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En français :

FOLLOW THE HUMMINGBIRD A PROVOCATION
September 2023
To the disgruntled workers, students, and militants in (and not of) the UC-system,
To the anarchic rebels, “ultra-left” communists, and the left from below beyond the UC-
system,
To the misaligned-dissenters, the “agent provocateurs,” and our accomplices against the
UC-system,
To the trouble-makers in the undercommons making a fucking ruckus,
And lastly, to the UAW “socialist militants” (read as business unionists) and their allies:
May we “consistently [fail] to deliver” the demands of UAW bureaucrats.
Fuck the UC
Concretely, their [Abolish the UC!] core prescription was for small groups of activists
to find ways for the strike on campuses to “spill-over” into a general struggle against
capitalism itself through dramatic and spectacular tactical escalations. That they alone
made this “call” was itself evidence of a more advanced radicalism. —Jack Davies &
Sarah Mason1
One must live a life of material privilege to overlook and unsee the ways
UC “student-workers” have had enough. Yet, some of us felt the collective
fire of a discordant ¡ya basta! from the tired, hungry, and anxious bodies of
UC “student-workers.” The dignified rage exploding from the barricades,
banners, zines, classroom revolt, polemic, and clandestine activity of ghosts
were direct actions and rebellious performances making grietas in the walls
of each UC campus. We felt the agitated desires from these ghosts of the
general antagonism. They were weaving themselves as anarchist cells in
UAW assembly meetings; subverting chants as insurrectionary radicals,
yelling Fuck the UC; writing biting analysis as the oh-so-spooky ultra-left
communists on UAW tactical paternalism; and we felt an aliveness in
this rebellion, as words and action opened an arrebato in our oppositional
consciousness: a coyuntura to build trans-territorial confrontation against
the Hydra-Head called the UC war-machine. We felt the gritos, however
so softly at times, of the miserable graduate students who turned their
wretched labor for the UC into energies to abolish it. And yet, UAW rank-
and-file grad workers—from the above epigraph—are still unable to see
1 Jack Davies and Sarah Mason, “Short of the Long Haul (2),” Notes from
Below (July 28, 2023): https://notesfrombelow.org/article/short-long-haul-part-2
beyond their own appearance as a “militant” union, which itself fails to
break away from fantasies of a UC-system which funds not only projects of
death across the Americas but is itself a settler-colonial technology which
has never redressed its historical and ongoing crimes on Indigenous lands
or its antiblackness which permeates the collective psyche of us all. Land
and life are at stake in abolishing the UC and its power, accumulation, and
capture of student-labor. We must betray all conventions which prescribe
the UC as our terrain of struggle through the mediation of “organized
labor.” The territory is racialized class war. It is a war enacted by the les
damnés and our accomplices. This was the spirit of our word, our actions,
and our dreams — igniting the flames of the general antagonism: “We do not
want to return to work.”2 We do not desire to be captured.
Apologists flood the UC-UAW and their partner associations,
merging their reflections and autocrítica into “accounts” of the strikes without
ever asking if the land-grabbing University they organize “labor”on is
accounting for contradictions greater than immaterial wage-labor. They
orient their “organizing” of rank-and-file and “solidarity” with labor
movements as wannabe Socialists and perform Marxist grammars of
suffering for the figure of the student-worker—a detestable horizon to desire
to maintain. UAW critics are blinded by the appearance of the University,
focusing on their disappointments and the supposed failures of “Abolish
the UC!” to “advance the struggle.” The joke is leveraging a critique which
assumes our goals were “organizing labor.” As many of us conjured words
and enacted direct action, we desired only an invitation: to expand the
vision of the strike and take multiple paths to realize our call for generalized
insurgence against Capital.3 The UC war-machine is not our friend. The
UC war-machine will never love you. They will squeeze us dry and to death,
with contracts, with a COLA, with a Ph.D. degree.
As unionists prepare for their “long struggle,” we find it necessary
to remind the multitudes of the workers, students, and racialized proles in,
against, and beyond the University to realize other means in the trincheras
of the UC war-machine: to dream a world other than Capital, to imagine
relations beyond the settler-colonial situation, to find each other in the
miserable seminars or classrooms and conspire against the Hydra-Head
of the University. Fuck a union which characterizes our negative ruptures
as a dead-end “generalized insurrection” as though the “organizing” of
student-worker labor for “fair contracts” was the emancipatory means of an
eclipsed US settler labor movement. Destroy the fetish of the union and we
2 Some Maladjusted Anarchists, Who the Fuck is ‘We’ (United States: self-pub-
lished zine, 2022).
