laV

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[email protected]

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Contents
ESSAYS
On Why We Should Expropriate from the Bookstore
by Friends of le Front Sophie Podolski de libération artistique 5
History of Resistance, Part Three by Stephen Ng 10
We Are All Stars by La Ventana Collective 26
The University Capital and Crisis by La Ventana Collective 30

POETRY
Ventaja by Samuel Brown Vásquez 17
She Crossed Three Borders by Jacqueline Méndez 19
The Teeth of Wraiths by Felipe Rivera 21
Thank You for Bread by Otis 23
Abuelito Tito by Luisa Leija 24
The Interrogation of the Good by Bertolt Brecht 47

ART
Drawings by Alfonso 9
43

LETTERS
Letter from a Comrade 44

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http://ventanacollective.blogspot.com

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On Why We Should
Expropriate Books from the
Bookstore
Friends of le Front Sophie Podolski de libération artistique

Marcela Soto: ¿No le importa perder

los derechos de autor?

Roberto Bolaño: En lo más mínimo.

Además, no pierdo los derechos de
autor; el que pierde es el librero. 1

A Golden Gate [X]Press article2 that reads like a press

release or a possible story for a corporation’s newsletter
recently incited disgust, if only slightly, among several
literary lovers and their anti-capitalist friends with benefits.

That article is about how “merchandise loss” is

hurting the Bookstore, the university, and ultimately the
students. Instead of writing about why students have to
resort to stealing books and defending those unfortunate to
get caught, the article defends the Bookstore’s profiteering
and the arrests of our fellow students. But it does not end
there.

The [X]Press only reaffirms their lackey status when

less than three days to the exact date, a year after that

1 Marcela Soto: Doesn’t it bother you losing your author’s rights?

Roberto Bolaño: In the very least. Besides, I’m not losing my author’s
rights; it’s the bookseller who loses.
2 Original [X]Press article “Thieves grab books, funds,” by Nathan Codd,

appeared Sept. 17, 2009 on p.2.

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article appears, another3 is published, like clock-work, in a
formulaic back-to-school story. In publishing the author’s
facetious attempt of half-formed sarcasm and irony, the
[X]Press ridicules students whose only crime was to get
caught and urges its readers to not steal and instead
heartlessly take advantage of their families for money,
exploiting love for quick cash.

Rather than supporting arrested students and

denouncing the exorbitant prices and the required use of
textbook-commodities that amounts to racketeering and
extortion, the student newspaper joins the Bookstore and its
undercover narks (which must be exposed and run off the
University like the swine that they are), the administration,
and the campus pigs in punishing students and enforcing the
paternalistic relationship that keeps students perpetually
infantile, vulnerable, and exploited as the underclass that is
taught not to think at all but to only follow instructions.

Though the [X]Press is student-run, it is not created

for students; it is a training ground for future apologists.
This is a response to those apologists…

Thieves sell books, keep the booty

By Friends of the FPLA

A new school year brings old benefits for the for-profit

SFSU Bookstore, including student-buying and organized
book-buying rackets. The Bookstore keeps proceeds from
University students and, according to management, public
libraries take away from this effort.
Since the semester began, four arrests have been
made by the Department of Public Safety for the usage of
school and public libraries and not buying from the
Bookstore. In the first two weeks of class, an arrest was
made every three days.

3[X]Press article “Some alternatives to stealing books, avoiding

humiliation,” by Will Liu appeared Sept. 6, 2010 on the newspaper’s
website.

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 Associate general manager Brian Zimmerman said
that though the numbers are comparable with previous
semesters, shoppers who lose a living buying books have
been around for years.
“It’s a huge cash business,” Zimmerman said.
“Since books can be bought and sold, it’s an industry.” 4
He explained that some shoppers select books
with the highest resale value and will buy them in one
quick motion of their debit cards, intending to read them
and share them with friends and classmates then sell them
back, foolishly expecting a fair return. Although the
number of bookstores compared to the number of
desperate students is relatively small, Zimmerman said the
profit-making is much more severe.
“The amount they are buying is much bigger, and
they are forced by the textbook-industrial complex to buy
high-value books,” Zimmerman said. “We have a book
steal-back-from-students program where students resell
us the expensive textbooks they no longer need at the end
of a semester, and they expect to get back something close
to the original price. It’s funny. Sometimes, I giggle.”
Zimmerman colludes with the City College of San
Francisco’s bookstore general manager to share
information and attract repeat shoppers, and bookstore
employees are trained to look for price tag stickers,
surplus of apparent usage and anyone attempting to buy
used copies.
“That’s the signal to us that they might be looking
for discounts that are hurtful, but not really, for business,”
Zimmerman said. “Used book prices and discounts are
illusory; they are really only marketing techniques.”
Zimmerman said that so far this semester all of
the arrests have been for borrowing textbooks for
personal and communal use. He said students commit
most book-borrowing during the beginning of the
semester and usually poorer and less inclined students
show up more at libraries throughout the remainder.

4This quote was not altered in any way whatsoever.

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 For an organization that keeps its proceeds from
the students, book-borrowing, book-sharing and non book-
buying have made it difficult to steal the way it might
otherwise steal from students, bookstore officials said.
According to Husam Erciyes, director of marketing
and strategic projects for the Bookstore, $325,000 was
given to the school administration’s general fund last year.
Combined with Bookstore promotion/intimidation events,
various deceiving ‘discounts’ and the book steal-back-
from-students program, the Bookstore stole millions of
dollars from students and the University in the 2008-09
fiscal year.
Erciyes said surpluses at the end of the year go
into the pockets of school administrators through the SF
State general fund, but they’re eroded by student and non-
student library usage.
“It affects how much we can steal from the
university every semester,” Zimmerman said. With a door
alarm system, full-time security staff and undercover
shoppers, Zimmerman hopes to coerce book-buying
through an intimidating approach.
“Some of those students don’t realize that when
they don’t buy from us, they steal from students,” Erciyes
said. “I just feel like a Kennedy right now.”
“I feel that students should think before they
borrow from a library about whom it is who is not going to
profit,” said nineteen-year-old Kimrey Nicholson,
Undecided major. “I feel giddy.”
With hundreds of visitors flowing in and out of its
twin entries every day, Zimmerman said his philosophy is
to coerce buying through customer reproach.
“The first thing a potential library user wants to
hear is ‘are you finding everything reasonably priced?’” he
said, grinning wildly like the Cheshire Cat.

