Communiqué for a radical occupation

Everyday we are suffocated by the self-righteous liberals and hippies who endlessly chant the dual refrain of “non-violence” and “peace.” “The police are like us,” they say; “Gandhi!”

Everywhere we go—everywhere—and especially at Davis, home of the green washed consumer paradise of the Whole Earth Festival; the collaborationist cultural centers that “represent” marginalized communities, distribute condescending handouts to members of those communities, and suppress resistance to continued fee hikes that are quickly forcing those same communities out of the university; and the liberal, prevaricating co-operative houses and geodesic domes which suck in the “aware” children of the white upper middle class and expel sensitive middle managers eager to be involved with the murderous industries of micro-finance and charity work. Everywhere we go we need peace.

We need a peaceful place, a place free of the passive aggressive future servants of empire and capital who constantly accost us. Like small dogs, they nip at our ankles, trip us up, and prevent us from resisting.

Everyone already knows of the variously implicit and explicit racism of these clowns; everyone already knows that their insistence on recognition merely affirms the authority of the administration, of the state, and of the white man; everyone already knows that the peace police are not themselves peaceful—as we’ve seen them wield possibly fatal weapons against protesters on the apparent belief that causing death and serious injury are the appropriate means for defending the private property of this fucked up world.

Everyone already knows all these things, yet for some reason we still pity their heavy sighs, their sobs of terror, whenever we act “violent.”

For some reason we allow them to tell us what to do. They tell us what slogans to chant, what signs to carry, and what banners to hang.

These non-violent activists—who somehow believe that life-crushing debt is not violent, who believe that the existence of cops is not violent, who believe that an american flag, that capitalism and empire, that patriarchy and racism are not violent—these incredibly violent activists, these campaigners and defenders of white supremacy, heterosexism, patriarchy, capitalism, and the state, they inhabit our administration, our community resource centers, and even our occupied buildings. They can no longer be tolerated.

The most non-violent act is abolishing the structurally necessary violence of the status quo. In this effort any and all necessary tactics are comparatively non-violent.

We must begin by expelling these assholes from our midst.

Today a radical occupation is necessary. A space free of surveillance and cops is necessary. A space that prevents the university from functioning and in which further action can be planned is necessary.

It is this space that we attempted to take at UC Davis today.

Within hours of taking the space, the vacillators—those who cannot decide which side they are on—began to murmur.

We took the old Cross Cultural Center, and were accused of disrespecting its legacy because we are “white activists.” Never mind that this accusation is blatantly false.

The Cross Cultural Center senior employees reside on the Freedom of Expression response team which polices student resistance, monitoring and recording those dangerous elements who fight against fee hikes rather than merely saddle poor people of color with more loans to keep them in the University.

It is we who are faithful to the history of the Cross Cultural Center. In our radical action, we continue the legacy of the hunger strike which established it. We uphold the principles of its founding against the cowardly betrayal of all students by its current administrators.

Our banner bears the famous quote from Frantz Fanon, “Revolution is the only culture.” And we are criticized for homogenizing culture. Our critics do not realize that revolution is the only true culture. There is oppression and there is resistance.

The logic of the neoliberal university, of the imperialist, is that of a bookkeeper. The administrator and the imperialist both endlessly catalogue the various cultures and backgrounds of the subjugated. The neoliberal university, just like the neo-imperial occupying force, creates safe havens for the various cultures.

There is a LGBTRC at Davis for the same reason that National Organization of Women advocated bombing Afghanistan: “protecting” the culture of women while destroying them physically and economically.

There is a CCC at Davis for the same reason that the first act of the US Occupying force in Iraq protected the Kurds and other Iraqi minorities: to protect them to death.

We refuse to be categorized.

We refuse to be catalogued.

We will revolt.

Revolution is our culture, because it is a culture of us all, of us all fighting together to be equal. Revolution does not seek to be recognized by the white man, it does not seek to be accepted by the white man.

Revolution seeks material equality.

Revolution seeks a world free of poverty, free of jails, free of the structures of oppression—sexist, homophobic, and racist—that saturate our current world.

White, brown, male, female, queer, gay, straight, bi—It is this struggle that is our culture.

This struggle, this revolution is the only culture.

Others accused us of undermining the University’s ability to continue to enroll “at risk” students for, at some point, this empty building would be given over to the Educational Opportunity Program. This program, like the Cross Cultural Center, does nothing to challenge the risk of these students.

We do not fight to maintain students with “at risk” status. We seek to eliminate the “at risk” of those students.

We do not wish to maintain a university which merely increases the risk of students, increases their precarity non-stop, further entangles them in a lifetime of debt and shit jobs, and, in return, gives those who graduate a largely meaningless, entirely commodified degree.

We are all at risk.

We wish to not be at risk.

We do not wish to be “helped.”

We will help ourselves.

We will help ourselves by the most militant means necessary.

Originally posted: January 25, 2012 at sensus_communist_