Editorial Board
The Worker was contacted by student activists on the forefront of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement on US campuses. They asked:
“What are the successes and shortcomings of the occupation tactic that is being used in the ongoing student movement for Palestine and how will this tactic help us win our demands? It seems like every occupation is eventually crushed by the police—how do we hold out for longer and how do we win from it?”
At the bottom of it, any protest is two things 1) a show of force or resolve in terms of confronting the enemy with disapproval, and 2) a training ground to gain experience in said struggles while increasing exposure for the cause. With this said, we can consider the occupation protests as a ringing success which offer inspiration to the new generation of activists.
It is without question that the students have put up a good fight, have increased their skill in organizing, and have brought maximum exposure preventing the imperialists from being able to proclaim popular support for Israel among the masses. The principal shortcoming is that the campus struggle itself has had limited ability to extend beyond the universities, although we have witnessed mass support and activity from trade unions as well as high school students.
There is also the question of power, which in some cases has been raised in a rhetorical sense, for publicity purposes—some encampments have raised banners proclaiming “liberated zones”, a statement which, while conveying the right sentiment, does not reflect reality. As the people of Palestine led by the resistance prove, power is not a question of setting up tents, study groups, mutual aid, or even organization, but something that—like Chairman Mao said—grows from the barrel of a gun. The student masses clamor for power and are faced now with the reality of who has it, and who it is used against.
The correct tactic for any situation is found by studying the conditions. In spite of the rhetoric there is awareness among the students that conditions only permit so much. The occupation tactic has worked and gone further than the reaction and revisionism believed possible, most notably with Hind’s Hall on Columbia. Here students took control over a building and forced the police to deploy a great force to reclaim it, and of course the students struggled. Inside Hind’s Hall, evidence of sustaining the physical, moral, and political struggle can be seen—in terms of fortification, canteen, and political education. It becomes less about the duration of the occupation and more about the educational value of it to the people in general.
Dissemination of the struggle is critical to mobilizing the masses to take part. The students did this quite well, forcing the monopoly media and the reaction to address them and exposing the backward imperialist character of their universities’ administrators. This is precisely how the struggle builds until it accomplishes its immediate demands, only to raise new ones when its forces have improved their ability to struggle.
It is true that every occupation—and for that matter every protest that goes on longer than a few days—gets crushed by police. On the one hand we know that without armed forces of their own the people have nothing; the good news is that these are formed over a protracted sequence of struggle. What is fundamental to this is the role of the political leadership, which must grow into a force dedicated to reconstitute the Communist Party, which is the vanguard and leader of the working class and its allies, including the students.
On the other hand, to be attacked by the enemy is a good thing—if your protest tactics never accomplish the police attacks, it can only mean that they find you insignificant or find you acceptable. Neither of these things can be suffered for long, as the police and everything they represent are not acceptable to us, and must be defeated and replaced strategically. Those who want a Palestinian solidarity movement acceptable to the Joe Bidens of the world only want a more effective, more concealed imperialism; they want to deny reality and give up on even the most basic conquests.
As the subjective forces of social progress advance—that means as more students rise to oppose imperialism and more workers rise to confront the conditions of exploitation at home and abroad—a torrent takes shape, and when these forces really rise up the whole world can feel it. When the workers and students become aware of themselves and their enemy, and have become organized under the correct leadership, they are invincible.
Tactically the inability to sustain the occupation can only be solved with studying history and the current conditions. The Worker has published about this regarding the Great Sit Down Strike of 1936-37, in which workers occupied the factories and carried out battle against the repressive forces of the ruling class. Study history with past and future practice in mind. This is not enough of course—fight also for improved tactics and better organization. This means those taking part in the occupations analyzing the facts and seeking to improve their shortcomings. Fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again until victory.
Only by organizing everything, planning everything, and relying on the broad masses with the interests of the international proletariat at the core of the agenda can the short term limitations be transformed into a leap. The fight to force the universities to break ties with Israel can and must persist, even over the summer break. It is nothing that can be won in one semester, and the recent wave must be seen as the first skirmish and not the last. By building durable organizations and training one another against opportunism and reformism, and by understanding the need to temper revolutionaries in these struggles, a higher caliber of student activist will emerge and the universities will not be able to maintain their links to the Zionist state, which is being confronted everywhere.
A Word on Strategy, Tactics, and Reforms
Strategy and tactics are the science of leadership in the class struggle of the working class. It is only within the class struggle, in combination of its legal and illegal forms, that the correct strategies and tactics can be formed.
Strategy determines the direction of the main blow of the working class and its allies at a given stage of struggle. It elaborates the plan for mobilizing the forces. If we are to look at the stage of revolution in the US we conclude that the main force and leading force is the working class, and that its reserve forces are the students and intellectuals. They must be directed to overcome dispersal and disorganization in the interests of forming solid leadership as a step toward reconstituting the only Party which can lead the long fight to victory. It is the task of leaders to make good use of everyone in this interest, in the context of any given struggle. With Palestine as our example, making use of all the active elements means beginning with an opposition to genocide, then developing into internationalism and anti-imperialism, and on this basis expressing the necessity of the Party and the conquest and defense of political power.
All social movements rise and decline; tactics determine conduct of the progressive and revolutionary forces corresponding to the rise and decline of the movement. Tactics cannot aim to win the whole thing, but rather focus on winning certain engagements. Tactics can therefore consistently change even within one strategic stage. Advancing and retreating represent two different tactics which find themselves within the strategic advance of the given stage—either can be appropriate but neither can come from a pure desire; tactics have to contend with reality.
Tactics are for dealing with the forms of struggle and the forms of organization corresponding to a particular strategic perspective.
Leadership: the task of strategic leadership is overcoming dispersal, training comrades for the long fight to accomplish power for the workers; the task of tactical leadership is to master all forms of struggle, making use of the appropriate forces so that they can serve the strategic objective. Tactical leadership complements and is subordinate to strategic leadership. When the tide recedes, what is left is fewer people, but with stronger resolve and developed further in their understanding of strategy.
Revolutionary tactics and reformist tactics can appear similar at first glance. Revisionism hides behind this appearance.
Reforms are necessary and useful—breaking ties with Israel is such a reform. Reforms include certain compromises and agreements. The question is how to make the best use of these in the interests of the oppressed. A reformist is one who makes the reform itself the principal task, the “be all and end all” of it; he or she likes to evade talk about revolution, or in some cases only uses this talk to puff out their chests. Under imperialism such reforms are nothing but a way to strengthen the rule of the imperialists. It is the inverse with revolutionary tactics, where reforms are used as a way to strengthen and develop the revolutionary forces. All legal activity and work toward reforms are therefore carried out in a way to develop the revolutionary forces—which is ultimately illegal as it is a question of seizing and defending power.
For revolutionaries, reforms are the byproduct of revolution, fighting for reforms is activism which prepares the masses to go further than what is acceptable to the ruling class, as the masses prepare themselves for taking by force everything they have been asking for. The reformist on the other hand will use each and every conquest to proclaim that violence is no longer a reality nor a necessity, that the reform itself proves that the whole system can be reformed. This is hogwash and lies. Learning to know the difference takes both experience and audacity.
