Country needs new New Left

The Port Huron Statement, drafted by the Students for a Democratic Society in 1962, represented a clarion call for a generation of activists. It was the manifesto of the New Left, issued at the dawn of a decade of student radicalism. The Old Left of labor organizers, Trotskyite communists, and social democrats gave way to a New Left of radical students, liberation movements and anti-war activists. The nexus of struggle shifted from the workplace to the university, from the working class to the radical youth.

It has been 40 years since that document came into being. It was written at a time when it looked like the welfare state would exist forever, when it looked like students were going to replace workers as the vanguards of the coming revolution. It looked like another future was possible.

40 years later we are fighting to hold on the last shreds of a social safety net. Our generation may end up less prosperous than our parents'. 40 years later we look back on a generation of intellectuals who turned the university into a "progressive," yet still elitist institution—who left the streets in favor of board rooms, cashing in their educational privilege. The promise of the student radical has been replaced by reality of privileged elites. The students who lack the resources of these elites face an increasingly perilous future. The student debt bubble is now passing the trillion-dollar mark. Pell grants, which covered 77 percent of our parents' educations at four-year public universities, are covering 35 percent of ours.

In the past 40 years we have watched that 1960s generation cede ground to the scourge of neoliberalism. We've watched the small gains made by working people reversed at the hands of corporate power. We've watched corporations subvert our democracy and we've been told to sit down and shut up, because freer markets equal freer people. But I still don't feel free. I know a lot of young people who feel the same. The Port Huron Statement is looking like a dream deferred.

It is time to update that dream. We need a statement that rejectsthe neoliberal era of austerity, student debt, busted unions, derivatives speculation, mass incarceration of a generation of people of color and a failing education system. We need a new New Left.

We've gotten off to a great start with the Occupy Movement. Unless we build on these gains in the coming months, we will not be able to create the same opportunity we had in 1962, and we will look back on what could have been. This spring we will take the offensive. On March 1, students throughout the country will protest the debt, tuition hikes and cutbacks that turn higher education into a privilege. Vassar activists will be protesting in solidarity with all students that day. We know that this crisis is our generation's crisis, and that many of us will be graduating with debt, dim job prospects, or both.

The Port Huron Statement describes the university as "a potential base and agency in a movement of social change." On March 1 we will affirm that truth and draft a Port Huron Statement for our generation of students. This spring, as students fight back and the Occupy Movement evolves, we will begin to form a Left for our times. If it sounds ambitious, remember the words of the original manifesto: "If we appear to seek the unattainable...then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable."

—Spencer Resnick '15 is a member of Vassar Young Democratic Socialists