Thoughts on Bhaskar Sunkara's "Fellow Travelers" in the latest Jacobin.

Roughly 50% of small businesses close shop in their first five years. While not attracting enough customers is a death sentence for a business, not attracting enough members sadly does not have the same effect on leftist parties. They shamble on, zombie-like, hollowed out yet still adorned with the ambitious banners that swaddled their birth. Or maybe they're better described as so much detritus on the forest floor, choking off the green sprouts of their successors, waiting for a cleansing brushfire that never comes. In any case, what doesn't describe them well is anything approaching "successful."

Which is why I was somewhat surprised to see Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara trod down this worn path so enthusiastically in his latest essay, "Fellow Travelers." Go read it if you have...

Ah, student government: that perennial stepping stone for proto-politicians and safety valve against student activism. While each campus' particular iteration is different, student government culture is surprisingly consistent across the country.

Disdain, in one form or another, for their fellow students can be found among SGA members at universities big and small. At first glance that seems curious: given the ratio of voters to elected officials, the numbers suggest that they should be some of our most democratic, responsive institutions. The size of a Congressional House district is roughly 700,000 people. In comparison, the largest public university in the U.S. (Arizona State University) has barely over 60,000 students.

This disdain manifests itself in many ways. Often we'll hear it when SGA members complain about perpetually low voter turnout and "student apathy." Other times it presents as a startling suspicion and paranoia. For example, a year ...

For Student Power will be covering the SOTU live, via Twitter and Facebook. Join in!

The annual State of the Union Address is a key aspect of the political spectacle of the modern Presidency. While the SOTU is actually a codified mandate in the U.S. Constitution, only in the 20th Century has it become a regular (and now annual) speech delivered to Congress — previously it had generally been a written document sent and read by a clerk. While the first broadcast SOTU was Calvin Coolidge's in 1923, via radio, the Address' central position in American political life was cemented with the first TV broadcast of Harry Truman's speech in 1947.

It's in these addresses that Presidents announce new policy goals, attempt to shore up public support,...

This is footage from the 2012 National Student Power Convergence, in Columbus, Ohio. I finally got around to offloading and editing it! Apologies for those I didn't get a chance to interview — our caravan had to leave the conference very unexpectedly earlier than we thought!

One of the things I found most interesting — and inspiring — about NSPC was that people's conception of what "student power" meant to them evolved over the course of several days, sometimes dramatically so. In general, people's politics often develop and evolve unevenly: sometimes gradually over years, sometimes leaps and bounds over the course of a weekend. And of course our politics develop differently and at different rates than those around us, which makes it important for convergences like NSPC have radicalizing experi...