This is article I wrote a few days before the March 5th National Student Strike.
---------------- Lessons from Building a Student Strike By Michael Feldman As you all know doing coalition work can be strenuous, especially with the diversity of political views on the American "left." Organizing events like a student strike is a valuable experience for communists and I urge all comrades attending High School and University to get involved building a campus anti-war or activist club. The March 5th Books Not Bombs, National Student Strike is being touted as the largest organized student strike in U.S. history. The National Youth and Student Peace Coalition (NYSPC) are claiming over 200 campuses signed up to participate in this historical student strike. This very well might be one of the largest student strikes since the Vietnam era but one must ask what will be the effectiveness of this strike. The aim of the student strike to "stop the war before it starts" is a typical idealist objective straying from any sober assessment of reality, the current state of the American peace movement and objective historical conditions. Frankly, we all know U.N. veto or not, the bombs will start dropping that should not even be a question. Bush has stated clearly his intention to pursue this imperialist war in a "coalition of the willing" if the U.N. Security Council does not live up to its role. One of the leading organizations pushing the "stop the war before it starts" slogan is of course none other than the Young Communist League, USA (YCL). It wouldn't hurt to mention that the YCL is one of the leading organizations of the NYSPC coalition with very influential ties to the NYSPC leadership. I have no problem with the YCL's heavy involvement with this coalition, what I do have a problem with is the fallacy of this slogan. In a recent pamphlet published by the YCL it states, "It is possible to stop the war before it starts. We must understand this reality." The reality is more than half of the U.S. supports the war on Iraq, while the other half believes the war should be waged "multi-laterally." On my college campus we have successfully organized a day of action but most importantly a day of learning for March 5th. But, our success was not met without difficulties. One of these difficulties was establishing a link to radical professors and urging them out of their shells to take a stand with students. Our campus activist club wrote a letter of appeal to the faculty urging them to cooperate with students and take part in strike planning meetings. At first professors were skeptical of the militancy of this "student strike," fearing it might just be too risky, although they were certainly sympathetic with our cause. But as the college administration took a clear position to oppose the student strike, professors formed their own strike planning committee to plan a day full of workshops on the war. This was certainly a break through for us. We now had the chance to forge a Student-Faculty alliance that would surely last beyond our student strike and we did just that. Professors sent delegates to our strike planning meetings to update us on their progress and to lend whatever support we needed financially and administratively. I was certainly inspired by the professor's stance and this made me re-think our strike strategy for March 5th. It became a question to me of what is more important and realistic at this stage not only of our national situation in the peace movement but locally right there on campus. Our campus is filled with apolitical students with hardly any established political clubs or organizations. It became obvious to me that not only was doing a "direct action" wrong at this point but totally unrealistic. Firstly, "direct action" would not appeal to those who are not willing to sacrifice themselves to the risk of getting caught doing something illegal. Secondly, those willing to sacrifice themselves have some level of political consciousness and that's the key, consciousness. At our final planning meeting for this week's student strike the main arguments focused on two key issues: Action or Education. There were several students at this meeting aggressively pushing for action, action and more action. I have no problem with action; I like to take part in my own fair share of civil disobedience as well. Pushing for actions though on a campus where students would not only feel alienated from them is neither productive nor effective in anyway. The tasks became clear, lets work with the professors for building a day of student and professor teach-ins on war, racism and the economy. We are encouraging students to strike in the school auditorium for the day in an attempt to raise the level of consciousness in our student body. It's imperative that the peace movement not be so caught up in "rallying" and in "civil disobedience" at this moment and put more efforts in effectively providing a counter-balance to the increasing reactionary tilt in American public opinion. If we are to have any hope in a Socialist future for the U.S. we must set not only the student movement but the left in general to a path of higher consciousness which rally after rally simply can't provide. A famous slogan from the French student-worker strikes of 1968 was, "Power is in the streets, not in parliament!" I agree, power is in the streets, but lets not make the same mistakes as the students that stormed into the streets of France. Lets arm our students, youth and workers with the ideas of revolutionary Marxism and take it to the streets! ########################################### This message has been scanned by F-Secure Anti-Virus for Microsoft Exchange. For more information, connect to http://www.F-Secure.com/ _______________________________________________ Marxist-Leninist-List mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxist-leninist-list
