The Next New Wave
In the face of atrocity, the New Left finds itself consolidating once more.
Signs and flags are held up at a pro-Palestinian protest in front of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley (Image: Kefr4000)
It is no question that the majority of (if not all) political leaders in the Western empire have swung to the Right en masse, acting as one reactionary mass as popular demands for justice – economic, social, historical – become unbearably loud. Indeed, we see our multinational order teetering upon universal, if contextually unique, fascism as the “democratic” governments find themselves woefully unable to juggle demands arising primarily from their own malfeasance.
As I write this, the police state is activating against student organizations at the behest of the rent-seeking Boards, Regents, and Deans across the United States; Columbia University destroying a demonstration under the justification of maintaining the integrity of the campus, citing and arresting people primarily for damage to property or inconveniencing the student body with their chanting.
As the Columbia Spectator reported today, the arrests of pro-peace protestors at the University has sparked solidarity protests across the country. Campuses from Brown to Yale to Harvard to Bard to Princeton, the Universities of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, Nevada, Ohio, Temple, and the City of New York have all found themselves hosting their own demands for justice and divestment; the position which Columbia sought to remove itself from instead being spread like seeds across the educational body of the US.
At the University of Southern California, the valedictorian for the graduating class of 2024, Asna Tabassum, had her speech canceled due to “substantial” security concerns that the university found might arise from the potential mention of atrocities our government is assisting with and emboldening in Gaza. Today, we find that all commencement speakers for USC have been cancelled under the same umbrella-term of “security” which has defined all our lives for the last 20-odd years in the US.
“I am not surprised by those who attempt to propagate hatred. I am surprised that my own university—my home for four years—has abandoned me,”
-USC Valedictorian Asna Tabassum
It is shameful that the University, rather than uphold their responsibilities to students and undertake the needed measures to ensure that the student body and attendees in general are secure on-campus; that the institution which has been so grateful to take the payments is unwilling to spend what is required to create a safe place for what should be a universal celebration in the community. In supplanting the very voices they claim as their own, bending to the will of a reactionary minority who threaten violence, USC is putting all at even more risk.
And this is, of course, the case across many, if not the majority, of campuses across the United States and the Western world in general; some of the most influential bodies in our lives have begun to mobilize against their very communities who, justifiably, are angered at the continued stagnation, corruption, and bloodthirst permeating our society. The natural response, as Columbia University is learning, is consolidation on the ground, the blooming of inter-group partnerships and intersectional organizing across a variety of causes.
This is what was called the “New Left” in the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s, an intersectional coalition of progressive, socialist, and communist organizations across a range of emancipatory causes and who recognized the oppression of underclass society through shared lenses of class, gender, sex, race, religion, etc. It was a new phase of Leftist organizing in the US that was largely sparked by activism such as the Free Speech Movement at University of California – Berkeley and sit-ins/Freedom Rides by organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, and Congress of Racial Equality which branched across multiple campuses in the 1960s.
Columbia today, in embracing the same tactics as the likes of Berkeley then, has followed the playbook the latter employed to deal with discontent from student organizers; first employing rules of respectability against protestors before resorting to armed police and expulsion to quiet the loudest elements of their student body. Then, as now, protests of support sprouted across campuses and locally, some 10,000 students, faculty, and community members showing four days later to Sproul Hall and in support of arrested protestors in December 1964. Five months later, in May 1965, Berkeley students would once again organize to stage the first public burning of their draft cards in protest of the US invasion of Vietnam.
,he consistent achievements of youth and students in political organizing shows that is anything but ineffective, the change wrought by their hands being seen in the very fabric of our society today some sixty years later. In every way and every social movement in the United States, it is the youngest generations who have borne the torch of progress forward, pressing forward in spite of the repressions and ad-hoc reactionaryism of older generations who have often grown fat on the extracted wealth of their children.
The New Left, despite the calls of its demise in the 1970s, has never truly gone from the political conversation. And while the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was largely successful in obstructing, dividing, and dismantling student organizations by the end of the program in the early-1970s, the spirit of justice that overthrew Jim Crow the decade before still lives on within the students of today.
I look forward to the coming days as communities continue to organize in response to Columbia’s blatant, overbearing response to simple political speech on publicly owned/granted land. In so doing, the university has brought the issue of Palestinian emancipation home for many who have been wary of or resistant to the pleas of pro-peace activists, spreading the message of the protesters to communities who have been otherwise distant until now. With every arrest or expulsion, the exposure to the repressions at home increases exponentially; a family, group of friends, or team of coworkers hearing firsthand of the degradation of fundamental rights and protections in the United States.
The violence did not come from the protestors back in the ’60s. The violence then came from perpetrators, from law enforcement and hate groups.
-Kredelle Petway, Freedom Rider
Photo: Kefr4000, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
