ON THE NEW STUDENT MOVEMENT AT UC BERKELEY
Contributions to an Ongoing Discussion from the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), University of Michigan
This statement was written on May 16, 1999:
BAMN at the University of Michigan salutes the new student movement that is emerging at the University of California Berkeley in the struggle in defense of Ethnic Studies .
As an organization committed to the defense of affirmative action by any means necessary, BAMN recognizes the importance of defending Ethnic Studies programs at UC Berkeley and across the country . Created by the same mass student struggles that won affirmative action , these programs are now under attack by the same forces that are seeking to destroy affirmative action in higher education and dismantle all remaining measures aimed at integrating the public schools . The UC Berkeley struggle sends an important warning to all these racist forces that they must now contend with the development of a new, militant mass civil rights movement that will necessarily be led by students and youth .
The power of the emerging new movement at UC Berkeley derives from three features of the recent struggle that , taken together , mark a new phase in the hard fight to rebuild mass struggle against oppression and injustice , not only at Berkeley but nationally .
1. REJECTING “MOURN, DON’T ORGANIZE.”
First, the hundreds of students who mobilized in defense of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley were convinced that they were fighting not only for a good cause but a winning one.
For too long , progressive students have tended to feel that the most important causes they cared about were lost causes , at least for the foreseeable future. In BAMN’s view this pessimism, actively promoted by many self-anointed student leaders, has held back the development of mass struggle for many years. The tactics typical of these leaders have all been predicated either on the certainty of defeat or the danger of victory . Since it was founded at Berkeley in 1995 , BAMN has fought against the impotent tactics of defeatist leaders and for the methods of mass struggle that alone offer the possibility of victory .
The motto of the defeatists has been “Mourn , don ‘t organize .” Their tactics have featured funeral processions for past gains supposedly lost decisively to right -wing attacks , complete with coffins ; building occupations conceived as the civil disobedience publicity stunts of a select few in which the noble but futile moral protest of a handful of martyrs would be substituted for the mass movement that alone can win; “struggles ” conceived from the standpoint of how to MINIMIZE struggle ; “actions ” conceived from the standpoint of how to MINIMIZE action ; “mass meetings ” conceived from the standpoint of how to MINIMIZE mass democracy ; and “mobilizations ” conceived from the standpoint of how to SHUT DOWN any emerging movement as soon as the immediate “mobilization ” is over .
As the struggle in defense of Ethnic Studies has grown this spring at UC Berkeley , more and more students have joined the struggle with the conviction that it was possible for their movement to save and expand Ethnic Studies . That growing sense that victory was possible has been accompanied by a more slowly growing realization that a victory by a new student movement on this issue could not be limited to Ethnic Studies alone . Victory in this struggle could shift the balance of forces on campus decisively in favor of minority and oppressed students and the left for the first time in many years. It could open a new period of winning student struggles at Berkeley -and if such a period opened here, the possibility of the new movement at Berkeley spreading to campuses fighting racist attacks across the country would be very real.
The growing consciousness that this struggle could actually win an important victory , could actually reverse an important right -wing attack and force new gains for students , was the first source of the power of the new Berkeley movement . It meant that students convinced they could win increasingly felt they had to win and tended more and more to demand methods of struggle that could produce , not more impotent moral protest , but real victory .
For the first time in many years, UC Berkeley students have begun to feel the potential power of their own collective action .
2. RECOGNIZING OUR ENEMY
Second , Chancellor Berdahl ‘s repression of Ethnic Studies demonstrators and hunger strikers is producing a new level of consciousness of the real character and role of the UC Berkeley administration .
Since the University of California Regents voted to ban affirmative action in 1995 , the UC Berkeley administration has earned a more and more ambivalent attitude from antiracist students . Presenting themselves as the defenders of affirmative action , in reality they have been its executioners . The only force capable of saving affirmative action at UC Berkeley and other California campuses is a new mass student movement . And to that force the UC Berkeley administration is fundamentally opposed , because of the threat such a movement would present to its own power.
In the 1960 s and 1970 s, universities like UC Berkeley were compelled by the sheer power of mass struggles on the campuses and in the streets and workplaces of America to grant a series of progressive reforms. Since the mass movements that waged those struggles were shut down
more than a quarter century ago , the University administrations that had adopted progressive reforms only because they were forced to have abandoned, distorted, or watered down the reforms. But they have shrewdly learned to use the surviving progressive measures to co-opt and
tie the hands of progressive students , presenting themselves as the bearers and defenders of social progress in higher education. In an increasingly reactionary political climate, many students understandably came, unreflectingly, to accept the myth that university campuses were enclaves of progressive thought and practice protected by the enlighted despotism of benign administrations.
The real character of this administration has been exposed for hundreds of students by the behavior and attitudes of Chancellor Berdahl in the course of the Ethnic Studies struggle. An apparent admirer of his government ‘s “bomb first, negotiate later ” policy in the war against Yugoslavia, Berdahl has now clearly demonstrated that his preferred response to students fighting for justice is police violence. Apparently taking his cue from the NATO briefers and their “collateral damage ,” Berdahl ‘s response to student outrage over his liking for repression is arrogance and contempt for his victims.
To play the decisive role that radical UC Berkeley students played in the development of the mass youth movement of the 1960 s, they first had to recognize that their main enemy was at home : the “liberal ” administration of their own campus. In the wake of the two mass arrests of the past weeks, hundreds of Berkeley students are awakening to the same lessons that radicalized and emboldened their 1960 s predecessors. They are beginning to see the UC Berkeley administration for what it really is: not the wise overseer of the academic search for the truth but a section of the state apparatus, an elitist top -down bureaucracy with an authoritarian fist under its liberal velvet glove .
