Power and the Problem with Youth Activism

Read the original post here on the Young People For Blog by: Matt Birkhold | Dec 24, 2007 |

Courtney Martin has recently noted that there is no shortage of activism of college campuses. However, according to Martin ("The Problem With Youth Activism," American Prospect, November 19), much student activism is ineffective because students have been pacified by what she calls the institutionalization of student activities and activism. In defense of student activists, Tim Fernholz ("The Kids Are Alright, Campus Progress, November, 27) argues that Martin is wrong and that her basic premise is indicative of a failure to understand politics. Fernholz goes on to argue that today's college activists are smarter then those of the 60s because they are willing to work within the system instead of engaging in protest, boycotts, and civil disobedience. Both Fernholz and Martin make some valid points. Yet neither mentions power in any regard. My aim is to make their conversation more complex by discussing how power impacts student activism.

Politics is primarily about implementing an agenda that will enable a particular vision of the world to become reality. This requires power. Consequently, politicians and their staff are constantly finding ways to retain power while aspiring politicians seek ways to gain it. In the realm of electoral politics, power is usually gained and retained through funding. In other realms however, power is found within people. This aspect of people power was understood particularly well in the 1930s and 40s by labor unions.

In 1936-37, workers at a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan began a 44-day sit down strike where workers occupied the plant for 44 days and refused to work. The company responded by asking the state to send in the police and National Guard to put workers back on the assembly line. Workers continued to strike and, 44 days later, GM formally recognized the United Auto Workers. Importantly, these workers understood that without their labor, cars could not be produced. They saw themselves as the most important aspect of automobile manufacturing. They understood they had power at the point of production, and that when they exerted this power collectively, they had more power than the people who signed their checks.

Student anti Vietnam War activists began to understand their power at the point of production in 1967 when they shut down the Oakland, California Draft Induction Center. Antiwar activists realized that draftees were needed by the state if they were to continue producing war, and that if they could shut down the draft induction center, they could halt the production of war. Student power at the point of production was further realized during the great student strike of 1968 at Columbia University. Following the lead of Harlem community activists and black student activists, SDS leader Mark Rudd organized white students to occupy campus buildings understanding that if students occupied buildings, the research needed to produce weapons used in the war could not continue. These three situations are important because they provide examples of human beings exerting power at the point of production after the legal avenues of change had been exhausted.

It is this very point that Courtney Martin understands but Tim Fernholz fails to grasp. According to Fernholz, "the executive branch has the most control over foreign policy, and only when its occupant is against the war will we see real progress. Until then, young people must work on defining what type of foreign policy our generation should support." With such an approach, Fernholz has completely relinquished the power of human beings--student and non-student activists alike--to the executive branch of the federal government. By doing so, he becomes a prime example of the critique Martin makes of student activists. According to Martin, the problem is not that student activists do not care; the problem is that they do not see themselves as creators and controllers of their own lives and the world around them. Martin sites a study conducted on college students that found that the average college student today was 80 percent more likely to feel that his/her life was controlled by outside forces than students in the early 60s.

In the world that Martin would like to see, young people would not sit around and wait for power in the executive branch to change hands but would instead hold an event on the Washington lawn to put pressure on those who currently have power to change what they do with that power. As Fernholz points out, those in power are not always the enemy. However, when those who have power use it in a way that the people deem inappropriate, it is the duty of the people in a democratic state to hold those in power accountable. If those in power do not respond, the people have a duty to go outside the avenues of change provided by people in power and develop new ways to create social change. This basic concept that activists in the late 60s understood, today's young student largely fail to grasp.

One reason young activists fail to grasp this lesson stems from the cold war. Marx, the original theorist of people's power at the point of production, was made virtually off limits in US colleges during the cold war. Because of this, generations of activists and intellectuals have been denied a crucial lesson in creating social change. Another reason stems from the way in which college activism is designed to keep students from getting too radical. In conversations with student activists, I regularly ask the question, "Why does the university require you to get the posters you want hung approved?" Students almost always respond, "Because they want to make sure no one gets their feelings hurt." Students are right, that is part of the reason the University wants to approve all signs.

However, a second reason is that colleges want to make sure that students do not get too radical and recreate the late 60s. To accomplish this, they monitor everything student groups do. When student groups get too radical or begin to question university policies, they typically lose university support. Because students want to get their message out, they create flyers that will be approved by the university. Unfortunately, this is too big of a compromise because all the time students spend getting flyers approved could be spent organizing or studying. By continuing with university approved activism students are giving up a great deal of power and giving the university far too much. This must be seen as both a diversion and a way to absorb radicalism.

Because they need students' money, colleges cannot afford to throw all the activists out. Accordingly, students must begin to see that they are in a position to affect change. Before seeing this however, they must begin to understand that human beings create, sustain, and have the capacity to change institutions. When we are complicit with institutions, we are actively working to sustain them. When we agitate, we are actively involved in changing them. Students have power; they just have to learn how to use it.

do you already know what you are getting?

truth reflects reality
but what is reality
& what is then true?
knowledge implies truth
& who can claim to possess knowledge that

is purely true to reflect the real?
- Alex B. Hill (date written unknown)

Whether we all know it or not we are enslaved by a great system, a system that propagates discrimination based on race, division rooted in the ideas of economic class, military control bent on power, and a political will lacking the necessary passion to stand up for what can easily be perceived as right (as opposed to wrong). Right: equal rights for all people of the world, equal opportunity, fair wage and living standards, a smile from a stranger, an atypical helping hand when it may seem uncouth, truth spoken from the mouth of a fellow on the misdeeds of a few who would wield a vast power in the name of many, not denying people their basic needs. Wrong is spewed from the system in many ways, most are unrecognized and more unknown to the general populace than one might think.

