Our Student Movement Can Do Better
The student movement for a free Palestine must correct the following errors: capitulation, the First World obsession with “mutual aid”, refusal to learn from history, blind fumbling in the interest of “doing something”, hastiness to condemn (rather than critique) the struggle here and abroad, surface level third-worldism as a justification for inaction, and the fetish for determining who’s making “real communist revolution” in place of a dialectical-materialist analysis of history.
1: The Liberal Trend, The Capitulationists, The Refusal to Stand IN OPPOSITION to Empire
The first trend I will critique consists of centering one’s own pro-Palestine political action around things that in fact stop short of anything that aids the fight for a free Palestine and an end to i$rael. People following this trend do not fight for things such as divestment from (or destruction of) weapons manufacturers or rejecting politicians who support i$rael in words, policy, or money. Rather, these people and groups focus on things such as organizing donations for individual Palestinian families, securing scholarships for Palestinian refugees and diaspora, or, in a more specific and truly condemnable example, the schools who capitulated and abandoned their encampment for paltry promises such as a house for Arab and Muslim students.
People rush to defend these forms of “resistance” with “we’re centering Palestinian voices”, while not recognizing that none of the things they’re fighting for (NGO-style refugee aid, more Palestinian-diaspora petty-bourgeois in elite ideological institutions of the amerikkkan state) are in any way actually opposed to the amerikkkan empire or contribute in any way to a future in which Palestine and its people are free from i$raeli and amerikkkan aggression. We saw the protests in 2020 end in symbolic gains that were not in any way contradictory to the U.$. empire, nor did they bring true freedom from the brutality of kkkops in the ghetto. Today, this trend threatens an unpleasant end for the currently-still-radical Palestinian liberation movement – a ceasefire on i$rael’s terms, maybe two states, more scholarships for the Palestinians who survived and were wealthy enough to get to the United $tates, and everyone who was uncomfortable chanting anything besides “ceasefire now” (the big brother of “defund the police”) gets to feel good about “playing their part”.
In the past, people have been harsh on MIM(Prisons) for refusing to capitulate to accepting any concessions for the First World that come at the expense of the Third World, or even concessions that don’t necessarily come at the expense of the Third World but serve to pacify the First World. Most notably, this is expressed in how angry people get about the analysis proving that prisoners, while no doubt an oppressed class and a hotbed for potential for organizing, are not exploited, so MIM(Prisons) doesn’t generally promote the fight for better wages for prisoners. To self-criticize, even I myself originally was upset about MIM(Prisons)’s stated intentions not to fight for healthcare for transgender prisoners, interpreting this as latent transmisogyny rather than a recognition that healthcare for trans prisoners (as important a battle as I believe it to be) is not a struggle in the interest of the global proletariat. Incidents like the capitulation of student encampments at Northwestern University, Vassar College, and other elite universities display clearly how radical a line that really is.
Going forward, two things are going to have to happen in order for further protests for Palestine of this form to yield meaningful results: first, protesters are going to have to recognize that everything they do in protest should be in the actual, direct interest of the oppressed people of Palestine, not in the interest of “anti-racism” or “solidarity” or any bullshit half-measures. Second, protesters will have to prepare to be faced with violence and with the full force of state repression. Here’s a little logic-puzzle version of what happens when you say “we’re staying here, we’re causing trouble, and we’re not moving until you (divest/get rid of your dual degree program/get this politician out of our town/whatever)”: there are three options. Option one: you give in, you leave there, you stop causing trouble, you get your House or your scholarships or your vote-in-six-months. Option two: they give in, they accept your demands and nothing less. Option three: they break out the tear gas, the riot batons, the robot dogs, the big-ass battering-ram pigmobiles. And here’s the truth of it all: if you let it be option one, you’re worthless, you’ve sold out the people of Palestine. If you don’t let it be option one, if you make The Man choose between option two and option three. Well, if he doesn’t have a really good goddamn reason to choose option two, it’s gonna be option three. That’s the unfortunate truth, so you better be ready, and start doing wrist and shoulder stretches, because plastic flexicuffs hurt worse than the metal ones, what’s up with that.
2. The Dogmatic Trend and its Flaws
What I just laid out describes the main current that I see “on the ground” in so-called pro-Palestine “activism” that does nothing at all for Palestine itself. I doubt I’m telling you guys anything new here, besides confirming that such things are happening and making the particulars clear. On the flip side of activism-theater, refusal to study history, and “wins” for the First World, I also have noticed that there is a trend to be unbelievably reductive and flippant when it comes to what one’s orientation towards Third World liberation groups engaged in armed struggle should be, what course of action should be taken in the First World, and a refusal to engage in good-faith conversation about either of those subjects without dogmatism.
