This is significant for how bad the baby boomer Left, which is who has run the Guild since they took over back in 1971, has been in opening up leadership and training new generations. Instead, you have lots of nonprofit fiefdoms dominated by aging baby boomers and a few left institutions like the Guild with few younger members. The left groups that have younger members-- the ISO for example -- do so by concentrating almost exclusively on that age group. Genuine multi-generational left groups of any significance are almost nonexistent, which speaks to a general disease on the Left.
I could go off on a number of other problems leading up to the Convention-- such as an incredibly undemocratic attempt to amend the Constitution to dilute the voting power of students and regions outside our five core cities (one reason why in disgust I didn't attend the Pasadena Convention), but they added to reasons why some of the students were pissed off.
A lot of this is typical inter-organizational wrangling, but since the Guild is in many ways the largest and best-funded self-identified "left" membership organization in the country, its problems have some relevance.
-- Nathan Newman
----- Original Message ----- From: "John Mage" <jmage at panix.com> To: "lbo-talk" <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Friday, December 27, 2002 8:24 PM Subject: #103
#103 is fine conjunctural analysis. Thanks particularly for the refi index on p.6. One story and one comment.
(story) On the practicality of rebellious institutions in the United States ("Mess" p.7), this story from the -also just received today - winter issue of Guild Notes - covering the events of the late October "Pasadena" Convention (the Lawyers Guild has the practice of not holding its Conventions in the same city, and the practice long ago developed of referring to Conventions not by their date but by their place e.g. Detroit where the Guild sent itself into the deep south to be there for the black kids, or Washington where students interrupted the annual Banquet, demanding the right of equal membership, or Boulder where the Guild stopped just short of flying apart and admitted students and legal workers as equal members).
There was to be a contested election for the first time in memory for the Presidency of the organization. The vote was set for Sunday, the last day of the Convention. Members whose flights left for home on Sunday midday lobbied to have the election on Saturday. The issue was put to the Conveniton on Saturday, which voted to hold the election on Saturday. A busload of students attending the convention were on a mural tour when the votes were taken. When they returned they were pissed:
"Saturday night, before the banquet, students gathered in a clandestine, sign-making, organizing, and resolution-writing frenzy...student troops stormed the banquet hall with placards reading "One Student, One Vote," "I want my vote to count," and "Murals Tour vs. My Vote?" We meant business." - according to Marilyn Onisko, elected by the Convention co-Student National VP and a student at U of San Diego.
She continues: "The banquet attendees reacted marvelously to the protest. In true Guild fashion and among wild applause,our comrades stood up from the dinner tables and joined the protest. [newly elected] NLG President Bruce Nestor, in a righteous and courageous move, formally apologized for the voting fiasco..."
Another piece in the issue mentions that the students were only informed of the 1970 Washington Convention precedent after their protest.
The student resolutions (including one to hire a student organizer) were approved the next day by the convention. But at the disrupted Banquet, according to a student account "[w]hat we did not expect, but greatly appreciate, was the incredible outpouring of generosity by our fellow Guild members, gainfully employed, who donated their money at the Banquet to help fund the student organizer position."
Not mentioned in any of the accounts was that the first Guild student organizers were hired in 1967 as the antiwar movement grew huge; they were Ken Cloke and Bernardine Dohrn.
A good sign.
(comment) "Kindness of strangers" sets out the current and capital account question clearly. But while exchange is affected in all models by this question, the political non-market causal nexus has to be given at least equal weight. It is at least triangular now (depending on how you see China) and in the recent past: 1. Japan made the banking law D-Day event demanded by the US Treasury into something that looked like ridicule of the US and of all the - to use Sakakibara's term - market fundamentalists, and 2. the French (and EU) just let Soros know that his crimes of the 1990s - challenging the political non-market causal nexus referred to above - have not been forgotten and will not be forgiven.
john mage