---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 16:48:40 -0700
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: The Port Huron Statement at 40
The Port Huron Statement at 40
<http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020805&s=hayden>
August 5, 2002
by TOM HAYDEN & DICK FLACKS
In the movie The Big Lebowski, the aging, stoned hippie played by Jeff
Bridges announces that he helped write the Port Huron Statement. We don't
remember the "dude" being there, but it's gratifying that the founding
manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society still lives in the nostalgia
and imagination of so many.
A glance at the web will show tens of thousands of references to
"participatory democracy," the central focus of that document, which still
appears as a live alternative to the top-down construction of most
institutions. Participatory democracy has surfaced in the campaigns of the
global justice movement, in utopian visions of telecommunications, in
struggles around workplace and neighborhood empowerment, in Paulo Freire's
"pedagogy of the oppressed," in grassroots environmental crusades and
antipoverty programs, in political platforms from Green parties to the
Zapatistas, in participatory management theory, in liberation theology's
emphasis on base communities of the poor and even in the current efforts of
most Catholics to carve out a participatory role for laity in their church.
The Port Huron Statement appears in numerous textbooks and has been the
subject of thousands of student papers. This continued interest is the more
impressive, since the statement was never marketed or even reissued as a
book. It was produced only as a mimeographed pamphlet in 20,000 copies,
which sold for 35 cents. We were jaundiced toward the very notion of public
relations.
Recent celebrants of the Port Huron Statement include authors Garry Wills
and E.J. Dionne, who see in its pages a bright promise of rational reform
that was later lost, when they say SDS became too radical. At the other end
of the political spectrum, Robert Bork says the "authentic spirit of
Sixties radicalism issued" from Port Huron in "a document of ominous mood
and aspiration" because it embodied a millennial vision of human
possibility. The former radical David Horowitz reads the statement as
encoding a "self-conscious effort to rescue the Communist project from its
Soviet fate." At different moments, both Democrats and Republicans (under
Richard Nixon) have invoked the rhetoric of participatory democracy in
campaigns. This perplexing spectrum of reaction reflects, we believe, the
statement's attempt at a new departure from the conventional dogmas of left
and liberal thought.
Did we succeed, and if so, how? This year's occasion of the Port Huron
Statement's fortieth anniversary provides a chance to ask whether its
importance today is primarily symbolic and nostalgic, or whether, as we
believe, the core of the statement is still relevant for all those trying
to create a world where each person has a voice in the decisions affecting
his or her life. It remains, as we described it then, "a living document
open to change with our times and experiences."
The original idea, conceived at a winter meeting in Ann Arbor in 1961, was
modest: to produce an organizing tool for the movement we were trying to
spread through SDS. Then the statement became more audacious. The roughly
sixty young people who finalized the statement during a week at a United
Auto Workers retreat in Port Huron, Michigan, experienced what one could
only call an inspirational moment. As the words flowed night and day, we
felt we were giving voice to a new generation of rebels.
The two of us had arrived in Port Huron from different paths that
symbolized the cultural fusion that happened at the beginning of the 1960s.
Tom was a Midwestern populist by nature, rebelling apolitically against the
boring hypocrisy of suburban life, until the Southern black student sit-in
movement showed him that a committed life was possible. Tom was drawn to
the mystique of citizen action and away from left ideologies based on
systems far different from America, with its vast middle-class status
system. Many others at Port Huron were mainstream student leaders inspired
by the civil rights movement, the South African antiapartheid movement and
even the youthful ideals of John Kennedy's New Frontier. Dick, on the other
hand, was a New York "red diaper baby" whose parents had been fired as
schoolteachers during the McCarthy period. Disillusioned by both Stalinism
and the conformity of cold war America, he and his wife, Mickey, questioned
whether an effective left could be built at all from its quarrelsome
subculture of factions. The fusion of these paths yielded a vision informed
by a democratic American radicalism going back to Tom Paine, one that
attempted to transcend the stale dogmas of the dying left as well as the
liberal celebration of the New Frontier as Camelot.
