Richmonder Dearil Mercier submits the following article on the Virginia Commonwealth University encampment and protests against the Israeli assault being waged upon Palestinians in Gaza. They posit what this movement means in relation to the broader class struggle.
Only four years have passed since the historic uprisings of 2020 against the tradition of brutalization by the bourgeois police towards the masses, especially directed towards black and indigenous Americans, and we yet again see a popular movement growing out of the students and workers against the war in Gaza. At universities all across the country, “encampments” have sprung up acting as temporary sites of protest and consequently end up as sites of ruthless police repression. Recently, the Virginia Commonwealth University “liberated” zone has joined the list.
On Monday April 29th, following the other spontaneous protests popping up around the country, VCU students set up their encampment and began with their demands. The demands of the students were: Disclose, Divest, Defend, and Declare. In short, they demand full transparency of VCU’s financial investments, a complete separation of any financial partnership with companies that are profiting off the war, protected speech for Muslim and pro-Palestinian activists, support for a permanent ceasefire as well as a denouncement of Israel as an illegitimate colony, and a condemnation of the US complicity in genocide. Within a few hours the encampment was destroyed, many were tear gassed, beaten, and a dozen were arrested. Alerts of a “violent” protest, vague and incredulous, were sent out by VCU’s alert system that immediately coincided with the arrests and violence on behalf of the police. We can’t help but be reminded of the same sort of repression we saw in 2020 in response to completely non-violent protests that included the elderly and children, all tear gassed and dismantled by the riot gear- clade Richmond Police.
The city continues to prove its commitment to upholding the underlying interests of capital by any means necessary, often squashing protests as quickly as possible; and in the ruins and confusion of a destroyed mass movement, politicians will beg for apologies and understanding. Often, this is where the demands of accountability fall on the head of this-or-that politician, as it did upon Stoney after the 2020 uprisings, and how recent events will likely fall on that of Michael Rao, VCU’s president.
While the decisions of individuals clearly and materially have effects on popular movements and political- economy broadly, as Marxists, we understand that these particular individuals only formally embody capital in its entirety. Wall Street, that knotted rat king of self-interested capitalists, will exchange proletarian blood for profit indefinitely for the mutual benefit of the total bourgeoisie class and as long as an institution like VCU aims to make money out of money, it’s tail will remain tangled with rest of the rats.
“It is a movement of the aggregate capital of the capitalist class, in which every individual capital appears only as a part whose movements intermingle with those of the others and are conditioned on them.” (Marx. Capital Vol 2. 2013. p. 625)
We see that the students have made a connection between the institution and the imperialist nature of capital, specifically American capital, with America being the largest arms dealer in the world and actively profiting on nearly all conflicts. We also see that they have recognized that the US, naturally, has chosen a side in this conflict– Israel- and despite condemnation of it’s various foreign enemies for crimes against humanity, the US cannot help itself but not only morally justify the one sided annihilation of Gaza, but actively fund it on account of Israel being a living fortress of American interests in the Middle East. Of course, we note the main demand, the most materially beneficial for those being slaughtered in this conflict, an immediate ceasefire.
Without concerning ourselves with the specifics and relatively liberal nature of their demands(the limited scope of criticizing individual capital versus social capital, the impossible task of determining land ownership based in ethnonationalism) the students are approximately correct in pointing out the material means in which capital is somehow linked to the bloodshed, but we cannot ignore the obvious missing link: the class struggle.
Up until now we have been referring to the movement as a “student movement” because that is how it is referred to in the mainstream media, but we know that among the protests, including some of these students, is a portion of the mass of workers that make up the working class. It is typical of bourgeois media, and unfortunately of the unconscious workers, to see their confrontation with the state apparatus as purely “ideological”, when as Marxists we know them to be economic contradictions between class interests. This does not dismiss the demands of these students and workers, who are approximately coming close to the correct conclusions, that there is a contradiction between the interest of a capitalist institution like VCU and that of the masses; and they demand by protest that these issues get addressed on behalf of the alleged “democracy” the US grandstands, but there remains this infatuation with political protest as the ends themselves. Lenin recalls of the spontaneous movements in pre- revolutionary Russia,
“The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began… I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of desperation and vengeance than of struggle.” (Lenin. What is to be Done?. 2020. P. 31)
We see this constantly with the student movements throughout the second half of the 20th and now the 21st century. The Black Lives Matter protests brought the entire world out into the streets, accelerated by a world crisis, and people fought bitterly with the police and reactionaries, but eventually the spontaneous force of the masses had no meaningful place to go; there was not enough of a connection between the historical development of racism to the international class struggle. The bourgeois parties absorbed all revolutionary potential for their own gain, claiming that these issues could somehow be fixed with legislation(that didn’t happen anyways) and the police continue to slaughter innocent people in the streets as if 2020 never happened.
There is more to changing social conditions than waging spontaneous unarmed clashes with the world’s best armed police force. Never in the history of social movements has the accumulation of countless martyrs, killed at the hand of the state with no hesitation, pleading to the dictatorship of the ruling classes to play by their own ostensible rules, ever materially changed the world, as noted by Marx, “the structure of the economic elements of society remains untouched by the storm-clouds of the political sky”.
We see the posturing between the two bourgeois classes(Democrats and Republicans) both claiming to represent the “working class”, accusing the other of being the real “enemy” of the masses, and yet the state repression is always indistinguishable from one another regardless of party lines; 2020 under Trump now looks exactly like 2024 under Biden. This made up “ideological” clash between liberals and conservatives is merely bourgeois infighting. If there are “storm clouds of a political sky” forming, they are not the clouds of bourgeois electoralism, but the impending final confrontation of the two warring classes. The masses are already coming to the conclusion that they will not find representation at the polls but still remain rudderless and vulnerable to reaction.
“Such workers, average people of the masses, are capable of displaying enormous energy and self-sacrifice in strikes and in battles with the police and the troops, and are capable (in fact, are alone capable) of determining the outcome of our entire movement- but the struggle against the political police requires special qualities; it requires professional revolutionaries.”(Lenin. What is to be Done?. 2020. p. 107)
There are many workers that make up the most progressive strata of the working class that are correctly linking the international class struggle to the various social movements of our times, and it is the utmost duty of the “professional revolutionaries” and the most theoretically advanced organizers in the class struggle to continue revealing to the masses what they already anticipate- the impossibility of capitalism to continue. We must continue to build class consciousness among the workers and see the horrors at the hand of individual capitalists as endemic to capitalism itself. Just as much as the individual capitalist is merely a conduit of historical forces, so is the worker who meets their natural enemy, the bourgeoisie, in the war of wages and the length of the working day. However, the solution to this protracted economic war lies in capitalism’s complete negation and abolition, not in further protraction and consequent slaughters. We can not have any serious political power until we develop a correspondingly powerful class consciousness, and this cannot be done without the careful organizing of the workers into unions and worker assemblies that embrace the class struggle, that see an end to the wage-system, and do not lapse into mere economism.
As long as there is capitalism, there will be war. As long as there remains a disorganized working class, there will be capitalism. We will see an increase of violence on behalf of the parasitic capitalists, desperate to hold on to their various hosts, and we will likely see even more ruthless repression the closer the masses get to class consciousness and actually, materially changing society. “Force”, says Marx, “is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is in itself an economic force.” (Capital vol 1. 2013. p. 526)
The Virginia Worker 
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