PRIMA PORTA

BEYOND VIOLENCE AND NON-VIOLENCE—A RESPONSE TO CATHERINE COLE

It is a sure sign that a movement has reached a limit when its defenders fall to bickering over failed ideas and imaginary threats—the better to obscure, or make forgettable, the real difficulty of the project at hand. A key example of this is the ongoing “violence” vs. “non-violence” paragone, which commentators on the liberal side of the Occupy movement can’t seem to get enough of. In an article published on Christopher Newfield’s blog, Catherine Cole, a professor at UC Berkeley, rehearses the argument that has become a standard liberal mantra in recent weeks. Though her points are specific to the political situation at the UC campuses, they have much in common with the broader field of liberal discourse on and around OWS. Fair warning: if campus politics aren’t your interest, consider skipping to the bottom.

Cole takes the position that radicals are responsible for perpetrating and perpetuating violence at the UC—perhaps no more responsible than the police, but responsible nonetheless. Only by renouncing all forms of “violence,” a term that includes property destruction, will the movement be able to advance. For Cole, the model of non-violent protest at the UC remains that of the September 24, 2009 walkout, which brought together several thousand students, faculty and staff in a rally on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza: “[N]ever before had the three segments of California’s higher education mobilized to this degree around a common cause. Berkeley’s rally on that glorious September day culminated in an exuberant procession through the campus and the streets of Berkeley, with colorful improvisational protest actions along the way. The massive mobilization of students—powerfully fueled by the rocket booster of Twitter, Facebook and tiny URL’s—gave many of us hope and inspiration, even in the face of the long entrenched problems we face in California.”

After the “glorious day” in late September, though, the movement was, at least according to the Police Review Board report which Cole cites approvingly, infiltrated by a “smaller, more calculating (but perhaps no less sincere) group” that “set out to instigate confrontations with the police – to engineer challenges to their authority and to erect obstacles to their plans in order to provoke them into high-visibility over-reactions that could be used to inflame the crowd and escalate its aggressiveness.” As such, Cole blames the police for their heavy-handed repression of the bystanders outside, who “unlike those who seized rooms in Wheeler Hall—were not doing anything illegal at all.” This day of violence was followed by a bout of “retributive violence” (i.e. property destruction) at the Chancellor’s house. It was there, according to Cole, that the movement forfeited “the one source of power it had: the moral high ground—even if it was only a small faction of that movement along with rogue non-affiliates who perpetrated that deed.”

To stop the cycle of violence, Cole argues, the protest movement must retake the high ground, recommitting to non-violent protest on the model of the September 24^th walkout: “Whereas activists have tended to perpetrate violence against property, the Administration has consistently perpetrated violence against bodies. But violence is a cycle, not a competition. […] The way to stop violence is through the practice of nonviolence. What is needed at this moment is restorative justice. Whereas retributive justice seeks vengeance, restorative justice seeks to repair the harm caused by crime. Restorative justice restores the humanity to both the victim and the perpetrator.  It is within UC administration’s power to be an agent of restorative justice and nonviolence.” As such, the administration should reach out to those students who are willing to engage in reasoned discussion about the state of the university. Within the movement, “violent” protesters must be marginalized at all costs.

There are many objections one could raise about the sequence of events Cole narrates and the lessons she draws from it. Glaringly absent from her account is the Live Week occupation of Wheeler Hall, which, after first receiving the sanction of the administration, was brutally evicted in the middle of the night as students were sleeping. What violence were these “infiltrators” committing that justified their criminalization? Why, moreover, does Cole believe the official line that the radical protesters were “outsiders” bent on co-opting and corrupting the movement? After all, building occupations were attempted as early as September 24^th, and many of the eventual “rogue non-affiliates” (a wonderfully opaque euphemism) were students who had been involved in organizing from the very beginning. One could note, too, that the “bystanders” outside Wheeler Hall, whom the police brutalized despite their alleged non-violence, had gathered with the express purpose of protecting the “infiltrators” from violence that, according to the logic of Cole’s argument, would have been well deserved. The argument about  “infiltrators” versus “bystanders” is not only inaccurate, it is also incoherent. After all, shouldn’t we applaud efforts to build solidarity between the campus and communities outside? Must we pretend that the crisis of the UC system exists in a social and economic vacuum? None of this seems to matter for Cole, though, since at the end of the day, an outside agitator is definable as any student whose politics fall outside the liberal comfort zone.

