This is a report-back from the 2024 May Day night of protest in Manhattan, Kansas (MHK). MHK, affectionately known as the “Little Apple,” is home to Kansas State University. It is also the city I call home.
There is no encampment protesting the genocide of Palestinians at Kansas State University (KSU). Some may see this as a failure, but, as I will argue later on, I believe it demonstrates strength and professionalism of the organizers, the KSU chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA). The KSU YDSA was assisted by other organizations such as the Flint Hills DSA. However, it was the students who led the way.
The students were very clear in their demands: They demanded President Richard “Dick” Linton to resign from the U.S.-Israel Agricultural Co-Operative, for transparency in all investments of the KSU Alumni fund since its formation in 2014, and for that fund to completely and unconditionally divest from all “israeli” capital immediately.
This report takes the format of an After Action Review, or AAR, a methodology borrowed from the United States army. An AAR is a standardized methodology for conducting report-backs. It consists of answering four simple questions:
- What was supposed to happen?
- What actually happened?
- What can be sustained?
- What can be improved?
I encourage all comrades to study this methodology and replicate it in your own organizations, because it works. You may doubt me on this point. I’d simply retort that, so far, the feds have kicked our asses, so why wouldn’t we borrow effective techniques from the winners?
A final note: I wish to be abundantly clear that although I am a member of the Flint Hills DSA, I am not a KSU YDSA member. I speak here in my own capacity and not as a representative of any group. The KSU YDSA were the organizers of this event and all credit belongs to them.
The author of this report-back giving her speech in which she argues that the United States is an illegitimate government that should be subjected to subversive actions, and that this is the greatest form of solidarity the American people can have with Palestine.
To be clear: I am proud of the work we did, even if it wasn’t as dramatic as other encampments. Drama and flair are not always good. Though I would not at all classify it as boring, I would classify it as lacking in notoriety. Part of what makes an encampment appealing is that it makes for an attention grabbing headline. Students, particularly younger ones with less wisdom and organizing experience, tend to fill in the missing gaps with romanticized and idealistic notions.
Many organizers (and this problem is not at all limited only to students) think that the most important aspect of a protest is the spectacle of it. They also commit adventurist errors such as thinking arrests are a sign of commitment to the movement, rather than a hindrance. These muddied and erroneous thought patterns are remedied in one of two ways: through a careful study of theory and analyses (such as this article), or through battle scars won in struggle. When possible, it is always better to learn such lessons from the mistakes of others rather than from oneself.
Such romanticized, idealistic, and liberal notions of protest were thankfully absent from the KSU YDSA and their planning process. Seasoned community organizers were able to share our experiences collectively of arrests, police brutality, misguided ideals, and, ultimately, of failure. The students wisely listened and learned from our mistakes, and, as a result, none of them were repeated. This is commendable.
Nobody was arrested to my knowledge, and I was on standby to bail folks out of jail. The potential for fights was absolutely there, but not a single one broke out (not due to a lack of trying on the enemy’s part). Our formation defused tense situations with professionalism and ensured the safety of all participants from both law enforcement and their fascist goons.
With that said, I do have some advice to offer the students. I will remain constructive but will not hold back — just know this is in no way to denigrate the efforts of the student organizers, who did an amazing job. This is out of love for communism and a desire to end the genocide of Palestinians.
What Was Supposed to Happen?
This forms the base of my criticism. It is not clear what exactly was supposed to happen. We spoke of encampments and vacillated between the idea of establishing one or remaining mobile, but no plan was made clear until five minutes before the event. Various comments were floated, but there was never a single clear decision point made by the group. I will elaborate more upon this in the “What Can Be Improved?” section.
What I can say with confidence is that the organizers intended that the demonstration would last for an indefinite amount of time. The purpose of this event was also clear: the intent was to criticize President Richard “Dick” Linton for his presidency of the U.S. Israel Agricultural Co-Operative and demand his resignation. A bold demand for complete divestment was also made.
