From Campus Organizing to Rebuilding the Left
Student organizing isn’t the most burning issue in American politics today. But socialists would be wrong to dismiss it. On-campus organizing can be the beginning of lives dedicated to renewing labor militancy and rebuilding the Left.
Protestors at the march against the Vietnam War organized by Students for a Democratic Society and the Women’s Strike For Peace, Washington DC, April 17, 1965.Michael Ochs Archives / Getty
The American university student movement has seen a few surges throughout history, first during the Great Depression and then at the height of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. Despite the many shortcomings of student organizing, these experiences occasionally sparked mass student actions that catalyzed change far beyond universities themselves.
While students do not have the kind of power that workers do in society, we can follow in the footsteps of past generations of student radicals and play a principled role in renewing labor militancy and rebuilding the Left.
When the Old Left Was Young
Although we often think of the 1960s New Left as the high-water mark of US student organizing, the student rebels of the Depression era were the “most effective radical organizers in the history of American student politics,” according to Robert Cohen in When the Old Left Was Young.
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