the return of the student movement as a social force

8/14/2019 The Return of the Student Movement as a Social Force

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The Return of Student Movements as a Social Force

By Christopher Carrico

‘It was telling that Obama said in his 2010 State of the Union Address that

universities would have to make more sacrifices in the current economy. FDR

gave a similar speech once, except he called on the captains of industry and

bankers to make sacrifices, not public employees and universities.’ Okla Elliott,

asitoughttobe.com, 3 March 2011.

Last month in CounterPunch, in the article ‘Why Madison Matters’, scholar and policy

researcher Andrew Levine wrote ‘Almost overnight, the world changed. Madison (Wisconsin)

became Ground Zero in America’s domestic class struggle; and, just as amazing, labor launched

an uprising in defense of union rights which thousands of students joined.’

There are two things that Levine finds amazing here. First, he finds it amazing that class struggleand a labour movement have found new life in the US. Given American labour history of recent

decades, this is reason enough to be amazed. A second amazement was the fact that a student

movement and a labour movement were working in solidarity with one another. This is a

remarkable development for the American scene, where student-worker alliances remained

largely matters of theory in the 1960s (not realized as a concrete reality as they were in some

other countries).

Levine noted that in the US in the 1960s, one major reason for the failure of a real student-

worker movement to materialize was the fact that the majority of the American working class

did not support the student anti-war movement. On asitoughttobe.com on 13 March, I arguedthat the main reason that the present situation is different was that:

‘Unlike the labor-capital pact that supported the military industrial complex of

post WWII America, many more working people in the US today see a

connection not between military spending and their livelihoods as workers in the

military-industrial complex. Rather, the experience of today’s working class and

poor is that spending on never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has created a

federal debt crisis in the US that the government attempts to partially offset

through dollars saved by the destruction of what remains of a social safety net

and basic social services. The same class fraction that once formed the American

“labor aristocracy” now, incredibly, has begun to see the truth that MartinLuther King, Jr., among others, articulated in the U.S. during the late 1960s: that

the anti-war movement, and the movement for social and economic justice in

the United States, are indeed a part of the same struggle and the same fight.’

If the American working class has stripped away some of its illusions about the War Economy,

American students have also stripped away some of their illusions that gaining a tertiary



education will guarantee them the possibility of rising above their class. ‘We see students in the

United States and elsewhere faced with the harsh reality that, in spite of their higher level of

education, they have no reasonable basis by which to believe that they will do better, or even

as well, as their parents’ generation did economically.’ The US is one of many countries where

this scenario is true. About the UK I wrote that:

‘Something of this same realization lies behind what has driven the recent

student movement in the UK. Sparked in part by drastic tuition hikes put into

place by the new Lib-Dem/Conservative coalition government, one interesting

fact about the UK movement was the widespread participation of secondary

school students. This is perhaps because the tuition hikes end the illusion of a

meritocracy, and signal that even those poor and working class students who

worked hard and achieved high test scores will increasingly be locked out of

tertiary education. Locked out of the possibility of rising above their class by way

of higher education, poor and working class students face a bleak future, with

dwindling opportunities for employment without further education,

accompanied by dwindling opportunities for advancement by pursuing diplomas

and degrees through the university system.’

Students and workers were responding to the newly elected ‘Tea Party’ Governor’s bill to

eliminate the right to collective bargaining for the state’s public sector employees. It was

opposed by a strong and fighting movement among the public sector unions, and was opposed

just as strongly by student activists from Wisconsin’s colleges and universities. The student and

worker battles ended in calls for a general strike.

The immediate battles have been lost. The bill was passed and signed by the Wisconsin

Governor. Workers in Wisconsin did not go out on General Strike. But there is still the feelingamong American progressives that something new was born in this fight, in spite of its failure to

achieve its immediate objectives.

I would argue that a new spirit has been born worldwide in recent years that has meant, once

again, as in the 1960s, student movements are at the vanguard of social change in many parts

of the world. For many years, the student movement in Iran has been major force in opposing

the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The student movement has been a steadfast

leader in the anti- and alter- globalization movements around the world (usually more steadfast

that the trade unions and the political parties), and in many places has transformed these into

very assertive movements.

Massive student protests were central in the recent unraveling of the North African regimes.

They played and continue to play a critical role in Tunisia and in Egypt, for instance. One factor

at work here is the large numbers of young people in these countries, many of whom are

unable to find much in the way of economic opportunities. A New York Times article of 30

January, 2011, entitled ‘Egyptian Opposition’s Old Guard Falls in Behind Young Leaders’ argued



that ‘Both newcomers and veterans of the opposition movement say it is the young Internet

pioneers who remain at the vanguard behind the scenes.’

In the Caribbean, in April last year, the students of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras

Campus staged an action that was originally intended to be a 2 day strike on one campus, that

turned into a strike that shut down 10 of the 11 UPR campuses, and saw students occupying theRio Piedras Campus for 60 days. Among the issues at stake were tuition hikes, and the

government’s refusal to provide adequate financial support to the University system.

In modern times, student movements have often played key roles in struggles for the

transformation of the wider societies of which they are a part. Even in their most narrowly

focused and parochial forms, student movements have played important roles in the

democratization of education systems, in reforms and transformations to the educational

curriculum, and engagements between academia and issues of wider social significance.

In the Caribbean, as in much of the world, 1968 was a watershed year for student movements.

In October 1968, when UWI lecturer Dr. Walter Rodney was refused re-entry to Jamaica by the

Hugh Shearer government, a student group from UWI Mona held a demonstration that shut

down the campus, and led a march on the Prime Minister’s Office and Parliament. The chaos

and destruction that followed as a result of the actions that poor and unemployed Jamaican

youths also took in protest of Shearer’s ban have come to be known as the Rodney Riots.

When student movements look beyond their narrow parochial interests they can become truly

significant agents of change in the societies of which they are a part. They have been a part of

coalitions of forces that have helped to end wars, change budgets, change constitutions, and

bring down governments. Student movements with this wider social vision seemed to have

reached their highest degree of significance in the 1960s, but in 2010 and 2011 they haveshown themselves to be serious contenders in the fight for social change once again.

However, as Alex Callinicos noted in The Guardian late last year (26 December 2010), ‘Student

demonstrators can’t do it on their own’. Students lack the collective power and the organizing

ability to fundamentally transform the societies around them without making linkages, and

acting in clear solidarity with other social movements, particularly the labour movement.

Callinicos writes (referring to the situation in the UK, but making an observation that is widely

applicable in many other places) that ‘students lack the collective economic strength that, for

all the setbacks it has suffered, the trade union movement still possesses.’

It is precisely this kind of student-labour alliance that caused so much hope in the case of the

movement in Wisconsin, and student-labour alliances were (and continue to be) a major factor

in the Egyptian Revolution. There is something about the character of these kinds of alliance

that gives them a tremendous amount of potential. Perhaps it is because they bring mental

and material production in their most organized forms together into a single movement.

Whatever the underlying social reasons might be, student-worker movements have historically

sometimes become movements for revolutionary social change.

the return of the student movement as a social force

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