![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/11/1.jpg\")
A slide from a Heritage Foundation presentation about Project Esther. Note that “Soros” and Jewish Voice for Peace are at the tops of the columns titled “Masterminds” and “Organizers.”
\nOn March 8, Department of Homeland Security agents kidnapped Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian organizer and graduate student at Columbia University who had permanent residency in the United States. Donald Trump’s State Department arbitrarily revoked his residency. They are holding Khalil in Louisiana, over a thousand miles from his home.
\n\nThis is part of Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on Palestine solidarity activism at Columbia University and other schools around the country. Above all, however, it is a test, and how we respond will determine what happens to the rest of us later—as Martin Niemöller described in his well-known poem.
\n\nHere, we will explore the stakes of this moment and share experience from anarchists whose comrade was similarly kidnapped for participating in the Occupy ICE movement in San Antonio, Texas in 2018.
\n\nThe Trump regime has promised to deport millions of undocumented people, and their efforts are already underway. The kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil is something different. Khalil is a permanent resident of the United States who is being targeted for political reasons. Trump is seeking to set an additional precedent in order to open a new front in his campaign to purge the United States of dissidents.
\n\nThis is the culmination of two years of planning. In April 2023, the billionaire-backed Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, a playbook to overhaul the federal government of the United States in order to consolidate autocratic power in the hands of Donald Trump. Although Trump temporarily distanced himself from Project 2025 during his campaign, it proved to be a solid predictor of his game plan once in office.
\n\nIn October 2024, the Heritage Foundation followed up Project 2025 with Project Esther, a playbook for repressing those who oppose the genocide of Palestinians. In the text of their report, the Heritage Foundation depicts all concern for Palestinians as participation in “a global Hamas Support Network” and explicitly accuses Jewish Voice for Peace and many other Jewish people of being “antisemitic” for refusing to support Zionism. At the same time, the report relies heavily on anti-Semitic tropes such as fearmongering about George Soros. This exemplifies the way that the far right has sought to appropriate concerns about antisemitism to promote racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitic conspiracy theories.
\n\n A slide from a Heritage Foundation presentation about Project Esther. Note that “Soros” and Jewish Voice for Peace are at the tops of the columns titled “Masterminds” and “Organizers.”
\nThe chief source of Trump’s appeal is that he has been able to channel the considerable anger of the downwardly mobile away from those who hold power and towards scapegoats, creating a pressure valve for a wide range of resentments. But in order to scapegoat people without consequences, it is necessary to undermine their social ties, to prevent others from identifying with them, to carve up society into isolated and mutually hostile factions.
\n\nReducing all empathy for Palestinians to support for Hamas is a discursive maneuver intended to frame all who speak out against genocide as legitimate targets for Trump’s government. In addition to demonizing Palestinians, Project Esther lays the groundwork to attack Jewish people as “antisemites” if they don’t get on board with Christian Nationalist priorities. This strategy weaponizes an existing rift that cuts through the Democratic Party—the question of whether Palestinians deserve to be treated as human beings—in order to create the conditions for a fascist takeover of the United States as well as further colonial violence abroad. The ones who stand to gain the most from this strategy are not Zionist Jews, but authoritarian Gentiles.
\n\nIn view of the significance of Project 2025, we should not underestimate how central Project Esther is to the Trump administration’s strategy. This will help us to understand the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil.
\n\nThe core of Trump policy is performative violence. That is why they have kidnapped an activist who has never been charged with a crime, whose wife—an American citizen—is eight months pregnant, who has a legal right to reside in the United States according to all established precedents. That is why they intentionally targeted a negotiator, the same way that the Israeli government routinely murders negotiators in Palestine. The point is to be shocking, to terrorize, to show that they can do things in public that the Biden administration had to do secretively.
\n\nEveryone who has excused or minimized the genocide of Palestinians—for example, by spending at least as much time talking about the 1139 Israelis killed on October 7, 2023 as they do addressing the tens of thousands of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian people slaughtered since then—must understand that today, supporting Israel means supporting Trump’s brand of fascism. The escalating violence of the Israeli colonial project helped create the conditions for Trump’s return; now that he is back in office, excusing Israeli colonialism can only facilitate Trump’s own consolidation of power. As we argued on the night of the 2024 election,
\n\n\n\n\nThe Biden administration has already done much of the work to desensitize the general public to the program that an emboldened second Trump administration will attempt to carry out—above all, by supporting the Israeli military in carrying out a brutal genocide in Gaza. In so doing, Biden and Harris have accustomed millions of people to the idea that human life has no inherent value—that it is acceptable to slaughter, imprison, and torment people based on their status in a targeted demographic.
\n
You either embrace the struggle for the liberation of Palestine or you become an accomplice in the rise of fascism. This was always true, but today there is no possible excuse not to recognize it.
\n\nEven if your sole concern is fighting antisemitism and you do not care what happens to people of any other ethnicity, you pave the way for antisemites to gain power by standing aside as Palestinians are kidnapped. Like Palestinians, Jewish people are on the hit list of potential scapegoats, and what befalls one scapegoat will eventually befall another.
\n\nIf there are no serious consequences for the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil, then soon enough, the Trump administration will push the envelope, moving on to kidnap other activists who obstruct the far-right agenda. Likewise, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians is a template for bloodshed that will be used again and again as long as there are no significant consequences. If politicians like Trump retain their sway by inflicting violence, they will have to continuously expand the range of people they target and the intensity of that violence, just as the Nazis did between 1933 and 1945.
\n\nFor now, a judge has ordered a temporary delay in the expulsion of Mahmoud Khalil from the United States. But this should reassure no one. If we count on judges to restrain Trump, we will have no recourse when Trump’s administration simply ignores the laws, and no plan when he manages to replace them with loyal flunkies—or has his flunkies replace the laws themselves.
\n\nOn March 10, demonstrators gathered in New York City for a protest that took the streets, resulting at one point in tussles with police. On March 11 and 12, further protests will ensue in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and elsewhere.
\n\nBut the point of these protests must not be to petition the authorities. Donald Trump is not a well-meaning public servant looking to represent his constituents. He is a power-hungry sadist who benefits from our displays of grief and impotent rage. Politics in the United States today is a question of relations of raw force. When we take the streets, we are not addressing Trump or his ghoulish underlings; we are addressing each other. We are setting out to demonstrate that resistance is possible, that there are tactics that can exert concrete leverage against our oppressors, that there are enough people invested in solidarity that it can become a social force capable of compelling Trump and his lackeys to stand down.
\n\nAt the March 10 demonstration in New York, participants handed out fliers to this effect:
\n\n\n\n\nFascist politicians need the police. But we know masses of people can get the better of the police, their cars, equipment, cameras. All we have to do is to start acting like our friends, neighbors, and our own lives are at stake. All other options have been exhausted. We have to pull down the new fascism before it consolidates control. If we settle for waving signs and chanting, our fate is sealed. If we remember the summer of 2020, we stand a fighting chance.
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![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/11/2.jpg\")
Mahmoud Khalil.
\nMahmoud Khalil is not the first person in recent history to be targeted by ICE for political activism. To get more perspective, we reached out to anarchists in San Antonio whose comrade was kidnapped during the Occupy ICE movement in 2018.
\n\n\n\n\nThis isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. In 2018, ICE targeted a filmmaker and student for their participation in the Occupy ICE camp in San Antonio. They were targeted as a consequence of their activism; the authorities used their political beliefs and tweets as evidence against them.
\n\nBoth our movement and the campaign to free our friend were held back by our decision to defer to the lawyers. The lawyers wanted to run a PR campaign based on respectability politics and innocence narratives, erasing our radical politics from the conversation. As time went on, the lawyers related with hostility and suspicion towards some participants in the movement.
\n\nDeferring to the lawyers and separating the legal support from the movement itself was detrimental to both. We gave up many tools that we could have used to fight; this contributed to fragmenting our movement. There was no rally, no day of action, no unrest, no political scandal. Not even a phone zap!
\n\nIn 2018, we were aware of the example of the Northwest Detention Center resistance, at which ICE detained the activist Maru Villaplanado. Maru Villaplanado was ultimately released and granted legal status due to a campaign of pressure and mobilization. Unfortunately, this knowledge did not lead us to take the kind of action that could have made a difference for our friend.
