I am currently writing from my tiny studio apartment in Chicago that I pay far too much for in rent, listening to the album “Control” by Pedro the Lion, a concept album about a businessman killed by his wife for infidelity. On the song “Second Best,” I just heard this lyric: “Desperate attempts to fan the flame without the fire,” which stuck out to me as evocative (if I write this right, that image may come up again).
I spent two days at the Northwestern (NU) Encampment, which quickly had a depressing and capitulative end. The camp became static and confined to the field it was on, with no apparent desire to escalate from the organizing clique, and this led the camp to atrophy and die. Admin realized that they could wait this camp out until the organizers became tired of the reproductive labor keeping the camp going, after which they would be much more amenable to taking down the camp themselves for a less-than-divestment deal. This deal entailed:
Ending the camp, with “protests” on the field permitted until the end of the term
- NU ID cards may be required to participate
- No other tents except one for aid
- Only “approved” noise amplifying devices;
In exchange, NU “committed” to
- Making a path to communicate with the Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees
- Re-establish an “Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility”
- Answer questions from any “internal stakeholder” about University holdings to “the best of its knowledge or to the extent legally possible” within 30 days
- “Support visiting Palestinian faculty and students at risk”
- Pay for five Palestinian undergraduates to attend NU
- Creating immediate lodging for MENA/Muslim students and providing and renovating a house for MENA/Muslim students by 2026
- “Engage students in a process dedicated to ensuring additional support for Jewish and Muslim students within Student Affairs/Religious & Spiritual Life”
In other words, the organizers of the NU encampment agreed to shut it down in exchange for demands far short of Disclose, Divest, or even Repair. There was some resistance to the deal, but those resistant students could not gather support to sustain it.
There are some Chicago politics here I am a little shaky on, primarily the connection of the groups on campus with larger non-campus groups like CJP (Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine), AMP (American Muslims for Palestine), and USPCN (US Palestinian Community Network), and the connections these groups have with Marxist-Leninist organizations like the PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) and FRSO (Freedom Road Socialist Organization). I have heard several times from comrades more in the know that USPCN functions as a FRSO front group for all intents and purposes.
Nevertheless, when it became apparent that NU’s camp was dying, I traveled to the University of Chicago camp, which was having its first day and remained there for a week. Here is a brief report and summary of conversations my comrades and I had over the week.
On Tuesday around 0430, after nine days of encampment, the camp was dispersed by UCPD pigs in riot gear. The details of this loss are aggravating and perplexing, the most significant of which is that around 3 AM, someone declared victory for the night, and those who had rallied that night to defend the camp left. When the pigs rolled in, there were about ten people in the encampment, where there had been hundreds several hours before. Who exactly in the organizing clique called victory and told people there was no harm in leaving is a mystery. What is less mysterious are the conditions in the camp in the lead-up to the raid that made such a demobilization call successful. For the seven days I was present, there was conflict between the “core organizers” and the campers, particularly with the radical elements at the camp, though occasionally peppered with moments of genuine activity. I trace this conflict to the nature of the University of Chicago as an institution and the students who can more easily study there as undergraduates.
On arriving at the camp, I was not highly involved; I am not a student, and my involvement in a student organization is none. The first day was a spectacle of the tents, two wooden walls, fencing, and meeting up with new and old comrades. The second day, however, I had been more integrated, having spent the night and worked on the night watch. At this point, I tried to get more involved with the tactical side of the camp. We had a general meeting at 0900 and split into two groups based on risk tolerance.
At this meeting, with the images of Cal Poly Humboldt in our minds, many of us were interested in the chances of escalation and disruption of campus, potentially with the occupation of a building. However, the clique of organizers very quickly made it clear in what they said that the encampment was not intended to go on very long (this was later confirmed in conversation; the core stumbled their way into politics they did not know what to do with) — on the second day the question raised explicitly at the strategy meeting was “what is the minimum we can get for people to be happy and leave.” After that, people trying to escalate got shut down, plans were aborted by movement police, and complaints at general assemblies, though popular with the crowd, were shut down by the organizing clique. It was also unclear who was on the negotiating team despite asks for more transparency.
There was also, very regularly, deployment of an “outside agitator” framing directed at those who wanted to agitate strategically in the camp and those taking autonomous actions (deemed “horizontalists” or “anarchists as a slur” as a student remarked).
A few days in, I joked to a comrade of mine that INSIDE the camp, we were watching the seeds being sown for the next 40 years of liberalism, capitalist crisis edition. And while it began as a joke, the kernel of truth in there grew and became more apparent as time passed. There was a constant invoking of a globalized Intifada, with little desire behind it to push that forward or match the practical content to the phrase (“desperate attempts to fan the flame without the fire,” there we go). Just as 1968 has been invoked as the year people across the political spectrum cut their teeth on, when some of these Campus Organizers are working in law firms, the State Department, or abusive NGOs (take your pick), they can have a photo of themselves getting arrested on their wall. It could even be the subject of conversation at dinner parties — “Who wasn’t a student radical in 2024!” Their parents were like them once, and someday, some of them may be like their parents. Some may not! The choice the scions of the managerial middle class will need to make in time is this: will they continue to loiter near The Table for increasingly shrinking scraps, or will they join us dogs gnawing on table legs?
I was at the camp because I am in the fight, and for now, the fight is on campus (though I think the question of how to get it past there is an open and pressing one). And though the seeds were and are there for future politicizing among formerly or currently depoliticized members of the managerial middle class (speaking of UChicago in specific) and for better democratic, flexible, and transparent processes and structures, the camp largely failed because it did not build these things and attempts to do so were shut down by careerists who wanted arrests on camera, thus attempts to act to keep the camp safe and threatening were scattered and chaotic.
I hope the people there who wanted more can come together for future work, particularly in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention!