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.