\n\nMany of us were young and inexperienced. We did not know better than to trust the lawyers. We didn’t know how to draw on the experience of other movements before us or around the country. Since then, we have learned that lawyers should have a very limited influence on our movements. They should focus on their work in the courts. We must prioritize organizing a strong political response, as that is the only real source of power and pressure that we can draw upon outside the legal system.
\n\nThere is no silver bullet or magic combination of tactics that would be guaranteed to stop Mahmoud’s deportation. However, if we limit ourselves to depending upon a legal system that has no regard for the humanity of its captives while the state targets an activist on explicitly political grounds, we will fail while simultaneously sabotaging ourselves. We wonder how differently things might have gone if we had called for national days of action. We wonder if there was some chance that we could have stopped them from deporting our friend. We don’t know the answer because we didn’t try.
\n\nTo have any chance of saving Mahmoud Khalil or any of the millions of immigrants in the crosshairs of the white supremacist state, we will need movements that are resilient, that grow in numbers and combativeness. Palestinian, immigrant, Black, Indigenous, and working-class organization and action must create a political crisis that interrupts the deportation machine. If we lead with an organized political response, we will have a better chance of stopping the deportation of Mahmoud and our other comrades and of interrupting the entire system it relies on. I hope that everyone who is confronting this tragedy today can learn something from our experience and put those lessons into practice.
\n\nThis is not the first time this has happened. If our enemies have their way, it won’t be the last. It is up to us to organize in defense of our friends, families, and neighbors.
\n\n-Some Cicadas from Abolish ICE, San Antonio, Texas
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Let us conclude by expressing gratitude for the courage of Mahmoud Khalil and others who have risked their own freedom in order to express solidarity with other people. In doing so, they show us what is best in humanity—and that gives us a reason to fight for ourselves and each other. Khalil has already distinguished himself in the fight to create a world without ethnic cleansing or genocide. It remains for us to do the same in return.
\n\n\n\n\nFor everyone who has met Mahmoud, they can attest to his incredible character, humbleness, selflessness, and his love for helping others. He is always willing to stand up for the oppressed. He is funny, kind, and sometimes a little messy. He constantly puts his needs last when it comes to helping others. I always tell him that sometimes he needs to put himself first. He always responds with, “People are made for each other, and you should always be willing to lend a helping hand.”
\n\n-Mahmoud Khalil’s wife (identified thus, rather than by name, in the original source)
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There is a fundraiser for Mahmoud Khalil here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/03/11/3.jpg\")
The Palestine solidarity movement on Columbia campus in spring 2024.
\nLast week, the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) reached a tentative agreement with the university administration, voting to end one of the longest strikes in the history of graduate worker organizing. After over nine weeks on the picket line, the strikers forced the administration to concede to all of their major demands. Yet the strikers were only able to achieve this victory because they had already confronted and defeated the union bureaucracy that sought to stop them from confronting the administration. Their victory shows that workers who seek to assert their interests in the workplace must begin by fighting for self-determination and grassroots power within workplace organizing itself. Read on to learn the whole story of the strike at Columbia.
\n\nAs of last month, the strike by the 3000-member graduate worker union at Columbia University was reportedly the largest strike action in the entire United States.1 This hints at the extent to which old-fashioned mass union militancy has receded since its heyday in the 20th century.
\n\nIn some ways, graduate students are emblematic of the new shape of the workforce. Graduate student organizing occupies what a grad student might call a liminal space between school and the workplace: graduate students are workers, but they have yet to join the workforce proper. They are not the only workers whose jobs are fundamentally temporary and transient; today, there are entire industries that will no longer exist by the time the next crop of graduate students receive their diplomas. Universities justify the low wages they pay graduate workers by describing them as students, not workers, gesturing at their supposed future employment prospects—which in fact will only be available to a shrinking number of graduates in an increasingly competitive market rapidly being reshaped by austerity measures. In this regard, the pyramid scheme of higher education is a microcosm of the pyramid scheme of capitalism itself.
\n\nYet seeking to defend the security of a particular demographic of student workers without concern for other workers or students is a doomed venture. Graduate students are not essential to the industrial economy in any strictly material sense. In order to exert any leverage on the administration that employs them, they must apply pressure in concert with others who are being squeezed at least as badly as they are. Twenty-first century capitalists have restructured the economy in order to render workers in practically every industry replaceable. In this context, behaving according to the old Industrial Workers of the World slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all” is a strategic as well as ethical necessity. For labor struggles to have teeth in this brave new world, those of us whose jobs and lives are becoming ever more precarious will have to forge new alliances across demographics and workplaces.
\n\nIn the following analysis, participants in the graduate worker strike at Columbia recount the entire story, blow by blow, and distill the lessons for students, workers, and rebels everywhere.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/10/9.jpg\")
\nThe full history2 of graduate student worker organizing in the US remains to be written. This story is complicated by differences between workers at private universities, which are subject to federal labor law, and workers at public universities, which are governed by state legislatures. For public universities, whose employees don’t qualify for federal labor law recognition due to the provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, policies vary by state according to political climate and local circumstances.
\n\nAt private universities such as Columbia, grad worker organizing was hamstrung by administrative and court rulings until quite recently. In 2000, grad workers at New York University (NYU) became the first at a private university to achieve union recognition when the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the government agency tasked with interpreting labor law, overturned decades of precedents forbidding grad worker unions. The newly recognized UAW-affiliated union at NYU immediately won massive gains in its first contract, including a 40% pay increase plus benefits and other protections.
\n\nHowever, in 2004, the NLRB (having been reappointed under the Bush administration) reversed its previous ruling. The Board declared that the Brown University grad workers fighting for union recognition were not eligible for collective bargaining because their status defined them “primarily” and “first and foremost” as students—not employees—with their compensation defined as a form of “financial aid.” NYU promptly un-recognized its grad union, provoking a bitter grad worker strike. In response, the administration both punished the strikers and offered grad students financial aid increases while cutting their representatives out of the decision-making process.
\n\nYet in 2016, as the political winds shifted once more and another decade of grad worker organizing raised the pressure, the NLRB once again reversed its reversal, ruling that Columbia grad workers did in fact have the right to unionize and collectively bargain. This opened the floodgates for grad workers at private universities, resulting in union recognition and contracts at Brandeis, Tufts, Georgetown, and Harvard, with many more under negotiation.
\n\nColumbia’s effort to unionize had begun in 2004 alongside the controversy over the Brown decision. Energized by the decision of the NLRB in 2016, the as-yet-unrecognized union at Columbia undertook a strike in spring 2018. This lasted for a week—a template set by their parent union, the United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), which generally aims to keep strike actions predictable and within budget.
\n\nThe strike of spring 2018 garnered considerable media coverage. Morale was high. Yet as it lasted only one week, the university was able to ignore it. The members met to debate whether to extend the strike, but a poll suggested that there wasn’t enough support to do so. They returned to work without making significant headway.
\n\nThe outcome of that strike reflected longstanding divisions that the UAW repeatedly exploited to moderate the form and agenda of strikes. Columbia includes several schools and many departments, which can be broken down roughly into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) programs and humanities and social science programs. Although a substantial proportion of organic rank-and-file participation in the union campaign emerged from workers in the humanities and social science programs, the repeated refrain that it was necessary to rein in demands to avoid alienating the STEM workers helped keep a lid on more radical aspirations among the rank and file. In the words of one rank-and-file member, the UAW successfully used this division as a strategy to manage union militancy.
\n\nIn fall 2018, momentum built towards a larger and longer strike scheduled to begin that November. Just days before it was to take place, following secret negotiations with UAW officials, the administration announced a proposal to formally recognize the union and begin negotiating a contract in exchange for a pledge not to strike for 16 months, demanding an immediate response. This bitterly divided the union, which voted by a thin margin to accept the proposal and the strike ban. Negotiations began in tense, lengthy meetings between the bargaining committee, administration officials, lawyers, and a handful of rank-and-file observers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/10/4.jpg\")
\nImagine an average twentieth-century workplace: generally speaking, one could assume that the longest-hired employees would be the most informed about organizing efforts and the most invested in the outcome.