For more information on the textbook-industrial complex and its

effects, read “What’s Up with Our Bookstore?” by Michael, from La
Ventana Issue 1, Vol. 2 (LV#2).

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History of Resistance, Part
Three
Stephen Ng

On Dec. 6, 1967, SF State’s administration shut down the

campus. Students looted the Bookstore following the
arrest and suspensions of Black students. Then the cops
mounted a two-hour siege.
On March 22, 1968, the Students for a Democratic
Society organized a demonstration against having Marine
recruiters on campus. A brawl between students and
recruiters ensued. Later, campus police was seen shaking
the hands of the Marines and congratulating them for
beating the college kids. And, later in May, after many
fierce confrontations between the growing student
autonomous power and the recruiters and their
supporters, the president of SF State ended the school’s
contract with the military, and the ROTC was kicked off
campus.
In late April, students and faculty went on strike.
Seventy-five percent of classes were cancelled and some of
them were turned into seminars against war, the draft, and
racism. Some teachers cancelled classes due to the high
rate of absenteeism. The first day of the strike, April 27,
was a day of workshops, poetry, music, a rally, seminars,
and demonstrations in the Fillmore District.
Black student athletes withdrew from competition
on May 2 of the same year because of exploitation from
white coaches. At a press conference, they stated: coaches
had broken promises of providing job security, adequate
housing; coaches overlooked Black athletes when filling
graduate assistant coaching positions; coaches showed

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absolutely no interest in their college education and the
coaches only cared whether they could compete and win
competitions, to the point that they flagrantly lied to get
them enrolled.
The Third World Liberation Front (TWLF)
brought 300 Mexican-American high school students to
the office of the dean of admissions later that month. The
TWLF followed set guidelines to get the Dean to resign, but
the resignation was rejected by SF State’s Administration.
The TWLF continued with similar tactics until the deans of
SF State asked the Chancellor for the enrollment of 400
disadvantaged students, 100 more than the TWLF’s
original demand for the enrollment of 300 students.
Associated Students (AS) in the meantime
withdrew its funding until the Black athletes’ demands for
a Black coach, a Black graduate assistant coach, a Black
housing coordinator, summer jobs for athletes, and the
establishment of a grievance committee were met.
On May 21, a sit-in was held in the Administration
Building from 1pm until late at night. At 10pm, police
entered the building. During this time, there were 200
protesters inside and 500 outside. In order to keep the
protest going, 26 protesters volunteered to be arrested so
that those outside could continue. Thereafter, police beat
11 people. Protesters heckled and harassed the police, and
as soon as a police van drove away, cops who were hiding
charged the protesters and wantonly beat any who they
happened to reach. Camera people from local news
stations were also beat, and in one instance a woman who
was sitting on a car was pushed off after no provocation
whatsoever and beat by police.
The next day, another sit-in occurred in the lobby
of the Administration Building. This sit-in lasted for a few
days until it was raided by police late one night. Thirty-two

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students and faculty were arrested. The president of SF
State soon thereafter resigned and flew to Ethiopia.
The next fall semester, police began to openly
wear pistols for the first time ever on campus.
Although the military no longer had a permanent
office on campus, recruiters were still allowed by the
Administration to come to the school. A Military
Information Day was to be held, and many students, along
with student organizations, threatened to protest and use
force in defense. The military stayed away but Oct. 8, 1968
was still officially declared Military Information Day.
Students used this opportunity to organize future actions.
Plans that were made that day on Oct. 8 were to
have the school of Ethnic Studies established in the fall of
1969, with the hiring of 50 professors and the creation of a
bachelor’s and master’s program for the school and to
have 2,500 “Third World” students admitted in the spring
of 1969, 5,000 in the fall 1969 along with the creation of
financial aid and jobs. Another plan made that day were to
have J. Martinez, a “controversial” Chicano professor, hired
full-time for the school of Ethnic Studies that was to be
established in the fall of 1969. Martinez was fired by the
administration and then rehired after continuous protests.
In this same semester, in the fall of 1968, the Black
Studies department was made official, after many years of
having it in the Experimental College. The Experimental
College was a parallel school set up by students three years
earlier to provide education alternatives without having to
abandon mainstream education at SF State.
After the suspension of Professor George Murray,
a Black Panther, 350 students called for a strike on Nov. 6.
The students reiterated their demands to have more Black
students enrolled and more classes for the Black Studies
department. The police was on campus until that

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afternoon; afterward they evacuated every campus
building, turning the University into a police state.
The next day, Nov. 7, Mexican, Latin American, and
Pilipino students demanded the creation of their own
departments. There were no cops on campus this day but
class attendance was still extremely low. During this time,
students caught walking the halls of any campus building
were detained and had their photographs taken.
Five days later, faculty restrained the more
militant student strikers from charging the police, acting as
police themselves, after about 800 students put the police
under serious threat. After a while, the cops were
seemingly leaving campus in formation. But upon reaching
a certain point, the cops broke formation and ran toward
the students, beating anybody in their way. At one point, a
cameraman from KGO (the local CBS affiliate) assisted the
police in assaulting two students, knocking one of them
unconscious. This cameraman was then chased by
students until he was cornered by two students who
trapped him without threatening him. Two cops saw this
and ran toward the students and beat them, alternating
between kicking and clubbing, with one of the two
students on his knees being repeatedly clubbed on the
head. The KGO cameraman was then escorted off campus
by four cops.
Later that month, the Board of Trustees ordered
faculty to return to work. The faculty defied this order. The
Trustees wanted to reopen the school under “maximum
security,” but most professors did not hold classes.
A large meeting, a convocation, was held Nov. 20
by the Dean of Education, the school’s president, the TWLF
and the Black Student Union (BSU). The meeting was
meant to be a negotiation of compromises on both sides.
The TWLF and BSU walked out of the negotiations the next

