Some advice for the campus occupation movement from an anarchist movement veteran
David Rovics shares some of his hard-won knowledge with a new generation of anti-war activists
Hey Folks,
Like many of you, I’ve been inspired by the campus occupation movement spreading throughout the U.S. and Canada.
I live in Mexico now, and I’ve been thinking about how I can support this movement from afar. As a writer, the obvious thing to do would be to share some thoughts on strategy.
As someone who has been politically active for basically my entire life, I’m sure that I know things that the younger generation of occupiers don’t. But I’m also a straight white cis-gendered male anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist. I’m extremely critical of the American Left. Do any of the new generation of occupiers want to hear what I have to say?
I’m well aware that a lot of Leftists don’t like me, and guess what? I’m like anyone. I want to be liked. The chip I’ve had on my shoulder for much of the three years comes from the fact that I’m pissed off that I’ve become a social pariah amongst my former friends for opposing COVID authoritarianism. But I know I need to get over that at some point. If I could flip a switch and reset my emotions, I would. Trust me.
Nevertheless, I’m going to start writing for the campus occupiers, because I feel like I have something to offer. I was active during the Occupy movement in 2011, and I also participated in the Unist’ot’en Camp, the uprising at Elsipogtog, Standing Rock, the Gidimt’en Checkpoint, the Sovereign Likhts’amisyu Village, the Oshkimaadziig Unity Camp, the rail blockades at Tyendinaga, and many other direct actions and protests. I know a thing or two about a thing or two, and intelligent people know that you can learn just as much from people you don’t like as from people you do.
I wouldn’t really say that I know that much about the movement at this point, beyond what I’ve read on Substack and seen on YouTube, so I’d like to start a discussion about what the possible needs of this movement could be.
I would also appreciate it if people could direct me towards resources, such as in-depth interviews with occupation organizers, which will help me understand the needs of the movement better. I want to be as useful as I can be from behind a computer screen.
SOME TOPICS I COULD COVER
Consensus Process that doesn’t get derailed by infiltrators, wingnuts, identity politicians, opportunists, or people who just like hearing the sound of their own voice too much
Security Culture
Standing in your truth (i.e. the psycho-spiritual/emotional dimensions of gearing yourself up for conflict)
Understanding Police Tactics
Understanding Ideological Subversion and Psychological Warfare
Legal Support
Jail Solidarity
Media Messaging
The eternally fraught terrain of race & gender and how to navigate it
Coalition Building
Radical Clowning
The Importance of Art, Creativity, and Fun
For now, I will share some thoughts of the great anarchist folk singer David Rovics, who has been politically active even longer than I have.
I’d also like to take this moment to say that David has an amazing new album out. Every song is about Palestine and the movement opposing Israeli genocide, which means that you couldn’t really find music more appropriate to play at BDS protests.
To any musicians out there - I’m sure that David would be happy if any of you covered some of these songs and played them at protests!
It just so happens, by the way, that David has publicly expressed his willingness to travel to campus occupations to play these songs. I’m sure he’d also be be willing to do teach-ins. He’s been a Palestine Solidarity activist for many years, and is connected to an international network. He brings a lot to the table.
He’ll come play music for you for free if you’re not too far from Portland, but if you happen to be able to get your hands on some student union money or something, he’d be happy to go further afield.
I hope that David won’t mind me saying this, because it’s not like he’s a grandpa or anything, but he is a movement elder. Hell, I’m 36 and I’m pretty much an anarchist movement elder at this point. Most people drift off after getting sick of scene drama around 27 or so.
Anyway, David has a lot of knowledge to share, and if you want to stack the deck in your favour, you do would do well to absorb lessons learned by activists who have been active for decades. The anarchist movement has hostile to older folks for about a decade now, but hopefully it’s only a matter of time before attitudes change. We all need to come together - anarchists, liberals, conservatives, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, rural white folks, urban POC, men, women, straight folks, queer folks, indigenous people, settlers, and everyone who wants to see an end to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
(Disclaimer: just so everyone knows, David Rovics being associated with Nevermore does not mean that he shares all of my controversial views. I am an agitator, and often say things that are meant to be provocative, because I believe that controversy can be beneficial in advancing discourse. Please don’t judge all Nevermore contributors by my most provocative statements. Nevermore is not a political party and we don’t have a party line. I say this because I wouldn’t want David to be judged due to my rabble-rousing.)
