The following paper was written by Eric O’Dell for distribution at the student conference in Chicago on the first weekend of November, 1997.  It is written by him as an individual, and represents his views, not necessarily the views of SLAM! or of any other organization.  We are publishing it here in an effort to contribute to the rebuilding of a powerful national student movement.  Rebuild!  Information for contacting the author can be found at the end of the article.

By Eric O’Dell, November 1997

Intro

The student movement has long been a vital part of the people’s movements—both as an ally of other sections of the people and in the struggle against students’ own particular forms of oppression. A fair number of attempts at building and sustaining national-level, multi-issue student activist organizations have been made over the years. This paper proposes that the time may be ripe for another effort, particularly if we learn well our lessons of the past. It also suggests how we might now proceed to make such an effort.

Background

Why build organization?

This may be an obvious question to many, but it’s worth reviewing.

Progressive social change is made by sections of the masses of people acting within movements to create qualitative social change through struggle-oriented activism. The mainstream media often mystify such movements, portraying them as spontaneous and arising out of nowhere. There’s a kernel of truth to this idea, but we know that there’s more to it. Movements are made by thousands of people acting to build and sustain organizations which carry out the often invisible day-to-day work.

Organizations can democratically devise coherent strategies aimed at hurting the powers that be and winning gains for the people which their membership carry out in a coordinated fashion. Without organization, different sections of the people are likely to work at cross-purposes, and the likelihood is much greater that people will fall victim to reformists, ultra-left crazies, or other misleaders.

Organizations concentrate and institutionalize a living memory of the lessons learned in the struggle, and pass it on to succeeding generations.

Organizations can build build principled and meaningful alliances with organizations based amongst other sections of the population. Without strong organizations as the building blocks, effective united fronts which bring together different movements amongst different sections of the broad masses are impossible.

The stronger the organization, the stronger the movement in which it is situated.  It is only under certain conditions that the broader movement experiences an upsurge, outstripping the development of the organizations within it. Under these circumstances the organizations try to consolidate as much of the forward progress made in the upsurge as possible before it dies away. But it is still only when strong and broad organizations exist in the first place that such consolidation of the gains can take place. Without them, the gains will inevitably be eaten away when the forces of reaction counterattack.

Without organization leaders in the movement get chosen by two processes: self-selection (generally by middle-class white guys), and by the media (generally the same result). Organization provides for democratic selection of and control over leadership.

A Little History

Because all our thinking should be rooted in the lessons of history, this section will briefly go over the history of the modern student movement, particularly of those organizations which are most relevant to the present discussion. No comprehensive summation is possible in this space, of course, but here is a cursory overview.

The rise of the predominantly white section of the modern student movement can be identified with the emergence of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) more than any other group. SDS came into being at the beginning of the 60’s when the student section of a small Cold War social democratic grouping called the League for Industrial Democracy changed its name, broke with its parent group’s stodgy politics, struck out on its own, and later split completely from its parent group.

Initially based primarily in the Midwest and Northeast, SDS established itself early on through work in the Civil Rights movement. It developed a close working relationship with another very important student group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was based in the South primarily amongst African-American students. As SNCC evolved and developed a more nationalistic politics, SDS activists were challenged to go back to their own communities and campuses and wage the struggle there. So SDS chapters took up a variety of other activist projects in the North. The Vietnam War also began to escalate and soon became one of the main focuses of the student movement.

By the late 60’s, SDS had grown into a group with many hundreds of chapters all across the country. The organization was at the center of many of the most significant struggles of the period, and its legacy lives on in many ways today. But the internal contradictions in the organization grew, and various political errors of a generally ultra-left type took hold. In particular, the organization became “core cadrified”—a whole layer of the leadership around the country had turned into revolutionaries and began to turn the organization into something which would meet their political needs as revolutionaries rather than meeting the needs of the masses of students just coming into activism. By the summer of 1969 things came to a head and the organization blew itself apart in a fit of hyper-revolutionary fervor.

