Building a U.S. Student Movement

By John Connelly 
Dissent 
August 21, 2012

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=817

In March of this year, a loose confederation of
organizers from New York, Wisconsin, and various
points on the West Coast began working to answer
the question believers in the Occupy movement
everywhere had begun to ask: what next? That fall
and winter, amazing images of protest and solidarity
from Zuccotti Park, Oakland, and campuses and
communities throughout the country imprinted
themselves on the national consciousness.
However, these organizers knew that if OWS and its
offspring were to have any lasting resonance there
had to be some kind of logical progression. They
turned their efforts toward creating a structure that
could shape the causes and beliefs of students
involved in campus encampments throughout the
country into one unified force. Out of these talks,
the idea of a National Student Power
Convergence-a space in which student activists
from across the country could gather to share skills,
compare tactics, and plan future actions-was
formed.

From August 10 to 14, the organizers of the
Convergence found themselves dealing with the
logistical minutia that come with feeding, housing,
and training over two hundred activists on the
strength of a donated budget and the goodwill of two
progressive Columbus, Ohio churches. Yet, with all
of the potential for the Convergence to end in
disaster-or at least the kind of anticlimactic fizz
that often follows attempts such as this-logistically
the event was as successful as could be reasonably
expected. I left Columbus feeling much more
optimistic about the Left's future in this country
than I had anticipated, and felt I had gained a
clearer understanding of the ideological tensions
and oppositional backlash any serious student
movement faces in this country than I have had at
any point since the last time I stepped foot in an
Occupy encampment.

The archetypes are familiar to anyone who has
spent much time doing left organizing in North
America. The newspaper-hawking Trots convinced
that anyone who does not share their vulgar Marxist
critique is a shill for the Democratic Party. The gruff
anarchists who reject any attempt to work within
established frameworks as a betrayal of freedom.
The pro-Obama moderate who dismisses both as
radical and out of touch with reality. These and
other personalities representing diametrically
opposed schools of thoughts and approaches to
politics were all well represented. What was
remarkable was that, with the exception of a few
caustic souls intent on turning workshops on
strategic planning into ideological battlefields, all of
these various strands of left and liberal thought
could exist in relative peace. The general consensus,
both among students and Convergence organizers,
was that a variety of approaches and tactics could
coexist without one contingent "selling out" or
another being off the deep end.

Even more interesting, student organizers working
on radically different issues were being encouraged
to view themselves as part of one big movement.
Stephen Lerner was especially explicit about this in
his presentation Saturday afternoon, reminding the
audience that regardless of whether they care about
racist incarceration policies, immigration, student
debt, or mountaintop removal, they could all find
the same handful of banks benefiting from the
system they opposed. Joshua Kahn Russell, of the
direct action training organization the Ruckus
Society, gave a rousing reminder in his keynote
address that you cannot accomplish goals of
systemic change by remaining a member of the
"righteous few." Students who interrupted or
attempted to alienate speakers they disagreed with
were generally not well received by their fellows.
Slogans like "We Are the 99%" are not going to
liberate us from left sectarianism, but these kinds of
presentations did open up a space where genuine
cross-ideological movement building could begin.

The blogger, student power advocate, and
Convergence facilitator Patrick St. John wrote that
"probably the most interesting part of this
convergence is that it wasn't organized under the
umbrella of a large national organization." In
person, he elaborated that many of the
Convergence's predecessors were bankrolled either
by NGOs such as Campus Progress or by the
Democratic Party itself, making them unreliable
incubators for student radicalism. These five days,
in contrast, consisted of "programming based on
what [student organizers] perceived the needs of the
current student movement to be," and not any one
agenda or ideology.

Also of interest was the sense of being part of both
an international movement and a broader historical
narrative. Proceedings opened with a video that tied
in iconic scenes in the history of American student
activism (the SNCC sit-ins, Mario Savio's "gears"
speech) with solidarity videos from students in
Spain, Egypt, Iran, and Great Britain. Carl
Davidson, former vice president of Students for a
Democratic Society and member of what Marshall
Berman calls the "Used Left," was on hand as a
living tie to both the mythological and historical
1960s. Students from Quebec's CLASSE student
strikes, Mexico's #YoSoy132 protests, and Puerto
Rican student unions were present. "We are united
in a global fight for education, and learning models
that organizers in other countries use will make us a
stronger student movement," said Isham Christie, a
Convergence organizer affiliated with New York
Students Rising.

"We should see some kind of large coordinated
direct action within three weeks, a month tops,"
says Maxwell John Love, the corporate secretary for
the USSA and one of the people who took part in
those conference calls back in March. Already, plans
are coming together for regional "mini-
convergences" and groups are following up with one
another to talk about potential campaigns.

"It's great that people are talking about organizing
for the first time in a long time," Davidson said to
me as my time at the Convergence was coming to an
end. "In the '60s, that's what we all wanted to be
when we grew up. But most of us weren't actually
organizers, we were just activists." To Davidson, the
difference between an activist and an organizer is
that an organizer builds organizations while an
activist simply works through them. Movement
building was, after all, supposed to be why students
were coming to Ohio in the first place.

What happened in Ohio this weekend was not the
birth of some New New Left, or even the
resuscitation of a floundering Occupy movement.
There is still much work to be done before we can
say that Convergence has produced anything
resembling a national student movement. However,
it was a jolt of badly needed energy to the hearts and
minds of student activists from all over the country.

___________________________________________

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