The student movement for Palestine spread like wildfire from Columbia University in New York City to schools across the country. Encampments and “de-occupations” sprang up in defiance of administrations, political authorities, and police throughout late April and early May. Radical labor, radical elements of the communities, communists, and socialists, have yet to sufficiently link up with the spontaneous movement. They have done so only in sporadic fits and starts. These encampments, marches, and protests do not yet have a consistent anti-capitalist character, but the state has felt its own weakness and, knowing the danger that would come from permitting them to continue, has unleashed a wave of pig terror. This terror has targeted some of the very students who make up the next generation of the empire’s bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, and labor-aristocratic classes. The stronger the state responds, the more it brings into being the very movement it fears.
On May 15 a pig army ran rampant at California’s U.C. Irvine. Despite the fact that the semester will end next month (U.C. Irvine’s spring quarter concludes on Friday, June 14), the protest was going strong. Other encampments have been broken up by sustained pig violence and state repression; a few were betrayed by their own unelected leadership, such as the camp at Brown, and dispersed after accepting false deals and empty promises from their administrators. Not U.C. Irvine.
$32 billion USD of the U.C. Irvine endowment is invested in zionist-allied or zionist-operated companies. This money supports the continued existence of the zionist state. On April 29 of this year, U.C. Irvine students established a divestment encampment and demanded that the school divest these zionist assets and cease to profit from the apartheid regime. The encampment expanded to occupy a lecture hall on campus and maintained its radical demands. Its leadership did not waver.
This is, perhaps, why the University unleashed no less than 10 pig agencies on the students there. An army of some 200 pigs assembled outside the encampment in full riot gear, carrying drawn nightsticks, and prepared to dismantle the camp and its barricades. These colonial cops marched in jackbooted columns that are all-too-familiar to anyone who watched the pigs attack an Austin, Texas encampment earlier this month or saw the marching SS troopers break up the UCLA encampment. Just like their siblings in blue all over the occupied United States empire, the California pigs were frothing for violence. They clubbed, beat, and batoned their way through the barricades, arresting at least 40 of the student-activists. The standoff began at around 2:30 pm; by 5:30, the camp was cleared and the pigs’ dirty business was done.
The pattern has been set. NYPD’s storming of Hind’s Hall and CUNY is now the order of the day. Every outpost of the student movement should prepare for violent suppression, no matter what the current mood of the authorities may appear to be. UC Irvine justified this explosive response by pointing to the students’ occupation of the Physical Sciences Lecture Hall. Make no mistake! Whether students occupy a building or a quad, the fear has entered the hearts of the administration and the political caste that the student movement will join together with the radical elements of the labor movement.
Had there been radical locals from the community labor unions, radical clergy, petit-bourgeois professionals who support the movement for Palestine, in sufficient force, the pig army would have hesitated before they stormed the barricades and swept the U.C. Irvine students into jail. The masses have the capacity to resist the police, indefinitely if need be; but only when they are united, organized and prepared.
We once again urge the student movement to organize democratically elected councils and to join up with radical labor. Again, we urge the students to study how to retreat if they cannot hold their ground; again, we urge the student-radicals to spend the summer sharpening their knives and preparing for August.
The fight goes on!
