Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Students For a Democratic Society (SDS), Old Believers edition.
Commentary
I just recently posted a note passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee concerning some student activity at Evergreen State College in Washington (Defend the Evergreen State College 6, June 7, 2008). There a number of students have been charged with offenses stemming from an incident last winter. Those charges, brought after what appears to be a police riot on that small out-of-the-way liberal campus, should be dropped. Moreover, ominously, the Evergreen State College administration has banned a chapter of the Students For A Democratic Society (SDS) from campus. The details are fuzzy but some students have staged an occupation (shades of Columbia 1968?). Any more up-to-date information is welcome here. Again, all militants must call for the defense of the right of leftist political organizations to exist on campus. Those are the minimum demands we pose today around this case.
This case, however, also brings to this old militant’s mind some reflections on the student movement of forty years ago, the campus struggles of the Generation of ’68 that I am seemingly endlessly commenting on this year. One of the slogans that the Evergreen State students have been putting forth is the notion of ‘student power’. I am not quite sure what that entails in the minds of the students out there but I assume that it is some variation of students having more input into the day-to-day operations of the campus. That my friends, in any case, is usually always a good democratic propaganda point to fight around- on the road to socialism. And that combination will, in the end, be the point that I want to make here.
It is rather a truism that politics abhors a vacuum. In a proper political universe the Evergreen struggle would be taken up, as a matter of course, by any workers party worth its salt. Today, in the absence of any other social force committed to speaking in alliance with them the students have correctly moved on their own. Thus, confronted with a non-responsive campus administration the beginning of wisdom for leftist student activists is to demand more say in what is going on, and to be left alone while doing it. However, it is also true that one should try, as previous student generations,in some individual cases willfully so, have not, to learn the lessons of history.
The question of 'student power' is hardly a new one and that is where references to the 1960’s are very germane. The 1960’s on campuses throughout the world represented the highest expression of the fight for student power. There were more theories about students as the ‘new’ working class and about the inviolability of the ‘red’ university than one could shake a stick at. Moreover, many of the early anti-Vietnam War struggles in this country were focused on the campus. The right of students to more say in the university furthermore got fully explored in the famous Columbia occupations led by Mark Rudd and SDS in 1968. In the end, however, power flowed back to the university administration. In Europe, that same year, another student uprising culminating in the May General Strike in France even more dramatically highlighted the struggle for student power. Again, power flowed back to the French capitalist state. Some ‘uppity’ students also ignited earlier struggles in France and other parts of Europe going back to the early 19th century revolutionary movements, and those effort, for the most part, failed as well.
Now that I have paid proper respect to the vices and virtues of student activism we have to come to the question of power. In short, do students control the life of the campuses today? It is almost silly to pose that question at this point. So what is the road forward? For this the May General Strike in France is illustrative. The students led the initial actions but until the social power of the working class was thrown into the balance the students were spinning their wheels. And that is the question of power in a nutshell. Until the issues that engaged the students got linked up to the social power of the working class they could not fundamentally get resolved. Although we know that the French Communist Party, in the end, sold out both workers and students the notion that students, by themselves, could fundamental change society took a beating.
The world-wide impact of the May events in France were moreover reflected in this country. SDS and the bulk radical student movement, including this son of the working class, had previously contemptuously written off the working class as hopelessly bought off or organically incapable of using its social power to change society. Sound familiar? After May the more serious student elements started dusting off their old text books that contained some words about the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, Lenin, the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution. And they were not wrong to do so.
That is what is missing in today’s student analysis of the way to obtain social power, the obviously limitation of the student power slogan. With the demise of the Soviet Union and other workers states the crying need for socialist solutions to the world’s problems, Marxism, communism and the like have been written off as failed experiments. That is why those Evergreen students, as sincere as they are in their struggles, can resurrect the student power slogan without embarrassment.
Let me make a point that shows this problem in graphic detail. Long ago, in the late 1960's, ostensible revolutionaries brought up the slogan on the campuses for worker/student/ teacher control of educational institutions(I believe that it was first brought up by Progressive Labor but I may be wrong). That is, in fact, a correct and worthy slogan. But here is the reality. Under what conditions would that slogan make more than propaganda sense? The answer- in a situation where the campuses were being nationalized under workers control.
Let’s me just present a concrete example, for now, though by way of illustration. Make a call for the nationalization of Harvard, as the young revolutionaries of the Spartacus Youth Clubs do today. But do not link that call with the struggle for a workers party and a workers government. Now, I hope, you get the point. The bourgeoisie will no more voluntarily nationalize its Harvards, its traditional sacred stomping grounds for creating its administrative elite than it will do any other progressive things. To challenge their exclusive 'right' to do so sounds to these ears like something that, in the end, can only be resolved by civil war. Under those conditions can students struggle for power by themselves? To pose the question is to give the answer. Students, right now, today make the leap and link up your struggles with those of the working class. Or, and I will play the role of professor now- at least think about it. Meanwhile- Defend the Evergreen State College 6!
