reminds us, “From a certain point onward, there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”
An occupation is the realization of the threats we make through disruption. To occupy is to strike, to remove a material place from capitalist time and space, to derail alienated activity and ride its inertia off the tracks, to rip open latent contradictions in the fabric of consensus reality. When we occupy, we create a base from which to launch new negations, but more importantly a subjectivity that is actively experimenting with new forms of life.
Disruption, negation, experimentation, occupation — the suspension of routine and rhythm, the conversion of a thousand plagiarized, angst-ridden zines into something terrifying and new: the insurrectional desire to experience unmediated forms of life here and now, to live communism and spread anarchy.
In a university that also operates within (and maintains) consensus reality, orienting action as a search for conditions that might solidify and circulate anti-capitalist relationships is more than mere prefiguration. It ensures the reproduction of alternative social ties, spaces, ideas or desires as an offensive tactic. It is an attack on isolation: an opportunity to share our experiences with one another, to celebrate our differences, and to expose the real lines being drawn in the social war. Elaborating insurrectionary potential requires more than blockading the flow of relations conducive to capital; it is a process of reorienting relationships and shared spaces towards the creation of new and transient collective realities. In other words, we must constantly recreate a “we” that isn’t a lie.
The crisis sparked by the brief occupation of the Litchfield Towers lobby drew lines in the sand, and suddenly kids from both populist and autonomous scenes found themselves sharing a declaration of “we.” The front page of the Pitt News read, “Students, administration clash over Thursday night protest.”
The front page of the Pitt News read, pick a side.
It’s been two years since the fabric of Pitt’s consensus reality really started fraying. In April of 2015, 78 Pitt faculty signed a letter protesting neoliberal-Playboy Chancellor Gallagher’s call for “Making an Impact Through Commercialization.”
Keeping knowledge free is in our own professional self-interest. The open and free exchange of research and data is essential to advancing scientific knowledge, and commodification threatens this fundamental principle of scientific inquiry…
In addition, universities are increasingly subject to pressure from their corporate “partners” to manipulate, suppress or simply avoid research that counters the interests of those who fund it…. We must be prudent in devising strategies for the production and dissemination of knowledge that maintain intellectual integrity, are inclusive rather than exclusive, and that create opportunity for and empower all members of our communities.
The university is one of the few places where our society might find leadership in developing the ideas and models we need to re-orient society in ways that can help to ensure that everyone today and in future generations can share in the benefits that so many of us at Pitt enjoy.
In 2017, our teachers are no longer on the defensive. The faculty and graduate students are both organizing with the United Steelworkers, with many comrades among them. But in order for these efforts to force a rupture that reveals the social war raging behind every new Starbucks and tuition hike, radical agitation should also shift to the offensive. The discourse of Progress and Democracy is especially dangerous after the election of Donald Trump. Radicals working within reformist groups need to exploit the heightened polarization and emphasize an anti-fascist framework if they want to prevent liberals and Trump-collaborators from pacifying these campaigns. The radicals on the outside need to familiarize themselves with the new social terrain, identify opportunities for militant disruption, constantly reevaluate their ideas of autonomy, and develop a broader strategy for circulating alternative social ties and desires. If we can’t generalize such a conceptual shift soon, popular consensus will normalize not only the Trump regime, but also the impending escalation of reactionary violence and State repression.
On our end, student-faculty and student-worker solidarity efforts are almost exclusively defensive, not to mention predicated on the relationships between self-appointed representatives of abstract identity groups. Fighting for specific reforms that could help our friends survive in the short-term is no substitute for finding ways to meet those needs ourselves: a gradual accumulation of concessions will never outpace the march of neoliberalism and the resurgence of fascism, let alone offset the rising cost of living. Conventional approaches like “raising awareness” about issues like union neutrality, the far-right, shitty wages and tuition hikes are crucial in base-building, and they could potentially present a counter-narrative to the administration’s justifications and propaganda. But waiting around for the University to fuck up on its own isn’t going to start the insurrection.
“If you want to force a change,” Milton Friedman advised his Chicago Boys, “set off a crisis.”
