We write to affirm solidarity with all people who struggle against state violence. We all understand that within the confines of what we imagine to be the 'United States,' people face various forms of oppression that flow from the institutions of sexism, capitalism, racism, patriarchy, classism, imperialism, and homophobia among many things. We also understand that the logics of these institutions are disrupted and resisted everyday. Some of these struggles make the headlines because they qualify as easily digestible narratives. Others do not.BOOM!
Given all these understandings, it is critical for us, as members of graduate employee locals, to ask ourselves, who is "we"? How are we going to define "us"? What are we calling for is a re-imagining of what types of actions does re-imagining ourselves demand? We cannot to use the word solidarity without a critical interrogation with whom and for what purpose we are invoking it. What do we do? Are we resisting oppression? Yes we are. Are we challenging the abuses of the state, and its power to create laws and structures that push people toward the margins? Yes we are. Thus, our community consists of those who are engaged in those same struggles. We haven't learned that yet. We need to learn that.
As the "academic archipelago" increasingly becomes a penal site in which our labor exploitation is not only an institutional practice, but a guiding principle of knowledge production, the need for critical engagement between graduate student locals and collaboration with insurgent intellectuals outside of the academy on combating issues of power and privilege is exigent.
It is with the explicit purpose of of challenging conventional understandings of union politics and creating communities of struggle that we are calling for the Critical Action Committee. The goal of the Critical Action Committee is to have a space where activists can discuss and create concrete plans of actions aimed at organizing across borders and boundaries such as "campus" versus "community." These divisions will continue to be meaningful as long as we continue to reify them. Organizing undergraduate students and non-tenure track instructors, working with local activists outside of the academy, or organizing with young people around issues of policing and incarceration, are things we are already doing. The activities are not peripheral to our labor organizing. Instead, it is precisely by working to unmake carceral landscapes that we create a context for fair labor. It is the aim of the Critical Action Committee to explore how we can re-center dismantling carceral landscapes in our labor organizing work. We are proposing that the Critical Action Committee meet for 2 hours at each meeting of the Alliance of Graduate Employee Locals, that each participating local dedicate at least one representative to attend the Critical Action Committee, and that meetings of the Critical Action Committee will be open to the public.