By the Oakland-Berkeley Revolutionary Study Group
“And the little beginning of little academic conflicts is a great beginning, for after it–if not today then tomorrow, if not tomorrow then the day after–will follow big continuations.” -Lenin
Student leaders of the university occupation movement have put forward a clear and principled call to not let normalizers and opportunists co-opt their movement into a distraction from the genocide in Palestine, led by US Imperialism and waged by Zionism. This call is absolutely correct in principle, but like all principles it must be fleshed out to be put into practice. What does it mean to center Palestine? It means to center the interests of the Palestinian people, and to frustrate all attempts to turn this movement into a platform for the honeyed words of romantic intellectuals, into a navel gazing spectacle for self centered activists.
But this principle of centering the interests of the Palestinian people does not mean that we should limit this movement to the issue of Palestine alone. The genocide in Palestine is a policy of US Imperialism. It is a bloody, horrific policy but it is still “merely” a policy. Underlying this policy is a deep rooted structure of imperialism, a stage in the development of human society in which the nearly 400 Million residents of the land currently known as the United States of America are conscripted into a factory which produces death, and the luxuries which the enemy consumes while watching this death. To properly center Palestine, we must lower our gaze, down from the highest branches of the tree of US imperialism, to the roots of the economic and political system which sustains it.
The enemy would prefer if we did not rebel at all, but this is out of the question. The next best thing is for them to limit our rebellion to an internal opposition, to a proposal for some new imperialist policy, to a call for return to “peace.” To center the Palestinian people does not mean to center them in our gaze, and convert ourselves into witnesses of their genocide. Nor does it mean to turn our rebellion into a toothless peace movement. It means to convert the enemy’s offensive war abroad, into a defensive war at home. It means to understand that only the people of Palestine can directly defend themselves through armed resistance. And only we can directly attack the imperialists at their centers of power. To center the interests of the Palestinian people means to use the outrage sparked by this genocidal policy of US Imperialism, and convert it into deep seated and all round revolutionary consciousness among the masses of the United States. No amount of militancy can overthrow this “giant with clay feet,” if this militancy is focused on fighting the shadow cast by this giant. The only thing that can do this is a clear definition of our enemy, and the discipline to attack this enemy at their weakest point with our strongest forces.
In order to help orient our forces, we want to outline two major deviations towards the student occupation movement.
Student Vanguardism
In a certain sense, the students can act as a vanguard of the revolutionary movement. The specific characteristics of students, who are mostly young people engaged in high level mental labor, means that students are often the first line of response to major political events, because they have high energy and are actively engaged in political life. But there are other characteristics of students that make them incapable of being a vanguard in the fullest sense of the term. Most students are not in school year round, and most students are in school for at most four years. College life also tends to isolate students from the lives of the broad masses. This makes it difficult for student movements to maintain a long term viewpoint, and to sustain protracted political struggles.
Rather than the vanguard, students are more like the scout force of the revolutionary movement. They are often the first to make contact with the enemy, but they are incapable of defeating the enemy on their own. Strategically, the students play a supportive role in the revolutionary movement, and their main task must be to facilitate the revolutionary movement of the working class. Today, the student movement is far in advance of the main force, the working class movement. If students do not keep this in mind, this will lead to a demoralization of the student movement, when inevitably they are incapable of defeating the enemy on their own. Tactically, students must continue their offensive against the enemy as far as possible. Strategically, students must circle back to join the main force, propagate the lessons they have learned about the enemy, and plan a new course of action with the main force of the revolutionary movement. This means that advanced students must prepare to go among the working class, especially when they leave school. To be effective revolutionaries, they must study revolutionary theory, especially the works of Marx, Lenin and Mao. But study alone will not give students proletarian consciousness, only social practice can do this. Therefore students must study revolutionary theory, allow this theory to open their minds to new forms of consciousness, and then change their social practice by going among the workers and allowing the process of capitalist production to imbue them with deep rooted proletarian consciousness.
Workerist Liquidationism
Because students are a scout force of the revolutionary movement, they are incapable of winning on their own. But no army could exist without an effective scout force. Students are an insufficient but absolutely necessary component of the revolutionary movement. Some pedantic “Marxists” believe that only workers employed in large scale production have any serious role in the revolutionary movement.
Liquidationism means renouncing the leadership of the advanced sections of the working class over the entire revolutionary movement. Therefore anyone who rejects the need for advanced workers to really lead the highly active student movement, and insists that workers must do everything on their own, is liquidating the leadership of the working class over the student movement, and replacing leadership with having workers do everything on their own. This viewpoint has led some revolutionaries to take a highly chauvinistic and condescending attitude towards the student movement, treating it as a distraction from the “hard core” revolutionary work of organizing workers at the point of production.
Just as students are isolated on campuses, workers are more or less isolated in their individual workplaces. As revolutionaries, we have two tasks to overcome this problem. We must propagate the activity of the students to the working class, explain to workers why the students are rebelling, and bring light of youth energy into the dark and stale factories and warehouses. Students must teach the workers about the crimes being committed by their bosses against their class sibblings around the world, in countries that many workers have barely heard of. We also must bring the salt of the earth attitude of the workers into the ivory tower of the universities. Workers who have been trained in the discipline of capitalist production can teach students how to avoid the “autonomist” anarchism that is so palatable in the petty bourgeois environment of the university. Workers who have been swindled by managers and capitalists for decades can teach students how to smell the bullshit promises of wide grinned university administration and the misleadership of demagogic professional “leftists.”
If revolutionary students can’t bring the workers to their encampments, they should form coordinated detachments, go to the working masses in their neighborhoods and workplaces, invite workers to tour their encampments, and share their experience with the broad masses, and try to gather lessons, advice, words of encouragement; anything that the workers can offer to bolster the isolated encampments. But regardless of tactics, which can never be prescribed in advanced, the advanced students must recognize that without the workers they are nothing, and to win over the workers they must transform themselves into proletarian revolutionaries, and steel themselves for the long decades of class struggle to come.
Victory to the Palestinian Resistance!
Victory to the Revolutionary Students!
Long live the International Proletarian Revolution!
Workers and Oppressed People of the World, Unite!
Signed,
Revolutionary Study Group
Revolutionary Student Union
Revolutionary Maoist Coalition
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