US: Terror on Campuses Amid Crisis of Capitalism
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Protests against the deportation of Hossein Abadi at Logan Airport, Boston, US. (Photo: Sarah Bentancourt, Commonwealth)
International students on US campuses are at present a terrified lot: they can be abducted, sent to some detention centre hundreds of miles from where they live, kept there for any length of time, and then deported abroad. And all this can happen to them not because they have violated any known law, but entirely at the whim of the administration. Exact estimates are difficult to come by, but about 1,500 students are reported to have had their student visas revoked and are facing deportation.
The administration has claimed in most cases that the targeted students had engaged in “anti-semitism”, but what constitutes anti-semitism is defined exclusively by the whim of the administration. There is no clear specification of the range of activities, even according to the administration, that can be said to fall under this rubric.
In fact, one student of Tufts University was targeted for co-authoring an op-ed article in the student newspaper of the university, Tufts Daily, asking the university to disinvest from Israel; another student was targeted merely for being related to an advisor to Hamas who had left that post a decade earlier and had even criticised the Hamas action in October 2023.
Even social media postings can get a student into trouble. Administration officials are currently busy poring over social media postings of students to determine who should be abducted and deported; and terrified students are busy deleting their social media posts lest they get into trouble.
There is not even any specification anywhere that “anti-semitism” is an actionable offence. The argument given for punishing students for “anti-semitism” is that the targeted students have acted against American foreign policy, one of whose global objectives is to fight anti-semitism. Any foreign student, it follows, can be deported for saying, or posting on social media, anything that is critical of US foreign policy.
Let us forget for a moment the fact that the very existence of Israel is an instance of ruthless settler colonialism that has displaced millions of Palestinians and taken over their land. Let us forget the fact that Israel is currently engaged quite blatantly in a genocide in Gaza that is an affront to the conscience of humanity. Let us forget the fact that lots of Jewish students have been active in the ongoing protests against this genocide. Let us forget the fact that even the majority of the people of Israel itself are opposed to what the Netanyahu government is doing in Gaza. Let us also forget the elementary fact that anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-semitism.
The point is that the US administration has taken upon itself the right to deport anyone it fancies on any excuse. Anti-semitism is the current excuse; but the actions of the administration portend an attack on any thinking and sensitive international student who dares to disagree with its views and actions.
If such an attack can be launched against foreign students and foreign teachers in universities, including even those who are Green Card holders, then there is no guarantee that it will not spread to American citizens too, notwithstanding the First Amendment to the US Constitution that protects free speech.
After all, it is a moot point whether Green Card- holding foreigners are entitled to protection under the First Amendment; but if they can be excluded from its purview, then even bona fide American citizens can well be excluded on the grounds that they were aiding and abetting “anti-American” elements.
Contrast this situation with what prevailed in the late 1960s and early 1970s when American campuses, and campuses in other countries as well, had seen massive movements against the Vietnam war. In all these movements, whether in the US or elsewhere, international students had participated as actively as students belonging to the countries where the protests were occurring. There was no question of foreign students facing any special threats, and hence being terrorised into acquiescence. The question naturally arises: what has changed since then to account for this contrast?
The basic difference lies in the context. Imperialism was as ruthless then as it is now, but it was an imperialism that, notwithstanding the defeat it was facing in Vietnam, had overcome the weakening of position it had suffered because of the Second World War; it had consolidated itself. True, it was severely challenged by the Soviet Union but it had managed to acquire the confidence that it would face up to that challenge.
It was this situation that was described, whether by Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse or by Marxist economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, as one where it had successfully manipulated its internal contradictions. The point is not whether they were absolutely correct in saying this; the point is that the situation lent itself to such a description.
By contrast, US imperialism today, and hence by implication imperialism in general, is enmeshed in a crisis. It is a symptom of the crisis that it desperately wishes to rid itself of all opposition, including, above all, intellectual opposition that comes from the campuses. In the Trump administration’s own words, the American campuses are filled with liberal and Left-wing elements that have to be got rid of. The open aggression displayed by the administration toward campus protests today is because of the crisis that the system faces.
Many would disagree with this proposition; they would argue instead that the difference between today and the period of the late 60s and early 70s lies essentially in the fact that a person like Trump who has a neo-fascist mindset is the US President today. But the reason that a person like Trump is elected president is precisely a manifestation of the crisis.
Neo-fascism, like the old fascism earlier, comes to the fore when the ruling classes ally themselves with neo-fascist elements in a period of crisis to ward off any challenge to their hegemony. Trump’s ascendancy in short, like that of Narendra Modi in India or Javier Milei in Argentina, and others of their kind, does not constitute the original cause. It has itself to be explained. And the proximate explanation for it lies in the unprecedented crisis that capitalism is facing at present.
It is a hallmark of the crisis that all attempts to resolve it within the system only succeed in aggravating it. This is clear from Trump’s actions, so much so that crisis-deniers, seeing only these actions and their perverse effect in aggravating the crisis, or what they perceive as creating the crisis, portray Trump as a “crazy” person; but underlying the actions of this “crazy” person is an insurmountable crisis.
Thus, Trump’s attempt to “get manufacturing back to the US” by imposing tariffs against imports from abroad, succeeded only in creating massive uncertainty all around, and hence a recessionary situation in the US itself, forcing a tariff pause on his part.
Likewise, Trump’s attempt to shore up the dollar by threatening retaliation against countries that promote “de-dollarisation” succeeded only in undermining the position of the dollar in the long-run by encouraging the formation of local trading arrangements that by-pass the dollar as a medium of circulation.
Exactly in the same way, Trump’s attempt to force foreign students who come to the US to quietly attend classes where they are taught only what his administration approves, and to avoid expressing any views on the burning problems that confront humanity, will backfire on the US educational system.
International students, of whom there are an estimated 1.1 million in the US at present, will simply stop coming to the US. Most of them are fee-paying students whose payments to a significant extent make the higher education system in the US viable.
With federal funding drying up for several universities (and this is quite apart from the drying up that the administration imposes as punishment on universities like Columbia and Harvard for nurturing so-called “anti-semitic” elements), the loss of revenue that foreign students not coming to the US will entail, will make several American universities financially unviable. And this is in addition to the great intellectual loss that the absence of international students, and the conformism that such absence will necessarily accompany, will give rise to in American universities.
This creates an opportunity for countries of the Global South to end the “brain drain” to the US and revamp their own education systems to retain their best talents. One cannot, of course, expect the Modi government to do this, but any democratic alternative to Modi must be take advantage of this opportunity. When the Nazis had come to power in Germany, Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore, aware that there would be an exodus of academics, especially Jewish academics, from that country, had made plans to attract some of them to Viswa Bharati. The democratic forces in our country must show similar awareness of the opportunities that the capitalist crisis provides today.
The writer is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The views are personal.