In its beginning, SDS was the student wing of one of those historic
factions, the New York-based League for Industrial Democracy (LID), whose
definition of anti-Communism was so far-reaching that it prohibited working
with anyone who sympathized with Castro's Cuban Revolution or blamed both
superpowers for the nuclear arms race instead of the Soviets alone. Soon
the LID would endorse the war in Vietnam. In those days, The Nation itself
was beyond the pale of legitimacy, as was our journalistic hero, I.F.
Stone. While the draft Port Huron Statement included a strong denunciation
of the Soviet Union, it wasn't enough for LID leaders like Michael
Harrington. They wanted absolute clarity, for example, that the United
States was blameless for the nuclear arms race. They were offended at our
suggestion that the labor movement was losing its vitality. In truth, they
seemed threatened by the independence of the new wave of student activism,
which they believed should be a kind of youth division of the older
non-Communist left, an overreaction that Harrington later regretted.
Starting in Port Huron, such frictions continued to wound the New Left
through the 1960s, until SDS itself succumbed and splintered under the
weight of the very factionalism Port Huron sought to transcend.
Like today, 1962 was a time when many students were waking up, but the vast
majority were
smothered in apathy. We couldn't resist racism and war, we realized,
without first piercing this freezing indifference bred by affluence,
conformity and the legacy of McCarthyism. The independent sociologist C.
Wright Mills had written a compelling essay titled "Out of Apathy," which
helped us understand that apathy was engineered by elites that benefited
from our silent condition. Psychologically, it was also a defense mechanism
against deeper feelings of helplessness. "Students don't even give a damn
about the apathy," the statement dryly observed. Therefore, to "break out
of apathy" became the first task in building a movement to challenge what
Mills called a
"mass society" of drifting individuals without access to power or
information. The vast majority of students internalized the message of
their elders that they were too young, too inexperienced, too unqualified
to make a difference. Most students could not vote, and the universities
acted as our substitute parents under the doctrine of in loco parentis. Nor
was there much record of student activism in American history to bolster
us. In the class discourse of the traditional left,
students amounted to nothing. But now the black student revolt in the South
was setting an example of a different way to see ourselves in history. On
some campuses, professors and students were questioning the cold war arms
race. There were stirrings on the fringe, too, where students were
listening to Bob Dylan and rock and roll. SDS represented the first
defections from the mainstream. The student government leaders and campus
newspaper editors who came to Port Huron asserted the notion of student
"rights" for the first time. It was natural to call on others, as the
opening lines of the statement did: "We are people of this generation, bred
in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking
uncomfortably at the world we inherit..." It was a timid trumpet, not yet a
call to the barricades, but the tone touched its audience as true, not
rhetorical. The need to declare ourselves, to find our voice, came from the
powerlessness of everywhere being treated as "kids."
It was no wonder, then, that the statement was inspired by participatory
democracy. Participation is what we were denied, and what we hungered for.
Without it, there was no dignity. Parents and professors lectured us,
administrators ordered us, draft boards conscripted us, the whole system
channeled us, all to please authority and take our place in line. Now it
was our turn. What became a worldwide youth revolt began, it should be
remembered, in the multiple failures of the elders.
The denial of dignity and the vote among blacks was a window into
powerlessness in many forms. Young male students could be drafted to kill,
but not to vote for peace candidates. A majority of Americans were denied
any participation in decisions that were being made every day in their
workplaces. Women were second class in every sphere of life. We agreed on a
core principle: We demanded the right to vote as a first step toward a
right to a voice and vote in all the decisions that affected our lives.
At the time, as disfranchised students, embracing such an expansive idea
required a wrenching re-examination of common assumptions. What, for
example, was the view of human nature that underlay our assertion that all
people had basic rights to participation, or that democracy was the system
best suited to respecting human dignity? All-night discussions ensued,
often concluding at daybreak. On the one hand, there were followers of the
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, influenced by the atrocities of the Holocaust
and Stalinism, who had asserted that "the children of darkness," the
political realists, were in their generation wiser than "the foolish
children of light," the pacifists and idealists. On the other side were the
Enlightenment humanists who believed in infinite perfectibility through
education and nonviolence as adopted by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
The dominant view was that we were children of light. We chose utopia and
rejected cynicism. The statement ended on an apocalyptic note: "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." But, reflecting our mostly
mainstream backgrounds, we also wanted to be relevant, effective. Agreement
was reached when Mary Varela, a Catholic Worker activist, inspired by Pope
John XXIII, suggested that we follow the doctrine that humans have
"unfulfilled" rather than "unlimited" capacities for good, and are
"infinitely precious" rather than "infinitely perfectible." The theological
amendment drew no objections and was incorporated without citation.
