Note: This is a working document that we are continuously “cooking,” not a final product. We publicize this draft so that folks interested in joining our collective can learn what we are about.
We don’t believe in temporal linearity. A mission is not a fixed end that can be used to justify all means. Instead, we work collectively within the circular relationships between our hearts, minds, and souls. As shown in the image below, we understand our mission as multi-faceted, with political thinking, political fighting, and political healing intertwined with and inseparable from each other. We strive toward a balance between all three without willingly compromising any. We know that without thinking, our fights are less effective and our healing efforts are faced with more traumas; without fighting, radical rhetoric are useless and harmful, and wounded & colonized souls cannot heal; and without healing, there is no grounding for the thinking and fighting.
Collective Thinking
Abolitionist Discernment:
As academic workers and emerging scholars, we operate in the colonial university and are thus complicit in the reproduction of its conditions. From this position we denounce the use of our labor to fuel the UC, and academia more broadly, which are entangled in global imperialism and carceral logics. We accompany this declaration with rigorous study and strategizing toward the abolition of oppressive-hegemonic systems: the University, the military-policing apparatus, incarceration, the nation-state, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, elitism, race and racism, settler colonialism, imperialism, liberal multicultural cooption, the NGO industrial complex, career union organizing, and more.
Power Mapping & Strategizing:
We know where our powers lie and what we must do to directly target what we aim to abolish–we are therefore committed to disrupt, boycott, and divest from oppressive power networks, leverage our labor power, and undo aesthetic and cultural hegemony. We critically engage with our positionality within the belly of the beast to dismantle it. At the same time, as we work toward the undoing of all forms of oppression, binaries, and borders, we are attentive to the ways in which the systems we inhabit tear us apart and isolate us, and we seek out connections and make communities at the ruptures. Building up our power from below organically, from small affinity groups to clusters, from mutual aid networks to movements, and from justice work to planetary care, we move toward the death of the toxic systems that refuse to let go.
Ongoing Study:
We understand ourselves to be students for life, and so we nourish these commitments through ongoing, non-hierarchical, and experimental forms of collective study. These efforts include research, multi-media reading groups, collective reflections, syllabus compilation, and more. Our intellectual work is not motivated by the colonial fear of not-knowing, of the uncontrollable or the unfathomable. We do not study to be experts, to be recognized, to be smart, to feel good, to have a say at the table, to dominate, to win debates, to make decisions for others, or to collect fetishized know-whats. We study because we want to understand ourselves and others; what we are fighting for and against; the options available; the mistakes of our ancestors as well as our own; how to heal politically; and anything else conducive to making collective liberation and decolonial rootedness possible.
Collective Fighting
Accomplice Not Ally:
If we are to be serious about this work and honest with ourselves, our first fight must be against the structurally cultivated desires among academics in the global North for middle class comfort, illusions of meritocracy, intellectual rhetoric, and performative solidarity. As young scholars in the imperial university, our everyday life is saturated by what the late Indigenous anarchist fighter Klee Benally calls “the ally industrial complex.”1 We pledge to refuse to make this work a means to individual ends, including career development, professionalization, workplace collegiality, virtue signaling, personal branding, social and cultural capital, networking, and “ethnographic fieldwork.” We fight against the systematic dilution of social movements and activism into a footnote of social science, liberal democratic legitimacy, and/or historical progress. And we struggle against the entrenched fear of the ontological illegality, criminality, and fugitivity of collective liberation work. We strive to decenter heroic savior complexes, self-importance, moral superiority, and ableism in our definition of political fights. We listen to the echoes historical re-writing has sought to silence and learn from those entangled in daily liberatory struggle on what it means to resist instead of those preaching revolutions in comfort, privilege, and stardom in the Ivory Tower.