Commentary
I just recently posted a note passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee concerning some student activity at Evergreen State College in Washington (Defend the Evergreen State College 6, June 7, 2008). There a number of students have been charged with offenses stemming from an incident last winter. Those charges, brought after what appears to be a police riot on that small out-of-the-way liberal campus, should be dropped. Moreover, ominously, the Evergreen State College administration has banned a chapter of the Students For A Democratic Society (SDS) from campus. The details are fuzzy but some students have staged an occupation (shades of Columbia 1968?). Any more up-to-date information is welcome here. Again, all militants must call for the defense of the right of leftist political organizations to exist on campus. Those are the minimum demands we pose today around this case.
This case, however, also brings to this old militant’s mind some reflections on the student movement of forty years ago, the campus struggles of the Generation of ’68 that I am seemingly endlessly commenting on this year. One of the slogans that the Evergreen State students have been putting forth is the notion of ‘student power’. I am not quite sure what that entails in the minds of the students out there but I assume that it is some variation of students having more input into the day-to-day operations of the campus. That my friends, in any case, is usually always a good democratic propaganda point to fight around- on the road to socialism. And that combination will, in the end, be the point that I want to make here.
It is rather a truism that politics abhors a vacuum. In a proper political universe the Evergreen struggle would be taken up, as a matter of course, by any workers party worth its salt. Today, in the absence of any other social force committed to speaking in alliance with them the students have correctly moved on their own. Thus, confronted with a non-responsive campus administration the beginning of wisdom for leftist student activists is to demand more say in what is going on, and to be left alone while doing it. However, it is also true that one should try, as previous student generations,in some individual cases willfully so, have not, to learn the lessons of history.
The question of 'student power' is hardly a new one and that is where references to the 1960’s are very germane. The 1960’s on campuses throughout the world represented the highest expression of the fight for student power. There were more theories about students as the ‘new’ working class and about the inviolability of the ‘red’ university than one could shake a stick at. Moreover, many of the early anti-Vietnam War struggles in this country were focused on the campus. The right of students to more say in the university furthermore got fully explored in the famous Columbia occupations led by Mark Rudd and SDS in 1968. In the end, however, power flowed back to the university administration. In Europe, that same year, another student uprising culminating in the May General Strike in France even more dramatically highlighted the struggle for student power. Again, power flowed back to the French capitalist state. Some ‘uppity’ students also ignited earlier struggles in France and other parts of Europe going back to the early 19th century revolutionary movements, and those effort, for the most part, failed as well.
Now that I have paid proper respect to the vices and virtues of student activism we have to come to the question of power. In short, do students control the life of the campuses today? It is almost silly to pose that question at this point. So what is the road forward? For this the May General Strike in France is illustrative. The students led the initial actions but until the social power of the working class was thrown into the balance the students were spinning their wheels. And that is the question of power in a nutshell. Until the issues that engaged the students got linked up to the social power of the working class they could not fundamentally get resolved. Although we know that the French Communist Party, in the end, sold out both workers and students the notion that students, by themselves, could fundamental change society took a beating.
The world-wide impact of the May events in France were moreover reflected in this country. SDS and the bulk radical student movement, including this son of the working class, had previously contemptuously written off the working class as hopelessly bought off or organically incapable of using its social power to change society. Sound familiar? After May the more serious student elements started dusting off their old text books that contained some words about the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, Lenin, the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution. And they were not wrong to do so.
That is what is missing in today’s student analysis of the way to obtain social power, the obviously limitation of the student power slogan. With the demise of the Soviet Union and other workers states the crying need for socialist solutions to the world’s problems, Marxism, communism and the like have been written off as failed experiments. That is why those Evergreen students, as sincere as they are in their struggles, can resurrect the student power slogan without embarrassment.
Let me make a point that shows this problem in graphic detail. Long ago, in the late 1960's, ostensible revolutionaries brought up the slogan on the campuses for worker/student/ teacher control of educational institutions(I believe that it was first brought up by Progressive Labor but I may be wrong). That is, in fact, a correct and worthy slogan. But here is the reality. Under what conditions would that slogan make more than propaganda sense? The answer- in a situation where the campuses were being nationalized under workers control.