I just went to the movies tonight and what was most striking was not the movie itself, but the previews. I nearly forgot that a movie was to follow. There was a new film on beating the US Treasury's money shredder, one on the fictional assassination of a US presidential double and the preceding systematic cover-up, a film decrying US torture in wartime, the government extending a soldiers' contracts: Stop Loss. The current climate of things is more than ready for a movement away from destruction and into progress. When I say progress I am not talking about reform, there is no place for reform in the current system. There needs to be change, as in complete, no holds barred flip of the system. People need to be the pinnacle of the equation - people in the sense that every man, woman, and child needs to be ensured that the reality they live with is not also the systematic structure that keeps them in poverty, at war, without proper clothing, or without the ability to pursue a higher dream. Here in the USA, we have the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - why must it only be a pursuit and not a right?

Before this day at the movies, I had another similar excursion. An exciting day to go see the new political thriller just in theaters. Lions for Lambs was one of the best political thriller for our time, now. During World War I, the Prussian troops used to call the English grunt workers, on the frontlines, Lions because of the ferocity with which they worked and fought, these men were Lions for Lambs. The Lambs were the politicians who sat in their plush offices and said to reporters, "we will do whatever it takes to win," as their men die by the thousands, day by day pouring the fiery passions of their hearts into their work. These men were only to be forgotten by the Man, the politician on the pedestal, the system for which they had risked their very lives to preserve - a construct that had no place for them and never will.

This is the overtone of the most recent political thriller to come out of movie making land. Sadly much of the message was lost to the American public before they had even seen the movie. It has become very common that political thrillers are not appealing to the American public. They don't like the harsh realities coming to life on the big screen, they don't like the messages, they don't like being called out in the theater where they came to enjoy a little bang-bang shoot'em up action. And so in the end Americans do not see these movies and political thrillers, which very well may be later called the greatest films of their times, fall in the box offices to popular whim. I recently read a very poor review of Lions for Lambs in which the student author claimed the film relied too much on political generalities and made the message too confusing. I would say that this was the prime example of the audience being lost to the message. As this student was the target and missed the mark completely.

Warning: Possible spoiler of Lions for Lambs

The film opens, in a hypothetical situation mirroring the present circumstances, with a 'liberal' journalist meeting with the new, young, up-and-coming republican political star. They are to spend an hours time getting the 'truth' to the American people. The Republican, played by Tom Cruise, tells of a new strategy in Afghanistan to win because "America needs a win." The typical Republican rhetoric of today played out very well as a representation of the current political situation. As the Republican explains this plan in detail the story cuts to a team of Army Rangers beginning to initiate this new strategy to win in Afghanistan. They tear across the sky in their Chinook helicopter to land and take the high ground in the mountains. Suddenly they are hit by anti-aircraft fire, the gunner is hit and one of the soldiers falls out the back of the helicopter. Another soldier hesitates and then jumps after him. We then cut to a student visiting his political science professor, played by Robert Redford, to talk about how his class involvement and grades have fallen as well as his attendance.

The Republican dishes his empty rhetoric, soldiers fall in a new push in the war on terror, and a student discusses his grades. The professor asks the young man why he has stopped attending his class yet has continued to do so well on his exams. The student hesitates and replies that there are girls, and his frat house obligations, and college social stuff. The professor cries bullshit and asks ominously, "Why have you stopped caring?" when before the student used to spark debates and challenge ideas. The student responds that he is fed up. He is fed up with the shit that is the political system and he can no longer see the point. The professor begins to tell the story of two of his former students who used to give him as much hope as he had now in this fed up young man. They came from a tough area of LA where they grew up fighting just to live another day in the ghettos. Guns, drugs, gangs - when they made it to college on baseball scholarships they did not waste their time and jumped right into the political science course. As a class project they presented on how to solve America's problems.

Their solution made a lot of sense. They noted how good we are with deployment abroad with US troops stationed across the world, but in America there is very little 'deployment.' They proposed that the Junior year of High School not involve the formal classroom setting at all. Juniors would be placed in either a Peace Corps type program, AmeriCorps program, or an ROTC program. They followed up this plan by noting the great and terrible disparities in America in literacy, access to opportunity, and potential in life. Drawing from their tough experiences as young people from the ghettos they saw this as an incredible way to get people involved. I have to admit that when they talked about this program in the film I could not help but think how amazing it would be if this were an actual program. Another student asks them, "You both talk a big game, but how serious are you?" They then place their military enrollment dispatches on the overhead. They are headed for the Army. They figured what good is it to talk and not be involved in something if you want to make change.

Cut back to Afghanistan. The soldier who fell out of the helicopter is unconscious and the other has a broken leg trapped in the snow. These soldiers are the two students that the professor talked so highly. Alone, trapped on the top of an enemy infested mountain the two former students, now soldiers, await their fate as the enemy closes in on their position. At the same time the Army is sending in rescue missions to help them, the Republican is getting the bad news that this new plan is failing, and the student meeting with his professor is wondering what he is supposed to do. Airstrikes to drive back the Taliban fighters fails and the two soldiers are shot dead just as help is on the way, the reporter refuses to write the politically charged article on the Afghanistan plan to boost the Republican party presidential hopeful, and the professor says to his student, "What if I give you a straight B, no plus no minus for the rest of the semester. If you don't show up, don't do your reading, and don't turn anything in. A straight B." The student doesn't know what to say, but time is up and it is another person's turn to have a meeting.

