11.Apr.2010 “What is “Electrocommunism and What is it Good For”

Below is a paper I presented yesterday at “Beneath The University, The Commons” conference in Minneapolis, Mn. A tremendous number of great ideas arose out of the conversations held there, of which the two most important are a parallelism of movements (which I hope to elaborate on soon) and the idea of a debt commune (specifically as a way to make student loans a weapon against privatization of education).

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We’ve heard a great deal this weekend about how the university produces subjects. Implicit in all and explicit in most of the papers presented so far is the notion that the important, shall I say “civic” role of those academic disciplines, which are not directly instrumentalized, is the transformation of the student into a citizen or subject.
Sub-ject also retains its etymological sense of “throw-under.” The subject of monarchial power is below the thrown–literally below the king or queen. In a conference titled “Beneath The University” I’d like to dwell, for a moment on “beneath” as the claimed site of the commons. That is to say that we accept, at least tacitly, that the commons are a “sub-ject” of the University. If, indeed, the commons are a subject of the University, they are clearly not the individuated, monadic upstanding citizens that liberal education has trained to speak. Rather, if commons have a transgressive potential it is precisely in their latent potential to act as a shared subject. That is, the commons might be a site of collectivity and comradery, which takes us, at last, to the subject of this paper, “Electrocommunism.”
Electrocommunism is more or less the occupationist activities to which Katie Woolsey and Madeline McDonald-Lane referred in their papers yesterday. Electrocommunism, some have said, is the negative fulfillment of a logic of capital that claims that the activity of student life is bloodthirsty competition for resources amongst students, programs, disciplines and universities: it replaces this competition and the displacement of desire into a foreclosed futurity with a model of friendship and exuberant rebellion in the moment. Or, maybe, electrocommunism is a clique of privileged young white boys acting tough: it’s a frat party masquerading as politics. The “electro” probably referred to most to the music of the dance parties and the penchant of participants for publicizing events on facebook and youtube. The “communism” is perhaps more noteworthy: it is the reemergence of the claiming of the term “commune” by those anti-statist portions of the radical left that more generally identified as “anarchist” for the past twenty years. Madeline McDonald-Lane highlighted yesterday the certainly sloppy historicized appropriation of May ‘68 by the electrocommunist scene. Nick Dyer-Witheford went on to suggest that “Communique From an Absent Future,” which is in many ways the founding document of electrocommunism, reflects an insufficiently dialectical appropriation of the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection. These valid criticisms notwithstanding, the electrocommunist discourse appears in striking contrast to the sorts of anarcho-primitivism that have held sway in the west coast anarchist and punk scene for the last 15 years: if there is much lacking from their analysis of class or race or gender, at least they admit that these categories importantly shape people’s lives.
The activities associated with electrocommunism were conceived at the time as tactics or as tools in an attempt to create a social movement around issues of budget cuts and privatization at the UC, but these same activities have been widely criticized from within the broader movement to defend public education. Whether or not “electrocommunism” deserves any credit in forming this movement, I think we can safely conclude that what we have today is a movement—one which works in concert with movements across California and around the world. This paper examines the geographic space in which this movement “moves” in an attempt to better understand the potentials and the limits of electrocommunism. In this sense electrocommunism is understood here as an instrument of mobility and the route that was taken, at a particular moment in a particular socio-spatial context, toward constituting a commons at an increasingly privatized university.
There is a story about the design and construction of the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz. This story has it that the layout of the campus, with its numerous, relatively isolated “colleges” and its 2000 plus acres of meadows, redwood groves and coastal chaparral, was conceived as a way to prevent the sorts of large-scale protests that paralyzed the urban campuses of UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University in the early 1960s. The logic being, apparently, that in the absence of a central plaza or large buildings, students would be unable to meet in one place, and thus unable to make their collective voice heard. Probably obvious to everyone in this room, is that at stake in this story is the systematic denial, through the construction of the lived environment, of a commons to the student body at UCSC, or, at least, the denial of a site for the commons.
This story about the conspiratorial design of UCSC appears to be largely mythic. Even the timeline doesn’t hold water: though UCSC opened in 1965, serious planning had begun in the late 1950s, well before any dangerous protests in Berkeley. The dubious plausibility of the myth seems to have had little effect on its repetition.
This story, and many others like it, amount to a mytho-geography of UC Santa Cruz; though many of the precepts of this geography may be groundless, it has come to be the basis for how students, staff and faculty interact with their natural and architectural setting. This mytho-geography now forms the imagined backdrop of anything that happens on campus.
There are two moments in which this mytho-geography can be most concretely identified as shaping or being re-shaped by electrocommunism: the dance parties surrounding the occupation of the Graduate Student Commons building from September 24th – 30th of 2009 and the march and dance party following the March 4th 2010 Student Strike. In examining these two moments I assert that the spatial practices of electrocommunism are a response to the particular social geography of UC Santa Cruz and investigate the complex, often problematic, relationship between electrocommunism and the broader student movement in which it appears.
