Socialist group admits aiding bourgeois university, disbands
A radical socialist group at Indiana University-Bloomington is disbanding itself after realizing that its efforts only reinforced the “bourgeois” nature of the institution.
Students Against State Violence (SASV), an anti-capitalist student group that claimed to be “building a movement against patriarchy, white supremacy, socioeconomic inequality, and imperialism,” announced in a public statement released last week that it will be dissolving itself as of the Spring semester.
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“As of this Spring semester, Students Against State Violence has made the intentional decision to dissolve,” the statement reads. “Moving on, we will focus our energies on other organizing efforts both on campus and in the larger community.”
According to the document, the group arrived at the decision to disband “through self-criticism of our goals, tactics, struggles, successes, and frustrations.”
“It is vital to understand that university education in capitalist countries functions primarily to reproduce class,” the organization explains. “It funnels petty-bourgeois students back into the petty-bourgeoisie—a class of managers and small business owners who imitate the bourgeoisie in their exploitation of workers and propagation of neoliberal values—and keeps bourgeois students in the bourgeoisie.”
As previously reported by Campus Reform, the radical group has been an active promoter of anti-capitalist vandalism on campus, and has distributed pamphlets that urged students to destroy the property of right-leaning organizations.
[RELATED: Student group promotes anti-capitalist vandalism at career fair]
In its lengthy public statement, the group goes on to argue that the university is indoctrinating students with neoliberal ideologies and is training the campus police, who they refer to as “slave catchers,” to detain and “murder” people of color.
The university, SASV claims, is also training “fledgling capitalists” to extract “surplus value” from areas of the world that are “still in the vice grip of colonialist exploitation.”
The student group explains that by focusing on education reform and other university campaigns, it was often directly contributing “to the myth that bourgeois education can be a vehicle for mitigating class contradictions.”
[RELATED: Student group promotes anti-capitalist vandalism at career fair]
Moving forward, therefore, the group has decided to direct its efforts toward supporting the working class in the surrounding community and on campus, but not as an official student group.
SASV stresses the importance of avoiding cooperation within the university system, stating that it will never allow for the dismantling of capitalist America.
“We must dismantle the bourgeois university along with the capitalist settler-state of the USA,” SASV writes. “Working within the university structure will never allow us to meet this ultimate goal.”
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