a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

{Note: Last week we had technical trouble with the blog’s “notification plug-in,” so subscribers were not notified that #39 (on the Egyptian youth-led revolution) had been posted. Sorry for that. Hopefully, it’s fixed. You can find #39 in the Archive.}

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot this week about youth-led revolts and revolutions, and will write about this topic next week. But this week I wanted to share with you a letter I wrote on April 30, 2008 to a colleague in Caracas, Venezuela (whose name I will withhold, not knowing his current safety or lack of it). He had been on a committee that invited me to lecture on Hannah Arendt in several Caracas universities. In June, 2007, I arrived just in time to witness a wave of student-led protests against the Chavez regime and particularly against it interferences at that time  with free speech and its arrests of dissenters. The situation was–and still is—very complex, because Chavez is an authoritarian, but a populist one; a former military man, but allied with the socialist left; a benefactor to many poor Venezuelans as well as to cronies who work for the petro-state and the Army, a bane to the struggling middle class and the unemployed; supported by some of the left intelligentsia (including some ‘stars’ in his cabinet), but not by most of the university students and professors.  If Chavez had not been so hated by Washington, he might  have been a contender for a Mubarak role.

April 30, 2008, New York City:

I was very interested to hear that you, your colleagues and your students are organizing a forum in which you can reflect back on the events of June, 2007 in Caracas and around Venezuela. You will consider, too, the role of the student movement then and during the next six months, when Chavez’s national referendum vote came up and he lost.

Several times during my visit, I mentioned Hannah Arendt and the American student movement of 1968, and you have asked me to write my recollections of those remarks for your forum. I am happy to do that. But let me say first that I am writing in a particular moment here in New York, at the end of April, 2008.  My daily New York Times is full of articles and opinion pieces about a reunion that took place last week at Columbia University.  Many of the former Columbia University students who had participated in the occupation of the university in 1968 returned for a conference at which they remembered their  experiences. A kind of dramatic re-enactment took place, which was reported all over again by the press, commented on all over again by a wider public—forty years on! Among the comments was one in the New York Times on April 23 by the writer Paul Auster, who said that he thought the student anti-war and anti-university protesters had accomplished “not much of anything.” The Vietnam War had dragged on for seven years more and the university was hardly reformed into any greater sensitivity to its Harlem neighborhood and the minority populations living there.  Auster’s comment triggered an impassioned debate.

Reliving the time in my own mind, remembering marching with a group from my school that joined the Columbia protestors, I asked myself:  How does one judge the effects or the accomplishments of a student movement? Not in any simple way, obviously.  There are immediate political effects. You saw one in Venezuela: the 2007 referendum failed, despite the continued popularity of Chavez and his programs. The students can take a great deal of credit for exposing how badly Chavez’s referendum over-reached: how vague it was, and ambitious beyond what was needed to keep a reform process going; how unrepresentative it was, as it tried to dictate public sentiment, not express it. As important as a political effect is, however, it is probably, in the longer run, less lasting than something else, which all student movements have in common: a discovery by a new political generation of power.  Political effects have to be renewed, again and again; but their renewal depends on the people –the students and all influenced by them—having learned what power is and learned how to renew it.

Of the many conceptual clarifications offered in Hannah Arendt’s work, I told your students that the one which matters most in a revolutionary moment is the one she made about  power and violence. She did not, like most political theorists, and like all dictators,  view violence as a means of asserting power. She viewed violence as what a regime turns to or resorts to when it is losing power or has lost power. Power, she held, is what people gain when they act together, when they form alliances, when they participate, talking together, discussing, debating, voting, determining what is to be done.  Democratic or republican governments are elected by people who have gained power and are willing to entrust a government to continue expressing their shared will –and to criticize the government if it fails to be representative.

Hannah Arendt did not think of politics as what is carried on by governments; it is not  rulership over people.  The essence of politics is people gathering, deliberating, acting together, gaining power. Your students were learning this lesson in June, 2007: they had power, they were powerful.  The Chavez government, feeling threatened, and becoming more distanced from the popular power that had entrusted it with administration, resorted to violence to counter the student’s power. The result was that the government alienated many of its supporters and showed its own weaknesses, operated against the best in itself and against its stated ideal of “participatory democracy.” The immediate result was that the government lost in the referendum.

