Time and Space

Time

The students know better. At Cal Poly Humboldt, the first student group to occupy a building (rather than start a protest camp) held that building and much of the campus for eight days, repelling police multiple times via concerted, courageous effort. Some wag suggested, to enthusiastic response, that their élan in fashioning barricades out of classroom furnishings came from being of the generation drilled, by police and their proxies, in school shooter readiness. This idea has in it a satisfying reversal—ha ha, it is the police who are the school shooters!—but is also curiously paternalistic, as if the successful maneuvers of twenty-year-olds must correspond to childhood training they received from, finally, parental figures. This idea’s other weakness is that it is obviously wrong. Would that its propagators had read half of what the students had. Through their anonymous statements, it became entirely clear that the occupiers at Humboldt were historians and scholars of the 2009 wave of student occupations in the United States, in New York and then California, some already habitués of the archives to be found on Libcom, CrimethInc., and elsewhere, some metabolizing material on the fly. From their cross-temporal peers—along with their own good sense—they drew their tactics, from occupation and chairicade, from the embrace of community members. Comrade Water Jug offered a charismatic image of the improvisations available in such a situation. 

At Emory University in Atlanta, a site of intense and ambitious action, the resource to hand was the local struggle to Stop Cop City, a locally centered national project comprising numerous social factions but with Atlanta students near the organizing core. This transfer enabled both a wealth of experiences confronting the arrayed and armed forces of repression, and a path to articulating most clearly the shared horizon of anti-Zionism and police abolition, a theme to which we will shortly return.

At UC Berkeley, whose carefully tended encampment on Sproul Plaza endures as I write this, the clear referent has been the successful 1985–86 campaign to divest from apartheid South Africa. Sproul is haunted always by the ghost of Mario Savio. In 1985, a similar (albeit larger and rowdier) encampment renamed IT for South African activist Steve Biko, started its own newspaper (for which I had the honor of writing), suffered mass arrests, was pushed out by the police, came back en masse, stayed for months, and won its demands, with a great many other universities following suit. If this present encampment is to achieve similar successes it will be, one suspects, because they adopt at least one more of the lessons from 1985 and open things to community members in order to achieve expansion and durability.

“The Student”

This is a partial survey. There have been numerous historical sources for inspiration and wisdom and tactical know-how. “1968” retains its aura not as an action model but because it names, among other things, the centrality of “the student” as a leading figure of the New Left (having emerged previously with the bridge between the civil rights and student movements in the early sixties). But to many, more and less sympathetic, the New Left feels old. We are regularly told that the era in which the student could be at the heart of social contestation has ended; that the situation is new and requires a new brand name, or conversely, that we must return to an older class politics; that the student cannot stand for universal emancipation, and so on. These propositions tend to be serial, if not cyclical; as soon as any given student-centered movement fades from its charismatic status, the naysayers and New Namers and Old Leftists wander out into the twilit evening to make their opinions known and relegate the student to the dustbin. 

And yet, here we are, with the students again. Perhaps we can hold this in mind in five years when such relegations are proffered next. Let us stipulate for now some obvious facts regarding student engagement. It is self-evidently true that the majority of current students are otherwise occupied or rebuked from political engagement by concatenated circumstances. It is also certain that some fraction of the engaged students will end up integrated into the mechanisms of colonial capitalism. That is not news. Campuses remain sites of heightened militancy and mass potential, as the last few weeks have intimated. Are all campus denizens pure of heart, sworn lifetime revolutionaries, with perfect politics and ideal class positions? That is not what makes a revolution or even an uprising, and as critiques go, it is adjacent to the counterinsurgent mantra of “But do you denounce Hamas?” It is true that, when the moment comes, when antisystemic struggles are confronted with the question of world-making, there must be a revolution within the revolution to avoid imposition of a new authoritarianism. For the moment, there will be no purifying the insurgency. Meanwhile, there is no way out of here without fighting back the police, and it is probably appropriate to take seriously those who have done so.

