Disclaimer: The opinions presented in this piece are solely those of the author and do not mirror the views of North by Northwestern or its editorial team.

I initially drafted this Op-Ed in May. I submit it now, with minor revisions to bring it up to date, motivated by the University’s newly announced demonstration policy and the alleged intimidation of student protesters following a demonstration on October 7, 2024.

In 1902, Vladimir Lenin repudiated the Socialist Revolutionaries, a revolutionary peasant party, for their terrorism. Terrorism did not mean, say, an indiscriminate attack on a rave, or leveling a residential block without clear military justification; it meant terrorization of the ruling class—the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, for example.

But if Marxists in Russia were among the most outspoken opponents of the Tsardom, why, then, would Lenin repudiate terrorism, arguably the most explicit resistance possible? As he put it, “Predilection for terrorism is causally most intimately linked with the fact that, from the very outset, [terrorists] have always kept, and still keep, aloof from the working-class movement, without even attempting to become a party of the revolutionary class which is waging its class struggle.”

A rather extreme example serves a mundane point: Historically, the most theoretically conscious Marxists carefully connected tactics, demands, and slogans with goals. Anyone can assassinate the Tsar, but the working-class struggle for state power moves history. If terrorism stifles the movement for socialism, then it is more than a mistake—it is an obstacle. Marxists never settled with “resistance is justified.” How one resists matters.

Lenin’s critique was not of terrorism per se, but bad politics. The Marxist political party clarified to the working class its world-historic task of overcoming capitalism. The party was the institution capable of connecting past lessons and future promises with what ought to be done now; it was the ‘conscious factor’ of the struggle for socialism. Good leadership and good political judgment were inseparable.

The Northwestern University Divestment Coalition—as well as protest leadership on other campuses—are no Marxists, nor are they terrorists. But the incisiveness of Marxism’s theory of politics still raises serious questions not easily dismissed.

This theory of politics maintained a critical relationship between the components of political judgment. Tactics and principles, means and ends, were not straightforwardly reconcilable; the task for Marxists was relating the two without merely subordinating one to the other.

Principles articulated the overarching intent of an actor, the images one sought to realize. Principles maintain what ought to be the case, even if incapable of being brought about under immediately prevailing conditions. Tactics, then, represented the mediated expression of these principles in action, as activity which was responsive to the structural limitations of the possible.

Tactics intended not only to succeed but also expand the horizons of political possibility for the future.

So what is a tactic intended to accomplish? A well-employed tactic can build and rally one’s base, expose an opponent’s illegitimacy, expand social power and so on. It may also be making the most of a bad situation. Every movement inevitably faces moments where it must conduct a retreat, maintain morale or preserve credibility in the wake of failure.

But mere impulse compels action before reflection. And even if a tactic is principled it may be applied at the wrong time (in other words, dogmatism), leading to the opposite outcome as intended. Pursuit of a tactic for its own sake undermines theory while insisting upon a historically inopportune principle fetters practice.

Without reflection, both sorts of errors set the movement backward; Marxists knew that robust political organization was the precondition for such reflection. Party leadership in the mass struggle for state power was the necessary backdrop upon which any social movement could read history’s tea leaves.

The encampment on Deering Lawn opened the door to negotiations with Northwestern, yet chaotic, unclear leadership and an ad hoc assemblage of tactics culminated in what is definitively a setback. The new state of affairs will only impose ideological and material constraints upon political horizons more heavy-handedly.

The Divestment Coalition’s “People’s Resolution” does not express how its demands would catalyze an eventual ceasefire in Gaza. This is because they are not intended to, which is perfectly acceptable. One need not be a Marxist to recognize that Israel does not bend to Northwestern’s endowment. It necessarily follows, though, that protest directly impacts only two areas of consequence: the aggregate outcome of the national student protests and the local landscape of Northwestern student activity.

The University’s miniscule concession of “re-establishing the Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility” is, frankly, lame. What ‘advisory’ really means is that any conclusion it draws lacks definitive recourse.

