Socialists have often been at the forefront of the student movement. The left proposes the simple but apparently radical idea that students and faculty should work together to control the means of education and take university governance back from corporate America. Socialists propose that higher education should not merely involve preparing students to be part of the capitalist machine, but that it should prepare them to be good citizens with a strong and enduring commitment to democracy and equality. These were the ideals of socialist students forty years ago, and these are the ideals of socialist students today. But how far have we really come in realizing these goals, and how far do we still have to go?

The very fact that we’re still fighting the same battles with corporate administrators demonstrates the distance between today’s reality and our ideals. State governments still control our public universities through corporate administrators. The role of student government is mostly advisory. Moreover, corporate America has been successful in turning student government toward an increasingly materialistic agenda. Many now become involved in student government to pad their résumés after graduation, not to bring about real change. While activism and organization are on the rise, apathy and defeatism are still the dominant forces on many campuses.

Take, for example, the situation at this columnist’s own Ohio University and more broadly in the state of Ohio. At Ohio University, corporate administrators routinely ignore the concerns of students and faculty. In recent years they have made unpopular decisions with impunity. They have institued alcohol and drug policies that use students’ own tuition dollars to turn our campus into a virtual police state. They have limited our First Amendment rights by creating Orwellian “free speech zones” in which only registered student organizations can protest in certain areas and at certain times, and they have hailed a slight easing of these still unconstitutional restrictions as an example of a progressive administration that hears student concerns and acts on them. They have made budget decisions that undercut the needs of students and faculty, including a reallocation of funds to hire more corporate bureaucrats at the expense of union custodial and maintenance jobs that were supposed to be protected by a labor contract. For these and other reasons, about 3/4 of voting students and faculty disapprove of our university president, Roderick McDavis. Our corporate Board of Trustees’ response to this disapproval was to limit student and faculty input in the president’s evaluation, give McDavis another five year contract, and grant him an $85,000 per year raise.

Our Student Senate has proven inept and indifferent to most of these problems, but even an activist Student Senate could accomplish little, if anything. Its role is merely advisory. The real power lies with the Board of Trustees, appointed by the Ohio governor to oversee university administration. Two students sit on the Board of Trustees, but their role too is merely advisory. This is essentially how all of Ohio’s public universities are governed, and Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland has given no indication that he wants to give students a greater role in decision-making. In fact, Strickland is dragging us down the road to a new bureaucratic nightmare. Dressed up as a program to improve higher education in Ohio, Strickland’s new University System of Ohio will bring Ohio’s universities into bureaucratic uniformity and cut budgets for programs that are deemed “under-performing.” In other words, look for increased funding for mathematics, natural sciences, and applied sciences coupled with body blows to the arts, humanities, and most social sciences.

The situation in Ohio is just an example of what’s going on nationwide. Corporate America is doing everything it can to see that there is no next generation of artists, musicians, authors, and philosophers — no new agents of morality and progress. This is because corporate America knows that, unencumbered by these moral restraints, the next generation of engineers, computer technicians, chemists, physicists, and biologists it is seeking to create will have no qualms about building new weapons of mass destruction. It knows that without agents of morality and progress the next generation of accountants, economists, and corporate lawyers will secure unregulated capitalism for decades to come. And what about that military-industrial complex that our forebears railed against? It’s alive and well at our universities. The federal government has now inextricably tied recruitment access to educational funding.

Now more than ever before, we need an organized student movement united around the principle that students and faculty must cooperate to seize control of the means of education and drive corporate America and the military-industrial complex out of our lecture halls and administrative buildings. Now more than ever, we need a new generation of student leaders who can shake off the malaise and defeatism and get us organized. We need marches, strikes, sit-ins, and complete university shut-downs. We need to bring the corporate university system to a grinding halt and demand its complete, non-negotiable reform on our own terms. We need another 1968 Revolution. We can do this, and we must do this before the transformation of American higher education into a recruiting tool for corporations and the military-industrial complex is complete and irrevocable. Forty years later, our universities are long overdue for another uprising.