~ II ~ Dead Ends
The same people who practice “critique” are also the most susceptible to cynicism. But if cynicism is simply the inverted form of enthusiasm, then beneath every frustrated leftist academic is a latent radical.
– Communiqué from an Absent Future
There is a peculiar grasp of method in the student organizing scene: the student group, the coalition, the teach-in, the petition, the letter-drop, the buttons and felt squares, the op-eds, the one-on-ones, the classic A-to-B march around Oakland, the discourse of accessibility or of buzzwords (intersectionality, systemic, anti-oppression, safe(r) space, self-love, revolutionary, collective liberation, community, consensus). Yet despite all of the base-building and the “meeting-people-where-they’re-at,” student groups at Pitt rarely break out of the initial education/negotiation stage of a campaign.
Each year’s new organizational leadership is drawn from that small base of students who spent their time as underclassmen slowly building their organizer cred: attending panel discussions and meetings, doing grunt work like flyering or gathering signatures, and then (maybe) hitting the streets during the occasional national mobilization. And each year the new board members, steering committees, core collectives, presidents, and “philanthropy chairs” mount their pylons of networking in-crowds and NGO internships only to gape helplessly at the massive turnover of the next semester.
For the student radicals working within reformist organizations, campaign strategies are inherited from the upperclassmen that bought them beer back when they first got involved. It’s chic to vaguely identify with anti-fascist and feminist politics, but some organizers cringe at –isms and are always sure to lecture newcomers on why it’s alienating to reference political theory. The only acceptable discourse is that of Progress and Democracy, which offers few tools for critiquing reform campaigns, but plenty of buzzwords for drafting petitions.
For the students who don’t try to disguise their analysis in the language of bourgeois populism, an unrelenting emphasis on intersectionality, autonomy, and horizontalism is the only authentic way forward—although nobody’s quite sure what these things look like in practice. This crowd is oftenlazily defined as the millennial activists; youth who conflate “organizing” with a directionless activism that is marred by ideological purity, adventurism, and (an admirably merciless) militancy. It’s a tired critique, but it definitely rings true whenever our organizing efforts and direct actions are oriented towards public visibility, rather than their emotional and material impact on both the community we long to build and the reality we despise. Besides, if the goal of an action is purely symbolic or designed to attract media attention, it ends up being little more than an impatient and unsuccessful populism (see: Democracy Spring).
Whatever way you spin it, student radicals in Pittsburgh are experiencing a degree of strategic polarization comparable to the tensions within highly mobilized campuses. One camp is acting out the politics of a populist routine, the other performs a pseudo-radical spectacle: one is base-building around modest demands without ever actually escalating, the other rides shotgun to trending hashtags from the latest revolt; one is checking off boxes on the never-ending list of “somethings” to accomplish before the final crisis of capitalism, the other desperately reblogs every adventurous breach in the anxiety of the everyday.
That being said, this section is not intended to define these tensions within some false dichotomy of “activists” versus “organizers,” or “autonomists” versus “populists.” Rather, I hope to challenge radicals working within one or both of the two most prevalent discourses (Progress and Democracy and Social War), to critically evaluate their relationships to the organizational frameworks, identities and desires produced by consensus reality. We won’t build momentum through the reconciliation of abstract tendencies, but there’s a chance things might start rolling if frustration can be articulated as the need for experimentation, or if the struggle to get out of bed nurtures a spirit of negation. [1, 2]
Critique illuminates all the errors of a society that its managers have overlooked. It is the perfect interlocking mechanism of stagnation, stunting the growth of burgeoning, subjective revolt by offering one a whole buffet of irresistible, irrelevant options for “change.” A release valve for intellectual dissonance, critique today resembles the state-sponsored “strikes” of communist countries, where the desire for resistance is satiated by a regimented diet of acceptable means of conflict, supervised by its very enemies.
– Preoccupied: The Logic of Occupation
The Populist
It’s true that the populist camp’s suspicion of ideology is a positive development. The tragedy of the 1960s is often told with fingers drawn at Maoist vanguards or lifestylist dropouts and escapist communes. But at least in the ‘60s you could generally figure out what the fuck it was that the people working with you really believed in. The problem today is that just about every populist, reform-oriented student group is a “Big Tent” organization, except that instead of involving the coordinated effort of multiple theoretical tendencies, there’s just a vague political spectrum that goes from “sorta liberal” to “hella radical.” With this in mind, it makes sense that the default discourse for most student groups is that of Progress and Democracy.
