School students in the US are organising a national high school walk out against gun violence on 20th April, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting.
Free Dennis walkout, February 2018
We're approaching the 15 year anniversary of the March 5th and March 20th 2003 school walkouts against the Iraq War. High school students today, if they were even born before those dates, won't have any memory of this event, so what can we learn from it and more recent school walkouts in the US?
Mainstream accounts of the movement against the Iraq War have focused on the February 15 2003 demonstrations where millions walked quietly around major international cities to protest the war. I attended that protest in London, met some lovely people, and had a nice walk, but that was about all it achieved.
What has largely been forgotten is the limited, but still significant, direct action against the war. Students, and some teachers, walked out of their schools, blocked traffic, set up temporary barricades in the street, and clashed with police. I was a bit too old to walk out of school at the time, but on the way back from work one day I literally walked out of a tube station into the middle of a road block of a major London roundabout. What began so promisingly fizzled out as the war showed no signs of stopping, but it was still a significant moment in the radicalisation of the generation of activists currently in their '30s.
In 1975 Martin Glaberman, US auto worker and associate of CLR James wrote1 :
If teachers or students shut down a school, the school is shut down. But when five thousand 'people in some small town in Ohio shut down a stamping plant, within two weeks two-thirds of General Motors is shut down and steel plants begin to lay off and railroads begin to lay off and so on. Those workers who have access to that kind of power are aware of that reality.
What Glaberman missed in this analysis was the power of workers, students and the unemployed to blockade capital from outside the workplace. When a factory shuts down, it can affect the entire supply chain, but when roads or public transport are shut down, it can affect the ability of capital2 to flow through an entire city. Following de-industrialisation, with some exceptions such as transport workers blockades3 may actually be more effective at disrupting capital accumulation than strike action at many workplaces. After all if you shut down your coffee shop, the coffee shop is shut down but nothing else will be.
Since 2003 there have been multiple large scale school walkouts.
In 2006 thousands of school students in the US walked out of the school for the May Day immigrants rights marches. This followed school walkouts and occupations earlier in the year in France against the CPE employement law.
In 2010 over 100,000 schoolchildren in the UK walked out of school to protest against ESA cuts and university tuition fees, playing cat and mouse with police through the streets all over the country.
If we look at this history of school walkouts, even going back to 1911, we see that the 2003 Iraq War protests were an anomaly. In most cases students have walked out over their own material conditions - whether against corporal punishment, cuts to education subsidies, or ICE raids on their classmates.
Just last week hundreds of Austin high school students walked out in support of Dennis, a student from Honduras who had been the victim of racist bullying and detained by ICE after another student had thrown a bottle at him and called him a racial slur.
Hundreds of Stephen Austin High School students walk out to stand up for student detained by ICE @KPRC2 pic.twitter.com/fugPvtHZTG
— Rose-Ann Aragon KPRC (@RAragonKPRC2) February 14, 2018
School shootings are terrifying, but the US government is unlikely to be able to respond to them without making things worse. A study of just 8,000 US public schools showed that over 70,000 students at those schools were arrested between 2013-2014, 29% of these schools had a permanent police presence4 . A step up of 'security' in schools seems a more likely response from the Trump administration than gun control.
In St Louis September 2017, students walked out of multiple St Louis schools during protests against the Jason Stockley verdict. The wider protests against the Stockley protest blocked streets, disrupted shopping malls, and clashes with police eventually led to the shut down major pop concerts in the city.
The St Louis school walkouts also show an example of how liberal teachers and school administrators, whether just by misplaced good intentions or machiavellian ingenuity can undermine the effectiveness of the tactic.
Teachers at University City High School allowed students an official short demonstration before the start of class, students were expected to stay on the sidewalk outside their school, and return to class when the end of the demonstration was announced. However a group of kids had other ideas, and as soon as the end of the demonstration was announced, set off in the opposite direction, unfortunately coralled back to school again by over-enthusiastic teaching staff. There is no doubt that school administrators will either attempt to keep protests within very strict parameters, or stop them happening altogether, so students should be prepared, and organised via whatsapp, instagram, writing on paper, toilet doors (or whatever you kids use these days) to take things outside their control.
This isn't only a tactic used against school kids. In February 2017, liberal film maker David Simon gave all the staff at his company the day off, to attend a 'National General Strike' on February 18th5 . This was followed by companies such as Google giving staff an hour or two off in the afternoon to attend anti-Trump rallies. Needless to say, if the company gives everyone a day (or afternoon) off their regular duties to attend a rally, it's a team building exercise, not a strike. These show that employers and school administrators are worried about a genuine strike action, so they're not to be sniffed at, but they offer a way for people to let of steam without challenging institutional authority, which is the root cause of the societal problems people are fighting against.
