In Solidarity with the UC-Berkeley Protesters

As I write, students are occupying Wheeler Hall at the University of California-Berkeley, after an unsuccessful try at occupying the Capital Projects building. The occupiers are on the 2nd floor, and the police are threatening to tear-gas them. Scores of police in riot gear are beating on the doors. This was building for a long time:

There is a grotesque irony to this. Student fees are being securitized and repackaged exactly like the toxic assets that triggered the latest economic collapse. Four years ago it was subprime mortgages; now it is “subprime education,” as Ananya Roy says. The very strategies and schemes that bankrupted millions of lives, and that showed the bankruptcy of the economic sphere — it is to these that the university has turned for its salvation, even after such strategies failed spectacularly. The Regents reveal themselves not simply to be dishonest, venal, and indifferent; they are too stupid to learn the most basic lessons of recent history. Or perhaps this is their idea of solidarity: that all members of the university community (save them, of course) must join the nation and the world in its immiseration, must be battered equally by a nightmare economy built on real human lives. We say to them: if you summon forth such solidarity, do not be surprised when its power escapes you.

The University of California Board of Regents is waging class war against its own students--a 32 percent hike in tuition. Services are being cut back. The kids aren't happy about this. At UC Davis there were dozens of arrests, as the students protested the 2,500 dollar increase in the student activities fee (the same thing as tuition). UCLA hosted protests too, and trapped some of the members of the Board of Regents, preventing them from leaving the building. Armed police were there en masse, some with bean-bag-shooting shotguns. To be used to subdue students. Over at Berkeley, the police have assaulted several students:

The students are demanding (1) amnesty for every student occupying Wheeler Hall, (2) amnesty for the three students thus-far arrested, and (3) the immediate re-hiring of all 38 laid-off UC Berkeley custodians. Earlier today over 1,000 students were surrounding the occupied building, in support and solidarity with those inside. At last check the SWAT team was attempting to hammer the hinges off the students' barricade.

This is just one part of the Obama administration's class-war, continued on to state-level budget cuts, and in turn university-level struggles over tuition and fees. At every turn, people in power will seek to squeeze out a surplus from those easiest to squeeze, gutting the social and educational infrastructure that enable America to be, euphemistically, perhaps, an advanced society. 2,500 dollar tuition hikes and 2 trillion dollars for the banks? It's easy to score points against Obama-administration economic policy, devoted as it is to shoring up the financial superstructure at the expense of a productive base. But when that productive base, in turn, has as one of its components technologically advanced companies, it can't rely solely on well-endowed private universities to supply it with workers. As Mike Davis points out, you can't squeeze the middle-class forever without reducing the American political economy to a shambles, without Brazilianizing it. And you can't squeeze it forever without it revolting, either.

Technorati Tags: Brazilianization, class war, Mike Davis, Obama, protests, UC Berkeley

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