The Struggles Against UC(I):
A parasite predicated on the occupation and desecration of Acjachemen lands,2 UCI has no right to exist. We are in collective alignment with the Indigenous land back movement, not institutionalized rhetorical and performative acknowledgements.3 We are constantly enraged by the anti-blackness of the University, the imperial labor union, the UCPD, the school-prison nexus, the capitalist dystopian city of Irvine, all of which are built and maintained on stolen land by the stolen labor of stolen people. In addition, UCI is known for its Zionist co-option and repression; disposal of undocumented students’ rights; exploitation of graduate, lecturer, and other service labor; anti-communist racist counterinsurgency; Islamophobia; ableism; militarism; financialization, and more. Our fight is therefore concrete and local, situated in our immediate environment. Our fight is also part of a global world-making practice that weaves together possibilities of freedom and safety for the most marginalized. Our fight reclaims our agency to build the world we want. Like José Esteban Muñoz, we are critical of the present as we keep “queerness as horizon” in order to “dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”4
Pedagogical Insurgency:
We fight for a university for the people and the planet! We take what we want from the university and return it to those dispossessed by it. We want knowledge for all and we learn from all. Our learning takes place outside traditional academic spaces, conventions, and terms of legitimacy; and from different perspectives and experiences. We take up political education to prevent the rewriting of history by the powerful and privileged, and to build and sustain knowledge of the material conditions of the systems we endure. Our visions and actions are generated through an active imagination where our creativity runs free and unbound. We experiment, with as much care and thoughtfulness as possible, with ways for teaching to be non-hierarchical, and for materials to be digestible, accessible, and relevant to those engaged in struggle. Our DIY aesthetics assist with the birth of a liberatory way of relating, learning, and being.
Collective Healing
Lineage work:
On the ruins of vicious regimes we work to create a new world(s) – a reclamation of other possible collectivities against colonial organization. We are a coalition of graduate students at the University of California, Irvine, committed to anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and abolitionist praxis in response to the violences brought forth by this settler institution, and global oppressive systems more broadly. Our collective formed in the pitfalls of the 2022 UC UAW strike, where we witnessed and endured the harm of our local and statewide leadership putting business unionism before the needs of the most vulnerable graduate workers. What was widely paraded as a “historic” labor “victory” was for us a painful betrayal against the most marginalized in our community. Our efforts within the UC are not unique – they follow a lineage of student organizing5. It is across these times and spaces that we embrace a form of solidarity Ruth Wilson Gilmore has described as “radical dependency,” understanding that oppressed and colonized peoples need one another to build up a better world.6
Relational work with our generational cohort:
We build on the linkages across our global collective struggle to work toward a sustainable model of resistance based on safety, mutual aid, and relation, committed to ethics of care and trauma-informed community building. We believe the way we organize and share this space is one mode to embody our politics and practice the world we want in the present. In this sense, our collective takes a prefigurative approach to organizing, envisioning and enacting forms that contribute to the flourishing of life, living now, unapologetically, the liberated future we are working towards. For this reason, we reject the majoritarian and hierarchical methods of the UAW, and we anchor ourselves to the most marginalized, prioritizing the needs of the most impacted, and creating multiple avenues for folks to contribute their strengths according to their capacity.
Infrastructure and archival memory for future generations:
We are in this for the long haul, and as we are drawing from the radical traditions that came before us, we hope to lay building blocks that may be returned to and activated in the future. As we practice the future we want, we also acknowledge our organizing as prep work for what we imagine will be a multi-generational struggle. For this reason, we operate sustainably, creating networks, cross-mobilizing with like-minded organizations, compiling archival memory, and building capacity to further grassroots mobilizations.
Towards the future:
We noted before that our mission is not a predetermination of our political and organizational ethos. We are crafting and re-crafting it constantly, as we engage in practices of community-building against the forces that seek to divide us, dispose of life, dispossess communities, and distance us from the roots of our knowledge. We invite you into this process with us, and ask what kinds of collective thinking, fighting, and healing you’re engaged in, wherever you are. As we engage in these collective struggles, we prefigure radically different futures, and we see ourselves as a small part of a lineage of resistance that predates the systems, languages, and world-orders we fight today, that reminds us of the temporality of systems of domination and the eventuality of cycles of death and rebirth. We aim to do our part in this cycle, and we leave the rest, our archives and thoughts and any bits of institutional knowledge we can offer, to you.
- Downloadable PDF for the zine: Accomplices not Allies ↩︎
- Learn more about the Acjachemen Tongva Land Conservancy and take actions accordingly: https://www.atlandconservancy.com/ ↩︎
- Steward-Ambo and Yang, 2021, Beyond Land Acknowledgement, Social Text, vol 39 (1(146)): 21-46. ↩︎
- Jose Esteban Muñoz “cruising utopia” ↩︎
- The Third World Liberation Front, The Third World Liberation Archives at UCB, Anti-Vietnam War Protests at UCI, The Black Panther Party Volume I no 4 page 3 ↩︎
- Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore – An Antipode Foundation film, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CS627aKrJI ↩︎
Rank and File Irvine 