Let’s me just present a concrete example, for now, though by way of illustration. Make a call for the nationalization of Harvard, as the young revolutionaries of the Spartacus Youth Clubs do today. But do not link that call with the struggle for a workers party and a workers government. Now, I hope, you get the point. The bourgeoisie will no more voluntarily nationalize its Harvards, its traditional sacred stomping grounds for creating its administrative elite than it will do any other progressive things. To challenge their exclusive 'right' to do so sounds to these ears like something that, in the end, can only be resolved by civil war. Under those conditions can students struggle for power by themselves? To pose the question is to give the answer. Students, right now, today make the leap and link up your struggles with those of the working class. Or, and I will play the role of professor now- at least think about it. Meanwhile- Defend the Evergreen State College 6!
Alan Woods account of May 68 is a must read.
ReplyDeleteRen-Thanks for Alan Woods article on May 1968. While I was doing my commentary I was thinking that I needed to review those events myself. And presto there you provided the May 1968 article. I will read it and comment on it as soon as I can.
ReplyDeleteI also want to review Woods article on Tet. I have read it but have not had time to review it. So many events occurred in 1968 that I have gotten backlogged. I will play catch up this summer when things get politically slower. For now, regards, Markin.
Ren- On first run through of the Woods May 1968 I do not see enough about the limitations of the general strike as a vehicle for taking power. The language of the article seems almost Luxemburgian. In connection with that I do not see enough about the necessity of workers councils (or factory committees)as alternate forms of organization in the factories to fight the Stalinists politically for the allegiance of the French working class.
ReplyDeleteI also do not see enough about the role of the those forces to the left of the Communist Party, those associated with Woods organization then (or his predessors). The points about the French CP are good but did anyone to the left of the CP think that it was about the business of revolution in 1968.
I liked the article overall and will have more to comment on it. I would only finish with a note that Woods, when he is projecting the possible places where the new outbreaks might occur today failed to mention his home turf of England.
Also I find it hard to believe that after all his work on 1968 Woods felt that it was possible to have a peaceful transformation under those conditions. Unless he meant that reference in the sense that Trotsky did for the 'bloodless' October seizure by the Bolsheviks. But do not forget the next three years of civil war are part of the picture, as well. Markin.
One mistake made in 1968 in France by the students whose exemplary actions seemed to have helped sparked off-campus worker-class factory seizures and strikes, seemed to be that in May 1968 the students didn't occupy the French television studios in the same way they had occupied the university buildings and French workers had occupied some of the factories. A similar tactical mistake may have been made by antiwar and antiracist students in NYC in 1968, after the police rampage at Columbia.
ReplyDeleteOne difference between France in 1968 and the USA in 1968, I think, is that in the USA in 1968 the specially oppressed African-American workers seemed more open to making a revolution after MLK's assassination than were most of the white factory workers at that time. So it could be that the strategic mistake made by the "student vanguardists"/"students alone"/"youth power" alone theorists and the "new working-class theorists" was more about a failure, in practice, to figure out a way to quickly develop off-campus links to African-American factory workers who lived in urban areas between May 1968 and October 1969.
For some other possible mistakes made by columbia-barnard sds activists after the April 30, 1968 police riot on Columbia's campus, folling is a relevant quote from a recent interview I did:
"After the first police bust, Columbia-Barnard SDS’s mass student base grew so rapidly at Columbia and Barnard that it appeared that the “action-faction”’s strategy of relying on militant, confrontational, non-violent mass disruption of Columbia University to both radicalize students and end institutional racism and university complicity with the war machine at Columbia was the most effective strategic approach. Yet, despite the further radicalizing effect on many young people of the August 1968 “Battle of Chicago”–where Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies played such a prominent role–when Columbia-Barnard SDS was unable to re-mobilize enough anti-war students to prevent Columbia from reopening in September 1968, it became evident that there were limits to how effective the “action-faction” strategic approach that had worked in the Spring of 1968 could be–in the absence of a political alliance with the African-American student radicals who had aligned with us in April 1968.
"So, in retrospect, I think Columbia-Barnard SDS steering committee members should have devoted more time to attempting to reconstruct its April 1968 political alliance with the Student Afro-American Society leadership at Columbia. Also, I think Columbia-Barnard SDS steering committee members were too slow to respond to some of the discontent that was developing among anti-war movement women in 1968 about the level of male chauvinism that then existed within the New Left student movement."
And I think we also should have handled the post-April 23, 1968 mass media attention to Columbia-Barnard SDS people and mass media circus atmosphere at Columbia in a different way, in retrospect. But it’s often difficult in the current moment to see what might have been done differently, especially when it seemed that world history was moving in a more revolutionary democratic direction all over the globe in a rapid way in 1968.