And the earlier optimism of the encampment wave is now proven definitively quixotic. Their actual outcome, followed up with a lackluster “March on the DNC,” all but confirm that student discontents culminated in gains of, give or take, nada. Divestment and boycott (for which scholarship indicates weak if not negligible effects) have not seen broad adoption.

Even more importantly, the Democratic Party has not even slightly changed tact. U.S. policy, whether its expression be in the form of military aid or diplomatic conduct, proves steadfast. At least in relation to these protests.

But the settled negotiations at Northwestern have put students in a substantially worse position. The University has now secured unchecked authority to stamp out protest. Expanded repression was a predictable consequence of the tactics students pursued, made even worse by the fact that student negotiations left the whole of April’s interim policy unscathed. In fact, the agreement marking the end of the encampment actually added an additional ban on non-Northwestern demonstrators.

The reverberating consequences are unsurprising: Northwestern quickly turned its gaze of justice toward its own students. Now, the university can command any demonstrator to “leave University locations when instructed to do so by a University official or Northwestern University Police,” with no stipulations on what situations are exempt from such a mandate.

Concessions such as these (and I only raise one of many) will make disrupting the ranks of future protests trivially simple. And, absent a continuity which “outside agitators” may provide, academia’s four-year cycle easily cleans house of those dissidents who are lucky enough not to be expelled.

Students are incensed by the enormous bloodshed in the Israel-Hamas war. In desperate times, of course one wants to struggle for something. But simply being “on the right side of history” does not guarantee success. Of course, present protests shape the conditions of future ones, but leadership felt little need to pay mind to this fact.

Perhaps students could have capitalized on the fact that they confronted Northwestern Police rather than the Evanston or Chicago Police Department. Unlike many other universities, lax police involvement here could have allowed for some respite to think. Yet encampment leadership fixated instead on how to resist the police and what to do if arrested. Nobody was arrested, of course.

Now “interim" has become “official.” Greater barriers to student expression are definitive. And these restrictions are not just over Palestine, but over anything one might feel warrants speech and assembly. Actions beget response, and the response was predictable.

Marxists understood success not as accomplishing any result, but rather as accomplishing the anticipated result— the result of competent leadership over the popular struggle. Theoretical clarity combined with historical experience allowed the Marxist party to connect demands to goals through tactics.  Connecting the three produced something greater than the sum of these parts.

Anybody who feels challenged by the lessons of the Left’s history ought to recognize the gravity of our present condition. Regardless of the illegitimacy of the status quo, impulse alone leads nowhere except university bureaucracy and the Democratic Party.

Today is a sub-party moment; the problem of leadership today isn’t about who ought to man the bellows to maintain the fire, but whether we even have something one could call kindling. Absence of a historically conscious, reflective leadership limits even our ability to understand what the political challenges that presently confront us exactly are. Such a deficit constitutes an existential threat in its own right, no matter how urgent the crisis du jour.

So I’ll raise now what should have been considered in the spring: Given countless invocations of the wins of Columbia in 1968, how did the next five years of the Vietnam War play out? Student protestors also conjured memories of the 2000s anti-war movement and Occupy Wall Street from the dead. A Marxist would be compelled to ask, were these really advances? Is revolution closer now than 20 years ago? 60? 100?

The opportunity to broach such a salient question was missed. Admittedly, we’re structurally incapable of parsing such a question at all; an independent political party struggling for state power would need to exist first. But that means it shouldn’t be taboo to ask whether occupation tactics proved desirable. They certainly weren’t effective. Kicking the can down the road is not good politics.

In a perfect moment to begin to think about what might really be necessary to confront an unfree world, protest served not to clarify, but prevent politics. The struggle continues... for?

Benjamin Katz is a Northwestern senior and the president of the university’s chapter of the Platypus Affiliated Society, an international campus organization that facilitates public fora, reading groups and journalism in order to host the conversation on the Left. He is speaking in his own capacity.

Thumbnail courtesy of Wikimedia Commons