Problems of the Student Movement
Recently, it has come to the attention of myself and others that I have worked with that the community where we live suffers because of our presence as transient students. I am a member of a student organization, and we have begun organizing clothing drives, starting to help out and collect information from community sources about the conditions, as well as collecting statistical information on the community and its makeup. We are a student organization, but have been attempting to build and spread roots in the community, to engage in work in support of community organizations which have similar goals, and build a united front for mass work. There are several weaknesses to the nature of our organization.
First, there is no class basis for organizing the students. Although we attempt to integrate members of the community, the main organization’s body is made up of students. The first concerns we have had for the organization in this regard are with its longevity; the consistency of mass work must be maintained throughout the organization’s work. One professor is currently helping us to set up a means of producing food for distribution by appropriating the university farm, and helped a similar organization set itself up along these lines in Columbia, Missouri. The organization of students is by necessity pragmatic. However, we cannot divorce ourselves from the masses; how can we serve them, as Mao said, “with heart and soul” if we do not know what service they require? The earliest stages of our organizing have been in engaging in work through other organizations; however, we did set up a clothing distribution in the fall, using students pragmatically as a source of resources.
The greatest benefit of the students in our case is in their class makeup; we have successfully raised money by appealing to the petty bourgeoisie directly, and turned this into necessities for the community. We have taken currently to organizing a student forum as a mass action campaign, in order to mobilize students in support of mass organizing. This has two pragmatic purposes: forming a proper practice in preparation for a similar community meeting, and to perpetuate the mass work by recruiting those who would otherwise have not engaged in it.
Second, the transient nature of the student body means that the present style of organizing may not continue without the current leaders. The aspect of political education is perhaps the most important when recruiting new members to the organization; when new members arrive, it is important to stress mass work as the only viable means of resolving social problems. Our educational policies revolve around the following questions, regarding both local and national matters: “What are our problems?” “How do we mobilize to solve them?”
Organizational meetings revolve around two different axes: committee reports concerning mass work and political education about a particular aspect of class struggle. The most important element of student organizing is the eradication of intellectual arrogance among the students; in other words, believing we know better than the masses. We must consistently criticize ourselves and our styles of work, as this is the only way to come to the correct ideas. For this reason, we have shifted elements of our organization’s internal structure in order to allow for these criticisms. Study cannot be divorced from acting in the community, engaging with the most oppressed of the masses and engaging with their problems on their own levels. The building of solidarity between the student and other members of the community is our first and final goal; study must yield the weapons with which to confront the problems of our communities, otherwise they were meaningless.
Third, the formation of working groups frequently focuses upon petty university politics. This should be avoided at all costs. We don’t care about the College Democrats or Republicans or Libertarians denouncing us; the only test of our strategies are whether they are successful in aiding the masses and raising their political consciousness. Among the masses in Kirksville, Missouri, there are several who are advanced, many in the intermediate, and many in the backwards. Few people living in the town have any investment in elections; four landlords sit in the five-person city council, a minor shift from the five that there were previously. The current mayor is a landlord, as was the former mayor, and the mayor before that. The most prominent class conflict in Kirksville is the conflict between the renting class and the feudal landlords; it is this that we emphasize and which is most comprehensible to the people here.
The engagement of student working-groups should be made into subsequent community working-groups. The working-groups’ structure is to be equal, with more emphasis placed upon the people of the community, and our roles as students are to be intermediaries and strategists working in concert with them. At no point should the masses be abandoned, should we dictate to the masses what they need or how they suffer; this is the manifestation of arrogance. Student working-groups are made pragmatically for the preservation of revolutionary ideas and styles of work, while community working groups are to be made strategically and with attention paid to the needs of the masses and the increase of their political consciousness.
Can students organize in the mass line? Yes. Anyone can use the mass-line to come to the correct ideas in concert with the needs and ideas of the masses. These three aspects of student organizing lead us away from error and towards engagement with the masses as well as the formation of an intermediary organization in our present area. Recognizing students as a non-material category means that student problems must be subsumed by community problems; the two may, however, intersect, as students may be members of oppressed classes. The transient nature of students means that political education is the top priority for newly recruited students. The style of work must be refined, and the perpetuation and refinement of revolutionary ideas are the top priority where new members of organizations are concerned. Finally, as with any other leftist organization, revolutionary student organizations should avoid placing emphasis on “legitimate politics” of both community and university administrations. Overreliance on either the landlord-dominated city government of Kirksville or the ineffectual petit bourgeois administration of Truman State University will lead to the distortion of revolutionary ideas and the styles of organizing necessary to raise political consciousness in me and my comrades’ organization. Similarly, any focus on “legitimate politics” in any other style of mass-organizing will distort revolutionary ideas. These problems are not insurmountable, and I have even laid out some ways to solve them.
