It's now - barely - officially March 6, 2007. This means that my grandfather joins my grandmother in the ranks of the nonagenarians, so happy birthday to him.

It also marks four years since my grandfather's 86th birthday, and this:

On March 6, 2003 hundreds of workers and students and other members of the New Haven community came together in the middle of a snowstorm to demand a new relationship with the university and a new set of contracts for each of four bargaining units - five if you count the new social contract, which you should, though the picket sign on the back of one dog read, if i remember correctly, four legs, four unions, one contract, and that was kind of awesome. Folks came to teach each other about what education and justice can and should mean, to articulate and bring to birth - to use Ralph Chaplin's gestational-apocalyptic metaphor - a new university from the ashes of the old, radically participatory and indeed performative, but with a tone firmly (sorry) rooted in histories of the transnational labor migrations - forced, nominally volitional, or otherwise, which built - or at least completely reordered New Haven and constituted the movements which had struck Yale eleven times before March 3 of that year, and have done so three more times since then. I haven't really felt that sense of possibility and, um, power - in a subversive, non-Foucauldian, liberatory sense, since then. I hope to soon. Because i think actions like the AJH-masterminded E.I.T.S. are so powerful because they articulate on the ground organizing and demands (and this foreshadows a response to Alek which I may or may not ever get around to dealing with more formally) with the simultaneous eruption of the Harney-Moten undercommons into a realm in which the "criminality" of the subversive academic "refugee" is however momentarily displaced and utopian possibilities become plainly illuminated, from the undercommons the spectre of a new commons, perhaps - and concretize a shared vision of what it is we are fighting for, which cannot be contained in Harney and Moten's formation of the Cary Nelson-Bill Readings reformist impulse in even its strongest iterations. Also, we need a fucking contract, but that demand isn't just about reforming something gone awry, or stopgap measures meant to slow the erosion of job security and labor rights and the forward march of casualization, because we can't let it just be that. We have to always demand and imagine more.