\n\nThe trajectory of grad student careers creates the opposite dynamic. The student organizers who have been in the fight the longest—the ones who are in their fifth, sixth, or seventh years—are on their way out the door. They’re not going to benefit from the contract that will be achieved through the negotiations; whether or not they succeed in getting an academic job, their time as grad students is coming to an end. Meanwhile, the incoming grad students—the ones who have the most at stake in the contract, because they’ll be subject to its terms for years to come—know the least about the union, the university, and the struggle.
\n\nConsequently, the interests of the most experienced organizers differ from the interests of those who have to live under the contract that results from their organizing efforts. The old-timers want to wrap things up with a long-awaited success under their belt; they’re also exhausted, burned out, and on their way out the door. This gives them an incentive to compromise and accept terms that they might not accept if they themselves had to live under them.
\n\nOn the other hand, for the most part, the incoming grad students—the ones who stand to gain or lose the most from the negotiations—haven’t been around long enough to become well-connected activists or members of the bargaining committee (the grad worker activists who are elected to represent the union). We saw this disconnect in the November 2018 vote, when nine tenths of the bargaining committee advocated in favor of the controversial strike ban deal, while nearly half of the rank-and-file opposed it.
\n\nLikewise, the UAW, a major international union with almost 400,000 members across 600 locals, has its own interests—which may or may not align with those of the grad workers themselves. As critics of union bureaucrats have long argued, when the financial and power structures of unions begin to look similar to those of the employers and governments they’re supposedly challenging, it’s likely that their interests will line up with them rather than with the workers they claim to represent. As Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) was negotiating their contract in 2019, UAW president Gary Jones was arrested for helping himself to over a million dollars embezzled from the retirement funds of autoworkers; he began a prison term at a cushy minimum-security facility at the end of 2021. UAW higher-ups accustomed to their steak dinners and golf trips at workers’ expense need to keep those union dues pouring in. They have a financial interest in getting grad workers to accept even a crummy contract. Rank-and-file power is a threat not only to employers, but also to the union officials who see workers as a constituency to be mobilized for political capital and a cash cow to fund their salaries.
\n\nAfter years of union activity, outgoing grad workers are the ones who are most likely to have absorbed the influence of UAW organizers. In some cases, they have been paid by UAW to organize their departments. They are the most likely to favor bureaucrats up the chain of command calling the shots in negotiations with the administration and decision-making within the union.
\n\nThis context is essential to understanding what happened next.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/10/1.jpg\")
\nThe bargaining began in February 2019—and stretched out interminably. Insulated by the no-strike pledge they had coerced the union into accepting and represented by an arrogant anti-union law firm (whose pockets were lined with more Columbia cash every day they could drag out the process), the administration had little incentive to offer any concessions over a year of negotiations. In early 2020, with the strike ban set to expire in April, union organizers began gearing up for a spring strike.
\n\nBut then COVID-19 hit. In New York City in particular, the impact was devastating. Classes were canceled, hundreds became ill, and a fitful shift to remote teaching through Zoom took place over March and April. With the strike ban expired, some organizers proposed going ahead with a strike despite the chaotic situation, but a majority demurred, disagreeing strategically or simply too sick, stressed, and scared to try it. Internal conflicts flared up within the union and personal attacks flew. A small end-of-semester strike did take place, securing crucial summer pay-bonuses for those on nine-month appointments. This was the first of many participatory actions that drastically increased involvement in the union. But with the nationwide explosion of racial justice and anti-police protests prompted by the killing of George Floyd, many of the most politicized union activists shifted focus to the mutual aid, street protest, and community organizing efforts that marked the long hot summer of 2020. Meanwhile, the post-doctoral workers, whose separate union had long organized alongside the larger grad worker union, successfully negotiated a contract that met their major demands, splitting off a segment of the mobilized workforce.
\n\nThe fall semester saw the election of a new bargaining committee, with sharp conflict between factions advocating different visions of how to move forward with the negotiations. A group of students with some union overlap attempted to organize a tuition strike addressing a broader range of demands, including increased financial aid, slowing gentrification, defunding campus police, and fossil fuel divestment as well as the union’s contract demands. In spring 2021, as negotiations sputtered and the union struggle resumed once more, this expansive radical vision receded into the background, one of the missed opportunities of the broader struggle.
\n\nAs the spring semester of 2021 unfolded, with students and workers once again returning to Zoom, momentum began to build once more towards a strike. But how would it work? How do you withdraw labor from a virtual workplace? What would picketing look like? Would the impact be sufficiently disruptive to exert leverage on the administration? Despite many questions, the frustration of two fruitless years of negotiations stimulated an active strike campaign.
\n\nThe strike began on March 15. The university set up a surveillance system to dock pay from strikers by forcing all workers to “attest” online—in other words, to digitally scab—in order to receive wages. The provost, the administration official heading up the negotiations for the university, was a progressive historian and political scientist with a long record of labor advocacy; this led some to (incorrectly) predict that the university might be more willing to bend in the face of the disruptive power and negative publicity of a strike. Lively daily pickets took place on the physical campus, while an online “virtual picket” on Zoom provided another option to strikers and supporters near and far.
\n\nTwo weeks into the strike, the bargaining committee submitted a proposal to the university that included significant compromises on many of the union’s critical demands. Concerned rank-and-file members began organizing on their own. In early April, in the third week of the strike, the bargaining committee announced that it would accept an administration proposal to “pause” the strike and enter into mediation—without receiving any substantive concessions or guarantees of back pay in return. A general body meeting of 300 union members voted 75% against the proposal, but the bargaining committee voted 7 to 3 to accept it anyway, disregarding the rank-and-file majority.
\n\nA furious debate ensued. Many individuals and some entire departments continued striking, despite the bargaining committee’s declaration of a “pause.” Rank-and-file organizing continued, with countless meetings, demonstrations on campus, and actions within departments. It became increasingly clear that the bargaining committee was out of step with the most mobilized sectors of the union’s rank and file. This was dramatically illustrated on April 19, when the university and the bargaining committee announced that they had reached a tentative agreement—one which did not substantively meet any of the three major demands regarding compensation and benefits, neutral arbitration, or full unit recognition that had been identified as the unit’s core priorities.
\n\nThis sell-out contract baffled many rank-and-file members. It’s only possible to make sense of it if we understand the reactionary tendencies of bureaucratic unionism and the peculiar circumstances of grad student worker organizing. The seven bargaining committee members who agreed to the contract were about to complete their time as grad students and move on to new jobs; they would not have to deal with the consequences of their failure to secure what the union’s members demanded. The UAW officials showed their true colors repeatedly, as they spoke out against the efforts of NYU and Columbia units to coordinate their efforts. The way that the UAW’s interests diverged from rank-and-file workers was obvious in the financial nuts and bolts of the tentative agreement. On paper, the raise coming to grad workers looked significant, if less than hoped for—until union dues were figured in. Once you subtracted dues and adjusted for inflation, the new salaries actually amounted to a pay cut for grad workers. The bargaining committee got their “victory,” the UAW got the university to subsidize 3000 new dues-paying members… and the rank-and-file workers got sold out.
\n\nAs the spring 2021 semester drew to a close, a ferocious struggle unfolded over the ratification of the contract. While the UAW and the bargaining committee could do practically whatever they wanted without the broader consent or participation of the rank-and-file, one thing they couldn’t do was approve the contract. Rank-and-file activists waged a campaign to vote down the sell-out contract. The union members who supported the contract defended this as “pragmatism,” arguing that the university was too stubborn to give any more ground than the strike had already forced them to cede. Since the bargaining committee and the university controlled all forms of top-down communication, including mass emails and social media posts, it took substantial bottom-up organizing to argue in favor of rejecting the contract and continuing to fight.
\n\nDespite the ways that the odds were stacked against the rank and file, when the votes were counted, the sell-out contract had been rejected by a narrow margin. Columbia and the UAW were shocked: a rank-and-file vote to reject a contract is virtually unheard of in labor disputes. The university retaliated by bad-mouthing the union membership and attempting to discredit the vote, but they went further: over the summer, the human relations department announced that it was unilaterally restructuring the pay schedule for grad workers, allowing them to withhold three times as much pay in the event of a new strike.
