The Al-Aqsa War still rages on. The genocide in Palestine — carried out in fits and starts between full-throated calls for annihilation and interim periods of slow but murderous liberal or labor zionism — has not ceased. It’s unlikely that this state of affairs will cease before at least this November, when the right zionist bloc of the U.S. ruling class hopes to back an even more pliant political arrangement here. At the same time, the student movement is now entering a period of potential lull. Classes are ending for the summer, which will undoubtedly drain the strength (in raw numbers if nothing else) of the movement. Add to this the serious degree of state repression — arrests, expulsions, police violence, the closing down of federal jobs to graduates from the institutions where protests occurred, etc. — and it’s clear that the momentum is at risk of stalling.

No one involved thinks this is the end. However, slowing down and reassessing, taking time to build a more militant, developed, structured movement with a broader base in the wider labor struggle, and preparing for a resumed offensive in August and September may actually be a hidden benefit of this current ebb. The time has come to make a tactical retreat, to gather our forces, to enhance our position, and to solidify our organizations. The coming summer gives us breathing room for a more serious confrontation with the enemy state.

This Is A Class Fight

First and foremost, the need should be clear to broaden the social base of the movement. Already, tentative linkages have formed with radical labor. These must be developed and expanded.

This isn’t a labor issue merely because it’s progressive and radical labor has also been historically a politically progressive force. It’s a labor issue because the struggle for Palestinian liberation is a class struggle of the international working class. The zionist state is a fortress of western capital. It is a hub for U.S.-Canadian technical labor — Amazon, AOL, Apple, AT&T, Cisco, HP, IBM, Google, Vimeo, etc., etc. — and provides a pool of trained petit-bourgeois settlers to serve as managers and researchers in the vast technical machine of U.S. capital. It serves as a testing ground for new U.S. weapons systems and counterinsurgency techniques which are eventually used on the domestic working population here — on us. It is a forward base for U.S. forces in Asia, a watchdog for the Saudi puppet regime, and a counterweight to Arab nationalism. It provides the U.S.-Canadian empire with the launching pad for keeping oil cheap, and intelligence services that act as, essentially, extensions of the U.S. state.

Expanding the class base of the student movement to include the radical working class isn’t merely good strategic sense for the student movement and the liberation of Palestine, it is also the correct position for far-sighted workers in the U.S. and Canada to take in their own interests. The liberation of Palestine is tied up in our own liberation.

Development and Organization

We urge all class-conscious members of the student movement to work over the summer at increasing:

1. The political development of the movement,
2. The discipline of the movement,
3. The organization of the movement, and
4. The connection between the movement and the broader working class as well as the putative Communists in the empire.

To those Communists and radicals, we urge that you (as we currently are, and others outside our organization have) become immediately involved if they are not; that they assist the student-radicals in the above areas, that they offer their services to the student-organizers and put themselves at those organizers’ disposal.

The conscious and active elements of the movement will carry forward the struggle when the masses are not active. We must not surrender the struggle now, but press forward.

In order to accomplish these tasks, we urge the following steps be taken:

1. Establish  a study group or groups within each population of students planning to act in August to study the Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, written by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a constituent member of the current resistance. We have a guide to forming a study group available free of cost on the USU website, as well as draft courses of study that our Pressworkers have actually pursued. Should a student group be unable to find someone who can act as a facilitator familiar with the texts, USU can work either to locate such a person or provide one remotely.
2. Engage in training, either with USU, some other group, or through internal study to consider the ways in which discipline can be improved. Identify the absolute numbers of reliable student-organizers who will be willing to act again.
3. Establish democratic organs to help guide and lead future encampments and movement. Study the methods of conducting mass meetings and come to a collective agreement about allowing the present, continuing leadership to be subject to regular democratic elections at a short period from the membership of any camp, should such a camp form.
4. Establish  a Red Library in each locality, a physical station with copies of radical literature, that can serve as the nerve center of a broader program of political development once the movement picks up.
5. Reach out — either directly or using an intermediary (again such as USU) — to radical union locals and other community groups prepared to enter the struggle such as ethical petit-bourgeois businesses, congregations of all kinds, survival programs, and communists, to permit them to assist future efforts and add bodies, labor, organizational insights, political clout, and so on, to the movement.

From without, the enemy may see this as a period of rest. For us beneath the surface, this should in actuality be a period of hidden activity, a time of building and rebuilding; of transforming the spontaneous into the organized, of linking up each disparate locality, of broadening the base and power of the movement. Before we build barricades anew we must learn, together, to hold them.

We urge all advanced and active members in the movement to take steps to stiffen the resistance to come, to study, and to prepare for August. Toward the liberation of Palestine, and the revolution!