Nation Topics - Movements | The Nation

Read David Corn's full report on John Ashcroft's December 6 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Embattled campus activists hone their message about the crisis in Afghanistan.

Before the World Conference Against Racism at the end of August in Durban, South Africa, some 200 young men and women are expected to come together to draft a Youth Declaration and begin building

Only hours into the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) national conference in Chicago--before half of the participants had even arrived--students were walking the picket line in s

In the progressive playbook for 2001, labor is called on to assume a leading role.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

When fifty of us dashed into Massachusetts Hall on April 18, we had no idea what would follow. The students, faculty members and alumni who began the sit-in at the office of Harvard's president to demand a living wage for all Harvard employees thought we could be dragged off by police or ignored by the community. Instead, we've been amazed by the outpouring of support for our standoff with the oldest university in the country--and the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere.

This sit-in embodies the conflict between Harvard as community and Harvard as corporation. On the one hand, Harvard wants to foster "genuinely free and responsible discussion" (as the president wrote in one recent statement criticizing our action). On the other, Harvard pays more than 1,000 workers poverty wages while sitting atop an endowment of almost $20 billion. Janitors, security guards and dining hall workers earn as little as $6.75 an hour and work up to ninety hours a week. Our Living Wage Campaign demands that Harvard implement a minimum $10.25 per hour wage with benefits, the same standard enacted by the Cambridge City Council. Hundreds of Harvard employees work two and even three jobs and still struggle to support their families. As a custodian said, "Look, this is not a matter of working hard--people are already working hard. I've been wearing a custodial uniform now going on twenty years. I always say the only thing we don't have is a number across our backs. They figure they own me like a piece of equipment--like a barrel or a buffing machine."

Five of the six members of the Harvard Corporation, the University's highest governing board, are out-of-state millionaires who jet in for meetings. Robert Stone, chairman of the search committee that selected Lawrence Summers as Harvard's next president, is longtime commodore of the New York Yacht Club. Herbert Winokur is a director of Enron, a destructive global energy giant and George W. Bush's biggest corporate backer. D. Ronald Daniel is the director of McKinsey & Co. (and quite a golf fan, if the portraits of rich sportsmen in his plush office here are any guide). These people have final say over everything at Harvard, from the janitors to the endowment to tenure.

For three years the administration refused any meaningful dialogue or action about a living wage. In fact, since we began the campaign, Harvard has outsourced and cut wages and benefits for hundreds more workers. Because things were getting worse and the administration refused even to talk, a sit-in became necessary. And the community's enthusiasm has been enormous. Our rallies now attract 2,000 people. Almost 400 faculty members endorsed the sit-in in a full-page ad in the Boston Globe. Five US senators and four representatives have pledged their support. Ted Kennedy, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and AFL-CIO president John Sweeney have all come to the steps of Massachusetts Hall to embrace our cause--that is, the cause of the thousands of workers, faculty, students, clergy and others who insist that Harvard change its attitude. More than a hundred camp outside the occupied building in tents each night in solidarity. To walk away from this building would be to walk away from all these supporters and from all the workers I know who receive poverty wages.

And so, as I write, we have occupied the offices of the president, provost and treasurer of Harvard for about 300 hours. We've been sleeping on their Persian rugs, sitting in their antique chairs and redecorating their walls with our posters (using university-approved poster tacks, of course). We still don't know how this will end, but we already know some of the things that have come of it. Here is what one professor wrote me: "In my ten years at Harvard, I've never seen the university like this--students, workers, faculty so united. Whatever else happens, you guys have accomplished what to me always seemed the impossible, which is to unite this campus across class and racial lines. It's amazing to me, and I'm so proud of you all."

With over 100,000 members in college and university chapters, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was the largest and most significant of the 1960s New Left organizations in the United States. While its history has been told before in a few well-known titles--Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS, James Miller's "Democracy Is in the Streets," Todd Gitlin's The Sixties and Thomas Powers's Diana among them--SDS is finally getting visual treatment as well with Helen Garvy's intriguing film Rebels With a Cause.

