Mass Arrests at UBC

Drop All Charges Now!

(Young Spartacus pages)

The Vancouver Spartacus Youth Club protests the arrest of protesters at the University of British Columbia by the RCMP on April 4. The arrests followed a peaceful concert against commercial development at UBC organized by Students for Democratic Society (SDS) and Trek Park for the People. The cops pushed, shoved and kicked protesters and threatened to use tasers. Some students had their faces forced into the pavement while being handcuffed with zip-ties. An SDS press release reported that student Alma Mater Society vice-president Stefanie Ratjen’s face was “shoved in a puddle of mud while an RCMP officer sat on top of her.” At least 19 people face charges. One student was charged with “assaulting a police officer,” and others with “obstructing a police officer.” Drop all charges now!

The UBC protesters received a taste of the treatment regularly meted out to the poor, minorities and working people by police in B.C. The tasering to death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport last fall made international headlines. Since then it has been revealed that at least ten B.C. Transit riders were tasered by cops since the start of 2007. On May 3 in Kamloops, the RCMP tasered an 82-year-old man, who had undergone bypass surgery, three times as he lay in his hospital bed! Police violence is intrinsic to capitalism. The cops, like the courts and army, are a central component of the capitalist state, which Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin described in his book The State and Revolution as “an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of ‘order,’ which legalises and perpetuates this oppression.”

In an April 5 statement, SDS declares: “Only a public inquiry can establish why the RCMP is distorting the events of April 4th.” We argue against any illusions in “public inquiries,” a standard tool of the capitalists to refurbish the image of their state machine. As we wrote on the Ipperwash inquiry into the racist 1995 Ontario Provincial Police killing of Native activist Dudley George:

“The capitalist rulers have a time-honoured strategy for dealing with public outrage. First, they lie through their golden teeth. Second, when anger persists, they stall. Then, if things still don’t settle down, they ‘reluctantly’ hold an ‘independent’ public inquiry, staffed by judges, professors, priests or other loyal representatives of the ruling class, and perhaps recommending token punishment for someone involved. The more thorough the investigation appears, the better it serves its ideological purpose: to prove that the system works, that the state is accountable to the ‘will of the people,’ and that justice has been served.”

—SC No. 146, Fall 2005

Now the B.C. Liberal government is conducting a public inquiry into the killing of Robert Dziekanski, a transparent attempt to defuse the mass anger over this cold-blooded execution.

Another SDS statement appeals to the UBC administration to “restrict police access to campus to prevent similar scenarios from occurring” and “ensure that students’ peaceful right to protest is protected.” The universities propagate bourgeois ideology, training the next generation of ideologues, technocrats, capitalist politicians and corporate lawyers needed by the capitalists to perpetuate their rule. We call to abolish the administration, which runs the university on the behalf of the ruling class. We call for student/teacher/worker control of the university, free tuition, open admissions and a living stipend for students.

We oppose the extension of the capitalist state onto the university campuses; as such we call for all cops off campus! We further demand that military and CSIS recruiters get off campus now! These are direct agents of the imperialist state machine that is today slaughtering people in Afghanistan. The SYC seeks to win students to the side of the working class and to struggle against the entire, barbaric capitalist system. Class antagonisms cannot be reconciled and the capitalist state cannot be reformed in the interests of the oppressed—it must be smashed through workers revolution.