On September 24th 2009 a student walkout was planned in coordination with a strike by AFSCME workers across the UC system. September 24th was the first day of class for those UC schools that use the (now largely archaic) quarter system academic calendar, and though such an early date created hurdles to organizing a student body that was largely absent from campus, there was a growing sense in August and September that the situation afforded a unique opportunity to unite students, faculty and workers against privatization of the UC. The phrase “creating a social movement” was on each person’s lips. At the same time, there was a group of people meeting clandestinely in Santa Cruz who had another phrase on their minds: “making occupation a threat again.”
This group of people, which importantly included folks who were involved in doing the hard work of organizing the official events of September 24th, and, I will note, a number of people here today, came together without any semblance of formal organization or structure. Though this group has subsequently mutated into something of a social milieu–for which it has been roundly criticized–as of September all that brought together these people were two shared goals: 1) to put occupation back on the table as a tactic of student movements in California and 2) to build a social movement. Note, here, that for each of these aims the tactic of occupation is an end in itself. Rather than issuing demands or requests of some perceived higher power, occupation locates in the expropriated building a site for the common and commoning of willing participants. Though the wider anti-privatization movement struggles to articulate demands that are in it’s view “achievable,” it’s worth noting that these two simple goals were achieved months ago.
By the night before the student walkout, the number of people involved in planning the occupation of the Graduate Student Commons had swelled to over fifty. That was an important number, in Santa Cruz, where the official AFSCME rally at noon on the 24th drew something less than 300 people, amongst them these same fifty some-odd “occupationists” and their friends. All of the day’s events were to be held at the main entrance of campus, despite being nearly two miles away from the center of the school or the nearest classroom. AFSCME and ULU, a coalition of campus unions, made it clear that though the strike was held at the entrance to the school, no attempt would be made to prevent non-striking students and workers from entering, and any attempts to escalate the action would not be supported by the union leaderships. At the end of the official day of “strike” a decision was made by a very loose “general assembly” to march to the center of campus to bring their anger to the administration directly. That general assembly, and the march that followed, were conceived of by people from the occupation crowd as a way to get people from the base of campus to near the occupation without letting the secret out of the bag. The assumption at the time was that without a large group of people to form a political cover, police would break up the occupation immediately. The logic was that if there were enough people standing around the building in support, the administration would be hard pressed to send in the police: with enough people watching even our reviled Executive Vice Chancellor Kliger might be ashamed to pull students out of a building called the “Graduate Student Commons.”
It was that same logic that led to the idea of the first occupation dance party. Exhausted from the hours of picketing in the sun, many of the students and workers who had marched from the base of campus were eager to go home. Likely many were put off by the secretly planned action and the now transparent subterfuge of the general assembly and the march. As the number of people outside of the occupation dwindled, the people inside scrambled to come up with a way to get more warm bodies to surround the building. A dance party in the plaza seemed like it might draw exactly these bodies.
The space of the quarry plaza and the Baytree book store do not lend themselves to being imagined as a “commons.” True to the myth of a campus designed without a center, the plaza lacks the trappings of what “the University Commons” may generally bring to mind. We’re talking about a twenty foot wide strip of asphalt that winds between a pair of slavishly contemporary buildings. Built in 2003 to appease, in fact, student complaints about the lack of a central social space, the Quarry Plaza better evokes a starbucks drive-thru than it does the grassy fields or brick and flagstone of an ivy league commons. In the 12 years that I’ve been hanging around UCSC September 24th was the first time I can recall that anyone had even attempted to politicize the quarry plaza. Regardless, it is the closest thing that UCSC has to a center of campus, and there is a great deal of foot traffic as students buy books or shuttle from dorms to classes: if there was any place on campus that could be re-imagined as common to all the students and staff, this was probably it.
The initial idea of a dance party, then, was simply to draw a lot of bodies to the area of the Quarry Plaza and the Graduate Student Commons to act as a political deterrent should the administration decide to ask the police to forcefully end the occupation. Political deterrent in the sense that students perceive themselves to have the right to assemble in that plaza, even if it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to. They have that “right” because, in the Western tradition, students are imagined as citizens of the University. The political may be the realm of representation and the negotiation of power, but in the Western tradition it also retains something of it’s Greek roots in the polis. It is commonplace to note that the “democratic” notion of the polis was founded on exclusion of certain bodies (those of slave classes, women and others); less frequently do we recall that the polis has its origins in particular sites at the center of cities. Over a millennia before the city form was appropriated by the latent bourgeoisie (then the burgher class) as a site for the consolidation of capital, it was the site in ancient Greece of the consolidation of political power in the form of the consolidation of certain bodies constituted as speaking subjects.
That is an especially prescient observation for us at UC Santa Cruz, precisely because this is a University without a city. The experiment of the occupations, and of electrocommunism, was to try, despite the mythic and actual geography of a campus without a core, to constitute a polis, a core, a commons at the center of campus: and to orient a movement toward that core. This is another way in which the mapping of pro-situationist theory onto the pastoral spaces of UCSC is an odd or inappropriate fit: Santa Cruz isn’t Paris and shouldn’t pretend to be.