Students are beginning to realize that their university is run by an administration that is not accountable to University students , teachers , and workers or the communities most of them come from, but to corporate wealth and a political elite that has made the corporations ‘ agenda their own. Accountable as he is to these forces and not to minority and other antiracist students, the Chancellor ‘s words and actions are beginning to reveal the truth that his and his administration ‘s authority rests not on the power of reason but on the power of the club and the gun .
3. MASS DEMOCRACY AND BUILDING NEW LEADERSHIP
Third , in the wake of the May 7 sellout of the Ethnic Studies struggle, many students are beginning to understand one of BAMN’s central arguments since 1995: that a movement for social justice today cannot win unless it is built with the methods of mass democracy. This recognition must lead in the next period to the emergence of new, younger leaders who will identify with and develop rather than fear the power of mass democracy .
The mass meetings that have witnessed a confrontation between critical students and defensive, bureaucratic leaders represent an important new development , as the new movement begins to thresh out the lessons of its struggles. Student activists are beginning a process that will eventually enable them to wrest their new movement from the hands of leaders who view it, not as the great mass democratic force it is, but as a mere bargaining chip in petty maneuvers and a backdrop for the theatre of their own egos.
The May 9 statement signed by Frank Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, and Dylan Rodriguez, makes clear the connection between the sidelining of mass democracy and the bureaucratic watering down of the original program of this movement -the process that led to sellout. The leaders of a mass struggle should be elected by the movement that forms in the course of that struggle and should be kept constantly accountable to the movement through democratic , open mass meetings. Those democratic mass meetings should make ALL the fundamental decisions of the struggle. No demands should be put forward nor any “tentative agreement ” reached except on the basis of full prior democratic discussion and decisions by these mass meetings.
Negotiations with administrators should be conducted in public, in front of the movement, or, if closed, interrupted frequently for negotiators to report fully on the details of negotiations so that the movement maintains control over its own struggle. The mass meetings to which such reports are given should summarily remove and replace any negotiators who are showing signs of buckling under pressure. Management tactics to wear down inexperienced negotiators like marathon bargaining sessions should be rejected out of hand. If concessions must be made, the movement itself should decide on them , on the basis of its own democratic process of discussion and debate, free from the false friendliness and artificial pressures that inevitably undermine the will to fight of negotiators cut off from the source of their power: the mass movement whose agents they should be.
Mass democratic processes such as this, in the context of rising mass struggle, will create the conditions for the development of a new generation of young leaders who will regard accountability to the movement as a fundamental condition of bold leadership . Such leaders will not view mass meetings as events to be manipulated or democratic criticism as disruption to be suppressed. They will see a vital, active, critical, democratic relationship with a growing mass movement as an indispensable condition of their development as strong leaders , whose talents exist to serve the movement and not the other way around .
4. THE HUNGER STRIKE VS. MASS DEMOCRACY
On the one hand, it is clear that many students joined this struggle in part out of admiration and support for the courage of the hunger strikers and many more out of outrage at the manhandling of hunger strikers by Berdahl ‘s cops. On the other hand, as BAMN at UC Berkeley has emphasized, in this struggle the hunger strike tactic itself was used by some leaders both to subvert the movement ‘s democratic control of the struggle and as a way of discouraging any questioning of a sellout agreement -to oppose the sellout amounted to a demand that the hunger strikers continue to starve themselves!
The reality is that the power of this movement did not derive from the hunger strike, but from the mass mobilization that had preceded it and that rose to a peak that even Berdahl did not dare to ignore after the mass arrests in the wee hours of May 4. In the discussions that will
continue next term, the new movement will have ample opportunity to draw its own balance sheet of the hunger strike tactic. The conclusions BAMN had already drawn from its past experience with this tactic have only been reinforced by the events at UC Berkeley. Whateve arguments may be made for hunger striking , they are outweighed by two decisive facts.
First, a hunger strike is inherently undemocratic, because it substitutes the charismatic authority derived from the self-sacrifice of a self- selected courageous few for the control the rank and file of a movement should have over the development of their own struggle. Whatever the intentions of individual hunger strikers, their fast becomes as much a pressure directed against the self-activity of the movement itself as a pressure directed against the administration. It takes real control away from the mobilized masses and places it in the hands of the hunger strikers or, as they inevitably weaken , in the hands of bureaucratic leaders willing to exploit the emotions we, but not a Berdahl, inevitably feel for the suffering of our brave sisters and brothers .
Second, this undemocratic character of a hunger strike also inevitably places a movement in the intolerable position of limiting the extent of its intransigence, of its real will to fight, by the physical and mental condition of the hunger strikers. A hunger strike can be used to embarrass and expose the cruelty of an oppressor or as the only method of struggle available in desperate conditions . But the classical argument for the possibility of a victorious hunger strike rests on one or both of two calculations : that our opponent is too compassionate to allow a hunger striker to die, or that our movement is so large and militant that our opponent is too terrified to allow a hunger striker to die. BAMN strongly suggests that our movement should never again place its leaders ‘ health and lives in jeopardy because somebody has false faith in the compassion of a Chancellor Berdahl!
BAMN does not believe that our movement needs a handful of martyrs. Our movement needs confidence in itself as the beginning of a new mass movement, in its own democratic decision -making , in its own collective self-activity, in its own ability to learn from defeats and victories and to grow. It needs a bold will to struggle for justice in a time when reaction is arrogant and in which we have no alternative but to start out relatively small, weak, and confused. All new social movements start this way. And all new social movements start young and inexperienced .
The Berkeley students this spring have raised the entire struggle for equality to a new level . Although BAMN has offered here a number of criticisms of this struggle,
16 May 1999
