Mass Action Gets the Goods: Organizing for Palestine at the University of Oregon

University of Oregon YDSA organizers learned three key lessons from the first year of the Palestine solidarity movement: democracy is power, mass action gets the goods, and socialists make the difference.

Last spring, YDSA chapters around the country did their part to support the Palestine solidarity encampment movement.

At the University of Oregon, our YDSA chapter played a key role in the encampment. Ours was one of just a few occupations around the country to bargain an agreement with our administration and win real concessions, like scholarships for displaced Palestinian students.

Our coalition came out of the encampment stronger and more united, with a commitment to keep fighting for full divestment of UO’s endowment from companies profiting off genocide.

How did we win an agreement last spring? And what are we doing to build on our momentum this year? This article analyzes our experiences and draws some lessons for YDSA comrades as we enter the second year of the Palestine solidarity movement.

These lessons can be summed up in three slogans: democracy is power, mass action gets the goods, and socialists make the difference.

The encampment

The Palestine solidarity encampment at UO was one of the largest in the country, directly involving hundreds of students over a period of 24 days (you can see a picture of it on the Wikipedia page for “Student Intifada”).

It built on eight months of local activism that began in October 2023 (I reflected on the first few weeks here). In these months, our newly-formed SJP chapter organized protests, sit-ins, vigils, and public education events, with support from UOYDSA. 

These actions put some pressure on the university and helped politicize students, but they fell far short of the power we would need to win divestment.

Our encampment began on April 29th, 10 days after Columbia students launched their second occupation. We started with a loose coalition of SJP, YDSA, Jewish Voice for Peace, and unaffiliated students, about 60 people in total.

Though we were prepared to face immediate arrest, UO bosses took a wait-and-see approach and didn’t call the cops. In the first ten days, our “Popular University” grew quickly and won support from campus unions, faculty, and (in a close vote) the student government.

But as the days passed, it became clear that we were in a stalemate. Instead of bargaining in good faith, UO threatened us with code of conduct violations.

With rough weather and end-of-term academic obligations looming, the risk of decline and implosion was real. Participation began to fall off, and camp meetings seemed to be going in circles.

Determined to break the stalemate, on May 16th we rolled the dice again by relocating our entire encampment to the lawn directly in front of the central administration building.

The escalation worked, ratcheting up the stress on administrators and giving leverage to our bargaining team. Combined with steady behind-the-scenes pressure from faculty allies, it was enough to secure an agreement with meaningful concessions from the university.

Our most satisfying win was an agreement by the university to create scholarships and provide wrap-around support services for five displaced Palestinian students—quite possibly saving their lives.

The deal also included an agreement from UO to cooperate with a student-faculty committee tasked with investigating how the institution manages its endowment—potentially a big breakthrough for transparency at the secretive “University of Nike.”

On May 22nd, the camp met to deliberate and voted, almost unanimously, to take the deal. We decamped the next day to celebrate and rest.

Two weeks later, we came back together for a “convention,” where we voted to formalize the UO Palestine Coalition and orient towards a “majority petition” campaign to win full divestment in 2024-25. 

These proposals, along with the convention idea itself, originated with UOYDSA, which is now a core coalition member.

The road to a student strike

Where do things stand at UO today? In August, YDSA convention delegates passed a resolution calling on chapters to start laying groundwork for a student strike for Palestine and free speech.

The student strike tactic is both extremely ambitious and appropriate for our moment. University managers are fiercely opposed to any attempt at eroding their control over endowments. This is combined with the intense financial and political pressure placed upon universities by Zionists who want to crush any expression of support for Palestinians. 

And of course, we can expect the new Trump administration to be even more repressive than Biden and the Democrats.

In these hostile circumstances, winning BDS and protecting student freedoms will require us to build and exercise maximum power. That means organizing massive, collective withdrawal of consent from the normal operations of our universities—in other words, a student strike.

In mid-October, having built consensus around the idea of a mass petition, our coalition began a campaign to collect cards from a majority of all students at UO. By the end of fall term, we had gathered over 2500 cards, exceeding our expectations.

The card campaign is aimed at demonstrating majority support for divestment, but it can also serve as the basis for forming a mass organization of students united around a widely and deeply-felt demand: a student union, like the ones taking shape at San Francisco State and across campuses in New York City. 