Within six months of SDS’s final collapse, the huge nationwide student strike of May 1970 (associated today mainly with the massacres of students at Kent and Jackson State) shook the country, demonstrating that students were still a powerful force for change. The leaders of the 60’s had largely turned their backs on student activism and gone on to form revolutionary groups which sought to base themselves in the working class or to commence armed struggle. One of these groups, the Revolutionary Union, founded the main predominantly white radical campus organization of the 1970’s, the Revolutionary Student Brigade (RSB).

The RSB (which started as the Attica Brigade) filled a vacuum on campus and waged a number of the most important battles of the decade, including continuing the anti-war struggle as the ruling class pursued “Vietnamization,” ripping Nixon’s efforts to hold onto power as the Watergate scandal unfolded, supporting the Soweto uprising in South Africa, resisting efforts to bury the memory of the Kent and Jackson killings, as well as more particular campus battles around open admissions, tuition increases, curriculum, etc. By the end of the decade, though, the RSB had lost its momentum.

The single strongest student organization of the 1980’s was the Progressive Student Network (PSN). The PSN came together at a conference in 1980 as a merger of the remnants of the Revolutionary Student Brigade, the Midwest Coalition against Registration and the Draft (Mid-CARD), and the Student Coalition Against Nukes Nationwide (SCANN). Through the 1980’s and into the early 90’s the PSN worked on a whole host of issues including anti-intervention, CIA off campus, anti-Apartheid, anti-ROTC, reproductive rights and women’s oppression, and others. For the first several years while it was strongest, the PSN was somewhere between a regional and a national organization. Its core was in the Midwest and the Northeast with connections reaching into the West and the South.

The organization had its ups and downs, but the overall direction of the 1980’s was generally downward. The last major organized struggle in which the PSN played a significant role was the Gulf War. In the aftermath of the war, the overall lull in the student movement resulting from the disillusionment about the results of the anti-war struggle was a blow which took the level of organization in the PSN below the critical mass needed to keep it going. Over the next couple of years the PSN as an entity faded away, even though today there are still a number of local campus groups in existence which were part of the network.
The situation of the last several years has been one of overall disorganization. There have been limited upsurges here and there around various issues, but without larger organization to connect the activists who come forward and consolidate temporary gains in a more permanent form, the upsurges fade away and many of the gains are lost. Also lost is the effect that the existence of a radical national organization has on the other sectors of the student movement. For example, when the PSN was strong, the United States Student Association maintained formal and informal ties with it. USSA’s stand on many issues was pushed in a more radical and a more activist direction by this contact. The PSN thus created a multiplier effect on campus activism.

One particularly important exception to this general situation has been the growth of the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC). Founded in 1988, SEAC quickly grew to be by far the largest progressive student organization in two decades. Although it has an overall single-issue character, and it recently went through a national political crisis from which it will be recovering for some time to come, SEAC’s history, structure, and politics should be studied closely by anyone interested in building national organization in the student movement.

Why Now?

Besides the cliched but true response, “If not now, when,” a number of factors presently exist which seem to make the conditions ripe for trying to rebuild a national student organization.

The level of student activism around the country, while not in what could be characterized as an upsurge, does seem to be on the rise. And the character of the activism seems increasingly broad-based and unity-oriented. The last few years have seen a growth in the number of multi-issue activist groups, multi-organization campus coalitions, SLACs and other class-conscious forms of activism. The openness of even single-issue organizations toward other issues and other organizations is much greater than it was in the 1980s.

Over the last few years a number of initiatives have developed which united hundreds of groups across the country around particular issues. In 1995 was the call to action against the Contract on America and against cuts in general. In 1996 was the call to action in defense of affirmative action, welfare, and immigrants’ rights. This year we have the Democracy Teach-Ins. There have also been local and statewide mobilizations in California, New York City, and other places around a number of issues. The fact that students keep coming together across geographic distances despite the lack of pre-existing organization is a good sign.

