About this post
The inspiration for this post was the student protests in France (against Sarkozy’s pension reform act) and then later in England (against tuition fee increases).
The newspapers I was reading at the time were filled with the predictable ad hominem attacks against the student protestors—calling them elitist, spoiled middle class children of privilege.
At that time that I began mentally composing this post in my mind. I didn’t have time to write it up back then because I was too busy with school work (ironically enough). But I filed it into the back of my brain to write up later.
Now that I have time, the events which inspired this post have largely faded from the headlines. But it will pop up again. The next time there’s any sort of student demonstration about any issue whatsoever, the usual ad hominem attacks against spoiled rich kids will resurface. So I figured I would write this up now while it’s on my mind, and then whenever this issue comes up in the future I’ll just link back to myself.
The Argument
My line of reasoning here is largely an extrapolation from Noam Chomsky’s arguments on “Media and Propaganda” (GET EXACT TITLE, DATE, AND PUBLISHING INFORMATION). If you can get your hands on this lecture, it’s totally worth listening to.
But I’ll try and summarize some of his main points.
Chomsky argues that whenever people gather together, there’s an inherent process of radicalization that goes on. People talk to each other, they discover that they have common interests, and they discover that they have the same views on a wide variety of issues. There’s a lot of: “I thought I was the only one who thought this way, but maybe I’m not so crazy after all” going on.
That’s why labor unions were so radical— at least historical when labor unions meant that people were actually organizing and workers were meeting with each other. (Today, when labor unions just mean that a small portion of your pay check goes to the union leaders, not surprisingly labor unions have become conservative.)
The goal of the ruling classes, therefore, is to keep people isolated from each other and prevent them from organizing. That’s why labor unions had to be broken in the 40s and 50s.
Furthermore, to prevent similar types of organization from happening, a concentrated effort has been made to keep people isolated from each other, passive, and idle. People are supposed to work all day in their jobs, go home to their houses, and turn on their TV, where they are exposed to programming which makes them think that their only goal in life is to be a passive consumer. “You may think in your head that there’s something more to life than this,” Chomsky says, “but because you’re all by yourself and can’t connect with other people, you just think you’re crazy.”
There are, however, Chomsky continues, certain forms of human organization that are too deeply rooted in society to be completely gotten rid of—for example, the churches.
In North America the 1980s the Latin American solidarity movement, liberation theology, and support for the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua grew entirely out of the churches. Furthermore, Chomsky says, whenever he is asked to give a talk around the country, it is often churches that organize it, or church buildings that host him. It wasn’t because religious people are inherently more radical than the general population—it was because churches represented the only form of social interaction that people had left. And so these movements took root in churches just because churches were there.
(He makes the case much better than I do. You’ll have to excuse my poor rendering of his argument, and try and check out the original lecture if you have time.)
Listening to Chomsky’s lecture, it occurs to me that college and university campuses serve much the same function as churches do. They are a place where people gather together, and they serve as a radicalizing influence simply because of this. Radical politics does not occur on college campuses because students are young and idealistic. Nor does it occur because middle class college students are rich and spoiled. Rather political movements take place on college campuses simply because they’re there.
Now if it seems that Chomsky (and myself) are making a lot of unfounded statements, stick with me through this because I think it makes sense on a number of levels if you think it through.
It’s commonly argued that student radicals are radical simply because they’re young and idealistic. There’s any number of clichés about youth and liberalism versus old age and conservatism. (Churchill’s dictum comes to mind as probably the most famous: “A man who isn’t liberal by the time he’s 20 has no heart, if he isn’t conservative by the time he’s 40 he has no brain.”)
And in the 60s the baby boomers in their own way played into this as well, with their rhetoric about how wonderful young people were, and “never trust any over 30”.
But this explanation, as neat and tidy as it is, doesn’t always match up to real life experience.
I knew any number of young conservatives from my college experience, and I’m sure you did too.
Secondly, most radicals stay true to their ideals right up through old age: Emma Goldman, Karl Marx, Michael Bakunin, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Of course that’s not to say that they never changed their views on anything. Like all human beings they re-adjusted their views as life experience dictated. But they never became conservative in their old age.
For that matter, biographies of famous people can show any number of case studies were people actually got more radical as they got older: Mark Twain, W.E.B. Dubois, John Stuart Mill, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ramsey Clark, et cetera, et cetera.
This isn’t to deny, of course, that some people do get more conservative as they get older. But it’s not a law of human nature, that’s all I’m saying.
Furthermore, if you look at it historically, university campuses have not always been the center of revolution.
Universities existed in some form during the middle ages, but it was not University students who lead the various Peasants’ rebellions, it was the peasants themselves. It was not University students who stormed the Bastille during the French Revolution, it was the common people. It wasn’t University students who dragged Louise XVI and Marie Antoinette out of Versailles palace and forced them to Paris, that was a group of mothers and housewives.
It wasn’t University students who started the 1848 revolutions if February, or manned the barricades in Paris in July of the same year, it was workers in both cases.