\n\nThe bargaining committee resigned en masse. At the end of the summer, a new committee was elected that promised not to sell out the rank and file. The summer also saw the union adopt a new constitution enabling more extensive rank-and-file participation and including accountability mechanisms to prevent the new bargaining committee from unilaterally ending or “pausing” a strike. The mobilization provoked by the sell-out agreement proved enduring, with major consequences for the next round of struggle.
\n\nUnexpectedly, the conditions that the pandemic introduced provided a major impetus to the rank-and-file participation and radicalization that emerged in 2021. Until then, bargaining sessions had occurred in person, usually off campus and in the middle of the day; while technically open to the rank and file, they were inaccessible to average members. The shift to online meetings rendered the negotiations much more accessible, and offered multiple channels of simultaneous communication; dozens or even hundreds of rank-and-file members could attend and use the Zoom chat function, Dischord channels, or WhatsApp groups to vent, gossip, and strategize in real time.
\n\nThis became particularly significant during the strike, when hundreds of workers whose afternoons were suddenly open began to attend—especially since UAW policies mandated either physical picketing or virtual participation (including attending bargaining sessions) to qualify for strike pay. Consequently, hundreds of workers who had never seen the bargaining process in real time before witnessed the arrogance and intransigence of the administration and its lawyers—and the way that most UAW-affiliated bargaining committee members were making compromises at the expense of the rank and file. Without this digital accessibility and expanded communication, it’s hard to imagine that the rank-and-file organizing to reject the sell-out contract and transform the union from within could have succeeded. A new cohort of rank-and-file activists who met on the picket lines and in virtual meetings and bargaining sessions became radicalized and stepped into greater organizing roles, particularly in the fall. Many of them were earlier on in their programs at the university.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/10/7.jpg\")
\nThis account of the struggle at Columbia does not focus on the specific demands put forward by the union over its years of struggle. This is in part because the particular content of demands changed significantly over time. The core demand for the first decade of organizing centered on union recognition, which was viewed as an essential step towards addressing a wider range of demands through collective bargaining. UAW organizers and activists established working groups to document issues and establish bargaining positions around issues including late pay and concerns particular to parents with children, international students, and other demographics. The focal point of demands shifted as some were successfully addressed administratively or through bargaining.
\n\nBy the time of the strike in the spring of 2021, three key areas of deadlock were emerging: around compensation and benefits (specifically increased stipends, dental and vision insurance, and child care subsidies), full unit inclusion (recognition by the university of all workers, including undergraduates, who were legally entitled to join the union), and neutral, third-party arbitration in cases of sexual harassment and misconduct. The latter issue became the most prominent and emotionally charged issue in spring 2021, as Columbia has experienced several disturbing public scandals around rape, assault, and sexual harassment by faculty members and employers towards graduate workers. These issues carried on into fall 2021, combined with questions about “union security” (whether grad workers would comprise an “open” or “closed” shop), to form the linchpins of union communications and agitation.
\n\nWhile the specific content of these demands provided useful points of mobilization at different times, the more significant issue pertains to how and by whom the contours of the struggle were determined, including not only demands but tactics, strategy, and modes of organization. The original approach introduced by UAW organizers was reminiscent of the Maoist “mass line” strategy, in which leadership listens to the concerns of “the people,” formulates a program based in these concerns, then diffuses that program back to the masses. By contrast, in the later phases of the struggle at Columbia, the union’s shift towards self-organization entailed much substantive rank and file participation in setting the content and priorities of the negotiations through open meetings and caucuses, consistent polls, and other means. Through this process, the gap between “leadership” and rank and file narrowed, ensuring that the interests of the bargaining committee could not dramatically diverge from those they claimed to represent as it had at earlier phases. As the university’s steadfast refusal to concede even around issues that involved no direct financial stakes showed, the central issue always centered on power—not just who gets paid how much, but who gets to decide. In this struggle, the demands themselves were less important than the parallel struggles, both of the union against the university and within the union itself, for power and self-determination.3
\n\nIn fall 2021, students and workers returned to campus in person for the first time since the pandemic began. This decision, unevenly imposed on workers in different departments and sectors of the university with little input, led to grumbling—and in some cases, organizing—across the university. The purportedly pro-labor provost was gone, replaced by a bureaucrat who was accurately predicted to be actively hostile towards the union effort. She faced off against a new bargaining committee that was determined to avoid the compromises and failures of spring 2021. The stage was set for an even fiercer round of conflict—this time, playing out on the physical terrain of in-person classes, which are more vulnerable to physical disruption through picketing and protest.
\n\nBargaining resumed, but all sides knew that a strike would not be long in coming.
\n\nOn November 3, 2021, the new strike began. It was to become the longest massive strike in the history of grad worker organizing, and ultimately more successful than the organizers could have dreamed. The university set the tone with increased pay docking, increasingly hostile communications laced with misinformation from the provost, and efforts to turn the faculty, the student body, and the community at large against the union. The strikers mobilized networks of campus and community supporters, raised a “hardship fund” to support economically vulnerable workers, maintained daily pickets on the campus, and organized creative protest actions. Each week, the union sent out a poll to gauge interest in continuing or ending the strike. One week after another, the results indicated that people wanted to continue to fight.
\n\nAfter a month, the strike had wrung some concessions out of the administration, but they appeared to be willing to put up with bad press and labor disruption in order to wait the grad workers out. As economic stress mounted, the union considered options to raise the pressure. At the beginning of December, the university escalated: the HR department sent a message threatening to withhold spring appointments from striking workers—in other words, to fire and replace them. More than any other action, this catalyzed outrage across campus. The following Monday, a gigantic rally featuring dozens of faculty supporters clogged the campus, and on Wednesday, the union conducted a daylong disruptive protest with pickets at every entrance to shut the campus down. [See the account below.] The university panicked. Even as the administration condemned the union in a shrill tone, it also offered its most substantial concessions up to that point, showing the power of direct action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/10/8.jpg\")
\nThe semester drew to a close, yet the parties still remained in a standoff. An outside mediator was brought in, but this time, the bargaining committee refused to “pause” the strike, having learned from the mistake the previous spring. The bargaining committee offered concessions, but weighed them carefully in open caucuses first, supplementing those with polls soliciting input on what the most important priorities were and which issues were non-negotiable. The university offered several “final” proposals, but when the administration failed to address key demands, the union held firm. Week after week, the polls showed high support for continuing the strike.
\n\nThe semester ended with hundreds of teaching assistants refusing to submit grades. Despite their threat to lock out strikers in the spring, the administration could not possibly hire enough scabs to take on all the different kinds of labor that the strikers were responsible for. The administration’s resolve was crumbling.
\n\nFinally, as the new year arrived, over nine weeks into the strike, the university bent and finally broke over its last areas of defiance. The tentative agreement now on the table for ratification substantively addresses all of the union’s major demands. It is very different from the agreement that the administration and the UAW tried to foist on the union last spring.
\n\nThe victory in this struggle is remarkable, not only because it is a successful union struggle in a time when those have become rare, but because it shows the importance of an internal struggle for self-determination over the conditions of decision-making both with employers and within the union itself. The new contract’s material gains, which would have been unimaginable had the union stuck to the strategy of the UAW and the pragmatists, are the consequence of self-organized action against the university and against union bureaucracy. We hope that the effects of this victory will ripple out into struggles in other campuses and workplaces, informing other movements and contributing to a deeper transformation of the university itself.
\n\nSelf-determination on a horizontal basis is not just the goal of our struggles—it’s the only way to make progress at all.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/10/3.jpg\")
\nThe following account was written by a rank-and-file anarchist participant in the SWC strike in mid-December.
\n\nThe Student Workers of Columbia, UAW Local 2110, are entering our sixth week of striking as I write this. This follows on the heels of a three-week strike this spring and a vote to reject the contract we were offered—which itself built upon nearly two decades of organizing to establish this union, force the administration to recognize it, and bargain over the issues. This account represents my perspective as a participant, an anarchist, and a rank-and-file member of the union.
\n\nThe issues that led to the strike are easy to sum up. We’re demanding:
\n\n1) a living wage, with adequate benefits and child care provision; \n2) neutral third-party arbitration in cases of sexual harassment and misconduct, as opposed to the broken internal system that the university offers to discipline itself; and \n3) recognition by the administration of all the workers who are legally eligible to join our unit.
