On April 17, 2024, after months of on-campus escalation, students at Columbia University launched the Gaza Solidarity Encampment by sitting around 50 tents on campus and immediately calling for the university’s divestment from the zionist occupation and all corporations that profit from its existence. This was the culmination of weeks of meeting and planning between anti-zionist students and student groups. The president of the University, ruling-class co-opted academic Minouche Shafik, turned to the NYPD and asked them to storm the campus and arrest the organizers. This marked the first on-campus police suppression of a student movement at Columbia since May of 1968.

Like May ‘68, the camp has since reopened and sparked empire-wide Gaza solidarity encampments in institutions of higher education across the U.S. Other direct actions and protests have intensified and spread in the wake of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment’s establishment. Major arms dealers have been blockaded, like Connecticut’s Colt Manufacturing and Pratt & Whitney. At Cal Poly Humboldt in Northern California the students have already seized buildings on campus in a breathtaking display of radical militancy. They have successfully fended off police incursions, although on Friday April 26 they consented to take down their barricades.

At least eleven campuses across the U.S. empire have erupted in righteous unrest. Many of these are concentrated in urban areas with a large relative population of students, most notably Boston and NYC. Although their messaging focuses on attacking the zionist state and the moral necessity of severing support from major U.S. institutions to the U.S. imperialist puppet in west Asia, they also represent a major threat to the legitimacy of the capitalist government more broadly. The student revolt is the result of burgeoning class consciousness among young radicals. Not, by any means, an understanding of their position as a class-in-itself, but rather the preliminary consciousness of the role of U.S. imperialism in global oppression and of the collaboration by the supposedly “neutral” or even “progressive” places of higher education. Universities and colleges are objectively sites of social reproduction for the ruling and professional class lackeys of capital.

What has been the response of the Academy and the capitalist government? Swift repression. Suspension. Arrests. The arrests not only of students who were protesting, but of the schools’ own high-ranking department members when they rallied to their students’ cause. The ruling class representatives, the headmasters, police chiefs, mayors, and politicians, closed ranks immediately. Both sides of the aisle stand shoulder to shoulder: Biden condemns the protests as antisemitic and Democratic mayors unleash the police, while the GOP urges counterprotestors to murder students. Snipers are perched on rooftops. Silver-tongued opportunists from the “progressive” establishment, like AOC and Ilhan Omar, were sent to the most prominent encampment at Columbia, with the aim of co-opting and neutralizing it. The result of this instant response, this instant expression of ruling-class solidarity, will be an expanding consciousness on behalf of the student bodies of the class-nature of the imperialist state, and the class-rule that undergirds the structures of all U.S. society.

The Students Must Enter the Movement

The task of already-existing Communist formations must be to support this awakening class consciousness. Student radicals have played an important role in every past revolutionary movement and, although they cannot form the backbone of that movement, they are critical for its advancement and development. (Students are very energetic, but they may burn out quickly, move away, or cease being students when their class-position changes and they enter the workforce). We must all strive to link up the repression of the students, the genocide and occupation in Palestine, the march of U.S. imperialism across the world, and the oppression in the domestic U.S.-Canadian empire with the existence of class society.

In order to do this, we Communists must neither hold ourselves apart from this current student movement, nor may we attempt to commandeer and steer it. It is an unforgivable error for us to applaud from the sidelines and do nothing. We are morally and strategically required to render aid in any way we can. Some will decry us as interlopers. Let them! Communists must become intimately integrated into every liberatory movement. It is an error to demand this student movement conform to Marxist theory or practice. This would constitute commandism, and would require us to deliver orders to those who have no reason to follow them. Both “left” and “right” errors would serve to isolate Communists from this movement and cost us dearly as this pre-revolutionary moment slips by. It is, in fact, our duty to go down into the encampments and work.

Of course, we must not worship spontaneity, but neither may we afford to ignore the spontaneous explosions of rudimentary class consciousness that occur organically as a result of the stresses produced by the contradictions of capital and empire. Spontaneity is neither the engine nor the aim of our organizing, but when the masses — in this instance, the student masses — take up arms of their own accord, we must join them.

However, this is not enough. We Communists also cannot permit ourselves to be swallowed by the anarchistic trend of the student movement. We cannot permit ourselves to be “carried along” by the currents that move through it. We must work but also we must exert our voices and call for changes in the strategy, organization, and composition of the encampments to harden them. We must always assert as well as demonstrate the linkage of the class struggle with the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Above all else, we must guide the student radicals to form Marxist organizations and launch new study groups and struggle circles.

