FBI ATTEMPTS TO REPRESS GROWING STRUGGLE AGAINST FASCISM AT RUTGERS
The U.S. government has dispatched agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to New Jersey in order to harass student and community organizers. This latest attack has targeted the leaders of last year's mass protests demanding the resignation of the fascist sympathizer Francis Lawrence, president of Rutgers University.
RUTGERS STUDENTS RISE UP AGAINST FASCISM
During the spring of 1995, Lawrence earned the anger of the students by promoting the fascist lie that Black students have an inferior "genetic, hereditary background." Demonstrations, with as many as a thousand participants, were the largest at Rutgers in decades. Student leaders demanded Lawrence¹s resignation, a tuition rollback, the abolition of the appointed Rutgers Board of Governors (BOG) and increased enrollment of people of color. These demands broadened the struggle to the long-standing fight to bring the state university back to the working masses, out of the treacherous hands of petty-bourgeois bureaucrats serving mega-corporations.
Lawrence, the BOG, and NJ Governor Christine Todd Whitman first tried to deny that the fascist statement was ever made. Then they offered apologies. The students saw right through these flimsy attempts to force them to accept an unprincipled peace. The protests continued and increasingly exposed the true face of the university administrators and politicians who refused to address any of the students' demands. The students' struggle began to threaten the local interests of the U.S. bourgeoisie.
THE FBI COMES TO THE RESCUE OF A FASCIST SYMPATHIZER
The FBI officially arrived at Rutgers on April 5, 1995, following a "pipe-bomb explosion" supposed to have occurred in the Mabel Smith Library on Douglass Campus. The police reported another "pipe-bomb" at the library, this one "unexploded," on April 6. Since the "explosion" occurred at night, while the library was closed, it resulted in no injuries and only caused minor fire damage to bookshelves. No"explosive devices" were ever produced for the press to review, and no one claimed responsibility for the "bombing."
Following the arrival of the FBI agents, whose stated purpose was to "investigate" the "bombing," Rutgers University was placed under armed occupation. Students were searched by police upon entering any library, and patrol cars crisscrossed the university. FBI agents began questioning students on all the campuses, focusing on current and former campus activists. Student demonstrations held on campus and community rallies held in nearby New Brunswick were placed under heavy police surveillance.
This orchestrated state-of-siege, designed to intimidate the students, failed to stop the mass protests. The student leaders, who want nothing to do with petty acts of terrorism like placing "pipe-bombs" in libraries, understand that only political action by the masses will bring about change. They rejected the FBI's attempt to intimidate them and to divert their attention from their just struggle. The activists planned a march to Lawrence's tax-funded mansion for April 12, 1995.
THE FBI AND THE POLICE ARE THE TRUE TERRORISTS
The day of the march, the bourgeois state changed its tactics and tried to suppress the student movement with brute force. While the FBI agents supervised, police officers from several local departments assaulted the students who were peacefully assembled in front of Lawrence's driveway at the intersection of River Road and Route 18 in Piscataway. The students, sitting in a large circle, were sprayed with mace and beaten with billy clubs. Several demonstrators later reported that a gang of plain-clothed thugs armed with wooden clubs arrived at the scene in an unmarked van and began to taunt them with racial slurs, as uniformed officers looked on.
Following the rally, several student leaders were charged by mail with an assortment of vague misdemeanors - an underhanded tactic of political harassment often used by the Rutgers University Police Department (RUPD). One of the students who was handed criminal charges was not even at the rally, which indicates the police had previously identified student activists through surveillance of their organizing activities and singled them out for prosecution.
Throughout the summer, the FBI intensified its witch hunt. FBI agents repeatedly showed up at students' homes, at their places of work and even at their parents' homes to "ask some questions." First-hand information indicates the federal agents questioned at least several dozen students who belonged to the wide coalition that called for Lawrence's resignation. Interviews conducted with several student activists at Rutgers in the fall of 1995 revealed that the FBI mostly targeted Black and Latino student organizers, especially women.
To this day, neither the FBI nor the police have provided any justification for their harassment of student activists. None of the student groups or community organizations who demanded Lawrence's resignation advocate terrorism or vandalism. Not one of the dozens of speakers who addressed the large rallies throughout the spring of 1995 ever encouraged random acts of destruction. The FBI and the police never disclosed any evidence that the "pipe-bombs" had anything to do with Lawrence's comment. An objective assessment of these facts leads to the inevitable conclusion that it is the police, under the direction of the FBI, that has led a violent, racist and terroristic campaign of intimidation at Rutgers.
THE BOURGEOIS STATE STEPS UP POLITICAL REPRESSION AS CLASS CONTRADICTIONS SHARPEN
The RUPD has long conducted illegal surveillances of student organizers, selective arrests and, on several occasions, brutal assaults of students at rallies. The pandering bureaucrats of the Rutgers administration also contributed to political repression when they staged a kangaroo court to suspend eleven students who had participated in a building takeover in the struggle to stop tuition hikes in the spring of 1992.
As for the FBI, the role of the U.S. government is to enforce the rule of the giant multinational corporations owned by the U.S. bourgeoisie. As the international economic crisis deepens, the ruling class is forced to intensify the exploitation of workers and of oppressed nations to maintain profits. Thus the bourgeoisie must increase political repression and foster the poisonous ideology of fascism to divide the working masses. When a local struggle grows beyond the control of the local forces, the state will dispatch its elite troops, like the FBI.
Multinational corporations like Johnson & Johnson, AT&T, and Chemical Bank control the Rutgers Board of Governors. They are waging a ruthless campaign to turn the state university into a money-making machine at the expense of the people. They extract hundreds of millions of dollars in profits every year through student loans, product-testing in laboratories, union busting and other fraudulent means. To run their day-to-day operations they hired a president who speaks of multiculturalism and racial harmony in public while he promotes fascism behind closed doors. The organized resistance of the students to this all-out assault has steadily grown in strength and focus over the last ten years. Thus, last year, the students' struggle proved to be too large for the local forces of the Rutgers administration and the RUPD.
THE NEXT STEP IN THE CLASS STRUGGLE
We welcome the students' struggle as yet one more sign that the days of the U.S. bourgeoisie are counted. Economic and social decay grow worse every day. The ruling class is determined to hang on at all costs and that is why it finds bogus provocations to harass activists. On our side, we must draw the lesson that we must undertake to build revolutionary organization that can lead the working class to victory and political power over the bourgeoisie. Participation in the struggle for university democracy is a vital part of this task.
