Today’s campus chaos channels the revolutionary zeal of 1968

To better understand what’s happening on campuses around the country, read “First We Take Columbia: Lessons from the April 1968 Occupations Movement.” The essay, which appeared April 20 at the autonomist website Ill Will, is penned by anonymous participants of the late Columbia and Yale protest encampments. The authors recall another occupation, another Columbia, which took place 56 years ago, while urging on their fellow occupiers.

The first thing you’ll notice is that essay says practically nothing, beyond a brief reference to “solidarity with Gaza,” about the ongoing war in the Middle East.

It is unmistakably the case that Columbia is less about antiwar or even anti-Israel sentiment than it is about domestic revolution.

Instead, the authors divide their advice into sections with headers such as “Occupations are effective because they are disruptive,” “An occupation needs to spread in order to survive,” and “Every occupation is a commune” together with examples from the 1968 Columbia campus protests.

The symmetry between 1968 and 2024 became increasingly clear this week as protests have escalated across the country, with students seizing university buildings, building barricades, and bringing in reinforcements from among outside radicals. Columbia protesters reportedly briefly held Columbia staff hostage, refusing to allow them to leave the building in a manner reminiscent of Columbia Dean William Coleman’s capture a half century earlier.

If the current radicals seem bent on recreating the spirit of ’68, perhaps there is much we could learn from those events to explain what we’ve seen this week and where these events are likely headed.

‘Occupations draw strength from the specter of a riot’

The Columbia ’68 occupations, which began as a protest action opposing a Columbia think tank’s ties to the Pentagon and the building of a gym, were preceded by a series of race riots in large cities. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was behind a number of those riots, some beginning as early as 1965. The campus protests underway now are supposedly also benefiting from the specter of the preceding Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.

While the anonymous article does not name them, the earlier Columbia protests were the brainchild of the Students for a Democratic Society. SDS Columbia was the coming-out party for the likes of Mark Rudd, John “JJ” Jones, David Gilbert, and Bernadine Dohrn — the leadership cadre of a collective that would eventually become the domestic terrorist group known as the Weather Underground.

While some conservative wags have suggested that protesters at elite schools like Yale and Columbia are destroying their post-college career opportunities, the organizers are really auditioning for the jobs they want. Like the Weather Underground before them, they’re vying for leadership roles in the coming revolution.

‘The first task then is to open the campus to the community’

While media outlets have attempted to give cover to student protests by claiming outsiders are to blame for vandalism and violence, in truth no daylight exists between the “agitators” and the student protesters. In recently released videos from Columbia, professional anarchist and “direct action consultant” Lisa Fithian can be seen directing students to build barricades. Fithian has played a key role in organizing chaos for nearly 40 years, from the 2000 “Battle in Seattle” to the Ferguson riots to (perhaps most notably) the 2008 Republican National Convention.

‘A proliferation of occupied spaces requires the space for a proliferation of autonomous initiatives’

It is unmistakably the case that Columbia is less about antiwar or even anti-Israel sentiment than it is about domestic revolution. The protests we have seen consist of a mélange of participating groups ranging from Anarchists to Marxists to Islamists of every stripe. It is, therefore, no surprise that viral videos of the encampments have something for everyone. Islamic prayer, Hamas chants, praise of North Korea, Black liberation rhetoric, on and on.

Curiously, however, many of these tumultuous factions exist on the largesse of massive left-wing foundations, such as Tides Foundation and Open Society Foundations, which are funding multiple participant groups. Numerous protest organizers are linked to the larger pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel campaign network.

While many look upon these donors as the masterminds of the events, it is better to view them as a gas pedal than a steering wheel. When these entities desire disruption, they release the tap to let money flow down to the fiscal sponsor nonprofit organizations, and from there to the bail funds and dime-a-dozen community groups, and then to the street radicals.

The Columbia protest organizers then, as now, were not a single unified front, operating on any one person’s orders. They were a wild mess of competing revolutionary Marxist factions, organizations, and sub-groups, each seeking to mobilize the attendees toward their own version of doctrinaire leftism, with heroes from Cuba to China to Algeria. But within the morass was the beginning of a struggle to determine the shape and direction of the New Left and where it would lead them.

'This is only the beginning'

Every sign points to the reality that these encampment protests are not really about Israel or Palestine at all. The protesters insist the goal is revolution, and revolutions are fundamentally about seizing power.

Many observers have noted that elite colleges and universities are reaping what they have sown with radical students alienating longtime alumni donors and even threatening endowments. In many ways, the primary target is a left-leaning establishment that has maintained Alexander Kerensky’s maxim “no enemies to the left” and is increasingly likely to meet Kerensky’s fate.

If it is the case that the ongoing chaos is aimed not toward geopolitical affairs but domestic political ones, then the road to revolution is likely to lead from Columbia to Chicago, where in 1968 a variety of student factions, including the SDS, led massive and chaotic protests that sank establishment Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s chances against law-and-order anti-communist Richard Nixon.

There are differences in 2024 to be sure, at least on the surface. The 1968 Democratic National Convention was contested, with incumbent Lyndon Johnson having formally declined to run for re-election. But then, as now, the Democrat Party base was in upheaval. Large swaths of the Democratic Party base would have strongly preferred that Biden not run this year. Post October 7protest organizers have not been shy at naming Biden as a target, either, deliberately targeting Arab voters in the swing state of Michigan in a push to reject Biden in the primary, if only symbolically.

Already, we are seeing signs of protests intended to target the convention, under the heading, "March on DNC 2024 Coalition." The organizers of that effort are a mixed bag but include Chicago Students for Justice in Palestine, a Palestinian campus group with links to Palestinian terror groups PFLP and Hamas, which have played a role in campus encampment protests.

Other participants include the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which played an outsized role in giving birth to the BLM movement, together with BLM’s Chicago chapter. Other groups include a bevy of Filipino American organizations linked to the New People’s Army, the Philippines’ Communist Guerilla movement.

Unlike in 1968, however, there is no longer a Richard Daly strongman in Chicago. Instead, the city is helmed by a radical disciple of the local teachers’ union. Mayor Brandon Johnson last year held a sit-down with Black Panther and repeated Communist Party USA presidential candidate Angela Davis. This is the same Chicago where former Weathermen leaders Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers hold court as hometown heroes, with Ayers recently weighing in on plans for the 2024 DNC protest.

Following the 1968 DNC protests, the Weathermen went to seize control of the entire SDS in 1969 and launched a terror campaign that didn’t end until the early 1980s.

What we are seeing on college campuses today is not the climax of something but rather the beginning. The networks and relationships now being established by these radicals will strengthen, and radicals will further be radicalized.

What is coming out of Columbia isn’t about Israel or Palestine or campus politics. It’s about revolution.