There is a very high risk that Communists  who endeavor to perform this work but who are alone and unorganized, without a study group, cadre-building program, or other Marxist organization to fall back on, will take on the character of the encampment itself. Yet, the work must be done! If such a Communist has no support but can do the work, we urge them to contact the Unity–Struggle–Unity Press so we can offer our support.

To those who see the student movement as a distraction from the class struggle or who cannot comprehend how such a necessarily ephemeral phenomenon can be part of revolutionary strategy, to those who are attached to the model of organizing the revolutionary movement from the unions and labor organizations as the basis and bedrock of their work, we say: unions in the U.S.-Canadian empire have been bought off! They have been deradicalized and compromised, just like all the major Communist movements in the past century have. Only the struggle for national liberation, of which the fight for Palestine is a part, can purge the movement of its imperialist opportunism. We must suffuse the revolutionary movement with this commitment. Eventually this must be made manifest through armed wings of Communist national liberation armies and special control commissions or other structural power for the nationally oppressed within the party-to-be. Today it manifests as support for the integration of all progressive national liberation movements into the Marxist fold.

The Current State of Affairs: Formlessness and Disorganization Predominate

Each of the campus encampments represents weeks of planning by student organizers. Nevertheless, apart from Columbia and Humboldt, the predominant feature of the encampments is formlessness. We can see this at work in, for instance, the mass arrests at Emerson (100+ students) and Yale (46 students). Formlessness does not mean an absolute lack of leadership, but it does mean a lack of formal structure. Formal methods of decision making have either broken down or have yet to be developed in most encampments. Some have made efforts to expand their decision-making apparatus, folding in non-students (which is correct), while others have retained a very narrow, undeclared clique in overall control (which is incorrect). This second trend must cease if the encampments are to survive in the medium-term, if they are to have any hope of achieving their aim, and if they are to bring student radicals into the overall movement for the abolition of capital and class society. Formal, open structures of decision making must develop, and they must do so along lines significantly different from those that grew out of the Occupy Wallstreet movement. Those same, ultraleft, ultrademocratic (i.e.: privileging individual interests over the collective, insisting on full agreement from every member or permitting continuous discussion without decision) mistakes cannot be repeated, but nor can the present narrow cliquishness.

When the organizers do not declare themselves nor make decisions open to the entire encampment, when they remain secret and unapproachable by failure to disclose the fact of their leadership, they cut off the students and workers seeking to aid them. They isolate themselves, narrow the base of knowledge, labor, and skill available to the camp, and enervate those participating who did not have a chance to join the governing clique. While these formless structures often develop to ostensibly combat hierarchy, they end up not only reinforcing hierarchical decision making, but hiding it in an invisible chain of command that is impossible to challenge, join, or combat.

The optimal organizational form for a student and workers encampment must take into account the following principles:

1. Transparency: Positions of authority — collective decision-making — must be public to the camp and known to its membership;
2. Consent: These positions must be elective;
3. Flexibility: Given the speed of events occurring, the main positions should be renewed frequently — perhaps as frequently as each morning;
4. Accountability: Those collectively entrusted with authority should deliver frequent and regular reports to the camp and submit major decisions for later ratification.

The form will thus resemble this one:

Elective Executive Committee

• Makes minute-to-minute decisions
• Reports on the status of the camp each day;
• May trigger expulsions from any committee by camp vote;
• Acts as the central coordinator;

Self-Defense Committee

• Sets watches;
• Coordinates marshals and lookouts;
• Distributes signals and informs camp inhabitants about what they mean;
• Keeps lanes and retreats clear, builds defenses;

Vigilance Committee

• Prevents police and other state agents from entering the camp, voicing their opinions during camp meetings, or voting;
• Conducts elections, guarantees the integrity of camp decisions by confirming votes etc.;

Political Development Committee

• Oversees the camp library and classes;
• Runs and develops political education;
• Strategizes and produces theory;

Health and Welfare Committee

• Oversees camp medics, water, and sanitation;
• Ensures the presence of food, medical supplies, and other necessities;
• Acts as a generalized quartermaster;

Communications and Correspondence Committee

• Handles communications to outside groups;
• Prevents outsiders from co-opting camp messaging;
• Opens lines of communication and correspondence with other camps in the same locality, as well as the most radical and progressive elements within local labor and nationally oppressed communities;

Committees must be small and agile and should not consume their days with talk. They must make decisions and then work, not spend their time embroiled in continuous debate. Once someone is heard from, they should not be heard from again on that topic unless there is good reason. Time limits must be adopted for holding the floor, and strictly adhered to. Circular discussion must be barred.

To the extent this or a similar form is not adopted, we must strive to work for the camp and toward its organization.

