Statement in Solidarity with the Student Occupations at Columbia University and World-Wide

Statement in Solidarity with the Student Occupations at Columbia University and World-Wide
(We invite all organizations and individuals worldwide to endorse this statement and send the endorsement to us using the contact form at http://luxemburgism.org/contact or by email to elerner@igc.org )
We stand in solidarity with the students protesting the Gaza War through Occupations starting at Columbia University and now spreading through the United States, Canada and everywhere. We unequivocally support the demands of the students, and the faculty and staff who are joining them, to divest university finances from all companies that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine and from supplying arms to Israel; to end the repression of students and faculty on campuses with a complete amnesty of all protestors from all punishments; to ban police from all campuses; and their demands that universities issue statements calling for an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
The protesting students know that the genocidal attack on the people of Gaza is an attack on us all. The billionaire class is almost unanimously united behind this wholly US-supplied slaughter and starvation of millions of people because they are trying to prove exactly what they tried, futilely, to show in the Vietnam War 60 years ago—that they can do anything to anyone, no matter if the world stands against them. They need to prove that now because they know that in the crisis they have led the world into, their profits depend only on the immiseration of the world’s working population. To suppress any resistance to that immiseration, they want to use unlimited coercion. The Gaza War is their way to demonstrate that now, 60 years after their defeat in Vietnam, after their bloody defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, now they can commit any atrocity and win. We know that we must stop them--now.
The police repression and university punishments that threaten the education of student protestors at Columbia, Yale, NYU and elsewhere is a first step to extend repression everywhere. The attacks on the rights of the students to protest, to free speech are an attack on the rights of all. Those who jail and suppress students today will, if they succeed, do the same to striking workers tomorrow. In defending the students, we defend us all.
The ever-growing protests show that the repression has failed so far. But to defeat it and to end the far more atrocious attack on the people of Gaza, the movement must grow further, leading, as in 1968, to a global student-worker mass-strike wave. We pledge every effort to help build support among working people everywhere for this mass movement, which has the potential not only to stop this war but to move to the offensive and take back what the billionaires’ class has stolen from us.
Initial endorser: International Luxemburgist Network