School students can best protect themselves against the combined threats of mass shootings, ICE deportations and police violence by taking control of their own struggles.
Where possible, encourage teachers to support them in taking disruptive action, instead of constraining their activity to a set piece lunchtime rally.
Disrupt the flow of capital in your communities, not just the functioning of your school but the roads and businesses connected to it - A walkout at lunchtime might empty your school; but a walkout before school could block traffic and public transport, disrupting the economy by making hundreds or even thousands of people late for work.
Be prepared to take further action if students are disciplined for taking part.
Most importantly talk about all these possibilities and limitations in advance.
- 1https://libcom.org/library/working-class-social-change-martin-glaberman
- 2Deliveries of fixed capital to companies, of commodities to consumers, of workers to workplaces.
- 3Blockades are not a new strategy, during the 1894 Pullman strike by workers organised under the exclusively white American Railway Union, black communities in Chicago overturned cars in their neighbourhoods to support the strike action. The history of mass strikes in the US has always involved support from outside the workplace and clashes with police (and until the mid-20th Century the National Guard and the Pinkertons) - it was never just 'stopping work'.
- 4https://www.edweek.org/ew/projects/2017/policing-americas-schools/student-arrests.html
- 5https://twitter.com/AoDespair/status/826600306767175680
Comments
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zugzwang wrote: Do most
zugzwang
I can't speak to the feeling about gun reforms in US schools (and I'm personally a bit confused about my own opinion, tbh) but I can imagine it being kind of a big deal there. The idea that multiple mass shootings happen in schools every year might make it more urgent for school students.
My experience from the school walkouts during the Iraq War was that most kids from my school not only walked out but many (maybe even most, it's getting to be a long time ago now!) went to join the protest in Central London. Skipping school might have been part of the appeal, but there was also a lot of anti-war sentiment; otherwise we could have just arsed about around our area!
About 'disrupting capital': I don't think the point here is that kids will want to disrupt capital coz they're necessarily anti-capitalist but that if there's an issue they care about then the way to make your protest most effective would be block traffic as people are going to work rather than after they've got there. If we'd have known that then maybe we would have walked out before registration (8:45) rather than wait until break time (11ish).
EDITED TO ADD: I think an important thing to do is rekindle the idea that protests aren't just supposed to be symbolic of resistance but actual acts of resistance. I think a lot of people (even unionised workers going on strike) think protest is just a way to say 'hey, I'm/we're against this' rather than 'we're against this and we will stop the normal functioning of business as usual until it's sorted'. That's what this article is trying to do, imo.
zugzwang wrote: What are some
zugzwang
https://twitter.com/studentswalkout is trying to organise one for this week.
https://twitter.com/schoolwalkoutUS is the April 20th one.
The Women's March is calling for the March one.
I found another account with about 1,000 followers saying it was organised by about 70 students, but they announced merging into the schoolwalkoutUS one, and I can't find that account now.
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Ed wrote: I think an
Ed
Definitely. Fighting this idea is vital.
zugzwang wrote: Do most
zugzwang
I'm less interested in this question than the actual walkouts in the US that have happened in the past year - the #freedennis walkouts last week against the ICE detention of a schoolmate, the ones over the Jason Stockley verdict in St Louis last autumn. In those cases the students clearly did care about responding to state violence and disrupting business as usual - there is video of them caring about it and causing disruption.
These national walkouts, as far as I can see, contain some kind of organic student response to school shootings (quite possibly overplayed by the twitter accounts above). With the Women's March there is also some liberal NGO-esque side to them too.
But if there are widespread walkouts on these days, then students may well have their own school grievances and other issues which come to the fore, regardless of what the national campaigns are imposing. Just wanting the day off school is also content, in other words, especially if it really is the day off and not a 19 minute interlude sanctioned by the head teacher.
Yeah don't really get the
Yeah don't really get the comment by zugzwang. Okay when you went to school, maybe nothing happened. Same one I went to school, but throughout history schoolchildren have gone on strike many times, as Mike says, often in support of their own material demands (like strikes in the UK in 1889, 1911, in the 1970s: against corporal punishment, for less homework), or in support of other students or teachers (like in France recently supporting migrant pupils, or the US against teacher racism, or the UK in the 70s against dismissal of a popular teacher), or as part of more general political movements (the 2008 anti-police rebellion in Greece, against the Iraq war in the UK, in support of immigrants in the US).