Garvy, a former assistant national secretary of SDS, reveals an insider's history of the organization with her film, built around the voices of twenty-eight of its leading activists, including Tom Hayden, Carl Oglesby, Casey Hayden and Bernardine Dohrn. And despite a sparse use of visual images, narration and music, Garvy has created an affecting picture. She avoids the "talking heads" danger inherent in documentary technique through tight editing--one interviewee picks up right where another leaves off. The effect is that of a seamless and compelling narration to the unfolding history and issues.

While other films about the '60s capture the energy and excitement of student rebellion with footage of protests and confrontation, this one captures the thought that went into the activism. It is the best film record we have of the intellectual motivations of the New Left in the United States.

The SDS story as Garvy tells it begins with its founding in 1960 as an organization concerned with racism, poverty, democratization of American society, the cold war and the danger of nuclear confrontation. SDS sought to identify itself with the left but avoid the traditional leftist pitfalls of sectarianism and dogmatism. The Port Huron Statement, drafted two years later by Tom Hayden, began with an expression of the generational anxieties to which SDS was responding: "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit."

Despite the great concerns and ambitions of its founders, SDS was at first nothing more than a loose network of activist friends on a few college campuses (Michigan and Swarthmore, in particular) and in New York City. Then the contacts began to expand; I first heard about SDS in 1963 as a freshman at the University of Oklahoma, where we were concerned with ending both segregation in the surrounding community and compulsory ROTC on campus.

The most important initial organizing thrust of SDS was to serve as a Northern student adjunct to the Southern civil rights movement. But it quickly moved from supporting the Southern struggle to attempting to spark parallel struggles in the North. Through its Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) the organization embarked on a series of ambitious community organizing campaigns in nine Northern cities with the avowed aim of creating an interracial movement of the poor. "We were very serious organizers," Sharon Jeffrey says in the film. "We intended to change the world." Within a couple of years, though, the escalating Vietnam War began to divert the energies of SDS away from its domestic community-organizing agenda. The ERAP began to wither, as did a number of civil rights projects in the South.

Nineteen sixty-five was a critical year in this transition. On April 17 SDS held the first March on Washington to protest US intervention in Vietnam. Exceeding all expectations, 25,000 people participated. Then more than 100,000 took part in the October 15 International Days of Protest and the November 27 second March on Washington sponsored by SDS and a range of other organizations. The number of SDS chapters on campuses multiplied from a few dozen to well over a hundred. Thousands of new members joined up. National and international media descended upon the Chicago national office, where I was working at the time, thinking that they had located the epicenter of the antiwar movement. In reality, by this time, SDS was just one of many organizations responding to a groundswell of opposition to the war.

The war was the new reality. At this time, SDS was actively struggling against America's foreign policy as well as its racial and economic policies at home. Then, in December 1965, Casey Hayden and Mary King, both highly regarded organizers and informal leaders from the civil rights movement, opened up yet another front. They circulated a letter, titled "Sex and Caste," that called upon women in SDS (and the movement in general) to initiate dialogues over "the problems between men and women." This call added gender to the inequalities of race and class that the organization sought to redress. It also marked the beginning of women's activism in the movement.

For the next four years, SDS played a prominent role in the growth of a freewheeling and militant new radicalism. But the movement defied any kind of central control, and a succession of national SDS leaders struggled to establish a clear role for the organization.

An initially small faction dominated by the Progressive Labor Party (PL), a pro-China splinter from the Communist Party, made inroads into SDS year by year, and its opponents among the national leadership grew increasingly rattled as they sought to fashion nonsectarian alternatives to PL's brand of Marxism-Leninism. The 1969 SDS convention in Chicago broke into warring factions--one controlled by PL, another by the emergent Weather Underground and others, including the Revolutionary Youth Movement. The Weather faction controlled the national SDS office until early 1970, then closed it down before going underground. That marked the formal end of the organization.

In many ways SDS succumbed to the very sectarianism that it had sought to avoid. "There was a process of one-upmanship on rhetoric," Bob Ross says, "that eventually one-upped us right out of touch with either students or the mass of the people."