Back at his frat house the student is asked by another frat brother what the meeting was for. He responds that it was a meeting about class and grades. He is then asked, "do you already know what you are getting?" End of movie. The high schoolers behind me couldn't believe it as many who have reviewed this film couldn't. "A terrible end to a terrible movie," said one. "I don't even get it," said another. That is the point! The film is much deeper than the usual hollywood hit. There is more to it than typical partisan political arguments and explosions with soldiers. This is a call for involvement, political action, doing something! We can no longer just sit by and watch things happen and complain about them later. Do we already know what we are getting? More importantly are you fine with that, are you satisfied? The end of the film noted how politicians bank on the apathy of the general public. They count on our ignorance of the situation. Great minds die in unnecessary combat, others get fed-up studying politics, and still others refuse to be manipulated by politics to give them good press - but for some reason that has become their job. All I can ask is "where are we going?"

All this has made me think and this post has been sitting in my draft box for a long while. "Why have I stopped caring?" Why should I care when everything is so arbitrary and falsely constructed in a terribly flawed system! Why should I waste my time and effort "playing the game" when all it does is mislead and fulfill my thirst with the nothingness. A higher education, while it is a great privilege, is wrought with discrepencies and lies. I needed the opportunities and intellectual challenges (outside of class), but in the end it will mean nothing if I do nothing. I hate the system and the system hates me. I will be judged as a failure by the system and doors will be closed. I am already judged as a failure - my grade point, my dislike of the institution, and my perhaps 'radical' and challenging ideas. I know that a degree can be seen as a way to be judged as less of a failure, but what is the point anymore? (Don't worry, I am not a nihilist) I know that in many regards I have been very successful, but those are all discounted (no matter how great) by my performance in school, by my calls against the current system, by my lack of respect for those ensnared by the system. I am called a "naive" white boy 'saving' the African continent. I am called a "naive" radical - speaking that my professors are full of unthought (in the sense that they regurgitate ideas rooted in the terrible foundations of the system). I am called a failure lacking purpose and knowledge of how things work in reality, but it is a false, constructed reality actualized by the few. I have learned so much from my friends, personal quests for understanding, and engagements with student organizations in thoughtful discussions. I am here, at college, because of societal structure and expectations. I am here because this is what I am supposed to be doing.

Back again to Lions for Lambs. Do you already know what you are getting? Do you understand what you are already getting and are you satisfied? Is it enough to be able to say that I at least tried? For me that is not good enough. To be able to say I changed it, I destroyed it, I made it right is good enough. I am told that, "sometimes you have to play the game." In no way, shape, or form will I play this game. I do not care to be recognized in this game. I will not don the jersey of this system to sit on the bench to watch the game from the sidelines. The system counts on our collective apathy, but that can easily be changed. Apathy is what fuels this game. An apathy that leads to a game of destruction, discrimination, and death. I already know what I will get if I continue to follow this system without thinking and acting for myself. I know the planned structural violence that plays out day to day - and I am not satisfied. Are you? What will you do?

----------------
Now playing: J-Live - Satisfied
via FoxyTunes



From the When not in Africa. . . blog.

Previously posted on the Young People For Blog.

Public Intellectuals and the Possibility of Building a Movement

Click to read the comments and original post on the Young People For Blog by: Matt Birkhold | Dec 03, 2007 |

Because there is an undeniable crisis in the US felt by the majority of residents, the question of how people become active is very important. The masses of US citizens are not convinced that the crisis facing the US is indicative of something profoundly wrong with the US system itself, only that there is something wrong with the people who are currently in charge of it. Given this reality, it makes little sense for people to take revolutionary action because the masses of people will respond to revolutionaries as if they are crazy because they do not see the need for revolution. In response, a number of prominent intellectuals who believe there is something wrong with the US system have assumed the task of trying to convince the masses of people that there is something wrong with the system itself, not just the people in charge. I will call a certain sector of these people public intellectuals because they have chosen to pursue this path through the use of popular media outlets.

Quite often, the tactic public intellectuals use to convince the masses of Americans that there is something profoundly wrong with the US system itself is articulating the grievances of the most oppressed groups in the country through popular media outlets such as appearances on CNN and various radio and TV talk shows. In an essay defending public intellectuals, Duke University professor of African American Studies, and self proclaimed public intellectual, Mark Anthony Neal has described such work as "the labor of those whose mode of activism is best realized via corporate media (including the publishing houses) and elite universities, and who leverage the resources of those institutions to do the work of social justice." There is no doubt that the best mode of activism for particular intellectuals can be realized through corporate media. However, if we are interested in building a movement for social justice we have to ask how effective these modes of activism can be.

In order to determine how effective the modes of activism described by professor Neal can be four questions must be asked. One, what are the conditions by which public intellectuals are given access to corporate media such as CNN or The Today Show? Two, by focusing on corporate media and elite universities, who are these public intellectuals targeting? Three, what does the target audience of public intellectuals say about who they see as agents of social change? And four, how likely is it that the targeted agent desires social change?

First, last time I watched, CNN was not exactly a hot bed of radical political thought. Because radical means "the root," and CNN only gives the average guest about three minutes of talk time, public intellectuals are prevented from explaining the root causes of the social problems they have been asked to discuss. Additionally, because CNN's revenue comes from advertisers, CNN will not air comments that have the potential to interrupt their flow of revenue. Because honest intellectualism may cost CNN revenue, if public intellectuals want to be invited back, they have to give up a commitment to complete intellectual honesty. Second, because elite universities are overwhelmingly white--and the nonwhite students that do attend tend to come from privileged class backgrounds--public intellectuals overwhelmingly reach people from privileged sectors of the population. Three, if public intellectuals are targeting largely privileged sectors of the population--if we assume they operate in good faith--we must conclude that they believe the greatest potential for social change lies in the agency of folks who have some level of privilege. Fourth, while this answer is certainly more complex than space will permit, the idea that people who are relatively comfortable will be a catalyst for change is pretty far stretched. While there is no question that ivy-league educated blacks will gain from social change or that wealthy white students were extremely active in creating social change when the draft was at the back of their neck, the weight of history clearly shows that significant social change does not come from those who are comfortable with the present organization of society. These answers lead me to pose one further question, if the modes of activism pursued by public intellectuals are not effective, what contribution can they make to the building of a movement for social justice?

