Summer’s Over
October 02, 2024 at 11:11PM“Any worthwhile analysis has to start from the searing fact that so far, nothing we’ve done has worked.” So begins this reflection by leftist collective The Bad Side on the campus encampments from last spring. Originally published as a pamphlet, and reproduced for a wider readership by n+1, this essay may start on a dispiriting note, but it quickly evolves in an exhortation to keep going, to fight on, to never give up:
Vigorous debate unfolded on many campuses between escalation and negotiation. The issue was knowing how much or which kinds of confrontation could be helpful in forcing the institution’s hand—though many resented that “the institution,” beneath contempt, was still a factor at all. Adjustments in outlook were necessary. Forms of sabotage familiar from other movements didn’t have the same effect. In the Weelaunee Forest, a torched bulldozer is its own reward: a literal and immediate impediment to the enemy. But the object of the campus encampments was a portfolio, a set of policies, the idiocies and lethal complicities of bureaucracy and elite opinion.
Escalation vs. negotiation: there’s no exact answer, no hard set of rules. Every campus is different. And struggles like this develop and even flip with startling cunning. We’ve seen many, many times how liberal de-fanging and co-optation—the “safety-ism” decried this spring—can pose a mortal threat to a movement. The same can be said for militant formlessness and political illegibility. Without firm answers, we can only hope to ask the right questions, holding ourselves to the discipline of the constant, present catastrophe.
But even the shrewdest strategic thinking gets spit out into a hateful paradox: In order to rise to the occasion, to practice fidelity to Palestinian liberation, to oppose in genuine fashion the world that empire makes and rules, non-Palestinian militants in the Global North will run up against the fact that what connects them to Gaza now is not just their radical conviction, but their proximity to complex mechanism of the pitiless imperial state. They are in the heartland of empire. No amount of tactical escalation can overcome this; the enormous distance between periphery and center won’t be transcended by force of will. More crucial is recognizing that one of this killing machine’s great advantages, allowing it to dominate and outmaneuver us time after time after time, is that it moves at two scales, two speeds. Empire cultivates deep, long-term structures (like the financial links between US civil society and the occupation) while manufacturing the bursting urgency of bombardment, point-blank murder, and second-by-second obliteration.
Opposing both processes, tooth and nail, is our titanic, essential task. The encampments, by menacing a whole web of investments while drawing reactionaries at home into open combat, came close to actually doing this. They were a real—which is to say, rare—experience of politics.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/02/summers-over/
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