We Will Sweep them Aside

[March 4th, 2010, Main Rally of Successful UC Santa Cruz One Day Strike]

Nearly 50 years after the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, we find ourselves in a world in which all the traces of a progressive society, every organ of resistance and every concession rested through years of struggle has been so emaciated by decades of reaction that the very thing against which they rebelled appears to us almost like a fantasy.

Whereas the radicals of the 1960′s were inspired to rebel against a process in which they were crafted and shaped into products for Corporate America, we now find ourselves compelled to revolt against a world which no longer wants the product we’re mortgaging more and more of our lives to become.

Yet there is a unity to these two eras, both then and now the institution of the UC and it’s role within society has remained essentially the same. The UC was created not in any way to advance social justice or equality, but as an instrument of corporate welfare. A so called “Knowledge factory” through which society as a whole would finance the training of workers for big business. The offices and laboratories constructed through student fees and state funding host research advancing the interest of Corporate America.

What is happening now is that all the frills and fringe benefits are being stripped away leaving only the corporate core of exploitation.

What we are experiencing here at the UC is a structural adjustment, liquidation on a scale contingent with the closed factories of Michigan, the ruins of New Orleans and the slave conditions under which everything we consume is produced.

The slashing of worker’s wages and the exponential growth of student fees to pay for administrator salaries and construction contracts is part of the same program behind the bank bailout and the Health Insurance sellout, a program which constitutes nothing less then the relentless exploitation, taxation and immiseration of the Working Class to maintain a system in crisis. A system which has become so broken and so incapable of managing society that it has begun to turn on and devour every positive, human achievement it was made to spawn.

The Administration here say that our strike is impeding learning, that we are destructive, that we are even violent. Their unbridled hypocrisy would be amusing if it were not believed by so many.

You say we are impeding learning? Who’s the one slashing majors, cutting classes and firing lecturers?

You say we are destructive? What’s a dirty carpet or broken table against the corrupt way the UC regents are appointed and the shattered dreams of students saddled with debt?

You say we are violent? Who’s the one obliterating the wages and hours of workers, enforcing cuts that will rip food off working class tables and push families out of their homes?

The strikes and occupations which our movement advances are acts of self defense by the Students and Workers of this University against the systematic violence being perpetrated against us.

We are here shutting down this campus here rather then begging for crumbs in Sacramento because we do not merely seek the rejuvenation of this University, we seek its transformation. We seek a University which moves beyond a hollow facade of commitment to social justice and which under Student and Worker control actively provides an emancipatory education to catalyze the construction of a human society.

We are a generation which woke up to find itself abandoned by the establishment. With every layoff, with every fee hike, with every liquidated job and every cut social service we are witnessing the thin veneer which has concealed a society of exploitation being stripped away and the naked emperor of the Market revealed in all it’s vile, disgusting mass.

Yet we have woken up to find each other. To find lying next to us the unemployed, the workers, the oppressed and exploited of the world who have been suffering even more and for longer then we’ve been alive.

And we have found that together, united in solidarity, we can, we must Struggle.

And we will struggle until we compel their surrender.

We will struggle until we force them to see that the growing discontent of world’s exploited in the face of their program of cutbacks and bailouts is the real crisis.

We will show them, that if they are unwilling or incapable of allowing us a decent existence, if they can’t find the money for education and food and health care while they still find all the money in the world for their executive bonuses, then we will sweep them aside and advance our own radical vision of a society without them as an accomplished fact.