The New Student Movement
Waskow, Arthur I.
In the last few months, especially since the war in Vietnam and protests against it have both escalated, a number of commentators from many wings of opinion— right, center, and socialist—have...
...For ADA, the equivalent group was an alliance of New Dealers and labor Socialists: Eleanor Roosevelt, Reuther, and Du binsky...
...I think that for some of the oldliners, the major factor in explaining their reaction is their participation in "controlling" organizations in ways roughly comparable to (partly because competitive with) but more benign than the Stalinists' way—and the resulting assumption that whatever social movement appears must be similarly "controlled" by somebody: if not by them in their comparatively benign and open way, then by their old oppo...
...4. For these reasons, the students seem to believe that "the revolution" of which they speak must not only include a redistribuiton of wealth and the grasping of a share in power by those who presently have no power at all and the acceptance of all as entitled to human dignity, but also the reconstruction of society so that it does not act or seem like a machine, but is always and always looks like people...
...and a willingness to treat people who do not fit the orderly assumptions as if they were not part of society at all...
...9. Their ideology and rhetoric urges them to work toward decentralizing their own organizations and to avoid imposing their own ideas on the groups they are organizing—especially the ideologically defenseless ones in the slums and the Delta—but in fact, of course, there are enormous internal pressures to assume that they are right and to make the new groups in the images that seem appropriate to the founders, as the founders tried to make SANE and CORE and Turn Toward Peace...
...who considers himself a "liberal"—a real liberal—rather than a "socialist," a "radical," a "progressive," a "New Frontiersman," or a "Great Society" man...
...For example, they probably need to work out more fully either their vision of the decent future or an ethic by which to measure the means they are willing to use in moving toward that future—or both...
...For a long time as the students count time (i.e., for the three years I have known some of them) one of the strongest of their commitments—both in general ideology and in their own organizational work—seemed to me to be the ethic of personal warmth...
...In SDS there is now a cadre with opinions and analyses much more "sophisticated" than those of the new entrants—but the cadre itself is under 30 and is still creating its own ideology...
...Otherwise, there is not much detailed content to these slogans yet...
...If the highest priority of the AFL-CLIO is the repeal of 14-B, requiring help from the Speaker of the House, and SNCC's highest priority is unseating the Mississippi Congressional delegation, requiring opposition to the Speaker, there are bound to be real political clashes between them...
...but they need to have some protection from others who keep the institutions of order just a few steps, instead of a few miles, behind them...
...and that the guys who fought Stalinists in the 'thirties and 'forties can recognize both the people and the mood better than I can...
...For what it is worth, it may be useful to compare their perceptions with the perceptions of someone whose basic political ideas were formed before, but only slightly before, the student movement received its great impetus from the 1960 sit-ins...
...not "Will it work...
...To them this revolt against labels means that they have learned a great deal from the corruptiveness of Stalinist techniques— but what they have learned is that they should not act like Stalinists, not that Stalinists should be purged...
...It is far more likely that the student movements will end up creating and giving the basic tone to and thus perhaps for a long time "controlling" other organizations e.g., the Mississippi Freedom Party, the Newark Community Union (in the slums), even conceivably f a c u l t y groups that take both their elan and their office workers from their students —than that anyone will be able to control them...
...The interesting point is that if I am right, the student movements are different from all of them in that the group that created them is at most ten years older than the youngest of the members, and that the founder group is still working out its own ideology...
...Some of the older generation also fear that the students are now being or will easily be "infiltrated" by or "controlled" by Communists of the Chinese if not the Russian variety...
...This is the real hope and meaning behind the slogans of "participatory democracy," "decentralization," "university reform," "the Third World," etc...
...The reasons that the second situation might result in an "underground" mentality and the emergence of Stalinist connections, ideologies, or personalities are obvious...
...For if, as SDS and SNCC sometimes seem to demand, all left politics were in the streets and in the ghettoes, I think the distance between active politics and the government would widen so rapidly that there would be a repression of creative disorder...
...But one could see the real need as a kind of meta-coalition between the generations: on one side the "creative disorder" people, SDS and SNCC...
...and who has had a chance to get to know many of the student activists reasonably well because of his work on the issues that exercise them most— racial conflict and world peace...
...And they find a joy in working in Mississippi, beatings, jail and all, that they would never find as cool gray bureaucrats in Washington...
...I could hardly blame them for thinking that I—and the students— are novices at Stalinist-spotting...
