The Youth Movement

Opening to the National Board

First an anecdote: An incoming first-year college student was seven or eight when the Soviet Union collapsed, has known no U.S. president but Clinton, and doesn't remember an economic recession. Why, then, did over 600 young people join the YCL by the Web alone since last October?

I don't intend to definitively answer that question, but maybe my report can point towards an answer. Like all of these presentations for discussion in our Pre-Convention period, I hope this, my little opening today, is the beginning of a bigger discussion on the ideological and theoretical issues faced by young people today.

I will not and cannot be comprehensive in a ten-minute report, and we have not had thorough enough consultation and discussion for this to reflect the thinking of the whole YCL leadership. I won't even go deeply into some of the demographics of the young population in the U.S.; I have a handout for that. But I think I touch on the main important points by focusing on what is new on the youth front, what are new trends and developments.

There are, I think, four key trends in the current youth movement and a whole slew of unanswered questions. First, there is today a big upsurge in the youth and student movement. After the crisis in the socialist world and the disillusionment in the student movement following the Gulf War, campus and high school movements went through a deep recession. The election of Clinton to the White House also made many organizations complacent. Cynicism ruled the youth movements during the 90s.

But incubating during this period were a number of new youth movements that exploded onto the scene most dramatically in Seattle, November 1999. These new movements are distinct from the Central American and South African solidarity groups, the student government activists, and even the choice activists of the 80s. Environmental radicals, sweatshop boycotters, anti-prison activists and gay and lesbian rights activists had been holding their own on campuses throughout the 90s.

High school organizing also grew during the 90s. From school blowouts against Propositions 187 and 209 in California to anti-Nike and anti-Gap campaigns in New York City, high school students are organizing among themselves more than ever. Political consciousness is starting at a very early age. This is also reflected in the more than 2000 membership applications the YCL has received from high school-aged students in the past six years. Many fifteen year-olds write things like, "The capitalist pigs have ruined America," when asked why they want to join the YCL.

That leads me to my second trend: young people are more anti-corporate, anti-capitalist and pro-labor than they were ten years ago. Today there are over 150 campuses with labor solidarity groups. There are over 200 campus affiliates of the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). This didn't exist when Noel and I were in school or even during the era of the U.S. war in Vietnam. In fact, the approach by most youth organizations these days is to be close to labor. Next week, on the anniversary of Dr. King's death, thousand of students around the country will take part in the second annual Student Labor Solidarity Day initiated by the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), a joint program of USSA and Jobs with Justice. It is worth saying that Fred Azcarate, the Director of Jobs with Justice was once the President of USSA.

The Seattle demonstrations against the WTO best represent the new relationship between labor and youth. 30,000 trade unionists joined together with tens of thousands of student and youth activists. Instead of hostility, both sides welcomed the other, despite real differences of tactics, demands and politics. It was particularly critical that Sweeney and others didn't distance themselves from the protestors who were being brutally attacked by the Seattle police.

This also reflects a change in labor, which I won't get into here, but I will note this change didn't emerge in a vacuum. The new leadership of the AFL-CIO, the success of Union Summer and the Organizing Institute trainings, the ongoing relationship between labor and USSA, etc., all contributed to this new potential. We need to strategize how to further this trend, both among labor and youth.

Let me also say there are real weaknesses in the new anti-globalization movement: anarchism, sectarianism, youth vanguardism, and a romantic view of police clashes are all real trends in that movement. We also need to figure out how to continue the development of anti-corporate sentiment into an anti-capitalist, pro-worker and even pro-socialist direction. There is also the contradiction that most young people are coming to the anti-sweatshop and even anti-globalization fight as consumers. Theirs is a moral outrage at what is being done abroad for their footwear or in their name. Many organizations have had a hard time getting USAS and its affiliates involved in fighting domestic sweatshops or struggling around other issues here in the U.S.

The third trend is the predominance of cultural politics among young people. I believe young people have flocked to poetry, hip-hop, punk rock, graffiti, and other politics of style exactly because they felt like this was one area where powerless young people could contest capitalism in the 90s. Many young people feel, "I can't vote against Giuliani or Prop. 187, but I can grab a mic a rap about them." As a result, every young person is a cultural warrior, or as one YCLer put it on his own hip-hop mix tape, "Everybody raps." This is not necessarily a bad thing, but too many think culture alone is politics and reject collective struggle for the individual or isolated acts of artists. And already capitalism, creative that it is, is selling youth radical culture back to them on a plate.

