Intro to Affinity Groups

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Affinity groups are self-sufficient support systems of about five to fifteen people who build trust, choose to struggle and work together, and share “affinity” in ideas, visions, and goals. Affinity groups are composed of people who have been brought together through movements or have existing ties such as friendship, living in the same area, or working together. The goal of an affinity group is action and might be better conceptualized as a crew of people who are down for similar things, whether it be political education, sabotage, “street art,” campaigns, publishing etc. “Abolish the UC” is an example of a type of larger affinity group, but they can also take the form of a group of friends who come together to feed unhoused community members or a prisoner support group. Sometimes, affinity groups remain together over a longer period of time, existing as political support and/or study groups, and only occasionally participating in actions. They provide a tactile and flexible mode of organizing that is able to change with rapidly shifting conditions.

A number of affinity groups may work together toward a common goal in a large action, or one affinity group might conceive of and carry out an action on its own. Affinity groups often form the basic decision-making bodies of mass actions. They are considered “autonomous,” independently entitled to develop any form of participation they choose. Groups of affinity groups working together are sometimes called “clusters.” A large action can have several large “clusters” all working together. In large actions, affinity groups usually send “spokespersons” to a “spokescouncil” meeting, to communicate and coordinate the different groups’ decisions and then bring the coordinated information or proposal back to their respective groups for their final discussion and approval. 

Affinity groups also serve as a source of support for the members and reinforce a sense of solidarity. They provide a solution to the isolation or separation that can affect individuals acting alone. By including all participants in a circle of familiarity and acquaintance, the affinity group structure reduces the possibility of infiltration by outside agents or provocateurs. The key element is trust; if you’re planning on doing things that aren’t necessarily legal, you definitely need to make sure you can trust everyone in the group. An affinity group conspires together, figures out logistics, and makes shit happen. There is absolutely no room for bragging or talking about what happened outside those involved. NEVER FUCKING SNITCH. This keeps repression and risk to a minimum. 

When bringing new people in, it’s crucial that they are in “affinity” with the goals and approaches the existing group chooses to take, and enter as equals. Because they are not “official” organizations, participants can choose to leave or dissolve the group when affinities weaken or are no longer necessary. Affinity groups are a powerful organizing tool that can exist alongside a diversity of approaches, strategies, and tactics.  

Five Tips for Forming an Affinity Group

1. Start where you are. Can you think of five people who might want to form an affinity group? Congratulations, you’re halfway there! Bring those five folks together for dinner to talk about reaching five more. Can you think of three, or just one? That’s okay! Do the same thing – have dinner and begin brainstorming. You never know where your conversations may lead. 
2. Take action early on. Once you have a group, get out of the house! Carpool to a rally, foreclosure blockade, or community garden “work day.” Or do something social – attend a workshop, go hiking, cook something, etc. 
3. Learn about small group decision-making. As your group continues to meet, you will inevitably encounter differences of opinion. Decide how you’ll resolve these differences, such as through the consensus model or other means. Try to include someone with small group facilitation experience or ask a few members to learn facilitation skills. 
4. Go beyond politics – bring your “whole self” to meetings. What are the roots of our political commitments? What values and personal experiences motivate us? Create space to share your stories. Create space for your non-political selves as well. What are your jobs, passions, interests, hobbies? Where are you from? What are your experiences? This can also help to suss out and address underlying power dynamics, particularly in groups of people from different class backgrounds, people who are racialized or gendered differently, or people who have differing legal statuses. For parents, bringing your whole self to a meeting may mean bringing your kids! Invite kids to eat with the group, and then set up a kid-friendly video in the next room.  Find a babysitter and “pass the hat” to pay them.  Or take turns watching the kids. 
5. Meet over a meal. There’s something magic about food (and drinks). Try to meet at someone’s home over a potluck, or rotate meal duty.

Resources For Affinity Groups

• A Guide for Your First Meeting
• Facilitation Tips
• A Guide to Consensus Decision-Making
• Affinity Groups and Spokescouncils

This article was originally published by our friends at Abolish the UC in their 2020 Disorientation Guide. The Five Tips and Resources sections were taken from Resilience Circles.

