Commonify Everything, Now.

The commons must be created through the act of occupation, of re-appropriation; a shared
resource cannot be handed over by the owners.

Protests don’t have clear beginnings and ends, they blossom from the bullshit of everyday oppression and
exploitation. They disrupt and defy the usual powerflows, forming the spaces and taking the time to refuse
the promised life and create new ones.

One response was announced at Schillerplatz a month ago with broken glass and the sound of a fire alarm;
fire-engines, firemen, and journalists; enacted upon a 20 foot dollar sign creeping into the privatised halls of
what’s now, one of many, ’burning’ universities. After statements and demands, a slightly questioning voice
declared: “the academy is now occupied!“ For a moment, everybody stayed put - a unanimous uncertainty
perhaps as to what an occupation is exactly, or a non-understanding of what should come next. In the
liberated space of the Aula, a number of crucial questions and issues had been collectively cracked open. It’s
important to recognise that what’s happened has emerged as a collective and communal process of knowing
- of asking questions concerning what we want, and how we might achieve it. A process whereby knowledge
itself has become productive, an act of doing. A practice embedded in a fight against hierarchy, against the
logic of management and teaching, and against knowledge’s ’production’.

Who’ll be Slave to the new Masters?

How does one say something to somebody, and leave behind the avant garde position of being ’the one who
knows’? Isn’t it our political task to demand that we do not know, to say fuck off to our would be leaders
and to the possibility of becoming them, to dump the student union in favour of the general assembly and
begin to demolish the many hierarachies created by universities and education? There is knowledge in the
university, but outside too, the walls are being ripped down and built again with new price tags. The
question is not how do we rebuild the ivory tower, but how can subjugation to knowledge production be
prevented? What do we do with the university to tackle the exploitation that flows through its walls? Trade
Unions and Student Unions are being made obselete by a knowledge capitalism intent on subjecting
everyone to ‚life long learning’; the requirement of eternally re-skilling on edu-courses in order to keep our
positions as wage labourers. There are no students and workers anymore, just people at different levels of
precarity and exploitation, in need of new forms of organisation.

Did you make this jumbled garbage or did I, or did we somehow make it together?

It’s no longer possible to under-stand. Not the divisions between teacher and student, not the authority of
state, nor management, not the demand to understand. Refuse understanding. Rise up instead. To teach is an
intense learning experience - to be a student; a stultifying process whereby the student is made reliant on the
explication of their teacher. Why not explode this hierarchy in a community of teacher-learners? The words
teacher and student don’t fit the learning environment. The problem isn’t that teachers get paid a wage, it is
that students do not. The work done by students produces profits, be it working directly for a professor, for
large companies via third party university funding, working shit mcjobs® to pay the rent and fees, or simply
playing their part in reproducing capitalism. To pay in order to have ones labour power sucked out in the
edu-factory is deserving of the term hyper-exploitation; students are the agents of their own suffering,
consumer and consumed, manager and managed. The time has come for students to demand a wage. And to
connect with all other forms of paid and unpaid labour in the process.

How does one embrace ignorance, and simultaneously try to tell people that you know its
important, necessary maybe?

Learning takes place outside of the categories ‚teacher’ – ‚student’, but more fundamentally the constructed
gap between the teachers knowledge and the students ignorance does not exist. It provides the basis for
constructing a capital-labour relation within the classroom whereby the student plays obedient worker -
receiving credits as wages - to the teachers ownership of the means of knowledge production. As long as the
rigid terms apply, there is no possibility for emancipation, only the chance of fighting against co-students in
order to become the next manager.

Let’s mess up the terms; theres a necessity of recognising onself as a learner, with the ability to listen, and as
a teacher with the ability to know - to begin discussions as people and not as functions and to place that
process within a practice of equality. Not an all knowing avant garde leadership, but a movement based upon
opening up questions and discussions. At the academy of refusal there was an absence of predetermined
meaning as to what an occupation should be, but simultaneously a shared knowledge of the fact that we do
not know. It is exactly in these spaces, opened up by a collective ignorance and shared knowledge that a
level playing field of meaning, a potential for something else, a different way of organising things, a
structure without hierarchy and based on equality - becomes possible.

What is Commonification?

Its the outraged response to the steady privatisation of everything, the fight back againt the frozen,
crumbling neoliberal nightmare, an uprising against the drive to enclose what is common, to limit access
and place it in ‚free’ markets, destructive competition relations, so that people can be made to pay for public
services and institutions such as hospitals, schools and universities. Commonification is the counter-attack -
the war on the commodification of our bodies and brains. The construction of new commons by re*claiming
what belongs to all. Another world isn’t possible; its necessary - occupy and commonify everything, now.

A community has formed, maybe its a community, let’s call it a community, a community of witches, a
group of people standing in solidarity against a system of death and deadlines, and the destruction of our
livelihoods and lives.

AG WITCHCRAFT

the academy of refusal