Participatory democracy sought to expand the sphere of public decisions
from the mere election of representatives to the deeper role of "bringing
people out of isolation and into community" in decentralized forms of
decision-making. The same democratic humanism was applied to the economy in
calls for "incentives worthier than money," and for work to be
"self-directed, not manipulated." The statement was not an endorsement of
the liberal welfare state or the managerial democracy of the New Frontier,
but a call for a thorough, bottom-up reclaiming of the public sector for
public, rather than military, purposes. Only then might corporations be
made "publicly responsible." In today's terms, we were trying to transform
the mass society into a civic society, spark a social awareness in the vast
world of private lives and voluntary associations that most people
inhabited far from the centers of power.
The phrase "participatory democracy" derived from the influence of Arnold
Kaufman, a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan who had
taught Tom and other early SDSers, and who attended the convention as a
speaker. Kaufman used the term to signify that democracy^Â as defined in
conventional liberal discourse, was far too limited when reduced to
electoral choice and concepts like the free marketplace of ideas. Kaufman's
case for participatory democracy flowed directly from John Dewey's writings
in the 1920s and '30s. Alongside his mainstream popularity, Dewey was very
much a man of the left. One of his longstanding organizational
involvements, interestingly, was active membership in SDS's parent
organization, LID, which he joined soon after its founding before serving
as president and honorary president in the 1940s. Dewey was not at all
satisfied with the state of left politics in his time; for most of his life
he searched for a "new left" himself^Â an alternative to the ideology and
practice of the established socialist organizations of his day. What
motivated that search was a deep sense that a radical political and
cultural force was needed if democracy in its fullest sense was to be made
possible.
Dewey's definition of democracy was explicitly participatory: "All those
who are affected by social
institutions must have a share in producing and managing them," he
declared, adding that "a democracy is more than a form of government; it is
primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint
community experience." He argued that such participation is necessary both
for the general welfare
and for the fullest development of individuals, and that such a principle
should be applied not only in the political sphere as we understand it but
in the spheres of family and childraising, in school, in business and in
religion.
A more immediate intellectual influence on the framers at Port Huron was C.
Wright Mills, who died
that year of heart failure. Mills was a follower of Dewey, who shared the
same desire to establish a
real American left. From Texas, a descendant of Irish immigrants, he too
was a native populist.
Intellectually, he combated the dogmas of Marxism, for example, the idea
that the vast American society was controlled by a narrow economic ruling
class. At the same time, he rejected the pluralist argument that America
was a balanced society of interest groups.
Instead he painstakingly constructed the notion of a fluid but
uncoordinated power elite that presided over a mass society of apathetic
individuals. Mills was a democratic populist whose vision also encouraged
"plain marxism," in which he sought to revive the humanistic values of the
early Marx that preceded dialectical materialism. In his "Letter to the New
Left" Mills passionately urged young intellectuals to see themselves as
revolutionary and not to become either compromised celebrants of the status
quo or blind followers of leftist orthodoxy. It is interesting, in light of
later attacks on the Port Huron Statement as a mask for Marxism, that Dewey
and Mills were its primary influences. Port Huron marked a milestone in the
search for a genuine American radicalism based on many traditions, but most
of all an egalitarian, almost anarchistic belief in democracy. It also
anticipated a post-Communist left, if not the decline of the Soviet
Union. Quoting Henry David Thoreau, movement activists said: Vote not with
a strip of paper alone, but with your whole life. Or as the novelist
Ignazio Silone wrote in Bread and Wine, the Italian peasants showed their
organizers a new way to live.