Biden has almost four decades of voting record to be examined, and you can be
sure it will be picked apart by media pundits and Republican operatives in the
following days and weeks. But even though Biden’s voting record shows that he is
fairly strong on the issues that matter to the left, his appeal to leftist
voters goes beyond his Senate votes. Like Obama, Biden is a change candidate;
but he represents a very different kind of change. Whereas Obama has argued that
we should engage in a great post-partisan experiment to overcome the problems
facing America, Biden represents the traditional Democratic brand. He is a
politician with roots in an era when Democrats were still proud to be Democrats,
an era before conservative centrists convinced Democrats that, if they would
only imitate the Republicans, voters would prefer the imitation over the real thing.

The Democratic Leadership Council was founded in 1985 by Democratic politico Al
From. It was founded on the false premise that Ronald Reagan won the landslide
election of 1984 because Americans had rejected Walter Mondale’s progressive
populism. The situation was quite a bit more complex. The Reagan campaign
engaged in a brilliant advertising campaign that relied upon Ronald Reagan’s
charisma and leadership style, contrasted with the Mondale campaign’s focus on
issues and Mondale’s general lack of charisma. Moreover, Mondale failed to
excite the demographic groups who often support the Democratic Party –
including young people, union members, those who self-identified as Democrats,
and those who self-identified as liberal. This likely had more to do with
Mondale’s role as vice president in the unpopular Carter administration, which
presided over an economic recession and energy crisis, than it did with
Mondale’s populist message. Nevertheless, the DLC asserted that progressive
populism had failed and that the Democratic Party needed to move to the right to
excite voters.

Pouncing on Democratic desperation following Michael Dukakis’ defeat by then
incumbent Vice President George H.W. Bush, the DLC issued the New Orleans
Declaration in 1990. The declaration took up traditionally Republican concepts
of small government, free markets, expanded trade, and welfare reduction. When
then Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton ran on these ideas and won in 1992, the DLC
claimed credit — again ignoring a political climate in which the incumbent
president had become unpopular due to economic recession, and an election in
which third party candidate Ross Perot had drawn considerable support away from
Bush. Even though evidence suggests that the Democratic Party’s shift to the
right under Bill Clinton guided the Republicans to shift even further right and thus
take over Congress in 1994 as the right-wing “real deal” rather than mere
imitations, the DLC continues to claim that its center-right policies lead to
electoral victory.

In August 2000, the DLC issued the Hyde Park Declaration. This new declaration
proved even more conservative than it predecessor, and many of its ideas ended
up in George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 platforms. For example, it’s not difficult
to see how the DLC’s emphasis on “the winner’s circle” and materialistic
ownership goals translated into Bush’s “ownership society.” The emphasis on
school choice and charter schools also ended up in Bush’s platform in an attempt
to undermine the improvement of underperforming public schools. The DLC’s
emphasis on tax credits and purchasing pools has been used by the Bush
administration to avoid true universal health care coverage. The DLC promoted
the falsehood that Social Security was in crisis and endorsed the privatization
of Social Security, used by Bush like a blunt weapon against Al Gore and John
Kerry. Last, but certainly not least, the DLC laid the groundwork for the
neoconservative interventionism that has been the centerpiece of the Bush
foreign policy and that Democrats failed to repudiate in 2004. Maybe that’s
because John F. Kerry signed the Hyde Park Declaration. Two of the names on
Barack Obama’s short list, Evan Bayh and Kathleen Sebelius, were also on the
Hyde Park Declaration; so was one of the names on John McCain’s short list, Joe
Lieberman. Joe Biden didn’t sign it.

Joe Biden didn’t sign it because Joe Biden doesn’t believe it. Biden has
always believed in “smart government,” not “small government” designed to benefit
wealthy corporate powers at the expense of the working class. Biden has
advocated for a more responsible trade system that, while falling short of the
left’s goals, would nevertheless be a big improvement over the DLC-style trade
system first implemented under Bill Clinton and continued under George W. Bush.
Biden has been a passionate advocate for the improvement of all our public
schools, especially the underperforming ones, and has repudiated his vote for
the No Child Left Behind Act which implemented many of the DLC’s policy goals.
Biden has been a vocal opponent of Social Security privatization. Moreover,
Biden has often been a voice in the wilderness for a sane, internationalist
foreign policy that repudiates neoconservatism. Yes, he voted to authorize the
Iraq War. But it is little known that he worked with Republican Sen. Richard Lugar
prior to that vote to draft a resolution that required the president to exhaust
all diplomatic efforts before invading Iraq? It would have effectively stalled
the march to war. Biden did that because he is in favor of a Democratic
foreign policy, not imitation Republicanism.