3 Emily Rich, “After the Strike: Reflections on the UC Struggle,” The
Brooklyn Rail (March 2023): https://brooklynrail.org/2023/03/field-notes/After-the-
Strike-Reflections-on-the-UC-Struggle
As they chanted from the marches, “A place for us all to thrive.”
COLA4ALL proposed and engaged in direct-action endeavors that
built community within the very institutions that sought to divide students,
isolate them, and suppress their fullest potential; within institutions that are
rooted in the violence of colonialism and the greed of capitalism; within
institutions that will continue to take from them until there is nothing left to
exploit. These extreme working conditions are not separate from the issues
of struggle outside of the university. These struggles are deeply intertwined.
The liberation of dining halls, one of the most powerful direct
actions organized by COLA4ALL, was in direct homage to the Black
Panther’s Free Breakfast Program. By working against food injustice and the
university’s profit-driven agenda, dining halls were opened to combat food
precarity that is rampant within the UC, just as it was within marginalized,
low-income communities of color. The liberation of dining halls created
a space for students to come and eat for free and to build community with
one another while recognizing that the food was already paid for by the
extremely high cost of UC tuition.
Chants of “On Strike! Shut it Down!” resonate with the history
of struggle against the UC. One of the most popular chants, “Cops Off
Campus, COLA in Our Bank Accounts!” illustrates the extended demands
by students that were more than just a COLA, but also about addressing
and dismantling the militarization of the UC system.
What the decentralized movement at UC Santa Cruz and other
UC campuses demonstrated was the necessity of democratic practices
of making decisions and the gifts of direct action. Many UC Santa Cruz
COLA organizers also articulated something beyond a COLA to also say,
“Fuck the UC.”
This was a controversial position, but it is one we must listen to
and be attentive toward. “Fuck the UC” is an enunciation against settler-
colonial technologies, of gentrification, of racism, of corporate capitalism,
of anti-undocumented student animus, and anti-worker infrastructure. “Eat
the Regents” is more than just student wildcat striker rhetoric. It is a call to
action against the very university system students are part of. It is to make
visible the hidden capitalist-imperialism supported by the structure of the
regents of the UC that make the living conditions of all workers within and
outside the university unbearable.
COLA, in the spirit of the Third World College, sparked the
potential to organize and mobilize students and workers. COLA re-inserted
a dialogue about invisible labor, the precarity of workers, and the crisis of
income and rent for many in the UC system.
With the firings of almost 100 UC Santa Cruz graduate student
workers who went on a full wildcat strike and did not submit grades the
Fall quarter, we saw the coercive power of the university with its inability to
not negotiate with its graduate student workers. On March 5, 2020, a UC-
wide blackout took place in solidarity with the fired UC Santa Cruz wildcat
strikers.
The spirit of COLA was beyond pay. The efforts of students,
from undergraduates articulating their own demands to graduate students
continuing teach-ins, political education, and collaborating across
intersections that have fueled momentum for articulating what autonomy
and being in and against the university can look like. It was a moment
akin to the Third World College, where students imagined that another
university was possible, where exploitation and rent burdened life did not
exist; where students and workers can fill their stomachs from mutual aid;
and, where students teaching each other about oppression and the history of
collective action can take place amongst joint struggles.
This movement was more than just COLA. It was and is part of a
long history of student resistance and rebellion that desires solidarity across
all paths of life. As a decentralized front, the practice of horizontalism, and
of its ability to include all, the movement for COLA has shifted toward a
movement against capitalism and settler colonialism—or has the potential to
be through UC Santa Cruz’s The People’s Coalition (and other formations
such as the one at UC Irvine), an autonomous group in fugitivity who were
organizing an undergraduate student strike before the pandemic. COLA
was and is a crack in the university, and it is our imperative to build beyond
COLA and to demand more than COLA. COLA4ALL means ALL.
Become unreasonable and become non-negotiable.
Another university is possible.
In coalition,
a UCSC wildcat striker and a UCSB dissenter