Regardless of one’s place in the spectrum, the ambiguous and moralistic populism surfacing alongside the Progress and Democracy discourse is now developing as an ideology.
The populist, much like their cultural mirror in the hipster, is quick to shed or appropriate new political aesthetics, shrugging off any attempt at classification with the flick of a hand-rolled cigarette. The absence of any theoretical framework or clear ideological affinity within student groups leads many organizers to act out populism as a sort of cautious defeatism, often under the guise of being “realistic” or “patient.” Populism is encouraged by the Unions and NGOs that assign demands to student front-groups, administer the organizing frameworks, and then recruit and fund young radicals. This practice is typically rationalized with talk of building power through a gradual procession of concrete “wins” and creating accessible, entry-level political spaces. Such arguments ignore the reality of the situation: most student organizations are reproducing the logic of capital.
Not merely capitalist logic, like equating brand recognition with public support, or choosing tactics based on the input of popular opinion (read: market research), but the logic of capital. The organizational leadership determines and enforces the character of the individual organizers’ productivity, extracting surplus value from their activism in the form of social capital, brand recognition, and financial donations or grants. The organizers’ productivity itself is valued according to event turnout, or by the sympathy that the student group wins from the administration (which is to say, the organizers’ efficiency in siphoning the inclinations of individuals into an agenda the student group controls). But most of all, the logic of capital emphasizes its own never-ending reproduction, of the definition of “activism” as it exists within the confines of Pitt’s consensus reality. Reformist organizations are ultimately conflating quantifiable “wins” and concessions with building movement momentum, conflating the range of possible reforms granted by the discourse of Progress and Democracy with the process of improving material conditions. Consequently, radicals working within the populist camp face a much higher risk of being co-opted; many end up adopting populism as an ideology, rather than using it as an accessible discourse for organizing conflictual spaces and materially supporting the people that inhabit them.
At Pitt, each and every student group is competing for our participation. Students really don’t have much free time, so of course it’s easier to focus on the things that are immediately accessible. Genuine concern for the working conditions of the people who create the products we consume translates into pressuring the administration to divest from this or that unethical company, or perhaps into individual choices like shopping fair-trade. But are these viable solutions? Now that the campus bookstore has a friendly face, the University can resume profiting from its brand name and new progressive image, and the “ethical” companies can continue selling their particular brand of green capitalism. Having a clean conscious is far too often a luxury that comes with the kind of price tag few can afford, although taking out loans is always an option. Good intentions are sabotaged by reality.
Time constraints force student radicals to narrow our rage into a single issue, or else risk overextending ourselves and sacrificing our mental health. After we’ve chosen a focus, reformist groups shape and mold that rage into a passionate-but-reasonable simmer in order to appeal to a broader audience. Each single-issue organization must specialize its labor force, lest its workers distract from the campaign narrative, or (god forbid) start assuming tasks that are generally reserved for the top-dog organizers, such as making PR decisions, organizing meetings and actions, networking with other groups, and writing propaganda pieces.
Sound familiar? That’s because it’s the same logic of our neoliberal education. Students’ skills are specialized during a point in our lives when we should be exploring our interests in ways that aren’t predicated on utility or dictated by specialists. I’m not trying to suggest there’s something inherently wrong with becoming skilled in a field, or committed to winning a demand, and it’s not like students have spare time to dedicate to every hobby we entertain. But just as students cannot keep ignoring the ways in which our education is centralizing knowledge production and training us for participation in the capitalist economy, the radicals working for populist organizations cannot keep ignoring the ways in which reformist campaigns are centralizing agency and training organizers for careers in the non-profit industrial complex. The liberal tendencies within student groups are dangerously close to monopolizing dissent on campus, and the populist discourse of Progress and Democracy is turning well-meaning radicals into another specialized class of students telling other students what to say and how to act.