These student unions can augment the power of traditional labor unions, including undergraduate student worker unions. If labor unions go on strike, a well-organized student union can employ solidarity strikes to help workers win (labor law doesn’t have anything to say about student unions!).

To emphasize: this is an extremely ambitious strategy and there is no guarantee we will succeed this year. But regardless of the outcome of the student strike campaign, YDSA chapters should use this opportunity to build lasting organizational infrastructure that might make strikes viable in the future.

Organizing powerful student strikes isn’t a fantasy. In November, students at Concordia University and Dawson University in Montreal struck in sizable numbers, and even caused the latter school to cancel all classes for a day. 

And in 2012, fully half of all university students across Quebec struck to defeat the government’s austerity plan for higher education.

Quebec organizers benefit from a rich tradition of student unionism, with students organized into membership associations by school and major. Building something comparable in the United States will be a long and arduous process. But our Canadian comrades prove that it is possible.

Three lessons

I think there are three clear lessons that YDSA organizers can take from our experiences at UO over the last year.

First: mass action gets the goods. 

While anarchists insist that “direct action gets the goods”, our experience at UO suggests something different. Our biggest gains came about through action that wasn’t always “direct” but which did involve masses of students and workers. 

The encampment itself was both “direct” and “indirect” in different ways. But what mattered about the tactic is that, at least for a few weeks in April-May 2024, it could activate large numbers of sympathetic students and workers.

During the encampment, UOYDSA members (and many campers outside YDSA) read Peter Camejo’s classic essay “Liberalism, Ultraleftism, or Mass Action.” 

Armed with Camejo’s ideas, we pushed back hard against any course of action that risked getting too far ahead of the consciousness of our base outside the camp.

We advocated tactics like sending campers to speak to their classmates and sign cards urging the university to bargain in good faith (ideas that we’re now carrying into the mass petition campaign).

UO administrators understood that the encampment had broad support on campus. The letter of support signed by the unions represented over 10,000 workers, and the vote of our student government more than 22,000 students.

The bosses also knew that the camp was led, in part, by undergraduate and graduate student workers who were leaders in their unions, and that a few hundred miles to the south, graduate workers at the University of California were going on strike to protect pro-Palestine demonstrators.

In other words, we were sending credible signals to the administration that we possessed an underlying capacity for disruption. The encampment was the tip of the iceberg, not the whole movement.

Inextricable from the strategy of mass action is the maxim that democracy is power. Democracy isn’t just an abstract moral value for socialists. Rather, it’s at the very core of our theory of progressive social change.

During our encampment, and also in the months leading up to it, our movement wrestled with questions of democracy. 

Sometimes, charismatic leaders made questionable decisions without consulting their comrades. At other times, we allowed legitimate concerns about security to stifle vital debates over strategy and tactics.

UOYDSA members consistently took the positions that all major decisions should be made at general assemblies, that the camp should have a clear structure, and that “autonomous” actions taken without collective consent risked dividing us.

We didn’t always win these debates. But by arguing for our positions, we modeled democracy, and showed to other campers that political disagreement is healthy and necessary for a strong movement.

This brings me to the last lesson: socialists make the difference.

Just before the encampment, UOYDSA cadre read Joel Geier’s account of how the Independent Socialist Club played a pivotal role in the success of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964-65. In many ways we tried to emulate the example of the ISC.

Like the ISC, we earned the credibility to make political arguments because we’d been some of the “best builders” of the camp from the start.  

We met every evening to assess the state of the movement and debate our own positions. In between, we would share in the hard work of maintaining the encampment, helping manage logistics, serving as media liaisons, and taking late-night security shifts. We were well-represented in the ranks of the “reds”, those most willing to risk arrest if a sweep came.

This is the actual meaning of “vanguard” organization. As socialists, we never set ourselves up in sectarian opposition to mass movements. Nor do we opportunistically dissolve our organization into those movements.

Rather, we throw ourselves into the service of movements, and win respect for our politics through our courage, hard work, and good judgment.

It’s an approach that’s worked well for us: since spring, UOYDSA has grown in quantity and quality, as we’ve attracted skilled organizers who started as independents in the camp.

As the Palestine solidarity movement enters its second year, I hope young socialists take these points to heart. 

Just remember: socialists fight for democracy, democracy makes mass action possible, and mass action gets the goods.