This past ten days a courageous wave of struggle against the U.S.-sponsored genocide in Gaza has begun to rip across campuses in the U.S. Students have set up protest encampments at dozens of campuses, they have braved over 700 arrests and significant brutality, and they have continued to come back stronger. You can get a sense of this in the reports we have compiled in the accompanying article.

Students not only face the crackdowns of the administrators at different schools, there is high-profile pressure from fascists like the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson (the top official in Congress), to call in the National Guard against these students. And over the weekend, direct threats from Zionist and fascist thugs have become part of the scene. The encampments have stood firm, but they need support from other colleges and high schools, and from all parts of society. And through all this, there needs to be vigorous discussion and debate over why this is happening and what must be done to deal with it. 

Students are a critical part of society. When they begin to question, expose and passionately oppose in large numbers things that call into question things that people take for granted, they can spark societal-wide debate and rethinking—as they have begun to do here. And when they take bold action in a righteous cause, especially against their own government, they shake up and inspire millions more beyond them. The campuses themselves become hotbeds of debate and struggle, with masses of students asking “why.” You get a sense of this from the letters this week from New York, Boston and Los Angeles. 

At the same time, the repression is very fierce—with people being doxxed and denied jobs, slandered, and in the past two weeks arrested, suspended, physically threatened, expelled and beaten. The repression is meant to crush all the protest and questioning… but if people come back stronger, the larger society begins to take notice, choose sides and rethink things. And we’ve seen this over the past ten days.

Why is the fact that students are raising their heads so very threatening to the rulers of this system? The revolutionary leader Bob Avakian speaks to this in “The Fight for Free Speech, as a Crucial Part of Fighting to Put an End to Terrible Injustice and Atrocity—And to the System That Is the Source of These Outrages”:

[B]ecause fundamental interests of U.S. capitalism-imperialism are at stake. Because Israel plays a “special role” as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the “Middle East”).  And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world.

And this repression is happening because representatives of the ruling class in this country have a definite sense that if youth especially at “elite” universities begin to seriously question and act against what this system is doing—if the system “loses the allegiance” of large numbers of those students—that can be a big factor in creating a real crisis for the system as a whole, as happened in the 1960s: a crisis that, now more than ever, this system really cannot afford, when the whole country is already being torn apart by deep divisions, with bitter clashes right among the ruling powers. So, at the same time as they are bitterly divided, the ruling powers of this the country are firmly united in their determination to punish and intimidate especially students at elite universities who have stepped forward to protest the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians.  The ruling class is desperate to prevent opposition to its fundamental interests from spreading and involving masses of people, from all parts of society.

Democrats and Republi-fascists

There is unity between the Democrats and the Republi-fascists that the protests must be chilled and suppressed; but there are some differences over how. While the Republi-fascists like Johnson falsely distort the protests as “anti-Semitic”¹ and call for all-out use of force, the Democrats are divided as to how to hold their supporters together and maintain the lie that they are the party of “reform,” while they are financing horrific war crimes. Israel’s ability to dominate the Middle East and to terrorize and suppress the Palestinians is crucial to how the U.S. empire functions. As a ruling class party of U.S. capitalism-imperialism, the Democrats are stuck with Israel and forced to stick by it, to the point that as Bob Avakian has pointed out, Biden is even willing to risk losing the election to continue this support. 

Part of the problem that the Democrats face is that the people whose support they rely on are people who often want to see positive change and have the illusion that the Democrats can be the vehicle for that. Appealing to and corralling such people is one crucial role the Democrats play in the imperialist political setup. Yet here are those same Democrats funding, backing and running interference for a horrific genocide! The revulsion against this is spreading far and wide. A New York Times article quoted a 75-year-old rural white woman in Wisconsin who actually voted for Biden in the recent primary saying, “So often we see on TV the children suffering and starving. We are liberals. We are progressives. Our whole ideology is to help one another and to take care of one another. So we can’t ignore it. We just can’t.” (“Putting A Different Face On Dismay About Gaza” [appearing online as “After Israel Aid Vote, Pocan Seeks to Show Biden Liberal Dismay on Gaza”], Robert Jimison, New York Times, April 2) 

You can see here potential for more major disaffection at the time when this society is being ripped apart and, as Bob Avakian has analyzed, revolution is more possible. It is especially times like these when revolutionaries need to go everywhere and to everyone whose “whole ideology is to help one another and take care of another,” and who “just can’t ignore” what is now being done by the party they trusted. It is a time to struggle with them to see that there is only one way to get to the society that could give expression to their deepest and very just aspirations: and that path is through revolution and the new communism developed by Bob Avakian.

Organizing for This Revolution: All Out This Week!

Revolutionary International May Day, May 1-5, is a critical juncture, a real chance to bring people together not only to express their opposition to this genocidal war but even more to find out about and get into the whole new way to live and the fundamentally different system we need, through revolution. Especially in the communities of the most oppressed, creative and militant ways need to be found to take this message to people in the week to come—and this can and should include going to the campus encampments with people from the communities, and bringing students into the communities of the oppressed to spread word of what is going on. 

We call on everyone reading this, everyone who is sick and tired of being treated as less than human and seeing others treated that way, step into this.