As we write this article, we are experiencing a student revolt against the genocide in Palestine that is sweeping the world. For months now, students around the world and in the United States have been protesting for Gaza as they once did for Vietnam. An anti-imperialist consciousness has begun to emerge among the youth, who are willing to fight and confront the state, and who want to see a free Palestine.
With the emergence of encampments and direct action to draw attention to U.S. universities’ ties to the state of Israel, there is an open debate about the methods and strategy to lead the movement to victory.
The Development of Consciousness
In recent years we have seen processes of struggle in different countries and different expressions of self-organization. When we say “self-organization,” we mean democratic assemblies. In these assemblies, people democratically decide the next steps of the struggle; they are the means by which self-organization is expressed. Self-organization is the conscious organization of those who struggle against bureaucratic leaderships. Self-organization has been an integral part of recent processes of class struggle, from the comités de resguardo in Chile in 2019 to the neighborhood assemblies that appeared in Argentina in 2024 to protest the Omnibus Law. Even in the United States self-organization has developed in acute moments of mass unrest, such as in Seattle in 1919.
In the United States, we are faced with the terrible genocide being carried out by Israel with the absolute support of Biden’s administration, which continues to send weapons, missiles, economic, technological, and military aid to Israel. In doing so, the Biden administration has the support of the entire bipartisan regime, including the Republican Party and the far-right Trumpist wing. In response to this, the pro-Palestine movement has exploded in the heart of the empire to demand an end to the genocide and the liberation of Palestine. This movement has continued with different rhythms and stages over seven months; after the wave of encampments that hit university campuses in the spring, the movement is at a crossroads, and it must draw conclusions from the experience of the last several months.
So far, the movement for Palestine has lacked self-organization in the form of assemblies.
This is true of the main currents leading the movement, which draw on a wide variety of strategic perspectives. These organizations include Within Our Lifetime (in New York City), the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace. Their organizational reference points are “populist,” “Maoist,” “Stalinist,” or “decolonial” positions. None of these perspectives center the development of assemblies and self-organization of workers and students. Most of the encampments were organized with small, unelected, and many times secret leaderships that made most of the key decisions.
This has also been true of the protests in the streets, some of which drew hundreds of thousands of people into the struggle against the genocide. Many of us marched day after day, but we didn’t have a say in the demands made at these marches or in creating a broader program for the movement.
That’s because these groups’ strategy is to pressure the state to make concessions, like a cease-fire, or to change its policy. They work with other bureaucracies, such as Democratic Party–affiliated NGOs, to negotiate their demands. They reject or obstruct the development of democratic spaces for discussion because of “security concerns” or because they believe that a select group of students should make all the decisions. This keeps the movement bureaucratized and denies deliberative decision-making to the thousands of students who put their lives and futures on the line to mobilize.
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Developing assemblies is vital so that the workers and students as a whole can decide and give their opinion on the best way to fight, organize, expand the movement, debate, and vote on the path forward.
To use a concrete example, in Argentina, the fight against the ultra-neoliberal policies of right-wing president Javier Milei and his government has given rise to dozens of “street assemblies.” In these assemblies, students, workers, and retirees gather to decide how to fight back and defend their rights. There are other assemblies at universities, where students deliberate and vote, or assemblies for women and queer people to discuss how they are affected by the government’s policies and how to advance the struggle. These assemblies debate and vote on the measures they take against Milei’s government, such as mobilizations, denunciations, and events at the universities.
Assemblies such as these and other bodies of self-organization that develop in moments of class struggle give us space to debate, exchange, and vote on the political and strategic perspectives for the movement, as well as on particular tactics or actions. Discussing these questions out in the open, we can see in real time which path is the most successful and make conclusions together about how to continue. We do not believe that such decisions should be taken by a limited nucleus of people.
It is in our interest to know what all those involved think, and this is the method by which we can get more and more people involved in the struggle. The unions, the student movement, and the working class have the power to stop the war machine. This is what it will take to end the genocide — a mass movement of the working class and oppressed, using our own methods. Developing assemblies, self-organization, and “direct democracy” is the method by which we will achieve this.
Why? Because the assemblies can become “our” places, where everyone can come together to decide next steps. One of the limitations of the encampment leaderships was that they did not put democratic organizing at the center so that the voice of the students could prevail. This stood in the way of the encampments’ growth and prevented the students from defending against repression. That is why we need to broaden the movement so that it gains power and can take independent action — decided with democratic methods — that can really overthrow the imperialist war machine and win.
For the movement to be successful, it is essential that as many people as possible are part of the decision-making process, not only so that more people can be involved in taking up the tasks of the movement, but also so that more people are active in the next stage of the movement. The movement is best protected not by limited participation in decision-making, but the broadest possible democracy (which also increases our unity). If we have our own spaces to discuss the movement’s strategy, where everyone can state their positions, we can decide for ourselves the best way forward. Co-optation occurs more easily when decisions are made behind closed doors or at the negotiating table. But when all positions are public, those of us who struggle can decide. This means that our assemblies must be collective and deliberative, representing openly all those taking part in the movement, including from political, social, or workers’ organizations.
