The working class must come to the defense of students protesting the genocide in Gaza!

As the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for president, I denounce the police assault on protests at University of California Santa Cruz early this morning. As many as 30 students have been arrested in a brutal crackdown on an entirely peaceful encampment.

The police would not have taken this action without consulting with the UC administration and Board of Regents, which is controlled by the Democratic Party. Indeed, it is the Biden administration that has overseen the assault on protests across the country, including here in Detroit at Wayne State University earlier this week.

Both the Democrats and the Republicans are directing the massive crackdown on basic democratic rights, including the arrest of more than 3,000 people, mainly students. And the entire political establishment stands guilty of aiding and abetting the underlying crime, the genocide in Gaza.

The assault at UCSC took place during the ongoing anti-genocide strike by thousands of UC academic workers, who are also members of the United Auto Workers. The strike poses the need for the working class, using the methods of class struggle, to emerge as the basic political force against war and dictatorship.

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But the UAW apparatus, which has endorsed “genocide Joe” Biden, is playing a criminal role in limiting the strike. It has called out only a handful of campuses. Seeking to contain growing rank-and-file demands for an all-out strike, it just announced that UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara and UC San Diego will go out on strike next week.

And the apparatus had done nothing to inform autoworkers and other members of the UAW that the strike is even happening.

All academic workers should be on strike! The attack at UCSC is the response of the ruling class to the courageous stand taken by workers. Workers must respond through a full mobilization of their collective power.

And it is necessary to break the isolation of the academic workers by taking this fight into the working class as a whole.

The SEP campaign urges auto workers to form rank-and-file defense committees, independent of the apparatus, linking up with other sections of the working class to prepare actions against the war and in defense of the right to free speech.

It is the working class which has the power to defend democratic rights and oppose the genocide.