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day when it was discovered that the president organized a
secret faculty vote.
A group of about 1,500 students marched through
campus in order to close any classes that may have been
still meeting. News of a student being arrested by a
plainclothes cop reached several students who then
intended on preventing the arrest. When a second
plainclothes cop was found entering the building where
the student was being arrested in a stairwell, the group of
12 students rushed to prevent the arresting from fully
happening. They wrested the handcuffs of both the cops
and freed their fellow student. Then, one of the cops fired
his pistol in the stairwell to scare of the militant students.
The students escaped and blended into the crowd.
The two plainclothes cops were chased away by
students once they were outside of the building. They
yelled, “Pigs! Pigs! Pigs!”
A group of five plainclothes cops were chased by
students from the Commons into the library Nov. 22. Cops
then beat an Experimental College professor, totally
unprovoked, who happened to be walking in front of the
library. This was done apparently to shock and disperse
the 250 students who had the five plainclothes cops
trapped in the library. The professor received five stitches
and a tetanus shot as a result of this police violence.
A second convocation was held in November but
quickly died as a result of the suspension of many
students.
The president resigned Nov. 27.
The new school president ordered the immediate
reopening of school at 8am Dec. 2. Students ripped off the
wires to the sound system the president was using to
speak. Cops were then chased onto the streets of 19th and

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Holloway Avenues. There were 10 arrests, and many more
protesters were beat.
The next day, a similar situation played out, but
this time there were 5,000 determined students. The
protesters marched to the BSS Building and were met by
police who then broke out of formation and proceeded to
beat the students mercilessly, in one of the bloodiest
confrontations of SF State’s history.
Students ran to the Commons and barricaded
themselves and fought fellow students who were counter-
demonstrators and siding with the cops and
administration. So-called peace officers, including officers
from the California Highway Patrol (CHP) and sheriffs
from Contra Costa flooded the campus. After a ‘visual’
confrontation, the students dispersed. But they regrouped
shortly thereafter.
The students decided to march up to the BSS
Building again, and this time they carried bricks, rocks and
other tools of the proletariat. They reached the building
and broke many windows and threw more projectiles at
the cops.
At one point, a cop had a student on the ground.
Another cop was rushing in to assist in the beating/arrest.
But a student armed with an iron tree support rod struck
the rushing cop’s head, knocking him unconscious.
Counter-demonstrators, or class traitors, were
given pats on the back by the police for having fought
alongside them.
Despite warnings and threats from the new
president, 2,500 assembled to protest Dec. 4.
The next day, Black civic leaders who came to the
school to offer outside support were arrested by police.
The cops even beat two medics that day. This only gave
strength to the students.

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 Students stopped traffic, including the Muni trains
on both tracks, in both directions, at the intersection of
19th and Holloway Avenues. By the time the cops arrived,
500 students had already made their way up to the
intersection of Junipero Serra Boulevard and Holloway
Avenue, blocking traffic there too. Students proceeded to
cut the brakes to parked cars, directing them toward the
police. Both of these intersections were simultaneously
blocked for at least 45 minutes.
One-hundred and fifty CHP and city police officers
dispersed the crowds away from the streets. A group of
200 to 300 students continued to hurl rocks and other
projectiles at the cops. After the cops were again preparing
to attack the students, a small group of protesters broke
into a press agency’s car, released the brakes, and steered
the car toward the cops who were in formation.
There were fewer cops on campus Dec. 6 because
community support had finally materialized. By this time
the community support was larger and dynamic. The
student struggle had fortunately generalized.
The concluding days of 1968 demonstrate to us
that community support is essential. However, more
glaring is the fact that students did not need to wait for
support. They took it upon themselves to act. Those who
wait for the ‘right’ conditions and for community support
serve only to stunt dissent and thus self-empowerment. As
1968 wore on, students realized the power they had
always wielded but had shunned.
Students today must act without asking for
permission from self-appointed leaders, leaders who cry
foul over ‘undemocratic’ practices simply because actions
were not approved or controlled by them—they who stand
between us and everness, revealing their true colors:
swine blue.

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Ventaja
Samuel Brown Vásquez

Bleary vision
Illuminates hues
Igniting crimson
off crevices
in huts
made of brick
neon lamppost radiates
a desolate corridor
penetrating each step
intimate against
a dreary glow
hovering silhouette
fragmented cloak of night

emerging path
even more subtle
than this escape
bombarded by shells
and growling moonlight
vigilance of breath
burrowed deep
within ravines
jagged edge of pueblo
whose thorns
pierce calloused skin
staining the mud
of open window
with frayed curtain
a lighthouse waving,
exhausted,
awaiting to retire
deep into silk time

softly embracing alleyway

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where pick-up games
of fútbol
now echo
the scars of silence
rehydrated
by mango seed
glistening
as remains
discarded on streets
void of noise
buzz against
eyes that match the stars
sleeping on crossroads
pressed gently
between thighs
warmed slightly
while rage of wind
bites back

a retreating sky
sends shockwaves
through nerves
which diminish shades
increasing the strokes
that raise hairs
and breathe like life
an absence
eternally sought
while lifted veil
reveals betrayal and retreat
tension and panic
from approaching gun
placed slowly
at my side
while you undress

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She Crossed Three Borders
Jacqueline Méndez

She crossed three borders

walked more than two thousand miles
she ran in fear,
escaping,
hiding,
dreaming
She arrived in a strange land,
Mute, confused, and unwanted
She worked,
She worked,
She worked,
under the California Sun
under 100 degrees of machinery
under cold temperatures of refrigerated rooms
She worked,
She worked,
She worked,
Ignoring pain,
with her arthritic hands,
She worked
breathing in chemicals
she worked
with her brown fragile arms
she worked

she harvested life

made flowers out of pain
and

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she worked far away from home
She worked,
persecuted
She worked,
discriminated

She died each night in her bed

She awoke each morning
with her shadow
She lived out of love
Awaiting her return
She burns,
she dies,
she lives
She dreams
and lives,
and dies
again and again
Awaiting her return
The purity of her dreams
burns in sweat.

