College is just work, except that we fund our bosses and get paid in promises.-For A University Against Itself, Filler Distro
The University of Pittsburgh spends a shit ton of money to make sure you understand and perform the role of a university student, they “orient” you. They convince you to drown yourself in debt, passively listen to your professors, do your homework, and graduate to go on to maintain this corrupt system. The University achieves this by bombarding incoming students with advertisements, high-school ambassadors, orientation guides, tours, online modules, presentations, welcome weeks, and much much more.
The University plays a critical role in capitalism and state control by ensuring an entire new generation of workers. Graduates are forced to work for most of the remainder of their lives to pay off their student loan debt. This creates a class of workers who will accept any job – no matter the pay – to keep up with their debt (1/3 of graduates work at jobs that don’t require a college education). Also, through selective University funding and scholarships, a whole class of students learns just what wealthy corporate board members (which contribute 62% of Pitt’s budget) want them to — the knowledge to maintain institutions of control and to further commercialize aspects of the human experience.
The very process of becoming educated accustoms us to both valuing and centering our lives around institutions. During primary and secondary school, we spend most of our waking hours at school, preparing for school, and doing unpaid academic labor for school. For many of us, school forced us to wake up before we naturally wanted to, go to a place we didn’t want to, and learn subjects we weren’t interested in. As “students” we were valued for how well we adapted to these routines and obeyed our parents and teachers, rewarded and punished accordingly. Thus, our activity, energy, movement, and social value were largely dominated by school.School is just another institution, like University, work, or a political party, it determines our lives for us, rather than leaving us to determine them ourselves.
We seek to take this power back over our lives. And we invite you to do the same. Where the University manufactures obedient workers, we seduce students to become insurgents. We realize the University’s complicity in capitalism and social control. Thus, we understand that playing the role of “student” just reinforces these structures. We don’t necessarily advocate for dropping out, as for most the domination of the University will be replaced with the domination of work (if you are not already experiencing both). We realize the University does provide a prolonged immunity from work and higher future wages for many students.However, the critical role the University plays in the immiseration and subjugation of our lives in their totality makes it an ideal target for subversion and destruction according to our desires.
But who are “we” you might ask? We, the writers, editors, artists, and criminals who put together this zine you hold in your hand are the Department of Insurgency at the Berkman School of Anarchy. But don’t be fooled, we are not a school, we don’t really seek to teach you anything. We are not a department either, we have no administrative heads, professors, or claims to specialized knowledge. We, as a department, are a crew of students, drop-outs, and non-Pitt affiliates seeking to spread generalizable and easily reproducible tactics toward an immediate increase in power over our lives. This means the reclamation and seizing of space, attack on structures of domination, community defense, vandalism, and expropriation.We’ve put together this guide to seduce you toward these ends.
The Berkman School of Anarchy describes a shared projectuality amongst affinity groups, crews, and collectives — AKA “departments” — in and around the University. It does not exist as an organization, spokescouncil, or assembly. It is simply what we have chosen to name the overlapping projects of small groups that conflict with the University. We do this in hopes of facilitating greater correspondence and collaboration between these groups. As well as a meme to seduce others into developing conflictual groups that may form projects that overlap with ours.
So what are you waiting for? Revolution? Social Collapse? reform? Death? We must begin to realize that the only way to regain power over our lives is to steal it. Revolutionary, reformist, religious, and apocalyptic promises only hinder us in this adventure.
We cannot wait for the activist student groups to break out of their initial education/negotiation stage. We cannot wait for the workers and students to “organize”. And we sure as hell cannot wait until widespread climate catastrophe. We must take what we want now, and organize directly towards those means.
The secret is to really begin.-At Daggers Drawn with the Existent, its Defenders and its False Critics