Seize the Ponies
The actions this Wednesday on the UC Berkeley campus under the banner “Occupy Cal” were the largest political manifestation there since September 24, 2009. On that occasion, a faculty-initiated walkout in concert with two union strikes, shortly joined by a mass of students, mobilized protesters across the UC system against the privatization of public education — 5,000 alone at Berkeley. Amidst broad and spectacular national attention and predictable comparisons to the spirit of “the Sixties,” the action in 2009 threatened to begin a new era in campus agitation and struggle.
It also threatened to bring it to an end. An attempted occupation of Wheeler Hall by a militant fraction of the participants, proceeding from a more sweeping anticapitalist analysis seeking “to push the university struggle to its limits” within a declared program to “occupy everything/demand nothing!” failed amidst great acrimony. The ill will arrived no more from the administration than from the main body of that day’s protestors, committed to the seemingly more realistic and less divisive goal of restoring a marginally more affordable and hospitable academic