Most of the tendencies of the radical politics of the seventies, including clandestine guerrilla organizations and the attempts to build Marxist-Leninist parties, can be traced from the breakup of SDS. Some members, however, came out of SDS committed to electoral politics and moving the Democratic Party to the left. A significant number also continued to pursue grassroots organizing strategies.

Although the SDS name continued to be employed by PL for several years, it was not the same organization and has never been recognized as such by original SDS activists. Consequently, Garvy does not include the PL "SDS" in her treatment. However, she does describe the Weather Underground experience, since its leading activists had roots in SDS. A number of these, including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Cathy Wilkerson, speak in the film.

Garvy treads cautiously in this part of Rebels. Since the Weather campaign of terrorism continues to be an issue of sore dispute among SDS veterans, Garvy tells two sides of this story. She includes both a point-blank denunciation of the Weathermen as unrepresentative of the movement by former SDS president Todd Gitlin and a sympathetic interpretation--that the Weather tactics grew out of frustration with the failure of large-scale marches and other nonviolent tactics to stop the war. "In some ways," Jane Adams says, "I felt that they were my agent despite the fact that I didn't agree with them. I could fully understand the frustration out of which their rage came."

But not all of SDS's long-term survival problems were due to its internal dynamics. Documents released through the Freedom of Information Act confirm what was widely suspected then: The FBI and other government agencies kept close tabs on SDS and disrupted its activities through the FBI counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO). The full extent to which government agencies contributed to destroying the organization's effectiveness remains unknown. There are still-unreleased files, and, as is typical, much of the content of the released material is blacked out.

Garvy situates SDS as a phenomenon of homegrown radicalism in the great tradition of American grassroots democratic movements. What she chooses not to show is that SDS was also a phenomenon of the American left.

SDS was as much an outgrowth of, and entangled in, the left-wing political tradition as it was a spontaneous response to issues of the time. A number of its original activists came from left-wing, including Communist, families. The organization began as the student affiliate of the cold war social-democratic League for Industrial Democracy (LID), which had a long history of intraleft warfare against Communism.

The LID parentage proved increasingly problematic as SDS got older, especially as the Vietnam War became a major issue. (Leading members of LID supported the war.) The final straw that broke the relationship came at the 1965 national convention when SDS voted to remove a clause in its constitution that barred Communists from membership. SDS's "anti-anti-Communist" stance could not be tolerated by the profoundly anti-Communist LID, and a formal separation was negotiated a couple of months later.

Throughout its history, SDS saw itself as an alternative to the traditional left-wing Trotskyist, Maoist and Soviet-aligned groups, which it dismissed as sectarian and largely irrelevant to the nation's political life. (It was in SDS that I learned the difference between an "-ist" and an "-ite." You used the former for polite descriptions, the latter for ideological enemies.) Nevertheless, it had both to struggle with those groups and to participate with them in coalition activities. Thus, historical events of the left, from the split between communists and social democrats to the Sino-Soviet split (via the PL), contributed to creating the organizational environment in which SDS functioned.

Garvy can be forgiven for leaving out this part of the story in the interest of producing a film for wide consumption--how many ordinary people would want to sit through hearing SDS veterans onscreen reminiscing about their differences with Trotskyism or other leftist tendencies? Still, those differences did make up a part of the nitty-gritty struggles of the day and were a significant part of SDS history.

Rebels With a Cause can best be described as oral history in the form of a film. As such it is a faithful record--without the left-wing context--of that part of the 1960s movement. It is especially valuable as an antidote to the cynical interpretations that dismiss the 1960s activists as either misguided idealists or hedonists consumed with sex, drugs and rock and roll. But beyond establishing an accurate record, the film's contribution is its transmission of historical memory to later generations. It is an especially valuable resource for current activists who wish to link their struggles to those of the recent past.