Seriously, are there any radicals working in the populist camp that haven’t been lectured by some condescending liberal about cuss words and respectability? Hasn’t everyone heard an older, more “experienced” organizer exaggerate a sigh before vapidly explaining the difference between essentialist abstractions?
Between the “ill-timed” actions that are too disruptive/confrontational/alienating, and the merits of more “strategic” tactics, such as symbolic protest or asking super tough questions;
Between the events and meetings that are too broad or open-ended, and those that are building the movement (or rather, their organization);
Between the “good allies” passively following the instructions of a certain identity group’s self-proclaimed “leaders” (as if everyone within that identity has the same interests and beliefs as those that speak on their behalf), and the “bad allies” actively prioritizing social and political affinity?
Let’s not even bring up the violence vs nonviolence dichotomy…
The problems with the populist camp only amplify with scale. At the individual level, populist frameworks for activism and organizing do little to challenge the desires and social roles allowed by the University’s consensus reality. At the organizational level, the student group is structured by the relations of capital and thus depends on the perpetual specialization, reproduction, and exploitation of labor-power. The discourse of Progress and Democracy produces a populism that is both ideological and anti-theoretical, confining student groups to reformist narratives whilst depriving the radicals within them of the ability to collectively evaluate their efforts in relation to a broader vision for revolutionary change. When viewed as a whole, it’s clear that there is a widespread deference to the sorts of actions, decision-making processes, people, and ideas that are perceived to be “legitimate” within the campus Left; meaning that the majority of student-led campaigns—successful or not—do little to disrupt the Spectacle of Campus Life, cultivate actively (as opposed to passively) desiring individuals and collectivities, or subvert the myths that uphold Pitt’s consensus reality. The heteropatriarchal / white-supremacist / neoliberal University’s ongoing colonization of social and economic life remains unchallenged at best, reenergized and relegitimized at worst.
We seek to push the university struggle to its limits. Though we denounce the privatization of the university and its authoritarian system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms. We demand not a free university but a free society. A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life. Instead we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into a declaration of war.
– Communiqué from an Absent Future
Reactive Autonomy
The emergence of an autonomous scene at Pitt is not the result of the spontaneous self-organization of radicals. In this early stage, it is a reaction-formation to the alienation of both Campus Life and the Populist Left.
Under Campus Life, each layer of alienation is turned into a private war with boredom, anxiety, and misery. The Pitt employee’s creative power is wasted on a 40-hour week of swiping IDs for students who will never learn his name. The adjunct professor must compete with her colleagues for a position, and even if she lands the job she’s not sure if she’ll be able to put food in her kid’s lunchbox. The student, perpetually intoxicated (if not through substance use, then through the countless other opiates sold to us), ironically satirizes and downplays the desperation underpinning their every attempt to balance life priorities—to finish class assignments, to keep in touch with distant relatives and loved ones, to calculate just how many hours of their life they must sell just to pay off their loans, to grapple with the scale of just how fucked we all are, to feel intimacy beyond the games of social capital and political manipulation. Everywhere, a quiet resignation to routine.
To be politically engaged, to root for one brand of elite interests against another, is no less a resignation to routine than going to work in the morning. To organize for University reform, to beg for the privilege to play faithful advisor to the administration’s strategic plan, is more of an endorsement of neoliberalism than an indictment.
Last year’s “strategic forums” once again channeled student anger into mediation, representation, and routine. The potential for a multi-front confrontation with the administration was outright squandered by a few prominent organizers, who leaped at the opportunity to represent the student body as student-advisors to Pitt’s strategic plan. In response to the populist left’s blatant complicity with these self-appointed student leaders and the administration’s recuperative efforts and propaganda, a few small crews of students broke away from their student organizations. Some of us opted to call for an alternative, autonomous “student action forum.” We thought the forum would create a space for students to discuss and self-organize around the issues closest to them. The forum was a flop (someone please remind me to at least hit up like a facilitation training or something before I ever try to call another general assembly), but it was also a turning point.
