Hello , my name is Michael Albert and I am the host of the podcast titled Revolution Z . This is our 240th consecutive episode and it is titled Step Up Students One . It is based on a piece I wrote about a month ago .
I was thinking about the coming school year and a bit nostalgically contemplating what it might be like to be re-entering a campus this year after a summer off . That led to a piece , a kind of message to students going back to school after their time off , simultaneously a plea and a hope , with perhaps a bit of advice from an old guy .
But hey , it turns out a message to youth . Unless it is literally about being young , is , with just a little refinement and massage , really a message to all ages , a message to ourselves , our families , our young , everyone who gives a damn for life's future . So here's what I wrote , but with various refinements interspersed spontaneously . Now it begins .
It's just a few weeks until US students will trek back to school , including college . What's coming to NYU , wisconsin , san Francisco State , mit , howard , pepperdine , morehouse , purdue , loyola , pace ? What's coming to Drake , kansas State , rutgers , boston University , university of Chicago , duke , berkeley , florida , kent State ?
What's coming to Reed , bucknell , columbia , vanderbilt , austin , evergreen , concordia , yale , jackson State and all the rest ? Will students scale Ivy walls and prowl campus corridors seeking change ? Will students create tumult , turmoil , tension and resistance ? Will students' evidence rejection and initiate revolt ? That's what ought to arrive this fall .
It's what we can all hope will arrive . But will it Flashback way back ? So far back , all the way back to May 1970 . But also , just like yesterday , richard Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia , what was already intense campus unrest dramatically escalated . The National Guard shot to death four students . At Kent State University , the campuses erupted .
Two were killed and 12 wounded . At Jackson State , about 2,000 students were arrested in the first half of May 1970 . Campuses were declared in a state of emergency . In Kentucky , ohio , michigan and South Carolina , at least a third of the nation's nearly 3,000 colleges had strikes . Over 80% of all colleges and universities had protests .
Approximately 4 million students and 350,000 faculty members actively participated in strikes . Buildings were shut down , highways were blockaded , campuses were closed . Nixon's Scranton Commission reported that roughly three quarters of all students supported the strikes .
Poulsters reported that within campuses alone , over a million people claimed to favor revolution and call themselves revolutionaries . In early 1971 , the New York Times reported that four out of 10 students thought a revolution was needed in the United States .
This upsurge and the civil rights , and then the Black Power movement , the women's movement , the anti-war movement and the youth rebellion behind it , all together threatened the very fabric of society and thereby helped to end a war as it twisted the country's mentality inside out and upside down .
Racism was under siege , sexism was in retreat , suburban culture was tottering . A gigantic war machine was slowed . Even capitalism had cracks , but the desire to attain a better world did not last sufficiently long or grow sufficiently wide and deep to replace Washington's White House and Wall Street's corporations , which instead went on producing domination and greed .
Capitalism's institutional persistence slowly eroded and even devoured 60s aspirations for solidarity and self-management . We want the world and we want it now . Now we didn't get it . Flash forward to this coming September . Imagine students back on campus . Do they discuss courses to take , ways to hook up with new guys or gals , upcoming athletic seasons ?
I'd be surprised if not . But will students also focus on war and peace ? On global weather , water and plastics ? On why calamities afflict the poor so much worse than all others ? On why they're a poor at all ?
Will students on campus focus on why life in the world is so much less than it could be for the starving , the raped , the bombed , the unemployed , the heat melted , the high-water rousing drowned , and for those who work at jobs that rob dignity , stifle creativity and subject souls to stupefying rule by others .
Will students on campus talk about having no time to live , no space to be humane and no meaning beyond the next crappy , cursing dollar ? Will the main topic for students on campus this fall be an envisioned future that is spiritually , emotionally , sexually , intellectually , ecologically and also materially liberating ?
Will it be how they are going to win that envisioned future consistent with their working hard for everyone else to get there too ? Imagine students asking why their curriculums produce ignorance about international relations on top of ignorance about market competitions , violations of solidarity , sagacity and sustainability . Imagine students deciding that enough is enough .
Devils in command , no more . Enough sadistic , suicidal corporate commodification . Maybe one particular student wears a funny hat and has a history of being aloof , but now shouts out grief , desire , hope and anger .
Perhaps another student looks as straight as a Pepsi commercial and has her high school classes , most likely to have a million friends diploma , but suddenly sings about how to upend masters of the universe .