...For others of the old-liners, I think the major factor may be the way in which they were deeply and permanently scarred, by the emergence of Hitler and Stalin, into the belief that Totalitarianism had a capital T, was unchangeable and diabolical—that is, that it was a total departure from and beyond history: a belief which not only, in foreign policy, ratifies the assumption that Vietnam is the same situation as that of Czechoslovakia (because the Totalitarian Mao is identical with the Totalitarian Hitler) but also, in domestic life, ratifies an absolute fear of the absolute power, cunning, and resistance to change of the Totalitarians...
...To discharge that responsibility, the students probably need to deepen their philosophic understanding of and commitment to their present view of the world...
...They have not much understanding of the real meaning of Dewey's pragmatism as regards the relation between ends and means, as far as I can tell...
...If this estimate is right, why do some leaders of ADA, Turn Toward Peace, LID, etc., get so nervous about the "totalitarian mood" of the students or about totalitarian "control" or "infiltration" of them...
...For ECLC and the Progressives, an alliance of Stalinists and fellowtravelers...
...There are three ways in which one could define the fear that is expressed by many of those who see the student movement as moving toward totalitarianism: 1) As "infiltration" or "control," either organizational or through personal influence, by either the old Communist party or the new Progressive Labor party, in or over the major organizations or important people in the student movement...
...Efforts to advance the personal happiness of the members of the movement seemed as important as formal victories in the society...
...And I would argue that the metacoalition between "the movement" and "the coalition" is indeed what is desperately needed...
...2. They seem to me to be making by no means a rigidly or vulgarly Marxist "class" analysis in the sheerly economic sense, but to be more interested in all the "left-outs" rather than in just the economic "have-nots...
...The conditions that would make it more likely are easily specified: (1) more ventures in foreign policy that look to the students either like classic American "imperialism" (like the Dominican affair) or like "neo-impetrial" strategic interventions (like Vietnam) but in any case have the effect of messing up other people's societies for the sake of American interests or even of their interests as defined by Americans...
...And "decency" is closely attached to the hope that the Third World can create "human" societies that avoid the "machine" mistakes of the West, Russia, and possibly—they plead ignorance— China...
...2) As an ideological commitment by the students to a vanguard party with "democratic centralism," to the need for a violent revolution followed by a dictatorship of the proletariat (or of the good guys), to the need for full support of the Soviet Union and/or China, etc., or 3) As the growth of a Stalinist personality tone (extreme rigidity, political and personal paranoia, puritanism, etc...
...Some students frequently believe the reformers must have "sold out" to the Establishment...
...Why should my estimates be so different from theirs...
...Most of these commentators have been from an older generation of American political activity...
...on the other the coalition that Bayard Rustin has described between labor and the liberals, ADA and LID, and the older civil rights movement...
...The Stalinists not only always want the mimeograph machine, they always know exactly where the mimeograph machines are and they always get control of them—unless the only opponents who know anything about it, the old anti-Stalinists, are ranged in full battle order against them...
...8. They seem to me to be self-activating...
...2) repression of part or all of the student movement...
...In listing these three reasons for the old-liners' misperceptions I do not mean to sound sarcastic—an attempt to "explain" ideas in terms of their social roots always sounds like an unmitigated and vicious attack—and I do not mean to say that there are not among the students, as probably among us all, some social and psychological tugs toward making a totalitarian analysis of American society or adopting totalitarian prescriptions for dealing with it or getting first help and then direction from some totalitarian group or totalitarianizing our personalities...
...and they seem to be dubious of spelling out their ultimate ends, partly because of an existentialist focus on Now and partly because spelling out goals might result in the mistaken exclusion of some people whose ends would grow and change if they shared in action instead of being excluded...
...They are disgusting" not "They are stupid...
...For the perceptions are clearly different...
...Given a choice between repression and suppression, the students would choose to be suppressed...
...Many of the students have translated this to mean the subordination of their own values and interests to those of the older, more powerful, and better established reform institutions...
...anger at those who create disorder (though sometimes a willingness to buy order back at the price of placating the disorderly...
...and many of the reformers can only explain the students' disagreement, and criticism, by postulating Stalinist or neo-Stalinist influence over them...
...but the multiversity is gray and chilly...
...On the other, it results in things happening that look to some outsiders like "infiltration," and that no one in the organization will repudiate because of respect and tenderness for the "commitment" and world-view of others...
...in some ways, the least vulnerable rather than the most to such tugs, and unlikely to succumb...
...For both SANE and CORE, for example, I would say a very specal group of Gandhian-socialistpacifists was extremely important in getting the organizations going...