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The Teeth of Wraiths
Felipe Rivera

Dedicated to the unknown, the absent, the untouchables,

Huddling, nurturing, crooning over simple shadows
A lingering scent of groping lust
Deaf parrots in cosmic solitude dressing and disrobing
And breaking cadavers in infinite jazz:
A severe gash outside our bodies
Scribbling with cut tongues, or fates
Tracing the tip of each delicate hair
A field of naked poppies, days before the solstice
A sperm-tinctured blanket mist and Mount Sutro
Indeterminate like time, or now, or dusk
Breaking wine glasses, screaming into black holes, or rum
Lips torn into existence

We are night or shade

Beautiful blind monsters smashing mirrors in reverse
Always absent and untouchable
Like two moons passing with no word
Now stuck to flesh made raw
On this furiously gentrified corridor
Where sighs sigh the shape of a jail cell
Of lavender, musk, or the Pacific

Have you been crushed, crumbled, returned to the earth

Medieval Madonnas levitating
Coated in rust where there is no rust
Always absent, unreachable like free wine, or infinite jazz
Lingering in scent, groping lust
Inside the folds of an old eye, a bruised dress

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Our terrible duty is to see it to the end

Huddled and crooning over a simple light

To the singing children, the ill-fed and the well-fed heading
for the abyss
To the unknown, the phantasms, a shadow or mirror, to
the moments of silence
This is our dedication:

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Thank You for Bread
Otis

Sailing through the streets

Nothing but the sound of feet and mechanized machinery
Fulton and Webster is where I be
Bobby says he’s kinda hungry, thank you for bread
The food of the masses
Soft and gooey unless it’s’ old
Thank you for bread.

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Abuelito Tito
Luisa Leija
sent to jail by his 8 children
after smashing his youngest’s head unconscious
slurring, once the cops arrived

slept with his wife’s sister

loved one
made the other bleed
they left everything in rubble
where everyone knew their names

children of an upper middle class

dressed now in their only possessions
coats upon sweaters upon shirts upon dresses
upon jeans they’ll now wear
desert walking crossing
into a lower class
identity
the hope el norte promises
a reality no one is prepared for

5 hours North of Villa

another family named Gomez
sent letters one day
to their father

locked away for hours a day

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among old bottles of wine

said to have seen the devil appear

in a chair he kept in the basement

at seven I thought the sótano was the door to hell

candil de la calle
oscuridad de su casa

perdóname, mija

perdóname

his last words

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We Are All Stars
La Ventana Collective
The university student is a state of being, a state of
touching. This state is a transitory one. It is a preparatory
stage. It is a hazing. It is a rehearsal. A passage, an end.
The student is not only deadened to reality, he is
also deprived of the consciousness of her own suffering, of
his own withering. The student accepts this as “normal,”
but it is only the “normality” of her repression that makes
him like the rest of society. The student is a privileged
person in an underprivileged world of suffering, a person
who does not recognize her own boredom as a form of
imprisonment, of torture, of ennui.
The student lives in a state of protracted infancy
because, as a student, he is the function of the university—
an institution that trains future, docile low-level
functionaries. And it is in this state of protraction that the
student comes into existence as its self, in itself. This state
of infancy is seen in the classrooms where students sit
quietly in military formation accepting the nonsense
professors spew. The student is there, content and
misguided, believing that the classroom is a setting for
privileged and serious learning. Thus the student readily
accepts the traditional, paternalistic teacher-student
relationship because to be a student is to be infantile, and
to be infantile is to accept the unknown as fact, the fact as
power.
The student unabashedly lives an overtly childish
existence. The tighter authority’s chains shackle the
student, the freer the student believes she is.
It is in the university where subservience is
ingrained ever more easily. Such inculcations formerly had
to be forced upon the white-collar workers; now they are
easily absorbed and passed along by the mass of future
low-level functionaries who have been filtered through

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grammar school as the most pliable bodies society has to
offer. Students are today being trained for jobs comparable
to those of 20th century skilled workers; but back then,
skilled workers never felt entitled to promotions.
The student clings to the crumbling, odorous and
chalky prestige of the university, and, in comparison to the
former level of general bourgeois culture, our machine-
made specialized education is just as profoundly debased
at the intellectual level because the modern economic
system requires it. It requires the mass production of
diseducated workers who have been rendered incapable of
thinking—like domesticated cows.
The university has become an institution for
organizing ignorance; “high culture” disappears at the
same rate as the school assembly lines produce professors;
professors are scum, opportunists more concerned in
preserving their sad comfortable atrophy, and most would
be jeered at in any high school classroom. But the
university student is oblivious to all of this and continues
to listen obligingly to the masters; the student consciously
suspends all critical judgment so as to wallow in the
mystical state of being a student—someone seriously
committed to learning serious things—and hopes thereby
to learn the latest “truths” and repeat them as his original
thoughts, floating within a plasma of conformity. The
future revolutionary society will condemn everything that
takes place today in lecture halls and classrooms as
nothing but noise, verbal pollution. The student is already a
very bad joke.
Students live a poor existence. Student poverty—
both material and emotional—is temporary and not
comparable with that of society’s poor. Because this
poverty and because student life, too, is temporary, what
results is a detachment from the historical processes
whereby the student accepts his poverty without
resignation, with an imperviousness to actuality almost
like a physical deafness. The transient student wallows in
it, thinking that the approaching future will compensate.

