From a Free Latitude

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On May 18, 2022, UCD Cops Off Campus and other student and community members liberated Latitude Dining Commons, disabling the swipe station and making lunch free for everyone. What follows is our communiqué published from inside the liberated dining hall. You can also read our reportback from the action (originally published by our friends at Work, Education, and Resistance), as well as news coverage of the event.

A free university begins with free food.

We begin from the simplest of questions: Why, with our astounding capacity for abundance, are people hungry? Why, here atop the most arable soil on the planet, can we not supply meals for everyone? Why, at a university managed by a cadre of millionaires drawing incomprehensibly grand salaries, is there persistent food insecurity? 

For some people these are very complicated questions. Those people are called economists. For most others, these matters are straightforward. Because we treat food as a commodity, it will only be produced if it profits someone, no matter how much we need it. And because we treat food as private property, it can only be had by those who can meet its price, no matter how hungry they are. Who oversees the commodity, who keeps property private, who wields violence and threat of violence to make sure that the hungry stay hungry? 

These are even simpler questions. As even children know, the answer is the police. Children in fact learn this early and clearly before the confusions of maturity set in, maturity that is just the code name for giving up on freedom.

When we speak of abolition, we may attach it to immediate goals, reaching back to the movement for the abolition of slavery and forward to abolition of every other form of domination. We may in the moment adopt the slogan ABOLISH THE POLICE. But this is not the final goal; it is a necessary step. It is far more important to abolish privation, immiseration, servitude. All of those are kinds of violence. Enforced hunger in a world of abundance is a kind of violence. The police, who are the enforcers of this condition, are themselves a kind of violence. Sometimes it is explicit; sometimes it is recorded for the world to see; visible or not, as long as people go hungry that violence is always there. 

And because we are abolitionists, we mean to abolish that violence. 

In solidarity with those who still believe in freedom; in solidarity with those who suffer the violence of hunger; in solidarity with the honorable history of people’s free food programs — we are today taking the action of liberating the food in this dining hall. It is a small step in solidarity with every student who has to worry about whether their budget will last, whether they will be hungry during finals, whether they can make it. There are better things for students to worry about, like the three Esses: studying, socializing, and seizing the university. But also this food is available for anyone in want of food, student or not. Hunger is hunger. Need is need. 

Making this food available is a necessary step not in the freedom of food but of people. We stand by this act of community care. We stand by this step toward addressing the basic and unevenly distributed vulnerability of humans to hunger, to heat and cold, to not making it. The work of care and the work of liberation are one and the same.