It's interesting that the anarchists get blamed for the split. Their interest in seeing the student movement stay decentralized and nonhierarchical is a wise one. You think that everybody would understand the strength of the networked, affinity group approach. After all, it is the methodology that is giving the IMF fits. Student protest movements always fall into the trap of hierarchical organizing. The students who want to be leaders, or be in the limelight, try to create something that will turn them into professional activists. There are many other factors that I won't get into.
The rest of the story involves rumours that I've seen in newsgroups, but haven't been able to confirm. I trust the rumors because I've seen this organization's internal plans from last March, where they spelled out their priorities, which included infiltrating and "performing an intervention" in the student sweatshop movement. This group would be the International Socialist Organization.
The ISO has plenty of motivation to steer the decentralized student sweatshop movement into a centralized top-down one. It would help them recruit new members--their favorite prey being student activists who have little experience with Left groups. Another motivation would be to discredit the anarchist way of organizing. They are pretty desperate right now to sell the idea of "democratic centralism" to anybody who will listen, given that anarchist methods are favored in the "anti-globalization" movement.
By the way, the Eugene anarchists are not the "Black Bloc." A black bloc only exists for a given action.
I wish the student sweatshop movement plenty of luck. Chuck0
Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> [The Nation didn't put this on their website; I scanned it, so
> apologies for any uncaught glitches.]
>
> The Nation - October 16, 2000
>
> The Student Movement Comes of Age
> Liza Featherstone
>
> They must be afraid of the movement," says Jonathan "Doe" Bradley, a
> former US Army medic who is now a student activist at the University
> of Arkansas, "or they wouldn't be reacting this way." The "movement"
> he is talking about is the student movement, and "they" are the
> police, university administrators and corporate moguls who have been
> unsuccessfully attempting to crush students' persistent challenge to
> corporate power. But this past summer, the movement faced even more
> formidable organizing challenges within its own ranks.
>
> In August, United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and 180/Movement
> for Democracy and Education (MDE), another student anticorporate
> group, held a joint conference on the University of Oregon's Eugene
> campus. Just a few months earlier, USAS, the most visible and
> successful of all the new student groups, had rocked campuses
> nationwide with protests against sweatshop conditions in the
> collegiate apparel industry, occupying buildings on more than a dozen
> campuses. The protests forced more than fifty universities and
> colleges to capitulate to students' demands and join the Worker
> Rights Consortium (WRC), an organization independent of apparel
> industry influence and founded in April by students as an alternative
> to the Fair Labor Association (FLA), an industry-backed monitoring
> group [see Featherstone, "The New Student Movement," May 15].
> Addressing the conference plenary, Thomas Wheatley, a former student
> and USAS activist at the University of Wisconsin who now works for
> the National Labor Committee, a leading antisweatshop organization,
> reflected on the movement's past year: "I didn't think we'd ever get
> this far. We're really pushing the labor movement forward, and we
> beat the living shit out of Nike and all kinds of companies,"
>
> The students have, very quickly, achieved a startling measure of
> power. The big question is, How will they use it? Those gathered in
> Eugene faced a rather daunting agenda: figuring out how to work
> effectively with workers in the global South and, in particular, how
> best to use the newly founded WRC; how to coordinate campus
> organizing efforts; and how to advance their work in coalition with
> labor unions and others fighting poverty and exploitation in the
> United States. To do all that, they needed to create an organization
> with some semblance of structured body that could, when necessary,
> allow far-flung and disparate member groups to speak with one voice.
>
> Initially, the meetings seemed imperiled by backlash at the
> University of Oregon. In April administrators at the college - which
> is Nike CEO Phil Knight's alma mater and boasts several buildings,
> including the main library, bearing his name - had joined the WRC
> after a series of student protests. Knight retaliated angrily,
> withdrawing a pledge of $30 million for a new sports stadium. So when
> the student anticorporate groups proposed holding a joint conference
> there, wary administrators insisted that they be allowed to
> participate. When the students refused, the University went so far as
> to file a human rights complaint against them with the city of
> Eugene. The students eventually relented.
>
> As it turned out, the conference-and, some thought, the entire
> movement-was nearly sabotaged by another local phenomenon, the same
> one that, during the protests in Seattle last November, put the
> languidly countercultural Eugene on the national radar for the first
> time in thirty years: anarchism. Ambivalence about the role of
> authority in the student movement led to bitter conflicts over USAS's
> structure, which reflected acute growing pains in the
> organization-not unlike those plaguing the rest of this lively,
> sometimes militant, radically decentralized global anticorporate
> movement.
>
> University of Oregon students don't have much in common with the
> marauding hooded Eugene residents who, calling themselves the Black
> Bloc, have been such a controversial presence at recent national
> protests. Agatha Schmaedick, a University of Oregon USAS activist,
> laughs at the idea. "It's ironic because people associate us with
> [the Black Bloc anarchists], but those anarchists think we're totally
> reformist!"