The Center for Campus Organizing was founded and has developed into a solid and respected institution providing resources for organizing, a communication hub, and a nucleus around which many local groups have come into contact with each other.
The rise of the Internet has resulted in an increase by at least an order of magnitude in the quantity of communication between student activists across geographic distances. Computers and the Internet definitely bring certain limitations and problematic aspects with them, but overall this development is a very good thing for the ability of student activists to network together.

This is of course not a complete list of all the conditions the student movement is facing. The continuing rise in the cost of going to college has negative effects in that people have to spend more of their free time working at jobs (when they can even afford to be in school in the first place), and it has positive effects when it increases students’ willingness to fight to keep education accessible and affordable. More broad investigation of the present conditions affecting the student movement is very important.

Organizing Principles

The organization will be based in the predominantly white section of the student movement. Issues of racial/national oppression and white supremacy need to be given strong emphasis.

This is tricky but important stuff. Because of the history and present character of our country, the student movement is to a certain extent a microcosm of the broader society, in that it is a movement of movements. One of the chief delineations is between the movements of people of color on campus (BSUs, MEChAs, Asian American and Latin American student associations, etc.) and the predominantly white section of the student movement. Because of the history of racial oppression, the principles of self-determination, the existence of nationalism, and other factors, one of the upshots is that no single organization can encompass all of these sectors. The organization being discussed in this paper would of necessity be based in the predominantly white student movement.

Identifying it as such is absolutely not to belittle the valuable and important contributions of students of color who work in predominantly white organizations. The work they do and the extra difficulties they face when working in groups mainly composed of white people has to be appreciated by everyone.

All of this brings with it certain demands. In particular, an active anti-racist orientation within the organization is absolutely central. This means not only taking up anti-racist issues in the activism, but also educating and struggling with the membership internally about issues of white chauvinism and white privilege. It means struggling to create or allow for the creation of affirmative and structural steps to counteract the disproportionate demographics which will inevitably exist in the organization (this without falling into tokenism or the destructive politics of white guilt as happened recently in SEAC, amongst other places).

Because of the experiences of people of color growing up and living a massively white supremacist society and because of the particular conditions students of color face on often overwhelmingly white campuses, people of color tend to get involved in groups based amongst particular nationalities (BSU’s, Asian student organizations, MEChA’s, etc.). In fact, one of the results of the nationalism that many people of color adopt is that in such nationality-based groups there will often be significant numbers of people who would not take part in an organization in which there are any white members. These types of groups need to be understood as just as good and important as the work people do in predominantly white organizations. People of color need to organize amongst themselves to fight against their oppression, and any predominantly white organization which wants to be taken seriously needs to have clear politics upholding this understanding.

Another interesting type of organization which has taken off in recent years is multiracial people of color–based groups. With this type of group people are uniting around the common aspects of their oppression as people of color. Again, the same principles apply.

A leading core of groups around the country must be established.

The politics of people trying to change the world often start at the point of thinking, “If we can all just come together, we can make good things happen.” This is a superficially nice-sounding idea, but reality is more complex. Some groups will be really into the idea of building broader organization and have a lot of energy to devote to the project. Others will be into the idea but will be mostly on the level of going along with an initiative that other groups are putting into play. Some groups will be slow to join a broader project and will only be pulled in when something large and strong and well-established has the organizational gravity to do so. Any successful organization-building project must start by uniting the set of groups who are more interested in taking (and able to take) the lead, and only then proceed to win over the groups which have less initiative.

The organization must be built up on a regional basis.

The Progressive Student Network was founded as and always aspired to be a national student organization, but after the first several years it wasn’t much more than a regional formation with limited connections in other parts of the country. From the beginning it was strongest in the Midwest, and most of the practical organizing took place on that level.

