The hunger strike is over, but the struggle continues

The hunger strike was a critical stage of student resistance to racist CU policies and extracted important concessions from the university administration. However, these concessions are primarily important not because the reforms themselves, but because they demonstrated the power of students united. They showed that the way to wage a sharp struggle is through unity, strength, and rising militancy.

To take on the university's anti-worker expansion into Harlem, the end of the hunger strike must signal the beginning of a qualitatively new phase of the struggle. It is time to simultaneously broaden and sharpen the attack. Most critically, now we must demonstrate not just the power of student unity, but that of worker-student unity, between Harlem's working masses and CU's student body.

The student resistance, like the most basic laws of motion, is driven forward by contradictions both external (the students vs. the university) and internal (student reformism vs. radicalism/revolutionism). The more advanced the struggle becomes, the more workers and students unite in camaraderie and action, the harsher the university will react. This is to be expected, and will be a good sign that we are finally moving forward and doing something right.

Internally, as well, the divide between reform and revolution, between the demand for superficial vs. structural change, will continue to become increasingly polarized. This, like the intensification of the external contradictions, is to be welcomed. Progress is only made through the intensification of contradiction.

The situation with the university was like a pot of water. The hunger strike provided heat, and slowly but surely, and eventually faster and more rapidly, small bubbles of resistance and struggle began to form, rising to the surface. The end of the strike leaves us open to two directions: turning off the heat, or letting it bring the water to a new qualitative form: boiling, turning it to steam.

The important thing is to rally the student body and the Harlem working class around the radical, revolutionary pole by continuing (but again, a newer, bigger way) what the hunger strikers made an truly amazing start of: Harlem/community worker-Columbia student unity.