The statement also contained a strategic vision of energizing a new
insurgency to shift priorities from cold war militarism to the quality of
life at home, spearheaded by the civil rights revolution, the revival of
peace sentiment, a labor movement committed to organizing and a new
consciousness among students and intellectuals in the universities. Michael
Harrington's The Other America, recovering attention to the invisible poor,
was a bestseller then being read by President Kennedy. Serious advocacy of
planned economic conversion from military to civilian production was
gaining ground. The President would soon question the cold war itself. For
the first time since the 1930s, the possibility of bringing domestic
priorities front and center was at hand. Politically, it meant realigning
the Democratic Party toward its historic liberalism by splitting off the
segregationist Dixiecrat South. Accordingly, the statement called for
demonstrations at "every Congressional or convention seating of
Dixiecrats," anticipating the challenge made in 1964 by the inclusive
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Following the example of SNCC,
hundreds of early SDSers established community organizing projects in
Northern ghettos in 1964, fully expecting to galvanize social reform, even
a gradual revolution, on the home front.
But we could not imagine that Vietnam was just around the corner. The Port
Huron Statement made just a passing reference condemning aid to the South
Vietnamese dictatorship. Unexpectedly, the American commitment deepened in
the year following Port Huron. When the moment of choice arrived in
1964-65, the Democratic administration sent 150,000 troops to Vietnam,
guaranteeing that the commitment to ending poverty and racism would ebb.
The visionary promise of Port Huron died on a battlefield that triggered a
radical polarization instead of reform at home. Our difference with Wills
and Dionne is that they blame the New Left for becoming too destructive and
extreme in the later 1960s, while we would locate the responsibility for
things falling apart on our leaders' choice to create a slaughterhouse in
Southeast Asia.
Perhaps the most important legacy of the Port Huron Statement is the fact
that it introduced the concept of participatory democracy to popular
discourse and practice. It made sense of the fact that ordinary people were
making history, and not waiting for parties or traditional organizations.
The notion was used to define modes of organization (decentralization,
consensus methods of decision-making, leadership rotation and avoidance of
hierarchy) that would lead to social transformation, not simply concessions
from existing institutions. It proved to be a contagious idea, spreading
from its academic origins to the very process of movement decision-making,
to the subsequent call for women's liberation. These participatory
practices, which had their roots in the town hall, Quaker meetings,
anarchist collectives and even sensitivity training, are carried on today
in grassroots movements such as the one against corporate globalization.
The strength of organizations like the early SDS or SNCC, or today's
Seattle-style direct-action networks, or ACT UP, is catalytic, not
bureaucratic. They empower the passion of spontaneous, communal revolt,
continue a few years, succeed in achieving reforms and yet have difficulty
in becoming institutionalized. But while hierarchical mass organizations
boast more staying power, they have trouble attracting the personal
creativity or the energy of ordinary people taking back power over their
lives. Participatory democracy offers a lens for looking at all
hierarchies critically and not taking them as inevitable. Perhaps the two
strands, the grassroots radical democratic thrust and the need for an
organization with a program, can never be fused, but neither can one live
without the other.
The Port Huron Statement claimed to be articulating an "agenda for a
Generation." Some of that agenda has been fulfilled: The cold war is no
more, voting rights for blacks and youth have been won, and much has
changed for the better in the content of university curriculums. Yet our
dreams have hardly been realized. The Port Huron Statement was composed in
the heady interlude of inspiration between the apathetic 1950s and the
1960s' sudden traumas of political assassinations and body counts. Forty
years later, we may stand at a similar crossroads. The war on terrorism has
revived the cold war framework. An escalating national security state
attempts to rivet our attention and invest our resources on fighting an
elusive, undefined enemy for years to come, at the inevitable price of our
civil liberties and continued neglect of social justice. To challenge the
framework of the war on terrorism, to demand a search for real peace with
justice, is as difficult today as challenging the cold war was at Port
Huron. Yet there is a new movement astir in the world, against the inherent
violence of globalization, corporate rule and fundamentalism, that reminds
us strongly of the early 1960s. Is history repeating? If so, "participatory
democracy" and the priorities of Port Huron continue to offer clues to
building a committed movement toward a society responsive to the needs of
the vast majority. Many of those who came to Port Huron have been on that
quest ever since.
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