The campus is renown for its majestic redwood trees and sprawling meadows. It is imagined, both by the administration and by the student body, as a natural space. Silvia Federici suggested yesterday that there are no longer any natural spatial commons but only spaces which have been materially produced as natural. There have been flare-ups at UCSC, both historically and recently, as to how this “natural” space will be utilized–flare-ups characterized by radical environmentalists who conceptualize UCSC as a nature preserve versus and an administration which, having fully naturalized the highly constructed Disneyland nature of UCSC, now seeks to re-develop it for the advancement of certain flourishing sectors of the neoliberal academy. Both sides of these perennial conflicts imagine the built environment of the campus as naturally there, which erases both the dead labor hidden in the production of UCSC as an institutional space and the dispossession of indigenous peoples from these lands.
It is exactly this problem of denaturalizing the lived environment of UCSC that has led the movement to its greatest revelation and its greatest success. When the anti-privatization movement came to recognize the geographic particularities of UCSC it realized the tremendous vulnerability of a pastoral campus to blockade. As was mentioned by Katie Woolsey yesterday, when the two entrances to campus were blocked by a student strike on March 4th, the administration immediately capitulated: all workers were eventually told not to come to work and no classes were held. The campus was deserted. Rather than continuing to attempt to constitute a polis in the vacuous architectures of the neoliberal academy, itself a tawdry sham of a commons, in these asphalt trenches between a rock and a starbucks, the anti-privatization movement, electrocommunists included, decided that it was more advantageous to deny the place-power of the polis to anyone. On March 4th there were incredibly successful actions all across the country, acts that through the bravery and determination of the people involved demonstrate the burgeoning strength of this emergent movement. We at UCSC faced little or none of violence and police repression that our comrades in Oakland and Davis witnessed. Instead, a few hundred people who shared simply the goal of shutting down the University for a day–again, a tactic that, like occupation is an end to itself–capitalized on their intimate understanding of the geographic particularities of UCSC to achieve that goal. The events of March 4th help us understand the potentials and the limits of electrocommunism precisely because the central imperatives of electrocommunism–that “we are the crisis” and “occupy everything” were made manifest on March 4th.
Administrators draw their power from their capacity to act as the representatives of the University: that is, their political power comes from their claims to represent the students, staff and faculty of the University. They appropriate the image of the student to legitimize their agendas and co-opt the spectacle of student radicalism when it serves their needs. It has been common in student movements, like most political movements, to respond to this appropriation by claiming that students have power too, and that they can represent themselves. In an era characterized by ubiquitous representation of students (I’m thinking as much here of YouTube and Facebook as I am formal organizations that seek to speak on behalf of students), maybe it’s worth asking if students should even seek representation at all. The goal thus far has been to re-appropriate the power that is taken from us by systems of representation: maybe our goals should instead be to seek the destruction of representational power.

It is within this socio-spatial sphere that the specter of electrocommunism briefly arose last Fall. Electrocommunism, or, more properly, the as of yet unnamed milieu that instigates those activities which are associated with electrocommunism, has been criticized for a supposed lack of popular appeal, for being supposedly white and supposedly masculine, for elitism, for secrecy and for a refusal to articulate demands. In the split within the movement that Nick Dyer-Witheford presented yesterday between “radical reformism” and “apocalytic secessionism,” electrocommunism comes down squarely in favor of the spaces of secession and the temporality of the apocalypse. And yet the people involved with these actions continue to also work both within, and in parallel to, the reformist camp as well, though not without friction. This notion of actions that happen parallel to one another has been especially useful for a group of people that disavow formal organizational structures and dislike the idea of issuing demands. If, as critics have claimed, the social milieu associated with electrocommunism is guilty of cliquishness and of being dominated by white males armed with supposedly impenetrable theory, working in parallel seems to be the best option. Moreover, bodies that have been constructed as white and male, bodies that exist at the intersection of a variety of privileges, not the least of which being access to the academy, are justifiably skeptical that there are useful and appropriate ways for their bodies to act and speak within traditional political organizations. It should not be the place of these bodies to issue demands or act as the representatives of a broad student movement, though these bodies may have supporting roles to play within that movement as well. As such a reluctance to issue demands might be usefully compared to the ambivalence of the hypothetical students in Tim Brennen’s hypothetical seminar room that are reluctant to speak. Faced with a University that compels its student-citizens to speak and then co-opts and automythologizes those speech acts, the important gesture of solidarity with the most precarious isn’t to speak; it’s to refuse, occupy, and to listen. In the context of a University where all types of speech are permissible but none are meaningful, where the physical spaces of the campus that might be useful for commoning have been reshaped in the image of the strip mall, and have become subject to the logics of the strip mall, and where the potentials of formal political organization are circumscribed by a preordained acceptance of appropriate time and place, electrocommunism was an understandable, if not always defensible, response.