Practical Strategy for Change

by Damon Krane

An old activist slogan advises us, “Speak truth to power.” But what if “power” already knows the truth and just doesn’t care? Last week I mentioned Madeline Albright’s 1996 appearance on ••60 minutes•• when she said that half a million dead Iraqi children was an acceptable price to pay to achieve the interests of U.S. elites. In doing so, she spoke for every U.S. policy maker involved in carrying out a decade-long campaign of destruction (via crippling economic sanctions and weekly bombing) against Iraq that Bush No. 2 is now seeking to expand and intensify into an all-out war. “Power” is as aware of the truth as human rights and anti-war activists; it just has a different set of priorities. As long as that’s the case, simply speaking truth to power doesn’t seem like a winning strategy for an anti-war movement.

At first our prospects don’t look good. Bush No. 2 has received the go-ahead from

Congress, and no general referendum on going to war is scheduled. At this point, we’re disenfranchised on the issue. But don’t despair. We spend most of our waking hours as the disenfranchised members of anti-democratic institutions divided between rulers and the ruled. The formal political system aside, I just described your place of employment and/or the school you attend, didn’t I? Yet disenfranchisement hasn’t stopped workers and students from winning victories in the face of powerful opposition. We can build a successful anti-war movement by learning from their examples.

Imagine workers, denied any formal control of workplace governance within a capitalist economy, being content to speak truth to their powerful employers. Workers might say, “Since all of your wealth depends on our labor, we think that paying us higher wages, reducing our hours, improving occupational safety conditions and providing us with health benefits are all worth the loss of your profits which these things would entail.” Workers have seldom, if ever, influenced corporate governance in this manner. Instead, they’ve pried these potential profits from their bosses’ greedy fingers by threatening to deprive their employers of even greater profit losses via strikes, sit-ins, occupations, slow-downs and other work stoppages.

OU students are similarly disenfranchised, lacking any formal power over university governance. Last year many OU students were confronted with a situation in which we found our priorities at odds with the administrations’. After two sexual assaults and one beating of a gay student were reported on campus within a single week last winter quarter, hundreds of OU students launched a campaign for university reforms aimed at combating a climate of hostility toward women and LGBT students. Among other things (••The Post,•• April 2, 2002), students demanded the administration comply with the federal guidelines of the Clery Act for informing students and university employees of crime statistics, reporting procedures, prevention programs and survivor support resources.

Administrators responded by denying that the law’s requirements applied to them and adding that they would be a real hassle to follow anyway. OUPD’s Mark Matthews told students “On your way to OU, you didn’t pass any signs along the highway that said, ‘Welcome to Athens, bad things don’t happen here’” (••The Athens News•• Feb. 11, 2002; ••The Post•• April 2, 2002). Even sympathetic administrators said we were being unreasonable by wanting changes to take place while we still are students here. “If we get something in four or five years,” one remarked, “I figure that’s pretty good.”

Things changed when we stopped trying to convince administrators with moral or legal arguments and thought about their behavior. They had gone so far as threatening to arrest students for trespassing on our own campus if we refused to move the walkout rally to a less visible location. President Glidden, to this day, has never commented publicly on the matter. Coupled with OU’s reluctance to publish crime statistics, this led us to believe that administrators’ highest priority was their public image.

Giving into student demands meant acknowledging that there were problems at OU, not the least of which was how administrators were managing the university. We started winning when we showed our determination to make administrators’ failure to address these issues result in much more bad press for them than would result from addressing them. OU then complied with the Clery Act, and crime alert flyers now go up around campus immediately following any assault reported. In written notices to students, OU admits it is legally required to provide the crime report information. I have no doubt that our campaign was also a major factor — along with the admirable work of Katherine Smith and Student Senate — in getting OU to agree to include a women’s center in the new student center.

So long as people are divided among rulers and the ruled, elites and the disenfranchised, the two groups will rarely have the same set of priorities. “Power” will know the truth and simply not care. Victories for the disenfranchised depend on finding out what it is that elites value and then raising the costs of a preferred elite action to prohibitive levels. This is the guiding logic of every strike and boycott, OU students’ post-walkout campaign, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s success in the Civil Rights Movement and far more than I can list here. It is how many argue that the Vietnam War was finally brought to a close. It should be the guiding logic of this anti-war movement as well.

Damon Krane is a senior specialized studies major. Send him an e-mail at dk338199@ohiou.edu.