The Student Environmental Action Coalition started out as a national network, but early on it divided the country up into 17 regions. Most of the actual networking between groups has occurred at the regional and state level, and the regions have been the building blocks out of which the national organization is constructed. Regional and “multi-regional” conferences have provided the ongoing face-to-face contact and sharing of experiences which turned SEAC into the strongest organization in the student movement during the 1990s. Even as SEAC rebounds from its organizational crisis of 1996–97, it is the regional structures that are providing the scaffolding within which the national organization is being rebuilt.

There are regional particularities that need to be understood. The main problem connecting the Midwest to the West Coast is geographic—the distances are so great as to make travel difficult, and there is not much to make use of in the Great Plains. On the other hand, the main contradiction between the South and other sections of the country is cultural. These cultural contradictions arise more than anything else from the broad historical concentration of African-American people across the Black Belt South. While “Organize the South” is an important slogan, it’s also important to develop an understanding of how these cultural differences will impact efforts to make connections between the South and other regions.

The organization must develop organically.

The Student Action Union (SAU) was created out of nothing at a conference at Rutgers University in 1988. Because the pre-existing relationships between groups were basically nonexistent, the group had a variety of troubles right from the beginning. The upshot is that it never did consolidate a critical mass of groups sufficiently committed to carrying the organization forward.

The lesson of the SAU experience is twofold. First, a big national conference under the right circumstances can bring together a large number of people, which can help build the critical mass necessary for building a national organization. Even though they started with nothing beyond themselves, the group at Rutgers played the media well and had a string of “names” that they used to attract a large crowd of attendees. But the fact that they didn’t start with a solid leading core of base campuses who had some experience working with each other meant that they couldn’t consolidate most of this initial big surge into ongoing organization.

Other even more unrealistic attempts have been made to call national student organizations into existence. All these attempts failed to take into account the fact that organizations are made out of human relationships, which are themselves made out of mutual commitment and trust which can only come from pre-existing and ongoing contact and joint practical work.
The organization should have a solid but minimal set of political/ideological principles, and beyond that should follow the principle “unity in action.”

The twin opposing errors to be made here are agnosticism and sectarianism. The basic principles needed to establish the progressive character of the organization are anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-heterosexism. Without institutionalizing these principles it is harder to call to account and correct particularly egregious cases within the network. The ills of the broader society reproduce themselves within the organization, and internal contradictions within the organization become too great for many people (women, people of color) to stand.

In addition, if people in a group are perceived as not being serious about dealing with these issues, building alliances with people of color–based groups becomes impossible. Because of repeated, almost universal experiences dealing with the white chauvinism perpetrated by most predominantly white formations, such groups almost always will cast a critical eye on any predominantly white group which wants to build a relationship with them. If a group is seen as not taking questions of white chauvinism and privilege seriously, nationality-based groups will steer clear of it. Analogous things hold true for organizations based in the women’s and gay and lesbian movements.

Above and beyond the aforementioned principle, though, the student movement is a broad-based and multi-tendencied beast. In order to unite all who can be united against the forces we oppose, space must be consciously made for a wide variety of ideological trends, including those whose politics have not yet developed into a coherent ideology. The guiding operating principle must be “unity in action”; in other words, the basis for unity is support for the particular issues and general strategies adopted within the organization.

It is true, though, that informal sets of political lessons will develop and propagate within the organization, and different political trends will manifest themselves. This is all fine and healthy, and care needs to be taken to avoid using such things as a means of excluding anyone from the organization.

The core of the organization should be multi-issue local groups, but there should also be space for single-issue local groups.
The network should have a fundamentally multi-issue character. It is relatively uncommon for one overwhelming issue to unite the whole student movement for a lengthy period of time (a war is the main cause of such circumstances); the general situation is one of a number of issues capturing people attention at the same time or in succession. A national student organization should have a multi-issue character to give it the ability to take up whatever struggle is capturing the attention of the masses at the time. In order to do this, multi-issue local groups must form the core of the organization.