I was therefore curious to know what this generation of students, who had not been born when the 1960s movement took place, would think of Garvy's film. There had been no overt censorship to prevent transmittal of the memory. But would other mechanisms keep students from knowing this history? Would they consider the events to be too remotely in the past to have any relevance to their lives?

I showed Rebels With a Cause at the university where I teach--Eastern Connecticut State, a working-class campus not at all known for student activism. As one might expect, reactions and interests varied. What I was most struck by was that while all the students had heard of the civil rights movement, many had not heard of the antiwar movement.

The media and schools have enshrined the civil rights movement, as they should, as a good example of a social movement in American history. The antiwar movement is another matter. It is largely ignored by the media and schools because it is still controversial--both in terms of whether citizens should have protested that war and, most important, for the "dangerous" example it set for how citizens might respond to present and future wars engaged in by this country.

In Rebels With a Cause Helen Garvy has given us a resource for keeping alive the radical memory of such dangerous examples and dreams in American history.

When it comes to oil politics and Alaska the Bush Administration and the environmental movement are already treading the measures of a familiar dance. President Bush is insisting on the urgency of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He points to a supposed oil shortage that has somehow darkened homes and businesses up and down the West Coast. The environmental movement is already ramping up its national mail campaign rallying supporters for the battle to save the Refuge.

The actual game is bigger and more sinister.

Let's start by disposing of some myths. Start with the ludicrous claim of the Bush crowd that California's energy crisis can be solved by oil drilling in Alaska. Nationwide, oil provides only 3 percent of the source fuel used to generate electricity. In California the figure is less than 1 percent.

Bush is offering California exemptions from its supposedly onerous clean-air rules, claiming that once freed from such red tape the state's utilities and power producers could build a new generation of plants powered by fossil fuels. The Wildlife Refuge's oil won't be of much help here, since government officials estimate that even on an expedited schedule, oil couldn't flow from the Refuge until the year 2015.

Nor is the oil companies' problem in Alaska a shortage. Recall that back in 1995 British Petroleum, ARCO and Chevron entreated President Clinton to cancel the twenty-two-year ban on export of crude oil from Alaska to other countries. Congress had made such a ban a condition for permitting construction of the Alaska pipeline. The intent of the ban was to insure that Alaska's oil would help stave off any West Coast oil shortage. The companies wanted the ban lifted because they had a glut on their hands and required new markets.

Clinton dutifully assented, and the oil companies began exporting Alaskan crude forthwith to Japan, South Korea and China. The extremes to which they went in using Clinton's waiver to bilk US consumers came to light in January when The Oregonian won a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, gaining access to 4,000 pages of documents in the Federal Trade Commission's files concerning the merger of BP-Amoco with ARCO.

An FTC economist had concluded that BP-Amoco was selling oil to Asian refineries at prices lower than it could sell to US refineries on the West Coast, in order to manufacture a US shortage. As evidence the FTC had e-mail traffic passing between BP managers who talked about "shorting the West Coast market" in order to "leverage up" the prices there. Another BP manager gloated that this scheme was a "no brainer." The FTC reckoned that this ploy allowed BP to hike prices at West Coast pumps by as much as 3 cents a gallon.

So the oil companies' strategy is to exploit the electricity crisis to seize at last a number of long-sought objectives: not just access to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which would be a great symbolic victory, but also tax breaks worth billions for oil and gas extraction from wells across the country.

The big prize for the oil companies in North America isn't the Refuge but sites off the Alaska coast and the Gulf of Mexico: "Deepwater," says Geoff Kieburtz of Salomon Smith Barney, "is where the real pure exploration activity is going on in this country." Here we come to one of the lesser-known legacies of the Clinton era. Under the encouragement of Bruce Babbitt's Interior Department, deepwater drilling operations nearly doubled in the Gulf of Mexico in the year 2000 alone.

Among those roaring their protests at this activity is Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, who three days after his brother's inauguration implored the new team to place a moratorium on deepwater wells in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, saying that "Florida's economy is based upon tourism and other activities that depend on a clean and healthy environment."

