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In another instance of inter-class bickering, the Trump administration has announced that foreign students will no longer be allowed admission to Harvard University, and that current students will be forced to transfer.
The plan has ignited an uproar among liberal media outlets. In an analysis piece, CNN senior reporter Stephen Collinson called the proposed ban “a crackdown on academic freedom”, while the New York Times ran an opinion column by Dr. Steven Pinker, Harvard professor of psychology titled “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” about Donald Trump’s bizarre obsession with the university. Neither the prim moralizing nor the attempted psychoanalysis understands the true nature of the Trump administration’s decree. The move is just another instance of squabbling among factions of the coalition running the United States government.
The Republican wing of the U.S. government believes (or at least claims to believe) that all non-U.S. citizens are leeches on U.S. society and must be rooted out and removed. In a remarkable show of obviously transparent projection, Republicans consider the very presence of non-citizens in United States society to be an existential threat to the sovereignty of the United States. Thus, they view the removal of such “undesirables” as a necessary inoculation against the chaos of a world gone mad.
Harvard and other elite universities have long been bastions and promulgators of United States soft power. The elite university boasts the scion of power holders from around the world among its alumni and student body, as well as the best and brightest students from around the world, incorporating the fruits of their labor into the U.S. empire and depriving so-called “developing” countries from researchers and innovators of the future. While on campus, students rub shoulders with the next generation of U.S. business leaders, intelligence officers, media executives, and politicians. These relationships further the United States’ expansion into every nook and cranny of the planet.
Massive resource extraction deals and colossal concessions, counterrevolutions and covert operations, the wholesale mortgaging of the future of entire nations in the interests of United States capital — the bonds formed between ruling class members at universities for the privileged run like veins throughout the capitalist world, sending blood money back to the heart of empire.
The revocation of the privilege of elite education for the foreign bourgeoisies will shake networks of power that keep capitalism going. Cooperation across international borders is seen as weakness by chauvinistic, vapid U.S. politicians, who seek a greater consolidation and concentration of power among themselves and their allies, even at the expense of alienating the very facilitators of the imperial riches and success they enjoy. Members of ruling classes in the periphery judge strength among themselves by the level and quality of their connection to foreign capital and imperial power, and even a nonessential change in the dialectic of imperial oppression will prove to be a severe shock to them.
Base infighting for power is nothing but a flailing attempt by the ruling class to preserve a past that is slipping through their fingers like sand through an hourglass. They are losing control, and while they may not foresee the tailspin into which they are headed, the brutish, panicked actions undertaken by the Trump regime should not be seen as anything other than desperation. The ruling class’s own greed is knocking out the foundations of the very state that provides them with the power they crave.
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