\n\nThere have been gestures towards a “NYPD off campus” provision like the one that New York University graduate workers have fought for, but it doesn’t have much traction, at least not yet. But the strike has implications beyond our campus: it is also a fight for student worker unions in general and the labor movement as a whole.
\n\nAs I write this, we’re hearing that this is currently the biggest strike happening in the United States. What does that mean for us? For the labor movement? For the economy more broadly? What can (and can’t) strikes do today? And what does this struggle suggest about broader prospects for liberation? Here are a few notes from the front lines.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/10/2.jpg\")
\nFirst, let’s get one thing straight. Don’t be fooled by the name: Columbia is not a “university.” It’s a real estate company that offers classes and degrees to boost its prestige. On the island of Manhattan, one of the most expensive markets in the world, it owns the second highest amount of property. It is second only to the Catholic Church, another real estate company posing as something else. This is appropriate enough for an institution named after the guy who kicked off the whole idea of land as something that can be owned in this hemisphere.
\n\nColumbia’s fancy words about its educational mission are not meaningless, though. They have a very specific meaning, which serves to add value to its brand. By posing as a socially responsible institution with a rigorous commitment to academic excellence, Columbia can mask and justify the astronomical profits it extracts from the land and people of New York City.
\n\nIt’s well known that the entire academic industry has been undergoing a neoliberal contraction in recent years. As in many industries, more and more jobs are switching to “contingent” and adjunct status: less pay, less job security, fewer benefits, etc. Economic logic and profit motives drive the distribution of resources among departments and schools more than ever—not that we should buy into some fantasy of a pure liberal arts utopia unsullied by crude materialism, which has never existed in this country.
\n\nColumbia is imposing its own version of austerity on faculty, staff, and students across the board. But in this struggle, despite what the administration claimed early on, the administration’s objections aren’t fundamentally about what our proposals will cost. Amid the strike negotiations, Columbia announced its assets had increased by $3.3 billion (yes, with a “b”) over the last COVID-stricken year, which rather dampened their claims that they couldn’t afford inflation-adjusted raises or dental insurance for their workers. Not to mention the countless thousands of dollars they’re shelling out to the top-shelf anti-union corporate law firm Proskauer Rose to fight us tooth and nail. Instead, they shifted their rhetoric to emphasize what they think is “fair” or “reasonable,” according to whatever undefined standard they imagine.
\n\nIn other words, it’s about power. What matters to them is not what it costs, but who gets to decide. An institution controlled by wealthy trustees and administrators, even if it has to sacrifice short-term profits, is preferable to one controlled by its workers, students, and the community where it is located. That’s why it’s so important for this real estate company that drips money from every pore to fight relentlessly against not only nickel-and-dime demands regarding childcare and benefits, but also the minutiae of the processes by which we try to hold accountable the faculty and bosses who harass us.
\n\nWhat do you do in the face of such a concerted campaign to maintain control? The union has framed the withdrawal of our actual labor as the chief weapon we have. That’s certainly something; even without all of our membership participating in the strike, we’ve made teaching, grading, research, and other aspects of the maintenance of the “university” into headaches. As a result, the administration has escalated their threats, threatening to fire us or lock us out from spring teaching appointments if we don’t break the strike and threatening to deny undergraduates credit for their classes in hopes of turning them against us.
\n\nBut the idea that withdrawing our labor is the best way to exert leverage hinges on the assumption that Columbia is in fact a university first and foremost, they way it represents itself to be. If we shift our analysis to account for the fact that Columbia is a real estate company that offers degrees, new things come into focus.
\n\nThe “university” function of this real estate company isn’t irrelevant in this model. But the question becomes: what arrangement of this university function will allow Columbia to keep its underlying economic model running smoothly while preserving the legitimacy afforded by its Ivy League mask?
\n\nI can imagine a few dystopian versions in which graduate students are rendered redundant in the push to austerity. At the University of Chicago and NYU, administrations tried to buy off grad students with cushy stipends that didn’t actually require work—on the condition that they remain (docile) students and not unionize. Where endowments don’t permit such tasty carrots, other universities—especially in more union-hostile regions—will rely more on the stick to keep student workers in line. Here at Columbia, I think we’ll probably win this particular battle and get a contract we can live with. But in the longer term, mark my words, this institution and its peers are laying plans to decenter student labor.
\n\nLooking at the situation through this lens has shifted my sense of what’s interesting about our struggle here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/10/5.jpg\")
\nLast Wednesday [December 8, 2021], hundreds and hundreds of union members, undergraduate students, faculty supporters, and activists from across the city converged on campus to shut it down for the day. Every entrance to the main campus was clogged with a lively demonstration, with hundreds of protesters cycling in and out and people aggressively confronting those who crossed the picket line. People still came and went, but the campus felt eerily deserted, and even those who did cross the picket line felt compelled to justify their actions. The union had inverted the sense of entitlement that usually characterizes students’ everyday relationship to the territory. People brought drums, banners, meals, media, and even one of the dramatic inflatable animals from the Teamsters that exemplify the visual landscape of New York City labor.
\n\nSome of the most interesting actions took place among small crews focused on stopping deliveries. A knot of protesters sat by a spigot all day to turn away the Teamster driver who came to refill the university’s oil supply. An Amazon employee organizer came out and networked with the strikers, and protesters swarmed Amazon, UPS, Fedex, and other drivers. Not all of the stoppages were successful, but many were; the infrastructural underbelly of the university faced more scrutiny and disruption than I had ever seen before.
\n\nUp until that point, the administration’s communications about the strike had been relatively restrained, if self-interested and misleading. But the campus shutdown made them panic. Multiple full-campus emails flew around raising the alarm, encouraging students to ask campus cops to help them cross picket lines, accusing the union of violence, and generally spreading panic. It seemed that many hundreds of us withholding our labor for weeks was annoying but tolerable—but interrupting the flow of bodies and goods for a day genuinely shook them.
\n\nOf course, plenty of students were pissed off, too. In one hilarious exchange I witnessed, a white guy with a Young Republicans haircut was crossing the picket line. As picketers yelled, “Don’t cross!” he retorted, “Don’t block!” When one striker replied, “Fuck you!” he sneered: “Get a job!”
\n\nApart from the comical ignorance of this wayward bro telling striking workers to get a job at a labor protest, there’s something else going on here. For a generation of reactionaries, protests have been associated with unemployed and unwashed hippies, malcontents looking for a handout, resenting the hard-working and successful to mask their own failings. The anti-war movement of the 1960s set this template so powerfully that even conservatives born decades after it still conjure up this trope—bolstered by more recent conspiracy theories about unemployed protestors paid by George Soros or some other shadowy force. Many conservative people can only understand protest through that frame, even a protest like this—which wouldn’t be happening if the protesters didn’t have jobs. Ignorant and self-serving as it is, this reading reflects the anxiety of the wealthy regarding the threat that the poor and unemployed pose to their power.
\n\nAnother reading, specific to this context, could be that the strikers are not really “workers,” but students (in theory, these are mutually exclusive categories, though in practice, they almost never are). This was Columbia’s line from the beginning—until the National Labor Relations Board refuted it and forced the administration to recognize the union—but the power of the rhetoric remains. In telling us to get a job, the bro could have meant that we should get “real” employment instead of complaining about our conditions in our intermediate state. Of course, not only are we “really” employed in our current jobs, but graduate students are routed into a shrinking bottleneck of professional and academic jobs that become more contingent and precarious every year. No matter how hard-working and diligent we are, even with all of our Ivy League advantages, the economy won’t structurally permit most of us to take that bro’s advice.
\n\nOne of the funniest recurring chants that marks the pickets and demonstrations is “WE HAVE TEETH!” This alludes to our demand for dental insurance; it has the advantage of being funny, universal, and intimately relatable. There’s an undercurrent of irony, though, in the way it plays on its metaphorical meaning. For something to “have teeth” means it has force behind it. To say we have teeth is to convey that we are making a threat that we can follow through on, that we’re not fucking around.
\n\nOne of the ways to deal with anxiety is through laughter. The humor in this chant is inflected with anxiety—we have teeth, sure, but does our struggle? Does our strike have the force behind it to force the university to meet our demands? And even if we do win, does our collective power as students, workers, future academics, etc. have enough “teeth” to matter, as neoliberal policies drain the universities of resources and austerity advances on multiple fronts?
