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. The writers of the document believed that ordinary citizens, particularly students, could create change through non-violent means. "[7], The Port Huron Statement argued that because "the civil rights and peace and student movements are too poor and socially slighted, and the labor movement too quiescent", it should rally support and strengthen itself by looking to universities, which benefit from their "permanent position of social influence" and being "the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint". Spontaneous democratic demonstrations erupted in Russia late last year, organized on Facebook by young people seeking honest elections. That uprising was vindicated to the Weathermen (and many African-Americans) by the vast swelling of support for John Brown during and after his martyrdom. 1 percent, who in 1962 owned more than 80 percent of all personal shares of stock. Our parents wanted a New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt to meet their basic needs, just as black people in Mississippi wanted the vote and Kennedy, and workers wanted the eight-hour day in Emma Goldman’s time. The same spirit of popular participation that inspired OWS drove the electoral successes of Latin American nations emerging from dictatorships in the 1990s. But the convention was never intended as a revival ceremony for Marxism. By 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed, establishing federal oversight of Deep South voting patterns. 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. From Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring, the ideals of the statement — particularly “participatory democracy” — continue to inform popular movements across the world. Finally came Occupy Wall Street. 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. Since I was pleasantly surprised by its birth, I am not one to predict its growth. The Port Huron Statement called for the growth and implementation of participatory democracy across college campuses, in the South, and in inner cities. 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. Like a lot of my friends (to varying degrees), I empathized with the anti-capitalist + anti-imperialist = anti-war rhetoric of the 1960s. "[7], "An imperative task for these publicly disinherited groups, then, is to demand a Democratic Party responsible to their interests. She spoke of and personified participatory democracy. 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. 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 Port Huron Statement was adopted at the organization's first convention in 1962 based on an earlier draft by staff member Tom Hayden. One of the major differences has to do with anarchism, or “direct democracy,” which plays a major role in the thinking, structure and practice of many Occupy activists. 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. Strict anarchist theory suggests that any reforms only legitimize and strengthen structures that should be toppled or dissolved. Even today I find it hard to explain the “power and excitement,” the “dignity” and the “persuasiveness” of this document, which sprawls over 124 pages in book form. After waiting several years for Wall Street to self-correct, the people of the 1930s began demanding what became the Wagner Act, Social Security, the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Federal Writers Project, which made life better for generations to come. 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 included the November 1969 Moratorium against the war, up to that point the largest peace march in American history; Earth Day 1970, for which. Ours was a democratic populist heritage, in which, we naïvely believed, many factions could bloom but none could choke our growth. Most of the participants were shaped and informed in part by Marxist traditions. This formulation followed long discussions in which we repudiated doctrines of pessimism about the fallen human condition, as well as the liberal humanist belief in human “perfectibility.” It may have been influenced also by the Vatican II reforms then sweeping the Catholic Church. Our proposal was to de-escalate the bipolar nuclear confrontation. The formulation about “unrealized potential” was the premise for believing that human beings were capable of participating in the decisions affecting their lives, a sharp difference from the dominant view that an irrational mass society could be managed only by experts, or the too hopeful Enlightenment view of Tom Paine that our world could be created anew. 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. For the first time, students were thinking of themselves as “agents of social change.” The buoyancy of this strategy, perhaps carried on the innocence of the young, was a momentous break from the culture of the left in those times, which was dispirited by McCarthyism, bogged down in poisonous factional disputes and weighted with the ideological language and baggage of a Marxism that remained foreign to most Americans. Assassination and Vietnam Destroy the Great Society. For example, Micah White, a brilliant editor at Adbusters, writes that “an insurrectionary challenge to the capitalist state” will be mounted by “culture-jammers” who create “fluid, immersive, evocative meta-gaming experiences that are playfully thrilling and [that] as a natural result of their gameplay” a social revolution will arise as “pure manifestation of an anonymous will of a dispersed, networked collective.” It is as if the pure insurrectionary act, memorialized as performance art, is more important than the construction of any alliances, or any consequences that flow from it. That brief generation tried to make sense of the terrible and traumatizing events of the time. It was a way of empowering the individual as autonomous but interdependent with other individuals, and the community as a civic society. What did Port Huron say in his statement? By risking their lives daily in sit-ins and voter drives, SNCC and rural black people would soon crumble the foundation of Dixiecrat power. But the early SDS saw no alternative to winning reforms from the state and corporate sectors. This is the fiftieth anniversary year of the Port Huron Statement, the founding declaration of Students for a Democratic Society, issued as a “living document” in 1962. 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.". But the heightened militancy became disconnected from a comprehensible narrative that the wider public might have understood. Tom HaydenTom Hayden, the former California state assemblyman and senator, author, lifelong activist, and Nation editorial board member, died in Santa Monica on October 23, 2016. 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. Elections produce popular mandates, and mandates spur popular activism. Though they were not at Port Huron, there were other philosophical searchers at the time who practiced participatory democracy. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published just two months after Port Huron, but all the Statement observed about the environment was that “uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth’s physical resources.” There was no counterculture, no drug culture, no hippies—all that was to come. The climate of officially sponsored terrorism ebbed in the South, and leaders like the Rev. 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. Leaders were assassinated if they moved in a progressive direction. Many of us read Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir, but the first women’s consciousness-raising groups were two years in the future and would be provoked in part by our own chauvinism. Why was it so necessary for SDS leaders to reject Port Huron as “reformist”? Yet the document was con-scious of the organization’s historical ties to labor and the working- class movement. 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). 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. Port Huron Statement Draft This is the text of the original draft of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, as distributed by Alan Haber to the attendees at the SDS Northeast Regional Conference, April 23, 2006.For the final, published Port Huron Statement, click here. Facebook and Twitter are credited with a key role in movements from Cairo to the volunteer campaign for Barack Obama. placementName: "thenation_right_rail", You may unsubscribe or adjust your preferences at any time. By 1966 the United Farm Workers was bringing new energy to the labor movement; that same year, Congress moved to include minimum-wage protections for farmworkers, who had been excluded for the previous twenty-eight years under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The early SDS certainly identified with the Wobblies, the anarchists who organized the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts; the Haymarket Square martyrs; and the historic wildcat strikes across the Western mining country. