UC Student Struggle

[human strike]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNIHLz0oU5c&feature=player_profilepage

If this is the police response to protests against an 8% rise in fees, would they like use SWAT teams to respond to protests against a 200% rise like the ones we're seeing in the UK?

Also is this normal for the US? This sort of police presence and repression. This kind of thing is almost unheard of here.

[Comrade Ian]

At UCSC when we occupied the main administrative building on campus last year, when they evicted us they brought in a huge contingent of riot police armed with pepper spray, pellet guns and a canine unit. They tossed those of us at the frontlines around like ragdolls, and they only eased up on the repression after hospitalizing a faculty member who was there as a legal observer. For the whole day they had completely shut down all access to campus by media or students, and effectively declared it a police state.

These days on campus every flyer I put up for my branch of the ISO, and now even every flyer put up advocating against the budget cuts, is systematically torn down by the administration and Campus Police. When some students tried to throw an unauthorized dance party at the beginning of the quarter, the police performed snatch and grabs on random students with nothing to do with planning the event, arresting them and keeping them at $5,000 bail under charges like "attempted lynching"(The charge these days for resisting arrest). It's made organizing on campus extremely difficult and is a part of why things have cooled down here since last year.

[Property Is Robbery]

Shit I know someone that's applied to Berkley, might talk him out of it with the pig presence and all, police state shit.



Also is this normal for the US? This sort of police presence and repression. This kind of thing is almost unheard of here.
Your government cares more about covering up then ours does :p:p

[MarxSchmarx]

I said it a year ago when these broke out, I'll say it again.

Until these movements can link their activism to the broader concerns of the working people of california, I don't think they will have much leg to stand on.

The University of California, like most 1st world universities, is predicated on relying on the meritocracy for maintaining the current order and for offering the chance at "upward mobility" without fundamentally altering the very premise that we need somethign as reactionary as social mobility.

It is arguably the top 5-10% of hard working, intelligent young people from communities that are poorly served and economically suffering that make the bulk of those attending the UCs, plus an inordinate number of folks from well to do communities who simply want an affordable education, and a smaller group from very wealthy families whose kids couldn't get into elite private universities.

So when these extremely privileged demographics complain about marginally higher tuition (which is still much cheaper than attending, say, Harvard or even the University of Pheonix) the bulk of Californians wonder why they aren't grateful with what they've got. That is because their demands are so narrowly tailored on fostering the meritocracy.

Let me say that again. The proximate goal of these struggles is to let a few people escape the proletariat. It is to let the supposedly more "deserving" enter the ranks of the well-to-do, coordinator class, or even the aristocracy. It is not about challenging the need for a meritocracy or dismantling a system that distinguishes between the managers/engineers/lawyers/parasites/doctors and the fast-food workers.

Of course I am all in favor of access for all to quality education. But the UC system is predicated on a pyramid scheme, where Universities of California are at the top, the California State system is in the middle, and community colleges are for everyone else. The idea is that by attending the UC, that is a ticket out of the working class. By denying students that opportunity, you are perpetuating the inherited social hierarchy. But opposing that is not the same as challenging the social hierarchy in the first place.

At best it is mundane reformism cast as serious activism, and a banal criticism of the privilege of birth. Of course I am all in favor of that, but when students, who appear apathetic about things like mass-transient's strikes and issues surrounding single parents, become radical all of a sudden when THEIR chances at living the good life are endangered, well, I don't think I'm alone in finding it somewhat self-serving and frankly disengenuous. At worse it is a proclamation that the meritocracy, and by implication class hierarchy, of which many of these students happen to gain considerably from, must be maintained at the expense of everyone else.

Now of course there are dedicated comrades who want to link something like this, that gets a lot of people fired up at least on campuses, to broader social concerns. And as a propaganda ploy among students to start people questioning the existing order, it might even have some reasonable basis. But I would not be surprised if the bulk of people who don't attend these elite schools in California do not care less if their high school valedictorian suffered an 11% increase in tuition on their way to becoming a plastic surgeon.

[DaringMehring]

It is a wealth transfer to the bourgeoisie from working people.

State cuts taxes for the wealthy.

State balances budget by making working people trying to put their kids through public university pay more.

It should be fought on those grounds. Don't make the public pay for tax cuts to the rich, or decreased tax revenues from the bankers' crisis.