Linking Campaigns
Why is it important to link our campaigns?
We’re up against big targets and we know that US imperialism is not going away without a fight. US imperialism also does not act as a monolith, but instead manifests in multiple crises impacting people in a myriad of ways and therefore leading to many different struggles of the people. In order to make concrete gains, we need to coordinate our mass movement across the different struggles and propagate how the multiple crises facing the people point back to US imperialism so that the people themselves take up this analysis in the course of their struggles. We as organizers need to understand how our different targets connect with each other and how each manifestation of US imperialism exacerbates our day-to-day conditions, and help the masses make these connections as well. And in order to confront such large targets, we need a truly mass movement to mount even larger campaigns against these targets. If we are unable to link our struggles together, we’re unable to fight together and the imperialists will keep us divided. We need to link our struggles and campaigns, we need to fight together in order to win!
What does it mean to link or connect our campaigns?
The ILPS-US national campaigns (e.g., Defend Peoples’ Struggle - DPS, People Over Profit - POP) are a way to show the unity of the people’s movement nationally against common larger targets. If we look back to the building blocks of a campaign, we can analyze the different aspects of a campaign to find the commonalities.
Things to consider: Does achieving the goal of your campaign forward the goal of the DPS or POP campaign? Does winning the demands of your campaign also concretely prevent the implementation of fascist policies? What are the ties between your campaign’s targets to fascist state violence or corporate profit? Linking your campaign to the DPS or POP campaign can look like projecting the calls and demands of the overall campaign, but it can also look like deepening the analysis of your campaign to truly understand how the specific targets in our area connect to the overall. You can then help others understand we are part of a united national movement and the importance of waging the DPS or POP campaign together.
How do we link our campaigns?
Analyze the concrete conditions by conducting Social Investigation and Class Analysis (SICA)! We must analyze how classes relate with each other politically, culturally, and economically. Through this you are able to find allies, masses to win over, who to isolate and who your enemies are. What is your campaign targeting and who are you trying to organize and mobilize against it? Once we know these things, we can understand how to take next steps in confronting your target with the people who share the same enemy and begin to lay out the tactics for doing so.
We also want to answer the question of how your campaign relates to US imperialism, especially economic exploitation and state repression. How does the issue of ICE on campus connect to the rising repression and fascism? How does increased surveillance in our communities relate to repressing peoples’ movements? How do budget cuts for social services, health and education correlate to rising militarism and wars abroad? How do attacks against workers organizing relate to increased privatization and stripping of workers rights and environmental regulations?
Linking DPS and POP: The Defend Peoples’ Struggle campaign targets all forms of state violence and political repression while the People Over Profit campaign fights for better conditions and livelihood. The connections between these two campaigns are very important - we see the way that even our government, which should be meant to serve the people, but instead prioritizes funding militarization of the state that ultimately serves to protect US corporate profit and interests locally and abroad. When the people resist to protect their lives and welfare, the state uses violence and repression to stifle opposition, and all the more we need to defend our right to struggle and defend our communities. These campaigns are inherently linked because US imperialism will only continue to mount attacks on the people for its own survival.
Examples:
A campaign against the presence of ICE at a particular high school can be strengthened by connecting it to the other struggles against ICE within your region, and move others to see how ICE impacts other communities and sectors of people. This campaign at one high school around the presence of ICE can also be connected to other high schools that face similar issues around increased policing and state violence. Ultimately, these connections of one campaign at one high school to the breadth of the mass movement against state repression allows us to see how our struggles against fascism are connected and can help us build a stronger, united front against the narrowest targets.
Concrete examples where an existing campaign has been linked
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) witnessed and experienced police repression in the form of encampment sweeps and ICE while engaging in mutual aid work. Recognizing the ways the state brutally responds to them for justly addressing the needs for people in conditions that are created by imperialism, they were able to draw connections to the DPS campaign and take action through it by sharing resources, patrolling, and creating systems for undocumented students in a conscious effort to defend people’s struggles!
Anti-Imperialist Action at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (AIA UMBC) took up a fight around a student repression bill that got passed recently in the Maryland State Legislature. The bill was designed similarly to Time, Place, Manner policies - to make these universal and increase the amount of police coordination (particularly off campus police) following the wave of resistance in support of Palestine. It put a target on the back of any student movement that’s opposing the current Imperialist status quo. AIA reached out to a number of student organizations to take this up, put out a joint statement, which was published in the newspaper after engaging news media, and sent speakers to read a joint testimony at a legislative hearing about the experience of students across campus (including their interactions with police, specific cases of repression, etc). Lawmakers thought it would be easy to pass and didn’t think there would be opposition, but the organizing and mass actions actually delayed the bill from passing and it expired and died! A key component in their campaign was using the DPS primer to make connections to people's repression with the police and schools and threats to migrants and migrant activists by ICE.
Linking DPS & POP:
While students have underfunded schools, profit-oriented education, and genuinely unsafe campuses, the government manages to allocate funds for ICE, military funding, and policed campuses which are all used against the very students the schools are meant to serve. Students who do not succeed in these broken systems are met with predatory promises from military recruiters and are then exploited into fighting wars against their own interests. Threats of deportation from ICE are a nationwide issue for students, while schools shuffle their feet to hide behind bureaucracy and concessions. A Save Our Schools campaign has been exposing the issues around the school budget and confronting the board around the disparity of the budget being spent on deporting migrant students and their families while cutting funding for culturally relevant education. It exposes the government for prioritizing having CEOs, Big tech and State repression in schools rather than providing students genuine education and resources that better themselves and their communities - it’s important to target the repression/militarization of campuses that maintain the profit-oriented nature of education.