Why We Must Escalate

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The May 1st Encampment and strike wave, carried out in solidarity with the call to action issued by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, was a watershed moment in the last four years of campus activism. Never before has Dartmouth seen the scope and scale of the activities which were coordinated on International Workers' Day. They have set the new precedent for what is possible and necessary in our local struggle against capitalism and imperialism. Conversely, the College also unleashed a level of repression as yet unseen in campus history. For many of us, we believed that the stark images of students and professors being wrestled to the ground would be the catalyst for a mass pressure campaign culminating in the unseating for the President and wins for divestment. But as the days following that flashpoint wore on, it dawned on me that we had already lost.

 

The reality of the situation was that only a minority of students, faculty, and staff were sympathetic to our cause (and even within that, there was a subset who were more concerned about free speech than a free Palestine) . We only won narrow majorities in the student and faculty no confidence votes. The graduate strike came to an end without any divestment wins. And all the while, we continued to have rallies and symbolic protests that failed to remobilise our base. In the end, Dartmouth was successful. They were well capable of navigating the PR storm. And their use of state violence deterred the real threat: continued physical escalation by the student movement. As we turn towards the new school year, we must accept that our path to victory lies in building increasingly militant and durable escalation against the College.

 

In making the case for this, let us first turn to some key takeaways from the May 1st action. First, police violence is the new reality for any effective protest. The College knows that it can use the threat of violence, arrest, and administrative discipline to keep protests docile and ignorable, such as what the encampment was reduced to in the months after May 1st. Anything that plans to be truly disruptive will always have to face the police as an obstacle. Second, mass arrests do nothing strengthen our own position. The arrests diverted valuable time and energy into jail/court support, deterred others from joining in our activities, and has kept important organisers away from direct action due to their bail conditions. Finally, we cannot rely on media, alumni, or faculty pressure to play significant roles in extracting concessions. While they can be complimentary to our own efforts, the activities of these groups were largely slow, passive, and ineffective at pressuring the College.

 

So, if we must expect confrontations with the police, cannot afford to suffer mass arrests, and there is no path to victory outside of direct action, what must be done? In the face of this, one might shrink away from the risks and dangers posed by direct confrontation with the College and stick to peaceful demonstrations. But we cannot afford such passivity in the face of genocide. Instead, we must continue to commit ourselves towards militant direct action with strategic counters to the obstacles that led to our defeat last year. The key plank of such a strategy is building a protest culture that is willing to confront the police and resist arrest.

 

What does this look like practically? Again we can turn to the events of May 1st for examples of how this kind of protest culture could have changed the tides of the day. The police carried out a typical arrest protocol for a stationary protest whereby they identify the most active/vulnerable members of a crowd and pull them away for arrest. On the Green, the protests were gathered on the Western half of the lawn. The riot police assembled on the eastern side near College Street. They then organised themselves into several operational zones. The foremost one was the battle line of riot office who advanced westward across the green towards the encampment zone. Behind them were officers playing support roles, guarding the police cruisers, preparing to process arrestees and load them into DOC vans, etc. Upon reaching the encampment, the police forced a buffer zone between the crowd and those who remained to guard the encampment. They did so by rushing the crowd to cause a stampede, before feinting and returning to their lines. As such, they created an environment where they could easily arrest people, take them behind their frontline, and prepare them for transport to jail. This occurred with little to no resistance from the protestors or the larger crowd. This went on until nearly the whole of the vanguard of protestors were gone, leaving the crowd directionless. Lacking this direction the cops then pushed the crowd off the Green entirely and into Main Street, where they easily swept and broke up the crowd, breaking its morale and forcing a withdrawal.

 

Imagine instead, though, that the crowd was better organised. That upon the arrival of the police battle line, that we formed our own ranks to meet them. That these ranks were locked together tightly, arm-in-arm by rows, and each column holding each other by the waist. In a scenario like this, anytime a cop would try to pull someone away, the crowd would lock arms, drop their centre of gravity and prevent that person from being pulled away. This keeps the composition of the crowd largely in check and vastly minimizes the rate and number of arrests suffered. This can be even further augmented with reinforced shields and banners to block baton strikes, gas masks for chemical weapon attacks, and so on. Such a crowd can be organised not only to hold the line, but to also push the cops back, as what happened at some schools like Humboldt and UT Austin.

 

Under these conditions, it is now the student movement, not the College, that has the power to decide when, where, and how an action ends. This is the key to victory in all future confrontations with the College. Using direct action for leverage in gaining a concession is only effective if we are the only ones that can set the terms of de-escalation. Moreover, a protest culture that actively confronts the police and actively protects its participants from arrest is much more likely to gain popular participation and support. In the lead up to the encampment, we had a bad habit of conceding arrest automatically, and thus divvying ourselves up into groups based on who was willing to go to jail or not. In the end, only a handful of people actively volunteered for such a consequence. While many more joined spontaneously, this will certainly be lower in the future unless direct action organisers can give people tangible ways to avoid arrest outside of not attending a protest.

 

These are not foolproof solutions to our dilemma, however. Arrests are still possible and should be expected under those conditions, and we must be better prepared to run jail and court support beforehand. But, as we saw at other schools, having these tactics on hand will greatly extend the duration of our protests. Remember, the May 1st actions were entirely peaceful, and still the police descended upon us. Police repression is not about violence or non-violence, it is about the protection of U.S. capitalism and its interests, including Dartmouth College. There is no safety in passivity. It can only be found in how actively struggle to protect ourselves and others until victory. 

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