Visions of Spring

This past semester was my first real dive into full-time student organizing. I had been a supporter and outsider for various campaigns on campus throughout my college career, but it wasn’t until Spring 2010 that I really went all out.

The PHEEIA (Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act), cuts to the SUNY system and tuition hikes were all on the table and the momentum behind activism in defense of public education motivated me and others to take up the cause on our campus. The semester was not as productive, campaign-wise, as we would have liked it to have been. It was an amazing breakthrough, however, when it came to growing as individuals, comrades and student activists. We learned a lot of lessons and gained a lot of experience which can only be obtained through trial and error.

I’d been contemplating writing a critique of our organizing for quite some time. Given that I am no longer a student, I can’t simply internalize the lessons and reapply myself next semester. That’s the job of those who are still on campus. What I can do, however, is convey the experience from my perspective and maybe provide some insight as to what I felt our strengths and weaknesses were and how activism at Stony Brook can improve in the future. I hope, too, that these lessons are not only applicable at one particular university.

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In the Fall of 2009 I studied abroad in Mexico with the Mexico Solidarity Network. During this time I was in pretty constant contact with Brian Kelly who was instrumental in introducing me (electronically) to many of the key organizers I would work with the following semester. In particular he expressed Doug La Rocca as an individual with similar values to me as someone I should link up with once I returned to the States. I contacted Doug while abroad and we began to talk about mobilizing against tuition hikes and budget cuts, as these were topics that were particularly important to him. I was reading a lot of Gramsci at the time and was less concerned with what to campaign for rather than the act of campaigning. I saw the need for any political endeavor to bring together sympathetic souls, build an organizing network and also develop a social network of activists on campus who could mobilize together.

In January 2010 Doug and I met for the first time and began discussing the topic. Each time we met Doug had a stack of books on the subject from the library while I had a lot to say about different actions we could take and how we should structure the campaign. We hadn’t yet reached out to anyone. We spent the next few weeks meeting up daily, gathering information and discussing potential allies. Finally we decided to have an “official” meeting. We only reached out to a handful of people, but those people brought people and we were in the basement of the Stony Brook Union surrounded by fifteen sympathetic souls discussing the issue and strategy. We were more than ecstatic.

We decided to aim at March 4th as our first action, in solidarity with the international actions that would be taking place that day. Due to a number of scheduling conflicts and considerations, we decided that March 3rd would actually be optimal and so it was. We would spend the coming weeks writing op-eds for the university papers, constantly canvassing campus and using various social networks to get the word out. Optimistically we expected around 500 people. Realistically we assumed about 75 people would show up. In the end we were pleasantly surprised with a turn out of around 200 people. We had some speakers, collaborated with the Graduate Student Employees Union and bussed the mass of students to a press conference that the university president, Samuel Stanley, was holding just off campus to protest where the media was.

All in all the action was a success. The rest of the semester, however, we would be met with dwindling turn-outs, plummeting morale and an ongoing discussion both about vanguardism as well as action v. organizing…

I will introduce each point and then elaborate on all of them collectively afterward.

The University As A Means

From here on out I’m going to frame everything individually, as I can’t speak on behalf of anyone else. I saw the university as an end. I believed in the growth of a “student movement”, the development of a real campus community and successfully waged campaigns in coordination with other campuses internationally. I was looking at the university through sunglasses from ‘68, though. In my opinion, the days of the student movement (as we understand it) are over. Campuses are no longer cohesive communities where the students feel their stake and develop a sense of social responsibility. They are cliquey pit stops between adolescence and career wage-slavery, now. They are, in essence, a posse, a beer and a piece of paper. Given this shift, we must adjust our strategy. We should see the university, then, as a pit stop on the way to meaningful revolutionary organizing and action. The university is a means. It is a vehicle and not a destination.