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However, the student will only discover an endless,
inevitable mediocrity.
Since the student is not in itself a person but
rather a state-of-being, the student movement is innately
blind to itself because it, by its very nature, is detached
from the rest of society. It cannot therefore understand the
forces that push it into action; it cannot connect its
struggle to its own life. The student movement seeks
“demands” everywhere, but because students cannot see
the absurdity of their own lives and their own
imprisonment, they cannot begin to imagine what the
struggle is for.
The conspicuous dilemma reeking in the
university is odious, and often ridiculed. It is an ambition
toward a state of grace and self-mortification:

The student activist serves the cause, and the

cause serves to justify the student’s
subservience.

Students consciously align their thinking with what they

perceive to be that of an oppressed group (of which they
may or may not be a member). They then proceed to self-
righteously speak for that group and articulate the desires
of that group, usually phrased as demands made of the
authorities. Such students believe that every person, every
group, must be represented. However, representation is at
the heart of the logic of modern politics, and its so-called
enemies uphold this logic better than anyone. Such
thinking is institutionalized among the academic Left
which is proud of its safe, insular and broad curriculum, a
curriculum that includes women’s studies, sociology,
environmental studies, queer studies, Raza studies, Black
Studies, etc.
As long as students learn to demand “justice” for
everyone, the possibility of revolutionary change can be

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ignored. Through appeals for justice or equal rights within
the system, the academic Left perpetuates the system and
its moralistic logic. And since Academia is virtually defined
by the dissociation of thought and action, no revolutionary
theory could possibly thrive within this context;
conversely, it is here that revolutionary ideology is at
home, an object of passive consideration and contrived
musings.
The deaths of students who struggle all over the
world for liberation reveal the poverty of the U.S. student
movement and the superficiality of its own struggles. And
when the real struggle comes, it will be easy to recognize
because it will cut through all the bullshit in which the
student is entrenched.
We begin by killing the enemy within us and
within our friends with whom we share our classrooms,
homes, and beds. We come together in gangs with those
we have learned to trust, occupying everything that
represses us, taking back the schools, the streets, our lives.
The function of the student movement must be
something other than making demands of the university. It
must destroy the existence of the student as a distinct
social role. More eager for grades than knowledge, more
eager for a “good” job than to live without dead time, the
first enemy of the student is within you.
The student however cannot be singled out alone,
because student passivity is only the most obvious
symptom of a general state of affairs, for each sector of
social life has been subdued by a similar imperialism.

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The University, Capital, and
Crisis
La Ventana Collective

Last year’s struggles in the universities of California

spawned a number of debates on the origins of the crisis
they face and on how to best defend public higher
education. We do not wish to engage with these but rather
to provide a look into the formation of the public
university, from its origins to the present. The following
then is written for the current struggles in California and
around the world, in hopes that it will be of use for those
who seek ways to free themselves of capitalism’s shackles
both from within the university and from without.
A widely held belief is that the public university is
an untouchable institution, that it is immutable and
timeless—even from economic conditions. It is from this
perspective that much discourse on the budget cuts has
been created, from which the strategy of unions and
lobbying organizations has been based upon. These ideas
have developed with no consideration for the current form
of capital in the United States; they have developed from
the perspective that the university’s function in society is
static, a monument to a moment of capitalism long passed.
The university must be understood, or at least
acknowledged, to exist in relation to capitalist
development and its need for profit, with its ever changing
form, and the larger socio-cultural context by which the
university is given meaning. The university in the United
States is not separate from capital. It was at one time but
since 1860 it has been used more and more for economic

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ends. The university over the last 150 or so years has
played an essential part in the transformation and
reproduction of capitalism.

The Unity of the University and Capital

The university cannot be viewed as a singularity, separate

from the economic and social forces of society. To speak of
the crisis of the university—as a problem to be confronted
on its own—is to misunderstand the function of the
education system. The university’s function is related to
and subjugated by the economy, by the strategic needs of
capital. Though, the university’s function is not limited to
the sphere of the reproduction of workers. Its role in the
production of knowledge extends its use to almost all parts
of social life.
The perception that the university exists for the
advancement of human knowledge, for the bettering of
humanity, that it is a neutral institution of learning
separate from the outside world, needs only to be refuted
by the history of the university itself. If we are to put
forward the argument that the public university’s function
is one linked to capital’s development, then we must trace
its transformation in relation to capital from its beginnings
to the present. This task though is much too large for what
space will allow, so we will instead focus on the two
different eras of great importance for capital and
consequently for the university—the first of these being
the Civil War and Reconstruction periods in which the idea
of the public university first emerged, and the second
being the Reconversion period after World War II in which
public education became generalized.