Without further ado, I present:
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CAMPUS PROTESTS
by David Rovics
1) Taking over physical space and having a protest encampment there is a powerful tactic.
It's a tactic that requires collective organization, and the participation of significant numbers of seriously committed individuals. As long as a physical space can be held in some visible form, it can continue to be a magnet for solidarity, more organizing, and popular education, as well as opposition, attacks, ridicule, and more. Past powerful examples of holding physical space and generating a lot of attention, controversy, and even political changes have included the IWW's free speech campaigns of the 1910's, the union sit-down strikes of the 1930's, the campus occupations of the 1960's, Alcatraz Island and other campaigns of the American Indian Movement in the 1970's, the urban squatting movement in many parts of Europe and New York City in the 1970's and 1980's, the Tahrir Square occupations in various Arab countries of the 2010's, and Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
2) The tactic of occupying a public space is often opposed by the authorities with state violence.
Holding physical public space generally involves violating the law on a daily basis. Usually there are laws against setting up tents in public spaces like the centers of campuses or in city parks, and other laws against spending the night in those tents. The authorities in most countries tend to get worried when a whole bunch of people are very publicly and intentionally violating laws, because it undermines what they call "the rule of law" and their authority. If negotiations are even attempted, authorities quickly resort to violence either way, in many countries.
3) If the repression doesn't kill the movement, it can cause a solidaristic reaction, and make it grow instead.
There are many examples of social movements that started relatively small, but then after being violently repressed, grew dramatically as a result of the broader community being outraged by the way protesters were treated by authorities, as well as the way they were being misrepresented in the press. This was a pattern that could be observed repeating itself regularly across the country during Occupy Wall Street, as well as during the global justice movement in the decade preceding Occupy.
4) The corporate media is using the protests as an opportunity to try to fear-monger around the supposed atmosphere of antisemitism and general chaos on the campuses.
This campus uprising is getting heavy media coverage. Partly this is because of dramatic events, police repression, brutal physical treatment of students and professors caught on camera, etc., and partly this is because an agenda of a given media platform is being served by covering the protests from a certain angle. It's good to bear in mind that protests and even large social movements do not automatically get media coverage of any kind, let alone positive press. And getting lots of media coverage, whether it's positive or negative, comes with major pros and cons.
5) The politicians, especially Republicans, are hoping to use their manufactured crisis as a means to win upcoming elections, a la Nixon in 1972.
The only crisis in this equation, of course, is Israel is committing genocide. There is no antisemitism crisis, and there is no chaos on the campuses -- overwhelmingly just peaceable, public campouts of concerned citizens who are doing what they are doing out of outrage against genocide, and at great risk to their personal safety, personal finances, and academic futures. But the reason for the massive media coverage on the part of much of the media is to create the impression of a crisis, either in order to distract attention from any number of other things -- such as the famine that is taking hold in Gaza, or the continuing, daily massacres of children that are now getting far less news coverage on many outlets -- or in order to get "law and order" candidates elected. This political strategy has been used successfully on various notable occasions, such as the pivotal election of 1972, which Nixon won.
6) It is significant, however, that this movement is taking place during a Democratic administration, and can't easily be painted as (and isn't) a partisan phenomenon.
Although the conservative, Republican Party-oriented media outlets are painting the movement on the campuses as "woke" and "liberal," the reality is that the mainstream of the Democratic Party leadership is 100% behind Israel, no matter how genocidal the government running the country may be at a given time. My experience with the global justice movement, that began during the long reign of Democratic Party neoliberalism and imperialism in the 1990's, was the fact that it was opposing capitalism and transnational corporate hegemony during a time of a Democrat-led government helped clarify the beliefs and intentions of the movement as a whole, and made us less susceptible to getting distracted by what most of us felt to be the hopeless arena of US electoral politics.
