The State of the Student Left

The State of the Student Left

http://www.thenation.com/blog/154860/state-student-left

Laurie Rojas
September 17, 2010

The beginning of the school year doesn't just mark the end of warm
summer days­it also reignites student organizing initiatives. But
there's a huge range of views among students about how to approach
organizing and activism. In order to get a better overview of these
differences and encourage debate, I organized a panel on the politics
of today's American student Left at the US Social Forum in Detroit
this summer. Below are some of the most provocative statements from
the panel presented in the hopes of sparking discussion. For the
full transcript, see "Ideology and the Student Left" (Platypus
Review, Issue #27, September 2010).
http://platypus1917.org/2010/09/12/ideology-and-the-student-left/

"If you look historically at what creates the context for a
revolutionary situation, from Oaxaca to Greece, it is clear that
students play a significant role in creating a context in which
revolution can become possible."

­Will Klatt from Ohio, a member of the new Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) and an organizer for Service Employees International
Union. He is currently organizing a national day of action,
"Education is a Right," for new SDS on October 7.

"One opportunity offered by private universities lies in their
position in the larger economic framework, which makes a lot of
strategies viable…to stand in solidarity with workers and push for
their demands. We students are in a strategic position for pressuring
our universities to pressure companies."

­Luis Brennan, a student community organizer at University of Chicago
and former member of the new SDS.

"There is a very important strategic component to reform struggle,
but not in the way that most of the social movement Left is invested
in. What we need is reform struggle in a revolutionary framework.
Struggles for reform will legitimize the revolutionary movement,
putting the movement and the people in a better position to gain
further demands along the path towards revolution, which comes only
when we get the power, as a movement, to fundamentally transform the
defining social institutions of our society."

­Aaron Petcoff from Detroit, formerly of the new SDS and currently a
member of the Organization for a Free Society (OFS).

"We need a total theory­not a total understanding of everything in
the world, but a theory that grasps fundamentally the unfreedom of
capitalist society, rather than merely collects particular
descriptions of the effects of unfreedom, or collates a series of
bullet points aimed at this amorphous thing called 'the Man,'
American hegemony, the System, or Empire."

­Ashley Weger from Chicago, an organizer for Platypus and former
organizer for UNITE HERE at DePaul University. Weger is currently
attending York University in Toronto and plans to start a Platypus
Marxist reading group there.

The panel was followed by an audience Q&A in which panelists
discussed the future of alternatives like worker-owned cooperatives,
community gardens, and tenants associations as well as the pitfalls
of broad umbrella organizations that claim to be non-ideological.

What strategies do you think student organizers on the left should be
implementing? How do you see students' place in relation to larger
student movements? Let us know in the comments section, or email us
at studentnation@thenation.com.

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