Autonomy attracts us because we’ve seen its potential to transform one’s sense of individual and collective power, to seduce spectators into active participation: its potential to inspire others to search for liberatory experiences and projects on their own terms. But autonomy is also a process. It requires intentionally theorizing and experimenting with our conceptions of autonomy in order to determine what practices will result in the active provocation, solicitation, and circulation of contradictory and complementary insurgent desires. Without continual experimentation and negation, without an intention that goes beyond “fuck that liberal bullshit,” we become passive consumers of the aesthetics and practices associated with autonomy, all the while reproducing the same relationships and arrangements of space that centralize power, agency, and legitimacy. In other words, we can cling to “spontaneity,” “horizontalism,” or “self-organization” (abstractions likely passed down from Occupy) all we want, but these words are practically meaningless until we start to facilitate spaces that provide the skills, platforms, tools, dialogue, material and emotional support required to inspire and nurture spontaneity, horizontalism, self-organization, autonomy.
The radicalism in our autonomous scene is reactionary primarily because it fails to break from the frameworks we are reacting to. Just because Pitt doesn’t recognize our crews as legitimate student organizations and none of us have “club presidents” doesn’t mean anything’s changed. The reactionary autonomist stagnates with their radicalism as an aesthetic; they parade their consensus processes, rowdy actions, militant rhetoric, nominally non-hierarchical meetings, and discourse pissing-contests in order to disguise the fact that they are reproducing the same organizing styles found in the populist camp, albeit with a sexier attitude.
If you think I’m projecting, that’s because I am.
How I became an organizer and started hurting people I care about.
Four years ago, my first real week spent “organizing” on a campaign ended with a series of banner drops that were timed to coincide with an SEIU strike. Shortly after, the more “experienced” student organizers suddenly stopped working with me. I found myself on a sort of unspoken blacklist after word got out that I allegedly dragged barricades into the street and vandalized University property with labor slogans. It was my first real mobilization; I honestly had no fucking clue what the word “escalation” implied, or how my actions might have made the campaign look bad. All I knew was that I wanted Something to happen, and that my decision to act on that desire managed to piss a good number of people off.
I still tried to be involved; I kept turning up at meetings long after I had stopped participating in any meaningful way. The older organizers gave me the cold shoulder, and I would leave early to cry alone in my dorm, or to smoke weed with you under the bridge in Schenley.
I don’t know where I’d be now if we hadn’t found each other. Like me, you were alone, stoned, and binge-watching that super dope first season of Vice on HBO. We rolled into every Free the Planet meeting high off our asses, even though we felt pretty unwelcome showing up there anymore. We spent most nights together, smoking by the Shrine under the bridge, throwing illegal bonfire parties on the lake by the train tracks, hitting every basement show at Bates Hardcore Gym, tripping face – sometimes twice a week – on Flagstaff Hill, passing around that grimey notebook I eventually scanned and printed as the second issue of Filler. I still remember holding your frostbitten hands as we climbed down from the roof of Towers Lobby; fifteen minutes spent fumbling with frozen wire, trying to drop our first banner together in the middle of a blizzard.
Months after the coalition splintered back into its original organizations, we realized we were still admins of the Facebook page. We hijacked that shit and told ourselves that we’d use it to organize differently, that we’d encourage militant action instead of shaming it, that we’d push the student movement toward the attack. We called for the first explicitly anti-capitalist march on Pitt’s campus since Occupy imploded, and all 40 of us marched for two blocks down the sidewalk…
Some older Pittsburgh radicals took notice, but despite their help we still had no idea what the fuck we were doing. We stagnated as those angry kids yelling on street corners, we fractured after our “formal” accountability processes proved worthless. We dedicated the weight of our emotional energy to the mere maintenance of our tiny organization before burning out one by one… by the end of the semester, we all retreated back into our respective countercultures.
We don’t talk much anymore, but it’s still comforting to read through the goofy shit you wrote in our notebook,
People come and go, it’s never going to change. But those times were still fun, and probably really strange.
By the end of 2014, I was slowly plugging back into the populist scene, albeit as part of a different student group. This time, I took their organizing trainings to heart, convinced that our failure to organize autonomously stemmed from a lack of organizational formality. I began rehearsing my interactions with people to the point that they were script-like, my voice echoing the cold, indifferent speech I picked up while attending countless meetings. I complied with every request to bottomline bullshit tasks; I found myself competing with the other underclassmen to get the most petition signatures in hopes that the older organizers might take my politics seriously.