...or (3) active coalition in which enmities and fears in both directions get resolved by what Dave Bazelon calls a kind of "action psychotherapy," with knowledgeable and sympathetic "politico therapists" helping translate between the two sides and suggest where each can move forward in its own way without trampling the other...
...It might well be agreed that the students themselves have a responsibility in the present to prevent their own approach in the future from becoming corrupted in this way, even if they were to suffer from repression...
...6. Indeed, those who attack the students for not opposing totalitarianism in the Third World should understand that many of the students have in mind something quite special when they think or speak of "totalitarianism...
...Since to many of them it is inconceivable that social movements could appear "indigenously" not only in the sense of not being foreign-controlled but in the sense of not being oldergeneration controlled, and since they know they do not control the students, they suspect the Stalinists or neo-Stalinists must...
...Such reasons may not be so obvious for the first situation if it were somehow not to be combined with the second—but my own impression is that a series of "imperial" adventures would seem to a lot of students to confirm the Chinese interpretation of America and the world...
...First let me try to get clear my own estimate of the student movement—or movements...
...Unlike SANE and CORE at one level of the political spectrum, ADA at another, or the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and the Progressive Party at still another, they seem not to have been put into motion by an older generation of people who had very clearly worked-out ideologies and who, at least for a long time, kept basic control of the organizations they created...
...Thus students think of themselves as left-outs even though they come from affluent families...
...As the students see it, this disease involves the love of order, because the machine must run smoothly...
...They mean the generally machinelike, dehumanizing quality of great bureaucracies, not the specially dehumanizing system of secret police and thought control...
...or (2) tacit alliance in actual fact, punctuated by various snarls in both directions whenever the two generations get unbearable to each other...
...For Cuba seems to be "turned on," live, unbureaucratic, full of sex and unexpectedness, even if its government controls the press...
...Not that it never happens...
...10...
...But the students seem to me to be the best among us...
...Nevertheless, it always tends to be "legitimate" among the students to uphold decentralization and oppose a central bureaucracy, and always "illegitimate" to want to read somebody out for disagreement on what needs doing or how to do it...
...Among the labels they revolt against are those habitually used by Stalinists, those habitually used by democratic socialists and other independentleft people, and those used by the Establishment...
...Is it right...
...That is, deep respect (not just tolerance) for personal peculiarities, an atmosphere of love and gentleness toward each other, and an unwillingness to interfere with love affairs, dress, or personal oddities even if these seemed to be getting in the way of the movement as a political thrust...
...1. They seem to me in revolt against labels and roles, though some are wea rily convinced that they will probably have to settle (at best) for the coining of fresh labels and the invention of new roles...
...Conceivably such differences could be dealt with in true coalition style, by each member's calmly accepting on the part of the other that on particular issues they will disagree whereas on others —perhaps on organizing the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union, for example— they can work together...
...I'm afraid the situation just now is degenerating from (2) into (1), rather than moving from (2) toward (3...
...And indeed "peace" or "disarmament" per se has recently come to mean much less to the students unless it is closely tied to a decent world for the hungry nations...
...If ADA is pressing for more money for urban renewal and SDS is encouraging slumdwellers to oppose particular urban renewal projects, there are bound to be real political clashes between them...
...5. In foreign policy, where some of the students have been criticized as anti-American or non-anti-totalitarian, their hope of a non-machine society seems to have some special impacts...
...That, I believe, is the real question—of which the argument over the student mood is mostly a symptom—and the one we should now proceed to answer...
...Again, what they fear worst is grayness and sameness...
...This isn't my distinction, but Sid Lens's...
...I think there is a strong component of Gandhi, or Gandhianized Christianity, or Gandhi-Camus existentialism in this...
...It is this whole atmosphere of self-creation that makes for the self-confident feeling among the students that no one else could "infiltrate" or control them...
...In the last few months, especially since the war in Vietnam and protests against it have both escalated, a number of commentators from many wings of opinion— right, center, and socialist—have expressed a great deal of doubt about and disapproval of developments within the student movement...
...The ones I know best and will be talking about are SDS and SNCC...
...But that kind of coalition would impose a terrible strain of self-control on its members, and both sides (the generation of "orderly reform" and the generation of "creative disorder") frequently find it easier to regard their erstwhile partner's particular defection or disagreement as evidence of some sinister plot...
...the point is that in certain sociological aspects, the organizations may be much alike...
...nents the Stalinists in their much more conspiratorial and destructive way...
