A statement from the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (US), May 1st, 2024
On April 18, 2024, Columbia University students discovered America. Their university takes its name from the supposed discoverer of the Americas, but a much more profound discovery was made by the over a hundred Columbia University students arrested on April 18 by the NYPD, on the orders of Columbia University president Minouche Shafik, for protesting the US-Israel genocidal war on Gaza. Through their defiance, they discovered that America is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a class whose wealth and dominance is fueled by, and who is willing to defend with vicious repression, its imperialist exploitation and domination of the world.
A lynchpin of American imperialism after World War II has been the state of Israel, which serves as an attack dog and enforcer of the imperialist order in the Middle East, helping to ensure that the oil keeps flowing, world trade keeps moving through the Suez Canal, and US imperialism remains hegemonic in the region. To play that role, Israel has been armed to the teeth with vast quantities of the most technologically advanced weaponry by the US, and has been allowed and encouraged, also by the US, to expel Palestinians from their land through wars, massacres, and ongoing displacement, and rule over those who remain in conditions of apartheid and siege. As US imperialist hegemony has lost some ground in the region owing to the failures of US wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, challenges by other powers, and the resistance of the masses, Israel has become an even more vicious attack dog for US imperialism. The genocidal war on Gaza that Israel unleashed last October has increasingly exposed the depths of this viciousness, with most of Gaza leveled to rubble, tens of thousands massacred, and, most recently, mass graves of hundreds, including children, discovered around a hospital. The Israeli military literally massacred hundreds of Palestinians in a hospital and tried to hide their bodies in mass graves.
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has been met with worldwide protests since October, and has begun to spark divisions among imperialists and their junior partners over how to maintain their support for Israel. In occupied and besieged Palestine, resistance fighters and the masses of people have refused to give up their aspirations for national liberation and even delivered significant blows against the well-armed Israeli military. In the US, the mass movement against the US-Israel genocidal war has certainly included some defiant protest, but has been held back by a postmodernist politics that elevates the safety and comfort of protesters over the need to take actions that can truly stop the war machine. Furthermore, various opportunist organizations that make up the Left in the US have worked to keep protests within “acceptable” limits even while trying to make themselves appear more radical than they are through empty sloganeering and occasional arrest photo-ops.
It is about time that some decided to step out of those acceptable limits and disregard their personal safety and comfort in favor of defiance. That such defiance first came from students at elite universities such as Columbia is no surprise, considering that such students have greater freedom to do so, and when they exercise that freedom to side with the masses, it can provide oxygen that breathes defiance into other sections of society. The particular tactic—setting up encampments in the middle of campus—and the degree of preparedness is far less important than the defiance itself—the willingness to get arrested, to get suspended or expelled from college, to go up in the face of slander by university administrators, top government officials, and the bourgeois media. For it is that defiance that has created favorable new conditions through struggle, and “discovered” the bourgeois dictatorship that props up Israel and its genocide of Palestinians and represses any serious opposition to it in the US. Indeed, Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, is a great educator, for she has taught college students everywhere more about power relations under capitalism than than all the Foucauldian nonsense and other postmodernist theory they have had shoved down their throats in college classes. The crackdowns on pro-Palestine, anti-genocide encampments at college campuses across the country are indicative of the fact that the US bourgeoisie cannot allow the legitimacy of its attack dog Israel to be called into question.
What remains to be seen is whether the US bourgeoisie is able to weather this storm, continue backing and bankrolling Israel’s genocidal war, and relegitimize its system, including Israel’s role within the imperialist order. Whether they are able to do so depends substantially on what people in the US decide to do in the coming weeks and months. In the immediate sense, it is essential to spread the student revolts and duplicate the most defiant acts of protest far and wide. Perhaps it is time to drop postmodernist mantras like “we keep us safe” in favor of more militant stands like “we put ourselves in danger to stop a genocide.”
Next is the issue of how to prevent the current high tide of struggle from going the way of every other high tide of mass protest since 2011—into tepid reformism, capitulation, and grifters using moments of radicalism to launch their careers. Preventing that all too familiar scenario will take a deeper interrogation of the limits of postmodernist and Leftist politics, as these politics remain ideologically pervasive in the student movement even as many students have practically, but only temporarily, stepped beyond their narrow horizon. For defiance to persist past the current moment, some of the defiant ones will have to become dedicated revolutionaries. To that end, we offer the journal Going Against the Tide1 as the best tool in the ideological struggle against the limitations of postmodernist and Leftist politics. While ideological rupture with postmodernism and the Left will be a necessary and arduous process, the defiant ones can readily reject conservatism in the anti-war movement with the attitude of “Fuck Rules and Safety Obsession.” And they can reject the encroachments of grifters and misleaders into their encampments with the attitude of “Fuck Revisionists, Snakes, and Opportunists.”
Then there is the question of how this April storm feeds into a red hot summer of struggle. Unfortunately for the bourgeoisie it is an election year, and millions can see that an electoral system in which it is impossible to vote against genocide is a sham. The bourgeoisie has provided us with opportunities to expose this sham—both the Republicans and the Democrats have conventions this summer that will enshrine their presidential candidates and their imperialist, pro-genocide, politics. The Democratic National Convention will be a special display of bourgeois hypocrisy, enshrining Genocide Joe Biden as a candidate they expect people to re-elect for the sole reason that he is not Donald Trump, and consequently deserves to be the main target of struggle. What happens outside—and maybe even breaking inside—of the conventions can expose this sham and demonstrate to the world that millions of people inside the US have discovered America, the true America, that one that plunders and exploits the world.
Equally as important as the militant struggle on the campuses, outside the conventions, and in the streets is the mission to win over large numbers of people, especially among the most exploited and oppressed masses, to support that struggle, oppose the current genocidal war on Gaza, and lose any remaining faith they have in bourgeois-democracy. To that end, we call on all those radicalized by the current moment to spend their summer going to the masses, agitating against the US-Israel war, getting to know the masses and their struggles, and fusing the defiant energy of the student movement with the depth of experience and daily struggles of the proletarian masses. It is that process that can not only strengthen the current anti-war movement, but also begin to forge a revolutionary movement.
A big responsibility falls on the class of 2024, just as it did on the class of 1968. This is a moment to seize, to not go back to normalcy, to reject reformist politics of all varieties, and to go from defiance to firm revolutionary convictions. As we wrote in our November 2023 statement “Spread the Steadfast Spirit of the Palestinian Struggle,” our mission right now is to “aim at nothing short of provoking a legitimacy crisis for bourgeois rule in the US, wherein the role of ‘our’ bourgeoisie in backing and supporting a genocidal war is so thoroughly exposed and hated that their political rule is broadly thought of as completely illegitimate, and they have trouble ruling society in the old ways.” You in?
ENDNOTES
1 This statement was written a few weeks before the launch of Going Against the Tide, and pointed to the journal kites, the predecessor of Going Against the Tide. We have updated this statement for publication in Going Against the Tide.
Going Against the Tide: A journal charting a path for communist revolution in the US 