Wageless Lives

This does not mean that we remain in the moment of the New Left. Its eclipse, however, does not imply the disappearance of its animating figures, but rather their changed context. The continuity with the present campus moment is to be found in the figure of “wageless life,” to borrow Michael Denning’s signal phrase. It is the time of the expanded proletariat, a planetary mass whose numbers include those exploited by colonial capital but also those dispossessed and excluded, those consigned to unwaged and precarious labor, those expelled and those never internalized to the working class. The student cuts an ambiguous figure here, but here nonetheless, a little more each year as the passage to bourgeois life chances straitens. 

In thinking about that particular linkage, we are reminded of another source of political knowledge for current students: the George Floyd Uprising of four years ago, in which many participated and to which the great majority surely paid close attention. In the great calendar of complacency, we had just reached this last year the moment when nominal leftists announced that the astounding struggles of spring 2020, led by Black proletarians, had all been for naught, had achieved nothing, meant nothing—until, this April, the 2020 Uprising was suddenly disclosed as enabling political education for those across the United States coming out for Gaza. From this, at a minimum, we might derive a very simple lesson: while we cannot resist trying to understand, synthesize, and learn from manifestly significant historical passages, patience is a virtue regarding conclusions. About the George Floyd Intifada of 2020, it’s too soon to tell. 

The identification of “the student” with “wageless life” is imperfect indeed. Its contours, rather, trace out a basic scission in the world beyond campus. Many students remain subject to wage discipline, either immediately or regarding future prospects, in ways that threaten political participation; this was made impeccably clear by the various progenocide professors from Berkeley to Harvard whose first impulse after October 7 was to declare, occasionally in the national press, that their anti-Zionist students should be refused employment. It was as if the coercive nature of the class relation felt a need to clarify itself in a spasm of extremely nonmute compulsion. But many students cannot be easily coerced in this way, and this population expands as the labor market (particularly as a path to improved life chances) contracts. These students, like everyone else beyond the discipline of the wage, must be subjected to the discipline of direct violence. Enter the police. And enter the intensification of policing, the great increases in violence and incarceration that correspond to the waning reach of wage discipline and track the development of the Crisis State. 

Space

And that is the world as it goes, with its dwindling percentage of the population holding durable and stable job contracts, its swelling portion surviving otherwise, wageless or irregularly employed. The former you manage with wage discipline; the latter get the cops, the national guard, maybe the army. Or maybe the fascist militia. This is the great clarity to be found in the night of April 30, through the haze of tear gas and incendiaries. The encampment and occupation at Columbia was cleared by the vast and gear-laden forces of the NYPD, while the dauntless encampment at UCLA was attacked by slavering Zionist youth brigades, their numbers swelled by random sociopaths and/or Israeli Defense Forces soldiers, their practice pogrom given more-than-tacit license by the UCLA administration led by Gene Block, who had been—quelle surprise—summoned to appear before Congress just that day.

And there you had it: police and Zionists, one and the same. I do not mean this in some quasifigurative way, as in equivalently evil or complementary parts of Team Genocide. I mean that it is evident in this moment that they are the same social fact, in the present: bearers of state-legitimated violence delegated to command territory, to impose order on space and control over resources via brutality, dispossessing persistently racialized persons to do so and reproducing that racialization and basis for dispossession in the process. Zionism merely names the police state in its most fully social sense. 

I do not think, however, that this is finally the true relation that joins the encampments to Gaza. First of all, the relations that begin this essay—the political and personal identifications and solidarities—are true enough. But if the question is whether, beyond moral sympathies, there is a real relation joining the U.S. campus to the colonized world, it lies beneath the police and the Zionist mobs—literally beneath. It is always worth recalling that the U.S. university is a colonial enterprise, from the founding of the great public universities as land grant institutions on land seized from first nations, through public and private universities’ current roles as landlords of a vast scale, often the largest property-holders in their cities. The desiderata of the U.S. university remains land, and land must be commanded by force. You can’t just sit there.

Joshua Clover is the author of seven books. Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings, a political economy of social movements, has recent editions in Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Swedish. He is currently Professor at University of California Davis as well as Affiliated Professor of Literature and Modern Culture at University of Copenhagen.