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?

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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.