THE BERKELEY STUDENT VOTE -- ANOTHER VICTORY FOR THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT
Radicals swept the elections for student government at the University of California at Berkeley, held November 29- December 1. The radical candidates for the student senate were all participants in the massive antidraft protests in Oakland during October, who had been disciplined by the university administration.
The elections provided a measure of the depth of antiwar sentiment among students in the United States, who are disfranchised from regular elections because of their age.
"Voice," the radical political party on the Berkeley campus, put up eleven candidates for the ten openings on the student senate: nine of the slate had been placed on disciplinary probation; two others, Peter Camejo and Reese Erlich, headed the slate as the suspended students.
The Voice slate would have won all ten positions except for an electoral provision guaranteeing minority representation to candidates from other parties polling more than ten percent of the vote.
Six seats went to the Voice ticket. The voting was by weighted ballots, and it was urged that Camejo and Erlich be the first and second choices, since the harshest disciplinary action had been taken against then.
Camejo, a well-known Trotskyist and spokesman for the Socialist Workers party, came in first. An article from Berkeley in the December 11 Militant said that "members of the election committee unofficially reported [Camejo's vote] to be the highest vote total in the history of student elections here."
It is expected that the university administration will attempt to prevent the elected Voice student senators from taking office on the ground that they are under disciplinary action.
The 27,000 students at the Berkeley campus have long been pace setters in the American student radical movement. The results of this election indicate that a clear majority are consciously opposed to the war in Vietnam and are ready to cast their votes for candidates who are avowed revolutionary socialists if they articulate these antiwar sentiments or are victimized for participating in antiwar actions.
While Berkeley is in advance of many other campuses in the United States, the same process is taking place across the country. The students as a whole are only the most visible indicators of a radicalization, developing over the issue of the war in Vietnam, that reaches deep into the American masses.
Antiwar sentiment is deepest among students and black people, but it penetrates a considerable and increasing section of the white working class.
The overt signs of the process include the teach-ins, rallies and demonstrations; the massive outpourings on April 15 and October 21; the plunge in Johnson's popularity; and the recent election in San Francisco where the vote on a referendum on the war registered 30 percent for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, with 18 percent abstaining and 52 percent opposed to immediate withdrawal but not necessarily in favor of the war.
At each stage the student movement has appeared as a harbinger of deeper motion among the masses. The Berkeley student election is another straw in the wind.