The Sorbonne University with its airs of eternity. Full of suspended history. Marble hallways like a frozen swamp. “When there is no sun, learn to ripen under the ice.” Then ten days ago, the ice started melting, one evening in centuries. A fire of tables and final papers: a flame higher than any man, in the middle of the quad, the quad of ceremonies. No more murmurs in the lecture halls, and in the hallways, no more discourses, just jostling together, searching for a structure. It begins. Projectiles, screams, fire extinguishers, chairs, ladders, against the cops. A monster awakens.

At Long Sunday, A. has posted up a translation of a communique written by the “Sorbonne Occupation Committee in Exile” — that is, the students who are currently resisting the introduction of fucked-up neoliberal industrial relations laws. You gotta love an occupation crew who can write. But more, you gotta love their politics: the refusal of mediation, the refusal of ‘democracy’, the importance of May ‘68 as “the revolutionary turmoil that did not take place”; protests in Rennes with “intuitive routes.” Damn.

Also on Long Sunday this week, a blog symposium about Mario Tronti’s “The Strategy of the Refusal”, and refusals of all kinds. Jon kicks off, pointing out the declarative, eloquent, take-no-prisoners style of what developed into autonomia and what, really, returns always as a kind of homage to Marx.

The essay itself is… (now I wish it wasn’t 3.22am and I was more coherent.) At one point, four or five years ago, it was like I began thinking in prose like that. It was a moment when the power relations adhering to and sticking together all the ideas I’d been taught — work and progress and career and unemployment and shame and good education, to name a few — ideas that had made me crazy with their insane refusal to organise themselves properly in my life — suddenly became crystal clear. What also burst into shape, for the first time, were precise co-ordinates for the stupidity of student union factionalism, of ‘politics’ lived in stuffy rooms vetting new members, of electioneering, and the tasteless grim death of socialist party organising. There was suddenly no longer a way to oppose ‘the system’ outside in the dole office and the university hierarchies, to what happened in those Left Focus caucuses, in the moments on demos where marshalls would tell us where and how far we could march, what chants to sing. It seemed all a part of the same thing. There were economies chugging along everywhere I looked.

So, a refusal. Tronti asks, “what happens when the form of working class organisation takes on a content which is wholly alternative; when it refuses to function as an articulation of capitalist society; when it refuses to carry capital’s needs via the demands of the working class?” And this is still the question to ask — what space is possible when you refuse to be the zombie of capitalism, not only in your working life but in thought and spirit and deed? What destructions are possible? What new forms can we make?