…Until Everything that Belongs to Everyone has been Reclaimed

A Speech Prepared by Members of the Soccer Institute for the Occupy Edmonton Solidarity Rally at the High Level Bridge, Nov. 28, 2011.

We want to speak to a few of the reasons we are here today, to the reasons why after our eviction on Friday Morning we haven’t disappeared, to the reasons why we will continue to assemble, to speak and act out against the injustices of the world we live in.

The Occupy Movement is, at its core, and when it is at its best, an unequivocal refusal of the status quo. It is an absolute rejection of the corrupted common sense that everyday seeks to coerce our consent for an economic and political system whose most fundamental operating principle is exploitation. Occupy is a rejection too of the forces that seek to discipline our bodies, to mold us merely as workers ready and willing to fill the pockets of the already grossly wealthy, and to shape us as consumers choked by false desires for things we don’t need.

The principle upon which we make our stand is equality, and the realm we rise up to defend is the Common. Our rebellion is not a new one. The revolutionary ground that we Occupy is a territory traversed and inhabited by a long history of struggle against economic and social oppression. We stand in solidarity with those who have fought, and who continue to fight, for the rights of women, for an end to racism, for the livelihoods of working people and an end to the systems of privilege, so long entrenched against us. We add our voices proudly to those of Rosa Luxemburg, Silvia Federici, Stephen Biko, Nelson Mandela, Karl and Eleanor Marx, Fredrich Engels, Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and to the voices of the millions of people that have fought and continue to fight against oppression and for equality all over the globe.

Our revolutionary chorus calls out for a struggle beyond the confines of emancipation thought merely as an equality of opportunity, as it is all too often so narrowly defined. We emphatically reject the competitive logic, and the principle of exclusion, that characterizes the markets we are forced to exist in. Equality for us will never mean equal opportunity to exploit and be exploited, which is the corrupted ideal of the free market, the housing and labor markets—even, increasingly, of the supermarket.

In response to globalization—which is understood best as the extension of capitalist modernity to all corners of the world—we rise up as a global movement of resistance. This ruthless expansion has been enabled by the privatizing logic of neoliberalism, which for at least two decades has been cannibalizing the public in all of its guises, from health and housing services to public spaces, epitomized for us, necessarily, by the privatization of Melcor Park.  This latest recession has made apparent the way accumulation by dispossession operates: As millions of people lose their jobs and houses, we are simultaneously asked to bail out or otherwise bankroll some of the world’s wealthiest corporations, while hundreds of billionaires are spawned around the globe.

We see the symptoms of this globalized neoliberal logic at our oldest public institution: The University of Alberta.  Although this institution was originally imagined as a space for the “uplifting of the whole people”, it has more and more become a place for the very privileged few.  As an aristocratic class of central administrators grows year by year, student tuition and debt levels continue to soar and acts of austerity are directed toward the most vulnerable members of the University.  Despite Alberta being the only region in the world whose economy is not mired in debt, the share of the university’s revenue provided by the province has been frozen; the University’s administration has used this scenario as an opportunity to cut back the budgets of faculties and departments, like English and Philosophy, to name only two, whose knowledges aren’t easily instrumentalized by the logic of accumulation.  This year alone, if our challenges to these cuts are unsuccessful, fifteen people will lose their jobs and their livelihoods.  Furthermore, these tactics are made possible in part by the corrupted provincial labor laws that prevent these valued support workers and, indeed, all laborers at the University, from seeking protection from such abuses within registered unions.  This scenario is just one example among thousands that points to the terrain on which the battle we are waging must be fought. In response to neoliberal austerity, we say Occupy your university! Occupy your government, your city-halls and your courts of law! In response to the neo-conservative cynics who have told us to “Occupy” our “Jobs,” we say, good idea! Occupy your work place and demand an equal share of the wealth you help to generate!

