The New Dawn of the Student Revolution

Humanist, Sept, 2001 by Mac Lojowsky

When Jefferson Airplane opened its 1969 sunrise set at Woodstock, Grace Slick declared, "It's a new dawn!" And, in many ways, it was.

Through the early years of that decade, African American students had organized the Freedom Rides, lunch counter sit-ins, and massive marches throughout the segregated South. By the latter part of the 1960s, the American Indian Movement, the Black Panther Party, and Students for a Democratic Society led constant campaigns throughout the nation, forcing citizens to take a closer look at the policies of their government. Montgomery, Alabama; Chicago, Illinois; Washington, D.C.; Oakland, Berkeley, and Alcatraz, California: the list of locations read like a roadmap to the growing power of the people's movement.

On the international front in Mexico, France, Germany, Brazil, Japan, Czechoslovakia, and Great Britain, students had taken to the streets in protest. Revolution was no longer seen as a classroom theory but as the necessary evolution of the world.

But then something happened. Maybe it was the government slaughter at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (NAUM). Maybe it was the government killings at Kent State University in the United States. Maybe it was because the Vietnam War ended. Much of the movement disbanded, and the students left the streets for the offices. It seemed that Jefferson Airplane's lyrics had turned on the Woodstock generation: "One generation got old." The students had largely traded their radical ideals for stock portfolios, summer homes, and BMWs. Except for the brief rise of the anti-nuclear movement and a handful of other factionalized single-issue focus groups, the sun of enlightenment in the United States had set by the 1980s.

Under Ronald Reagan and subsequent conservative administrations, corporations slowly crept in and consumed U.S. culture. They bought memberships in the Sierra Club, World Wildlife Federation, and Conservation Society. They bought and wrote laws that reshaped the economy through such policies as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT). They further developed an elaborate system of "corporate welfare" in the form of massive tax breaks and heavy government subsidies.

The corporations bought youth through MTV and designer clothes and taught the philosophy of consumerism to an entire generation. They bought the newspapers (Gannet) and the television stations (Time-Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, General Electric). As Noam Chomsky observed of the corporate control of information distribution in 1994: "They don't spend billions of dollars a year for the fun of it. They do it with a purpose."

And their hard work and spending did serve its purpose: the United States fell asleep for the better part of twenty-five years. The laws and social gains that activists had worked so hard for in the previous decades were slowly rolled back. Social welfare and public assistance programs were all but eradicated. The U.S. government continued its war against the foreign poor in such countries as Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Colombia. And the term downsizing became a household word. After nearly sixty years, union busting was again regarded as an acceptable business practice to maximize corporate profits.

And since the corporations owned almost all forms of information, they reported to the nation that everything was fine. Reagan served two terms as president, then ex-CIA director George Bush (note the Iran contra scandal and Guatemala for just two glaring examples of his "leadership") was elected president. Next, the "free tradin" Bill Clinton took office, complete with Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir playing at the Inaugural Ball.

U.S.-based companies--with the help of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and international trading laws they all but wrote--began going elsewhere. These companies saw no reason to contend with U.S. labor unions, environmental protection statutes, and minimum-wage laws when the same products could be produced overseas without these financial inhibitors. Furthermore, the U.S. government and the IMF were encouraging and subsidizing them in these foreign "investments."

When U.S. workers began to feel the economic strain of "global trade," the companies and their news agencies blamed the spotted owl, foreign countries, and minorities. And in many ways the people believed them. The environmental organization Earth First! and Oregon loggers were literally at each other's throats in 1989, while companies like Boise-Cascade quietly continued their international crusades in developing countries.

But about a decade ago the tide began to turn. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students occupied their nation's capital, demanding basic democratic rights. The Soviet Union broke up with the promise of democracy for all. The people of Chiapas, Mexico, drew a line and said, "No mas." Los Angeles, California, caught fire. The anti-sweatshop movement began to take shape and sweep across U.S. college campuses.