By Barbara Zagorc
Growing up in the 90s in post-socialist Slovenia, people around me would say something was “American” when they meant it was really great. I heard things like, “Those pants are really American!” and “Wow, look at that table. That’s really American.” Soon after, however, that prevailing view became much more skeptical. While studying sociology in Slovenia, American practices were constantly on the table, subjected to ruthless criticism, starting with American military ambitions. That criticism is still very present, so whenever I go to America, people always ask me the same question: “Why?” Why would I want to go there? And yet, I found my way to Berkeley for the first time five years ago. Whatever one might think of the broader picture of America, UC Berkeley has long been seen as a top university, internationally known for both academic excellence and socio-political activism. Still, I did not expect to encounter what I did there. Berkeley surprised me. What I encountered there stayed with me.
One day in 2021, I was walking miles from South Berkeley to the Rose Garden … Yes, I walked to the Rose Garden. “You are a European, of course you walk,” people told me. On the way, I was admiring how people in Berkeley leave books they no longer want or need anymore on the sidewalk for someone else to take. Looking at it more closely, there it was – a cartoon book, Marx for Beginners by Rius. At first, I thought, “Wow!”, then I said, “Oh, of course, it is only for beginners!,” and later that book convinced me to take it home. Not because I needed an introduction to Marx, since by then I had already read the whole Capital during my Master’s. Not just once. A real one – three volumes, actually, no summaries. With footnotes, a lot of them. I took that book home because I found it fascinating that, at least in the past, it served someone. In America. And I took it home because I became part of a sharing practice that was new to me.
Marx’s famous line from his Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it,” had never really stuck with me. I had always been among those just criticizing the capitalist mode of production. But seeing alternative practices in Berkeley every day changed that and put me on the path to thinking about social relations outside of the dominant ones. Seeing a student as a temporary resident/visitor and a local as a permanent resident playing chess together on Telegraph, a piano at the Sproul Plaza welcoming passersby, Food Not Bombs feeding people in solidarity, not charity, unhoused people at that time living in People’s Park asking me about the result of the last Warriors game. Being part of practices like these, I think, can motivate or maybe even enable us to imagine relations outside those generated by competition. It can help us think beyond the demand to see ourselves constantly as entrepreneurs or projects, as people who have to manage and improve themselves and be as productive as possible, or even to think of our children in terms of human capital.
I came to think of these practices through Foucault’s view of resistance, meaning not as something outside power, but as ways of refusing to be governed in a particular way (see Security, Territory, Population). Sharing, cooperation, care, mutual aid, and collective self-organization can create what I think of as communities of resistance – communities that are not simply formed first and then resist but are produced through the very practice of relating to one another differently. These practices matter because they show that resistance is not only protest, opposition, or defending something from destruction. It means creating and sustaining different kinds of social relations in everyday life. During his repeated visits to California from the mid-70s to the early 80s, Foucault was critical of what he saw as a Californian search for an authentic “true self”. What interested him instead was how people actively shape themselves and their ways of living. What struck me in Berkeley, though, was that this experimentation was deeply relational. It was not only about shaping oneself, but also – and perhaps above all – about shaping ways of living with others. That relational dimension of Berkeley is, to me, what makes it truly distinctive – and what makes me want to return.
Does my excitement mean that if I want to live a radically different way of life, I need to pack my bags and move to Berkeley? Of course not! There are many other places to go, not only in America but across the globe. But do I really have to move somewhere to live differently? I do not think so. Again – I believe the most distinctive element of communities of resistance is specific social relations. That is, social relations that are not based on competition, on seeing others as competitors, but rather on cooperation, on collectively creating different ways of living and relating to one another. Relations like that can be built everywhere. They can persist everywhere. But at the same time, they can also disappear – when people can no longer sustain them or, just as importantly, when external forces work to destroy them. Attempts to do so are happening all across the globe. So, Berkeley, keep and cherish what you have. Space is not something stable, it is constantly produced, as Lefebvre (see The Production of Space) put it. Nor is place’s authenticity fixed, as Zukin adds (see Naked City). Power relations shape both a place and its transformation, but so do the everyday social relations through which communities reproduce what they value about those places.
Barbara Zagorc is a PhD candidate in sociology and a researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her PhD research focuses on the transformation of People’s Park and the conflicts surrounding it.