signalfire.org/?p=25611 Excerpts of : From the Ground, to the Sky (Click link for Full Polemic) By: —Secretariat of the Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee — Secretariat of Ignite (Participating Organizations in the Ad Hoc Committee Against the Militarization of CUNY) "We should first note that the principal reason our video gained notoriety so quickly is that dominant ideology simply could not assimilate the spectacle we staged. Here, a mass of students exercised its power over a man who until very recently occupied the summit of the capitalist state’s military and intelligence repressive apparatuses. To paraphrase Brecht, it was as if the rain began to fall from the ground to the sky. It is in this sense that our action—while admittedly ‘rude’ and ‘ugly’—effectively represented a reversal of existing social relations at the level of ideology. We are proletarians, and many of us come from nations oppressed by U.S. imperialism. Our action was nothing less than a taking in hand of our historical responsibilities with a view to transforming the terms of the class struggle that has produced and reproduced us as a dominated and exploited social class. . . . "For these reasons, our concept of ‘war crime’ refers to a specific class practice essentially inscribed in, and masked by, the bourgeois legal system itself, not a violation of certain of its constituent rules. Far from covertly upholding the law, our accusation of criminality against Petraeus is an accusation directed in large part against bourgeois legality as such. The epithet “war criminal” should thus be understood both as essentially tied to the juridical instance of the capitalist state and as discontinuous with any notion of a breach of bourgeois legal norms. Imperialist war is always a crime against the masses, whether authorized by the United Nations, or by Congress, or carried out unilaterally—or, for that matter: whether brought by Obama and his FSA/Takfiri terrorist agents, or by Putin and his Ba’athist/Hizbullah agents. . . . "The militarization of CUNY, a process in relation to which the hiring of the Professor-General is a symptom, must be understood in this context. CUNY is the only major university in New York City that proletarian students can aspire to attend. The recent return of ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) to campus represents an aspect of its transformation into a kind of apprentice program for military officers. This process of militarization extends to the increasing trend of closing off various CUNY campuses to surrounding communities. Several decades ago, most individuals with high school degrees could enroll as students in the CUNY senior colleges, and community groups could use university facilities when not in use by students. This is no longer the case. The violent arrests of the six student protesters are proof enough that the process of militarization is already quite advanced. CUNY security officials worked side by side with the NYPD as they beat up and arrested the students. This repression, internal to the educational institution, clearly demonstrates that the university administration, far from being ‘technical’ or ‘neutral,’ can only be understood in relation to the social division of labor that it masks. Our immediate aim is to reverse the militarization of CUNY. Our strategic goal is to break with the university-function as such. In order to accomplish this, we must undertake a transformation of existing social relations at all levels: economic, juridico-political and ideological. In this process, the university will become a base area that can meet the needs of the proletariat and its allies."
Posted on: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 04:23:33 +0000
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