7) The repression against protest and free speech in the past six months has been extreme.
Even by the standards set by repressive police states like ours over the past couple of generations, the political atmosphere in the Congress and in the media has been especially rabid and one-dimensional. Whereas during the genocidal American war in Vietnam, despite a tremendous degree of campus activism and mobilization of society in general, for a long time it was a real taboo to call in the riot cops to arrest your students. Fast forward to 2024, it seems to be standard practice.
8) Whether the student-led movement will be able to seize the mantle of defenders of free speech is an open question, and I think a very important one.
Without painting the students, staff, or faculty across the US with too broad a brush, it's fairly obvious to say that for many people involved, this is a movement to free Gaza and it's a movement for free speech, against conflating opposition to Israeli genocidal practices with being anti-Jewish, against throttling free speech, canceling Valedictorian speeches on false grounds, or banning student organizations. For other people involved, free speech may not be such a priority. Recent years have seen many left-identified people on campuses across the country protesting against and shutting down events involving speakers identified, rightly or wrongly, as rightwing in some way. It has been normative for there to be a greater concern for "safety" over freedom of discourse. Without an unequivocal support for the fundamental notion presented by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, we stand to lose this argument.
9) If the movement doesn't subside quickly, psy ops tactics to divide and conquer it will (continue to) be employed on a massive scale, and this takes many forms.
All successful movements are profoundly inclusive in nature. All unsuccessful ones adopt exclusive attitudes. There are always dishonest actors working for one or another division of the police across the country, along with random wingnuts and brainwashed sectarians, who will be pushing for the movement to behave in exclusive and cliquish ways, always pushing for divisions within the movement to be explored, pushing to denounce people within the movement who are perceived to have made mistakes. This phenomenon must be recognized and opposed through rejecting exclusivity and embracing inclusivity. Movements desperately need to grow, or they die (unless they become successfully institutionalized). This is always the case. This one is surely no exception.
10) There's a big difference between "widespread protests" and "massive protests," and it's important to note this and the perceived atmosphere various media are trying to establish, for whatever varied and contradictory reasons.
This movement is getting massive media coverage. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it's important not to mistake massive media coverage for a massive movement. Occupy Wall Street also got massive media coverage. The global justice movement a decade earlier did not. The impact of Occupy getting huge media coverage from the beginning was pretty evident; the movement didn't have time to develop in some organic way, but was just everywhere all of a sudden. This gave it the appearance of being a big movement, but this was only really the case in certain cities. The blanket media coverage seemed to give a lot of people within the movement and outside of it very inaccurate impressions about how big, how organized, or how much potential various local groups had to accomplish what both the media and many participants imagined could be accomplished. Unlike with the case of movements that got virtually no press, such as the global justice movement, Occupy never had large-scale protests in most of the country unless it was a protest announced in advance on local media, and this was also the case with the racial justice movement of 2020. And in both of these cases, although repressive authorities and police brutality played a huge negative role, it was when the media stopped covering these movements that they largely just seemed to dissipate.
In conclusion, in case it's not abundantly obvious, I hope to see this movement grow dramatically, and bring our bipartisan, genocide-enabling political leadership to its senses, and soon. But if that has any chance of happening, this movement will have to find a way to overcome a lot of major obstacles.
Bearing Witness is the new album, out on Bandcamp now, dropping on streaming platforms on May 1st. The Bearing Witness WORLD TOUR has me in the PNW in May, Australia in June/July, California in August, Scandinavia in November, and those islands north and west of France in March, 2025.
More focus on protest and police violence and government censorship but not much coverage of Israeli atrocities. Could this be the strategy? Kman
Excellent points by David.
And yes, people should listen to you too.
I am also someone who has been involved in movements going back to the early 1990s.
The shutdown of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999 in Seattle was a highlight and has lots of lessons to teach us. “That was what democracy looks like”