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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   25245 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Students from various campuses have occupied the Columbia University campus in New York City in protest of Israel. There reports and videos circulating of protestors harassing Jewish students on or near campus grounds. The NYPD has deployed officers to surround the campus and has established filtration checkpoints to prevent outside agitators from entering campus. Various Columbia alumni have expressed concern with Columbia’s handling of the situation. All classes are now online at least for today. Similar protests are happening at Yale and various other campuses across the country.

Edit: Congressman Josh Hawley has called on President Joe Biden to deploy the National Guard to Columbia and other universities to protect Jewish students on campus.

Edit: NYU has ordered their encampment to disperse and the NYPD is moving in to clear the demonstrators.

Edit: I’m seeing footage of NYU professors being marched out of the campus in zip ties. Cal Poly Humbolt students have barricaded themselves inside a campus building with furniture.

Edit: University of Texas, Austin student protestors are being dispersed by police. And possibly vanned. Protests now seem to be nationwide.

Edit: Mass arrests beginning at USC protests.

Edit: Tasers and rubber bullets being deployed against protestors at Emory University in Georgia.

Edit: There appear to be police snipers monitoring protests at Ohio State University.

I wonder how much of this is just boredom? It’s a slow news cycle. The Iran stuff turned out to be a nothingburger. What are the politically-active class supposed to get riled up at this week, Trump’s courtroom farts? (I’m not kidding. That was the other option here.) The masses demand a current thing at all times. I mean really, endowment divesture? Would anyone care about this if there were a salient mass shooting anywhere in the country over the weekend?

Something like that…maybe. Evidence: the number of alternate topics in this thread.

Calling it class interest or even a cohesive demand is a bit much, though. It’s not the same people protesting every time. I’d say there’s a background temperature of discontent which, this week, happened to be hottest around Columbia. Even if we had known that Iran’s launch would blow over, we could never have predicted that this was going to top the leaderboard for today.

It’s not the same people protesting every time.

I'm not directly familiar with US protest culture, but in the UK it so is. Sometimes they forget to change the protest signs and people march against student funding cuts behind a "Free Palestine" banner. We have a single-digit number of activist groups experienced in organising this kind of noisy, disruptive protest, and until the SWP collapsed due to sex scandals most of them were SWP front organisations.

Even if you look at people rather than orgs, we are talking about a subculture (strictly two subcultures because the socialist-anarchist split hasn't gone anywhere) involving a few thousand people split between a small number of big cities (mostly London and Bristol in the UK) which is cohesive to have its own values. The tribal values of the subculture that is socialist protest includes a hierarchy of issues, and Palestine is number 2 on the list after opposing US foreign policy.

In my experience it could be best stated as there's a subculture of anarchists/communists who basically participate in every left-aligned protest, but many of the protests (particularly bigger ones on popular subjects like anti-austerity or LGBTQ+ rights) will also attract a changing crowd of other, more normie types, which means the anarchist/communist contigent is less notable.

Also the folks who bring Palestine flags to every protest tend to be Middle-Easterners, often actual Palestinians, themselves.

In my experience it could be best stated as there's a subculture of anarchists/communists who basically participate in every left-aligned protest, but many of the protests (particularly bigger ones on popular subjects like anti-austerity or LGBTQ+ rights) will also attract a changing crowd of other, more normie types, which means the anarchist/communist contigent is less notable.

From a UK perspective, the problem is that the SWP crowd have the necessary skills to organise large protests which skirt the boundaries of legality, and the normies don't. So unless the protest is organised by some other group with access to those skills (like a union), it inevitably becomes a SWP-led protest. I became something of a meme in left-wing student circles after I was identified as "the Lib Dem who turned up at a demo in a black cab" - I had 50 protest signs with Lib Dem sympathetic messages to dish out to Lib Dem supporters and a taxi was the only way to get them from the sign printer to the protest in the time available. The SWP had pre-distributed 2 or 3 protest signs each with SWP-sympathetic messages to the 100+ activists they had milling around the start, and lots of non-SWP-supporters ended up carrying because they thought they were just picking up a spare sign from another protestor.

Also the folks who bring Palestine flags to every protest tend to be Middle-Easterners, often actual Palestinians, themselves.

In the 1990s most of the Middle Easterners in the UK were either rich Arabs (who didn't go on protests) or Turkish Cypriots (who don't care about Palestine). The "every demo is about Palestine" dynamic back then was definitely driven by white British lefties. Looking at media coverage, I think that 2024-vintage pro-Palestine protests in the UK are dominated by people from predominantly-Muslim ethnic groups, although I see more South Asians than Middle Easterners.

One of the particularities of Finnish protest culture is that most activist-led protests, probably due to anarchist influence, will announce that political party signs and flags should not be brought in the protest, presumably to combat potential protest takeovers like that. Also there's no major Trotskyist groups to speak of, and the closest equivalent as a communist group that's experienced in organizing protests, the Communist Party of Finland, tends to have a subdued profile in the protest themselves.

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