PARTISAN!

Edith Fischer explains the tactical concerns of building occupations in the student movement for Palestine.

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Student demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance have exploded across the United States, before spreading to several other imperialist countries. These struggles present a vital opening for the escalation of the struggle against imperialism and the capitalist world order. The question of tactics in the student occupation movement is of immediate concern to all revolutionaries. It is imperative that a correct understanding of the task be disseminated far and wide. I propose the following points as an outline of the immediate tactical concerns for the movement:

Occupations are mass actions. An effective occupation is undertaken by large numbers of people, even if it begins with only a small and disciplined number. In all cases, it is the capacity to bring to bear numbers, in the occupation, in the streets, and in solidarity, that will decide the difference between success and failure. Comrades should avoid adventurist, direct actionist stunts which utilise small groups of cadres to carry out symbolic actions without mass support. At every step we must seek to grow the movement and win majority support behind militant action. An occupation that is not growing is in retreat!

Take the Buildings! They can be defended. When held by large numbers of comrades, they can be effectively held against police incursions. It is necessary to take them and hold them. More importantly, classrooms can be transformed into spaces for the carrying out of politics. Barricades should be erected and rooms opened up for meetings, sleeping space, kitchens, etc. Security cameras should be disabled. Let the schools of the regime become schools of the revolution!

Encampments are vulnerable but necessary. Wide open spaces allow the repressive forces of the state to play to their strengths. It allows the police to kettle demonstrators, it allows them to approach from all sides. However, the encampments cannot be abandoned. Put simply, they are the connection between those occupying the buildings and those on the outside. They allow supplies to be delivered, protesters and supporters to come and go, and otherwise allow for the open political growth in the movement. They must be maintained – even if that means getting dispersed and then returning in force.

Demands are a tool to raise political consciousness. By mapping the structural forces behind the power of the police and the university, by drawing out the complicity of the university and its state with the massacre in Gaza, by formulating these ideas into political demands, the occupations can raise political consciousness, both in the encampments and society as a whole. This is not a question of this or that reform. Our demands must put the whole institution on trial!

Democratic organisation is key to both efficacy and militancy. Two tendencies vie for influence over the student movement. One says that organisation should be rejected in favour of spontaneous, omni-directional militancy. The other says the movement must be led by an unelected leadership caste of NGO affiliated organisers. We are opposed to both poles in this debate. The alternative is democratic organisation. Assemblies should be open and held daily. Students and the worker press should be free to publicise, hold out on their views, and matters should be settled by majority votes.

We need to form accountable committees to carry out vital tasks. Committees should be formed and democratically elected – an organisational committee to implement decisions between meetings, a defence committee to organise picket defence, intelligence gathering, and lookouts, a political education committee, a logistics committee, a media liaison committee, a first aid committee, etc. All of these committees should make reports to the general assembly every day, and be immediately recallable by a general vote. Democracy is key.

Fending off the police is preferable to retreat, retreat is preferable to arrest, arrest is preferable to being dispersed. There is a simple order of operations at play. Dispersal and defeat should be avoided, of course – a managed retreat is preferable if the occupiers do not have a chance at repelling the cops. Mass arrest and the use of civil resistance tactics are preferable to simply being dispersed and defeated – however, we can and must fight back and resist the police.

We can and must challenge the power of the police. A cult of “civil disobedience” and “non-violent direct action” dominates the activist left. This cult must be challenged. As mentioned above, civil disobedience is a tactic that we should consider. But it should not be fetishised and elevated to political principle. Students, workers, youth, can and must learn to overcome their fear of the police. Every escalation must necessarily be a challenge to police power. Students must stretch the resources of the police, attack quickly and retreat, confuse and divide the enemy. We cannot have our comrades being beaten bloody, tased, and detained without any resistance. Lock arms and hold the pickets. Give chase when they retreat. Wear masks. Bring banners and flag poles. Erect barricades and construct shields. Only struggle, unity, and solidarity can overcome fear.

Go out with a bang, not a whimper. In 1905, in the face of the imminent suppression of the worker and peasant soviets, the Russian socialist movement undertook a hopeless insurrection against the Tsarist authorities in Moscow. In the view of Lenin and other prominent revolutionaries, the armed uprising was hopeless but necessary. Why? Simply, it dealt the regime a bloody nose, it gave workers valuable experience in street fighting, and it demonstrated to the entire country that the revolutionary flame would not fizzle out in the face of co-optation. What does this teach us? Simply, the worst way for a movement to end is with a fizzle. This produces no way forward for those radicalised, it breeds hopelessness and despair. It is better to either make a tactical retreat and fight another day, or to remain against hopeless odds and be smashed.

Finally, a note on strategy. I will quote here at length from Comrade Lenin, from the text On Strikes:

The government itself knows full well that strikes open the eyes of the workers and for this reason it has such a fear of strikes and does everything to stop them as quickly as possible… Every strike strengthens and develops in the workers the understanding that the government is their enemy and that the working class must prepare itself to struggle against the government for the people’s rights.

Strikes, therefore, teach the workers to unite; they show them that they can struggle against the capitalists only when they are united; strikes teach the workers to think of the struggle of the whole working class against the whole class of factory owners and against the arbitrary, police government. This is the reason that socialists call strikes “a school of war,” a school in which the workers learn to make war on their enemies for the liberation of the whole people, of all who labour, from the yoke of government officials and from the capital.

“A school of war” is, however, not war itself. When strikes are widespread among the workers, some of the workers (including some socialists) begin to believe that the working class can confine itself to strikes, strike funds, or strike associations alone; that by strikes alone the working class can achieve a considerable improvement in its conditions or even its emancipation. When they see what power there is in a united working class and even in small strikes, some think that the working class has only to organise a general strike throughout the whole country for the workers to get everything they want from the capitalists and the government. This idea was also expressed by the workers of other countries when the working-class movement was in its early stages and the workers were still very inexperienced. It is a mistaken idea. Strikes are one of the ways in which the working class struggles for its emancipation, but they are not the only way; and if the workers do not turn their attention to other means of conducting the struggle, they will slow down the growth and the successes of the working class…

The workers, therefore, cannot, under any circumstances, confine themselves to strike actions and strike associations…. strikes, as we have seen, show the workers that the government is their enemy and that a struggle against the government must be carried on. Actually, it is strikes that have gradually taught the working class of all countries to struggle against the governments for workers’ rights and for the rights of the people as a whole. As we have said, only a socialist workers’ party can carry on this struggle by spreading among the workers a true conception of the government and of the working-class cause…

From individual strikes the workers can and must go over, as indeed they are actually doing in all countries, to a struggle of the entire working class for the emancipation of all who labour. When all class-conscious workers become socialists, i.e., when they strive for this emancipation, when they unite throughout the whole country in order to spread socialism among the workers, in order to teach the workers all the means of struggle against their enemies, when they build up a socialist workers’ party that struggles for the emancipation of the people as a whole from government oppression and for the emancipation of all working people from the yoke of capital—only then will the working class become an integral part of that great movement of the workers of all countries that unites all workers and raises the red banner inscribed with the words: “Workers of all countries, unite!”

Comrades, we must avoid the trap of economism (limiting the scope of our politics to the immediate struggles of the class), and strikism (the reliance on mass struggle to sweep away the system absent systematic political organisation). Instead we must proffer a systematic critique of capitalist society and the imperialist world system, and work tirelessly to elevate. We must correctly apply the correct tactics in accordance with this general strategy. We must do this for the working masses of the world, not least in Palestine.

Forward to the World October.