and by themselves they won’t overcome, but they’re the basis for
overcoming. If you can rebuild, reconstitute and strengthen a
culture in which social bonds are considered significant, you’ve
made a step towards undermining the control that private and state
power exercise over society.
In a cover story in the Nation, Daniel Singer described “the
unmistakable attempt by the international financial establishment
and [European] governments to [adopt] Reaganomics” and the
“striking signs of resistance in Europe” against this. There have
been mass demonstrations in France, Germany and Italy, and
250,000 Canadians turned out in Toronto to protest what was going
on. That’s 1 % of the total population of Canada—an astonishing
figure.
There’s been a lot of response all over the place.Traditionally, campuses have been a major source of resistance. Yet
a new study from UCLA says that student activism is at an all-time
low, and that interest in government and politics has plummeted. It
also states that students’ “academic involvement has gone down as
well....They’re watching more TV.” Does that track with your own
perceptions?
To say that this is a low point is short-sighted. Is it lower than the
1950s? Is it lower than 1961, when John F. Kennedy sent the Air
Force to bomb South Vietnam and you couldn’t get a single person to
think about it?
When I gave talks on the war in the mid-1960s, we couldn’t get
anybody to attend. Students weren’t interested—except sometimes
in attacking the traitors who were condemning government policy.
Most of the real and important student activism took place in the
late 1960s, and it was by no means “traditional.”
What about the anti-apartheid movement in the late 1980s?
That was real and important, but it’s not all that was happening in
the 1980s. The Central America solidarity movement was far more
deeply rooted in the mainstream of society. Students were involved,
but they weren’t by any means at the core of it. You found more in