But there should also be space for single-issue local groups to take part. Such groups are still the primary form which student activism takes at this point, although there does also seem to be somewhat of a trend toward single-issue groups developing into multi-issue groups.

The goal should be to build a strong organization with solid national institutions, but it should always keep a “networky” character.

There is too much diversity and distrust of authority amongst the student movement for any broad-based organization to adopt democratic centralist principles or the like. There is always a tension between centralism and decentralism, and any workable organization in the student movement needs a strong dose of the latter. Even when unified campaigns or structures are adopted, each local group in the end is going to do what it wants, and a realistic structure needs to acknowledge that fact.

This decentralism has its downsides, amongst which is a centrifugal tendency (or maybe Brownian motion). Counteracting this tendency and providing some kind of coherence and focused strategy is one of the main reasons to build a national organization. Striking the appropriate balance between unity on the one hand and diversity on the other hand is an ongoing challenge, with errors to be made in both directions.

Cadre-based left groups should not be excluded in general, but people should keep an eye on them.

Left cadre organizations are part of the scene in the student movement. A certain fraction of student activists will always develop politics which impel them to join such organizations. Even if one thinks this is a bad thing, it needs to be accepted. It would be wrong and destructive to the student movement to try to implement a policy excluding such organizations across the board, but it is important to examine the social practice of such organizations within the student movement. Some have better practice and make positive and important contributions in building the struggle, others are mixed, and some have social practice that is destructive overall. The upshot is that an attempt should only be made to exclude a cadre organization when it has decisively proved itself to be destructive to the cause of building the student movement. For example, some Trotskyist groups possess a political line which says that mass-based student organizations of the type discussed in this paper straight-up shouldn’t exist, and they will put this political line into practice via outright efforts to sabotage the organization. This is an example of a situation where exclusion is appropriate.

The core leadership must maintain the political orientation that the purpose of the organization is to serve the needs of the base.
It is a seemingly logical thing to try to build an organization that suits one’s own interests. When one’s needs jibe well with those of the great majority of people in the sector one is trying to organize in, this is appropriate. But in the student movement, when a radicalized layer of activists with a deeper vision comes together to try to build something bigger, this layer tends to have a different point of view resulting from a somewhat deeper political understanding and a different set of resulting political needs than the average student activist in a local group. “Core cadrification” often results when this layer of leadership tries to transform an organization from one oriented toward the great majority of the membership to one oriented toward themselves, in essence trying to evolve the mass organization into a cadre organization. It is always a problem when the leadership doesn’t maintain a political consciousness of this dynamic and take active, ongoing steps to counteract it. Failure to do so almost always leads to organizational crisis.

Existing initiatives have an important role to play in the building of a national organization.

Any effort toward building a new national student organization must come in large part from groups who haven’t yet been involved in any pre-existing initiative, but we must also look to existing organizations which can bring experience, pre-existing connections, and other resources to such an enterprise.

First, the Center for Campus Organizing can and should play a vital role. Both the developing informal network of groups and individuals and other resources such as the e-mail lists, the newsletter, contacts with other organizations, etc. are absolutely key. While it’s impossible to the staff of CCO to completely avoid leadership roles, they should be careful to leave the predominant leadership to the individual local student groups. The primary role of CCO should remain a catalytic one.

The developing relationships amongst the collection of groups involved in the organizing of the Democracy Teach-Ins are also important. This initiative, particularly those in it who have a more explicitly “Democratizing the University” focus could play a significant role if it develops in the right direction.

There should also be a close association with the Student Environmental Action Coalition. This is a tricky thing, though. Any new initiative should be careful to avoid raiding SEAC for advanced groups. What SEAC can provide is concrete practical experience—both positive and negative—in building a national organization. It may also be able to assist in tracking down and hooking up other local groups on the same campuses as members of the SEAC network.

