We should not be intimidated by the police state, because its success at crushing the pro-Palestine struggle depends on a particular set of criteria: for the struggle to stay within the existing activist sphere, and within this sphere’s associated parts of the country. The campuses, college towns, and metropolitan centers where these protests have been concentrated represent a bottleneck for the state’s repressive operations. They’re a limited range of physical and social spheres, in which the counterinsurgency has some of the greatest advantage. If the pro-Palestine struggle doesn’t broaden itself beyond these locales and social circles which “the movement” conventionally gets centered around, the struggle’s participants will be left without sufficient backup. Our goal must be to go lower and deeper into the real masses, as Lenin said, so that we can get our cause the support it needs.
In the United States, where the ruling class has long been working to divide the urban from the rural, a crucial part of going deeper into the masses is expanding the struggle beyond the urban. It’s in the cities where the state has the greatest strategic advantage. Where it can most easily trap the most people within military occupations, whether through the actual army or through police that have been turned into armies. In the rural areas, the forces of dissent have more flexibility. They can let cadres utilize local knowledge of the environments they’re operating within, build intimate alliances with the communities that host them, and hide in places that are harder for the state to find. Which can also be done in the urban areas, but the rural offers particular advantages (especially when it comes to evading capture, and acting in a more fluid way than the state’s forces). And applying these practices to the rural is key to victory within both parts of the country.
When I say “the rural,” I don’t simply mean the college towns. The predominant mode of socialist organizing in the modern United States, which focuses on building influence within the “left,” is satisfied with acting as if these leftist enclaves are all we need to cover when it comes to the rural. If we exclusively engage with the small parts of the rural areas which culturally resemble the urban areas, then we’ll isolate ourselves, and the police state will accomplish its goal of holding back revolution. That’s what the police have the potential to do in my coastal Northern California area should the pro-Palestine movement not develop beyond its initial stage. This being the stage where the struggle is centered around the campus.
For as determined and coordinated the students who’ve occupied Cal Poly Humboldt’s Siemens Hall have been, the police have of course been able to win this battle. Following around a week of preparation after being driven out of the occupied zone, the Arcata Police Department came back with all the standard enhancements these kinds of operations entail, including backup. The APD brought in officers from Chico, overcame the barricades around the campus quad, arrested dozens, and now have the campus under what’s effectively martial law. No one can come to the campus without authorization. The police can do whatever they want within this new type of occupied area. The students living in the dorms have their everyday movements restricted, with one email telling them not to walk across campus. I know this because I’m a student there, and I got that email.
All of this was a predictable outcome of picking a fight with the university, and with its many allies in the police and national security state. The question is whether the pro-Palestine struggle in my area, and in all the other parts of the country where such fascist tactics are being used against the protesters, can advance to the next stage. The stage where it builds a base of support among the bulk of the people, and thereby makes the state unable to so easily shut down its efforts.
A winning strategy for the pro-Palestine cause is one where we work to reach far outside the spaces wherein activism typically originates from. The tone of these protests aligns with the group that’s carrying them out: the student element. The demonstrations are filled with a sense of rage towards the existing system; which we should have, but in order to mobilize the types of Americans who are beyond the student and activist elements, we’ll need to offer more than the anger. If we want to win over the working families, the people who aren’t in the particular condition that young students are in, then we’ll have to offer a cohesive vision for an alternative to the present order.
Alienation and anger are things that young students especially can identify with, and these feelings are necessary for every revolutionary to go through at some point. But a working class organizational project can’t sustain itself by relying on these emotions. Not unless it limits its reach to those most receptive towards appeals to these feelings, and thereby ceases to be an effective project. To win the people as a whole, not just the minority of people who are most inclined to participate in activism, we must put forth a practical program for what will come after the state’s overthrow. We must explain why aligning with not just Palestine, but also every other anti-imperialist country, is necessary for freeing both the Palestinians and the U.S. working class. We must connect Gaza and other imperialist wars to the economic grievances of the people, instilling mass awareness that the imperialist system is behind the decline of their conditions.
This emphasis on economics isn’t to take away from the Palestinian genocide. It’s to build a mass force within the imperial center which is actually capable of ending this and the other horrors imperialism perpetuates. And that force can only exist on the basis of advancing the proletariat’s interests. It’s through this mass-oriented strategy that we can expand the pro-Palestine cause beyond the narrow social and geographical space in which it’s presently concentrated. That we can mobilize U.S. Americans from all corners of the country around the defeat of the imperial system. It’s only through asking “what will bring in the majority?” that we can broaden the struggle into all revolution-compatible elements of society. And that we can therefore gain both the numbers, and the rural connections, needed for outmaneuvering the state.
The student protesters are doing something heroic. This needs to be only the start of their project’s development, though, for their actions to lead up towards victory. We can’t keep the pro-Palestine struggle in its early stage, which is what the leftism-oriented orgs that dominate modern activism are satisfied with letting happen. We have to reach the types of people who otherwise would never even get involved with politics because capitalism has made them so alienated. That’s how we can become big enough, both numerically and in terms of the physical territory we influence, to put the police in the place of disadvantage. They can dominate on campuses, and even in entire cities. But they can’t handle a country that’s mostly unified around an anti-imperialist program, whose people are led by a sufficiently trained vanguard, that’s therefore equipped to defeat the ruling class.
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