History of Student Protests

The protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that have erupted on college campuses around the United States are merely the latest in a tradition of student-led, left-leaning activism dating back at least to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s.

Some of the student protests, like the Civil Rights and anti-apartheid movements, helped achieve tangible goals that have become broadly accepted over time. Others continue to stir debate about their wisdom and efficacy. The current movement is notable for the way it has divided not only Americans in general, but Americans who identify as liberal, over the thorny question of when criticism of Israel veers into antisemitism.

(Four students were killed and nine wounded by National Guard members responding to anti-Vietnam War protests at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, in 1970,Credit…Larry Stoddard/Associated Press)

Like the older movements, the current one is likely to be the subject of decades of research into its origins, its aims and its aftereffects. In the short term, politicians, including the presumptive Republican and Democratic presidential nominees, are implicitly acknowledging its potential power to sway elections in the way the demonstrations of 1968 are often credited with helping to doom the Democratic presidential candidacy of Hubert H. Humphrey and elect Richard M. Nixon.

“Student movements in the United States are never popular off campus,” said Robert Cohen, a historian at New York University. “And that’s a reflection of a kind of underlying cultural conservatism of the country. It’s like, ‘Shut up and study. You’re not respecting your elders, you’re supposed to be seen, not heard.’”

(Demonstrators at Harvard in 1978 called for the university to divest itself of stocks owned in companies operating in South Africa. Credit…Associated Press/Associated Press)

Black activists in the United States have a long and complicated history when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Soon after the 1967 war between Israel and neighboring Arab states, leaders of the S.N.C.C., which had grown increasingly radicalized, stated that Jews were “imitating their Nazi oppressors” by using terror tactics on Arabs. Such statements led to denunciations from more moderate Civil Rights forces just as comparisons of Israelis to genocidal regimes are making more moderate liberals queasy today.

For Mr. Crandell — a Black man who was suspended from Tulane this week for his participation in the protests — there is no debate. “We are witnessing a genocide in real time,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday.

Speaking of Black Americans and Palestinians, he added: “All of our struggles are together.”

Susan Beachy contributed research.

Richard Fausset, based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice. More about Richard Fausset

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One of the courses I teach is called “Science, Activism, and Political Conflict,” and one of my ambitions with that course is to show students that both of these things—activism and political conflict—are normal in science, and in academic life more generally. That’s a theme that we like to emphasize when speaking in “defense” of student protest. It’s part of a storied tradition, it’s respectable, it’s normal. But in order to explain why I think what you all are doing is so important, I want to start today by saying that actually, student protest is nowhere near normal enough in the history of higher education in this country. The real scandal is not that there has been student protest. It is that there has not been much, much more of it.

The way we narrate the 1960s campus antiwar movement today foregrounds specifically student activism. That’s as it should be: students supplied the movement with most of its energy and especially with most of its courage. Like we see today, students are often more willing than faculty to take risks for the causes they believe in. But I think sometimes a one-sided emphasis on student activism can reproduce a condescending attitude toward protest, framing it as an expression of youthful exuberance—as if there were anything wrong with that—rather than the necessary corollary of eminently reasonable political and moral principles. So I want to note that opposition to the Vietnam War—and to universities’ material complicity in the American-backed slaughter—transcended all boundaries on campus.

We have spent months naming what is happening to Gaza: an atrocity fully commensurable with the great atrocities in which the United States was involved in the twentieth century, with support from companies that elite university endowments invest in. But it often seems—and I say this above all in a spirit of self-reproach—that we don’t really believe it, or else we would have reached the breaking point described by Savio, that point when continued participation in the machine becomes impossible and you have no choice but to defect. You all are showing that you do believe it. And that you understand that the reality of genocide demands refusal.