>
> But Eugene, like Madison, Wisconsin, which was also well represented
> at the meetings, has an intensely process-oriented student activist
> culture. Passions raged over the proposal to establish an elected
> governing body that would decide many of the questions that are
> currently left to conference calls open to the entire membership or
> to paid staff in the group's Washington, DC, office (who are not
> elected). The anarchists and radical democrats in attendance worried
> that such a body would turn USAS into a "hierarchical" and
> "bureaucratic" organization; one even warned, in an address to the
> plenary, that if the group adopted this structure "we'd be no better
> than a corporation." Others took a dim view of such arguments. George
> Washington University student Todd Tucker observed, "It just seems so
> stupidly American, like, 'I won't take orders from anyone.' It's John
> Wayne, not even Bakunin!" The controversy inspired twenty-nine hours
> of plenary meetings, two of which lasted past 3 AM; at several
> junctures, anarchists walked out of the room and even burst into
> tears.
>
> At present, some decisions about the national organization simply
> don't get made at all; for example, USAS was unable to spend money
> organizing a major presence at national protests in Philadelphia and
> Los Angeles this summer because no one had the authority to approve
> such a commitment. Although the conference calls (which cost the
> organization $25,000 last year) are clearly an attempt at
> participatory democracy, many students say they are not democratic,
> since only those who happen to find out about them, or can afford to
> get on the phone, can participate.
>
> "It reminds me of the major split in SDS [Students for a Democratic
> Society]," said Molly McGrath, a recent University of Wisconsin
> graduate who spent the summer organizing the Eugene conference. While
> it's unlikely that this event will have the world-historical
> consequences that the SDS wars had, the con flict was in many ways
> analogous: Like the SDS founders, the anarchists are fiercely
> dedicated to nonhierarchical structures, but many of their fellow
> activists - whether liberal or far left - feel that such purism about
> process and structure conflicts with other movement goals. For
> example, USAS cannot react quickly to emergencies-such as a strike
> that could be aided by student solidarity actions. Moreover,
> developing relationships with workers in the global South is
> especially hard without tight structure and nimble coordination. This
> spring and summer, students traveled to Mexico, Nicaragua and
> Honduras to meet with labor activists and garment industry workers in
> those countries and to develop the networks for the nascent Worker
> Rights Consortium. In March, students investigated a Nike supplier in
> the Dominican Republic, where workers were being fired for attempting
> to organize unions. USAS activists also met with Dominican workers
> who were attempting to attend school at night and were consistently
> prevented from doing so by the factory's practice of forced
> overtime-production quotas were often impossible to meet within the
> nine-hour workday. In the past, the national USAS organization,
> lacking an infrastructure, has not been able to capitalize on such
> efforts, so figuring out a way to do so was an urgent priority at the
> meeting.
>
> Despite the sometimes agonizing conflicts, the students made progress
> in Eugene. They strategized about how best to finance delegations to
> overseas sweatshops and about how to build alliances with workers'
> rights groups. They debated - and passed - a proposal to establish an
> International Solidarity Committee that would plan the delegations
> and make sure they were linked to specific campaigns. An elected
> governing body was established, and on the last night, those
> bleary-eyed USAS members who could stand to show up for the last few
> hours of late-night plenary decided to hold elections later this fall.
>
> Besides the national USAS, the most crucial of this young movement's
> new institutions is the just-formed - and in many ways still
> undefined-Worker Rights Consortium. Though the WRC is a concept with
> great potential, it's still not clear how the organization will build
> relationships with workers or how it can best use the networks it
> already has. The WRC must carefully negotiate its own relationship to
> labor organizations, for example; the labor movement provides its
> best access to workers, yet the WRC must maintain some independence
> if it is to have credibility with university administrators. Funding
> raises even hairier questions; for instance, will the WRC,
> established by an anarchist-influenced student movement, accept
> government money? At present, the WRC is woefully understaffed and
> searching for an executive director; clearly it's too soon to make
> any judgments about its effectiveness.
>
> The disarray of the movement's national organizations may not inhibit
> organizing on individual campuses, partly because of the very
> decentralization the anarchists celebrate. Students at Ohio State,
> Nebraska, West Virginia, Wyoming and Montana are launching new
> campaigns this fall to get their schools to join the WRC and drop out
> of the FLA. At schools that have already joined the WRC, students are
> trying to make sure the administration complies with its requirements
> - disclosure of factory locations, for example. Some students are
> focusing on other pressure points; activists at Clark University in
> Worcester, Massachusetts, for instance, are launching a national
> campaign to push Barnes & Noble-which operates 400 campus bookstores
> nationwide - to make its suppliers comply with the WRC's code of
> conduct.
