There was a growing peace movement, which many in our ranks eagerly joined. College enrollments were booming in the 1950s and 1960s, and many students objected to the way college administrators attempted to control their personal lives. Typically they would say, “I fought in World War II; I fought in Korea; and all I want before I die is the right to vote.” (Many decades before, the 22-year-old Emma Goldman learned from a similar experience, after an early lecture in which she had scornfully dismissed the eight-hour day as a stupid token demand. SNCC played a direct role in shaping my values, as it did with many SDS founders. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people--these American values … Indeed, the greatest outpouring of youth, student, GI, liberal, feminist and environmentalist sentiment—of perhaps any previous era in American history—occurred after SDS had closed its doors. The ’60s movements stumbled to an end largely because we’d won the major reforms that were demanded: the 1964 and 1965 civil and voting rights laws, the end of the draft and the Vietnam War, passage of the War Powers Resolution and the Freedom of Information Act, Nixon’s environmental laws, amnesty for war resisters, two presidents forced from office, the 18-year-old vote, union recognition of public employees and farmworkers, disability rights, the decline of censorship, the emergence of gays and lesbians from a shadow existence… Perhaps never in US history had so many changes occurred in so short a time, all driven by the vibrancy of participatory democracy. In 1961 at a National Student Association convention I found a yellow pad with a chart identifying SDS in a box on the left, Young Americans for Freedom on the right and an entity named Control Group in the center-top. [2] It issued a nonideological call for participatory democracy, "both as a means and an end",[2] based on non-violent civil disobedience and the idea that individual citizens could help make "those social decisions determining the quality and direction" of their lives. We even thrashed out basic views of human nature day after day, not the usual subject of political platforms. The download replaces the overthrow in the imagination of some in this new movement. The same spirit of popular participation that inspired OWS drove the electoral successes of Latin American nations emerging from dictatorships in the 1990s. LID descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, started in 1905. These reforms came about, as Zinn would rightly warn, as pragmatic institutional responses or concessions meant largely to restore order. Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Port Huron Revisited.” About This is Democracy. Cuba was one such focal point, and Vietnam became another. On May 9, 1970, one week after the National Guard killed four protesting students at Kent State, and after Walter Reuther demanded an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, he and five others were killed in a charter-jet crash. AFL-CIO staff were also involved in the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and in controlling Saigon’s labor federation, protecting the flow of US military supplies into South Vietnam’s ports during the war. Assassination and Vietnam Destroy the Great Society. [7], "Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence and arms control as the national defense goals. The statement expressed SDS's willingness to work with groups whatever their political inclination. As if to prove Zinn’s thesis, the global cold war quickly morphed into the rise of neoliberal globalization, the militarized war on narcoterrorism and, by 2001, the “global war on terror.” The old threat of international communist conspiracies was replaced by alleged new threats from the narcoterrorists and global jihadists. As Attorney General Eric Holder said at SNCC’s fiftieth reunion in 2010, “there is a direct line from that lunch counter to the Oval Office and to the…Department of Justice where the attorney general sits.”. It appeared that the SDS demand for new priorities was being recognized when Kennedy initiated and signed a partial nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union in October 1963. The climate of officially sponsored terrorism ebbed in the South, and leaders like the Rev. Here’s Why. The CIA also ran covert operations through the AFL-CIO’s international affairs department. After twenty years of celebration, we decided in 1962 that those New Deal reforms were stagnating and insufficient, and that it was time to begin again. The CIA’s role in the AFL-CIO and foreign policy came to light as the byproduct of hearings into tax-exempt foundations by Representative Wright Patman in September 1964, confirming our worst suspicions. Initially drafted by Tom Hayden and debated over the course of three days in 1962 at a meeting of student leaders, the statement was issued by Students for a … Leaders were assassinated if they moved in a progressive direction. No one had complained when that label was suggested in 1960 by C. Wright Mills, in his open “Letter to the New Left.”