The Woke Left is Crippling the UCSC Graduate Students’ Strike
By: Randolph Hannah
Tags: Labor, Strike, Education, Graduate School, University Of California

“We’re winning!”

Until today I hadn’t heard of The People’s Coalition, the main group supporting the UCSC graduate students currently striking for a cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA). Despite its pretensions to solidarity, The People’s Coalition is helping graduate students sharpen the knives for their collective seppuku, sacrificing their strike on the nauseating altar of identity politics.

Graduate students at UCSC, instead of working alongside undergraduate, service, and medical workers, have blindly glommed onto The People’s Coalition, which aims to “put into conversation the foundations of white supremacy (i.e. anti-Blackness/enslavement, abelism, genocide, and orientalism) to understand fully the world of Oblivion in which we were born into.”

To be honest, I have no idea what the fuck any of that means — the sentence reads like it was written by a gimcrack neural network trained on critical race theory. (It probably was.) There are very few people who actually deny the existence of white supremacy, slavery, anti-black racism, ableism, genocide, and Orientalism. And there are very few people who actually deny that they disproportionately affect people’s daily lives. To claim that we need to “put them back into the conversation” is to wrap oneself in the mantle of pathological narcissism, erasing decades of work by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientist s— of every race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality — who crafted the literature that The People’s Coalition is now abusing to gain cultural capital.

What the UCSC graduate students don’t know — or simply chose to willfully ignore — is that by handing their fate over to a group of self-obsessed, bootless anarcho-primitivists, they’re only shotgun-blasting themselves in the feet. To actually gum up the system’s gears, they’ll need to organize not only graduate students, but all non-academic workers across all nine UC campuses. They can’t keep allowing the People’s Coalition to hoodwink them into blindly fetishizing its smooth-brained plan to “begin to create and re-create alternate ways of living [and] work to discredit and delegitimize the University, and broader ways of living and organizing society as non-viable … [and] to dismantle the University and these broader ways of living.”

(I desperately need someone to tell me in what universe a group dedicated to “dismantling the University” is even remotely suited to organize a wildcat strike on behalf of graduate students. It genuinely boggles the mind.)

The People’s Coalition does not seem very much concerned with organizing undergraduate, service, and medical workers across all nine UC campuses, nevermind the tens of thousands of workers in Santa Cruz proper. The People’s Coalition is certainly concerned, however, with making sure that graduate students of every race, gender, and sexual identity are represented by those on strike.

It’s quite telling, indeed, that UCSC graduate students haven’t reached out to the 12,000 Santa Clara County workers and 14,000 Northern California Safeway workers who both plan to strike on Friday, many of whom are people of color. Graduates students are either hesitant — or completely lack the desire— to bring in workers outside academia. Identitarian diversity stops with class. This is because most graduate students don’t consider themselves working class, afraid of putting themselves in the same category as those who work *gasp* non-academic jobs.

They haven’t connected their struggle for a COLA to how capitalism—not just the amorphous “UC” and Janet Napolitano—is responsible for workers’ and students’ collective economic misery. I guarantee that the graduate students are going to deeply regret not having organized non-academic workers because out of the initial two hundred UCSC graduate students who decided to withhold grades, only eighty-five of them remain. I’m not a statistician, but those numbers look like shit.

UCSC graduate students can keep sucking the posionous teat of politics all they want. Let them foolishly shunt non-academic workers to the side, and commit a monumental fuck-up. Because to be honest, the graduate students—in one of the most rotten displays of performative protest I have ever seen—may have actually nailed their coffin shut today.

Yesterday afternoon, the bright minds over at The People’s Coalition sprung upon the idea of interrupting a class full of computer science students taking a midterm. Some birdbrain, flanked by undergraduates cosplaying as radicals, walked up the to front of the class and began to berate the students for “crossing the picket line” and not realizing that the “this problem is bigger than your grades.” (Perhaps you should focus on, you know, making that connection instead of bleating at a class full of deer-eyed computer science majors.)

I cannot emphasize how fucking stupid this was. Undergraduates were already calling for the administration to chuck graduate students into the sea before this shitshow happened. Now they’re out for blood.

The only thing I think the graduate students are actually doing right is holding undergraduates’ grades hostage. They don’t have much leverage beyond that, mainly because UAW 2865—the union that represents the graduate students and, also, apparently, Janet Napolitano—is nothing but a den of snakes. I understand that UAW is running interference for UCSC — fuck ’em. But disrupting undergraduates while they’re taking a midterm is honestly a Nobel Prize-worthy way of getting undergraduates to fantasize about running you over with a bulldozer.

Sometimes it looks like the graduate students are actively trying to bleed themselves of the pitiful undergraduate support they still have left, and it’s not entirely clear what they’re doing to bring disaffected undergraduates back into the fold. They aren’t making an effort to organize those undergraduates whom the People’s Coalition would presumably want to organize: Those who are too poor to pay the rent, buy groceries, and regularly eat sleep for dinner.

Graduate students aren’t trying to communicate to undergraduates why the fight for a COLA is more than just an excuse to stand in the middle of the street holding a sign reading “GIVE US A COLA,” mindlessly rattling off statistics about how poor everybody is. (Yeah, I think we know we’re fucking poor.) They aren’t connecting their struggle for a COLA to how neoliberal capitalism has been savagely disemboweling public education for decades.

The UCSC graduate students definitely aren’t winning, and anyone who thinks otherwise is probably carrying cyanide-laced water for The People’s Coalition. I only pray that UCSB, UCD, and all the other UC campuses that decide to go on strike hurl this dog-and-pony-show politics into the garbage.

This all reminds me of political scientist Adolph Reed Jr.’s diatribe against the Woke Left in “Django Unchained, or, The Help: How ‘Cultural Politics’ Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why,” where he tears down its “fetishization of heroes and penchant for inspirational stories of individual Overcoming,” concluding that their narcissistic charades only serve to “mark the extent of our defeat.”

Sounds about right.