Above photo: Detroit Metro Times.
And The Fight For Palestine In Detroit.
The Wayne State University encampment was repressed. Now, the movement must consolidate the lessons from the experience, and keep international liberation from imperialism and capitalism at its center.
Amid the latest military offensive in Rafah, the movement in solidarity with Palestine has remained active. Students across the country have been at the vanguard, setting up encampments and demanding that their universities divest from the Israeli war machine. The response from university administrations has been repression so intense that it has sparked broad outrage and condemnation because of its chilling effect on the right to protest and dissent. The intense crackdowns have led sectors of the movement to take up the issue of repression as a central part of the fight for Palestine. In California, UAW Local 4811, representing grad workers and researchers across the UC system, are on strike to demand that the UC system divest from Israel and stop retaliating against students and faculty. In Detroit a coalition of groups launched a campaign against repression and harassment of the movement.
The Detroit campaign reached a high mark when protesters were targeted for arrest by the Detroit police after a protest against Joe Biden’s presence at the annual NAACP dinner. In response, activists held a press conference to denounce the blatant targeting and harassment of activists. At the same time, organizers posted on social media videos of the arrests and the harassing behavior and racist language of DPD officers. As a result, an officer was suspended, and the DPD took a more hands-off approach at the march and rally that started the encampment at Wayne State University. Yet the threat of police repression remained, and DPD quickly threatened to sweep the encampment. Nonetheless, the movement’s response, and the social weight it carried, prevented the encampment from being swept immediately. Instead, the university administration waited to attack until the encampment was at its smallest — a pattern we have seen across the country, as evidenced by early-morning sweeps at UCLA, U of M, and other universities.
In a sense, the encampment and repression at Wayne State University touches on the strategic importance that Michigan will play in the upcoming presidential election. Michigan is a swing state, one that is crucial for any successful presidential campaign. It also plays a prominent, if understated, economic role in the U.S. as the home of the “Big Three” auto companies. Michiganders have a sense of their strategic power in the upcoming elections, especially Arab voters, on account of their large population in Michigan. This is expressed not only in the 100,000 votes cast “uncommitted” in the Democratic Party primary, but the presence of elected officials and religious leaders at the encampment in the face of the threat of repression. Nevertheless, the limits of the social power of the “vote” is expressed in the continual support that the Biden administration and the Democratic Party give to the state of Israel, and the refusal of the majority of university administrators to divest from Israel.
In a limited but important way, the encampments bring to the fore the social power of the movement, a power that is not dependent on votes for bourgeois candidates. Instead of courting politicians to support divestment in exchange for votes, students are claiming physical space and, in a sense, imposing themselves by doing so. For example, the CUNY encampment made an explicit call for a “people’s CUNY” run by students, faculty, and staff, with open enrollment and free tuition. In this way the encampments also challenge university administration’s “ownership” of the campus and assert the idea that students and faculty are the ones who truly own the university.
While these encampments are a good start, we should understand the need for strategies and tactics that do not rely solely on an active militant minority taking direct action. Only a wider mass movement that includes the working class has the social weight necessary to stop the genocide in Gaza. No doubt many in the movement know this. But without conscious strategies and tactics that reflect that reality, we end up relying on those militants who are active and eager for change; in doing so, we limit the scope of organizers in the movement. This is why, among other reasons, challenging the repression of the movement is an important way to broaden it and mobilize more people to the struggle in solidarity with Palestine.
The Need For Clear Anti-Capitalist And Anti-Imperialist Politics
Yet, to strengthen the movement’s resolve and clarity, we need to raise radical demands that express the real interests of the working class and the oppressed, demands that go beyond the scope of capitalism and imperialism.
The struggle for divestment from Israel has raised questions about the relationship between capitalism and imperialism. It has shown how government institutions, including universities, are committed to upholding U.S. imperialist interests, especially strategic ones like the U.S.-Israel relationship. It has meant that what seems like an “easy” thing to do, like the demand to divest from Israeli companies and government contracts, is not so simple because of the crucial purpose those institutional investments serve in maintaining the international order. This poses serious questions about our conception of capitalism as a form of society that can resolve the fundamental problems that it was built on and produces fundamental reform and resolves social crises that it created and relies on to stay in power.