\n\nMyself, I’ve never had dental insurance in my adult life. Have you ever waited in line at the monthly poor people dental clinic for hours, only to be told at the end that your number didn’t come up? I have, more than once. So the idea that I could get a PhD and go to the dentist too sounds pretty appealing. But is this a prelude to a more secure dental life? Or the last gasp of a movement that is unlikely to secure us a ticket back into a dentist’s chair after graduation?
\n\nI think the answer depends on where we see our power and whether we strategize accordingly. Can we shift from imagining that our (precarious, replaceable) labor itself is the source of our strength, to concentrate on building a collective capacity to disrupt the everyday functioning of capital in the university and beyond? A single day of physically disrupting students, workers, and deliveries seems to have made more impact than five weeks of striking, judging by the university’s communications and also by the announcement that Columbia made at the bargaining table the following day—when they offered the biggest economic concessions they ever have.
\n\nThere’s a lot that we can learn from this. In this brave new world, our labor is no longer the source of our power. But the relationships we make in the course of standing up for ourselves—across the lines of position, workplace, and identity—could be the basis for a strike power that exploits the vulnerabilities of infrastructure by targeting bottlenecks in the flow of people and economies. Our enemies are more concerned with preventing us from building collective power than they are with any particular economic concessions. They know that it’s worth a short-term investment to preserve their rule in the long term—and that they can always route around us, in the future, if we remain intractable. They’ve done it before, buying off whole generations just long enough to regain control.
\n\nAs the climate collapses, mass surveillance spreads its tendrils ever deeper into our lives, economic disparities intensify, and fascism rears its ugly head, time isn’t on our side. We can’t just shut down our workplaces; we have to shut down the whole economy. That’s what it’ll take to strike with teeth. And our teeth—not to mention our lives—depend on it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/10/6.jpg\")
\nHow to Strike and Win, by Labor Notes
\n\nUnions Against Revolution—A critique of trade unions and syndicalist unions from a communist perspective, by G. Munis
\n\nUp against the Wall, Motherfucker—The Game? Revisiting a Simulation of the 1968 Occupation of Columbia University
\n\nIn fact, considerably fewer than all 3000 members were participating in the strike at any one time. ↩
\nAs early as 1968, teaching assistants at the City University of New York were the first to be included in a collective bargaining agreement, their cases included with the faculty union’s contract, while University of Wisconsin at Madison teaching assistants were the first to achieve independent union recognition with their successfully negotiated contract in 1970. At the University of Washington, graduate student workers began organizing as early as 1963, but were not granted formal recognition with collective bargaining power until 2004. A proposed California state law that would have mandated state universities to recognize graduate worker unions was defeated in 1984, but after many years of fierce battles at the University of California at Berkeley and other campuses, a United Auto Workers-affiliated union was recognized in 1999—though radical student organizers argued at the time that union bureaucrats and university officials kept control of negotiations without accountability or rank-and-file participation. In other states with legislatures more hostile to unions, graduate student workers still lack collective bargaining rights, organizing in associations that their employers refuse to recognize. As of 2004, for example, 23 states banned all public employees from unionizing, while others specifically excluded grad workers from collective bargaining rights afforded to other university employees. Generally speaking, grad worker unionization succeeded on several campuses in the 1970s, stalled in the Reagan years, but surged again in the 1990s; all this time, however, grad workers at private universities were forbidden recognition. ↩
\nFor further reflections on the limits of demand-based politics within social movements, read “Why We Don’t Make Demands.” ↩
\nFollowing up on our J20 Protest Simulator, we raided the archives to find earlier examples of protest simulations. We found one from the 1960s, depicting the occupation of Columbia University in April 1968 at the high point of the anti-war and Black liberation movements. On the 50-year anniversary of its publication in the Columbia Spectator, we put this game at your disposal.
\n\nThe occupation of Columbia University was a major flashpoint of the struggles that defined the 1960s. The two issues at the center of the conflict remain timely today: university-driven gentrification in predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods and the complicity of the educational system in US military intervention overseas. Inside this upheaval, multiple movements with a variety of objectives coincided and competed. Black students established a Black-only space in one of the occupations; in many ways, it was their initiative that drove the movement, not the leadership of white activists. Non-students also played a major role, flooding in from off campus to add additional variables to the equation.
\n\nAt the heart of the Columbia occupation, we see the classic tension between activists seeking to improve American society and a counterculture aspiring to make a complete break with it. Some students simply wished to block the construction of a Columbia gymnasium in Morningside Park, or compel the university to stop supporting military research. Others sought revolutionary change; many of the core members of the Weather Underground emerged from the struggle at Columbia University—Eleanor Stein, Mark Rudd, John Jacobs, Ted Gold, and David Gilbert, who remains incarcerated to this day for his revolutionary efforts. At the center of the most uncompromising participants was the game’s namesake, a group called UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKER.
\n\nThis phrase was in the air already when the occupation kicked off, associated with the most extreme elements in the movement. At the opening of the events, Mark Rudd included the slogan in his letter to the president of the university:
\n\n\n\n\n“You call for order and respect for authority; we call for justice, freedom, and socialism. There is only one thing left to say. It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening shot in a war of liberation. I’ll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot: ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.’”
\n\n-Mark Rudd, open letter to Columbia President Grayson Kirk, April 22, 1968
\n
A distinct current under the name Up Against the Wall Motherfucker had emerged in the New York City counterculture three months before the Columbia occupation. Drawing its name from a poem by Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones)\n and styling itself “a street gang with an analysis,” UAW,MF introduced confrontational anarchist politics into the discourse of the anti-war movement and the hippie counterculture, emphasizing the importance of affinity groups and direct action. UAW,MF gained notoriety participating in the occupation and defense of the Mathematics building during the Columbia occupation.
\n\n\n\n\n“There were five buildings occupied at Columbia and the one we were in was the only one the police didn’t attack. We didn’t put a call out, but everyone who was a fighter gravitated towards that building. We were so fortified and aggressive that having evicted all the others they decided to negotiate rather than force their way in.”
\n\n-Ben Morea, recalling the role of Up Against the Wall Motherfucker in the occupation of Columbia University
\n
\n\n\n“The whole point of Columbia ’68 was that if you were inside one of the occupied buildings, you had just as much power as anyone else. It didn’t matter who you were, what your major was, who your parents were, or whether you were on scholarship or paying your own way or not even a student. None of these things mattered when it came to our daily lives inside Mathematics. Everyone was equal…
\n\n“It turned out the cops were saving Math for last. It was going to be their dessert, probably because it was known to be the most militant of the five buildings, and also the one with the most nonstudents. We could hear them coming, one building at a time, and in the lights they had set up, we could see the chaos. When they reached Math, it took the cops forty-five minutes to dismantle that barricade and get through the front door… When they finally broke through, we were all sitting on the three floors of staircases, in our protective civil rights pose, arms over our heads. As they marched past us, everyone was slugged on the back of the head by a plainclothes cop with a small club. As I recall, some of them were using handcuffs as brass knuckles. Angry and pumped up, screaming and yelling, they got to the top floor and starting pushing everyone down the stairs, and then shoved us into paddy wagons…”
\n\n \n
\n\n\n“When the Columbia University students in 1968 took over the university, we went up there and squatted one of the buildings that was the most militant building—which we felt was the mathematics building—and saw our role as organizing the defense of the building, the defense when the police came and attacked, and also the defense against the right-wing and conservative students—the athletes and jocks who were attempting to prevent us from—in one case—getting resupplied from the outside.”
\n\n \n
\n\n\n“We never knew when rhetoric would leap the firewall that separated it from reality. During the strike at Columbia University, Valerie [Solanas] climbed through a window in the Mathematics building to ask Ben what would happen if she shot someone. Ben said it would depend on whom she shot and if he died. Less than two months later on, June 3, 1968, she shot Andy Warhol. As soon as he heard the news Ben cranked out a flier that claimed her as one of us.”