The Vanguard

We dealt a lot with whether or not we were “too centralized” or acting as too much of a “vanguard”. We worried about it so much, in fact, that we tended to avoid delegating real responsibility. What I didn’t realize at the time (I was very worried about becoming a “vanguard”) was that having structure and organization is key to avoiding the formation of a vanguard. Power doesn’t simply disappear, it just gets redistributed. While there was no formal power to be had, social relations, schedules and very likely race and gender dynamics determined who commanded more authority, more respect and more influence in the organizing. Avoiding formal organization didn’t prevent a vanguard, it allowed a power “free market” to develop which was not only incredibly inefficient in allocating power (sound familiar?) but ultimately made for a lot of confusion and inefficiency in organizing.

Action v. Organizing

Prior to March 3rd a few New School “activists” showed up at Stony Brook to talk about student “organizing”. I was still pretty new, uninformed about the New School actions and since they seemed nice enough and spoke with authority I was pretty susceptible to their propaganda. These two have been characterized, since, as insurrectionists or “Peter PAnarchists” and those descriptions, in my opinion, are pretty dead-on. I, unfortunately, followed the trend of valuing action over organization as well as propaganda by the deed. I hadn’t completely gone off the deep end, but I definitely leaned towards action as a means of mobilization.

I got especially anxious and selfish towards the end of the semester. Seeing as I was graduating, I wanted there to be a “boom”. I wanted to go out with a bang. I convinced myself that some kind of militant action would spring the campus into consciousness and pushed pretty hard for a rooftop occupation of the Student Activities Center. Thank goodness it didn’t get off the ground. I don’t know how many others felt the way I did, or at least sympathized. I do know, however, that all of us not being on the same page didn’t help whatsoever and ended up stunting any real organizing we could have accomplished in the last month and a half of the semester.

Wrap Up

Given these (very) basic critiques, I’m going to propose what we should have done and what I believe should be done in the coming semesters for those folk who are still Stony Brook students. Acknowledging the fact that I was wrong about a lot of things only six months ago, I could very well be wrong about some of these things and not realize it until six months from now. The old rule applies here: take the best, leave the rest.

The first step is reevaluating our perception of campus organizing. Our focus should be the horizon, beyond the university, because that is the focus of most college students today. We shouldn’t be thinking about building a student “movement”. We should be thinking about building the movement. This entails smaller, easier reform based campaigns on campus with a focus on education, awareness raising, building social ties and radicalization. We should look at each new addition to the community not as solely an instrument for the current campaign but, rather, as a comrade and someone who will venture out into an institution post-grad and will influence that institution as well as their new social connections through the experiences they had and the radicalization they’ve gone through. This means that our biggest concerns should be developing a strong social network that isn’t merely a bunch of people with the same stake. This means making real friends (not just for the sake of making friends) and developing an environment through which new activists and sympathizers can feel less alienated, more accepted and have access to boundless resources (both social and material) which will assist them in becoming educated on core values such as complementary holism.

While the activism shouldn’t be tied to a formal student organization (for many reasons we discussed this past semester), there is a need for informal structure and organization. The drafting of a mission statement and a constitution can be helpful in clearly laying out boundaries and goals. The creation of committees and perhaps even some elected positions (with automatic democratic recall, of course) will certainly assist in delegating responsibilities and holding people accountable (which are two problems we had). Informal structure can also assist in the creation of a committee dedicated to suggesting and compiling various resources (videos, music and texts) and providing easy access to them for any and all student activists. Most of this is heavily influenced by my understanding of some of what OFS does. These aren’t original ideas, by any stretch of the imagination, but they are ideas that we could not implement given our vanguard-phobia.

The structure of this informal organization, too, should be fluid and complementary to existing student organizations. I don’t think that the informal organization should, itself, wage campaigns. Instead it should encourage participation in campaigns waged by student organizations such as the Social Justice Alliance, Stony Brook Freethinkers etc. It should aim to recruit from these student organizations, radicalize recruits and see those organizations become radicalized through the process. This will help create unity amongst disparate groups and strengthen the activist community at Stony Brook. Again, this is a concept that was introduced to me through OFS. I’m not providing unique ideas here. I’m only applying what I’ve been exposed to.

I’d like to answer any questions, hear any comments and internalize any criticisms so please feel free to leave feedback!