Reflections on Risk

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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.

All of Them Means All of Them: Toward the Total Abolition of Policing

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The following essay was written by Abolish the UC in October 2020 in response to the Cops Off Campus statewide day of action.

No Cops, No Campus

When we say “Cops Off Campus,” we recognize policing as far more insidious than the literal daily presence of armed police on UC campuses, lurking in classrooms and student living quarters. Policing is a ubiquitous campus administrative practice that pervades our working, learning, and living environment via ICE agents, Student “Hospitality Officers,” Student Judicial Affairs, various unions and their reps, Campus “Freedom of Expression” Teams, Campus Diversity Directors, and even department chairs and deans tasked with reporting students (or having students report on peers) who are undocumented, threatening to strike, supporting striking colleagues, or just painting graffiti on campus buildings…

The UC not only employs campus police forces; it runs programs that feed new recruits into the state and county forces that habitually brutalize and kill Black, brown, and poor people throughout the so-called US. UCI, for example, feeds so many students into the famously corrupt LAPD that the force uses its high percentage of UC graduates as advertisement. UCPDs accept surplus military weapons designed for armed conflict and use them primarily against student protesters — we all remember when UCPD used military-grade pepper spray at close-range on their students protesting tuition hikes — and as recent reports document, just last year, the UCSC secretly made use of the DHS and federal surveillance technology to surveil campus activists, faculty, workers, and staff. The UC’s use of campus cops opens invariably into relationships with state, federal, and international policing and redoubles a climate of racism, targeted violence, and perpetual stress/danger for the most marginalized members of our communities. “Cops Off Campus” means no more University pigs, but it means an end to their auxiliaries, too: an end to policing in all its forms.

This summer, George Floyd’s murder and the uprisings that followed marked a moment when protests over racist police executions turned decisively from calls for justice and charging killer cops into focused demands for the total abolition of police. While city councils and state legislators dialogued and reshuffled their police budgets in an attempt to placate voters, protests have intensified with the realization that federal and state police are not forces that lawmakers will, or are able to, control. Here at the UC, the university has no mandate to employ police forces, and their presence on public campuses is nowhere decreed or required. We don’t need to agree to or accept the normalization of UCPD’s presence on UC campuses and their ever-increasing budgetary allowance. Police presence is an expression of the UC’s investment in white supremacy and racial capitalism. They serve no other role. Policing is the logic of anti-Blackness and the logic of settler colonialism. Policing is the logic of whiteness and property. We cannot study, think, or stop fearing for our safety in a space where the police are welcome. They shouldn’t be welcome; they’re not welcome. They threaten and traumatize the students, teachers, and workers who are everywhere already disproportionately targeted by state violence: Black, brown, Indigenous, trans, and disabled people.

To ask, “what will the UC do with the money currently earmarked for policing if campus police are dissolved?” is concern trolling. Phrased differently, it’s akin to asking “what alternatives exist, or can be created, to continue policing under a different guise?” There are no “alternatives” to policing in this sense. Policing is an incommensurable violence. Yet this question does demonstrate an unsettling truth: the anti-Black, settler colonial, racial capitalist University cannot exist without policing. A real end to campus policing has to include not just an end to the presence of uniformed officers at the UC, but an end to the compulsion to police our communities — an end to the practices and conditions and World that make policing possible. The University itself is one such condition of that World. To truly get cops off campus requires a real commitment to grappling with and letting go of impulses to control and threaten each other: a real commitment to abolition. That includes the abolition of the University as we know it. We’ll figure out a world without police, without policing. Let’s get cops off campus, sure — but also, let’s have no campus and get cops off the whole fuckin planet.

Disorientation Guide ’22-’23

Each year, as summer comes to a close, the sun-exhausted townies of Davis wipe the sweat from their brows and the wildfire ash from their window sills. They are bracing for the autumnal ritual, which begins with out-of-towners trickling back to apartments they leased in spring and reaches its crescendo with processions of families pouring into campus and the downtown, armed with Ikea furniture soon to be stuffed into cramped dorm rooms. It’s ineluctable — not just the buzzy crowds, but the sheer capacity that’s suddenly set in motion to get these thousands of people housed, fed, entertained. Like all forms of spectacular pleasure, it rests upon erasure — of the workers who keep the operation running; of the land and its history, which is a violent one and without which none of this would be possible.

