198 Sundays: We Don't Need No Thought Control

In light of UVM student protests over layoffs, I thought today's Method should be 62. Student strike, a form of Noncooperation with Social Events, Customs, and Institutions:

Students and pupils of all types of schools, from elementary schools to universities, may as a means of protest or resistance temporarily refuse to attend classes.  Or they may refuse to cooperate in a related way--by boycotting only some, but not all, lectures, for example; or students may attend classes but refuse to pay attention, as was done at the University of Madrid in 1965 as part of the campaign for an independent student union. 

Possible variations are legion.  It is more usual, however, for all classes to be boycotted. (Student strikes are also called school boycotts or class boycotts.)

The student strike has long been widely used in China, Latin America, and to a lesser degree Africa.
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In 1899 there was a student strike in all universities in the Russian Empire, in protest against the flogging of some students by the police in St Petersburg.  During the 1905 Revolution the student strike which had begun in February was called off in the autumn in order to open the lecture halls to the public for revolutionary talks and discussions in the evenings.

During the Egyptian noncooperation movement of 1919, strikes of schoolboys and students became so frequent that the government had to issue a special order to counter them.  The noncooperation movement which toppled Guatemalan strongman Jorge Ubico in June 1944 began with a strike of students at the national University.

In the Netherlands in the winter of 1940-41 students at Delft and Leiden went on strike in protest against the dismissal of Jewish professors.  Early in 1955 students at the East German University of Greifswald went on strike against a government decree transforming the medical faculty into a military school of medicine directed by the "People's Police."
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Following the United States' invasion of Cambodia in May 1970, American colleges and universities, and even some high schools, experienced a wave of student strikes without precedent in United States history.  According to the Newsletter of the National Strike Information Center at Brandeis University, as of May 10 there were 142 high schools on strike or scheduled to strike, and on May 9, 431 colleges and universities were reported on strike.

Student strikes/boycotts were used quite a bit during the struggle against Apartheid.  The first time I'd even been made aware of the oppression and resistance was when South Africa banned Pink Floyd's Another Brick In the Wall (Part II) because it had become an anthem of striking students at Elsie's River (something we also gleefully adopted without understanding the song's deeper meaning or why it was used by the black kids a world away).

Of course, such methods were used in South Africa well before The Wall was released in 1979.  Former president Mbeki was kicked out of school in 1959 because of student strikes.  A decade later, students outside South Africa were using a variety of strikes and boycotts to act in solidarity as well as put real economic pressure on the regime.  These actions culminated in the almost universal divestiture by institutions of higher learning and other entities that helped end Apartheid in the early 90s.

Now we find ourselves in a position of fighting two wars that are sapping our ability to care for our own people as we displace others, and dealing with a financial crisis that was fundamentally created by corporatism and consumerism.  We see the impact at state universities like UVM, where students are marching against austerity measures--perhaps they will escalate to strikes and boycotts to force the administration to consider alternative plans.

Looking back at 1970, it's interesting that Sharp describe strikes as "a part of university life" after the invasion of Cambodia.  Certainly student life organizations today don't seem to be so rebellious!  Why is it, I wonder, that students in our country, let alone the population as a whole, aren't engaging in more struggle against our current wars, permanent war economy, and corporate overlords?

It has been posited in some circles that it's because of the Kent State Massacre--people were and are too scared to act for fear of being shot.  I have fundamentally disagreed with that assessment, having read quite a bit about the incident and, of course the peace movement, patterns of nonviolent resistance and responses to harsh repression.

Interestingly enough, Kent State happened in the midst of the first rumblings of student strikes, and the massacre appears to have galvanized the movement and became a rallying event as much as the Maine, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11:

The slight hope and deep frustration on which the Movement had been floating was transformed to pure despair and pure rage. There was nothing to talk about, only sides to be taken. After Nixon's speech announcing the invasion, scores of campuses had gone out on strike in a contagious competition. After Kent State, it was hundreds, and it was untenable for students opposed to the war to cooperate with the part of the System with which they had the most contact and the most control, their universities.

Not just for students but for their parents, who were part of the Silent Majority Nixon needed, Kent State was a stunning event. A gasp of recognition rippled through mainstream America: these were their kids being shot down! The madness of the war, if not the war itself, had finally come home. These "average Americans" could accept the use of state power to draft lower and middle-class kids, since the draft was rooted in the good war against Hitler and the Japs. They could accept the unleashing of the raw power of the state against unruly and disdainful foreigners. They could even accept police killings of black activists...What they could not accept was the state turning on their own kind, and when parents of Kent State's dead went on television, bitterly denouncing the attack, the Silent Majority listened.
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When I and two other strikers began leafleting in an advanced science class, the professor recovered from his astonishment at the sight of these hairy barbarians and politely asked us to wait a few minutes until class ended. We complied equally politely, but after Kent State, bands of raging strikers roamed the campus in search of offending classes, and Chicago went down for the count.
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Now America's ruling elite worried less about how to win the war and more about how to avoid losing the country. The young were gone, the troops were unreliable, and unions were starting to break ranks with the hawkish AFL-CIO. America's house was becoming divided, and the owners' strongest instinct was to tone down the war as much as was needed to save their power at home.
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By the fall of 1970, America's elite, unrepentant but pragmatic, had moved to a new consensus, in essence telling Nixon and congress to cut the necessary deal: the end of the war for the end of the Movement. Now the war was really over, even more obviously than after Tet, Woodstock, and the Mobe. Still, the ocean liner of state turned painfully slowly, as Nixon and Kissinger committed their foulest war crime: seeking to preserve the aura of US power and their own bold image, they cynically promoted a "savage retreat" over five years.

