We are a group of students, workers, and student-workers on the UC-Berkeley campus who produce and use the university. Our aim is simple: to transcend the merely symbolic level of rallies, small-scale walkouts, and unfocused general assemblies and actually get a strike off the ground that has the power to shut down this university. Shut down the university in order to transform it!
We are often asked how as advocates of public education we could in good conscience interfere with instruction. The point is not to maximize instructional time for those who currently have access to the “public” university in the capacity of consumers; no, we must shut down the university in order to transform it. When the actual university becomes identical to the potential university; when the university becomes public in the true sense of the word and sheds its ideological function; when those who produce and use the university successfully wrest control of the means of education from the superfluous bureaucratic-managerial class, only then will we accept the argument that instructional time actually constitutes education as such. Or as Gramsci wrote,
There is no unity between school and life, and so there is no automatic unity between instruction and education.
Until then, the university — as factory, as ideological state apparatus, as vocational school for the aspiring managerial class — must be seized by those who use it. Two, three, many November 20ths!
See you at the barricades…
THOSE WHO USE IT 
Leave a comment