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<H2>History this week No.52 /2011</H2><!-- google_ad_section_end -->
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<P><STRONG>By Christopher Carrico</STRONG></P>
<H4><EM>‘It was telling that Obama said in his 2010 State of the Union Address
that universities would have to make more sacrifices in the current economy. FDR
gave a similar speech once, except he called on the captains of industry and
bankers to make sacrifices, not public employees and universities.’ Okla
Elliott, asitoughttobe.com, 3 March 2011</EM></H4>
<P>Last month in CounterPunch, in the article ‘Why Madison matters’, scholar and
policy researcher Andrew Levine wrote: “Almost overnight, the world changed.
Madison (Wisconsin) became Ground Zero in America’s domestic class struggle;
and, just as amazing, labor launched an uprising in defense of union rights
which thousands of students joined.”</P>
<P>There are two things that Levine finds amazing here. First, he finds it
amazing that class struggle and a labour movement have found new life in the US.
Given American labour history of recent decades, this is reason enough to be
amazed. A second amazement was the fact that a student movement and a labour
movement were working in solidarity with one another. This is a remarkable
development for the American scene, where student-worker alliances remained
largely matters of theory in the 1960s (not realized as a concrete reality as
they were in some other countries).</P>
<P>Levine noted that in the US in the 1960s, one major reason for the failure of
a real student-worker movement to materialise was the fact that the majority of
the American working class did not support the student anti-war movement. On
asitoughttobe.com on 13 March, I argued that the main reason that the present
situation is different was that:</P>
<P>“Unlike the labor-capital pact that supported the military industrial complex
of post WWII America, many more working people in the US today see a connection
not between military spending and their livelihoods as workers in the
military-industrial complex. Rather, the experience of today’s working
class and poor is that spending on never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has
created a federal debt crisis in the US that the government attempts to
partially offset through dollars saved by the destruction of what remains of a
social safety net and basic social services. The same class fraction that once
formed the American ‘labor aristocracy’ now, incredibly, has begun to see the
truth that Martin Luther King, Jr, among others, articulated in the US during
the late 1960s: that the anti-war movement, and the movement for social and
economic justice in the United States, are indeed a part of the same struggle
and the same fight.”</P>
<P>If the American working class has stripped away some of its illusions about
the War Economy, American students have also stripped away some of their
illusions that gaining a tertiary education will guarantee them the possibility
of rising above their class. “We see students in the United States and elsewhere
faced with the harsh reality that, in spite of their higher level of education,
they have no reasonable basis by which to believe that they will do better, or
even as well, as their parents’ generation did economically.” The US is one of
many countries where this scenario is true. About the UK I wrote: “Something of
this same realization lies behind what has driven the recent student movement in
the UK. Sparked in part by drastic tuition hikes put into place by the new
Lib-Dem/Conservative coalition government, one interesting fact about the UK
movement was the widespread participation of secondary school students. This is
perhaps because the tuition hikes end the illusion of a meritocracy, and signal
that even those poor and working class students who worked hard and achieved
high test scores will increasingly be locked out of tertiary education.
Locked out of the possibility of rising above their class by way of higher
education, poor and working class students face a bleak future, with dwindling
opportunities for employment without further education, accompanied by dwindling
opportunities for advancement by pursuing diplomas and degrees through the
university system.”</P>
<P>In the US, students and workers in Wisconsin were responding to the newly
elected ‘Tea Party’ Governor’s bill to eliminate the right to collective
bargaining for the state’s public sector employees. It was opposed by a strong
and fighting movement among the public sector unions, and was opposed just as
strongly by student activists from Wisconsin’s colleges and universities. The
student and worker battles ended in calls for a general strike.</P>
<P>The immediate battles have been lost. The bill was passed and signed by the
Wisconsin Governor. Workers in Wisconsin did not go out on General Strike. But
there is still the feeling among American progressives that something new was
born in this fight; in spite of its failure to achieve its immediate
objectives.</P>
<P>I would argue that a new spirit has been born worldwide in recent years that
has meant, once again, as in the 1960s, student movements are at the vanguard of
social change in many parts of the world. For many years, the student movement
in Iran has been major force in opposing the government of the Islamic Republic
of Iran. The student movement has been a steadfast leader in the anti- and
alter-globalization movements around the world (usually more steadfast that the
trade unions and the political parties), and in many places has transformed
these into very assertive movements.</P>
<P>Massive student protests were central in the recent unraveling of the North
African regimes. They played and continue to play a critical role in Tunisia and
in Egypt, for instance. One factor at work here is the large numbers of young
people in these countries, many of whom are unable to find much in the way of
economic opportunities. A New York Times article of 30 January, 2011,
entitled ‘Egyptian opposition’s old guard falls in behind young leaders’ argued:
“Both newcomers and veterans of the opposition movement say it is the young
Internet pioneers who remain at the vanguard behind the scenes.”</P>
<P>In the Caribbean, in April last year, the students of the University of
Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus staged an action that was originally intended to
be a 2-day strike on one campus, that turned into a strike that shut down 10 of
the 11 UPR campuses, and saw students occupying the Rio Piedras Campus for 60
days. Among the issues at stake were tuition hikes, and the government’s refusal
to provide adequate financial support to the university system.</P>
<P>In modern times, student movements have often played key roles in struggles
for the transformation of the wider societies of which they are a part. Even in
their most narrowly focused and parochial forms, student movements have played
important roles in the democratization of education systems, in reforms and
transformations to the educational curriculum, and engagements between academia
and issues of wider social significance.</P>
<P>In the Caribbean, as in much of the world, 1968 was a watershed year for
student movements. In October 1968, when UWI lecturer Dr Walter Rodney was
refused re-entry to Jamaica by the Hugh Shearer government, a student group from
UWI Mona held a demonstration that shut down the campus, and led a march on the
Prime Minister’s office and Parliament. The chaos and destruction that followed
as a result of the actions that poor and unemployed Jamaican youths also took in
protest of Shearer’s ban have come to be known as the Rodney
Riots. When student movements look beyond their narrow
parochial interests they can become truly significant agents of change in the
societies of which they are a part. They have been a part of coalitions of
forces that have helped to end wars, change budgets, change constitutions, and
bring down governments. Student movements with this wider social vision
seemed to have reached their highest degree of significance in the 1960s, but in
2010 and 2011 they have shown themselves to be serious contenders in the fight
for social change once again.</P>
<P>However, as Alex Callinicos noted in The Guardian late last year (26 December
2010), “Student demonstrators can’t do it on their own”. Students lack the
collective power and the organizing ability to fundamentally transform the
societies around them without making linkages, and acting in clear solidarity
with other social movements, particularly the labour movement.</P>
<P>Callinicos writes (referring to the situation in the UK, but making an
observation that is widely applicable in many other places) that “students lack
the collective economic strength that, for all the setbacks it has suffered, the
trade union movement still possesses”.</P>
<P>It is precisely this kind of student-labour alliance that caused so much hope
in the case of the movement in Wisconsin, and student-labour alliances were (and
continue to be) a major factor in the Egyptian revolution. There is something
about the character of these kinds of alliance that gives them a tremendous
amount of potential.</P>
<P>Perhaps it is because they bring mental and material production in their most
organized forms together into a single movement. Whatever the underlying social
reasons might be, student-worker movements have historically sometimes become
movements for revolutionary social change.</P></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>