From Dec. 22, 2005 Pre-Convention Discussion

Taking the lid off CAN

This semester we set out with big expectations for the Campus Antiwar Network (CAN) to grow dramatically, both quantitatively and qualitatively. It’s important to note that in fact we did grow in many ways this semester. CAN has many new chapters at schools that have never had anti-war chapters before. We organized some phenomenal successes, including fantastic contingents in the September 24 protests on both coasts, a counter-recruitment conference (cosponsored with another coalition) with attendance of over 650 people, and a number of successful anti-repression defense campaigns, including the Hampton case and the “Hands off Dave” campaign at Kent State. We have an unprecedented visibility (with articles about us appearing in USA Today and Rolling Stone, among many others) and a new recognition of CAN on some of the broad left as the student wing of the anti-war and counter-recruitment movements. We have a great deal to be proud of.

Yet alongside these successes, many of our established CAN chapters have stagnated. While some – including both new chapters like Pace University and Pratt Institute in New York, and established ones like Madison – routinely have organizing meetings of 15- 25 people, very many of our chapters have hardly grown this semester at all. In particular, a number of them seemed to limp toward the end of the semester, with a very small group of members, a lack of public events, and a sense of demoralization – even if they started out the semester very strong, with big public events and a strong showing at September 24. Indeed, what is most striking about CAN chapters at the end of the semester is their unevenness.

This unevenness was also noticeable in the strikingly divergent experiences on CAN’s national day of action on December 6. Some December 6 events were very successful and bigger than expected, showing the potential to organize big, exciting student protests, while others were very disappointing. For example, none of our long-standing four chapters in New York brought more

than five people to the NYC protest, which we had conceived of as the centerpiece of our semester’s end (one new school had a much bigger turnout, saving the event).

Given the significant growth at some schools and the increase in antiwar opposition nationwide, I want to argue that the stagnation of many CAN chapters is caused not by any objective conditions, but rather by an approach in many of our fractions that is holding CAN chapters back from growing. Identifying and changing our approach will be the key to helping CAN grow in the spring at schools that struggled in the fall.

Shifting our approach

In the middle of the semester, some ISO branches began to make an important shift toward opening up the branches, making way for new leadership and new organizing methods rather than tightly managing all areas of branch work. This new method makes even more sense for a group like CAN, which is not a revolutionary organization, but a student activist coalition. We want CAN to be the kind of dynamic organization where any anti-war student can join, have an idea about something they’d like to do, and make it happen. Instead, we have set a lead in too many chapters that makes it very difficult for this to take place.

The problem is that we have not shaken off a method we developed in a very different context – most of which made sense for that time, but which is holding us back today. Last year, when the anti-war movement was small and embattled and it was hard to hold on to anyone (due to the weight of “anybody but Bush” in ‘discrediting’ activism and the rightward shift of the broad antiwar movement), we developed a tendency to see ourselves as the only reliable leadership, and ideological disagreements as the main challenge we had to overcome. This was meant to steel a small group of people ideologically in a period where most people’s experiences in the movement were ones of defeat and isolation.

Because we were an organized group of committed activists with a long-term perspective, we could try to provide a sense of what was possible in this difficult period, and anti-imperialist politics that explained why even when what we could accomplish was small, it mattered. It was necessary for us to play this role for CAN chapters to survive the demoralizing context of that time period. We should be very proud of our contribution to keeping CAN intact. If CAN had collapsed last year (like so many activist groups did), none of the main successes of this fall would have been possible, nor would we now have the potential to quickly build a strong national student coalition.

Today, the situation is extremely different from last year. As the many new CAN chapters have shown, people can begin to lead CAN very quickly. In the context of a rising movement, people can organize things that are successful and learn from their own experiences (and through genuinely collective assessments) how to better build the group, rather than “learning” from our telling them what will work. They do not need us to hold their hand while slowly introducing them to the group. Indeed, this approach will frustrate people and drive them away. The task, then, is to complete a shift we have already begun: to throw out the habits that held CAN together last year and fully embrace a new method that matches our changed circumstances.

The number-one mistake we are making in CAN is appointing ourselves the unspoken leadership of the group. This assumption is affecting all aspects of our work in CAN, and CAN will not grow until we abandon it. Specifically, here are four related ways this assumption on our part can poison the atmosphere in our chapters: (Not everything here applies to every school, but taken together I think they capture what we need to change).

Substitutionism

Many ISO fractions play way too big a role in setting the priorities of the chapter. Fraction meetings, rather than planning a political intervention built around socialist politics, make many of the important decisions for the chapter. CAN meetings then become, rather than places for

collective discussion and decisions about what to do, places where we try to “win” everyone else to what we already decided to do. A comrade at NYU explained this very well: “We don’t ask people, ‘What do you think?’, we ask them, ‘What do you think about what I think?’”

This is very different from the approach adopted by our newer chapters. For example, at Pratt University, they opened the first CAN meeting by having everyone say the things they were most pissed off about. Out of that discussion, they were able to choose their priorities for the semester.