For example, if the takeovers of buildings had been democratically voted on, it would have been much more difficult for the police to repress or evict the protesters. What a difference it would have also made if there was coordination between the different occupations and encampments across various cities or even across the country. When the police threatened to evict encampments, the others could help and defend each other. But this experience was limited by the bureaucratic leadership of the encampments, who said that overemphasizing the encampments was distracting from the genocide in Gaza.
We, as revolutionary Marxists, propose assemblies and self-organization as a method, based on historical experience.
What we are looking for is the widest participation of the workers or students in decision-making. We believe that this democracy from below has to be a conscious and permanent practice. In that sense, the example of CUNY in New York City is instructive. University workers participated in three assemblies to decide what measures to take, voting by a show of hands. This is an example that all universities and workers could follow.
The fight against centralized decision-making is not limited to actions taken by students, but can be seen in other sectors of the Palestine movement, including in the wider labor movement. Even though we welcome union statements calling for a “cease-fire,” we have seen how the bureaucracies of the labor movement have stood in the way of not just the greater intervention of the workers movement into the fight against the genocide, but also the success of workers’ struggles for better conditions in their workplaces. Their leadership runs contrary to the development of assemblies and self-organization. For example, the UAW waged a historic fight that won many of their demands, but the fight was limited without the application of real and direct democracy among the rank and file. The same can be said about the interventions of the unions in the Palestine movement; they do not promote mobilizations or actions for to end the genocide, instead supporting the regime that props up the state of Israel, as we can see in the support of UAW president Shawn Fain for Genocide Joe. Despite the labor leaders’ obstruction, U.S. union workers have taken action against the genocide and in support of the movement as it was here and here. But it takes broad organization from below to use the power of the working class to end the United States’ complicity in Israel’s oppression of Palestine, including rebelling against the anti-worker laws that discipline workers and prevent them from using the strike as a weapon.
Political Projects
Self-organization arises in the heat of class struggle, but for Marxist revolutionaries, it is the starting point for developing the political power of the working class and the oppressed, independent of the ruling class and its allies. It is the basis for workers and students to become political subjects who make democratic decisions and deliberate about their future for themselves.
Developing deliberative democratic assemblies is the key to expanding our movements to draw in more sectors and fight together for our demands, but it is also the method by which we can fight for more. The genocide in Palestine has shown how this capitalist system only brings misery to the working class and oppressed people around the world. It is a genocide alien to the working masses; the imperialist governments maneuvered behind the backs of the masses around the world to carry out a genocide on this scale. The interests of the two-party regime, both Republicans and Democrats, are not our interests.
In the United States we see different political projects. On the one hand there is Biden and the Democratic Party, which give absolute support to Israel; it is the same party that funds the Ukrainian government to protect itself against challenges to its hegemony, and that enforces a policy of using the Border Patrol to “combat migration.”
On the other hand, Trump and the Republicans do not differ much from their opponents. Trump supports the state of Israel and the genocide. He continues with repressive plans for the border and immigrants. He plans to institute more protectionist policies. What gives him a great chance of winning the presidency is an unimproved economic situation. In this lies the fight to gain the support of workers in the “registered” labor movement, who have lost the value of their salaries with inflation. Biden has lost some of their support because of the fall in purchasing power, and on the other hand he has lost votes over his unconditional support for Israel.
Trump is not going to change. Against the backdrop of an ongoing crisis of the neoliberal world order that has called into question the United States’ might as an imperialist power, neither Trump nor Biden presents a viable path forward to solve this capitalist crisis.
More importantly, they present no solution for the millions of working and poor people in the United States who are seeking an alternative to increased poverty and precarity. In that sense the weakness of these capitalist governments shows the necessity of a third project — a workers’ party that fights for a different kind of society. The populist, Stalinist, or Maoist politics of the leaders of the Palestine movement end up adapting to a pro-Biden policy, seeing this as the most expedient way to achieve their demands. But we need our own alternative. From the self-organization of our movements, we see the path forward through the development of a third party, a workers’ party — independent of the capitalist class — that fights for socialism.
Amid the election campaigns, we will hear constantly that the United States is the most democratic country in the world, but we see that this is untrue.
With the perspective of building spaces where we can make democratic decisions — such as assemblies in the universities and in the unions — we can fight for greater worker and student democracy as part of the effort to build a working-class party that fights for socialism.
We say again, self-organization and democratic assemblies where you can speak, vote, etc., are the first steps of the vanguard to advance the logic that we workers and students are the ones who have to decide since we are the ones who generate wealth. We can stop, run, and change everything. The self-organization of the working class is the first step in building a force that can topple this system and build a society without exploitation and oppression, where those who produce and make everything run in society are in control. We know that if we come together and unite, we are stronger, and in this way we can build self-organization in all the places where we are. Capitalism always tries to divide us by race, creed, color. We want to break down these barriers and fight for true dual power and self-organization.
Originally Published: 2024-06-14 14:11:46
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