\n\n-Osha Neumann, Up Against the Wall Motherf**er: A Memoir of the ’60s, with Notes for Next Time
\n
\n\n\n“We were singing. We were chanting our demands. Yet this was a strangely calm moment, as cops went about being moving-men, extracting the furniture, once a barricade, and passing it out, chair by desk by file cabinet. They were blue shadows, hulking back and forth as searchlights passed across their backs and into our faces. “Up against the wall, motherfucker!” (we’re Math, after all). Then the first helmet appeared in the well of the entranceway. We, the defense committee, stood above them, atop a short flight of stairs. Five more helmets appeared. The last of the barricade was vanishing quickly. Suddenly, falling from five flights above, a chair crashed between us and them. “Up against the wall, motherfucker!” Then another. This was nuts! No matter what we did, we were at their mercy. Did we want to start this off by killing a cop? I put up my arms and yelled, ‘Stop!’ Everything went silent.”
\n\n-Tom Hurwitz, in A Time to Stir: Columbia ‘68
\n
The game was created by several Columbia students who went on to successful careers in academia and, in one case, game design. Jerry Avorn, one of the chief designers of the game, also authored Up against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis, detailing the events of the occupation. This is a useful reference point to understand what Avorn and his colleagues understood themselves to be depicting.
\n\nThe original text of the game follows. Consult Appendix I for our reflections on the politics implicit in the game itself, Appendix II for a chronology of the events it depicts, and Appendix III for what UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKER themselves thought about the occupation of Columbia University.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/14/columbia-gameboard.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the gameboard.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/14/columbia-game-parts.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the game parts.
\nWith the first anniversary of last spring’s demonstrations fast approaching, we present a commemorative supplement to the supplement: a playable game-simulation of spring on Morningside Heights.1 It has been designed with the same kinds of operations research and game theory techniques that are used by mathematicians, business, and the military to generate models of interaction that can be used to predict events in real life. We call it UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKER! Instructions follow.
\n\nThe playing board for UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKER is made up of eleven tracks, each of which represents a quasi-political subgroup likely to be involved in the spring demonstration: black students, liberal faculty, alumni, uncommitted students, and so on. At the center of the board is Low Library; it is the goal of the ADMINISTRATION player to win the influence of these groups by moving the Position Unit Counter (PUCs) of each track inward toward Low. The RADICALS player, on the other hand, strives to move the PUCs on each track away from Low, radially out toward the edges of the board. The approximate initial political orientation of each subgroup is indicated by a dot in one of the squares on its track. The circular line surrounding Low Library represents an ideological isograph; that is, a PUC inside the circle means support for the ADMINISTRATION, and one outside the circle represents sympathy for the RADICALS. Fence-straddling for a given group is symbolized by a PUC directly on the line.
\n\nUnderneath the boxes in each track are numbers ranging from 0 to 10. These indicate the magnitude (and value) of support from each group. You win UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKER by amassing more support points than your opponent, or by wiping out your opponent altogether (see below). The manner in which the PUCs are manipulated will be explained below.
\n\nThe game consists of twelve turns. Place (or, better, paste) the board on a smooth flat surface. Cut out the Position Unit Counters, mount them on cardboard or heavy paper, and place one in every box with a dot in it, one per track.
\n\nStep One: The RADICALS move first. The attacking player consults the Projected Leverage-Over-Time chart (PLOT) on page c7. This determines the combat influence he will be able to exert during that turn (indicated by Level of Administrative Will (LAW) for the ADMINISTRATION, and Ratio of Activism Determinants (RADs) for the RADICALS). LAWs can be represented by small pieces of paper colored red, white, and blue, or by individual capsules of Secanol. Small pieces of paper colored red or marijuana seeds can be used for RADs. The attacking player then deploys his [gendered language sic, throughout] LAWs or RADs in the boxes so marked in each track, as he chooses. He may concentrate most combat pieces on one track, distribute them over all the tracks, ignore one or more tracks, and so forth.
\n\nStep Two: If, on any given track, there are any of your opponent’s combat pieces opposite your combat pieces, (as of course there won’t be on the first half of the first turn), you may choose to “attack.” This is done in the following way: the attacker computes the odds in his favor by counting the number of combat pieces he has at his end of a given track and dividing by the number of combat pieces the enemy has on the other end of the same track. Thus, if there are six RADs and three LAWs on a track, the odds are 2-1 in favor of the RADICALS.
\n\n(NOTE: following standard combat-game practice, if the odds are uneven, they are computed in favor of the defender; that is, when dividing, any remainder—no matter how large—is disregarded, so that 39 LAWs attacking 10 RADs would result in odds of 3-1 for the ADMINISTRATION).
\n\nHaving computed the odds, the attacking side rolls a single die and refers to the University Conflict Outcome Matrix (UCOM) to determine his results.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/14/4.jpg\")
Conflict outcome matrix.
\nYou must roll the die again for each different track you attack, but you can attack as many tracks as you want in a single turn. You may never attack at worse than 1-2 odds.
\n\nStep Three: After each attack, you may move the Position Unit Counter (PUC) one box closer to your combat pieces (LAWs or RADs) if and only if you have eradicated all of your opponent’s combat pieces in that track.
\n\nStep Four: After one side has completed its part of the turn, the other side repeats Steps One through Three.
\n\nA set of Contingency Cards is provided. These are to be mounted on heavy paper and placed in a pile, face down, near the playing board. Before each move, a player draws a contingency card. You may use it immediately, or you may save it, or, if it is not to your advantage, you may disregard it. You need not reveal its contents to your opponent.
\n\nAt the beginning of his turn, each player may choose to up the ante by shouting, “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!” You should call a UAW,MF! with feeling, as it is usually the high point of the game. For the ADMINISTRATION, it represents calling in the cops or worse; for the RADICALS, it means calling a strike, or taking another couple of buildings. After calling a UAW,MF!, the player rolls the die and consults the UCOM, but the results apply across the board (not just in a single track) in the following manner:
\n\nThe attacker may then advance the PUCs as above.
\n\nThe game ends after each player has taken twelve turns. Each then adds up the total number of points on his side (measured by the point values under the boxes on his side of the circle in which a PUC is found). The winner is he who has the most points. The loser calls a news conference.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/14/3.jpg\")
\nThe following text is excerpted from an article that co-creator Jim Dunnigan authored in the Columbia Spectator alongside the game. Like many apologists for cybernetics who insist that technology is “neutral,” he argues that computer simulations (and the mechanistic understanding of human behavior that they imply) can be used for “good” as well as “evil” if they are in the hands of “good guys” [sic]. From our perspective, it’s dangerously naïve to imagine that technology of any kind is neutral, be it military ordnance or sociological frameworks: as the slogan goes, every tool has a world connected to it at the handle. In this article, we see Dunnigan’s belief in the neutrality of tools apparently lead him to endorse Columbia’s involvement with the Institute for Defense Analyses—which was one of the triggers for the protests at Columbia in the first place. It may well be that game design, itself, comes with certain class interests. For precisely this reason, we consider it important to study game design and the assumptions of those who engage in it—not so much to influence them for the better, the way Dunnigan recommends, as to understand how they influence us.
\n\nUP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKER… is as close to a computer-assisted simulation as you can get without using a computer. Why the computer? The computer keeps the books. It handles the details. An operations research simulation looks at an event to be simulated as a “system” which has “movable parts” and is oriented towards an “objective.” In the case of UAW,MF the movable parts are the major participants of the spring confrontation, past or future. In most human systems the “objectives” are ill defined, if at all, by the participants, which may be one reason for the mess the world is in. Thus one immediate benefit you obtain from social simulations is a defining or objectives, or at least possible objectives. To get even this far you must attempt to define the situation as well as the relationships between the parts of the system. In UAW,MF I arbitrarily defined the “system” as two major ideological directions (which made the “game” simple although less accurate). Proponents of these two ideologies vie for the favor of various other groups. The game pieces represent the relative “influence” of the two major groups, and to this is added another assumption: That the proportion of influence fluctuates between the Radicals to the Administration as the confrontation progresses. Throw in a few more assumptions and you have a game \n(“simulation”).
\n\nKeep in mind that the game is meant to be modified by changing your inputs (assumptions). The goal is to try to re-create the original situation; but even then you aren’t finished. Just because you’ve arrived doesn’t mean you got there the same way the original event did. But you’ve learned a lot about what was going on while you were doing it. Simulation is based on information; you’ve got to do your homework. Footnotes aren’t enough. Your system has to work and you have to be able to see why, or why not. A book may be written, and that is that. A simulation is never completed.