What does this mean in practice? At a minimum, chapters of any significant size should seriously consider electing an independent, accountable leadership. But this by itself will not solve the problem. In New York, nearly all our chapters, as well as the whole city, elected their own coordinating committees this semester, but the same dynamic then played out on those coordinating committees – with ISO members coming in with a fixed idea of what we wanted to do and taking on all the major responsibilities for making it happen. CAN chapters need to be structured to allow for independent leadership, but there is no structural solution to our faulty method.

Often we believe we have to make the decisions, because other people don’t want to take on responsibility, or have to be won to doing so over a long period of time. Sometimes we think this view has been confirmed through recent experience: we try to get other people to take responsibility, and either they’re reluctant to take it on, or they don’t follow through. I think this happens because we are trying to get people to take on bureaucratic responsibility, without actually breaking from our political substitutionism. So rather than deciding together with people what we all want to do, we decide what we think should be done and then attempt to “assign tasks” to carry out the priorities we set.

This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: because we don’t expect other people to actively lead the group, they don’t feel ownership over it; their lack of investment keeps them from leading, which falsely confirms our view that we couldn’t “trust” them to begin with. The difficulty in extending leadership in CAN beyond our fractions is not really the cause of our assumption of most responsibility, but a symptom of it. In one New York chapter, a CAN member actually told us that the reason she stopped coming to meetings regularly was because she felt like only some people’s ideas were listened to (not including her own). Most people won’t be so explicit; they’ll just stop coming.

A different approach was articulated quite well by a comrade at Pace University in New York, one of our most successful new CAN chapters (whose organizing meetings have grown from 15, to 25, to 30 people), who argued against “over-organization”: “We can show up with tape, markers, and no plan, and things will get done. They’re activists – it’s not like they don’t want to do the work. This is what we’re here to do.” This kind of common-sense trust of our fellow activists (they came to the meeting for a reason; they want to do something) can be missing from those of us who had to continually fight for people to do anything last year. It’s time to regain it.

If this seems far-fetched, I think it’s worth considering the experience of New York’s ISO district. After we began to implement a new, more flexible perspective in November, we were surprised by how much people took on new responsibility for leading the branch. We had to actually open things up in order to really see how necessary it was to do so. I believe this will be our experience in CAN as well.

No longer substituting ourselves for the entire CAN chapter also frees us up to play the role of the left wing of CAN (as Ken L. from Rochester’s document in the Dec. 7 ISO Notes highlighted). This is partly because in practice, we do not have time to think through a socialist intervention if we are also running around doing an entire chapter’s work. But more fundamentally, it is because we do not feel confident trying to recruit to the ISO in CAN when we feel like we’re already making all the decisions for the group. If CAN has a more diverse leadership and we’re only one force among many, it will be natural for us to actively build the socialist, left wing of the group. It is worth noting that while our more experienced members can be quite hesitant to sell Socialist Worker in CAN, many members who have gotten involved this semester – and don’t have the weight of past experience hanging over them – have adopted a very natural, confident method of using articles in the paper to pursue political discussions in the group, and been very successful at selling it.

Seeing fellow CAN activists as people who need to be “trained”

We have developed a strong tendency to think of others in CAN as people who we need to “train” in how to build the movement. While it is true that we may have learned things through experience that are useful in building CAN, other people have useful ideas too – sometimes precisely because they don’t have our experience, that is, they can more easily come up with ideas that are different from what we’ve done before. The fact is (as another comrade put it to me), the great success of so many new CAN chapters shows that leading CAN is not rocket science, and people don’t need elaborate training to do it. We need to see the dynamic not as being, we are the teachers and other people need to learn from us, but rather, that everyone has ideas to contribute and we will learn from each other through struggling together over time.

To see ourselves as the only ones with things to teach and others as the only ones with things to learn is condescending – and it comes across. It is quite off-putting when people can tell that we have appointed ourselves the ones whose job it is to encourage them to “step up” – particularly when we are simultaneously reluctant to actually consider their ideas when they do offer them, which also makes us seem insincere. The best way to get people to contribute their ideas is not to continually express the desire that they do so, but to take them seriously when they do.

Seeing ourselves as responsible for “developing” the other leadership in CAN – rather than allowing it to actually develop organically – can actually prevent it from happening, even if we succeed in technically expanding leadership beyond the ISO. In my chapter, we knew there needed to be leadership outside the ISO, but we assumed we would have to be the ones to bring it about. With the best of intentions, we wound up picking a non-ISO member whose ideas were similar to ours as the leadership we were trying to develop, and set up the meetings so that her ideas were really listened to – without changing the overall culture of the group. In effect, we brought her into our leadership clique, which did nothing to truly open up the group, and is not really any more democratic than if our fraction were running everything ourselves. In reality, it never should have been up to us to decide who became the leadership in the first place.