. The technological revolution of the Internet and social media is propelling a global revival of participatory democracy. The consequences for realignment were far different from our predictions. But the Statement also called for economic democracy, as distinct from the New Deal’s more bureaucratic approach: the major resources and means of production should be “open to democratic participation and subject to democratic regulation.” There was a danger of “bureaucratic coagulation” and too much emphasis in Kennedy’s New Frontier on “problems are easiest for computers to solve.” There should be experiments in decentralization, we said, devolving the power of “monster cities” to local communities seeded with more developmental incentives. The latter had developed a largely anti-communist orthodoxy in the wake of the HUAC and Army-McCarthy hearings. It meant a greater role for citizens in the ultimate questions of war and peace, then considered the secret realm of experts. But we believed that social movements should insist on the democratic reform of state and corporation, not expect their overthrow or implosion. This led to a language and a form of thinking cleansed of ideological infection, with an emphasis on trying to say what people were already thinking but hadn’t put into words. Political realignment was advanced that same year when the Supreme Court decreed that voter representation must be based on population rather than the land holdings of growers. Returning to the Statement’s moral focus, since a human being’s economic experience has “crucial influence on habits, perceptions and individual ethics,” we insisted that there be incentives beyond money or survival, ones that are “educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated; encouraging independence, a respect for others, a sense of dignity, and a willingness to accept social responsibility.”, Not that Marxism was irrelevant to the Port Huron gathering. For an American hero, the Weathermen turned to John Brown, who led a suicidal uprising against slavery. The same dilemmas arose in the ’60s in the relationships between SNCC and the national civil rights leadership, and between SDS and the liberal Democrats we blamed for starting the Vietnam War. The Port Huron call for a life and politics built on moral values as opposed to expedient politics; its condemnation of the cold war, echoed in today’s questioning of the “war on terror”; its grounding in social movements against racism and poverty; its first-ever identification of students as agents of social change; and its call to extend participatory democracy to the economic, community … The overall strategy of realignment envisioned participatory democracy directly connected to a new social movement, one capable of forging a new governing majority on a national scale, with young people as shock troops building a “bridge to political power” composed of liberal Democrats, peace groups, organized labor and the civil rights movement. Finally came Occupy Wall Street. It seemed we agreed that we were something new: a movement, perhaps an embryonic blessed community. By “system” I mean the intersecting (though not coordinated) hierarchies of banks, corporations, the military, media and religion, dominant then as now (though there are far more women and people of color at the upper levels today). But even the “best and brightest” among the young radicals were thwarted by our inability to predict the future. In addition to its critique and analysis of the American system, the statement also suggested a series of reforms: it proclaimed a need to reshape into two genuine political parties to attain greater democracy, for stronger power for individuals through citizen's lobbies, for more substantial involvement by workers in business management, and for an enlarged public sector with increased government welfare, including a "program against poverty." The oppressive paradigm the PHS tried to discredit was the cold war between two blocs engaged in nuclear brinkmanship. This was much too rapid and radical for most voters, as the 1972 presidential election results showed, but the PHS prophecy of realignment had proven to be more feasible than anyone had imagined. The SDS manifesto, known as the Port Huron Statement, was adopted at the organization's first convention in June 1962, based on an earlier draft by staff member Tom Hayden. When a worker in her audience replied that he couldn’t wait for the overthrow of capitalism but that he also needed two hours less work “to feel human, to read a book or take a walk in daylight,” the experience gave Goldman the consciousness of a great organizer. A useful model was implicit in the Port Huron Statement, one transmitted from our parents’ generation, the last until now to weather Wall Street scandal, foreclosures, bankruptcies and unemployment (without any safety net). The PHS criticized the profit motive behind automation while noting that the new technology, if democratically controlled, could eliminate much drudgery at work, open more leisure time and make education “a continuing process for all people.”. The PHS was even prophetic in condemning the. [tone] The ideals that led those gathered outside Port Huron, Michigan in 1962 to issue this call to action not only added to the discussion of what became the Great Society of the mid-60s, but helped frame the issues that fueled the rising anti-war movement, college campus activism, and the broader social movement known then as the counterculture that carried into the early 1970s in the United States. Of course, there are differences between the Port Huron Statement and the Occupy Wall Street manifesto, but they should not be overstated. As a result of centuries of extensive popular struggle, there is a minimal welfare system that provides support for poor mothers and children. As a result of the civil rights movement, there came a generation of white liberal politicians like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, along with a huge complement of black elected officials from the South, from local sheriffs to Congressmen like John Lewis (a SNCC member) and Jim Clyburn (vice chair under Charles McDew of the South Carolina State student movement in 1960). They must support Southern voter registration and Negro political candidates and demand that Democratic Party liberals do the same (in the last Congress, Dixiecrats split with Northern Democrats on 119 of 300 roll-calls, mostly on civil rights, area redevelopment and foreign aid bills; and breach was much larger than in the previous several sessions). Spontaneous democratic demonstrations erupted in Russia late last year, organized on Facebook by young people seeking honest elections. Sign up for our free daily newsletter, along with occasional offers for programs that support our journalism. Hayden, who died at the age of 76 on Oct. 23, was just 22 when he penned the manifesto at a UAW retreat in Port Huron. Realignment was embraced by King, Bayard Rustin and Michael Harrington, and was the implicit agenda of the vast March on Washington for Jobs and Justice in August 1963. [2] Under Walter Reuther's leadership, the UAW paid for a range of expenses for the 1962 convention, including use of the UAW summer retreat in Port Huron.