It wasn’t all that long before a new “we” broke away once more to organize autonomous action, yet by that point I had already turned into a “serious” “organizer.” We threw benefit parties, but I stressed over attendance numbers and the zine table instead of enjoying myself and catching up with friends. We called for general assemblies hoping to inspire intersectionality, or to present alternatives to the administration’s “strategic forums,” but really I just wanted everyone else to adopt my proposals and integrate their work into my own vision for a student union. We organized Share Fairs and Really Really Free Markets to build community and practice mutual aid, but I secretly valued people for the material items they contributed instead of the energy they brought to the space. We wiggled our hands in all the gestures of consensus process, but it was always the same people proposing ideas and facilitating the meetings. I adopted all the aesthetics of radicalism only so I could pretend that I was creating space instead of taking it.
Still, this new scene had real momentum, and it was only a matter of months before some of us started conspiring to escalate a populist march. The escalation was part of our plan for a series of autonomous interventions in the 2016 United Students Against Sweatshops convergence, which the Pitt chapter was putting in hella work to host that year. We thought the convergence presented an opportunity to push a national organization, with chapters on dozens of campuses, in a more radical direction… but also, like, personal politics. After the populist radicals found out about our plan, they invited me to the organizing meetings for the big march. Finally! I had been given a seat at the table. People were taking our mess of an informal coalition seriously! I didn’t even mind when I noticed that the list of participating organizations printed alongside the meeting minutes concluded with “oogles” where it should have read “Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition.” I mean, shit, that was pretty funny.
But then the professional organizers started telling me what they needed “my” “organization” to do, and somebody gave me a clipboard. Which was, of course, the last thing my ego needed. When the big day came, I indulged my newfound legitimacy and took my place alongside the other march marshals. Clipboard in hand, I micromanaged each step my friends took, hoping to control every beat of the march so I could pull off a pointless escalation that was, in all honesty, motivated more by personal politics than a strategic vision. When the time came for the autonomous crews to escalate, no one followed the plan, because by then it had become my plan. I was too busy sulking to notice the circle of young radicals forming around the Food Not Bombs shopping cart. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but free food and a black flag did more to spark an autonomous scene than a strictly choreographed extra fifteen minutes in the street ever could have. Most of those kids are now close friends and comrades.
It is not a question of choosing between these two sides, nor of synthesizing them, but rather of displacing the priority of this opposition. The real dialectic is between negation and experimentation: acts of resistance and refusal which also enable an exploration of new social relations, new uses of space and time.
– “We are the Crisis” in After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California
Incite, Conspire, Diversify
The autonomous scene has grown exponentially since the USAS convergence. There’s no sense in constructing some fancy framework for analyzing our interpersonal relationships, as my use of the phrase “autonomous scene” is simply shorthand for a series of overlapping networks (of organizations, informal crews, circles of friends, accomplices, codefendants, bitter enemies) that are, to varying degrees, coalescing outside of the mediation of University-affiliated student groups or political parties. The “autonomous scene” is an intentionally vague phrase, and it’s far bigger than any of the various acronyms we use to form social clusters within it.
Our anxiety, boredom, and misery inhabit a critical historical moment. Our relationships are indisputably militant, as every time we manage to really, truly connect with someone, it’s because our realities merged along some plane of revolt against isolation, mediation, domination, control. Even the administration can’t ignore that “we” are experimenting with the communization of our segregated realities—that “we” are learning how to, if only briefly, create autonomous spaces in which there really is a “we.” And we want more.
If defining the scene in concrete terms risks suppressing its potential to nurture relationships that don’t fit neatly within Campus Life, then how can it be critiqued? Without a clear picture of what counts as being a part of “the” autonomous scene, without formal specialization or hierarchy, how can we generalize a shared perception of our situation? What sort of frameworks for decentralized coordination can extend beyond our immediate social circles, when we struggle to do so even on a scale as small as Pittsburgh’s radical youth scene?