In terms of this particular campaign, I guess we will see how widely observed it is.
But as some people have hinted at, I think unfortunately school strikes aimed at strengthening gun control laws won't really help anything
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Steven. wrote: in the 1970s:
Steven.
I was at school in the 60s and 70s and I can assure you there were no gibbets anywhere on school premises. Surely you mean corporal punishment :D
Ha ha quite right, post now
Ha ha quite right, post now fixed
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The point of blocking traffic
The point of blocking traffic is not really to appeal to some vague 'everyperson' but more to disrupt business as usual and draw attention to the issue.The 'but what about doctors/ambulance' thing seems more like a right-wing trope than anything else. You never see anyone bring up these concerns when major sporting events, concerts, conventions, festivals disrupt the regular operation of traffic and the city.
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I am not sure blocking roads
I am not sure blocking roads is a good way to attract support, but ambulances are not a problem, if you manage a big block then they will be rerouted, if not they will ignore you. In thge case of emergency you could let one through.
But again, is the point to attract support or to have an economic effect. Years back there were groups here that would split up the demos and block various sites, usually not for long, but they created a lot of havoc and showed that the police could not repress demos which outsmarted or outmanoeuvred them. For example they might blockade a train station for an hour then move on to a shopping centre then a bus station etc It does require relatively large groups of people who are quick, confident and willing to take risks.
The lesson that police can be circumvented seems to have been completely lost and current demos seem to accept the walking kettle or bang against the sides.
zugzwang wrote: I'm not
zugzwang
I believe you misinterpreted. What I think Juan Conatz is saying is that when the right-wing or even liberals criticize tactics like blocking traffic, they do so hypocritically, because they never apply these objections to other situations in which traffic is blocked, intentionally or otherwise. Consider, for example, all the times the cops will shut down entire freeway routes whenever they want to parade around for one of their own and no one bats an eye, but protestors block one on-ramp and it brings on the sound and fury. Their objections are fig leaves to obscure the fact that what the critics are doing is objecting to the act of protest and the politics itself.
If the students walk out and block traffic, will protest actions cause various harms, even to people who are, hrm, innocent or don't deserve it? Yes, sometimes. But, then, this is part of the point: that if the system will not listen to the protestors, then the protestors will disrupt the system. It also brings into sharp focus the demands of the protestors, that it is not some whim, but something that is serious enough to warrant the disruption. If the students do block traffic, imagine the hypocrisy of someone who would try to criticize the protestors, on the basis that they are endangering life by making a doctor take an inconvenient route to work, when the very point of the students' protest would be to prevent the further loss of life to gun violence.
The particular goals of the proposed student walkout are, to my mind, not especially great. I am somewhat ambivalent over the issue of gun control and gun control doesn't push the political envelope as an impossible demand. But I am less interested in what kinds of consciousness an individual student might have going into a protest compared to the kind of consciousness they will have coming out of it, having executed a tactic and experienced the response to it.
Political tactics express political content beyond the individual beliefs of the people carrying them out. For example, a striking worker might believe that their strike is primarily something for the media to see and to garner sympathy, but the act of a strike expresses something else, that the essence of class struggle for the worker is in their ability to withdraw labor. Similarly, if the students walk out then some or maybe most of them will think of it as just a symbolic act, and if they go and stand on a street corner for a little while then that really will be all that it is. But if they go and block the streets, then, as Ed and others have said, the act of disruption becomes the real political content; the value of protest lies in its ability to confront everyday capitalist ideology and preventing its continued operation where possible. Communist theory consists, in part, in bringing out the submerged, implicit political content of such struggles.
The capitalist state understands this implicitly, and functionally so if not necessarily consciously. If public opinion were the real grounds over which these struggles are fought, then the capitalists act pretty incompetently. Consider, for example, the heavy-handed police actions that are ordered in reaction to such protests, or the proposed legislation in some American states to allow motorists to run over protestors. Now, I can't immediately find any solid numbers, but I can't imagine that most people would be okay with protestors getting run over (though if anyone wants to harden my heart and show that most people are super assholes, then, well, I'm prepared). That's because, at the stage at which there is enough political will among enough protestors for road blocking tactics to be viable, public support isn't the primary thing, it's how much grief each side is willing to endure. Heavy-handed police actions and legislation that makes it difficult or dangerous to protest are designed to maximize the grief of protestors and make such protests hard to sustain. Justifying these actions is something that comes after the fact.
Pedantic proofreader's
Pedantic proofreader's response: the bit in italics at the end changes grammatical person, from "they" in the first bit to "you" in the next - if that bit's intended to address potential participants directly then probably best to use "you" throughout.