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The Reconstruction Period

1862. The year that the Land Grant College Act was
enacted marked the first time the federal government had
made a major effort to create a public university system.
The Reconstruction period that followed saw significant
economic and social transformations leading the country
toward a fully industrial capitalist economy. In this era
there was major growth as the result of industrialization
and urbanization that in turn relied on the creation of
scientific knowledge in industrial production and social
organization. The university began to be understood as the
institution that could fulfill this role.
The discourse among academics and industrialists
reflected the emerging view that the university could and
should be used as a tool of economic development. F.H.
Stoddard, a New York University professor, remarked in a
speech in 1890, “The college years are no longer conceived
as a period set apart from life… the college has ceased to
become a cloister and has become a workshop.”5 The
industrialist Carnegie remarked, “While the college
student has been learning a little about the barbarous and
petty squabbles of a far distant past, or trying to master
languages which are dead, such knowledge seems adapted
for life upon another planet than this as far as business is
concerned, the future captain of industry is hotly engaged
in the school of experience, obtaining the very knowledge
required for his future triumphs.” These statements made
by Carnegie and Stoddard show the kind of ideas that
began to take shape among elites and scholars alike
concerning the university’s role in society. If the university

5F.H Stoddard, “Inductive work in College Classes,” Proceedings of the

Annual Convention, College Association of the Middle States and Maryland,
1890, p.78

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existed before this time as a kind of separate social
institution that had little connection to the needs of the
economy, it appears that at this point it began to be
utilized by economic forces if only marginally.
It is in the context of these economic and social
developments of capitalism that the state took the first
steps to create a public university. The Land Grant College
Act allocated millions of acres in hopes of aiding the
founding institutions of learning capable of fulfilling the
needs of the economy.6 The university before this time
educated only the elites and the land grant university in
this sense was in many ways undistinguishable from its
predecessor. The role of the university of the 19th century
was not to educate the working class or to provide them
with skills but, on the contrary, to provide the movers of
capital—managers, industrialists, politicians, etc.—with
the knowledge and technology required for developing an
industrial capitalist economy in the United States. Its role
was to help create the conditions under which a large
industrial working class could be realized.

Reconversion Period and Fordism

We now move to the period of Reconversion after WWII,

where the industrial working class had long been realized,
having shaped the very form of American capitalism
through 90 years of class struggle and crisis. The rise of
fascism was largely a result democracy’s inability to deal
with this crisis. The democracies that rejected the path of
fascism with its repression and irrational ultra-
nationalism—as the United States did—had to find a way
to deal with the inherent contradictions of capital that also

6Christopher J. Lucas, American Higher education: A History (New York,

Saint Martin’s Press, 1994) 146.

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avoided the Soviet model. The solution to this problem lay
in an alteration of state and economic relations that sought
to regulate capitalism with state controls and discipline of
the working class, an alteration that forged a new relation
to work that was conducive to the new regime of
production. This regime, known as Fordist-Keynesianism,
was based on a compromise of organized labor, corporate
capital, and the state.7 This compromise is based on the
defeat of militant working class movements after WWII.
Over 5 million workers in 1946 were on strike at some
point. The most menacing of these to the state was the
1946-47 wave of general strikes in response to the rolling
back of wartime gains which started in Connecticut and
spread to Pennsylvania, Texas, New York and came to a
climax in Oakland, California. The general strikes, in which
workers often faced off against union leadership,
embodied precisely the type of behavior that Fordism
sought to overcome. The bureaucratic unions, fortified by
the Taft-Hartley Act, diffused conflict by absorbing labor
into the state institutions of the Fordist-Keynesian period.
How workers were disciplined into the Fordist production
system is best understood through the concept of
disciplinary government developed by Michel Foucault.
It is important to first look at the operation of
Fordist production and the techniques of disciplinary
government in order to understand why and how the
university became transformed and became so important
during this period to capital’s development.
The Fordist economic practice first emerged in
1914 when Henry Ford introduced five dollars pay for
eight hours’ work in his automated car assembly plant. The
generalization of this practice came about after WWII.

7David Harvey, The condition of Post-Modernity (Massachusetts, Blackwell

Publishers, 1990) 133.

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What made Henry Ford’s style of industrial organization
unique was not so much the fact that he utilized the
Taylorist division of labor and deskilling, nor that he paid a
high wage for an eight hour day, but rather that he
understood that mass production also necessitated mass
consumption by the working class.8 By allowing leisure
time and an income sufficient to buy commodities, Ford
hoped to produce the disciplined workers necessary for
intensive assembly line production and also the consumers
of mass-produced products that Fordist production
perfected. Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks, saw
Fordism as having “amounted to the biggest collective
effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and
with a consciousness of purpose, unmatched in history, a
new type of worker and a new type of man.” Gramsci saw
this new organization of work as “inseparable from a
specific mode of living, and of thinking, and of living life.” 9
This practice of having work and all social life unified into
the capitalist process is what made Fordist-Keynesianism
different from those forms of social organization before it.
Once it reached a compromise with the state, the
organization of labor in the Fordist factory, which has the
whole social life of the worker in mind, laid the foundation
for disciplinary society.
The work of Foucault around the concept of
power, when used in the investigation of the Fordist-
Keynesian regime of production and governing, is useful
for understanding how social life becomes completely
subsumed by capital. Foucault explained power as such:
“The characteristic feature of power is that some men can
more or less entirely determine other men’s conduct—but
never exhaustively or coercively. A man who is chained

8 Ibid, 126
9 (Harvey, 126.)

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and beaten is subject to force being exerted over him, not
power. But if he can be induced to speak, when his
ultimate recourse could have been to hold his tongue,
preferring death, then he has been caused to behave in a
certain way. His freedom has been subject to power.”10
Foucault saw the utilization of power as a means of
governing that induced behavior of individuals from
within by imposing a hegemonic knowledge or truths by
which they understand the world and act. Power is not
repressive but acts in a positive or productive fashion
where it operates. This does not mean that repression is
replaced in a disciplinary society—it is always present—
but rather pure state violence is obsolete for maintaining
the economic order and therefore only utilized in the last
instance. This clarification of power by Foucault identifies
a type of governing that until the Fordist era was not
coherent or developed enough to be named.
If power is present in all areas of social life—from
the family to institutions—then the practices of
Fordism/Keynesianism, with its project of absorbing all
aspects of this social life into the productive processes in
conjunction with the centralized and expanding
institutional influence of the welfare state in the lives of
the populace, are none other than the perfection of power
in the service of capital. The university of the Fordist era,
institutionalized by the state, opened up to a significantly
larger percentage of the population and increasingly
important to business, exemplifies the process by which a
once autonomous point of power in society comes to the
service of capital.

10Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion, vol. 3,

Power (New York, New York Press, 1994) 324.

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The University under Fordism

The university of the Fordist period (1940-1973) was

transformed drastically from its post-war existence in a
number of ways. For the first time in its history, the
American university was established as an institution of
the state and attended by an increasingly larger segment of
the population, particularly among the white working
class, with an increase in attendance of over 500 percent
from 1945 to 1975.11 This era of mass education was
necessitated by two related factors: the global struggles of
the Cold War and the internal economic changes of the
United States. Though it must be stressed that what
occurred globally in this era had equal consequences for
the economic situation nationally and vice versa.
Globally, the United States was in a state of self-
conscious national panic from 1950 to 1958. The Soviets
during these years had made great gains in both their
economy and military technology. The Soviet gross
national product had risen by 7.1 percent in 1956 and
their industrial production rose by almost 11 percent. 12
These economic gains were in conjunction with the
launching of the Sputnik satellite, giving the Soviets
superiority in space technology, and followed by the
leaking of the Gaither Report by the Washington Post which
revealed the innovations the Soviets had made in missile
technology—presumably surpassing those of the United
States.13 The President’s Committee on Education beyond
High School wrote in its 1957 report, “America would be

11 Arthur M. Cohen, Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and

Growth of the Contemporary System (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Publishers,
1998) 196
12 Martin Walker, The Cold War: A History (New York, Henry Colt Company,

1993) 113.
13 Ibid. 114

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heedless if she closed her eyes to the dramatic strides
being taken by the Soviet Union in post-high education,
particularly in the development of scientists, engineers,
and technicians.”14 The report expresses the fear of
technological inferiority in the United States stemming
from a weak higher education system. The answer to this
fear came in the form of the Defense Act of 1958 which
provided billions of dollars in funding to universities.
Internally the United States was undergoing a
transformation from a war economy to one that could
fulfill the role of managing the great financial empire
secured at Breton Woods. The large number of returning
veterans in need of work, the loss of wartime
manufacturing jobs and the increasing financialization of
the global economy posed a number of problems whose
solutions lay in disciplining the population into the new
regimes of work. The rapid growth in the decades after
WWII of the service and professional sectors would
require a larger, better educated and more disciplined
workforce.
The university of the post-war years was changed
dramatically in order to aid in this disciplinary process.
The university became increasingly dependent during
WWII on government funding and in turn was depended
upon by the government for technical training. After the
war, the implementation of the G.I. Bill, which gave billions
to educate returning veterans, was followed by a number
of subsequent bills that dramatically increased university
enrollment during the next two decades. This process of
institutionalization—the gradual generalizing by the state
of a uniform social practice throughout society—had taken
hold of the university in an increasingly rapid fashion from
the beginning of WWII to the 1970’s. The premise for this

14 (Christopher J. Lucas, 233.)

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institutionalization fits into the larger pattern of internal
post-war development.
The suburbanization that helped solve the
looming crisis of capital reinvestment following the war
changed not only the face of American cities but also their
character. This suburbanization could not have occured
without the innovation of Keynesian style debt financing.
Both suburbanization and Keynesian economics relied on
a population that could or rather was willing to consume
at an acceptable rate.15 All of these factors worked in
conjunction to facilitate the post war transformation of
society. While the manufacturing sector of the economy
was increasingly shrinking (or moving overseas to lower
wage labor markets), the growth of employment in
intellectual, service, financial and other white-collar jobs
was on the rise. At the same time the state and business
became increasingly involved in every aspect of higher
education. The idea became so generalized that in order
for one to receive well-paying employment, one must
attain a college degree.16 This normalization of the
university into the social life of a large segment of the
working class and its importance to the continuation of
capital accumulation is what differentiates this era of the
university’s development from those previous one in
which it played only a marginal role.
The university of the Fordist era then, in the most
abstract sense, was utilized by society for the project of
transforming global capital into the new forms it would
take in the Fordist era of 1945-1973. Having become a
more generalized and well-funded educational institution,
the university allowed for the production of ideology that

15David Harvey, The enigma of Capital ( New York, Oxford University Press,
2010) 171.
16 (Christopher J. Lucas, 238.)

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was needed to ensure the dominance of capital globally
and of the discipline of labor locally.17 The 1957 President’s
Committee Report on Education beyond High School lays
out the goals of the mass university quite clearly: “She
[America] would be inexcusably blind if she failed to see
that the challenge of the next 20 years will require leaders
not only in science and engineering, and in business and
industry, but in government and politics, in foreign affairs
and diplomacy, in education and civic affairs.”18 The
report emphasized the university not only as a means to
remain a great power globally but to maintain political and
economic order internally. This function of the university,
for the service of both local and global capital, follows the
trend of the development of capitalism that would become
more globally unified, flexible and mobile in the decades to
come.
The Fordist university transformed higher
education into a common institution of American society,
offering an educational opportunity that was the dream of
many people and expected as a guarantee by many more.
Our current conception of the university as a synthesis of
an autonomous space of knowledge creation and also as an

17The war between “communism” and capitalism was largely based on the
dominance of one ideology over the other. The Soviet Union’s politics was
based on a well-developed Marxist theory and its political class was drawn
largely from intellectuals. For the United States, the production of a well-
crafted intellectual rationale to explain the position of global capitalism
became equally as important as military technology. Bombs after all—as
would be learned in Vietnam— could only go so far in coercing nations of
the Third World into capitalism. The intellectual would prove to be a highly
prized asset in convincing the public of the legitimacy of the wars in Korea
and Vietnam and later of the dirty wars in Latin America. The importance
of Milton Freidman and his Chicago Boys in creating the intellectual
justification for the neo-liberal project highlights this fact.

