#364 | “Students acted because they had hope”: Demands For Divestment & The Imperial Boomerang w/ Arun Gupta

Photo by Arun Gupta. Used with permission.

Investigative journalist Arun Gupta returns to the podcast to report on the pro-Palestine student encampments that have bloomed on university and college campuses across the United States and around the world over the past several weeks. He has been documenting the protests on campuses across New York City, including Columbia University and City College of New York (CCNY), which has seen some of the most high-profile repression from police and counter-demonstration agitators.

“This movement is really about hope, and we should not lose sight of this fact. That is the most important story that should be coming out, that students acted because they had great hope. Hope is not woowoo; it is hardcore Marxist, materialistic, and dialectical. Hope comes from our collective strategizing and imagination, which is rooted in the material conditions. It is dialectical in the sense that you cannot achieve political change without having great hope and the imagination that we can do this: we will win—not that we can, but we will—and that is just absolutely fundamental. It’s not enough—you still need strategizing, leadership, organization, and some degree of luck. But radical change doesn’t flow from oppression. It flows from people who believe, amid the great horrors and traumas that the ruling class visits upon us, that we can collectively make the situation better, and that’s what all these students all exuded.”

Bio:

Arun Gupta is an investigative reporter who has written for the Guardian, the Daily Beast, the Intercept, The Washington Post, and other publications. He is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute, cooked professionally in New York City, and is author of the forthcoming, Apocalypse Chow: A Junk-Food Loving Chef Explains How America Created the Most Revolutionary Food System in History (The New Press).

Episode Notes:

Read Arun’s article, Students for Gaza are Undeterred published at Yes! Magazine

Subscribe to his newsletter, Life, the universe, and most things

Read his work at Yes! Magazine

Follow him on X/Twitter @arunindy

Music produced by Epik The Dawn.