During the ongoing United Auto Workers (UAW) strike by workers on UC campuses, dining halls have been liberated and opened up to strikers and the wider community. The following communiqué, from so-called Santa Cruz, addresses a recent coordinated wave of dining hall liberations.
The colonial capitalist university will never win. Union sell-outs and scabs will never win.
Here at so-called Santa Cruz, we declare and express our solidarity to all communities in struggle. Today, along with comrades across so-called California, we are engaging in a transterritorial attack on UC incorporated and what they call food insecurity, a condition created by their capitalist greed. These spaces, like the dining commons, are spaces we understand as battlegrounds of the ongoing war against subsistence, where proles take up the war against capital by expropriating dining halls and feeding one another.
The logic of capital underpinning the UC allows UC admin and their cronies to create and enforce the divisive narrative that we are stealing from one another when we liberate dining halls. This is the logic of capital that depends on the creation of an individualistic world. The world of individualism teaches us and obligates us to be on top of everyone else, to have more than everyone else, to hurt and use each other in the search for the false capitalist promises of “progress and development.” This creates inequalities, injustices, and violences that we experience in our everyday lives, that become incorporated into our day to day as the “new normal.”
The civilizational crisis that we live in, however, opens the door to the construction of a challenge to this false normality, through the practice of refusal, of abnormality, which must be based on values of direct-democracy, mutual aid, self-management, gender equity, respect for Mother Earth, and autonomy. Practices of horizontalism, decentralization, mutual support, and self-management survive here and now, there and tomorrow, not only as a legacy of a remote past, but as a project for a liberating future. We claim these as our weapons in the capitalist war against subsistence. Utopia is here, right under our noses, but we simply have not been able to see that which we were never taught to see. Let us expand our minds and open our hearts to the power of community, autonomy, and mutual care. The time is now or never to turn the tides in the war against subsistence that capitalist modernity brings to our front door.
The COVID-19 pandemic, the latest of the crises engendered by capitalism, interrupted the last dining hall liberation here at UCSC. But this crisis only served to highlight and worsen the conditions upon which communities seek to ensure their existence, bringing to the forefront all the ways in which capitalist institutions only further profit from the continued struggle for survival that we must all undertake. The last of the dining hall liberations, then, was not an end to this struggle, but rather a moment of rupture that today demonstrates that we are now, more than ever, embroiled in the fight for justice against the UC and hungry for the end of capital. The machine that is the UC, one of the significant nodes in the integrated world of capital, must be abolished, as it will never, ever provide care or sustenance for our communities.
Today we say then, it is time to take matters into our own hands and bite the hand that beats you, because when we feed each other, everybody eats!
Fuck the UC! KKKops Off Mother Earth!
Connect: 1312_Slugz | abolishtheUC