It wasn’t University students who started the Paris Commune (it was the poorest districts of Paris that rouse up.) It wasn’t University students who ground Russia to a halt in 1917, it was the Worker’s Soviets. It wasn’t University students who formed the anarchist brigades in Spain during the Civil War, but the common proletariat.
I could list examples all day. But here’s one that’s particularly telling:
At the start of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, workers groups in both France and Germany sent each other messages of peace and solidarity, both saying that they knew this war was between the capitalist classes in both countries, and that the workers had nothing to gain by fighting each other.
The workers’ groups in both countries gracefully acknowledged the message. The University students jeered at it, and instead supported their respective countries in the wars. University students were hardly at the forefront of the anti-war movement then.
Nor is this the only example of Universities being for reaction. In the English Civil War, the University students sided with the royalist cause against the republicans. During World War I, the University students supported the patriotism and militarism of their respective countries, and the only organized anti-war effort came from the worker’s movement.
In fact, choose just about any radical concept you want—socialism, anarchism, communism, organized anti-war activity, organized anti-racism campaigns—none of them originated on the college campuses. They all originated out of the worker’s movements in the 19th and early 20th century.
(This is not, of course, to downplay the contributions that students occasionally made to these movements. For example students were certainly instrumental in the 1848 revolution in Vienna. Student groups like SLID did some good work during the 1930s. But the backbone of all of the radical activity was firmly in the workers movement.)
From the 1960s onwards, all of these radical causes became associated with University students instead of worker’s organizations. What changed?
While one side of the coin of course is that the labor unions were brought down to size in the 40s and 50s, and the workers organizations were destroyed. Without these forms or organization blue collar workers started to turn to conservatism and patriotism in the 50s and 60s.
But why did college campuses in the 1960s suddenly become hotbeds of radicalism, and why did it happen all over the world at the same time?
Because the baby boomers were the first generation when it became standard to attend University. Suddenly you had masses of people gathered together in the same place at the same time, talking to each other, and finding out that they all had similar views.
Yes, there were external issues as well. The civil rights movement was a radicalizing experience. And yes, the Vietnam War played a major part. And yes, student movements in one country appear to have been influenced by student movements in another (Clark Kerr, the President of Berkeley University during the Free Speech Movement, said American students had been influenced by what was happening in Japan. Politicians in Japan, in turn, blamed their student radicals on American influences. )
But every generation has their issues. And in many of the countries where the student unrest was the greatest, the Vietnam War wasn’t even an issue (France, Mexico, China, Brazil, Czechoslovakia et cetera) or their governments were only indirectly involved in Vietnam (Japan, the UK, West Germany). The reason why the University became the place for organization was simply because it was the place where everyone was already gathered together.
Ironically, it was just at the time that University’s were becoming main stream, that media commentators started accusing the students of being spoiled elitists.
No, ironic isn’t the right word. Ironic implies it was just some sort of coincidence. This was a deliberate propaganda campaign.
In previous eras, whenever radicalism reared its head, it had usually been the worker’s organizations or the proletariat that did so. And the response from the bourgeois press had always been the same—calling the lower class radicals dirty, uneducated, uncultured ignorant mobs. (Read, for example, the bourgeois reactions against the Paris Commune. For that matter, in our own country read how the labor unions were described in the early 1900s)
Now, suddenly radicalism was coming from the most educated sector of society, so the old invectives would no longer work. But it was important to discredit the radicals somehow, and, most importantly, they had to be kept isolated from mainstream America.
Now that the worker’s movement had been destroyed, and workers no longer had any sort of radicalizing organizations, it was decided to pit the blue collar workers against the student radicals by labeling the radicals as elitist snobs who didn’t understand what it was like to do an honest day’s works.
Of course, most of this was coming from the pens of journalists who were themselves quite well off and well educated, but it worked. It was a tried and true divide and conquer strategy that had been used in the previous decades to isolate union activists.
And so at this point insert any number of conservative histories of the 1960s about spoiled whiny rich elitist rich kids who didn’t understand the true values of real Americans.
The same strategy has been used in every generation since.
Of course every subsequent generation hasn’t been the same as the 1960s.
The same intensity wasn’t maintained every year. Just as not every year was a revolutionary year during the worker’s movement, so not every generation of university students have disrupted public life in quite the same way. But ever since university education became the societal norm, radical politics have been associated with the universities. Even if the public marches didn’t reached the height they did during the Vietnam War Moratorium, the student radical hanging out at coffee shops has been a cliché in every subsequent generation. Students at big schools (like Berkeley or the University of Michigan) routinely organize so many protests every year that they’ve almost become part of the background noise, and it’s not usual considered newsworthy.
The anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s (and the move to divest funds from companies that did business in South Africa) was driven by the University students. The anti-sweatshop and anti-WTO movement in the 1990s was organized on Universities. In the 2000s, opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were high on Universities.
And in France this year we saw University students leading the fight on an issue that didn’t even affect their generation--to preserve retirement pensions for baby boomers.
POINTS YET TO ADD
*Mario Savio—Jack, etcetera stayed active after graduation, but didn’t have access to base of supporters
*China, Burma, Iran examples
*England, tuition fee examples
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