Maybe another student speaks , shrieks or paints about floods drowning people's hopes and about a rising tide of people's compassionate creativity , lifting people's prospects . Maybe yet another student will write about resurgent racism and sullying sexism and about combative communalism and fierce feminism and their time finally coming .
Maybe students will hum new tunes , sing new lyrics and rally , march , sit in and occupy all while waving a big , solid fist and creating a living , breathing community of respectful mutual aid in place of dismissive mutual recrimination .
Maybe a few and then more , and then so many students will reach out in ways that pull still others in and never in ways that repel others away . Imagine the students don't just send emails to their friends and allies , don't just tweet and tick-tock others , but actually enter dorms , knock on every door and initiate long talks , and then do it again and again .
Imagine they listen closely , they communicate clearly and they patiently present carefully constructed arguments that address not only war , racism , sexism , poverty and all the nightmarish patterns that afflict our lives , but also positive prospects that they prefer for on campus and for off .
Imagine students consciously and methodically earmark fraternity and sorority members , athletes , readers , writers and scholars for conversation , incitement and recruitment . Imagine they see their campuses as places from which to churn out activists .
They see no higher calling than to make campus-wide critical descent and innovative construction begin , accelerate and , like a dream too long deferred , explode . Imagine students school themselves outside the narrow bounds of their college's border and thereby envision an alternative to cutthroat competition and insular isolation .
Students who teach themselves to describe a better alternative . Students who inspire others with their vision . Students who regularly refine their vision and formulate and implement paths to reach it . Imagine that students , by the new year , share many views and much spirit . Imagine them angry and hopeful , sober and laughing .
They meet in dorm hallways and dining areas , on ball fields and in bedrooms . They form campus organizations or even campus chapters of a larger , encompassing national community of organizations .
Imagine the latter is called Students for a Democratic Society , a new SDS , or maybe it even morphs itself to transcend its past and to look forward to become , say , students for a Participatory Society or even Students for a Participatory World , where each chapter chooses its own local name Dave Dellinger , sps , emma Goldman SPS , malcolm X , sps and , for that matter
, Rosa Luxemburg , sps , emiliano Zapata , sps , ella Baker SPS , eugene Debs , sps , and so on . Imagine , in short , that students rise up with information , relentless focus and inspiring abandon . Students become angry , militant and aggressive , even as they also keep foremost in their expanding minds mutual concern and compassion .
Imagine all this tumult pumps into the already nationally growing US descent against war and economic injustice , against global ecological nightmare and against ubiquitous antisocial violence .
Imagine aroused students knocking on everyone's doors and pushing it to neighborhood associations and union gatherings and church cells as a growing , useful branch of movement activism , willing to break the laws of the land and push thoughts and deeds into revolutionary zones . Students who sing , dance , march and law break got up a howling storm of desire and intent .
That youthful energy and insight is something .
The anti-war movement , the labor movement , the movement for gender and sexual liberation and the movement against racism and fascism , the movements for local and worldwide rights and against environmental suicide , the movement for consumer rights and against corporate commodification , the resurgent labor movement for dignified work and the movements for equity and against market
madness all need Successful campaigns for change , need , require and indeed must have youth . So imagine that young people with time , energy , heart and mind discern that they are being coerced by society , most often to become crushed victims , sometimes to become passive abetters and occasionally to become active perpetrators of society's injustices .
Imagine students seek more and other than to be bent by society's pliers . Imagine they hunkered down for the long haul . They equip themselves much better and orient themselves much more wisely than my generation of the 60s ever did . They are smarter , more strategic , more persistent .
Imagine students not only reject status regimentation and war , corporate alienation and greed , patriarchal racism , ageism and gender repression and tribalistic , sectarian intercommunity racism and nationalism , but also carry their feelings of rejection into positive advocacy that undertakes innovation to bring to campuses not only small sub-communities of dissent and rejection but
campus-wide communities of joyous and sustained commitment to positive vision . Being left , being radical , being visionary becomes synonymous with being caring , being right and being true to self and others . That would be a ticket to a new world for everyone . That would be a ticket much better than old-style graduation into a morally decrepit world all around us .
This trip will be long , but why not step up now ? Of course there are obstacles . There is massive media misinformation , there is habituated personal passivity , there are campus rules and there is state repression . But look around Society is headed for hell .
Such reasons to not step up , to not rise up , ought to seem comparatively insubstantial next to today's injustice , much less its suicide trek toward environmental disaster . But perhaps some other obstacles impede all the above students stepping up . First , there is doubt about winning and even about there being anything to win .