The opposite is true of the YCL and the Party however. We hardly tapped into the new upsurge in youth radical culture at all. We need to redouble our efforts to attract young artists and performers and effectively utilize those that we have in the context of mass political struggle. Now that is art.

The fourth trend is that even though there is a huge upsurge in youth organizing, there is an insufficient level of organization and institutional strength in the youth movement. USSA, which is the oldest and largest student organization in the U.S. has a little over 200 member campuses, out of 4000 colleges and universities in the U.S. The Center for Campus Organizing, a national training and support center for campus activists, and probably the second most important campus organization in the U.S., folded just a few months ago. The Student Environmental Action Coalition, which emerged in 1990 with a student conference of 10,000 attendees, is today a shadow of its former self, while enviro-activists are spontaneously sprouting up around the country.

High school students have no national organization, and except for a few notable exceptions in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Miami and Chicago almost never have political citywide high school age organizations. Youth Action in Albuquerque, NM is the closest thing to a national leader on high school age youth organizing.

While young workers are one of the fastest growing organized sectors of the economy, the majority of young workers remain isolated, super exploited and lacking organization in their work place or community. Even the AFL's Union Summer is more targeted to bringing young activists into the ranks of organizing than spreading union consciousness among young workers.

Also, youth organizing non-profits are losing their funding. From USSA down to many youth leadership organizations in many cities, funding of youth activism is out in the philanthropic world, meaning there is less and less money to fund the organizations that can give structure to the youth upsurge.

All in all, the youth movement is lacking organizational might when it most needs it, at a time when Bush is stepping up the attack on education, at the time when the young generation in coming into its own politically. This is sadly true for the YCL as well.

So I presented four key trends. There are probably more, but since this is my report, there are four. But I want to speak to one more thing, the trends in the YCL itself.
The YCL has had a number of recent breakthroughs and new challenges that are a reflection of some of the trends I mentioned earlier and some that are independent. I think the most notable experience is our growing relationship with USSA.

Just this year we have had what I think we all believe is a new situation. The YCL table has been a favorite at USSA's Legislative Conference for the past several years, but this year it was probably the most visited organizational table. Also, Anita and I were asked to come to present a special workshop about the organizing for the World Youth Festival. But what was really new was that I was asked to be the keynote speaker at the USSA "Unity Meeting," which brings together its various constituency caucuses. I was even introduced as National Co-Chair of the YCL. Furthermore, the YCL was printed in the USSA legislative program book as a national coalition partner, something that has never happened before.

A friend of mine, a USSA alumna said to me, "This is the first time I have been to Leg Con where the kids weren't whispering, 'the Commies are here.'" How do we take advantage of this breakthrough without threatening positive trends in USSA leadership? How do we get more YCLers running for student office? How do we help USSA build new member campuses? How do we get more involved in USSA's legislative and electoral agendas?

Another change in the YCL is the growth of high school interest. Over half of our members are high school students, but we have very little successful experience organizing high school clubs. We only have two high school students on our National Committee. How do we approach the special needs and problems of high school youth? How do we build high school clubs? This is one of our biggest challenges.

We also have a new development in recent years of YCL growth in rural America. The fact that the YCL club in Chickasaw, OK is the largest in the country is something completely new. We are still learning to work with these comrades, and they are learning to work with us. We have yet to fully address the financial, cultural and logistical challenges these new clubs and members face.

And of course, the YCL's financial, political and organizational shortcomings make these challenges all the greater. We need to raise more money, build and maintain more active clubs and have a more regular political education and leadership development process. We just don't have the cadres to do everything demanded by our growing organization.

Finally, I want to speak briefly about why the Party is having this discussion. Too often, I think we in the Party leave youth issues for the youth, namely, for the YCL. Ideological issues, strategic issues, and even policy issues are sometimes overlooked. What is the Party's youth policy? And how is it formed? What is the Party's approach to young people? How do Party clubs interact with the local YCL members and clubs? How does the national YCL interact and work with the Party nationally?

We cannot take any of these questions for granted. I believe and I hope we can begin a new period of dialogue and innovation in Party/YCL relations and that the Party can renew and improve its youth policies and approaches in cooperation with the YCL in this period. This report is presented in that regard.