\n\nColumbia isn’t much of a school when it comes to Operations Research and simulation research. The IDA [Institute for Defense Analyses] is small change in this respect. This may be a relief to some people, but in the long run it can be very harmful. Like most techniques man [sic] has created, Operations Research can be used for both good and evil. “Dr. Strangelove” is much less of a fiction than you might think. People in the humanities, particularly at Columbia, seem to be reluctant in committing themselves to work in this area. This is regrettable. The potential of Operations Research is vast. Here I have only scratched the surface. If future Dr. Strangeloves (who CAN be good guys) do not receive a humanistic education in a “language” they can understand and respect… I don’t have to describe it.
\n\nFrom Up against the Ivy Wall; A History of the Columbia Crisis by Jerry Avorn. For an introduction to the events, you could start with brief oral histories like this one or this one.
\n\nTuesday, April 23
\n\nNoon. SDS Sundial rally
\n12:40 P.M. March on gymnasium site, Morningside Park
\n1:35 P.M. Sit-in begins in Hamilton Hall
\n1:40 P.M. Dean Coleman held hostage in his office
\n2:50 P.M. Six Demands formulated; students decide not to leave until demands are met
Wednesday, April 24
\n\n5:30 A.M. White students evicted from Hamilton by black students
\n6:15 A.M. Students break into Low Library and seize Kirk’s offices
\n7:45 A.M. Police enter Kirk’s offices but make no arrests
\n3:00 P.M. College Faculty meets
\n3:30 P.M. Coleman released
\n8:00 P.M. Administration makes unsuccessful compromise offer to black students
\n10:00 PM. Avery Hall occupied
Thursday, April 25
\n\n2:00 A.M. Fayerweather Hall occupied
\n4:00 P.M. Formation of Ad Hoc Faculty Group; formulation of its first proposals to end demonstrations
\n7:00-8:00 P.M. Strikers reject Ad Hoc Faculty proposals
\n8:00 P.M. Harlem activists address rally at Columbia gates, march across campus
\n9:30 P.M. Counter-demonstrators attempt to invade Fayerweather
Friday, April 26
\n\n1:05 A.M. Vice President Truman announces impending police action to Ad Hoc Faculty
\n1:05 A.M. Mathematics Hall occupied
\n2:15 A.M. First negotiating session between faculty and students held in Math Library
\n3:00 A.M. Police charge crowd at Low Library
\n3:20 A.M. Truman announces police action canceled; gym construction suspended
\n1:10 P.M. H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael enter campus
\n4:00 P.M. Galanter committee submits proposals for tripartite commission on discipline
Saturday, April 27
\n\n1:00 A.M. Mark Rudd delivers “bullshit” speech before Ad Hoc Faculty
\n10:30 A.M. Petersen-Trustee statement released on campus
\n11:30 A.M. Faculty cordon around Low Library established to prevent access to demonstrators
\n6:00 P.M. Rally of anti-war demonstrators held near campus
\n11:00 P.M. Faculty negotiators report deadlock on major issues
Sunday, April 28
\n\n8:00 A.M. Ad Hoc Faculty announces final resolutions (“bitter pill”) to end crisis
\n10:00 A.M. Joint Faculties meet in Law School
\n5:15 P.M. Majority Coalition establishes cordon around Low
\n7:00-8:00 P.M. Demonstrators attempt to pass food through counter-demonstrators’ cordon into Low
Monday, April 29
\n\n3:30 P.M. Kirk issues negative response to bitter pill
\n6:30 P.M. Strikers reject bitter pill
\n11:30 P.M. Ad Hoc Faculty appeals to Mayor Lindsay, tables amnesty motion
Tuesday, April 30
\n\n2:30-5:30 A.M. New York City police remove students from occupied buildings and clear campus; 712 arrested, 148 injured
\nNoon. Ad Hoc Faculty meets in McMillin; strike resolution presented and withdrawn
\n2:00 P.M. Joint Faculties meet in St. Paul’s Chapel, establish Executive Committee of the Faculty
\n8:00 P.M. Students hold strike meeting in Wollman Auditorium
Wednesday, May 1 to Sunday, May 5
\n\nClasses suspended in most of University; academic calendar and grading procedures revised to permit completion of semester; Executive Committee establishes fact-finding commission
\n\nMonday, May 6 to Thursday, May 16
\n\nUniversity reopens but thousands of students participate in boycott of classes; discipline commission proposes that criminal charges against students be dropped, and that most strikers be placed on disciplinary probation; Kirk rejects proposals, then accepts them; moderate Students for a Restructured University splits with Strike Coordinating Committee
\n\nFriday, May 17
\n\nCommunity activists seize Columbia-owned apartment building, Columbia students stage sit-in at tenement in support; police move in within hours and arrest 117 (56 students)
\n\nTuesday, May 21
\n\nStudents reoccupy Hamilton Hall in protest against disciplining of four SDS leaders; threatened with suspension, demonstrators refuse to leave; police empty building, clear campus as students erect barricades and fires break out in two campus buildings; 138 arrested, 66 later suspended
\n\nTuesday, June 4
\n\nColumbia holds 214th Commencement Exercises; several hundred graduating students walk out of ceremonies and hold counter-commencement on Low Plaza
\n\nFriday, August 23
\n\nGrayson Kirk announces his early retirement as President of Columbia University, and Andrew Cordier is appointed Acting President
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/14/2.jpg\")
Up Against the Wall Motherfucker report on a Students for a Democratic Society Regional Council.
\nA text from UAW/MF that appeared around the time of the Columbia occupation.
\n\nColumbia University, as an institution owned and run by the same interests that run corporate America can never support an education directed to the overthrow of those interests. A revolutionary movement wishing to educate revolutionaries cannot come to terms with Columbia. Ultimately its goal must be to destroy Columbia. But the strike, although it speaks the rhetoric of revolution, cannot bring itself to admit what must be its ultimate goal. So its formulations are sometimes confused and unconvincing.
\n\nA revolt at Columbia would have to cut Columbia’s ties to the ruling corporate structures of America. This means taking power from the trustees and money interests that support Columbia. It cannot then be expected that Columbia will be supported by the money it is in revolt against. Without that money there is no Columbia. But the strike leadership denies that it wants to destroy Columbia.
\n\nExample of resulting contradiction: question of amnesty: one does not ask the authority one is revolting against to legitimize one’s revolt unless one is unsure whether one is revolting or not. Amnesty was presented during the strike both as tactical (we cannot negotiate with the university with the punishment over our head) and as more than tactical (we cannot accept anything but amnesty because there is no legitimate authority around to punish us). Which is it?
\n\nIf the rhetoric of revolution is to be believed, then the demands for reform of Columbia are tactical. One urges one’s demands to expose, to force polarizing crises. The strike becomes a source of energy that will burn through the dry straw of academic life: in one door of the campus and out another. Its guiding principle: disrespect, bad taste.
\n\nKick the professor in the stomach (if he stands in your way).
\n\nSlash the Rembrandt (if the threat of slashing it will deter the police, one must be willing to make the threat real).
\n\nPile the Chinese porcelain camel on the barricade (Headline: Policeman’s axe smashes art treasure.)
\n\nRifle through the files. Smoke the president’s cigars.
\n\n-UAW/MF
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/03/14/1.jpg\")
A student smoking a cigar belonging to an administration official during the occupation.
\nUp against the Ivy Wall; A History of the Columbia Crisis by Jerry Avorn
\nBlack Mask & Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: The incomplete works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, and the Black Mask group
\nThe Brown Paper Bag Theory of Affinity Groups by Up Against the Wall Motherfucker—one of the first texts about the affinity group organizing model to appear in the United States
\nElegy to Richard Lee, a Motherfucker from Austin—This gives a sense of the sort of lives that the most uncompromising anarchists from the 1960s era led over the decades that followed, rather than returning to electoral politics and academia (as many senior members of the Weather Underground did).
\nFootage from the occupation of Columbia in 1968.
\nColumbia University is situated on Morningside Heights, looking over what was then the predominantly black and poor neighborhood of Harlem. The University’s attempt to further gentrify Harlem by building a gymnasium in Morningside Park was one of the chief causes of the upheaval. ↩
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