I do not have very much faith in the graduate students’ wildcat strike at UCSC for a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), for a couple of reasons.

First, although some UCSC undergraduates have come out in support of the strike, most of them are silently praying for the administration to put all the graduate students in front of a firing squad. (Just stroll on over to r/UCSC and dip your tongue in the communal bowl of irony-poisoned, blood-soaked undergraduate vitriol.) Not every graduate student is in favorite of the strike either; apparently only fifteen percent of them signed on to it. Strike participation that low is greatly worrying.

Second, the graduate students’ union, the feckless and notoriously corrupt UAW, does not support their strike — it forced them to accept a no-strike clause in their contract — and at this point is merely angling for damage control. The administration realizes that the graduate students’ union will not protect them from getting fired and thrown out of school, so I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the 200 or so graduate students who have refused to turn in grades all get fired, whether they end up submitting them or not. (This does not mean that they should end the strike for fear of being fired. It just means that, in this instance, they have no protection, and that the threat of termination poses an obstacle to organizing a successful strike.)

Third, the strike has been centered entirely on graduate students — this is a suicide mission. If graduate students want to actually win their COLA, they will have to coordinate across all nine UC campuses, joining in solidarity with not only undergraduate workers, but also campus service workers and health employees. I am not faulting the graduate students for not having organized such alliances — in some instances, they already have — and I also recognize that organizing is made much more difficult by the fact that there are a hodgepodge of unions across the UC system. But limiting the strike to graduate workers will not work; they simply don’t pose enough of a threat by themselves.

I also have no doubts that UAW has done its best to keep graduate students from connecting the strike to broader issues pertaining to all UC workers, and to the political economy of higher education. And this segues into the fourth reason why I think the strike will fail: namely that, so far, UAW has been nothing but hostile toward the graduate students’ strike. It has shown that it will do whatever it can to placate tensions between the graduate students and the administration, assuming the role of peacekeeper and thus, by extension, strikebreaker. This is not even the first time that UAW has sold out the graduate students it claims to represent. When Harvard graduate students represented by UAW went on strike in December 2019, UAW ended up killing the strike in its crib, leaving the students in a worse position than they had occupied before the strike.

Without institutional backing, graduate students have been forced to rely on a GoFundMe campaign to finance their strike; there is currently no organizational infrastructure in place that students can use to form a rank-and-file committee entirely divorced from UAW. But there’s the rub: if graduate students at UCSC choose not to rely on UAW, they have no institutional alternative and must rely on communal direct action, but if they continue to rely on UAW, they will be sold out quicker than they can blink, and their strike will go out with a depressing, and potentially violent, whimper.

However, the picture is not all bleak. Graduate students at other UC campuses like UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara have been holding solidarity protests of their own, and some are even planning strikes if any UCSC graduate students get sacked. This is a beautiful display of solidarity and should be honored as such.

But — and this should be obvious, but, given the rhetoric flowing out of the Twittersphere, is clearly not— solidarity does not equal victory. Both the UC and UCSC administrations are more than able and willing to feed all the striking graduate students to the sharks and then some. They are simply capital’s enforcers in California’s public higher education system, and they give jack fuck if graduate students are homeless. If those graduate students want to get together and make a big fuss about it, the UC can simply delete their existence in response. There are plenty of foreign students just chomping at the bit for a student visa and a ticket to UCLA, students who will be made well-aware of the fate that will befall them if they attempt to agitate in the vein of their homeless predecessors.

Remember: Janet Napolitano, current President of the UC, had no qualms about deporting two million immigrants as Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security. To her firing 200 graduate students — and possibly deporting the international ones —is like taking a sip of water. To presume that 200 striking graduate students will generate a modicum of empathy in Napolitano — whose soul resembles a wooden baseball bat studded with nails — is to engage in grotesque wish-fulfillment. Hell, UCSC’s own president has already bused in cops from outside police departments, and they’ve wasted no time in breaking graduate students’ fingers and ripping out chunks of their hair.

As it stands, I don’t see this strike ending in a win for graduate students. There are simply too many factors working against them: Undergraduates hate the strike, UAW doesn’t support it, the administration has no qualms about stuffing 200 graduate students into the shredder, and the police have no shortage of batons and “pain-compliance” techniques with which to brutalize students. Sympathy protests and occupations and a relatively well-stocked strike fund are political theater at worst and beautiful acts of solidarity at best. Occupying a campus entrance and refusing to submit student’s grades is not going to win graduate students their COLA. If anything, those two tactics alone have merely served to arouse bitter resentment among undergraduates, and haven’t seemed to accomplish much else.

To win their COLA and make Napolitano and the rest of the UC administration bite the curb, UCSC graduate students must organize in solidarity with student workers, service workers and health employees, coordinating those efforts across all nine UC campuses. That might not even be enough, but it’s a fuck ton better than the Occupy-esque affective protest politics on display right now, which — if they are not immediately discarded — will assuredly drive the graduate students’ strike directly into the ground.