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UC Berkeley Professors and Students Stand Up Against Trump’s Assault on Universities

From a reader:

Woman with UC Berkeley shirt holds up "Release Mahmoud Khalil" sign.

 

UC Berkeley, March 15, 2025.    Photo: Special to revcom.us

University of California Berkeley professors rallied last week in response to the assault on the universities from the Trump regime. T-shirts and prepared signs said, “Freedom to speak, freedom to teach, freedom to learn, for everyone!” Significantly, over 1,000 people came. That included professors, retired professors, some administrators, and many students. Many professors, a number of heads of departments, and several deans spoke at the rally. The speakers called on everyone to stand up for what UC Berkeley has been renowned for—free speech, critical thought, opposition to racial and gender oppression—and some called on the university administration and the UC Board of Regents to do this as well (which they, so far, have not been doing). Some denounced fascism. The head of Gender Studies read the Martin Niemöller poem about the lessons of Nazi Germany (“First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist…”), and called on people to stand up and do better than the German people. One speaker from Berkeley Law made the important point that yes, we will fight this in the courts but that the courts are not enough, people have to protest. Another speaker read the famous Mario Savio statement from the Free Speech Movement, and called on people to act in that spirit:

Protest at Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley, Defend Our University.

 

Protest at Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley, Defend Our University, March 15, 2025.    Photo: Special to revcom.us

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

A crew from Revolution Books reached out to the people at the rally and distributed hundreds of the flyers with Bob Avakian’s statement “Trump’s fascist rule, like Hitler’s before him, is a regime of horrors—and is completely illegitimate,” and flyers from THE REVCOM CORPS For The Emancipation Of Humanity on the March 27 protests supporting Mahmoud Khalil. They brought to people word about the national @BobAvakianOfficial Everywhere Campaign—to spread word about how through his social media messages, Bob Avakian is leading people to see how capitalism-imperialism is destroying the future, how Trump/MAGA fascism arose out of this very system, how there is a whole better way the world can be, and how to work now for the revolution that humanity urgently needs. Many of the professors were eager to talk about fascism and what we should do to defeat it.

CARD Trump's Fascist Rule

 

We are at a turning point in history. The capitalist-imperialist system is a horror for billions of people here and around the world and threatening the very fabric of life on earth. Now the election of fascist Trump poses even more extreme dangers for humanity—and underscores the total illegitimacy of this system, and the urgent need for a radically different system.

The website Revcom.us follows the revolutionary leadership of Bob Avakian (BA), the author of the new communism. Bob Avakian has scientifically analyzed that we are in a rare time when an actual revolution has become more possible in the U.S. He’s charted a strategy for making that revolution, and laid out a sweeping vision and concrete blueprint for “what comes next” in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

Revcom.us projects BA’s voice, leadership, and vision throughout society. It posts his timely leadership for the revcoms (revolutionary communists) and the whole movement for revolution, including his social media posts, and curates his whole body of work. 

Our website applies the scientific approach BA has developed to analyze major events in society and the world—why they are happening, how they relate to each other, how all this relates to the system we live under, where people's interests lie, how revolution is in fact the solution to all this, and what the goals of that revolution are.

Revcom.us acts as a guiding and connecting hub for the revcom movement nationwide: showing what’s being done, digging into what’s right and what’s wrong, and rapidly learning—and recruiting new people into what has to be a rapidly growing force. As part of this, revcom.us feature and promotes the weekly The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show on YouTube.com. 

Put it this way: there will be no revolution unless this website not only “keeps going” but rises to a whole different level!

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