Do Concrete Work

When you arrive at an encampment, assuming you were not one of the people who helped plan it, you should present yourself and your group and give others an understanding of your skills with a short introduction. You might say, for instance, “Hi, we’re a local Marxist study circle and some of us have medic training. One of us is a carpenter.” Immediately follow this with the most important part of your greeting: placing yourself at the disposal of the camp. “We’re here to help. What can we do?” Even in the absence of a “traditional” (read: declared, obvious) hierarchy, this will help you gravitate toward the camp’s leadership. You may have to do this a few, or even many times. Once you have been given a task to accomplish, do it. Don’t quibble over operational questions. You must establish your commitment to the movement.

After you begin to work, others will see your commitment to the movement. When you have established yourselves firmly as an asset to the camp, you should begin to make suggestions about the organization of its decision-making structure. You must work toward democratization — a mass meeting of the entire encampment — and toward hardening and radicalizing the defense network of the encampment to protect it from police raids. Be clear: no one should aim to be arrested. You yourself must do everything you can to avoid arrest. Arrests are one of the ways movements are broken up and revolutionary organizations destroyed. In fact, some of the best work you can do is to assist in the marshal work, which is thankless and can always be more organized than it is currently.

Marshals must not only be prepared to break up internal arguments, protect the camp, build defenses, and push out counter-protestors, they must also work out schedules of who is on duty when, create patrol routes, and formulate a system of signs and signals to alert the camp to danger. They must keep a clear lane of retreat for the camp in case overwhelming force should be applied. In the best case scenario, they would ideally be outfitted with short-range walkie talkies or other communication devices outside of cellular phones.

Marxists are also particularly suited, generally, to political education work. Forming study groups, reading circles, and encampment libraries should be a specialty, as you will likely have been developing reading lists etc. with your other Marxist organizers as part of your regular work. Different from work in your study groups, if you are a political educator in an encampment you must be prepared for democracy that includes non-Marxists. You will need to educate yourself on non-Marxist texts, analyze them with non-Marxists, and make a case for Marxist readings.

Above all, your work with the camp must be democratic. Even when the encampment’s leadership is not democratic, you must work by convincing the members of the encampment of the correctness of your position vis-a-vis arrests, organizing, and escalation. You cannot insist. You must guide by example. You must remain humble. You are working among the advanced student masses, and you must help them build bridges with the advanced working classes.

Even if they refuse your every suggestion, it is a worthwhile endeavor to continue to work for the encampment and supply aid. Your rectitude is not determined by your success.

Escalation and Militancy

The entire goal is to help the encampment self-organize so it can become more and more militant and then prepare escalation tactics. That which is not coming-to-be is dying away, and we must do everything in our power to prevent the student movement from being swept from the field, as it has been each time throughout the past century. While you must avoid calling for adventurism (direct armed conflicts with the police, the arming of the encampment with guns, etc.), you must also be certain to press for ever-intensifying tactics.

Escalation must come in the form of linkage with the other progressive movements in your locality or, at the very least, must not create antagonisms with them. Before you call for escalatory action, you must be certain that the encampment is organized enough and militant enough to survive such a call. For instance, prior to forming governing committees, it would be suicidal to suggest the taking and occupation of an administration building. Likewise, prior to the successful occupation of multiple buildings and a high degree of militancy, it would be literally suicidal to suggest the arming of student-militias with firearms.

Escalation and militancy are a dialectic. You must help achieve greater militancy, then use that militancy to escalate. Militancy is primary to begin with, then escalation is primary; once escalation has been achieved, militancy will once again be primary, and a new, more heightened degree of militancy must be achieved before the next plateau and escalatory action.

Ultimately, you should push the encampment to make ties with the most radical elements in the local unions, newspapers, among the most radical local faith leaders, and among the oppressed national communities. 

May Day

May Day, the international day of labor solidarity, is the day on which this program should begin. We must unite the student movement — both with other branches of that movement and with the wider labor struggle! We implore all those Communists who are able to go forth and execute the plan to help the encampments self-organize. We implore all those at the encampments who read the Red Clarion or get their hands on this article to begin efforts starting May 1.

Since 1889, May 1 has been the international day of labor solidarity and one of the chief holidays of Communists worldwide. It commemorates the May 4, 1886 slaughter of the workers of Chicago at the Haymarket Massacre and the fight for the 8-hour work day. This year, let May Day commemorate the intensification of the protracted struggle to bring down the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire, to reduce the corrupt governments of the West to their knees, and a day on which we advanced the struggle to give the people of Palestine breathing room with which to win an end to the occupation of their land, and the total destruction of the zionist state that stands on it.