We are the crisis

Is it any coincidence that neoliberal attack dog Secretary Arne Duncan turned down California for funding to further carve up and sell off public education at the same time thousands hit the streets? As everyone knows, investors avoid politically unstable geography and California is now not proving so compliant. Let's chalk this up as our first real victory. A victory not to lower fees or tuition, rehire laid off workers or restore textbook grants. But a victory as a showing of our power, that we are the "crisis" as our friends at Occupy California write:

"From our perspective, overcoming the contradiction requires not only making education free, but overcoming capitalist relations as a whole. We cannot solve the crisis within the current system because we are the crisis of the current system."

We are the crisis. Is it any accident that the very programs under the knife are those spaces we successfully fought for and won in the 1960s-80s?

These are spaces that at best are antagonistic to the prerogatives of profit.

These are spaces peopled by those least reliable to do the unwaged labor of manufacturing themselves for future exploitation, to sink deeply into a life long feudal student loan debt that can never be repaid, an IOU on future profits they will produce for their employers to be.

Down in the basement of our "higher education" system, the community colleges, these spaces are peopled by those who criss-cross fortress like borders, defying the death squads, and multinationals that guard them.

We are the crisis. We have made California not only unprofitable but unmanageable.