Next Wave of Student Protests Takes Aim at Capitalism

After an historic year of campus activism, a new movement is building on college campuses to spearhead a nationwide conversation — how to outlast capitalism.

In the last month or so, an unprecedented wave of activism has spread across college campuses nationwide. From the Million Student March to end student debt and implement tuition-free public colleges and universities, to the Black Lives Matter protests that were spontaneously organized to show solidarity with black students at the University of Missouri and other students fighting structural racism on campuses, the last month has been the busiest for student activism in decades.

But in 2016, an entirely new wave of campus activism is hitting schools in the form of teach-ins, chiefly focused on finding a way to move beyond capitalism as the dominant socioeconomic system in the United States.

“Growing up, we were taught that there were only two choices for an economic system: state socialism or unfettered capitalism, which is false,” said Dana Brown, coordinator of the Next System Project‘s teach-ins. “But there has yet to be a national discussion about what comes after our current system and how we get there. We believe college campuses are the best place to begin that conversation.”

Brown stresses that the coming wave of teach-ins, which will start in earnest at college campuses in New York City and Madison, Wisconsin, aren’t to advocate for one system over another. Rather, the teach-ins are aimed at sharing ideas for potential solutions, which The Next System Project plans to post online to be shared nationwide. The official website, teachins.org, explains the goal of the project:

Our society faces a systemic crisis, not simply political and economic troubles. The economy is stagnating. The political system is stalemated. Communities are in decay. The planet itself is threatened by climate change. Traditional strategies to achieve equitable and sustainable social, economic, and ecological outcomes no longer work … It’s time to talk about the real alternatives we know exist and learn how to make them a reality for our communities.

“People are aware that the existing system is in profound trouble,” historian and political economist Gar Alperovitz told US Uncut. “Throughout most of the 20th century, in Europe and the US, there was a balancing act between growth and inequality. That was kept in partial check by progressive movements and the power of unions in politics. But that structure largely collapsed with the collapse of organized labor.”

Alperovitz argues that America’s once-mighty labor unions, which have been on a rapid decline since the Reagan administration, are waning in influence, creating a power vacuum that politically-active young people on college campuses can fill. The trends appear to bear out Alperovitz’ hypothesis: Between 1973 and 2011, American union membership has halved as a percentage of the total workforce, according to the Economic Policy Institute:

The Next System Project is right to target the millennial generation — nearly one-third of Americans between 18 and 39 have a favorable view of socialism, which is high compared to just 15 percent of people over 65 who feel the same way. The Pew Research Center recently learned that an astounding 50 percent of Americans between 18 and 49 approve of socialism.

“When a majority of people under 50 favor socialism over capitalism, you’re witnessing a profound cultural change,” Alperovitz said.

So what exactly is a teach-in, and why is it being used as a tool to take on capitalism today?

In terms of format, the teach-in is the most open-ended and decentralized setting for an educational forum, creating space for people of varying ideologies and experience to engage in ongoing dialogue. Teach-ins first emerged during the resistance to the Vietnam War 50 years ago, on the University of Michigan campus, spread to Berkeley, California, and famously blossomed into a nationwide revolt against the Nixon administration’s militaristic foreign policy.

Teach-ins about the corporatization of higher education also played a significant role in the lead-up to the pivotal WTO protests of 1999 in Seattle, Washington, in which 100,000 people gathered to protest globalization and economically-disastrous “free trade” policies. As scholar and activist Ben Manski wrote in the Berkeley Journal, the Seattle protests were one of the major catalysts that sparked similar mass protests around the country opposed to global capitalism:

In much of the Global North, the coalitions that had led the opposition to the WTO, IMF, and World Bank became, after September 11, 2001, leading voices in opposing the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In the U.S., many of the veterans of Seattle also became leaders in the new voting rights movement that emerged in response to the Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 presidential recounts … By 2008, when global capitalism crashed, the global movement that had won one of its first major victories in Seattle had matured and become a part of the everyday culture of tens—perhaps hundreds—of millions of people across the planet.

Just as the 1965 University of Michigan teach-ins spread to Berkeley and gave birth to a nationwide uprising against war, and just as the pro-Democracy teach-ins of the late 1990s created the spark that led to an outpouring of resistance to global capitalism in Seattle, Dana Brown hopes that 2016’s teach-ins will spawn a new student-driven movement that will eventually create a political and economic system that works for everyone, not just the wealthy elite.

“Whether it’s protesting the crushing levels of student debt, getting a school to divest its money from the fossil fuel industry, or fighting racism, college campuses have become havens for meaningful action in recent years,” Brown said. “None of us knows what the answer will be. But our goal is to make that conversation happen.”

Those interested in the project can learn more and get involved at teachins.org.

C. Robert Gibson is editor-in-chief of US Uncut. His work has been published in The Guardian, NPR, Al Jazeera America, Salon, and the Washington Post. Follow him on Twitter @crgibs.