One of my favorite political songs is an old hobo tune called The Big Rock Candy Mountain, about a place where there are “lemonade springs where the bluebird sings.”
That lyric doesn’t give the full flavor of the song, though — the Big Rock Candy Mountain is also a place with whiskey rivers, a place where the cops have wooden legs and “they hung the jerk who invented work.” It’s a song about a post-scarcity, post-state-violence utopia where everyone has what they need.
I was thinking about the Big Rock Candy Mountain this morning as while engaged in a friendly twitter debate about a new essay on the abolition of work— an essay that I found pretty frustrating for a bunch of reasons. The idea of the abolition of work is a fundamentally utopian idea, and the danger in advocating for a utopia in any concrete way is that you’ll make it seem farther away than did before you started talking.
The trick — and it’s a trick I think The Big Rock Candy Mountain pulls off beautifully — is to help people imagine a world they’ll never get to in the hope that they’ll start walking toward it, or at least start wondering which direction it might lie in.
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I came up in student organizing through student government, and I think that’s part of the reason I’ve always loved the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
One of the things I find most exciting about student organizing, and student government-based organizing specifically, is that it comes about as close as we get to a post-scarcity organizing environment. When you’re in student government, you don’t have to fundraise. You don’t have to scrounge for cash. A pile of money just appears every year, and all you have to do is figure out what to use it for. (When I was an undergraduate two decades ago my girlfriend was the Financial Vice President of our student government. At twenty, she managed an annual budget of a million dollars, one that was democratically allocated and disbursed by and for the students of our campus.)
When you’re in student government, money is for using, not for getting. It’s a tool, not a goal. A means, not an end — unlike in almost all other institutional organizing.
If you maintain the support of the students and you can keep free of the clutches of the administration, the money is just there, yours to spend as you see fit.
And I think that’s a big part of what makes (some) campus organizing so Student Organizing, Student Government, and the Big Rock Candy Mountain |:
