Mark's Pages

July 30, 2008:

There were two points of disagreement. First, whether the collective should be democratized, in the sense of welcoming participation in decision-making by volunteer staffers and holding the elected leadership accountable. Second, whether the collective should play a role in the student movement on campus, or should remain aloof.

I argued, with others, that the leadership and decision-making structures should be reformed. And, that the collective should participate in every way possible in the campus movements. As this disagreement evolved, our point of view became nearly universal among the participants, while the traditional leadership were isolated almost entirely among themselves.

These traditional leaders argued, essentially, that all was well. The leadership should meet secretly and separately from the volunteers; their deliberations should not be made public; membership on the leadership bodies should be via co-option rather than election; and that the collective should not consider itself part of the student movement — despite the fact that student tuition subsidized the paying jobs which these leaders held.

Naturally there was a great deal of personal conflict and animosity. One of my strongest criticisms of the leadership was that they deliberately fostered these animosities, hiding, in my opinion, the principled issues behind a smokescreen of interpersonal diversion.

We lost. The old leaders, outnumbered fourteen or fifteen to four, came in the middle of the night, changed the locks, fired the staffers who opposed them, and expelled all the volunteers save one. They did this at the very end of the spring term, timed so that the other student organizations would be unable to intervene, or, for that matter, express opinions. When the students came back from summer break, all was long done.

I was very hurt by this outcome. I felt that it was unjust in the extreme. Aside from that, my feelings were wounded really very deeply.

The victors told people for years afterward that a certain national political grouping which didn't yet exist at that time had "tried to take over" the collective. This was their explanation of the principled disagreements which had been argued out over the course of nearly 18 months. They made it difficult for interested independents to check the facts, by stealing and probably destroying the discussion books to which all participants had freely contributed over this time.

There's a sad moral to this story. The roots of Stalinist psychology lie in the peculiar way in which small-minded individuals come to view themselves as synonymous with the movements. So that in their own eyes they and they alone are the specific agents of progress in history.

These people really are "petty-bourgeois", to use the old language. A genuinely popular mass movement will sweep them away.

I would like to live that long.