Last spring, students around the country and the world set up a wave of encampments on their college campuses protesting the brutal war on Gaza and demanding their schools divest from companies profiting off the genocidal offensive. Some were also joined by faculty and graduate student unions. At the New School in New York, faculty set up their own encampment after the students’ was broken down. UAW local 4811, which organizes graduate workers in the University of California system, held a solidarity strike after protestors at UCLA were attacked by counter-protestors.
Only a month after the outbreak of the war last year, well before the encampment wave began, Columbia University in New York had already suspended and cut off funding for the groups Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and closed off the typically-open campus to the public indefinitely. In April, things hit a fever pitch, and colleges in NYC cracked down with extreme force against protestors, for example unleashing the NYPD in full riot gear and making mass arrests at schools all over the city.
Repression Spreads, Campus to Campus
College faculty have been punished with suspensions and investigations for standing in solidarity with their students. Some international students face deportation if they’re suspended or expelled, just for exercising their right to peacefully protest. Trump vowed to escalate these deportations. Alongside these intimidation tactics are new bans against protests in “academic settings.” Last year at Emerson college in Massachusetts, a campus police sweep of the encampment arrested over 100 students and left dozens injured. Now, students must also register protests a week in advance and end them before 8 PM.
At some schools, students agreed to shut down their encampments due to administrations’ “willingness” to sit down and talk, but the lack of ongoing pressure allowed schools to look like they were listening without making real changes to their practices. The campus occupations showed that only drastic action which cut across business-as-usual would bring their administrators to the table. The same kind of action is needed for the movement’s demands to truly be met.
After students packed up their encampment, Brown University rejected their demand that it divest from 10 war profiteering companies including Boeing, General Electric, and Northrop Grumman. The administration’s excuse? That their connections with the companies were so small that they weren’t “directly responsible for any social harm” they caused. If the connections are so small, why not cut ties with them in solidarity with students demanding an end to any complicity in the massacre of Palestinians?
Why The Crackdown?
Protests are the most basic and powerful way for ordinary people to exercise their collective power to win real change, something the capitalist class will never concede without a fight. This preemptive repression seeking to cut off struggle shows that the movement last spring did have a huge impact, striking fear into the ruling class, despite the setbacks it faced. Brown University may have been able to get away with not divesting immediately, but school administrations around the country still learned how strong their students’ willingness to fight is, and just how much force it can take to beat them back.
The ruling class has not forgotten the mass student movement that played a key role in forcing the US to withdraw from Vietnam and accept a stunning defeat for US imperialism. Today it is plain for all to see that the world is barreling toward more and greater military conflict than has been seen since the Second World War. The US and China are locked in an existential conflict for global imperialist domination, and the ruling classes of both countries are in full-on war-preparation mode.
The old Marxist truism that “war is the midwife of revolution” is not lost on the ruling class. They are terrified of the potential for a powerful mass anti-war movement, let alone a revolution, to develop in response to their reckless drive toward global inter-imperialist military conflict. They are especially scared of students and the working class linking up, as has happened in the past in various countries to great success. But we won’t let them stop us.
Fight Back Against Repression! Spread The Anti-War Movement!
Although there has been a resurgence of protests since the anniversary of October 7th, many who were out demonstrating are starting to feel fatigued and pessimistic. After both street protests and campus encampments failed to win major gains, some students are growing skeptical about the effectiveness of protesting at all (see centerfold). Linking up with organized labor in logistics and manufacturing under demands that challenge the whole of US imperialism would not only provide a necessary shot in the arm for young people feeling demoralized, but bring in those who hold a real lever of power to halt the production and shipment of weapons.
The movement needs to expand its demands beyond boycotts and divestment to include protecting the right to protest and organize. These attacks on students open the gates for wider attacks on the working class, especially when the movement doesn’t have a clear escalation plan. The threat of increased repression will be even greater under a Trump presidency. Already he has grandstanded about using the military on protesters and arresting journalists and politicians he doesn’t agree with. Trump also has a far-right base he can whip up who, given his track record and role in the January 6th riot, have the potential to become violent counter-protestors.
Trump is also planning to form a conservative, public, and tuition-free ‘American Academy’ that would revise US history to erase mentioning of slavery, native genocide, and all social studies. Transgender athletes will be banned from participating in sport events. Trump vowed to shut down the Department of Education and withhold funds from institutions that don’t follow his reactionary policy. All and all, he aims to wrestle power away from, in his words, “insane Marxist control.”
At root, the Palestine solidarity movement needs to take on the whole capitalist, imperialist system. The fight to end the genocidal war in Gaza is linked with the need to end the war in Ukraine – the Democrats have made that perfectly clear by bundling military aid in the billions for Ukraine and Israel – which are linked with the need to fight US and all imperialism. For lasting peace on every continent, we will need a new mass, independent, anti-war party that can bring together students and working people to take on the whole capitalist system.