Joe Biden may not be everything that we would want in a running mate, but he is
unquestionably the best the left could have realistically hoped for in a race with
the post-partisan, centrist Barack Obama.

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Consider the populist approach to trade. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, populists are not generally in favor of fair trade. They are in favor of tariffs and other protectionist measures intended to keep American jobs in America and largely bring to a halt the frenzy of so-called free trade that has occurred under the Clinton and Bush administrations. Those who are truly in favor of fair trade recognize that globalization is inevitable, but that it should not happen on the backs of the world’s workers. Fair trade consists of measures that would acknowledge the reality of the global economy, but with the caveat that American workers must be protected from its harshest aspects and that the needs and dignity of workers abroad must be respected. This differs significantly from a populist approach to trade that would focus exclusively, or at least primarily, on protecting American workers at the expense of workers in other countries.

Another issue to consider is the populist approach to immigration. Populists have been at the forefront of the campaign to “crack down” on illegal immigrants by, among other things, engaging in mass deportation, building a fence on our border with Mexico, and militarizing our southern border by hiring more border patrol agents and sending the National Guard to patrol the border. This is all based on the ancient and ugly belief that “they” are taking “our” jobs and therefore must be kept out. It should be noted that the mainstream Right’s approach hasn’t been much better; it favors a “guest worker program” that would benefit American corporations and turn immigrants into a new caste of slave labor in our society. Still, it is clear to any person concerned with the human dignity of immigrants that the war of attrition proposed by populists is not the way to solve the problems faced by undocumented migrant workers or workers born in the United States.

If Obama wanted to get passionate about the economy while continuing his message of change, he would have to embrace not populism but socialism. Unlike populists, socialists encourage the workers of the world to unite against their exploitation by the global capitalist class. Socialists refuse to pit the white worker against the African American or Latino American or Asian American worker, the U.S.-born worker against the immigrant worker, or the American worker against workers abroad. Rather, socialists propose that we must ensure good jobs for all workers regardless of skin color; that we must ensure the social welfare of the U.S. worker while developing a humane immigration policy; and that American jobs should stay in America even while we insist that the rules of trade respect the rights of workers abroad. Socialists declare that these issues are not mutually exclusive. Until governments everywhere are of the worker, by the worker, and for the worker, truly just and humane conditions will not exist for workers anywhere.

Indeed, socialism would provide the bridge between Obama’s foreign policy proposals and his best economic proposals. Socialists have always held that war is the result of the manipulation of the working class by wealthy elites to fight other workers, thus undermining the solidarity of laborers the world over. Today, the taxes paid by American workers are being used to send other American workers to kill Iraqi workers. The same is true in Afghanistan. The same would be true if a McCain administration engaged in armed conflict with Russia over Georgia’s treatment of Abkhazia and South Ossetia — here again, the wealthy elite would be using the money of American workers to send other American workers to fight and kill Russian workers. What socialists wish Obama would do is make the connection that neoconservative warmongering means taking American workers’ tax dollars and using them for death and destruction rather than using them for social services that would benefit the entire U.S. working class. 

As it unites workers in a common cause, at home and abroad, socialism would be a real “change we can believe in.” Populism is really business as usual, another way of pitting worker against worker and dividing rather than uniting people in our own country, on our own continent, in our own hemisphere, and abroad. Krugman is right that it would be good if Obama became more passionate about economic issues, but he’s wrong about “populism.” The time is now to propose a truly new direction for the U.S., and our walk together in that new direction should be guided by a socialist worldview.

A look back at the latter half of the 20th century shows us that the Cold War
was the biggest hoax in modern history. The United States framed the Cold War as
a struggle against the spread of Communist authoritarianism, using the Cold War
as an excuse for a wide range of imperial foreign policy blunders — most
notably, the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Russia framed the Cold War as the fight for
a global revolution to overthrow capitalist oppression, while engaging in its
own oppression of Warsaw Pact nations and committing its own imperial blunders
– notably, the Afghan War. The fact that this struggle between the two empires
continues almost two decades after the Soviet Union collapsed and Communism was
replaced by capitalism in Russia demonstrates that ideological framing on both
sides was a lie. The Cold War was a race by two new empires to fill the vacuum
left by the collapse of the old European empires following World War II. That’s
why it continues today, even as we reap the bitter fruits of Cold War
imperialism in West Asia (the Middle East), Afghanistan, and the former
Yugoslavia. Apparently neither the United States nor Russia have learned the
lessons of the Cold War, or it would not continue.

