As I reflect on my first full year here at EMU, I am overwhelmingly grateful for the experience. I now have friends in (almost) every corner of the world. My worldview has been enriched by the plight of our fellow human beings, and the struggles each community faces. It made me think of the old Eugene Debs quote: “I have no country to fight for, I am a citizen of the earth.”
Regardless of our ideological differences, we all have our shared humanity, which is something I’ve always felt strongly about, only reinforced by my short time here on campus. We’ve taken up the fight against ICE, Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people and anthropomorphic climate change. We’ve done wonderful mobilizations around these issues which are all interconnected to the broader fight against the international class structure we live under in this current time.
The fate of every human being on planet earth depends on whether our fellow human beings are being sufficiently taken care of or not. We are blinded by the two-party system, which has a massive hegemonic hold over U.S. politics. We fight amongst ourselves appearing as opposing sides, despite our shared class position. Now more than ever, is the time for us to unite as the working class here in the United States Empire. According to data from inequality.org, in the United States today, the top one percent holds 31% of total wealth, which is slightly less than the entire bottom 90%.
Historically, the production mode of capitalism is predicated on a class divide over the ownership of the means of production. The ownership class, which has say over the who, what, when, where, and why of your workplace, dictates the every move of society. The Israeli oil and surveillance lobbies we’ve mobilized against on campus this year all have this primitive accumulation-era divide to thank for their historic influence over USian lives. As we head towards a summer break, let your anger carry you. You have every right to feel angry, as we are a university fundamentally built on the passage of Matthew 20:16. As for an alternative to the historical divide of capital accumulation? It’s a spectre that once haunted Europe, and has spread to every corner of the world, becoming undeniable. So much so in the United States Empire in fact, that Fred Hampton once famously uttered, “If you’re afraid of this, you’re afraid of yourself.” Truly, as an international working class, we must stand in solidarity with one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”