Why we need struggle, not “respectful dialogue”

Pro-Palestinian protests spread across campuses around the world in 2024, and the U.S. was no different—with hundreds of campuses erecting peaceful encampments against Israeli genocide. University administrators and local governments responded by accusing them of “rioting” and labelling the protesters “antisemitic”, even though many of the protest organizers were Jewish anti-Zionists.

But these claims provided their excuse to respond with the brutal police repression and vicious persecution that successfully silenced the movement, at least for the time being.

Once the tear gas had cleared and the targeted students were punished for exercising their free speech rights, universities returned to the pretense that they welcome “dialogue” between political opponents. College administrators are flocking to so-called “civility” programs now operating at more than 100 universities, run by organizations such as the Constructive Dialogue Institute (CDI). As The Guardian recently reported, “more than 200,000 students across the country have taken “Perspectives”, an online course by the CDI. Universities like Harvard, Yale and New York University have made it a requirement for incoming students.”

Although the new “civility industrial complex” is dominated by right leaning and pro-Israel funders, their arguments find an echo in many liberal circles, particularly those concerned with propriety, i.e. not appearing “shrill” or “intolerant” in the realm of mainstream opinion.

There is even a trend developing among the newest generation of elected Democratic Party socialists: to engage respectfully with political adversaries. Newly elected New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani led the way on November 21 when he met with Donald Trump at the White House—where the two exchanged friendly banter and pats on the arm. That same month, Mamdani also endorsed establishment Democrat Hakeem Jeffries to be Speaker of the House if the Dems won a majority. In February, he endorsed mainstream Democrat Kathy Hochul for reelection as governor.

These are all clear signals that, while Mamdani seeks to rock the boat, he does not plan to sink it.

This approach has divided members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), to which Mamdani also belongs, and other progressive Democrats. Justice Democrats co-founder Corbin Trent argued in response to Mamdani allies Brad Lander, who is running for Congress, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez following Mamdani in endorsing Jeffries,

Jeffries is the establishment. He’s the status quo. He’s the leader that has presided over a party that’s failed to beat Trump. He is the same type of Democrat that led to us losing thousands of seats over the last decade. A party leadership that is still less popular than Donald Trump. When you are trying to transform a party you can’t back down…

Jeffries promised him nothing and meant to promise nothing, and Lander handed over his support for free anyway. That’s the saddest habit in our movement. Our people give up before the fight even starts.

Unfortunately, “giving up before the fight even starts” happens all too often. Avoiding confrontation, even when fascists turn up, is usually justified by claims that “if we ignore them, they’ll go away” and “don’t give them the attention they want.” Or worse still, as was the case when pro-Democratic Party organizations like Indivisible organized recent “No Kings” protests, but refused to raise pro-Palestinian or other radical demands because it might alienate the political establishment.

None of these are winning strategies. In fact, abiding by proper etiquette has never won social change of any significance: victory is achieved only through determination—and confrontation.

Bethany Moreton, a member of Uncivil—an organization of academics opposed to “civility” programs—told The Guardian, “No one really believes that somehow we’d have the Voting Rights Act if Martin Luther King had just sat down with the wizard of the KKK and they had hashed out their disagreements.”

As is well known, Rosa Parks was both “impolite” and breaking Jim Crow segregation laws in 1955, when she refused to give up her seat in the “colored” section of a city bus to a white passenger. Her arrest spawned the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a 381-day well organized and massive protest of African Americans led by Martin Luther King, Jr. This protest led directly to the 1956 U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down segregated seating on city buses.

The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, summarized in an 1857 speech, why struggle is necessary:

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

It took an armed struggle and the Civil War to win an end to slavery in the U.S. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels enthusiastically supported the North in the Civil War, recognizing that slavery provided the economic foundation that enabled capitalism: “the veiled slavery of the wage laborers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World.”

Marx and Engels likewise recognized the centrality of struggle as the motor of progress in human society. The first chapter of their 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party begins,

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

… The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

When Marx and Engels referred to class struggle, as they noted above, they were also including more broadly the struggles between “oppressor and oppressed.” Combatting oppression effectively advances the class struggle by breaking down divisions between workers. But the class struggle also is the most effective strategy to combatting oppression, because using the social power of the working class strengthens the fight against all forms of injustice.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott in the 1950s showed the power of the Black working class outside of the workplace in striking an enormous blow against Jim Crow in the South. In the 1960s, the struggle of Black workers spread to factories. All-Black workers’ organizations not only used the strike weapon to fight racism in the union and on the factory floor, but their strike actions also gained the support of a significant layer of white workers.

The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), for example, an organization of Black autoworkers that grew out of a wildcat strike at General Motors’ Dodge Main plant in 1968, lasted just a few short years. But during its brief existence, DRUM showed the potential for African American workers to go on strike against racism, while gaining solidarity from many white coworkers.

Unfortunately, too few people today are aware of this history. And while socialists welcome every successful progressive reform, like free childcare or rent control, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that they provide an example of how incremental reform can ultimately win a socialist society. While democratic socialists might sincerely believe in “respectful discourse” between political opponents, this actually signals political weakness, not strength.

Just as slavery did not end because plantation owners suddenly developed a conscience, today’s ruling class will fight tooth and nail against making concessions to workers and the oppressed until they are forced to, from below.

A version of this article will also appear at Red Flag (Australia).