In the midst of the Great Depression, as fascism gained momentum and the world moved again toward war, a group of radical scientists in Great Britain attempted to organize their fellow scientific workers—to recruit them to the cause of revolutionary anti-imperialism. In my class, we read a book by one of them, the crystallographer John Desmond Bernal, called The Social Function of Science. There Bernal makes an argument that I think is even more important today than when he first wrote it:

The fact is that we are emerging from a period when war was a specialized task affecting a small portion of the community, and are now reverting to one in which every member of the community, tribe, or nation is primarily a warrior. Under modern industrial conditions war is no longer fought only by the men in the field of battle but by the whole national industrial complex. The indirectness of participation is a very convenient mask.

That is the mask with which Harvard hides its complicity with the American military-industrial complex and its investments in Israel’s war machine. And it is the mask that you all are threatening to remove. I hope you succeed.

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Indigenous rangers in Australia’s Western Desert got a rare close-up with the northern marsupial mole, which is tiny, light-colored and blind, and almost never comes to the surface.

By Anthony Ham

May 1, 2024

If you saw a northern marsupial mole, you might be surprised. Known to the First Nations peoples in the Western Desert of Australia as the kakarratul, it is eyeless and has shaggy golden fur. Just four inches from nose to tail, the animal would fit in the palm of your hand. And unlike the mole species of North America, it is a marsupial.

But you probably wouldn’t see one: While the animals are plentiful, sightings remain extremely rare because northern marsupial moles live in tunnels beneath sand dunes, navigating them with a swimming-like motion using flipper-like front feet.

“This is the hardest of all the animals to find,” said Denzel Hunter, an Indigenous ranger who works to survey and conserve wildlife in the lands of the Nyangumarta people. “Every time we go out looking for northern marsupial moles, we find evidence that they’re there. But I’ve never seen one.”

Earlier this month, Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa Martu rangers found a kakarratul in the Great Sandy Desert, nearly 1,000 miles northeast of Perth. Their photographs of the creature, which has been spotted only a handful of times in the past decade, expand scientific knowledge of the species as well as of the wider desert regions that make up close to one-third of Australia’s land mass.

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Capitalism is now dead, in the sense that its dynamics no longer govern our economies. In that role it has been replaced by something fundamentally different, which I call technofeudalism. At the heart of my thesis is an irony that may sound confusing at first but which I contend makes perfect sense: the thing that has killed capitalism is… capital itself. Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial era, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful than its predecessor that like a stupid, overzealous virus it has killed off its host. What caused this to happen? Two main developments: the privatization of the internet by America’s and China’s Big Tech. And the manner in which Western governments and central banks responded to the 2008 great financial crisis.

If we do pay attention, it is not hard to see that capital’s mutation into what I call cloud capital has demolished capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits. Of course, markets and profits remain ubiquitous—indeed, markets and profits were ubiquitous under feudalism too—they just aren’t running the show anymore. What has happened over the last two decades is that profit and markets have been evicted from the epicenter of our economic and social system, pushed out to its margins, and replaced. With what? Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud rent. As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labor, but they are not in charge as they once were. They have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labor—in addition to the waged labor we perform, when we get the chance.

This great transformation, triggered by capital’s recent mutation, comes three centuries after capital’s original triumph in transforming feudalism into capitalism. Capitalism prevailed when profit overwhelmed rent, a historic triumph coinciding with the transformation of productive work and property rights into commodities to be sold via labor and share markets respectively. It was not just an economic victory. Whereas rent reeked of vulgar exploitation, profit claimed moral superiority as a just reward to brave entrepreneurs risking everything to navigate the treacherous currents of stormy markets. Nevertheless, despite profit’s triumph, rent survived capitalism’s golden age in the same way that remnants of the DNA of our ancient ancestors, including long-extinct serpents and microbes, survive in human DNA. Capitalist mega-firms, like Ford, Edison, General Electric, General Motors, ThyssenKrupp, Volkswagen, Toyota, Sony and all the others, generated the profits that outweighed rent and propelled capitalism to its dominance. However, like remora fish living parasitically in the shadow of great sharks, some rentiers not only survived but, in fact, flourished by feeding on the generous scraps left in profit’s wake. Oil companies, for example, have raked in gargantuan ground rents from the right to drill on particular plots of land or ocean beds—not to mention the unearned privilege to damage the planet at no cost to themselves.

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