In the wake of 1967 Detroit rebellion, theorist/activist/auto worker James Boggs asked the question, "What are the responsibilities of revolutionary leadership?" He concluded that activists had to form a political party that could advance the political development of the masses of angered, militant African-Americans and not just articulate their grievances--an act that is inherently reactionary because it does not propose new alternatives. Importantly, Boggs based his model on that of V.I. Lenin, the leader of the successful 1917 Russian revolution. Because we are not in a revolutionary moment, the development of a revolutionary party is not appropriate. However, the learning opportunity provided by Boggs' discussion of Lenin is the emphasis he placed on Lenin's tireless struggle to build a movement. According to Boggs, "Lenin rarely addressed himself to a mass audience either in writing or speaking, or appeared on the public platform. Instead, he concentrated his extraordinary abilities and energies on the task which he had concluded was decisive to the success of the Russian Revolution: the building of an apparatus of dedicated, disciplined revolutionists to lead the masses in the struggle for power."

Whether we seek revolutionary change or not, its not hard to imagine how great a movement for social justice could become if public intellectuals spent less time in front of a mass audience and more time developing the masses to lead the struggle for the power among the grassroots that social change requires.

The Kids Are Alright

Today’s youth activism is better than that of the ’60s. Too bad one young journalist doesn’t get it.

By Tim Fernholz | November 27, 2007 | Click to read the original post on Campus Progress.

“Do you think this is the right stereotype?” asked the journalist. “I don’t want it to be all funky when we pin it on.”

“Looks good to me,” her editor said, without even glancing at the article.

Meet the new face of journalism’s anti-youth activism movement. Courtney Martin, a young author, speaker, and adjunct professor, has recently penned a series of articles for the American Prospect attempting to document the political proclivities of Generation Y, the Millenials, or, in short, us kids. Her latest, “The Problem With Youth Activism,” shows just how far she is from understanding what the current generation is doing.

Martin would like to see today’s young activists adopt the tactics of the 1960’s student radicals—protests, theatrics, and the like. Martin’s complaint is that young people today are too complacent, too safe, and too co-opted by "the man." We’re just not angry enough, she argues. But today’s young activists are angry—they’re just too busy attempting to create meaningful change to sit around waving signs. Martin, despite her travels around the country speaking to college students, doesn’t understand what a new generation of activists is doing to effect political change. In fact, she doesn’t even understand who today’s young activists are.

There’s no doubt that too many Americans, young and old, are apathetic about politics and the world around them. But the fact is that young people are politically active on and off campus and more involved than many other demographic groups around the country. If you judge by their voting patterns, activism, organizing, and use of new technology, young people today are doing more now than in previous decades. Martin says we need to take advantage of our “raw power—the priceless power of being young and mad.” We already are young and mad, but we’re smart, too. Young progressives have moved beyond superficial displays of anger to spend more time changing the world than complaining about it. This isn’t to discount the strides our forebears made in the golden age of the student movement; it’s simply time to realize we don’t have to fight their battles all over again.

Martin’s first mistake is to restrict her view of young people to those who attend universities—the ones she has met. Mike Connery, a blogger who focuses on young people’s role in contemporary politics, points out that only 21 percent of all 18-29 year-olds currently attend college; even fewer are enrolled at the elite institutions at which Martin speaks. Two recent examples of successful youth activism were driven by activists who don’t fit Martin’s mold: The protests in support of the Jena 6 were brought to national attention thanks to youth-produced online campaigns, and the massive immigration protests in 2006 were successful in part because of online youth organizing, including the more than 100,000 high school students who walked out of class thanks to MySpace organizing. This isn’t to mention work by, for example, the League of Young Voters, an explicitly off-campus organization, and many other groups that engage young people without a campus focus.

But let’s play by Martin’s rules and restrict our definition of "youth activism" to "student activism." Martin conflates cooperation with university administrators with selling out. But today’s college students aren’t dealing with the same school administrators as their ’60s-era counterparts. Many schools retain a commitment to social justice, and when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain, students hold them to it, as with University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman and affirmative action. Further, there’s no shame in using university money to agitate, especially, as Connery notes, when students are the ones who distribute it. And, as any organizer knows, it’s not always smart to view the powers-that-be as enemies: Young activists must change administrator’ minds and polices through pressure and sound arguments—not just piss them off.

Martin proves to be completely unaware of the effective student activism taking place today. For example, at my own college, Georgetown University, students have organized a successful living wage campaign that led to the unionization of sub-contracted workers and helped negotiate a raise for security guards. They also started STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, an activist group that has chapters on 600 high school and college campuses. LGBTQ students and their allies forced the administration to enact plans to hire a full-time LGBTQ resource coordinator—which is a big deal for a Catholic university. And this is just in the four years that I’ve been here.

Around the country, organizations like Campus Progress fund issue campaigns that are conceived and organized by students on issues from stopping the death penalty and global warming to ending the war in Iraq. Some students have recently organized to support affirmative action. As Connery points out, other students at Harvard University and New York University have protested for a living wage and against bad immigration policies. And these are just the examples that make it into the national media. Despite Martin’s condescension, students who raise awareness of issues large and small on campuses across the country are engaging in meaningful activism, too. This might be part of Martin’s problem: Many community-centric activists aren’t involved in monolithic national movements. But these students aren’t voting on buttons—they’re passionate about working to change the world.

