Why the Youth Liberation Movement Failed
And, more importantly, how we can win.
To plan a successful liberation movement, we need to analyze previous efforts. Activists of the past have a lot to teach us regardless of whether they achieved all their goals at the time. I've been studying the Youth Liberation movement in 1970s Ann Arbor, which is the best-known and most coordinated effort against child oppression in modern US history. From all the information I've been able to piece together about this movement, here are my major takeaways about its shortcomings.
chorui halim
Table of Contents
Before We Start
Here are some disclaimers:
- I was not a part of this movement.
- I haven't reached out to anyone who was a part of this movement.
- I'm an adult, so I'm no longer subjected to child oppression.
- Even when I was a child, I was nowhere near brave or thoughtful enough to organize something like this.
- The purpose of this analysis isn't to rag on anyone involved in this movement (or any youth activists working today). The purpose is to understand what we need to make future success more likely.
Really, I'm just trying to process my thoughts into something semi-coherent. I would love the opportunity to talk to anyone who contributed to this movement and get their thoughts as well. Maybe one day I'll get to write a second edition of this article based on their feedback!
On Child Oppression
Child oppression is weird. In most societies around the world, it's the most intense form of marginalization. But at the same time, it's the only oppression that is definitionally temporary. Not everyone survives youth oppression, but for everyone who does, there's a clear end date for the worst aspects of it.
This makes youth oppression incredibly hard to organize against. Even when children understand that the way they're being treated is wrong, most of them choose to age out instead of fight it collectively. Those who try to organize are met with a crushing level of denial from the rest of society. Hardly anyone else treats youth oppression as a serious issue worth fighting - including other marginalized people. Even most children don't think of their mistreatment as structural oppression; they tend to focus on dynamics of interpersonal abuse and try to deal with it on an individual basis.
The family form plays a dual role of care and coercion, which also complicates the fight for youth liberation. Through their families, children receive food, shelter, medical care, emotional support, and love. We don't have an adequate system in place to help children access those resources outside of the family. In fact, leveraging those needs is how the family form maintains total power over children! Youth liberation activists are generally well aware of that fact, but it nonetheless does present a chicken-and-egg problem. We need to organize for better systems because children have no way to get their needs met anywhere else, but in organizing for better systems, children often risk their existing access to resources. Most young people understandably draw the conclusion that it's easier to just wait to turn 18.
Maintaining the Movement
The ability to age out presents another issue: the high level of turnover makes it difficult to maintain momentum. By the time young people are able to articulate and organize against their oppression, they're often already in their teens. That gives 5 years (at most) before they hit the age of majority. Effective liberation movements need to sustain themselves for decades, if not centuries.
Successful movements maintain themselves through the flow of knowledge from generation to generation. This involves knowledge generation such as running studies, creating records/documentation, or writing books. But it also involves older members training younger members one-on-one or in small groups. When the flow is interrupted, that knowledge is easily lost. Instead of being able to learn from previous efforts, activists are stuck reinventing the wheel.
We're seeing this happen with anticapitalist activism in the US today. Because of how thoroughly unions in the US have been decimated since the 1980s, workers often struggle to organize against their employers. Because Americans grow up so thoroughly steeped in anticommunist propaganda, most can't articulate even the most basic mechanics of class oppression.
But at least for workers, there are organizations like the IWW that exist to support people through the process of organizing their workplaces. Children have no such infrastructure. There isn't a single major political, legal, or social body that represents the interests of children in the US today. There isn't any organization that reaches out to children to make them aware of the history of the struggle against their oppression. There isn't even any general awareness of the nature of their oppression in the past or the present. Every youth liberation effort - especially pre-internet - had to reinvent the wheel.
Building Coalitions
Though Youth Liberation's 15-point platform echoed the struggles for Black, LGBT, and feminist liberation, I couldn't find any records of them working with other organizations in pursuit of those struggles. On the other hand, many civil rights organizations have youth chapters, but they're generally focused on fighting some other type of oppression.
This is a major weakness of the movement. When youth activists are relegated to youth chapters of other orgs, they don't get to dedicate themselves wholly to fighting for their own interests. But when youth activists are siloed in their own orgs with no connections to other movements, they also don't get to collaborate on a greater regional or national strategy. When the org falls apart, there's no one left to fight for the cause.
What We Can Improve
A successful youth liberation movement needs to account for the unique nature of child oppression. It needs to focus on building systems of material support for children beyond the family, so that when potential participants are weighing the risks of contributing to the effort, they know they'll have a safety net to fall back on. It needs to build legitimacy - if not within mainstream society, then at least within activist spaces.
The movement needs to build and maintain a knowledge base, as well as make it available to as many young people as possible. The internet makes the first part of this task vastly easier. But the second part (marketing, essentially) is still a lot of work. Since children are so strictly separated from public life offline, the work of physically distributing materials (zines, reading lists, manifestos, etc.) is best done by young people themselves. But the rest of the tasks have plenty of room for collaboration between young activists and allied adults - which I believe will ultimately make the system more robust.
We actually have a lot to learn from capitalist organizations regarding knowledge management, since many of them have put decades of work into figuring out the best way to sustain themselves long-term. For example, NASA has a knowledge policy outlined in NPD 7120.6A as well as a collection of KM resources developed by their Chief Knowledge Officers & APPEL Knowledge Services. Both are publicly available for free. (The mass exodus of employees during this administration has caused a major interruption in the knowledge flow for the agency, which we'll be seeing the devastating effects of over the next few decades.)
Another crucial aspect of maintaining the movement is coalition building. We cannot win without it. Especially in a movement with turnover this high, we need to be building ways to scale up the impact of our work. And, given the highly isolated nature of modern childhood, I think that coalition building is the most effective way to introduce our analysis of child oppression into the mainstream.
Youth liberation is a critical fight. Every other structure of oppression relies on the indoctrination of youth to reproduce itself. We're not going to be able to dismantle sexism until we stop forcing the violence of hierarchical gender on children. Worker oppression won't end until we understand how capitalism uses children to sustain itself generationally. So in order to fully deconstruct relationships of domination, every fight for liberation must also adopt a youth liberationist lens.
Similarly, youth liberation must be a goal within a broader fight towards socialism and communism. The oppression of children doesn't occur in a vacuum; it happens for specific economic and political reasons. So it follows that we won't be able to dismantle it unless we're also working to destroy the structures that incentivize it. Children are kept in an extended disempowered state so that they come out the other side as compliant workers and citizens. If we attempt to liberate youth while keeping capitalism intact, what we'll produce at best is a generation of people who both struggle to function under capitalism and are unable to mount an organized movement against it.
At the end of the day, building this movement is a balancing act. The central problem, I think, is balancing the need for a youth-led movement versus the need for lasting infrastructure. Young people face overwhelming isolation as well as an utter lack of (legal, social, political, economic) power in society - these are significant hurdles to overcome while getting a mass movement off the ground. To be able to connect young people with each other as well as their radical history, some level of collaboration is necessary between youth and more experienced activists. But if we all approach this effort in a thoughtful and coordinated way, if we're willing to take risks, and if we're willing to honestly evaluate and work on the shortcomings of our movement, I really think we can win.