Political response: if zugzwang wants to read more about blockades, I remember there being a lot of discussion back around the time of Occupy Oakland (I think "blockading the port is just the first of many last resorts" was interesting, can't remember how far I agreed with it). There's also "power is logistic, block everything" by the invisible committee if you like that kind of stuff.
On school walkouts more broadly, a few years back Viewpoint did a piece on "strategy after Ferguson"which had a really good contribution from Advance the Struggle in Oakland about how school walkouts in response to police violence led to other forms of school student activity including a test boycott - I'll try and add the whole thing to the library when I get a chance.
https://www.viewpointmag.com/2016/02/01/strategy-after-ferguson/
Sorry for not including more links but typing long posts on mobile is a nightmare, you can google this stuff more easily than I can paste it in.
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zugzwang wrote: Threre are
zugzwang
This isn't about students blockading a hospital though, the reasons strikers would exempt hospitals and set up food distribution networks is because they'd shut everything else down. You're objecting to even the possibility that an ambulance might have to take a longer route.
zugzwang , really don't get
zugzwang , really don't get why you are still banging on about this. I have been part of a road blockade, when an ambulance came up to it we let the ambulance through, then reformed the blockade behind it.
This is basic common sense. So I really don't see why you seem to be arguing that any call to block roads needs to have a disclaimer added stating that certain things should be exempted. Whereas I have never noticed you make a similar comment on any of our articles which call for people to organise strikes, without specifically mentioning emergency exemptions.
Hundreds of students just
Hundreds of students just walked out of West Boca High School in Miami
https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/965999148066660352
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zugzwang wrote: traffic also
zugzwang
sorry, you what? Who has ever claimed anything remotely like this?
do you have the same concerns about strikes by transport workers? As every strike of transport workers like bus drivers, train drivers, baggage handlers, pilots, cabin crew etc causes disruption. That is basically the point of it.
If you think you can change the world without disrupting anyone's day, you're unfortunately very mistaken.
(That said I still think these walkouts are pointless, because supporting tighter gun control laws is a dead-end which at best just puts more power in the hands of the US state, which unfortunately causes the deaths of far more people than lone gunmen)
I think there would be some
I think there would be some value in trying to revise 'gun control' to an anti-militarist position - attacking the manufacture and distribution of guns, the supply, rather than legislation affecting retail. The same companies are producing weapons to sell abroad, to the police and armed forces, as well as private individuals - of course the US is not going to clamp down on arms manufacturers but it's a different terrain to liberals who only want the police to have guns vs. right wing 2nd amendment fanatics vs. people like us who either just don't think it's viable or in some cases actively advocate armed self-defense which is all that the level of policy rather than production.
Also I think schoolkids would absolutely get that not making guns in the first place is better than being picky about who can buy them.
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zugzwang wrote: I have
zugzwang
In the US and UK, strikes are rarely longer than a day, so nothing approaches anywhere near this point. If it did get there, you'd need to sort things out so people can eat.
I assume you'd disagree with the three month nurses strike in Kenya last year though -
although of course the employers could have ended that at any time by agreeing to the demands: https://libcom.org/news/interview-100-days-kenya-nurses-strike-21092017
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admin: discussion on the
admin: discussion on the merits of strengthening gun control legislation split here: https://libcom.org/forums/theory/tightening-american-gun-control-laws-21022018
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Ed wrote: I think an
Ed
There should be a pamphlet consisting of the best 100 quotes from the libcom forums and the above should be in it.
Sherrifs posted in Florida
Sherrifs posted in Florida schools now:
https://twitter.com/AP/status/966455665714761728
Anyway, here's a really
Anyway, here's a really interesting report on school walkouts (and road blockades) against police violence in Oakland in late 2014 and the organising that came out of it. Obv, not everywhere is Oakland, and things elsewhere are probably going to look different, but it's an experience worth considering, I think.
Sounds like things popped off
Sounds like things popped off in Stockton (California, not Teesside) on Friday: https://mobile.twitter.com/IGD_News/status/968075306216062976
http://www.recordnet.com/news/20180223/hundreds-of-students-stage-walk-out-to-protest-gun-violence
Western High School, Davie,
Western High School, Davie, South Florida today (probably yesterday by the time anyone sees this): https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Students-Leave-Classes-at-Davie-School-in-Latest-Protest-For-Gun-Law-Reform-After-Parkland-Shooting-475183473.html
Would be fascinating to know if there's any crossover with the teachers' actions in WV.