When I was in Caracas, I spoke about Arendt’s distinction, and offered your students some anecdotes about her attitude toward the American and European student movements during the first year that she taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, 1968/69. That

year, she was teaching a course called “Political Experience in the 20^th Century,” which was not your usual political theory course. She wanted us, her students, to read novels and plays, poems and memoirs, to try to get a feel for what people had actually experienced in the period of the First World War, between the Wars, during the Second World War. Central to their experience was how far governments could get from citizens; how wrapped in ideology and bizarrely non-sensical ideas and visions government leaders could get; how convoluted in bureaucracies people could be. She was interested in studying how difficult it is to maintain one’s independent judgment when masses of people are swept up in totalitarian ambition; how hard it is on friendships and families to be torn in the unfolding of events and the escalation of violence and secrecy and lies. I wanted your students to get a sense of the perspective she always took: looking into things from the bottom up, not looking down on people as leaders—and theorists– so often do.

I told your students what a pragmatist Hannah Arendt was about organizing.  A group of her New School students came to her before one of the big anti-war demonstrations in New York and asked her advice. They had been approached by a labor union group over the possibility of co-sponsoring a demonstration. But they didn’t know whether to accept this proposal because the union group shared some of their goals but not others, and they feared being “co-opted.” Hannah Arendt pondered the problem, and then replied: “Ach, ya, but you could use their mimeograph machine!”  She figured that as long as the students could keep producing statements and manifestos that let people know what they thought, what their goals were, all would be well. The more  discussion, the more action, the more power.

On another occasion, she asked me to escort her to a meeting that was taking place inside the New School, which had been occupied in the wake of the killing of several Kent University anti-war demonstrators by the Ohio State National Guard. The occupation was a kind of sympathy strike, but the meeting was about whether and how to make  a protest against the New School’s own administration. The discussion was very hot, and Hannah Arendt was very excited by it. But she was disturbed that the students were getting caught up in their complaints about the university and its policies and practices, and losing their larger anti-war purpose in the process. She thought this was a wrong emphasis, unproductive; it was not focused on the political realm (although the universities were, of course, not divorced from the political realm). Your students were, I think, much better able to keep their focus on the Chavez regime –questioning what it was doing to your universities as well as to your country generally.

But Arendt became a heroine of the New School students for a political action of her own at that time.  The faculty of the New School’s Graduate Faculty met with the school’s administration during the student occupation. The question was: should the police be called in to clear out the building, as had been done at Columbia University with a terrible result –many students injured and arrested, huge alienation of the student body, terrible hatred from the surrounding community. The faculty was divided, but tending toward calling in the police. A strong, complexly rationalized speech supporting this was made by one of the older German émigré professors of Philosophy. Until then, Arendt had said nothing.  She was, personally, someone who found it very difficult to make speeches –although, god knows, she was incomparable in her ability to articulate her views and go right to the heart of a matter, But after her Philosophy colleague’s oration, she decided to stand and speak. She said, very simply, without elaboration: “But look, think what you are going to do by calling in the police–mein Gott! These are our children!” The room went silent. But this remark, this plea to her colleagues to think about things differently, to ask themselves what, actually, concretely, they were imaging doing to “our children,” turned the tide –the police were not called.

She took a great interest, I told your students,  when I  described to her an “underground railroad” organized by New York students to aid both American soldiers who wanted to desert from the Army and young men who wanted to evade the military draft. This project helped them escape the country to Canada or Sweden.  She, in response, talked about the various rescue groups she had had experience with as a young woman. In Germany in 1933, there were groups which helped people escape Germany to France; and in France during 1940 and 1941, groups which helped Jews and political enemies  of the Nazis and of their French collaborators escape occupied France to Palestine, to America or South America (Venezuela, of course, became home to many). We had a very interesting discussion about when it is important to break the law in order to challenge the law, or to defy “emergency laws” made by a dictatorship in order to challenge the dictatorship. Hannah Arendt wrote a very valuable essay called “On Civil Disobedience” in that period, which was published in her last an essay collection, Crisis of the Republic –a piece that should be standard reading for anyone interested in non-violent resistance.

All my best to you and your colleagues, and to your students, whose movement I came to admire so much last June and continue to follow with great interest!  Elisabeth