Against this ever-growing inequality, we advocate, as we declared this Tuesday past, for a radically participatory democracy, an end to cuts to public services, an end to corporate influence in politics; we demand fair wages and social supports, fully funded healthcare, free post-secondary education, just and sustainable environmental and labor laws, and the implementation of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

We have been told that our demands are “too Utopian”—a nonsensical phrase that would be utterly perplexing if the ideology behind it were not so baldly communicated by the police who raided our camp.  We can only understand this charge of being “too utopian” as suggesting that we demand too much equality, too little exploitation and poverty. But we are not thwarted or defeated by such immoral cynicism. Rather, we greet our detractors with a fierce smile and the loving spasms of revolutionary laughter. For Occupy is nothing other than the return of the Dispossessed, the beginnings of a new Awakening of a Revolutionary Body whose Massive and Monstrous form is impervious to such petty and stupid attacks.

Today, we are here at the High Level Bridge, a symbol of the gathering together of energies by traversing the prejudices that divide us, a reminder of the necessity of—and our commitment to—expansion.  For the Occupation will not end until we Occupy Everywhere, until Everything that belongs to Everyone has been reclaimed, and the Common Wealth of the world is enjoyed Equally by All!

The Soccer Institute

High Level Bridge, Edmonton, November 28, 2011

Notes on Occupations, Programs, and Production

We want to make a few remarks on what we see as the two greatest strengths and two most pressing concerns of the occupation movement that began in New York City in the form of Occupy Wall Street and has spread to thousands of cities across the globe.

First, the strengths of occupation as a strategy: The occupation in Edmonton, and this is most certainly the case everywhere, was built from the outset on a series of time-consuming and seriously considered programs. Committees responsible for everything from health, food and de-escalation training to sanitation, communications, a burgeoning public school and police negotiation were thought out before the October 15th march, established at the moment of occupation, and continue to be integral to our persistence thanks to constant modification and development at our daily General Assembly. The current site on the corner of 102 and Jasper Ave. is a well orchestrated expression of the desire to self-organize around a radically different set of principles and categories than those with which we’re all too familiar. This takes an immense amount of tedious planning and patience. How we relate to each other during these day-to-day activities and struggles, however, amount to a practice that has generated and will continue to generate the conditions for a program. Only out of these immanent relations and our refusal to relinquish autonomy will something resembling a program emerge, however heterogeneous its stakes and outcomes may be from protest movements of recent decades. We insist that the relations and ideas we’re generating here and across the globe are contingent on the materiality of occupying space, that is, of living amongst one another as a condition of possibility actualized as the retrieval of space from the fabric of capitalism. This gets to the heart of the question: “why occupy?”—a question answered two days ago by our comrades in Cairo:

We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy , real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.

Rather than performing public displays of discontent, the occupation seeks first an ethos of subtraction. By subtraction we mean an affirmative retreat “from the protocols and rules and property relations which govern us, which determine who goes where, and when, and how . . . in order that those of us inside the occupation (and those who join us) can determine, freely and of our own volition, how and for whom it is to be used.”  This subtraction both insists that and creates the conditions for how we practice immediately the concrete sharing of means. The sharing of means, however, brings with it a series of imperatives, none of which will register as passive, let alone as state sanctioned. The sharing of means implies the dispossession of everything for everyone, the collective building of permanent zones of autonomy, and the imperative to protect, teach, feed, house, and love each other as relations that accelerate the destruction of the present state of things. As we should all know by now, though, these practices are in direct contradiction to the sustained processes of capitalism. This is how we know we’re onto something. Our comrades in hospitals and jail cells in Oakland, Boston, Chicago, San Diego, Baltimore, New York, Rome, Napoli and Berlin can attest to this. What we’ve been reminded of in the past two nights in Oakland where over 500 cops from 17 districts showed up in riot gear with rubber bullets, tear gas and flash bang canisters, in Atlanta where 52 peaceful occupiers have been thrown in jail, and countless other instances of state brutality across the globe in response to whispers of another world is that we must learn how to construct barricades to defend against any force that threatens these practices and this idea and we must maintain them fiercely.