And it’s not just activism. Thanks to the work of our baby-boomer forebears, young people have a place in politics today. They work on political campaigns, in think tanks, and in government. They seek to expose problems and advocate for change through journalism and blogging. They even run for office. They are part of groundbreaking campaigns like the Oregon Bus Project and Forward Montana. Our generation is also taking the lead in online organizing, from Facebook to MySpace. Do you think that the YouTube debate, arguably the best of the election cycle so far, would have happened without our generation’s influence?

The fact is that my generation is more politically active than most in the media realize: Forty-nine percent of youth voters went to the polls in 2004—over a million more youth voted nationwide than seniors. That number has increased for three years straight. In the 2006 mid-term elections, 24 percent of us turned out, to make up 13 percent of the electorate—a four percent increase from the 2002 midterms. More importantly, young Americans voted overwhelmingly for anti-war candidates in congressional races, which led to a change in congressional control. But, for Martin, a change in political control doesn’t count unless someone’s waving a sign.

Martin and other critics of student activism point to the fragmentation of the anti-war movement as key evidence of our generation’s failures. In another piece for the Prospect, filled with similar wishy-washy generalities, Martin laments that our anger about the Iraq war hasn’t resulted in much action to stop it. Of course, she doesn’t suggest what this action ought to be. That’s because there isn’t much agreement on what to do—the war is bad news, but no one from the grassroots up knows the best way to end it. Protests won’t help, especially ones led by fringe groups like ANSWER. Like the generation before them, activists today have helped turn public opinion against the war, and they’ve elected a Congress with a mandate to end it—and it’s taken them about the same amount of time as it did for students in the ’60s. But the executive branch has the most control over foreign policy, and only when its occupant is against the war will we see real progress. Until then, young people must work on defining what type of foreign policy our generation should support. Luckily, some "complacent" college students have already founded an organization dedicated to getting student ideas on policy issues into the public discourse.

Martin says she would rather see young activists spend their time placing “viruses in campus administrators’ computers with pop-up windows demanding no more expansion into poor, local neighborhoods,” creating “mock draft cards [to send] home to their parents,” and organizing “a dance party—1 million youth strong—on the Washington lawn.” All of Martin’s suggestions have one thing in common, besides their sheer inanity (what, exactly, is “the Washington lawn?”): They would achieve nothing, except to further the stereotype that young people don’t understand politics. But then again, neither does Martin. As my generation works out how to make our own impact on the political system, we don’t need a ’60s wannabe telling us we’re not angry enough.

Tim Fernholz is a senior at Georgetown University and Editor-in-Chief of The Georgetown Voice. He is also a member of the Campus Progress Student Advisory Board.

How Progressives Can Win in the Long Run

By Iara Peng | September 27, 2006 | from WireTap magazine, a project of AlterNet.

Right-wing groups spend ten times more on youth leadership development than progressives do. If we want to win, we need to start investing in the next generation of leaders.

For nearly 30 years, ultraconservatives have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in young people and built an infrastructure that initiates young people into the radical right movement through campus activism, leadership training and career development. Their investments have paid off. The radical right wing now controls the executive and legislative branches of government, and it's only one seat away from complete dominance of the Supreme Court.
If progressives want to achieve the same sort of political success that the radical right has enjoyed for the past two decades, we're going to have to do more than focus on the next round of elections and pay lip service to engaging young people. We must make a serious, long-term investment in our next generation of progressive leaders. Young people provide a vital infusion of ideas, energy and passion to the progressive movement right now, and their commitment to continued activism and leadership is critical to building a progressive future.

The right wing's investment in young people

For decades, right-wing organizations including the Leadership Institute, Federalist Society, Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation have spearheaded a massive effort to bring young people into their movement. Last year alone, the Right invested $48 million in 11 youth-focused organizations aimed at increasing the number of ideologically friendly campus papers, fostering networks of students on campuses, shifting the way that students self-identify in terms of political ideology, providing skills and strategies training, and promoting right-wing values.

Students are cultivated by the right-wing campaign against college courses that conflict with their agenda. For example, they have accused more than 100 professors of making "anti-American" statements. They attend courses with titles like "How to Stop Liberals in Their Tracks." They have internships, fellowships and jobs waiting for them when they graduate. They learn how to run campaigns and how to run for office.

The return on this investment has been enormous. A powerful network of young ultraconservatives fills state capitols, the halls of Congress, the executive branch and the courts. It is supported by community leaders, skilled organizers, academics and media personalities that help dominate the debate. The leaders in whom the right has invested in are familiar names. In 1970, a man named Karl Rove was head of the National College Republicans. In 1981, Grover Norquist took the reins. And in 1983, it was Ralph Reed.

Progressives need to do more

Young people have been at the forefront of every social and political movement in the history of the world. Through organizations like United Students Against Sweatshops and others, young people have defended the struggles of working people and challenged corporate power. And progressives have made great strides in supporting young progressive leadership development at a national scale over the last few years through the creation of new, progressive leadership development organizations with a nationwide and multi-issue focus, including Young People For, the League of Young Voters and the Center for Progressive Leadership.

At Young People For, we've created a diverse national network of young leaders on campuses around the country. We connect them with each other and provide them with skills and training from national progressive movement leaders. Over the course of their one-year fellowship, they work to implement individually designed Blueprints for Social Justice -- creating important change in the present while at the same time learning valuable lessons they can put to work in the future.

This year alone, fellows at Young People For have played a key role in shutting down Florida's juvenile boot camp system, expanding campus nondiscrimination policies, creating leadership institutes on college campuses for high school students and GLBT leaders, and engaging young people in the political processes by registering them to vote.