The demands of the KSU YDSA, in their own words, presented to University administration
What actually happened?
Planning
What actually happened was as follows: we started with a week’s worth of planning led by Cde. Nick in the KSU YDSA as well as with backup from the community. Cde. Nick is the public face of the protests, and his identity is publicly known to the university administration, so I will use it with his consent. I also use my name because I was a public speaker.
Planning sessions were lively and involved a broad array of both students and community members. Relations were cordial between the two, and I feel as though there was strong integration and respect. Although community members (such as myself, among others) did take on leadership roles, I personally believe that all of us were cognizant of the fact that we are subordinate to the students, and that we are members of their movement in a supporting role. I genuinely do not believe any community member ever tried to co-opt or commandeer the student movement. Even when community members disagreed with the students’ decisions, they still respected them and executed accordingly. In other words — there was good order and discipline. The errors of commandism and tailism were avoided.
Commandism and Tailism
Commandism is an error which occurs when Communists try to dictate to the people what they must do without properly consulting them or seeking democratic input from them. It represents a “left” deviation because it is a manifestation of the Communists being ideologically too far ahead of the masses. A commandist could very well have the correct political idea and the correct line, but, without buy-in from the people, and without their consent to Communist leadership, none of that matters.
In this context, commandism would look like me barging into a student movement and immediately giving orders to the students, telling them what to do, changing all of their slogans without consulting them, and generally acting like a dictator. What’s important to note is that commandism is not offering guidance or criticisms — all Communists have a duty to criticize and to advocate for the revolutionary line in every situation. However, the key word here is “advocate.” As Communists, we must be cognizant of when we are guests in someone else’s space and know when it’s time to lead versus when it’s time to only lend our support. A student-led protest is definitely a time when Communists should be following the lead of others. However, that does not mean that Communists shouldn’t offer information and advance a radical line.
The opposing error to commandism is tailism. If commandism represents the “left” deviation of being too far ahead of the masses, then tailism is a right deviation that represents lagging behind the masses. Commandism represents seeking no input from the masses; tailism represents letting the masses determine our political line irrespective of the masses’ level of consciousness and development.
Going to the masses to ask what their views are is correct and good. However, the masses are not a mystical entity. They are a group of people to which the reader and the author both belong. The masses contain multitudes of opinions ranging from fascism, through centrism, liberalism, and to social democracy, to communism. The average character of the masses’ politics will depend on the overall level of class consciousness and political education among its members. The Red Clarion offers a fantastic schema that explains this idea in greater detail.
So, in the context of rural Kansas, the masses can be said to firmly oppose genocide as the average level of political development. This is positive, encouraging, and correct. However, it is not true that the average worker in rural Kansas supports full-on liberation of Palestine. They do not support Hamas, PFLP, DFLP, PIJ, and other armed resistance groups. In fact, they are likely to accept uncritically the label of such groups as “terrorists,” and are more concerned with the cessation of only the most extreme forms of brutality, as opposed to ending the ongoing process of settler colonialism. The masses are starting to grasp at the correct idea, as they’ve clearly and righteously broken through the bourgeois propaganda which tries to justify genocide. However, there is still ideological work to be done — clearly liberalism still lingers though it is being steadily eroded away.
In this context, tailism might look like saying “Well, we don’t want to alienate people by endorsing Hamas or even armed resistance. We really want popular support, so we should keep this toned down. We don’t want to look like terrorists. Besides, people in Kansas don’t really give a shit about national liberation struggles in the Middle East. Let’s just tone it down and keep it reasonable.” Although there is clear concern here for peoples’ opinions, this concern is one of appearances and marketing, rather than a true two-way consultation which would inform organizers while sharpening the masses’ collective consciousness. The logic of tailism is not of deep respect for the people, but of deception and condescending refusal to challenge errors which evidently stand between the people and their own liberation.
