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Unable to turn back or undo the widespread popularity of the Palestinian solidarity movement in the domestic U.S., unable to defeat it in the theater of public opinion, unwilling to stop the ongoing genocide supported, encouraged, and puppeteered from Washington, the political department of the ruling class has moved from primarily using public pressure to primarily using brute force against the remaining student radicals. Physical kidnapping, criminal charges, and direct targeting of student radical leadership are all being employed. This is a playbook we’ve seen the government make use of before. The leaders of the Ferguson protest movement were killed, jailed, or disappeared in a similar way.
The time has come for all principled Marxists to engage directly with the student movement and aid it in its self-organization. The student movement must now adapt and advance to address the new needs it has called forth. The state is using a two-pronged assault on the movement: the first prong is the use of the legal repressive apparatus — the courts, the police, deportation — and the second prong is the use of the civil institutions acting as state agents (in this case the universities) which are expelling, suspending, and revoking the degrees of student radicals.
As repression intensifies, it becomes clearer and clearer that we Marxists have not learned the correct lessons from the initial attacks on the movement (see our prior article, “Join the Student Movement!”). The movement must become organized to a high degree. Organization must develop in a particular direction and particular fashion to address the attacks the movement is now suffering.
That means the movement must develop to address:
- Organizational safety from the university system’s discipline;
- Physical safety from federal and state agents of repression (police, ICE, etc.) as well as paramilitary responses from private citizens;
- Anonymity of the leadership cadre and opacity of plans of action;
- Open lines of retreat after actions, and cessation of all action that results in identification or arrest.
To the purpose of addressing these issues, we have put together the following plans that Marxists involved in the movement should pursue. As always, we encourage to the strongest degree that any Marxists involved form separate, Marxist-Leninist organizations that are not directly integrated into the student movement and that can guide and coordinate the actions of the individual Marxists involved.
Organizational Defense Against the Universities
The universities are the second rank of defense for the state against the advent of student radicalism. In particular, elite universities like Columbia serve as the center of social reproduction for the ruling class, and thus are very concerned with the needs and demands of that class. These universities obviously have a class-character and a class-standpoint; their faculty are overwhelmingly high petit-bourgeois or bourgeois and their class standpoint is direct adherence to the haute bourgeois imperialists.
Despite the fact that they are “private” institutions, the university system is very malleable to the wishes of the government (and thus, the ruling class through its government agents). They have traditionally been the seat of reproduction for the reactionary vanguard, the CIA, and have always acted hand-in-glove with the state itself. Thus, we should not view the university system as separate from the state, but rather an extension of the state’s power into the social life of society. The university is the agent of the state. In this way, they act as machines of repression like the courts and prisons.
Columbia in particular has increased its repressive activities against student radicals: they have fired the leader of a student-worker union, issued expulsions, suspensions, demanded in-class attendance despite the threat of federal agents prowling the campus to deport radicals, private hearings with students, etc.
Defense against these tactics cannot arise spontaneously; it must be coordinated. The universities, as de facto agencies of the state, are too large and powerful to bend to pressure unless that pressure is exerted on a mass scale. Even the student population itself may be too small to draw the necessary concessions. Thus, the defense against the universities requires the utmost in organizational advancement and will also require the development of direct ties between the student-radicals and the masses of workers in their immediate area. Luckily, even the petit-bourgeoisie is likely to be outraged at the encroachment of the universities on the traditional “liberties” (as liberals understand them) of the students, particularly those who are members of the petit-bourgeois or bourgeois ranks of society. This represents a contradiction which must be exploited, a wedge which must be leveraged against the universities to the greatest degree possible.
1. Internal Solidification and Resilience
Resiliency is the order of the day. Withstanding legal or quasi-legal pressure requires resilience, specifically the organizational resources to ensure that everyone involved in the radical project stands in solidarity with one another. There are several components to a resilience of this type. The first is organization.
Organized groups are more resistant to repression. By organization, we mean a determined set of relationships and rules by which decisions are made and authority is delegated. The student-radical groups must be democratic, they must have defined membership, and they must have defined leadership and delegated channels of authority. This is the first step toward resisting the quasi-legal pressure being brought to bear by the universities.
This organization should then proceed to hold meetings with all involved and ensure that everyone understands the necessity of absolute solidarity. These meetings can boost morale, bring everyone on the same page as to strategy, and collect reports of issues being faced by the student-radicals.
The second component of this resilience is support. Once an organization is functioning, it must begin to garner material support for the radicals being targeted by the administration. This works in concert with component III of this proposal, the existence of Safehouses. In essence, those targeted by the administration should be assured of 1) housing, 2) income or essentials, and, where possible, 3) paid work. In order to achieve this, the organization should pool the resources of its individual members and solicit resources from outside in an effort to prepare for the necessity of material support. This should be done before it is necessary to draw on these resources, but that moment may be behind us.
2. Aggressive Legal Defense
The student-radical organizations must also prepare to strike back in the bourgeois courts with an aggressive legal strategy. The maneuvers currently being undertaken by the administrations are quasi-legal at best, and are subject to challenge. They can be slowed by entangling them in preliminary injunctions and litigation, particularly in federal courts where the local federal judiciary may be seeking to prove its independence from the central government.