The situation in South Ossetia must be viewed through the lens of the ongoing
Cold War. The Republic of South Ossetia has twice declared independence from
Georgia after referenda in which an overwhelming majority of Ossetians have
voted for independence. And twice the international community, including Russia,
has refused to recognize South Ossetia’s independence. Why? On the one hand, the
United States and Western Europe see Georgia as an ally and a potential member
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Recognizing the independence
of South Ossetia would jeopardize that relationship and diminish
American-European influence over South Ossetia, which is friendly toward Russia.
Meanwhile, Russia refuses to recognize South Ossetian independence because to do
so would be to give up any hope of future imperial control of South Ossetia. It
would also likely embolden the Chechen Republic that Moscow so brutally
oppresses. Although Moscow may want to appear innocent, there can be no doubt
that the war over South Ossetia is less about Ossetians and more about
reasserting Russian domination of Georgia and, indeed, South Ossetia.

If this all seems familiar, it’s because we’ve done this particular dance
before. The devastation of the nations that once made up Yugoslavia occurred
because neither the American-European alliance nor Russia wanted to give up
imperial domination of those nations. Unable to decide what to do, they
initially did nothing. The rest is history: Serbian ultra-nationalists engaged
in widespread ethnic cleansing of those seeking independence until NATO finally
stepped in and put an end to it. The echoes of the war between the nations of
the former Yugoslavia are still heard today, as the same Serbian
ultra-nationalism reasserts itself in response to Kosovar independence. The
horrors of the former Yugoslavia remind us of what the imperial Cold War has
wrought, and history now threatens to repeat itself in the Republic of South
Ossetia.

Of course, the ideological framing of the conflict has begun in earnest on both
sides. Russia is lashing out at Georgia for aggression and human rights abuses,
while also laying the blame on those who have armed Georgia (namely, the United
States and Western Europe). Meanwhile, the United States has made this an issue
of Georgian territorial integrity and Russian violation of that integrity.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain has laid the blame
squarely on Moscow, even provocatively suggesting that NATO should become
involved in the conflict. Fox News pundit Geraldo Rivera compared Russian claims
that its military is protecting Russians in South Ossetia to Hitler’s claims
regarding Germans in Czechoslovakia before Nazi Germany invaded that country.
When the Hitler comparisons begin to rear their ugly heads, it is usually a good
indication that someone is trying to justify something that cannot be justified
without appealing to fear and guilt. Absent from all this ideological framing is
any mention of South Ossetian independence, and in fact most Americans probably
have no idea that the Republic of South Ossetia has twice declared independence
and our government has twice refused to recognize Ossetian independence. All
they know is what the pundits are telling them: the Russian juggernaut is back.

But let’s play devil’s advocate and assume that I’m being too cynical, that the
United States and Russia are really concerned with peace and stability in the
region. If that’s the case, they should convene an emergency session of the
United Nations Security Council and offer a joint resolution to end the
conflict. The resolution should order an immediate ceasefire and a withdrawal of
all Georgian troops from South Ossetia. The resolution should recognize the
independence of the Republic of South Ossetia and establish a multinational
peacekeeping force that includes both Russians and Americans (as well as other
Europeans) to present a unified front and discourage further Georgian
aggression. A multinational force would also prevent Russia from reasserting
imperial control over South Ossetia. Continuing the Russian-led peacekeeping
force currently in South Ossetia would make it easy for Moscow to take over
where Georgia had left off in oppressing the South Ossetians. Everyone, with the
obvious exception of Georgia, would get a little something out of this, the
region’s peace and stability would be restored, and a new democratic experiment
would begin in the Republic of South Ossetia.

That’s what the United States and Russia should do, but we shouldn’t hold our
breath. Remember, this isn’t really about peace and stability. It’s about a
dangerous game of imperial chess in which South Ossetia has become the latest
pawn, and neither side will be happy until it can make the elusive declaration
of checkmate. As long as this imperial game is the principle motivating factor
behind American and Russian actions, the region will lack peace and stability
and the Republic of South Ossetia will continue to be a victimized nation
deprived of self-determination. And that is the real tragedy of South Ossetia.

Nate Nelson is a YDS Member from Ohio University and maintains a blog called Nate, Uncensored