Tailism can also take a more insidious form revolving around identity politics. Tailism might point to a Palestinian-led liberal organization such as Al-Haddaf K.C. and highlight the fact that Palestinian diaspora members lead this organization as evidence that we should follow their lead since this is a Palestinian issue, in spite of their liberalism. While it is always a good thing for Communists, especially white ones such as myself, to be cognizant of racial and other social dynamics at play in our organizing, what this amounts to is actually hiding behind whiteness to defend oneself from the vulnerability associated with taking a political stance.
Members of a diaspora community, like members of any community, have all sorts of opinions. There are liberal Palestinians, conservative Palestinians, nationalist Palestinians, Communist Palestinians, radical Palestinians and reformist Palestinians. Palestinians suffer from a unique and particularly egregious form of national oppression and settler colonialism which gives them a unique outlook. However, at the end of the day, they are just people, like anyone else. People have all sorts of views; some extremely backwards, some very advanced, and most falling in the middle. To assume that someone’s ethnicity automatically gives them a correct opinion would amount to a kind of tokenism and racism.
As stated before, I feel this group did a fantastic job at maintaining the correct ideological stance. Neither the mentioned tailist nor commandist errors were committed. The KSU YDSA deserves recognition for balancing this incredibly difficult line.
Planning Continued
Students were thorough and meticulous in their planning methodologies. They engaged in what I would consider a quasi-militaristic planning process — and I mean that in a good way! They considered organizational, physical, and material factors in their planning. For example, comrades wisely paid close attention to the weather. A big storm was brewing in the area, and there was a lively debate on how to handle that. The students ultimately decided “Rain or Shine, For Palestine!” even though the storm didn’t materialize until later that night. I commend the student-organizers for their attention to detail and consideration of factors that more novice and inexperienced folks might overlook.
Community members, in turn, heard the concerns of the students and supplemented them with supplies. For example, when I personally heard about the weather, I offered to drive to a local sporting goods store and purchase twenty ponchos for the core organizers to stay dry during the rain. I also purchased two cases of bottled water, knowing that folks often get dehydrated and forget to bring their own hydration sources. Because of my status as a labor aristocrat, I was able to peel away from work for an hour in the middle of the day to accomplish this task. Other community members, while they didn’t necessarily have that privilege, were able to contribute however much they could afford. In that way, the community listened to the organizers and took their lead. We pitched in with resources at their direction. The end result was a well-oiled risk mitigation machine. This is a methodology I strongly advise all other encampments to reproduce.
The Event
During the event, Cde. Nick gave a good speech arguing for full and explicit Palestinian liberation, praising the Intifada and affirming the right of Palestinians to resist their occupation — undoubtedly the correct ideological line.
I gave a speech arguing that people must sabotage their workplaces, agitate among coworkers, and foster a general attitude of contempt towards the United States as the leader of imperial violence. My goal was to build support and consciousness of the need to overthrow the government as the best possible way that Americans can help Palestinians.
A Jewish student and scholar of the Torah gave a speech about the relationship (or lack thereof) between Judaism and zionism. He argued that zionism is not Judaism, and that Jewish values stand in firm opposition to the colonial brutality of zionist occupation. This anonymous comrade also affirmed the right of Palestinians to resist their occupation in no uncertain terms.
These explicitly political speeches were rounded out by other students coming forth to read poetry by Palestinian writers such as Mahmoud Darwish and Refaat Alareer.
At points, the event did show some signs of disorganization. Upon returning to the site of the speeches after a short break, I found folks had abandoned it. In the process of abandonment, they left behind a lot of litter. They also left behind the Bluetooth speaker used to give speeches. Given the heightened state of repression against Palestine organizers, I immediately began picking up the litter and cleaning up the mess by myself out of a desire to protect the students. Not only was this a simple step to avoid giving the administration more ammunition, it was simply the right thing to do ethically. All Communists should take care to leave a community space better than they found it after hosting a demonstration of this nature. After cleaning up and securing the equipment, I texted the organizers to ask for assistance, yet nobody responded until forty-five minutes later. It was a student attendee who happened to read our group chat, not a core organizer, who volunteered to help me transport and secure the goods.
