No gods, No masters
– Daniel Guerin
I don’t know if anybody really cares about the WSA. I definitely shouldn’t care about the WSA, especially now. Nevertheless, I need to say:
1. The WSA does not represent. Almost nobody votes for the WSA; those who “win” their respective “races” are voted in by a tiny minority, most likely an extended group of friends/facebook buddies. And often, the WSA bypasses this “democratic” process and just appoints people. And like any pre-college student council regime, did people really vote for their “representatives” actually wanting them to “represent?” Or thinking they could “represent?” (how is it exactly that you “represent” me?)
1.5. I want to quickly clarify: I’m not talking about WSA Workers here, though there may be a little overlap.
2. The WSA has no power. It can do administrative things that save the university money and labor; like having students discipline other students (at this private school, would administrators really do anything worse?) or “dining, double beds in senior houses, registration, and the search for the Dean of Diversity…”
3. But when it comes to issues that challenge university policy or university figures in any significant way, the WSA has nothing to say. Or else, the WSA has things to say, but says them without doing anything and without any ability to put leverage behind their words.
4. And contrarily, when students do challenge power on campus (Argus 12/10/2004), the WSA comes down on THEM for not acting being “reasonable” and “civil.” The WSA is threatened when students speak for themselves because then it might have to stop pretending it has any reason for existing. One WSA member, for example, after an effective student protest/takeover, informed students that, in fact: “You are not being silenced. You are silencing yousel[ves].” Their paternalism is thick enough to cut with a knife.
5. The only useful thing that the WSA does is distribute money to student groups. And even here, it makes this task unnecessarily difficult for students. Especially here, it tries to justify itself by inventing hoops for students to jump through (but you did back off when I replied to that e-mail, didn’t you!). Robots—an automated teller machine (ATM) would serve this purpose a lot better. KaCHING. And if financial decisions must be made, why not have student groups/student group leaders make these decisions—that is, worker councils and full worker control.
6. Instead, the WSA is a training ground for people who want to go on “representing” other people and to have THAT POWER for themselves. And by representing people, I mean RULING OVER people; the WSA may have no formal power, but I doubt the ambitions of those who dance around in it stop there (In their replies, look for the politics of disavowal).
7. The people with formal power on this campus are not the WSA.
8. People, and particularly “white” liberals (and as a demi-“white” liberal who can be nothing other than a dWL, I think I know what I’m talking about), need to really give up on this empty rhetoric of electoral politics that has always been the discourse, ideology, and playground of the powerful. People, not leaders, generate change in society; and “leaders” and elites only ACQUIESCE to change when “they” become afraid of “us,” and the disorder “we” may cause. What “we” need, I think, are not better leaders, but more Participants, more Subjects. The social movement, the syndicate, the strike—these are the real models for action and change; and in modern times, they have always been (look now at students in France—the WSA did not DO THAT!).
9. But “we” have got non-institutional power and gotta think about power as a relationship, not something that some “have” and others, by definition, “have not.” As one of my favorite Wespeaks (may it endlessly be recycled in this forum) goes: “Claire Potter declared some power as absolute. Hmmm…right, like god, French colonial rule in Algeria, North American ties to Britain in the 1700s, slavery” (E.B., 04/30/04). That is —an Intifada of the Mind (end the 40 year Occupation now! http://www.endtheoccupation.org/).
10. So whatever you might think about the WSA (I’ve voted for the ATM and Palestinian freedom), maybe we can agree: the self-deceptions, myths, and illusions need to stop.
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