Some groups that were part of the Progressive Student Network are still around, and there are still a few individuals in and around them who were involved in the PSN while it was still active and vital. This is an asset which, while short on quantity, is long on experience.

This is of course not a complete list. Organizations such as the United States Student Association, Empty the Shelters, and others can and should help and advice on the project in whatever way is possible and appropriate for that organization.
There are also a number of individual “players” out there, most of whom are rooted in some local group. Where possible, an individual should struggle to involve the rest of his or her group in organizing beyond the local level. Collectivity over individualism should be encouraged. Amongst other things, this will help counteract the “lots of white guys” factor that results from white and male privilege.

A Game Plan

The plan of action is probably the most fluid part of this whole document. There are probably a number of different variations that could be developed; an ongoing back-and-forth about this stuff between lots of people is probably necessary. In the end, though, we need to unite a fair number of groups around a single common plan.

A leading core of local groups and of individuals within those groups must develop and then propagate outward.

A core of groups that are the strongest and most committed to the idea of building broader organization needs to be gathered. This circle should hammer out the outline of a common plan and sign onto it. As this is done, active and fairly systematic outreach should go on to reach out to more groups to enlist their support. Different groups are inevitably going to have different levels of participation; the initial focus should be on uniting those groups which have the most initative and energy to devote to the project. Then over time as a critical mass builds, the groups with less surplus energy can be drawn in.

This leading core will inevitably also have an uneven regional breakdown. In particular, one or two regions of the country will inevitably be better organized and more in the forefront of any organizing effort. It is vital that the initial energy go into establishing and consolidating a critical mass in the regions where it is most likely to take hold. Thus the initial primary focus should be on building up these strong regions, with other regions trailing along in the wake to a certain extent. As things develop, these strongholds can later be used as the bases from which to build up the other sections of the country.

One of the first steps is to establish a centralized system of communication amongst the people interested in the idea of building national organization. An e-mail list and postal mailings are probably the two most important mechanisms. This is something the Center for Campus Organizing could likely help with. As the initial core-building process proceeds, a realistic timeline should be laid out, and things should begin to proceed from planning to implementation.

Either regional conferences are called and organized by a strong group in each region of the country or a big national conference is organized in a geographically strategic location, with active assistance from CCO.

A conference should act as a nucleation site for the development and institutionalization of regional networks. The conferences themselves should be largely about sharing experiences and building connections between groups, but one of the practical goals should be the development of campaigns and connected activism around concrete issues.

The main advantage of regional conferences is that they are easier to get to. A shortcoming is that weak regions can easily be left completely behind if no well-organized regional conference happens there. The advantage of a national conference is that it binds the whole national organization together in a way that isolated regional conferences can’t. A shortcoming is that the cost and amount of energy required to put on a good one can be challenging. Different scenarios can be envisioned, but one potentially useful strategy would be to ultimately develop an alternating schedule with a really big national conference the first year, big regional conferences the next, a national conference the following year, and so on.

As regional networks develop and solidify, plans are laid and implemented for a national representative leading body, national office, publication, etc.

As the relationships between groups develop, things should move in the direction of formalization. This is the stage at which plans for decision-making bodies, national publications, national office, fundraising, and the like are put forward.

Outro

It all sounds nice and straightforward on paper, but one certainty is that things will be a lot messier in the real world. But if enough people are dedicated to the idea and act in a committed fashion, on the basis of principle, and with an eye to the lessons of the past, some pretty bad-ass organization just may result.

This paper will be circulated broadly within this student movement. Anyone who is involved in student activism and actively interested in the ideas laid out in this paper should contact me. I want to compile a list of local groups committed to developing the general program further and then move in the direction of making it happen.
 

Eric Odell
[email protected]

(Eric Odell was a founding member of the Student Environmental Action Coalition and was the first editor of Threshold, SEAC’s national magazine. He also was in close contact with the Progressive Student Network, amongst other groups, for a number of years. He is now involved in the Columbia Student Solidarity Network.)