The social war is already all around us. It’s not a question of merging the various social and political circles into some unified campaign, but of facilitating the realization of mutual desire.
Find each other, because the Something we’re waiting for is never going to happen unless we become Something. If each of us acts on our own ideas and desires, a shared perception of our situation is temporarily understood every time we act collectively—every time we create spaces, projects, and experiences together. Which is really just a roundabout way of saying, what you do or don’t do makes all the difference.
In California, the kids spray-paint We are the Crisis on the walls of occupied lecture halls. In Greece, they write We are an Image from the Future.
What could “we” be?
“We aren’t revolutionaries, but we are the revolution. And sometimes I think that the whole movement is just me and you…”
Appendix
There is at least one practice worth prioritizing and refining. Healthy doses of introspection, taken alone or with the guidance of trusted comrades, might be a step in the right direction. Some questions I find myself habitually returning to:
What are my short-term and long-term objectives? What are the first steps, and how can I take them while staying true to my beliefs?
Does my current project require bringing in, training, or even radicalizing new people? Or can it be better accomplished with a few close friends who are already on the same page?
Am I making time and space to hear my comrades’ criticisms, to learn together, and to unpack each other’s shit?
Is this crew/organization a closed collective with a formal process for integrating and welcoming new people? Should there be a separation between public events and collective meetings? What sort of decisions are made in these spaces, and how are they made? Is everyone in the crew/organization participating in planning the next public meeting/event, and if not, what’s the difference between being a member and part of the general public? Are there informal hierarchies that negatively impact the participation of others? Yeah, no shit there are, so what are you going to do about them? What’s the most strategic way to address them?
When was the last time I revised my personal theory of change? How can my crew and I intervene in campaigns that seem to be stagnating? Are my organizing efforts, actions, and events actually getting me closer to any of my objectives?
Is my crew prioritizing its abstract “organizing” work or its participation in an organization/campaign over its capacity to emotionally and materially support the people that comprise it?
If my crew for this project is just me and two friends, is there consensus on whether it’s actually necessary to form or participate in a formal organization? How is everyone doing on, like, an emotional level? Maybe it’s time to just chill and enjoy each other’s company for a bit?
Am I building affinity through trust and compassion? If not, how can I create space for healing?
Am I having fun? Am I getting enough sleep? Am I falling into the trap of capitalist conceptions of productivity?
[1]☭So, what is capital? Fredy Perlman defined capital as, “…at once a name for a social relation between workers and capitalists, for the instruments of production owned by a capitalist, and for the money-equivalent of his instruments and ‘intangibles,’ …” Capital is a social relation that necessitates the use of things in a specific way, and it is those things in so far as they are directly reproducing this social relation in the process of value accumulation. As Marx emphasized in the Grundrisse, capital must be understood as a process. Marx defined capital variously as “a social relation of production,” “value in process,” “a Moloch,” “accumulated labor,” and most poetically as “dead labour which, vampire like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”
– Jan D. Matthews, An Introduction to the Situationists
In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing loss to Donald Trump — someone who had widely been regarded as the most un-electable candidate in the history of presidential politics — millions of liberals have stepped out of their yoga classes and re-emerged in our social movement spaces. And they brought their bad politics with them.
The Pitt College Democrats are holding a “solidarity rally” on campus this Saturday at 2pm. The event, which will provide a platform for multiple politicians, was ostensibly organized in order to “show support and solidarity with marginalized groups in a peaceful rally.”
Frankly, we call bullshit.1 It’s Valentines Day, and the Pitt College Dems are still a little heartbroken after finding out that love doesn’t actually trump hate. In hopes of soliciting even the slightest interest in their failed neoliberal party, the PC Dems are now flirting with those Bernie-bros that they alienated mere months ago, probably dropping some shit pick-up line about the political realism of their “strategies” “against” Trump.
Struggling to maintain their relevance in the wake of the largest mobilization of our young lives, the PC Dems are now co-opting the (already opportunist) political aesthetic we typically associate with the alphabet soup of socialist and communist parties that hang around Pitt’s campus. Armed with some new slogans (occasionally substituting “resist” for “I’m with her”), a vague injunction to a moralistic do-somethingism (so long as there is no action plan that goes beyond talking to your politician of choice or asking politely for a march permit), and some sleek new fliers, the PC Dems are preparing an ambitious new campaign: BORE THE RESISTANCE TO DEATH.