Collectively, we're doing great work, but we're not doing enough. Right-wing groups spend more than ten times as much on long-term political leadership development than we do, and financial trends over the past four years show that progressive leadership development organizations are actually, on average, experiencing a decline in revenue. Unlike their conservative counterparts, youth-focused progressive organizations are often funded with a "buying," not "building," mentality, meaning that donors want their contribution to have immediate payoffs, such as election-year voter registration, but are not focusing on investing in the strategic, long-term sustainability of those organizations.

We need more investments through growth capital followed by sustainable, multiyear revenue. Doing so would allow youth-focused progressive organizations to plan for increased growth and build for the future. Eventually, this sustained investment would also help them create reserve funds that would allow them to continue operating at the same scale if funding sources temporarily decline.

Progressives should make a commitment to youth leadership development throughout our nonprofit organizations -- not just youth-led organizations -- that is on the same scale as that of the right wing. It's time to scale up our efforts by demonstrating our commitment to young people through mentoring, professional development, networking and intentional training opportunities to help develop young leadership.

A way for progressives to catch up with the right's infrastructure

In order to address this disparity, we must build widespread knowledge about progressive leadership development needs and opportunities, increase awareness about the gaps between right-wing leadership programs and their progressive counterparts, and support progressive programs over the long term. We need to identify gaps in progressive leadership development programs and start to support programs that fill those gaps. And we need to be clear about the ways in which progressive programs are falling short and develop new initiatives.

Getting to scale is the process of expanding effective programs to achieve greater impact by:

Increasing the numbers of young people served by these programs
Broadening geographic coverage
Building multi-issue and multidimensional programs
Making sure various marginalized communities are reached
Simply put, getting to scale means that our programs will be able to extend services to more people in more places. If our youth-focused work grows to the scale of the work done by the right, we won't have just created more of the same or an increase in quantity. Instead, we'll have created a catalytic effect that leads to fundamental change.

By getting to scale, we can do a better job of reaching beyond urban areas to provide services for marginalized youth at community colleges and on nontraditional campuses. The marginal cost per youth may be expensive, but the gains of reaching more young people in community colleges outweigh the costs, especially when larger social benefits are factored in.

If progressives are to support young people over the long term, we need to make sure our youth-focused work consists of multiple programs that offer complementary types of leadership development to various groups of young people. We must build strong relationships between leadership development organizations to ensure that future leaders have access to various leadership development opportunities throughout their youth.

Together, these organizations will be able to connect young people with opportunities to grow and develop their skills over time, from high school experiential leadership programs to college-based activism and leadership trainings to career development and professional development to mid-level career development, training and networking -- providing the key infrastructure to get our movement to scale.

To learn more about Young People For, or to discuss this story, visit the YP4 blog.

Iara Peng is the director of Young People For.

The New SDS

ARTICLE | posted April 2, 2007 (April 16, 2007 issue) on The Nation by Christopher Phelps

Twenty-year-old Will Klatt, wearing a green knit hat, baggy jeans and black jacket pulled over a hoodie, stands before a Civil War monument at the center of Ohio University's main campus in Athens. Although a February snow is falling steadily, more than a hundred students have turned out for this rally called by a new organization with a very familiar name: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

"Many of us at Ohio University have taken classes on the principles of democracy, on justice, on ethics," says Klatt, "and with the presumption that we will use this knowledge, acquired in our classes, to become more informed citizens. Yet this knowledge we acquire is nothing if we do not put it into practice."

The students, including frat boys and jocks, clap and whistle. They are here in protest against new fees, elimination of four varsity sports programs and increased administrative bonus pay. Each decision, organizers say, reflects a lack of student power on campus--as do "free-speech zones" confining student protest to irrelevant corners of campus. "We are talking," says Klatt, "about the corporatization of our university."

Angry at the Iraq debacle, emboldened by the Bush-Cheney tailspin, a new student radicalism is emerging whose concerns include immigrants' rights, global warming and the uncertainties facing debt-ridden graduates. Such considerations distinguish the new SDS from its historical namesake, which took shape in a very different context of economic affluence and establishment liberalism.

The original SDS, formed in 1960, sought "a participatory democracy," the involvement of all in running society from the bottom up, as elaborated in the Port Huron Statement of 1962. Frustrated with conventional liberalism, inspired by the civil rights movement and sustained by opposition to the Vietnam War, SDS grew to perhaps 100,000 members before disintegrating in a shower of fratricidal sparks in 1969.

The notion of re-creating SDS was the brainchild of Jessica Rapchik and Pat Korte, high school students in North Carolina and Connecticut, respectively, who met on an antiwar phone hookup in the fall of 2005. Upon discovering their mutual dissatisfaction with the existing left, they hit upon the notion of reviving SDS. One of the original SDSers they first contacted was Alan Haber, president of SDS from 1960 to 1962, now a woodworker in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had independently suggested "re-membering" SDS at a historians' conference in 2003. Once the call to relaunch SDS went public in January 2006 with a new website, campus chapters began popping up, from Florida to Colorado. Today, there are more than 100 college chapters and dozens more in high schools.

By laying claim to an old name, contemporary students risked that 1960s veterans might disapprove of new wine being made in their bottle. Sociologist Todd Gitlin, SDS president from 1963 to 1964, is one such skeptic. "What was often brilliant about SDS," he says, "was that it was attuned to its moment. It didn't recycle the Old Left. It was the New Left." Maurice Isserman, who joined SDS at Reed College in 1968, recently published a sharply critical piece about the new SDS in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In an interview, he said of the group's revival, "As a historian, I found it a little offensive. It's like, could I be in the Sons of Liberty tomorrow if I started it, claimed lineal descent from Sam Adams?"