[3]. Their ideological heroes included Lin Piao, a leader of the Chinese Revolution, along with Che Guevara and the young French intellectual Regis Debray, with his foco theory that small bands of armed guerrillas could set off popular revolutions and their vision of a “tri-continental” alternative to the “revisionist” Soviet Union. The elite of the World Economic Forum, flying into Davos on corporate jets, were challenged by the World Social Forum, in which thousands of campesinos, indigenous people, workers, students and artists made their way to Porto Alegre, Brazil. She spoke of and personified participatory democracy. tn_articleid: [84840], We differed with most of the left-liberalism of the time by suggesting that our own government was partly to blame for the cold war, and by denying that the Soviet Union sought to take over the world by force. In a world haunted daily by the prospect of nuclear war, a country roiling in the civil rights movement, and being inextricably drawn into a civil war in Southeast Asia based on the so-called domino theory, what could be a more noble goal? In late 1967 Johnson screamed at his top advisers, “I’m not going to let the communists take this government, and they’re doing it right now!” Fifteen hundred Army intelligence officers, dressed as civilians, conducted surveillance on 100,000 Americans. However, it stated that this "will involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty" who "must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy", ally with groups outside the university, integrate "major public issues into the curriculum", "make debate and controversy". Radical reform depended on independent social movements in combination with awakened progressives within political institutions rather than any revolutionary conquest of state and corporate power. The writers of the document believed that ordinary citizens, particularly students, could create change through non-violent means. Or were they democratic improvements, as I would argue? “It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal.”. There were also children of New Deal democratic socialists now experiencing liberal middle-class lives, and there were plenty of mainstream idealistic student leaders, graduate sociology students, a few pacifists and a number of the spiritually inspired. But the convention was never intended as a revival ceremony for Marxism. Early in 1960, the SLID changed its name into Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It is time for a participatory New Deal, to bring the banks and corporations under the regulations and reforms they have escaped through runaway globalization. tn_author: ['tom-h'], Participatory democracy was a psychologically liberating antidote to the paralysis of the apathetic “lonely crowd” depicted by David Riesman et al. The Port Huron Statement was the most important manifesto of the New Left student movement of the 1960s. We asserted a belief that “men [are] infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom and love.” (Use of the term “men” was unquestioned; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was one year away.) Six years later Ramparts magazine revealed that the secretive Control Group included CIA agents whose work was to promote a pro–cold war global student movement. Why Cuba Matters (Seven Stories). The Statement therefore included a twenty-page attack on this cold war mentality, half devoted to a proposal for phased nuclear disarmament, half to a welcoming attitude toward anti-colonial revolutions. tn_keyword: ['peace-acti'], [6] In particular, the statement viewed race ("symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry") and Cold War–induced alienation ("symbolized by the presence of the Bomb") as the two main problems of modern society. Port Huron Statement - Participatory Democracy. Participatory Democracy and Occupy Wall Street. Under Walter Reuther 's leadership, the UAW paid for a range of expenses for the 1962 convention, including use of the UAW summer retreat in Port Huron. It narrows the domain within which public influence can be expressed. If that was true, what was the point of depending on mainstream public opinion? Yet the document was con-scious of the organization’s historical ties to labor and the working- class movement. Labor and Participatory Democracy. There was a third obstacle to the PHS dream, besides the assassinations and the Vietnam War. What is a Chicano? targeting:{ This was a stunning turn for a “new” left, because it implied a broad rejection of many of the new social movements as basically “reformist” too, since none of them were led by Marxists and none (except the Black Panthers) favored vanguard parties. The Port Huron Statement correctly predicted that if nuclear war with the Soviet Union could be prevented, there still would be an ongoing “international civil war” between proxies of the United States and Soviet Union. It closed with the following: "If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable." The document at one point mentioned a need to bring together “liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance and the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system.” Even those at Port Huron who were children of the Old Left had concluded that moral values and democracy were more important than any ideological renovation of Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism or anarchism. Ours was a democratic populist heritage, in which, we naïvely believed, many factions could bloom but none could choke our growth. As a Cold War document, the Port Huron Statement is … For Reprints and Permissions, click