For instance, the movement needs a clear understanding of imperialism and the reality that it is not a policy that can simply be changed. Rather, as Left Voice member Jimena Vergara recently wrote, drawing on Lenin’s definition: “Imperialism is an epoch of capitalism that organizes and governs the contemporary world order where power (economic, political, military, and ideological) is vested and concentrated in the hands of corporations represented and defended by their imperialist nation-states.” We therefore have to understand that, because capitalism is at the heart of imperialism, the only way to beat imperialism is to fight capitalism too. While winning statehood for Palestine would be a progressive step forward, it would not bring an end to imperialism or capitalism, nor would it end the exploitation of the working class of the Middle East.
Capitalism is not simply a collection of individual interests but a system that requires constantly increasing rates of profits to sustain itself. This global pressure means that capitalism as a system always trends toward increasing exploitation, regardless of which individuals are in charge.
This is why, for instance, none of the “alternative” bourgeois nationalist governments have empowered the working class to run society. In some cases, these governments — including many Middle Eastern regimes, like the one in Iran — have consistently repressed movements fighting for more freedoms and against corruption in their countries. While the scale and scope of these bourgeois nationalist governments might not result in the same as the carnage caused by U.S. imperialism, the exploitation and oppression experienced under these regimes is nonetheless a reflection of basic features of capitalist society. Here, the lesson is clear: the working class and oppressed need their own party to represent their interests and unleash their collective power to take control of their lives. Any party fighting for liberation for the working class and oppressed must emphasize that our interests cannot be fully realized under capitalism, and it must pose the need for revolution to overthrow capitalism.
Any talk of liberation has to take up consistent anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics. In a piece entitled “Palestinian Self-Determination and the Fight for Socialism,” Josefina L. Martinez points out that “we cannot look to the Arab bourgeoisies,” and instead must “look to the millions of workers, peasants and popular sectors of the Middle East and North Africa, who in recent years have seen their living conditions further deteriorate, as a result of the structural adjustment plans of imperialism and the IMF, applied by increasingly authoritarian regimes.” Self-determination for oppressed nationalities must be a secular fight that liberates other oppressed groups like women, youth, and LGBTQ+ people. And it must end the exploitation of the working class and create a workers government.
Preparing For The Next Phase Of The Struggle
To fully learn the lessons of our experiences and develop the politics that we need, the movement must create democratic spaces for open discussion and debate. Democracy within the movement is important because of what it allows us to do. It enables us to develop a collective strategy that the movement can confidently fight for and defend against the opposition from liberals and the Far Right. It creates a process of discussion that challenges us to more consistently and concretely present our ideas.
That is why creating assemblies and self-organization — organizations run and controlled by the movement’s rank and file — is key to bringing out our full strength. These assemblies and bodies of self-organization can be fully realized only on a class-independent basis; that is, they must not rely on or orient toward the Democratic or Republican parties, both of which belong to and are run by the capitalist class.
To reiterate the point in the previous section, the politics that we bring to these assemblies and bodies of self-organization is extremely important. A deeper development of internationalist, revolutionary theory, politics, and strategy can guide the actions of our movements. We have rich traditions from which to grow, but it is essential that we develop our perspectives to reflect the lessons of our experience and the shifting conditions of international capitalism.
The class struggle ebbs and flows. We have seen different versions of this over the last several months and years. The development of bodies of self-organization and assemblies helps the movement survive the ebbs and maximize what can be achieved during the flows. This is how we build and maintain the movement’s continuity.
If the movement is to prepare for the next phase of the struggle, it must collectively draw conclusions from its experiences, especially since October 2023. The movement is far stronger if it has a collective perspective based on democratic discussions focused on developing clear politics and strategies that concretely and systematically take up the question of power and liberation. With activity on campuses slowing as many students leave for the summer, the movement will be strengthened by making time and space to consolidate the lessons learned from the encampments, how they have fed the labor movement, and how to keep international liberation from imperialism and capitalism at the center of our perspective.