I am speaking in particular about people who will say (correctly) “fundraising and mutual aid and liberal-left protests don’t do anything for Palestine”, but then follow that statement up with “the ONLY thing that will ACTUALLY free Palestine is communist revolution”. Though the last month has only strengthened my convictions that communism (in the form laid out by Marx, Lenin, and Mao, and practiced in the USSR and China) is correct, and true, and the only pathway to the permanent liberation of all the oppressed peoples of the world, it seems disgustingly chauvinistic to imply that the thing that a First-Worlder can do that has the most material impact on the people of Palestine is to focus on one’s home country, on some idea of “making revolution”.
Notably, other than MIM(Prisons) and another group I am working with who I shall not name, I have noticed that people who say such things don’t ever enjoy discussing what “making revolution” looks like, in this day, in this country, beyond platitudes. I see this trend frequently among communists who I know offline, but also among certain prominent users of popular “anti-revisionist” communist online discussion boards (I say this not to gossip or shit-talk, but rather because I believe it behooves one to recognize that even spaces that portray themselves as “anti-chauvinist” or “anti-revisionist” do not by default take Third World liberation and the contradictions that it would entail seriously. Judging by former discussions I’ve seen on the Maoist forums, this warping of the idea of “revisionism” to defend inaction isn’t a new trend per se).
This correct rejection of mutual aid and petit-bourgeois identity politics, followed by the proclamation of the vulgar line of “nothing you do has an impact for the people of Palestine if you aren’t making communist revolution in your home country”, seems to me to be a disguised version of the same sentiment that leads to disgusting and chauvinistic lines such as “well, we should critically support Hamas, but they aren’t communist, so the most important thing is to be critical of them”. Did Torkil Lauesen believe that the most important thing that a First-Worlder could do was “make revolution”, and that in the absence of a clear path forward, one should sit on their heels and wait for one to appear? did Ulrike Meinhoff? Would any of the people who say, whether behind their screens or out on the streets or in the encampment, “the only thing you can do for the people of Palestine is make communist revolution”, genuinely try and claim that they’re doing more for Palestinian liberation than Hamas, Lauesen, or Meinhoff? Of course I don’t intend to advocate adventurism, I don’t believe that we in the First World should be taking up the gun or robbing banks, but I do believe that a refusal to engage with the question of what a liberated Palestine (and, if Cuba and South Africa, for example, are any precedent, not necessarily a communist Palestine) would look like beyond First World radical academics’ ideas of “building revolution” is just a flipside of the chauvinism displayed in the “well, at least we’re doing SOMETHING” rhetoric of mutual aid and peaceful protest.
No matter whether they distort Marxism, Maoism, or third-worldism, they inevitably find their way to the same conclusion: none of the groups currently debating and fighting and sacrificing for the Palestinian cause are worthy of my time; they’re all revisionist, bourgeois, labor-aristocrats; students are all postmodernist bourgeois-wannabes risking their educations and sometimes their lives for the bit; protesters are all shills for the DNC; thank goodness I don’t have to feel bad about my inaction. The dogmatists, the “do-nothing”-ists, imply, in essence, the same thing that the first type of chauvinists implicitly believe. The job of a First-Worlder is to fundraise, or to go to art builds, or to read and daydream about the day a revolution free of contradictions springs from the soil, while the job of a Third-Worlder is to die.
3. Both Are Worse
As I’ve already said, my central point is thus: both trends, more than anything else, serve as a justification for the ostensibly class-conscious First-Worlder to not do anything that would compromise their comfortable lives, a veritable “class-suicide hotline.”
“no, First Worlder, don’t go beyond liberalism and bourgeois legality, don’t commit your valuable free time to reading and study, don’t risk getting expelled – parade-type protests, symbolic encampments, and mutual aid funds are totally sufficient and just as important! You have so much to chant for, you have so many tech jobs to land!”
“no, First-Worlder, don’t get involved, don’t join any groups, don’t talk to the lower and deeper masses, don’t learn from resistance movements of the past – you haven’t fought with enough other First Worlders online or in your book clubs, god forbid you accidentally make a mistake and learn from practice!”
These are the two trends that we must combat in the struggle for a free Palestine here in the belly of the beast, where all the funding and weapons for the ongoing genocide continue to flow from.