When I arrived at the new site of protest, on the corner of Bluemont and North Manhattan on the university property, I noticed a large crowd of about fifty to one hundred people. This crowd was diverse relative to the Manhattan baseline in terms of its racial composition and its age spread;it had student and community representation, and there were young children in addition to elders present. This is a reflection that our demonstration was doing something correctly. There were no phony and artificial divides here. One for all and all for one!
This may sound small for those in an urban environment, but to get ten people to show up in rural Kansas is a success, much less one hundred! Given the circumstances this turnout was impressive. Our last rally only netted forty at the most.
Zionist Agitators
After standing on the corner and waving signs and banners for an hour, the group decided to march to President Dick Linton’s house to set up an encampment on his lawn. This formation was eagerly tailed by both police as well as fascists. The police kept back at a distance and monitored things. They seemed to be actively coordinating with one another. However, I wanted to keep my distance for safety purposes, so I didn’t investigate further.
The fascists on the other hand, were all too eager to approach us. A group of six zionazi agitators from the Young Americans for Freedom student organization tailed our formation. They were evenly split between men and women, and all of them were white and seemed to be of a petit-bourgeois background, based on what students told me. The leaders of the group had a look in their eyes like that of a shark hungry for blood. It was clear to myself and other community members that they represented a threat that needed to be dealt with.
Given the large police presence, using violence was not an option. That would have constituted the error of adventurism, and would have given law enforcement the opportunity they so desperately craved to crack down on us violently. But it would have been a grave mistake to let the fascists simply pass us by just because their police handlers stood by in reserve.
Thankfully, my comrades had a clever scheme ready to use. A group of four of us, all queer individuals, three of whom are transgender, decided to confront the fascists with an interesting technique. This particular YAF group is famous for “just wanting to debate,” and so we indulged that desire!
Many comrades correctly caution against debating fascists. In this instance, we feel that it was actually the correct choice to engage them in debate. Firstly, none of us had any illusions that we were going to change their views. That was not our point of debating them; our intent was to use the debate as a stalling tactic. Fascists are often white egotists who love the sound of their own voice almost as much as they love the taste of a policeman’s leather boot. So, we used our womanly and nonbinary charms to let their egos feast.
The reason debating fascists is usually bad is because it gives them an audience to manipulate. However, in this case, by debating the fascists we actually denied them an audience. The only people around to hear our “debate” were the police, who had already made up their minds by virtue of wearing that uniform. Furthermore, we were able to stall and delay them by over an hour which gave the students ample time to set up their encampment without having to fend off violence by Nazi sympathizers. And because debates are completely legal, the police simply sat on the sidelines and watched.
No one was arrested. Nobody had to go to the hospital. The group remained safe as they set up their encampments. The police had to bog down their available manpower and resources to keep an eye on us and the fascists. The fascists were unable to find the encampment. Overall, I consider this a success.
Eventually we tired of this debate, and some comrades were starting to feel unsafe upon observing the fascists body language and aggressive posturing. This is entirely reasonable since our group was composed entirely of gender minorities. So, we decided, after over an hour of delay, to leave. Of course, we were trailed by the Hitlerites, but, by using techniques I learned in the army, we were able to lose them inside of the student union. That was the last anyone saw of them that evening.
Encampment
I had to leave soon after dropping the fascists, but, from what I heard, the encampment was overall a failure. Only twelve students actually stood around the whole night, and the police swiftly broke up the encampment. Thankfully, no arrests were made. However, peoples’ tents were confiscated and the students were driven away by the police and warned that if they came back they’d be arrested and charged with trespassing. That dampened folks’ spirits enough, and sadly put an end to the K-State occupation of 2024.