It is worth asking why this shadow play of invisible “non-affiliates” and innocent bystanders has proven so satisfying for members of the UC Berkeley faculty. One answer is that faculty participation has always been peripheral to the student movement; even activist faculty like Cole, whose efforts were decisive in shaping the critique of privatization in the run-up to September 24^th, have struggled to articulate a position of solidarity with students whose motivations they find deeply foreign, having more to do with jobs and debt than with the defense of liberal education. That the students’ trenchant critique of the UC administration has failed to gain adherents among the faculty should come as no surprise: professors are structurally aligned with the administration, on whose approval their advancement depends; the students who pass transiently through their classrooms and offices are often far more alien to them than the bosses upstairs. And lest we forget, UC faculty were furloughed in 2009; the crisis touched them directly that year, throwing a portion of the humanities faculty (who were less able than their peers in the sciences to recuperate their losses in the form of private-sector work) into a brief alliance with student organizers. But it did not last.

I am not shocked, then, that professors like Cole, who remain tied to the university and its administrative power structure, have balked at the radical direction the protests have taken at the UC. It is disturbing, however, that she thinks it necessary to restore that power structure within the student movement itself, accepting the administration’s discourse on violence and infiltration. In order to solve the “cycle of violence” at the UC, she calls for greater faculty and administrative control over the movement: “The teacher is responsible for setting the tone of the class. Likewise the Administration sets the tone for the campus. The tone that has been set since November 20, 2009 has been a trigger-happy resort to riot police and an utter failure to engage in any kind of meaningful dialogue.” To resolve this standoff, the administration ought to show “visible interest” in communicating with the demonstrators, conveying its willingness “to learn what their message is and to learn their perspective on the issues that concern them.”[1]

Let’s be clear: the purpose of the student movement is not to negotiate the privatization of the university with administrators. Students have tried again and again to reach out to the administration, but to no avail. The problem is not that administrators like Yudof and Birgeneau are hard of hearing; they have heard our message and they are ignoring it. The days are long gone when university administrators thought it their job to protect and safeguard affordable higher education; they’re paid to manage the university system like the multi-billion-dollar commercial enterprise it is, students and faculty be damned. We see no point in initiating yet another round of public conversations where members of the administration can respectfully “learn our message” while reminding us of the “limits of protest.” The administration knows our message all too well—not despite of the occupations but because of them. 

As for the so-called “cycle of violence,” we should know by now that the discourse of non-violence exists primarily for the benefit of the enemy, dividing our movement from within while diverting attention from austerity and privatization to the alleged presence of “rogue non-affiliates.” It cannot be said often enough that radicals are not the problem, reactionary self-policing is the problem. If anyone has not understood the meaning of the student protests, it is the faculty; it’s high time they listened respectfully to our message, since much of its content has apparently been lost in translation. If they do, they will discover that the anger of students has everything to do with the crisis of capitalism in which universities are embroiled. For students, there is no clear boundary between life inside and outside the education system. Moreover, as voices within the student movement have claimed from the very beginning, the university is not the virtuous bastion of enlightened thought as professorial rhetoric supposes, it is rather a machine of the reproduction of salaried labor and management. There would be no “public university” without the forces of industry that now threaten to destroy it—that is the paradox we face, and which no amount of liberal hopefulness will help us to overcome. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that the specific material conditions which made the development of affordable public education possible in the wake of the Second World War—namely, high rates of profit accumulated first through the modernization of industry, then through the outsourcing of production to former colonies—will return in the foreseeable future. Nor should one believe that the jobs for which students are being trained, and for which they have accepted an enormous burden of debt, will reappear even in the event that the economy recovers. Capitalism does not work that way; it is not a force for the good, even if occasionally it produces instruments of social enrichment, of which the American university system is a prime example.

One could make a similar point with regard to OWS. Following the evictions at Zuccotti Park and Oscar Grant Plaza, the movement is again faced with a limit to its powers, and with the paradoxes of capitalism in crisis-mode. Behind the movement are all the familiar tactics and rhetoric of protests past, from “non-violence” and “inclusivity” to reformism and institutionalization. Ahead of it is not less radicalism but more, not fewer tents—and fewer undesirable occupants, fewer homeless and hopeless—but more, not only in the parks and other public spaces but also in neighborhoods and, eventually, at the sites where goods are produced and circulated. There are no liberal solutions to the crisis of capitalism; there are only radical projects and the radical discomfort of breaking one’s pact with normality. As Silvia Federici suggests in a recent interview, “the [OWS] movement must begin to pose the question of how to create a reproductive network outside of the market, for instance connecting with the existing urban farming projects and other elements of the solidarity economy.” To address this question—namely, how to live without capitalism—means going beyond the discourse of violence/non-violence. Moreover, it means getting beyond the illusions that bind us to our present positions within the capitalist system. There is no sense or justification in considering the UC system as separate from the CSUs, the community colleges, and society at large, or of upholding the hierarchy of administrators, faculty, students, and staff. What was glorious about September 24th, 2009 was that for a moment it seemed that the faculty would meet us as comrades rather than as superiors. We thought that our common struggle might bring them closer to us, calling into question the dubious notion that “the teacher is responsible for setting the tone of the class.” As Cole’s missive demonstrates, the teacher still has much to learn—and much more to unlearn—from her students.