It would have been even longer had not a scared congress begun to help wind down the war. Congress had previously been purposely passive, eager to defer to the executive's usurpation of war-making power and political responsibility. There were a few notable but soundly outvoted "doves" - in the Senate Democrat William Fulbright, who held well-publicized hearings, and Republican Mark Hatfield, who said the only thing to negotiate was "the time and method for the withdrawal of our military presence," and in the more hawkish House, Democrat George Brown and Republican Ogden Reid...The atmosphere of crisis after Cambodia and Kent gave the doves a boost.
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The Movement dwindled and died from 1970 to 1973 as all US forces came home. At times the numbers were high - nearly a million marchers on both coasts in April, 1971; 12,000 activists performing civil disobedience in Washington in May; and 100,000 marching in 1972 against the mining of North Vietnam's harbors, and at the January, 1973, "counter-inaugural" against the bombing of Hanoi - but the hope was gone. After the US air and ground combat role ended with the signing of the 1973 peace accords, the Movement could only watch the slaughter from the sidelines. It had become a Sword of Damocles, as the SWP's Fred Halstead said, hanging over Nixon and then Ford should they try to increase aid or reintroduce US forces, but the sword stayed in its sheath.

Kent State did scare people, but it wasn't The Movement: it was the very people we were resisting who had a vested interest in the status quo.  When did The Movement fade away?  After they'd essentially won.

So again, why no Movement to the same extent today?  I'd be inclined to agree with those who think the absence of a draft is a part of it.  I also think that it has to do with our passive, consumerist society that has been well-trained by the media, corporations and government, who have all learned so well from Freud as well as Hitler.  We have become too comfortable and complacent.

I guess more teach-ins are in order...

ntodd

Covered on previous Sundays:

THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT PROTEST AND PERSUASION  

1. Public Speeches
2. Letters of opposition or support
5. Declarations of indictment and intention
8. Banners, posters, and displayed communications
9. Leaflets, pamphlets, and books
10. Newspapers and journals
11. Records, radio, and television
14. Mock awards
15. Group lobbying
18. Displays of flags and symbolic colors
19. Wearing of symbols
21. Delivering symbolic objects
22. Protest disrobings
23. Destruction of own property
26. Paint as protest
30. Rude gestures
31. "Haunting" officials
32. Taunting officials
33. Fraternization
34. Vigils
35. Humorous skits and pranks
37. Singing
38. Marches
44. Mock funerals
45. Demonstrative funerals.
50. Teach-ins
52. Silence
53. Renouncing honors
54. Turning one's back.
55. Social boycott

THE METHODS OF SOCIAL NONCOOPERATION

57. Lysistratic nonaction
61. Boycott of social affairs
65. Stay-at-home
66. Total personal noncooperation

THE METHODS OF ECONOMIC NONCOOPERATION

71. Consumers' boycott
86. Withdrawal of bank deposits
88. Refusal to pay debts or interest
90. Revenue refusal
91. Refusal of a government's money
97. Protest strike
112. Reporting "sick" (sick-in)
113. Strike by resignation
117. General strike
118. Hartal

THE METHODS OF POLITICAL NONCOOPERATION

120. Withholding or withdrawal of allegiance
122. Literature and speeches advocating resistance
124. Boycott of elections
135. Popular nonobedience
137. Refusal of an assemblage or meeting to disperse
140. Hiding, escape, and false identities
147. Deliberate inefficiency and selective noncooperation by enforcement agents
148. Mutiny
150. Noncooperation by constituent governmental units

THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT INTERVENTION

158. Self-exposure to the elements
159. The fast: a) Fast of moral pressure; b) Hunger strike; c) Satyagrahic fast
160. Reverse trial
162. Sit-in
164. Ride-in
170. Nonviolent invasion
171. Nonviolent interjection
173. Nonviolent occupation
174. Establishing new social patterns
177. Speak-in
178. Guerrilla theater
179. Alternative social institutions
180. Alternative communication system
189. Selective patronage
193. Overloading of administrative systems
195. Seeking imprisonment
196. Civil disobedience of "neutral" laws
198: Dual sovereignty and parallel government.

Comments

[ericka]

I also think that it has to do with our passive, consumerist society that has been well-trained by the media, corporations and government

And you've hit the nail on the head. We've been taught oh so well to "need" the things we have, our status, and our way of life. It keeps us complacent in even the most dire of situations.