18 (Christopher J. Lucas, 232.)

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economic training institution stems from this era. Though
this conception is now being challenged by a new phase of
capitalist development. The Neoliberal transformation of
American society has set as its goal to privatize much of
what was once held to be common property in American
society—i.e. the public university. This modern day
expropriation of the commons by capital—what David
Harvey has called accumulation by dispossession—has no
doubt begun to attacking public higher education, though
not without resistance.19
American society, placing a high level of
importance on higher education despite the growing
irrelevance of the institution in the economy, is an example
of the contradictions that often exist between subjective
desires in society and the needs of capital for continuing its
accumulation of wealth. The university as we know it no
longer has as much relevance, in relation to labor demand
(which is much more flexible, information-based, and
precarious) than in the rigid labor regimes of Fordism. The
well-funded state university is no longer rational from the
perspective of capital, yet it is highly regarded in society.
The use of crisis to justify the cutting back of
university funding seems to be an ideal method to
circumvent popular resistance. The blame is not placed on
the capitalist state but it is instead the natural order of the
market. The irrational rationalization of capitalist crisis
plays a double role here: one to fix internal contradictions
of capitalism—such as an expensive university that proves
to return little in terms of the demand for flexible labor—
and second to obscure austerity measures and

19David Harvey, The enigma of Capital (New York, Oxford University Press,
2010) 48.

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dispossession to appear as the collateral damage of crisis
instead of a necessary practice for continuing profits.

This essay will be continued in a future issue of La Ventana

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- 43 -
Message from a Comrade
Dear friends,
Things in México are getting hard for Mexicans.
This financial crisis is hitting hard over here; so many
businesses are closing, and banks, corporations.... So many
people are getting fired.
The other day I was talking to an army guy and he
told me that they are afraid of something happening in
2010. He wasn't too specific but he said something like
another revolution, that's what they, the Army, are getting
ready for because they know that in México there exists
the ideal growing conditions for the PUEBLO to rise up. He
even said something about a potential coup d'état...
Brothers, I feel pretty glad about all this, not
because I like bad things going on in the world, but
because all what we're going through is not just happening
here in México, but in the throughout the entire planet.
This means that a new DAWN is about to come. It
is time to open our eyes and our hearts, to wake up our
consciousness in love. All these things that are happening
in the whole planet are something inevitable, they are
something that we have all created together; GAIA is sick
and is about to shake away all this illness.
The prophecies (from all kinds of spiritual ways),
from the Mayas, Hopis, Huicholes, Buddhists, Christians to
even the psychonauts like Timothy Leary and Terrance
McKenna, like the ANCIANOS, the “people who know" and
of course our own COMMON SENSE tells us the same story:
we’re living the end of an age; we're about the get into
something better, and like they say, "the darkest moment
in a day is just before DAWN.” I trust that it will be so. I

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don't know when. I don't think sincere people really know
WHEN this is really gonna happen, but we may infer
because of the symptoms that we already see: it's gonna be
a little bit pretty soon. I hope we could see that in our
lifetime. We can see that something is really rotten in our
social, political, emotional, economical and ecological
system; GAIA is sick and only LOVE can get us through this
madness, to the TRUTH, the LIGHT.
CHANGE is near and I'm so happy about it.
I hope I can see the fall of this system in my
lifetime, this capitalism that kills a human being every two
seconds because of lack of food, when richest countries
and food industries are putting good food into dumpsters,
this WAR is based on a way of life, of death culture: where
you can go overseas and kill people when you're 18 but it's
‘illegal’ to buy a beer; where in the so called "war against
drugs" you can turn your army against your own people
and violate their human rights, even killing them; where
you can earn a bonus for each extra abortion you can ‘sell.’
I hope I can see the fall of a system where it's
better to keep broadcasting lies to people about
EVERYTHING 'cos it's profitable, where our food is being
modified genetically without even caring about the effects
on future generations, where poisoning this Earth is so
profitable that it becomes cheaper to keep doing it than to
stop it, where HUMANS are turned into RESOURCES as if
we were renewable, cheap, and disposable THINGS.
I hope I can see the end to this COMPETITION
system, where just a few ones can win and the rest of us
lose—because that's what a competition is made for—not
everybody can win... win, win, win... fuck winning.
COOPERATE, brothers! That's the way!
I hope I can see the walls of these birdcages (also
known as countries) fall down; these cages they want us to

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feel proud of, to kill for it, to live for it and to die for it,
singing WAR songs also known as ANTHEMS while cutting
all connections to the rest of our brothers and sisters
overseas, even just a few miles away, making you feel that
you're "better" than the rest.
...and then I hope I can see the NEW WORLD,
where competition is replaced with COOPERATION, where
NATURAL RESOURSES are turned into our HOME, into WE
ourselves—we're part of everything, everything is part of
us; we're not separated from everything else. I hope I can
see this world where we live according to natural cycles,
where all of us become CAMPESINOS, where we all grow
our own food for our worldwide community, where we can
travel around our world, where we can share what other
people need by knowing that everyone else is gonna do the
same.
I hope you, my friends, will be there to share this
world between us.

LOVE, PEACE and LIGHT.

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The Interrogation of the
Good
Bertolt Brecht
Step forward: we hear
That you are a good man.

You cannot be bought, but the lightning

Which strikes the house, also
Cannot be bought.
You hold to what you said.
But what did you say?
You are honest, you say your opinion.
Which opinion?
You are brave.
Against whom?
You are wise.
For whom?
You do not consider your personal advantages.
Whose advantages do you consider then?
You are a good friend.
Are you also a good friend of the good people?

Hear us then: we know.

You are our enemy. This is why we shall
Now put you in front of a wall. But in consideration
of your merits and good qualities
We shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you
With a good bullet from a good gun and bury you
With a good shovel in the good earth.

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- 48 -