Right now the Interior Department is looking at 688 lease applications that piled up in the Clinton years for new offshore oil development in the Beaufort Sea, and from the Gulf of Alaska's Copper River Delta (perhaps the greatest remaining salmon fishery in the world), the Cook Inlet (flanked by the Katmai National Park and the Kenai Peninsula), Bristol Bay and the Chukchi Sea up by Point Hope, the entire coast of Alaska is in play.

At the national level the big environmental groups are focused entirely on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is indeed in peril. But they would be advised to learn the history of that very Refuge. It was originally set aside in 1957 by President Eisenhower. In the same package Ike's Interior Secretary, Fred Seaton, opened up 20 million acres of Arctic coastline to oil development.

There are local groups--from the Gwich'in trying to save the Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve west of Prudhoe Bay, to the Inupiat Eskimos defending their whale hunting grounds against oil derricks in the Beaufort Sea, to the Northern Alaska Environmental Center in Fairbanks--taking on the oil companies' grand plan. They understand the stakes more clearly than the national green groups, with the laudable exception of Greenpeace.

As for the Wilderness Society, National Audubon and the others, rapt in their fixation on the Refuge, they seem to be ceding without a fight the rest of the Alaska coast, the Gulf of Mexico and maybe even the Rocky Mountain front. Just listen to Deborah Williams, executive director of the lavishly funded Alaska Conservation Foundation. She recently journeyed to the Refuge with Lesley Stahl of CBS's 60 Minutes and vowed that not one oil rig would ever rise on the plains of the Refuge.

But at the same time Williams told the New York Times that she supports oil drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve, which is eight times as large and just as pristine as the Refuge, because "I drive a car and use petroleum products. We all have to be responsible and balanced." Williams, it should be added, was working for Bruce Babbitt at the Interior Department as his Alaska specialist when he OK'd test drilling in that very part of the Alaskan tundra.

"Yes, nonviolence is a noble ideal, but do you really think it would stop a Hitler?" Or a street thug, a dictator, a death squad?

Pacifists are long accustomed to these questions, mostly thrown up by self-proclaimed realists. And they get the put-down message: Nonviolence is a creed only slightly less trifling than hippies sticking flowers in soldiers' gun barrels.

Readers whose minds are open to another view will be rewarded by A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict. It is a comprehensive and lucidly written addition to the literature of peace. Its worthiness puts the authors, Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, in the high company of Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston, Michael True of Assumption College and Richard Deats of the Fellowship of Reconciliation--all scholars of mettle who bring before the public the many historical examples where the force of organized, nonviolent resistance defeated oppression.

Ackerman and DuVall, deserving of praise for writing nonideologically when they might easily and self-indulgently not have (and thus lost readers looking for hard reporting rather than soft commentary), use fourteen chapters to document and analyze history-altering reforms created by nonviolent strategies. These include the early 1940s Danish resistance to the Nazis; Solidarity's strikes in the 1980s, which eventually took down the Soviet puppet regime in Poland; the 1980s public demands for free elections that removed the Pinochet junta in Chile; the near-bloodless elimination of the Marcos government in the Philippines; the work of the Palestinian-American Mubarak Awad to rally nonviolent civil resistance against Israeli authorities in the occupied territories; and civil rights workers in Nashville in the 1960s.

These are the better-known examples. Ackerman and DuVall also explore the removal of autocratic governments in El Salvador (in 1944), Mongolia and Eastern Europe. Oddly, the authors omit the story of Le Chambon, the French village that was a leading center for hiding Jews in the early 1940s and whose pacifist citizens successfully faced down the Nazis with weapons of the spirit, not weapons of steel. (That story is told by Philip Hallie in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed.)

Ackerman and DuVall do not portray Awad, King Christian X of Denmark, Gandhi of India, Mkhuseli Jack of South Africa, Reverend James Lawson of Nashville and others as willing martyrs for the cause. Instead, they were hard-thinking political strategists who built bases for citizen support that would not crack when the heat rose and the dogs snarled.

