Occupy Everything, Demand an Interview: UC Berkeley organizers Ali Tonak and Tim Simons talk about California resistance

While Evergreen witnessed the year’s first building occupation last February, the University of California school system has been the fertile ground of dozens of occupations across the entire state. The number of occupations exploded after a 32% tuition hike was announced by the UC system’s Board of Regents, a body of unelected individuals analogous to the board of trustees at Evergreen.

Later, Berkeley students occupied Durant Hall and held an open dance party. Communiqués published cited a reason that should find home with many Evergreen students; Durant Hall, which has been under renovation for over two years, is sapping up literally billions of dollars paid for by the tuition hikes. The blog UC Regent Live states that, “the UC administration has used not only students’ tuition, but also the promise of future tuition increases, to secure the bonds and bond ratings necessary to channel ever increasing resources into construction projects. They will always need more money, and it will always be our money.”

Around the time of this interview, students had just occupied Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley. Over 60 individuals sat in at Wheeler Hall in an open and permeable occupation similar to the occupation of the HCC at Evergreen. On Dec. 11, four days after the occupation began, police stormed Wheeler Hall and arrested all participants with bail being set at $25,000. This led to a riot that evening.

Eventually, all protesters who were arrested at the occupation who did not have outstanding criminal backgrounds were given citations and released without bail.

Two individuals active in this and other occupations visited Evergreen two days after the arrests to speak on the idea of occupations and its tactical importance in resisting tuition hikes and the gutting of higher education at the expense of students and workers. Ali Tonak, a graduate student of environmental science at UC Berkeley, and Tim Simons, who studied Political Economy and Social Movement theory at Evergreen and is currently a collective member of Inkworks Press, sat down and answered a few questions for the CxPJ.

What did the lead up to the occupation look like? What sort of organizing was in place before the strikes, and what still needed to be done?

ali tonak and tim simons: There had already been two months of heavy activity on campus preceding the Wheeler occupation. A walk-out on Sept. 24 attracted about 5000 participants. Libraries were forced to be reopened on Saturdays by student takeovers, and a statewide conference issued the March 4 date as a day of strikes and actions. There were many different groups who met regularly to organize on campus, such as a graduate student group and groups where students, faculty, and workers came together to organize.

Undoubtedly there were many others that we don’t know about who made plans and acted on them. Of course there was a lot of organizing that was going on day-in-and-out, propaganda campaigns, public events, many meetings. One thing to emphasize would be that some of the best moments of the struggle on the campuses have not come from meticulously planned rallies, or even actions, but from groups of people taking the initiative at a certain moment of inertia.

How did you handle coordination between the various UC campuses and has this served to strengthen connections between activists on campuses across California? How many universities were involved in total (As of the end of 2009)?

This is of course a partial count but as far as we can remember there were 11 campuses in total: UCLA, UC Irvine, Cal State Fullerton, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, San Francisco State University, CSU Fresno, San Francisco City College, Modesto Junior College, CSU Stanislaus. There were some large conferences and gatherings where people had the opportunity to come together. And of course relationships were built over the course of the fall through people traveling to each others’ campuses.

How were decisions made in the General Assembly?

Actually, for most of the time, general assemblies were not very exciting or motivating places to be in and alienated most people. This was widely recognized all around. Many important decisions were made by ad-hoc groups that were quickly formed around actions or larger coalitions.

The general assemblies tended to focus on planning rallies, pickets and the petitioning of state government. Those who ran the general assemblies were somewhat uncomfortable with the strategy and tactics of occupations, and thus the assemblies became increasingly less significant as more and more of the movement began to embrace occupations as a core aspect of their struggle.

A communiqué from UCLA said, “We are under no illusions... we know the crisis is systemic.” Where do you see this crisis originating from and how did you address systemic causes while fighting for immediate gains?

The struggles and occupations that have echoed across California these past months point to something that is much larger than a new student movement or a movement to save public education. They are the first contagious uprisings in the US of those facing the structural violence of mass austerity measures implemented during this current period of economic crisis. We are living through a moment of capitalist restructuring and consolidation financed by massive infusions of public money. Privatization, cuts in social programs, foreclosures, mass layoffs; these are the symptoms of the neoliberal disease that has kicked into overdrive since the investment banks collapsed in September 2008. The IMF and the World Bank have been devastating countries
across the world on behalf of international capital for many years using this very model of ‘structural adjustment programs’.

It is through this lens that we need to view the attack on public education in the failed state of California and beyond. Whether they know it or not, those who make up the resistance to the current wave of fee increases, budget cuts and layoffs are on the front lines of the struggle against structural adjustment in the United States and the regime of financial capital.

In this era of skyrocketing inequality and disintegration of the middle class, populist anger on the radical right has manifested as the Tea Party movement staging rallies across the country. Yet anti-capitalists and the left have been largely silent post-financial meltdown up until the marches, occupations, blockades and sit ins that have punctuated the current mobilization in California.

The movement needs to continue to push the limits of the struggle on campus while generalizing the revolt across society linking up with movements resisting the economic violence of capital and the physical violence of the state. This process seems to already be underway in the lead up to March 4.

Continuing with the messaging put out during these occupations, the term “Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing,” was used frequently. What is the reasoning behind demanding nothing and did that prove to be tactically advantageous?

First of all not all the occupations that took place in the fall were demandless. Demands ranged from a tactically chosen small sets of demands that occupiers thought were winnable, to laundry-list demands listing every possible grivience one could have with a university and as you asked, to occupations which were demandless.

In not issuing demands to administrators who are the ones creating the very material crisis for us in the university by raising our fees, firing us, cutting our pay and essential services, these occupations recognized that they can never fulfill our demands and instead we should appeal to each other.

These occupations tried to communicate a certain break with the usual way of doing politics and also encourage further occupations. And indeed it had this effect and we can surely say that there was intra-occupation communication happening on a morphogenic sphere.

Also occupations were seen not only a means to an end but as an end in and of itself (or perhaps a mean without an end). By appropriating space and by locking it down some occupiers were attempting to open it up to a whole other set of social relations that might be possible in absence of private property.

Gov. Schwarzenegger has proposed a constitutional amendment allotting no less than 10% of the state’s general fund in the future to education and no more than 7% allotted to prisons, citing the protests as one of the main pressures. As proposed, the cut in prison allocations would be accomplished through privatizations. What are your feelings about this piece of legislation?

We reject pitting the privatization of prisons against the privatization of public universities. We seek to abolish prisons just as we seek to abolish the university that produces obedient workers for jobs that don’t even exist anymore. Universities and prisons represent the two poles of class mobility in the US and should be understood as connected elements of a system for controlling workers and marginalized communities.

Two things are very clear from the Governor’s announcement. One is that the oddly popular idea that affecting change at the legislative level means traveling to the capital for rallies and lobbying has been shown to be false. If we fight from where we are strong and enough ruckus takes place, politicians notice. The second thing, which is more heartening, is that, we can see the fruits of our resolve already. We have no illusions about the emptiness of what Schwarzeneggar has promised, but it is clear that power feels threatened by a movement that is still in its infancy.

What do you think are the most important steps are to take now for students in the UC system and what advice would you give to Evergreen students who are fighting tuition hikes and budget cuts in our university?

In California and in the US in general people are organizing towards March 4 and the week preceding it. Clearly the roots of our impoverishment are connected through the so-called crisis and their engineers. If we fight together, and if we can expand the struggle beyond the university without abandoning the struggle on campus we might be able to start to turn the tide. Direct action tactics such as occupations, blockades and other forms of disruptions provide the means of propelling our movements
forward. But of course we need to come up with new and more innovative forms of action that are just as effective.