Make the University An Anti-Colonial Commons: A Statement on May Day To Our Past Selves from the Liberated Zone at UT Austin

“An Anonymous Transmission From The Future” originally posted to Austin Autonomedia.

Today is May Day, and we have celebrated an entire week of our growing presence and resistance. On May Day, we honor the spirits of all revolutionary martyrs through struggle. We have celebrated today with a brilliant noise demonstration, breaking the University’s sonic stranglehold. Some friends have taken over the radio station and begun broadcasting messages of resistance from the camp and the Palestinian resistance. Every night we listen to the daily updates from Palestine and other liberated campuses, celebrating the many victories over occupying police & soldiers, learning from the tactics deployed & practicing them, and evaluating the obstacles & limitations we still have to overcome.

In the past week, we have grown so much. We are smarter, fiercer, and more capable than we ever could have imagined ourselves before last week. The University’s rules mean nothing to us, and the police can’t stop us, because there are so many of us here and we are so prepared that they are helpless.

We put up tents, canopies, and tarps to make a beautiful space that we can really live–not just survive–in. There’s a camp kitchen now with gas burners, pots & pans, & stores of food. There’s dedicated prayer areas, changing areas, and low-stimulation zones. We have meetings rooms, projection & screening areas, artist workspaces, and more all built out on the lawn. Many of us stay here because it is a vibrant and enjoyable space, and certainly moreso than our shitty apartments or the dorms built by prison architects.

The police tried to tell us we couldn’t do this, and we told them that they couldn’t get past us to take the tents. Tried as they might, we held tight to each other and forced them back with everything we had. Each time they advanced, our calls for support summoned way more courageous frontliners prepared with banners, signs, umbrellas, & barricades to help keep the police away. They have not taken one more person or one more inch in the last week.

Class is cancelled, and no one cares about graduation anymore. Who could care less, when the revolution transforms every aspect of our lives and every fiber of our being? Faculty have stopped grading and abandoned their posts, but teaching hasn’t stopped. Now, they join us in all teaching and learning from each other, building the critical thinking, historical knowledge, and strategic skills we need to really take control of our lives, rather than simply advance out of the University into a role as professionalized managers of a burning world.

The labs and offices where the Army Future Command used to scheme their genocidal designs for Palestine (and later, the whole world) have been left empty and inoperative. The tower is hollowed out, but the administration still makes futile attempts to govern the empty shell of their old campus through virtual meetings. Unfortunately, they keep being interrupted by community-led protests at their doors and mysterious internet outages.

Those of us who mourned the loss of the Multicultural Engagement Center and other institutions labelled “DEI” found new agency once we rediscovered the lost lessons of the past and put them into practice. We realized that we had been limited by the history of assimilation into the University and forgotten our power. We forgot that the Third World Liberation Front Strikes that became the basis for Ethnic Studies & diversity centers at campuses were never about integration to the University, they were about revolution, about having an independent space for the development of revolutionary anti-colonial consciousness, practices, & community. So, we decided to establish it ourselves, re-occupying the old MEC offices and establishing an Anti-Colonial Commons space. It now featues programming, guidance, & space-making by all those who used to labor to make the MEC a vibrant space. This center in struggle is now no longer about tending to our lives as marginalized students, but about building the education and support systems to become agents of revolutionary change on campus and beyond. After all, What Starts Here Changes The World!

So many different kinds of people have gotten involved, as the politicizing force of our presence and the University’s horrid response has drawn more and more people in. Students & non-students alike have been learning, collaborating, building, fighting together. When the false walls between us came down, we realized how much we owe each other. Now we are working together on efforts to reclaim housing and land from the gentrification UT and its police have pushed, working to make space for our unhoused neighbors to live with resources, safety, and dignity.

The different social clubs and student groups have started offering programming, mixing social activities with political resistance. We’ve been learning how to stretch, move our bodies, be fast & strong with the help of the athletes, who offered us useful games and practices to increase our capacity for resistance. Students in the dorms and coops have been turning the kitchens into canteens, working together to coordinate bulk order and drop-offs of food and cooking for the camp, for free. Every night, musicians host a variety of shows: acoustic sets, choirs, raves, hardcore shows. It’s been inspiring to see each group of students be so creative about what they can offer, to find what they already have capacity to do and bringing it to the camp.

You are on the path to this future. Let nothing deter you. Do not wait for anything, the time to act is now. You have been given a responsibility by the Palestinian resistance: to do all you can to end the genocide through the immediate escalation of struggle to higher levels wherever possible, on campus & beyond. Kill the cop inside your head: do not let fear deter you or try to control others. The diversity of ways we can contribute and mobilize is our strength, and our ability to take risks together makes our resistance stronger. Do not get bogged down in negotiation with the bureaucracy or playing by their rules. Once we felt the power of directly shutting down the University-Military Industrial Complex, we knew we did not have to limit our demands to what they said they could give us. Hurry, comrades, to set up the tent, keep the lawn, and join us on the commons!

–Alliance Towards Transformative Anti Colonial Commons

photo: Palestine Action US