...Where I have described a free-wheeling, loosely knit, decentralist, and warm-toned movement with a flavor more like that of the Wobblies or the communitarians of the 1840s than of any other American politics, many of that generation whose political ideas were formed by, during, or in response to the New Deal and World War II see the students as hostile, bitter, and —especially—ready to turn themselves into totalitarians...
...How can that be stopped...
...Having sketched my own perceptions of the student movement, I should like to suggest how (and to some extent why) they differ from those of the older generation of New Dealers and democratic socialists...
...Or, among those who believe that the "siren song" of Stalinist ideas or friendly influence is the danger rather than organizational control, it is assumed that the siren song is so beguiling that only a crafty Socialist Ulysses can guard against it—not the untutored student sailors on their own...
...One of the few left-descriptive words they respond to warmly is simply "radical...
...Finally, among some of the old-liners there are real and unblinkable differences in interest, as well as in style, from the students...
...If, on the other hand, as ADA and LID sometimes seem to be saying, all the students' energies went into elective politics on the left of the Democratic party, I'm afraid the Democrats—without the spur of disorder in the streets, the Delta, and the ghettoes—would simply absorb it and make very few important legislative changes...
...For example, "peace" seems important to them not for the sake of survival alone, or even chiefly, but because the war machine is a machine, perfectly calculated to treat three billion humans like things...
...But I'm stubborn, and I think I could "explain" what I regard as distortions of perception on the part of the old-line socialists and pacifists...
...3. They analyze the reasons for the present exclusion of some people from the polls as partly but not wholly economic: partly the wish of the Establishment to make more money, but partly its grasp for power aside from wealth and partly a kind of disease that comes from focusing upon the machine the Establishment thinks it is running rather than upon the people who are really being run ragged...
...But they tend to believe that it is not always, or even usually, possible to work out the impact given means will have on hoped-for ends, and thus to choose means on some intrinsic moral principle— if not absolute nonviolence, then a "not quite violent" ethic...
...Asceticism was a matter of individual choice or of scarce resources, not of puritanical discipline...
...Although I fully agree that it is not utterly impossible for the students to become "totalitarians" in one or another of these ways, I do not see any important signs that this is happening...
...The leftouts seem to be those who have been kicked off the bottom rungs of "status" and "power" ladders as well as those on the bottom rungs of the "class" ladder...
...Even those who concentrate on the fear of indigenous, self-grown totalitarianism among the students regard with deep foreboding any friendly connections they may have with "old far lefties"—a foreboding that has a tinge of the "infiltration" fear about it...
...But some of the students have already seen this "danger" and are trying to counteract it by bringing artists, actors, and other specially non-puritanical or non-political people into the ghetto projects...
...Not that they are pure Gandhians by any means...
...7. The students seem to me to be ready to respond to a wide range of issues in explicitly "moral" terms rather than strategic or technical ones...
...And this is not simply a leftward favoritism: the students fight the racist and anti-civil-libertarian government of Mississippi, but they save their deepest fury for the cool, gray way in which the Justice Department in Washington refuses to come to their aid...
...There has been much recent talk of "coalition" on the left...
...And their reaction seems to be that no one ought to be "left-out"—that all human beings belong in the polis—that it is an outrage for a n y o n e to be napalmed, starved, ignored, or segregated...
...The question then is whether there will be (1) active enmity between the two generations so that LID and ADA spend most of their energy not on left-Democratic party politics but on trying to crush SDS and SNCC (and SDS and SNCC spend most of their energy not on activating the Delta and the ghettoes but on attacking LID and ADA...
...Indeed, the Fellowship of Reconciliation had a major role in both...
...But the point is that whatever they do or fail to do under the pressures that might be applied to them, my estimate of their present mood and tone is that they are absolutely unlike the old Stalinists, as well as uninfluenced by them...
...This results, on the one hand, in its being difficult to "control" the student organizations themselves...
...I will try to sketch both their ideological commitments and their organizational structures...
...Thus what I regard as the old-liners' major misperception of the students is fueled by their important clashes of interest with the students...
...The ethic of personal warmth may be declining— I think I detect this, but I'm not sure—as work in the ghettoes gets tougher and the demand for superhuman energy and commitment grows...
...among the students...
...In other words, a relatively small number of highly committed people can bring about more change by using the techniques of disorder than those of order...
...I do not need to suggest my ethical choices from among these groups...
...This is one of the most important aspects of their thought, and is why some of them can in one breath damn the University of California as "totalitarian" and deny that Cuba is...
Vol. 12 • September 1965 • No. 4