We definitely aren’t here to tell newcomers that they should substitute their exuberance for a new chapter in their lives for angst-colored glasses. This is just to say that there are stories here, ones that won’t get told during your orientation. This is our attempt to share some of those stories.

Here we follow the long tradition of UC Disorientation Guides that seek to provide a counter-hegemony to the cleansed history and experience that the UC wants you to have. Because, tbh, they’re scared that being a militant is way more fun than a football game.

This guide is just a start, come help us keep the fire burning —

Fuck The Police

FREE LUNCH PROGRAM

May 18, 2022, University of California Davis

The usual protocol for entering the dining commons at UC Davis requires students to swipe a card deducting from their meal plan while others pay cash or other method. On May 18, during the midday rush, a banner hung from the outdoor balcony of the Latitude Dining Commons declared a FREE LUNCH PROGRAM. Though the administration often performs concern over the high measure of foodinsecurity among students, they did not  arrange Wednesday’s free lunch. Rather, a group in solidarity with the police abolition movement gathered in front of the swipe station and invited everyone to eat for free. And eat they did. The action had support from other campus and community activists and groups committed to police abolition, mutual aid, and workers’ rights. A banner dropped from above the hall’s entrance demanded, FEED THE PEOPLE / COPS OFF CAMPUS.

What does free food have to do with cops? In the wake of the action, a small group of young republicans pretended to be baffled by this matter. The shortest path to clarity might involve paraphrasing Kwame Ture: If someone wants me to go hungry, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to make me go hungry, that’s my problem. The police are the power to make people go hungry — when there is enough food to feed the campus, the city, the state, the planet with ease. But this is not what the institution wants. No matter what it says, its actions brook no confusion. And so, fully aware that deploying the pepperspray boys would be a bad look, they sent instead a small platoon of administrators to try to stop things. Everyone knew the police station was two blocks away. The situation was tense. “You can have a protest,” said the most cringing of the well-compensated snitches. “But you can’t say ‘Free Food.’ Can we find some sort of compromise?”

Yes, absolutely. The compromise was: free food but everyone would try not to laugh at the admin.

The students walked in, a few bemused, many relieved, some a combination of the two. As word got around, some non-students came as well. The university likes to call them “non-affiliates” and pretend they are a threat to the university community. We think they are people, as deserving of food as anyone.

As observers, we see in this event a model for transforming the university. It is an act of community care, egalitarian and open-hearted. But it is not an act of philanthropy, requiring the grace and largesse of donors much less of other poor people. Charity shifts the pieces on the board a little in order to keep the game fundamentally the same. Those who own much might be generous though it is those who own little who are asked to donate over and over. A university’s goal must be to own nothing. The abolitionist message of a dining hall takeover is that we want an entirely new and different structure, a making-free of the resources that should be — that are — ours in the first place. Swipe-free, tuition-free, police-free, we are not joking about a free university. Administrator-free too, just as a cherry on top.

But we recognize certain things about actions that take this form, that turn toward liberation rather than donations, free education rather than gofundmes. Acting against the protocols of the university means taking risks. The group inside Latitude comprised undergraduates, graduate students, alumni, faculty, and community members. They represent different levels of vulnerability to aggression and punishment because of status within the university, socioeconomic situation, race, gender, disability, or a combination of these and other factors. The group attended to these differing vulnerabilities by standing side by side around the card swipe counter, confronting the risk together and committed to responding together, just as they will stand in solidarity with anyone who is persecuted for their presence that day.

Previous dining hall actions, especially those at UCSC during the COLA wildcat strike of 2019-20, inspired the Latitude action. At UCSC, the administration unleashed significant punitive force on the activists. UCD COC doesn’t know if this university plans to get carceral on a group that made one free meal possible on a campus with a 44% food insecurity rate and a posse of administrators protecting their own wealth. But we hope you will support us if they do. More importantly, COC hopes you will ask yourselves and others why the basic human need for sustenance is policed here and how together we might make food free every day for everyone.