Strategic and tactical rigidity

We have developed a tendency to be rigid about what kinds of actions we think CAN should do – in particular, pushing CAN to adopt a method for its growth and organization that is very similar to the ISO’s, for example, with public events featuring political speakers, built by tabling on campus. There is absolutely nothing wrong with either political speakers or tablings (both of which have been crucial to some chapters’ growth), but we can loosen up a bit about whether these are the only things we do. Part of our being the left of the group is that it will have a “right” and a “center” as well – and not every action will be one that we would have come up with. While our politics do give us a perspective about what kinds of events will be most effective (there’s a very good reason we don’t do the moralistic actions World Can’t Wait does where they accuse passersby of supporting torture) and we should bring that into CAN, we shouldn’t convey that ours is the only way of doing things, nor should we be dismissive of ideas that may actually be great just because they’re different from what we’ve done before.

For example, the new CAN chapter at Pratt, an art school in New York, did an antiwar art show as their first event, displaying artwork done by CAN members and their friends. This was a fantastic event for their chapter. It’s also the kind of event that could be dismissed out of hand by ISO members who had a preconception about what we should be doing.

In some cases, we never explicitly argue against other proposals, but we effectively kill them by ignoring them and going ahead as though ours were the only ideas put forward. This can have just as strong an effect of killing the enthusiasm of people who put forward other ideas, and leading us to miss out on some good opportunities, as if we actively opposed them.

The same goes for ways of building events; tabling doesn’t always have to be the main way we build everything. Of course, a great tabling can be very effective (RIT’s chapter seems to have perfected the art – see pictures at www.traprockpeace.org/can_rit_19oct05. html). But in some chapters, because we have become accustomed to seeing tabling as the way every event must be publicized (perhaps because we believe people must be convinced of a lot before they will come to a meeting), we feel obligated to organize tablings no one is really excited about, and hence organize them badly. If we relax our sense of how things can get done, and above all scrap the assumption that we have to be the ones to decide, we’ll be more successful because we’ll be doing things our whole chapter is more enthusiastic about. (This could include doing tablings as part of larger sidewalk events, like die-ins, mock votes, etc.)

(I was recently surprised to learn that some of the strongest new CAN chapters, like Pace, build largely through word of mouth, with students bringing their friends and people they invite in classes and dorms or through Facebook – along with plastering the campus with fliers. At Hampton, the repressiveness of the school means they are not even allowed to put up fliers. Yet they have built a core group of 30 people attending their meetings through word of mouth alone.)

Excessive fear of mistakes and disappointment

Although we will always make plenty of mistakes (as we often say, the only way to avoid mistakes in struggle is to abstain from struggle altogether), sometimes they’re more costly than others. When the antiwar movement was in decline, mistakes could seem very significant because so many things were pulling people away from activism, one disappointing event could seem to be the final straw. With things moving our way, though, we needn’t be so afraid. At this point, fear of making mistakes is hurting us more than any individual mistake would.

One way this plays out is that in some chapters, we give ourselves the role of “managing people’s expectations.” We are too scared that people will leave if they are disappointed by anything, so we encourage them not to expect very much. One comrade recently told me that at the beginning of the semester, her chapter had a lot of new CAN members who were full of ideas about things they wanted to do. Because the fraction had had its own expectations frustrated again and again the year before, it repeatedly warned the other CAN members not to expect too much. By now, while they have stayed active in the group, those people have by and large stopped generating ideas they were excited about.

This fear can also prevent us from successfully turning around the atmosphere in our chapters. It doesn’t do any good to let new people take the reins, only to immediately jump back in and take over as soon as things start to go in what looks like the wrong direction. For example, if someone makes a flawed flier, we needn’t jump to remake it.

If we really want to open up CAN, we need to have enough confidence in our ability to grow right now to know that mistakes won’t be fatal.

Where do we go from here?

I’ve been arguing that it is largely a method we have developed in the ISO that has held back many CAN chapters we relate to from growing this semester. The other side of that is that there are huge opportunities open to us if we can set ourselves up to help CAN grasp them. Just as we shouldn’t be terrified of other people’s mistakes, we needn’t be demoralized by our own. The absolute worst thing we could do at this point would be to fall into frustration or despair (nor should we blame ourselves or others in our fractions for what is, after all, a collective mistake that comes from our past experiences).

Unlike some other times when we’ve struggled in CAN, this time the big picture is that things are moving very much in our direction.

Opposition to the war, and just as importantly, a desire to find a way to fight against it, are stronger than ever. This can be seen in myriad ways – from the success of new CAN chapters, September 24 contingents, and conference, to the turnout at some of the November 2 walkouts called by World Can’t Wait and Youth Against War and Racism – two coalitions with much smaller bases than CAN. The reason we should take figuring out the right method very seriously is that we have so much to win: a fighting student movement that can take our campuses by storm and turn the sentiment against the war into a powerful movement to stop it.

Elizabeth W.F. – NYU branch, New York