The new SDSers have few such qualms. They seek continuity with radical history but value the name Students for a Democratic Society as much for the future it projects as for its fabled past. They find it a compelling name for an inclusive, multi-issue student group seeking social transformation. Emerging from a post-Seattle, direct-action culture defined by negation--"anticapitalist," "antiwar"--they value its forthright, positive aim of democracy. The new SDSers admit, however, that the name does not always evoke the associations they intend. "Oh," said a friend to Yale University senior Micah Landau, 21, "so you want me to join the guerrillas?"

What most links the new SDS to the old is the principle of participatory democracy. SDSers consider that ideal, both as a social aim and a guide to present-day practice, to be the quintessence of their project. They seek to combine the expansive vision of liberation from oppression, empire and capitalism characteristic of SDS in the late 1960s with the commitment to participatory democracy typical of the movement in the early '60s. The tone at meetings is honest, searching, respectful. Although the group has informal leaders, no one is a "heavy."

The belief systems of SDSers range tremendously. Variations on anarchism and socialism are commonplace, but each chapter has a distinct character. At Choate Rosemary Hall, the Connecticut prep school, Paul Gault, 18, says "a lot of students wanted just an outlet for their voice," making the chapter "by SDS standards not too radical." But since the new SDS has spread most rapidly on regional campuses and at community colleges, not elite institutions, a more typical chapter--both demographically and ideologically--might be Mt. San Antonio Community College in Walnut, California. There the four SDS members identify themselves as Marxist-libertarian, libertarian socialist, anarcho-syndicalist and communal anarchist, the differences between them being "zilch," they report. Ohio's Klatt says that many people in SDS are "anarcho-something-or-other, but they feel like anarchist organizations are so unorganized that they haven't been effective in creating systemic change." At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, however, the ten core SDSers are all liberals, while at the University of North Alabama the thirteen to fifteen core SDSers are mostly liberals, with a sprinkling of socialists. "Anarchy isn't really our deal," says Andrew Walker, 23, a journalism major.

While SDSers are extraordinarily skillful at dissecting race, gender, class and sexuality in their personal lives, they show less aptitude, as yet, for economic research and political analysis. Most SDSers would have an easier time defining "heteronormativity" than corporate liberalism. Their knowledge of the labor movement all too often begins and ends with the Industrial Workers of the World. However, the new SDS's sensitivity to group dynamics is light-years--or several decades--ahead of its '60s predecessor. Women compose 40 percent or more of the membership and often exert chapter leadership. Sarah McGarity, 20, a political science and women's studies major, helped create the Ohio University chapter and believes women are for the most part equals within SDS. "Women definitely have the opportunities that weren't necessarily given to them in the '60s," she says.

Race today is not quite the study in black and white that it was in the '60s. Now as then, there are few African-Americans in SDS, but proportions vary. Of the five who started Wayne State's chapter in Detroit, two were African-American, one Asian and one Latina, says Carmen Mendoza-King, 21. If SDS is not as heavily white as it was in the '60s, this is mostly a result of subsequent waves of Asian and Latin American immigration. Hunter College senior Daniel Tasripin, 24, whose father was Indonesian and mother Polish-Jewish and French, argues that SDS should recognize affirmative action, the curriculum and the "basic justice of the university in relation to the surrounding community" as issues not specific to people of color but reflective of "the universal need for a university that represents all the people."

SDS is loose, more movement than organization. Anyone can sign up online. The group now claims more than 2,000 members, but it is hard to tell what that means. There are no dues, and therefore no funds, no staff, no office and no national publication apart from the website. The group has no elected national leaders and no basis for national decision-making. Paradoxically, these weaknesses provide some strength. The very élan of SDS is anti-bureaucratic. SDS enables regional and national linkages while preserving local control. Its appeal is that it is self-creating, do-it-yourself, free from centralized discipline or external control.

This explains why SDS displays such variety and vitality at the chapter level. At Brown University, where meetings regularly attract twenty-five people, SDS distributed a "Disorientation Guide" to 1,600 new students this fall. At Olympia last May and in Tacoma this March, Washington state SDSers were arrested for blocking Army Stryker vehicles from being loaded onto ships bound for Iraq. At Pace University in Manhattan, five SDSers were arrested in November simply for stepping onto campus to exercise free speech in protest against their administration.

From the outset, the new SDS sought interaction with older radicals, in particular veterans of the first SDS. This, however, has proved more vexing than anyone anticipated. The new SDS's adult counterpart, Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), has been riven by divisions rooted deep in SDS history. Power has resided largely with three figures: historian Paul Buhle, once editor of the original SDS journal Radical America; Thomas Good, a 48-year-old Communist-turned-anarchist who created the new SDS website; and Bruce Rubenstein, a Connecticut personal-injury attorney. Left on the outs have been Haber, a kindly bearded sage, and a small "democracy" caucus whose best-known member is historian Jesse Lemisch.

The MDS tensions trace in part to distinct pasts. Both Haber and Lemisch were present at SDS's founding convention in 1960; Rubenstein was part of Weatherman, a faction that scuttled SDS in 1969, and its successor, the Weather Underground, which bombed corporate and government targets. Bitter sniping on group listservs has been a more recent source of estrangement. Substantively, the dividing lines surfaced in an early discussion about whether to bring young and old together in one big-tent SDS. That proposal proved a dead letter when the students stated their desire for autonomy. A more gnawing issue is whether processes in MDS have been transparent, legitimate or democratic. A final matter is the residual influence of Weatherman.

The Weather controversy erupted when Bernardine Dohrn, a Weather leader who now teaches law at Northwestern University, was invited to speak at the first new SDS conference, held in Providence, Rhode Island, in April 2006. Dohrn received a rousing welcome, but when Bob Ross, an early SDSer, used his talk to lament that "the largest legal and unarmed movement in the history of the West" turned "ineffectually violent and useless," he was received coolly. At the first new SDS national convention in Chicago, in August, Good opened the proceedings by reading greetings from Dohrn. Moreover, Rubenstein, MDS's treasurer, is unapologetic about his Weather history and says that if it were 1969 he would "do it all over again," but that he does "not endorse those tactics" for SDS today.

