Hit & Run 1: Campus Movement vs. Student Movement (X.) by X.

A massive increase in organizing activity in New Brunswick and at Rutgers is keeping most of us too busy to post regularly (more on the new campaigns soon). But this new organizing intensity provides a lot of insight that needs to be discussed! So I'll be logging in some quick notes (a Hit & Run series) on a few topics to get conversations started.

CAMPUS MOVEMENT vs STUDENT MOVEMENT

The ongoing campaign for ward-based elections in New Brunswick was initiated by the Tent State University movement at Rutgers and led to the formation of the growing and vibrant off-campus grassroots movement Empower Our Neighborhoods (check out empowernb.com).

What made a significant difference in the building of the emerging citywide coalition of neighborhoods for democracy was that the students approached other communities in New Brunswick as part of a longstanding campus movement rather than a newly-founded student movement. The campus movement at Rutgers today (Tent State) has a history and -more importantly- a memory of organizing both on- and off-campus (even if most of the student organizers from previous generations have moved on). It has allies and contacts in various off-campus neighborhoods as well as on campus among faculty, staff, unions, even administrators. It benefits from an extraordinary new generation of student organizers that inherited the movement's past experience and knowledge. The Tent State students are now taking organizing to a whole new level, working hand-in-hand with revolutionary democratic alumni that organized at Rutgers up to twenty years before they did. Above all, this campus movement is fully conscious of itself as a permanent social, political, cultural and economic power base in New Brunswick. Today, brand new student organizers rapidly learn that although many individual students move on (after graduation), the student community, its interests and its role as an agent of change remain.

Back in the early 90's, the student movement at Rutgers was spontaneous, relatively naive and totally unaware of its place in relation to other class forces at the university and in the city (like most student movements across the US today). The Rutgers-based campus movement of the new millenium daily grows more aware of its origins, its potential, its friends and enemies and its shared goals with other communities in New Brunswick that will unite around Revolutionary Democracy (the great majority of Afro-Americans, Latinos, women, creative class professionals, intellectuals, artists, new economy workers, immigrants, etc). The campus movement is becoming a movement for-itself, grown from a student movement that was at first just a movement in-itself. This difference is the key to understanding the unprecedented organizing successes of the past two years, both in terms of the campus movement's ability to run its own campaigns and in terms of its ability to build strong, long-lasting bonds with allies on- and off-campus.

That the maturing of the Rutgers campus movement coincides with the advent of the Obama Movement is in fact... not a coincidence. The same economic, political, social and cultural forces that made the Obama Movement possible shaped the opportunities to build a campus movement in New Brunswick over the past two decades. Which tells us what incredible potential lies out there to build a nationwide network of revolutionary democratic coalitions in university towns and cities. More on that soon...

PS: See Marx on class struggle for the reference to the class in-itself vs. the class for-itself. You can start with this wikipedia entry.