The Beginning of the End
This piece was originally published in Issue 7 of The Written Resistance, a quarterly publication by the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP).
A few weeks ago, “The Beginning of the End,” a piece on academia’s grotesque repression of the movement for Palestine, was published in Issue 7 of The Written Resistance, titled “You Can Crush the Flowers, But You Cannot Delay the Spring.”
As the Editorial Board writes, “This issue of The Written Resistance is written from and for this fight. From the multi-pronged defense of Palestine on campus, to the migrant-led resistance in our neighborhoods, to the tenuous threads of internationalism and global solidarity being carefully woven through our movements, our struggles—and our victories—are intertwined. Spring does not come after the struggle. It is the struggle.” This publication is a space by NSJP to platform student experiences and analysis. The Written Resistance is the only newsletter directly serving the student movement, designed to foster chatter and help us unite the student movement for Palestinian liberation.
I am grateful to NSJP for giving me this space to express my thoughts on the beginning of the end in academia.
Slightly over one year ago, university students in the United States and Canada launched the historic Student Intifada, an uprising that quickly spread across the world. Approximately seven months after the beginning of the U.S.-funded and armed annihilation campaign in Gaza, students and community members embarked on the most confrontational series of actions in contemporary movement history. They not only insisted on asserting the physical presence of the movement for Palestine within academic institutions, but also exposed the underlying logic of the university as a tool of empire. With this exposure, of course, came a repressive reaction. It is clearer now than ever before that both public and private universities across North America prioritize their function as profitable corporations and arms of the state over the free pursuit of knowledge and the rights of students, faculty, and staff.
Our universities are undeniably willing participants in the ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine. Endowment funds and have lent tens of millions of dollars of invested capital to arms and weapons manufacturers over the past year alone. Engineering and mathematics departments serve as research labs for the production and evolution of grotesque machinery, weaponry, and now artificial intelligence tools used to surveil and precisely kill Palestinians. This is not questioned; departments across all academic disciplines cradle Zionism as an indisputable given. However, the mechanism of academia as an extension of empire extends beyond these investments and research; it permeates every aspect of student life — or rather, the (re)production of good students and good workers.
Universities in the neoliberal age can be understood as one of the pathways that lead to alienation. Marx’s theory of alienation is commonly understood as the estrangement from the fruits of one’s labor and the labor itself, from one’s potential for productive activity outside of work, from oneself and others, and from one’s own political or politicized existence. This is indeed part of what Marx and Marxist intellectuals theorize, but it is not entirely representative of the theory as a whole. Wage laborers, the most profoundly exploited and alienated workers, sell their labor-power, their capacity to work for a wage and produce commodities for the capitalist, who then pockets the surplus. In that sense, this very commodity is alienated from the worker who produces it to live. It is this process at its core that creates the good worker: a worker who simply produces as a means of living, estranged from the fruit of their labor while also being prevented from achieving political consciousness or self-realization.
Applying this to the academic terrain, a good student and academic produces commodified knowledge to be used both by the state and weapons manufacturers in genocidal warfare, commodified knowledge used by draconian health megacorporations that patent and price-gouge life-saving medications, commodified knowledge used by dystopian surveillance police-robots, or the real estate goliaths that gentrify neighborhoods. A good student and academic may recognize the contradictions at hand, that their tuition and research are used to build weapons of mass destruction—things they may not necessarily “agree” with—but restrict themselves to a reality that presumably cannot be changed. A good student and academic is indeed a deeply alienated one, someone whose hands are perennially tied.
In that sense, those who challenge the status quo are not good students or academics, because they fundamentally confront the logic of academia and, by extension, any ideological apparatus under capitalism: to continue to (re)produce the relations of production and the productive forces that produce them. What the Student Intifada ultimately exposed, then, is that universities will go to extreme lengths – disciplinary action, evictions, exposing students to brutalization and incarceration, and deportations – to protect the material conditions which sustain them. Even when universities protect their interests by doing what was thought to be impermissible, they are punished by the state itself.
And yet, they double down. This violence that universities have unleashed against students, staff, and faculty is not only a demonstration of what is conveniently deemed permissible to preserve and reproduce the conditions of production; it is also evidence of the crumbling logic of academia as an extension of empire. Like many violent institutions and empires before it, universities will not retreat peacefully and allow for the development of alternative, better conditions; they will fight for survival as forcefully as possible. As Samir Amin says, “a senile system is not one that shuffles peacefully through its last days.”
This is not a condemnation of the pursuit and practice of higher education in and of itself, nor is it a call for the total abandonment of previous organizing strategies. It is rather a call for building the power to create a new university, a long and arduous process that is already underway as our current conditions crumble. It is an invitation to not only imagine but also secure an academic future that wholly rejects the premise of epistemological and material investment in imperialist warfare and the profiteering of megacorporations, one that fundamentally rejects the premise of knowledge-as-commodity as a natural extension of higher education. This is fundamentally what it means to struggle for liberation: to viscerally believe in and work toward a better future—this conviction must extend to the university as a site of struggle.
It is now where Fanon’s precondition of liberation and Lara Sheehi’s theory and practice of militant clarity and psychic militancy matter most. It must be clear that the goal is not cosmetic changes to academia within a decaying capitalist dystopia; rather, it is a rejection of neoliberal academia as a starting point and an unwavering commitment to building liberated, popular institutions from the ground up. For a moment, the Student Intifada actualised this militant clarity on the lawns of their repressive institutions, rejecting firstly the premise of an everlasting relationship between academia and militarization, and secondly the capitalist premise of “private property” in its totality. It was this confrontation with the very logic of capitalism that unleashed the wrath of universities against their students, and it was this confrontation that struck fear in the hearts of those who profit at our expense, uncovering the cracks in the status quo and triggering the beginning of its end.