Many in MDS consider Weatherman ancient history. "Heck, they're all 65 already," says Penelope Rosemont, another graying MDS officer. "How violent can you get at 65?" Lemisch, however, is concerned that a rehabilitated Weather may corrupt the revived SDS. A critic of a recent spate of films and books that sanitize and romanticize the Weather past, he has interpreted some direct actions of the new SDS as reminiscent of Weatherman's "Fight the People" slogan. The students, for their part, find Lemisch's criticism lacking in proportionality. Although intrigued by Weather's notoriety and susceptible to being impressed by Dohrn's celebrity, they regard Weather as a negative political example. "They espoused a sort of white-guilt and white-privileged politics that is, in my estimation, wrongheaded," says Tasripin. Co-founder Korte, now a 19-year-old student at the New School, objects to "people trying to conjure or dress us in Weather's clothes." An actual inspiration for the new SDS, says Senia Barrigan, 20, a Brown University student and daughter of immigrants from Colombia and Ecuador, was last year's strike by 70,000 teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, which sparked a militant but peaceful popular insurgency against a corrupt, autocratic government.

MDS secretary Good, however, has referred to "my Weather comrades" and called himself "an unrepentant Weather supporter." He donned a "Fuck Jesse Lemisch" T-shirt at the national convention and issued a facetious "fatwa" calling for a pie to be thrown in Lemisch's face. Some in MDS and SDS find these puerilities obnoxious or embarrassing, but that hasn't translated into support for the "democracy" caucus, widely regarded as a nuisance for sending frequent, adversarial complaints over the group's listservs. (The dissidents, for their part, object that they have been removed or excluded from many listservs.)

In February MDS held a daylong public meeting to announce a nonprofit corporation, MDS, Inc., that will raise funds for SDS. One of the selected speakers, former Weather leader Mark Rudd, delivered a piercingly honest self-criticism, stating that Weather "did the work" of the FBI by "killing off" the original SDS. Rudd urged the new SDS to recognize violence and property destruction as politically self-defeating in the United States. A panel of students, in turn, asked MDS to assist SDS by sharing wisdom and skills rather than bickering. However, Haber's desire for extended participatory conversation among the gathered MDS members was not fulfilled, and the dissidents felt railroaded. "It was not democracy's finest hour," allows Rudd. "I felt they should have been given ten minutes to present their case."

The newly elected board of MDS, Inc., is broadly representative of the whole left, but its biggest names--Tom Hayden, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky--are symbolic luminaries, not actively involved. Much hinges on whether the new chairman, Manning Marable, a distinguished African-American historian at Columbia University, can guide MDS, Inc., beyond its present contretemps to "assist and promote the development of activism among young people," as he envisions.

The youth in SDS have for the most part tuned out MDS. They are instead focused on their own priorities: defining their points of unity, developing a decision-making structure and challenging the Iraq War.

The connection between these needs became clear at the January 27 mass mobilization on the Washington Mall called by United for Peace and Justice. SDSers could not agree on where to meet beforehand. Some wanted to convene at Dupont Circle, the traditional gathering point for the masked anarchist "black bloc." Others, greater in number, wanted to meet at the Smithsonian Castle and leaflet the crowd. In the end, all SDSers found themselves drawn behind the black bloc as it trampled a flimsy fence, rushed up the Hill bearing plastic shields and painted obscenities and slogans on the Capitol steps. While some in SDS were elated by this action, others considered it witless. "Propaganda by the deed doesn't work," says Yale's Landau. "They probably alienated far more people than they inspired with the Capitol rush, especially the graffiti on the steps of the Capitol."

Because the Capitol police behaved with extraordinary restraint and made no arrests, the provocation received scant media scrutiny. Such luck cannot be expected to hold twice. Many in SDS conclude that the episode proved there is a need for greater coordination and that structurelessness can be undemocratic if a chapter or two engage in rash actions contrary to the wishes of most members. At a February SDS meeting in New York, more than eighty students from twenty-two Northeastern campuses endorsed a federated regional council system, a possible basis for a national structure. Whether organization and anti-authoritarianism can be synthesized in SDS, however, remains to be seen. Klatt foresees a period of transition, "kind of like how our American government had to go through the confederation of states before they came up with a unified country."

Within SDS there is rising awareness that the wildest tactic may derail the most radical strategy. Landau believes SDSers "who are willing to jump into the most extreme action without thinking about base-building and movement-building" are counterweighed by others with more thoughtful approaches. Korte says SDSers are increasingly asking themselves, "Rather than tactics guiding our strategy, is strategy guiding our tactics?" Joshua Russell, 23, a Brandeis grad whose job for the Rainforest Action Network allows him to travel as an unofficial national SDS organizer, hopes SDS will become a "movement-building institution that will unite people."

The matter of moment is the Iraq War. Whether or not they approve of the Capitol rush, SDSers are eager to push the envelope beyond large marches. There is "a general feeling that the tactics being used now are not enough," says John Cronan Jr., 23, a Pace student. At the University of Alabama, SDS recently staged a "die-in" to dramatize the war. Three Michigan chapters are investigating their universities' financial ties to the military industry. To mark the war's four-year anniversary in March, SDS initiated class walkouts, rallies and marches at more than sixty campuses and high schools. And, to borrow a '60s phrase, momentum now flows "from protest to resistance"--from merely speaking out against the war to the nonviolent obstruction of its operation. Twenty New York SDSers were arrested on March 12 after they shut down an Armed Forces Recruiting Center in Manhattan for two hours. Their chant: "Stop the war! Yes we can! SDS is back again!"