This arm of the strategy should be carried out by trained movement lawyers who understand the necessity of militancy in the face of the current repression. We would recommend speaking with the National Lawyers Guild in detail about the potential for pro bono representation.
3. Prepare Plans for Tuition and Labor Strikes
The prior two stages should prepare student-radical organizations for the next stage of escalation: tuition and labor strikes. Unlike regular capitalist businesses, the universities have a flow of income that is independent from their labor-force. This often comes through the state apparatus itself (witness Washington’s attempts to interfere with Columbia’s internal operations by threatening to withdraw funding). However, there is a reliance upon both tuition and student labor in the allocation of university resources.
Tuition and labor strikes must be highly coordinated to be effective, and a large minority of student-workers and tuition-paying students must be prepared to expose themselves to the potential repercussions before they can be successfully carried out. However, given a high degree of organization, they can be extremely effective in bringing the administration to the bargaining table and forcing concessions.
4. Connect with Unionized Workers on Campus
Other workers on the campus — faculty and staff — should be brought into the movement. Any student-radicals that are not yet in deep dialogues with the unionized workers on their grounds are cut off from the wider pool of labor solidarity and the above-listed labor strikes under C will be far less effective. The survival of the student movement relies on it connecting with the broader struggle of working people and uniting both of those struggles together.
At this stage, with many imperialist unions disclaiming Palestine solidarity, it is important that the student-radicals carefully assess whether the union leadership on their campus is friendly. If they are not, the radicals must bypass union leadership and instead establish connections directly with rank-and-file union members. They should be prepared to explain the manner in which the struggle of the student intifada is connected to the struggle of the unionized workers.
Student Self-Defense
In order to preserve their physical safety from state agents, the student-radicals must adopt modes of self-defense. We propose four steps or stages of heightening intensity to the student self-defense efforts:
- Identifying the most vulnerable student-radicals;
- Establishing a phone tree and lines of communication and warning;
- Designating an on-call schedule for phone contacts; and finally,
- Forming on-call defense brigades for physical confrontations.
1. Identifying the most vulnerable
The radical organizations, once fully formed, should reflect carefully on who is the most vulnerable to state action. Foreign nationals or anyone who could presumably be deported with a minimum of legal fiction should take precedence over others. Those who are being monitored by the state for any reason — plea bargains, court programs to get rid of cases, etc. — should also be considered. The organizations should privately draw up secret lists of those who must have the highest level of security.
2. Establishing the phone tree
An emergency phone tree must be established. Everyone in the organization should provide two phone numbers and at least one email address. The organization should then establish the call protocol in the case of any threat to an individual or group of student-radicals. Each person should have at minimum two other individuals to contact when an emergency begins. Once someone is contacted, they should immediately contact their listed “downstream” individuals. In this way, the entire organization can be alerted in very short order.
3. Designate an on-call schedule for the phone tree
Optimally, there will be one or two points of contact for the phone tree at any given time who make certain they are available. Anyone experiencing the threat of physical repression should call the on-call numbers; the on-call members may then communicate with the organization’s sitting body for self-defense to determine what actions are appropriate and then begin activating the phone tree. In most cases, physically assembling at the site of the emergency should be considered first.
4. Forming on-call defense brigades
Once the organization reaches a certain degree of development, the decentralized phone tree method should be transitioned to the formation and training of on-call defense brigades who can be called up to respond to emergencies. These defense brigades should be armed with some hand-held striking weapon (bats are a perennial favorite) and trained in defensive tactics. They will be called to rapidly assemble to sites where individuals find their safety threatened.
Safehouses/Underground
The student movement has called forth the need for a functioning underground. Those exposed leaders who now stand subject to vigilante threats or state action must have somewhere safe to retreat to until the crisis subsides. The construction of an underground now will provide the infrastructure for underground actions in the future and will heighten the degree of development of any student-radical organization.
We propose the following phases or schedule of establishing an underground:
- Establish the network of safe locations available for long-term occupation;
- Establish safe practices for moving between locations;
- Prepare retreat plans for people who have been identified under II(1) above;
- Transition to in-person meetings for all action planning.
1. Establish a network
This requires drawing up the names and addresses of everyone with space that can be used to hide people moving into the underground. A network of 5+ locations is required for this to be effective. These people must be trustworthy and developed, and must realize that they may be seriously inconvenienced for an extended period.
2. Establish safe practices for moving
The organization must establish a protocol for the safe transfer of radicals from safehouse to safehouse. This includes communication between safehouses (to be done in person at pre-arranged locations) as well as what physical routes will be taken and measures taken to obscure the identity of the people being ferried between safehouses.
3. Prepare retreat plans for those identified as most vulnerable
Everyone on the high vulnerability section of the organization’s vulnerability chart should have immediate emergency plans in place should they feel their safety is compromised, with predetermined signals and safehouses to arrive at.
4. Transition to in-person meetings for all action planning
No actions should be planned on any electronic media. All actions should be planned face to face and in person. Communication by digital media should be minimized as much as possible.
This is the Hour
We do not have much time. The student movement is under threat and must radicalize or it will be excised from the universities. Trained Marxists should endeavor to teach themselves the skills necessary to perform the tasks outlined above and should integrate themselves and offer their services to the student movement immediately. If you have resources or access to spaces that could be used as safehouses, you should make that known and contact student-radicals with that information immediately.
A luta continua!
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