Except that the barricade can never mark the reach of these practices, a tension we encounter daily at the occupation across the river. Specifically, we experience the limits of this admittedly provisional subtraction in two ways. First, how to practice the immediate sharing of means beyond the occupation. And second, how not to merely perform communization (something like lifestyle politics or communal living for the few) but to instead create the conditions for its generalization and reproduction all over. These limits lead us to consider imminent concerns.

It’s clear to most that the trajectory of the movement will be born as much out of material and theoretical struggles as it will out of our ability to overcome opposition, both of which we actively engage in every day. What we face in this current stage of the occupation (the stage wherein we have successfully refused to relinquish a space we’ve torn from capital but nonetheless find ourselves in constant negotiations with Melcor, the city–Mayor Mendel, it should be mentioned, has expressed no interest in supporting us–and the cops, all the while freezing with foreshadows of a deep and dark winter) is the need for the following

1   Intensification. Without intensification, a kind of waning of urgency ensues and the brutal reality of outdoor living in a cold urban core sets in. The antagonism between the public and the private, between capital and labor, between the so-called 99% and the 1%, needs to be lived as a constant contradiction. We came together over a week ago and decided to reclaim a piece of the city. This fact often gets elided by the more pressing concerns of warmth, procedure and the residual (dogs, kids, bills, school, job, etc.). Over 200 people showed up to defend the occupation on Sunday, October 23rd against what was supposed to be a forcible eviction. This is intensification.

2   A Winter Phase. Occupations in Ohio, Massachusetts and Rome have announced indoor occupations beginning tomorrow, and our friends in Winnipeg are fortifying for a winter long outdoor camp with heaters and fire pits. Edmonton is nearly the northernmost occupation in the world (save for Moscow and a small showing in the Arctic and the Yukon); sickness and fatigue will set in very quickly if we don’t expand into the architectural holdings of that which we seek to disrupt.

3   Disruptive direct actions. These should be designed to not just raise public awareness, but to actually rupture the processes through which capital valorizes itself. The occupation itself is built on this tactic, but fear of police retaliation and an unchecked assumption that all we need is more knowledge has taken root. Many of us believe that the true potential of the movement lies in its ability to collectivize sites of production understood very generally (i.e. affective, intellectual, creative, material, and biopolitical production) rather than its innate capacity to ‘draw attention.’ We created the conditions for all kinds of remarkable relations and activities when we claimed Melcor’s property as our own; we’ve since not been so successful.

4   An internationalist synergy. The greatest strength of all, perhaps, is the international scale of the movement. Friday, October 28th will see the streets of Cairo lined with comrades marching in solidarity with Oakland. What remains is for us to consistently synchronize and to never cease in our actions such that direct action and the expanding archipelagos of anticapitalist activities strike at the heart not just of local or regional economies but the global market place all at once.

Edmonton | SOCCER Institute | 10.26.11

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT SAMARASEKERA OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA

Since the central administration at the University of Alberta has generally excluded students’ voices from decisions regarding tuition increases, budget constraints, austerity measures, cuts to bursaries, and graduate student labour, we are writing to remind you of our education and expertise. Who are we? We are part of a growing contingent of disappointed members of the University community committed to inserting our voices into decision-making processes that will affect not only our academic futures, but the academic futures of all potential students who may come after us. This letter, then, is the opening of a dialogue that is long overdue.

We are students of economics, political theory, society, applied science, the fine arts, physical science, culture, literature, and philosophy.  We believe our training, though diverse and specialized, amounts to a collective body of knowledge that holds vital insights for the university as it faces difficult financial circumstances.  We have been thinking of the issues that confront our university for a long time now—in seminars, at roundtables, in our residences, and at pubs and cafes—and we have been waiting for you to ask us for our assistance.

Since you have not asked, we are insisting that from this point forward we be considered integral stakeholders of the university and its putative culture of fostering sustainable and equal access to higher education.