here. We are not as badly off as Americans were in the 1930s, of course, if only because of the safety net reforms that were achieved in that earlier dangerous time. First, there was the assassination of John Kennedy, which devastated any rational basis for strategy. This year marks the first presidential campaign in our lifetime when the gluttony of Wall Street, the failures of capitalism, the evils of big money in politics and a discussion of fundamental reform will be front and center in election debates. slotId: "thenation_right_rail_84840", In foreign policy, the statement took issue with the American government's handling of the Cold War, both the existential threat of nuclear war, and the actual arms race. For more information, visit our Privacy PolicyX. Well, anarchists can’t seem to understand that they are to support that…. Its key idea, "participatory democracy," proved a watchword for Sixties radicalism that has also reemerged in popular protests from the Arab Spring to … Less than two years later, the Democratic Party was taken over by progressive forces, and the old insiders like Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and George Meany were suddenly outsiders. Obviously the concept arose from our common desire to participate in making our own destiny, and in response to the severe limitations of an undemocratic system that we saw as representing an oligarchy. The importance of this sojourn into left-wing history is that SDS and SNCC (and King, among others) were unaware of the company we were keeping. The future of democracy is uncertain, but we are committed to its urgent renewal today. Soon the open, participatory structure of the early SDS was being penetrated and disrupted by the Progressive Labor Party, a tightly disciplined, highly secretive organization dedicated to recruiting SDS members in support of a communist revolution on the inspiration of China and Albania. Listening and speaking in clear vernacular English was crucial. The document provided ideas of what and how to work for and to improve, and also advocated nonviolent civil disobedience as the means by which student youth could bring forth the concept of "participatory democracy.". The Kennedy administration was in a crossfire between two opposing forces: the civil rights movement versus the dinosaurs of the Dixiecrat South, on which the party depended for its national majority. LID descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, started in 1905. The Port Huron Statement offered a new vision of social change while defining freedom to mean participatory democracy. It was written by SDS members, and completed on June 15, 1962, at a United Auto Workers (UAW) retreat outside of Port Huron, Michigan (now part of Lakeport State Park), for the group's first national convention. [5], It has been described as "a seminal moment in the development of the New Left"[2] and a "classic statement of [its] principles", but it also revealed the 1960s' tension between communitarianism and individualism. The Port Huron Statement's great contribution to political language was ''participatory democracy'' -the notion, in essence, that people should take part in the decisions that affect their lives. One victim of an assassination attempt in 1969 was Richard Flacks, a key participant at Port Huron. From Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring, the ideals of the statement — particularly “participatory democracy” — continue to inform popular movements across the world. According to Michael Kazin and others, the role of the American left has been to make lasting cultural and normative contributions while never actually coming to power. The Port Huron attendees insisted that it begin with an emphasis on “we,” to be followed immediately by a section on values. At its most basic, it meant the right to vote, as Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “not with a mere strip of paper but with one’s whole life.” It meant simplicity in registration and voting, unfettered from the dominance of wealth, property requirements, literacy tests and poll taxes. Most of the thinkers who inspired the early SDS—Mills, John Dewey, Camus, Lessing, James Baldwin—were shelved in search of an ideology that only Marxism seemed to offer. But even if the paranoia went too far, as it usually did, there were still grounds for believing that manipulators were behind the curtain. Soon Northern students were streaming south for the Mississippi Summer Project, in 1964, whose aim was to unseat the state’s white Democratic delegation and replace it with a democratically chosen slate, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, at the convention that year in Atlantic City. They were leaders in the Chicano movement. That’s under attack in an effort to minimize the state. But the heightened militancy became disconnected from a comprehensible narrative that the wider public might have understood. It appeared among the demands of young people in Tunisia, Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries in the Arab Spring of 2011. Participatory Democracy: From the Port Huron Statement to Occupy Wall Street On its fiftieth anniversary, the founding declaration of SDS echoes today in democracy movements around the world. Whether or not the Kennedy killing was part of a larger conspiracy, as many still believe, a mood of paranoia took root in the New Left, in which it seemed that any notions of peaceful democratic transfers of power were illusory. The SDS call for a participatory democracy echoes today in student-led democracy movements around the world, even appearing as the first principle of the Occupy Wall Street September 17 declaration. In retrospect, however, it’s impossible to reach a majority, much less the 99 percent, while rejecting coalition politics. The energy of some SNCC and SDS organizers also overflowed into the nascent farmworkers’ organizing efforts in the Southwest at around the same time. 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