What Can Be Sustained?
- Bonds between students and community. This model has continued on in our organizing, and it is one of the main reasons I credit the success of the YDSA and their efforts. Despite this close bond, it was clear to all parties that the students lead the effort and that the community was to play a supporting role.
- Planning for contingencies. In particular, considering the second-order effects of the weather and how it might affect attendance, planning for various contingencies, looking into the needs of the people such as hydration and snacks, and novel de-escalation techniques for dealing with fascists can all be sustained and even replicated by other Communists.
- De-Escalation Tactics. Nobody got hurt, the fascists never caught up, and police made no arrests. The fascists didn’t achieve their goals. I call that a win in the strongest of terms.
- Radical and principled messages. Despite the pressures from liberals and university administration, the YDSA remained steadfast in their unconditional support for explicit Palestinian liberation on Palestinian terms. They did not shy away from proclaiming support for armed resistance. Furthermore, they allowed radical speakers to give speeches that call into question the legitimacy of the American Empire.
- Political Education. Many of the organizers had attended various sessions of the Kansas Socialist Book Club’s series on the PFLP’s Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, which I credit for the radical messaging. Because the KS-SBC helped educate these organizers and students, they had a solid understanding of the theoretical basis of Palestinian liberation. This prepared them well for organizing this event.
- Clear, radical demands. There was no wishy-washiness and no beating around the bush with the group’s demands. They were bold, uncompromising, and radical. They were also specific, achievable, and impactful. They neither gave into liberalism nor bolster reformist illusions, and they were very politically relevant. These goals reflected a great deal of thoughtfulness and careful research from the students.
What Can Be Improved?
- The overall desired method of the protest was not at all clear. Did we want an encampment, or did we want to simply have one night of protest? This decision was never made clear. To improve this moving forward, organizers must ensure that a democratic decision is made one way or the other. Should changes be made once the original decision is arrived upon, then those changes must similarly be made in a democratic fashion and published clearly for the entire group to know.
- Undemocratic leadership. I commend Comrade Nick for his overall organization and skills as a leader. However, I did notice that he seemed to be exclusively running the show and that he didn’t seek much input from other students. This caused him a great deal of mental fatigue and stress, which we’ve discussed in individual conversations for hours since this event. As a result, I believe most errors of this can be traced back to the “Charismatic Great Man” style of leadership. It is a positive trait to be bold and ambitious! However, you’ll burn through yourself like dry prairie grass if you don’t let others take over some functions.
- Lack of operational considerations. A question I found myself asking was “How do any of these tactical considerations contribute to the strategic goals of boycott, divestment, and sanctions?” It seems like the group came up with the demands, and then the protest was something that happened because it was what everyone else was doing. But I did not see much discussion or linkage between the protest itself and how that contributes to achieving the demands.
- Unclear chain of command. There was no delegation of duties as far as I could tell. It was unclear who the point person was for each particular task. The only exception to this would be for the delegation of a media spokesperson, and the group handled this very well because everyone knew where to send all media questions. However, there were no other committees or chairpeople for important tasks. Everything was done on an ad-hoc basis, creating delays, stress, and confusion. So, moving forward, the group needs to democratically convene and decide on what positions are important, and appoint individuals to chair those commissions. The Red Clarion has a great example of a template for committees that can be used in the future for these kinds of protests.
- The encampment itself. Ultimately, a small faction of students decided to attempt an encampment setup. I believe, in retrospect, this proved to be incorrect. Thankfully, by the grace of God herself, no one was arrested or harmed. However, this presented an unnecessary risk. If the group had less luck, then we would be singing a different song right now. There were no supply lines, no chain of command, no structure or organizational capacity, and no means to guard and secure the encampment. It seems to me that this decision was a foolishly impulsive one; participants wanted to camp out because that’s what other campuses were doing. While I can personally relate to the fear of missing out, it has no room in professional organizing.
Leave a Reply