"Nonviolent resistance," the authors write,

becomes a force more powerful than the hand of an oppressor to the extent that it takes away his capacity for control. Embracing nonviolence for its own sake does not produce this force. A strategy for action is needed, and that strategy has to involve attainable goals, movement unity, and robust sanctions that restrict the opponent.... When the regime realizes it can no longer dictate the outcome, the premise and means of its power implode. Then the end is only a matter of time.

Debunking the prevailing image of pacifists as appeasers or well-meaning but addled dreamers who've read one too many biographies of St. Francis, Ackerman and DuVall provide ample details to dispel those errant notions. As portrayed here, organizers of successful collective, nonviolent opposition to oppressors tend to be self-disciplined, practical and dogged--traits commonly held up as military virtues, which is why Gandhi so admired soldiers. The authors write:

Nonviolent action is like violent combat in at least two ways. It does not succeed automatically, and it does not operate mysteriously--it works by identifying an opponent's vulnerabilities and taking away his ability to maintain control. If a regime intends to remain in power indefinitely, it will require extensive, long-term interaction with those it rules--and that creates a dilemma: the broader the regime's system of control, the more vulnerable it is, because it depends on too many actors to ensure that violence against resisters will always work. Once an opposition shows its followers that this weakness exists, it can begin to pry loose the support that the regime requires--its revenue, its foreign investments, or even its military.... Victory is not a function of fate; it is earned.

Tolstoy described pacifists similarly: "For us to struggle, the forces being so unequal, must appear insane. But if we consider our opponent's means of strife and our own, it is not our intention to fight that will seem absurd, but that the thing we mean to fight will still exist. They have millions of money and millions of obedient soldiers; we have only one thing, but that is the most powerful thing in the world--Truth."

Peter Ackerman, formerly a visiting scholar at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, and Jack DuVall, who has worked in television and as a political speechwriter, also collaborated, along with producer Steve York, in a three-hour PBS documentary of the same title that played last September. The film quotes a postwar historian summarizing the Danish resistance to the Nazis by strikes, work slowdowns, hiding or helping Jews and not obeying orders to disperse: "Denmark had not won the war but neither had it been defeated or destroyed. Most Danes had not been brutalized, by the Germans or each other. Nonviolent resistance saved the country and contributed more to the Allied victory than Danish arms ever could have done."

A Chilean leader said of the organized resistance against Pinochet in the 1980s and the successful call for fair elections: "We didn't protest with arms. That gave us more power."

Refreshingly, the authors offer compelling observations--almost as sidenotes--about the ineffectiveness of violence. Lech Walesa and Polish strikers taking on the Jaruzelski regime remembered that except for momentary glee nothing was accomplished by Polish workers in 1970 and 1976 when they burned down Communist Party buildings. "In the 20th century's armed liberation movements," Ackerman and DuVall write, "portraits of gunwielding martyrs--the Che Guevaras of the world--were often flaunted as symbols, but none of those struggles produced freedom."

A Force More Powerful will likely stand as a book more powerful than any guts-and-glory war memoirs by generals or gun-toters, or any extollings of military might by one-note historians.

For more than two years, the antisweatshop movement has been the hottest political thing on campus [see Featherstone, "The New Student Movement," May 15, 2000]. Students have used sit-ins, rallies, hunger strikes and political theater to demand that garments bearing their institution's logo be made under half-decent working conditions.

From the beginning, the major players were students and administrators. While some progressive faculty members--mostly from sociology departments--offered the students early support, economists, who like to think of their discipline as the queen of the social sciences, kept fairly quiet.

That changed this past July. After colleges and universities made a number of visible concessions to the students over the spring, a group of some 250 economists and lawyers released a letter to administrators, basically complaining that they hadn't been consulted. The letter, initially drafted by Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University and burnished to perfection by a collective of free-trade zealots calling themselves the Academic Consortium on International Trade (ACIT), reproached administrators for making concessions "without seeking the views of scholars" in relevant disciplines. Judging from their letter, the views of these scholars might not have been terribly enlightening. On page 24 of the magazine, the ACIT missive appears with some comments (see "Special" box, right).