There is doubt that a better world is even possible and even if technically possible , there is doubt that we humans can attain it . And second , even if humanity could attain it , there is doubt about personally having anything to offer by way of helping that struggle . What can be done to overcome all these doubts ?
Develop and share immediate , flexible demands and tactical plans . Orient choices of and sustain commitment to immediate , flexible demands and tactical plans . Develop and share vision for better schools and even for better society . Develop and share vision for the new world we desire and for strategy to birth it .
Develop and share answers to the very fair question OK , what do you want ? Yes , all of that could be done .
More isn't a related but subtly different obstacle to campus tumble , turmoil , tension and resistance , a considerable level of campus defeatism , depression and aloofness , a kind of mindset that runs away from politics , that runs away from activism , a feeling that politics and activism are alienated , boring and acrimonious realms that drain already overstretched and highly
precarious lives . Isn't this obstacle that many , many students are not only unconvinced by activist formulations but , to preserve their own sanity , they don't even want to hear from the left . They often agree with the left , but they want to avoid the left . They want to ghost the left . They even energetically run from the left .
What can the left do to overcome this obstacle to its own growth ? Perhaps the left can engage with young people via socially uplifting activities . Perhaps the left can directly address the actual feelings that block communication .
Maybe a useful surge able to grow and persist , to diversify and deepen in the various ways necessary to flourish , will need to be a kind of home for students , a nourishing and not a hectoring environment .
Perhaps it will need to be an exciting , welcoming , inspiring destination that people want to seek out and not a place they want to emotionally and socially avoid . Perhaps , right up with offering vision , strategy and program , the left needs to offer a patient , caring home and not a frazzled , contentious , emotionally draining , denigrating jail of a different kind .
If all that , then perhaps back to college and back to high school too , will indeed include tumult , turmoil , tension , resistance , rejection and revolt . Perhaps it will more centrally feature than ever before vision-based , multi-focused , multi-tactic , strategically sustained movement that embodies humor , heart , mutual respect , support and aid .
Perhaps it will liberate humanity and save our planet . Perhaps it will tell passive teachers of passivity . There's a new movement on campus . The old ways are over . You , too , step up or step aside . Imagine that . So that was the end of the article .
I thought I would present it as this episode and also comment on it as I went through it , so there would be something for those who had already read it . But well , as you just heard as I read it , I didn't stop to comment . I didn't feel the need . Honestly , I thought the message was clear , but I don't know , maybe not .
So what , at least , is my reaction now to the whole thing ? It is as it was when I wrote it not that long ago . There is so much to do and it is so obvious that doing it is paramount , not even paramount essential , not even essential , just an absolute necessity . So will it happen ? Will students , among others , step up ? Seems like , how could they not ?
I don't know how to answer that . I don't even know how to think about answering that . Maybe to think back to when I was a student . When I was a student , a subset of us stepped up . We had less difficulty doing that , in some sense , I think , than students today .
The reason was because we had been lied to so severely and it was uncovered in a moment in time in the 60s , and we became very , very angry . We were angry and we resisted and we rebelled against the falsehoods and the hypocrisy all around us . Now it's different . Students now aren't deceived . They know what's going on . At least that's my belief .
I don't think there are many students who , I don't know , watch a movie or read a novel in which horrific things happen , done by states , done by their own state , done by their own military , done by their own corporations , and don't believe it , think to themselves well , that's just not realistic enough .
Quite the contrary , they think it's quite realistic , it's completely realistic . When the Twin Towers were knocked down and people thought , oh , the government did it , roughly a third of the population thought that , hello , a third of the population believed that the government knocked down those towers in order to pursue some megalomaniacal strategy .
Now people believe the most incredible things . Way more difficult to believe than that a particular set of institutions corporate , governmental , gender , cultural , racial deny us and restrict us . Way harder to believe than that . I think students know what's going on .
I think the obstacles are , like the essay said , more rooted in a belief that nothing better is possible , more rooted in a belief that you can't attain it , more rooted in a belief that , well , maybe it could be attained , maybe it could be better . But I don't personally have anything to contribute , so I'll go back to class and I'll do business as usual .
Something has to break that or we are in very deep trouble , we being the entire planet , all of humanity . And so I think to myself what would have happened if my generation was teleported to here ? Would we do better than we did ? If not , it's not enough . We'd have to do better . This generation has to do better . It's a lot to ask .
It's not fair to ask , it's really not what we should have left you to do , but it is the situation , and we'll know in a few weeks whether or not you're going to step up . And that said , this is Mike Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z .