We feel our measure of participation in the university’s administrative practices should be proportionate to the measure of the increasing debt load we carry—a burden we have been bearing more and more to ensure this public institution keeps its doors open.  Shouldn’t we be considered major stakeholders, even investors, by virtue of our collective investment in the university?  According to the Canadian Federation of Students, “the share of university operating budgets funded by tuition fees more than doubled between 1985 and 2005, rising from 14% to 30%”.  This is not an easy burden to bear—many of us have already invested so much of our futures into this university that the weight of our debt will likely outlive us.  Student debt is an issue that we experience at a visceral level, and it regularly haunts our thoughts of the future.  Yet, in order to meet the shortfall of Canadian universities’ operating budgets, we students have amassed a staggering $14 billion dollars of collective debt from the federal government. Upon completion of an undergraduate degree in Alberta specifically, the average student will carry approximately $24,000 in student debt.  This issue needs to be addressed seriously because these numbers are inflating at an unacceptable rate, and this trend will not resolve itself.  What type of future are we, as current administrators, faculty, and students of the university, offering to future students who will increasingly immiserate themselves in the short term in order to buy hope for a debt-free future that may never arrive?  Why do we as a university continue to perpetuate the abstract promise of the fruits of a university education for all people when it is in fact more and more for the very few?  Of course, we already recognize the cynical answer to these questions: by displacing the real value of an education through debt, the university can continue to increase returns on financial investments and perpetuate the abstract, and increasingly misleading, idea that the university serves the entire community. But we are no longer content with cynical answers.

Furthermore, since many of us have taken on increasing amounts of student debt, supposedly in order to learn and to invest in our futures, we are alarmed to discover that while tuition continues to rise at an onerous rate, the quality of our education is being diminished—all this occurring as the university’s true financial crisis continues to be displaced into the future in the atomized form of student debt.

Specifically, we are offended by the nearly 10% decrease in budget to the Faculty of Arts in the most recent several years:

First, we are offended that our knowledge was not consulted in this process.  Aren’t the recipients of an education from the University of Alberta worthy of confronting the challenges of this university?  Indeed, don’t we students have an intimate understanding of the vital services that allow for the successful completion of a post-secondary education?  We would have liked to have aided you in the critical questions facing the Arts, which you have mishandled so gravely with the AdPReP external review process.  Instead, once again we have simply been handed the consequences of these funding cuts to which you habitually acquiesce, and we are left paying more for an Arts education that you have clawed back significantly for at least the past three years running.  You should no longer expect well-trained, critically-minded students to pay more for an Arts education that has been diminished by 10%.

Second, we are offended that in this year’s round of Arts cuts, to the tune of 1.4 million, you are simply targeting our most vulnerable colleagues: non-academic support staff.  We have come to know these individuals in our departments as indispensable sources of academic support in times when we require departmentally specific and time-sensitive information and guidance.  Given the massive cuts that are taking place at certain levels of the university’s administrative structure and not others, we demand a serious answer to the following question: Why has there been no external review process to assess the potential for sweeping cuts to central university administration or central faculty administration?   As you can probably intuit, we would redirect some of the austere attention at our university; we can speak more to this issue as our conversation unfolds.  

Please don’t mistake our energies—we are not looking for empty attention, and we care deeply about our university and the community it is meant to serve.  That is why we are beginning this conversation.  We truly believe that Henry Marshall Tory’s words still hold true today: the university should be about uplifting the people as a whole.  Not just the select few.  Not just those able to afford access to university.  Not just those in central administrative positions able to effect significant cuts to the university without scrutiny. We are stakeholders of the university and we insist that—due to our collective and specialized knowledge, our shared experience as students, and our visceral connection to the burden of a debt load that increasingly keeps the university in operation—we are in a unique position to articulate what is best for the university and its future.  We will not be silent recipients of your deep and damaging cuts any longer.  

Signed,
The Students of the University of Alberta

Please sign: 

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/OpenlettertoPresidentSamarasekera/