At the end of the day, the Democrats still uphold the system we oppose, a system that is built on the violence of white supremacy, heteronormative patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and the myriad other hierarchies that dominate life here in the heart of the Empire.
In that spirit, Filler is excited to announce our very first public contest, a breakup story decades in the making, your new favorite Valentine’s Day rom-commie special…
Breaking Up with the Democrats!
Crew-up, or go it alone! The individual, affinity group, or organization that pulls off the most creative, intersectional, funny, or disruptive intervention at the PC Dems’ rally this Saturday will receive their very own bag of goodies and a personalized Valentine’s Day card. All participants will get a love note, but only one direct action will get the goodies! If your crew wins the grand prize, so far you’re looking at some rare zines, free stick-and-poke tattoos, antifa stickers, gift cards, free meals, and more TBA!
Contest Guidelines:
1) Avoid taking actions that put bystanders at risk of police violence.
Obviously, there is no guarantee that any direct action won’t piss off the pigs, but keep in mind that this contest’s goal is to generalize conflictuality and subvert the Democrats’ attempts to pacify the movement – not to kick off the insurrection in a crowd full of liberal snitches and hostile media, let alone families with children or people who already experience a greater risk of violence in this system of (hetero-normative patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism, or any of the myriad other hierarchies that dominate life here in the heart of the Empire).
2) Seek accomplices, not allies.
Be conscious of the way liberals weaponize identity politics in order to pacify and exploit marginalized communities. Don’t let some “respectable,” self-appointed community leader silence you or speak on your behalf just because they share part of your identity and the oppression that comes with it – I sure as hell didn’t vote for Milo to be LGBTQ Nation’s person of the year. Likewise, don’t let liberals get away with snitching on you or delegitimizing your action just because you’ve decided to use your privilege to take the kinds of risks that some of your comrades might not be able to take.
We know that fronting as an “ally” to an entire group of people is absurdly problematic, as it assumes that everyone within that community shares the same beliefs, interests, capabilities, needs. We know that when Democrats call for “privileged allies” to follow the instructions of “community leaders,” they are really trying to tell you to obey their tokenized mouthpieces. Instead, we urge you to listen to (and deepen your relationships with) your trusted friends and comrades who are fighting this system all the harder just because of who they are.
3) Pics or it didn’t happen! Don’t forget to claim your action in some way! You could take (non-incriminating) photos or video footage, or you could send us a communiqué to show off some of that sexy prose and radical perspective you’ve been working on, or maybe even just hand out and/or throw fliers in the air that explain your action – whatever works, just make sure to do it!
We recommend using Tor and guerrilla mail together if you want to submit your contest entry anonymously. Send your submissions to FillerCollective@riseup.net!
Endnotes
1) Don’t get us wrong, it’s great that more students want to get organized and stand in solidarity with one another. What’s bullshit is that the Democrats are suddenly acting like they’ve been anything but a leech on liberation movements in this country, and students hoping for change are getting sucked right back into the system.
Democrats are responsible for breaking a new record in migrant deportations under the Obama administration. Democrats deployed the National Guard to suppress liberation movements such as the Movement for Black Lives. Democrats passed legislation expanding the power of the surveillance state and the executive branch, creating the authoritarian structures now wielded by an egotistical proto-fascist. Democrats bomb civilians and children just like Republicans do. Democrats gentrify our cities and unironically praise the socially-conscious business ethics of Starbucks and Whole Foods. On campus, the PC Dems also have a strange habit of publicly defending the Pitt College Republicans and denouncing direct action.
Their complicity with the Obama administration should speak for itself, but over the last few months the Pitt College Democrats have been fronting as if they represent some sort of relevant opposition to the system. Some really cool folks are getting involved, but their good intentions are continually sabotaged by the reality of our situation: the Democrats are part of the problem.
Photo: Our generation’s first autonomous student bloc at Pitt