>
> AIthough student antisweatshop activists have been criticized for
> evading problems at home by focusing on corporate wrongdoing in the
> Third World, they have proven increasingly committed to fighting
> domestic poverty. A group of USAS students went on a delegation to
> the Kensington Welfare Rights Union in July, and hundreds of students
> participated in the group's protest march during the Republican
> National Convention. USAS is forging a long-term relationship with
> the welfare rights direct action group and will probably help KWRU
> fundraise for its Poor People's Conference in November. But students'
> most promising domestic solidarity efforts focus on the one arena in
> which they truly wield power: the campus. Some students are working
> closely with campus workers on new organizing drives at Earlham in
> Indiana, the University of Wisconsin, USC, Ohio State and numerous
> other institutions. Others are pressuring their administrations to
> boycott notorious unionbuster Sodexho-Marriott, a French company that
> provides campus dining services and is also the largest investor in
> US private prisons (this campaign, which began in April, has already
> been successful at both Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington, and
> SUNY, Albany).
>
> As the student movement begins to confront domestic injustices,
> however, anticorporatism may prove too limiting a language. It has
> been the movement's dominant idiom-made so dramatically visible by
> Seattle and A 16, even penetrating national electoral politics via
> Ralph Nader's Green presidential campaign-and in many ways it's a
> useful one. As the villains everyone loves to hate, corporate power
> and greed lend coherence to a global youth movement that's too often
> viewed as diffuse and lacking focus. Anticorporatism translates
> admirably into union solidarity, and corporations provide a
> convenient euphemism for capitalism, which not everyone wants to talk
> about (after all, who wants to be taken for a glassy-eyed
> sectarian-newspaper pusher?). What's more, universities' cozy ties to
> large companies bring anticorporatism into students' daily lives -
> and, perversely, lend students power as consumers in the
> "academic-industrial complex."
>
> But building a social movement to fight poverty may require a broader
> vision. Many people of color and poor people in the United States do
> not feel that anticorporatism can adequately describe their
> experiences of everyday inequality and injustice. Addressing the USAS
> conference, Maria Cordera of the Third Eye Movement, a Bay Area youth
> organization that fights police brutality and the prison industry,
> acknowledged that student anticorporate activists "need to connect
> prisons to globalization," but she observed that "for people of
> color, our bread and butter issue is not globalization, it's how are
> we going to feed our kids." (This, of course, is part of the reason
> Nader's presidential campaign has more support among the upscale than
> among the poor.)
>
> Students fighting poverty in the United States must confront culprits
> more complicated-and closer to home-than corporate greed: class
> interests and the breakdown of the social contract. This past spring,
> Dave Snyder, a Johns Hopkins student who helped organize a sit-in
> over campus laundry workers' wages this year, led a USAS delegation
> to Kensington, the desperately poor Philadelphia community in which
> the welfare rights group is based. The residents "kept talking about
> the people who live in this nearby middle-class neighborhood, people
> who ignore them and shut them out," Snyder remembers. "I felt this
> rage against those middle-class people, trying to imagine what kind
> of horrible people they must be. Then we [the students] went to that
> neighborhood because someone's parents lived there, and I realized,
> this is my middle-class neighborhood; my parents would live here. I
> could live here."
>
> The students' focus on corporations sometimes causes them to miss the
> point; for example, confronted with the incarceration boom, they
> focus on aspects of the prison industry that are relatively
> peripheral, like private prisons or prison labor. Antisweat activists
> at California schools, wishing to make common cause with antiprison
> activists, have been redefining prisons as sweatshops, because some
> prisons lease inmate labor for corporate profit. Although this has
> been effective in building multiracial coalitions, prison labor isn't
> as widespread as many activists claim, and-also contrary to student
> and youth activist rhetoric-the lure of prison labor profits does not
> motivate incarceration policy.
>
> At the same time, workers overseas already understand the potential
> power of student anticorporatism. During the USAS conference, there
> was one moment that put the week's internal melodrama into
> perspective. That was when Rosa Gonzalez, a young worker who had just
> been fired for union organizing in a free-trade-zone factory in Mil
> Colores, Nicaragua-which supplies clothing to US companies like
> Kohl's and Target addressed the students. She described a factory in
> which workers are frequently denied sick leave even in an emergency;
> women routinely have miscarriages in the bathroom. Gonzalezs own
> situation is desperate; her firing has branded her a troublemaker,
> and no other factory will hire her. Some days her family eats only
> one meal, she said, tears streaming down her face. Gonzalez told the
> students she hoped USAS could pressure the US companies to reinstate
> fired workers throughout the Nicaraguan maquila.
>
> "I ask your solidarity," she said. "You are our only hope."
>
> ----
>
> Liza Featherstone is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn. This
> article is part of the Haywood Burns Community Activist Journalism
> series, supported by the New World Foundation and the Nation
> Institute.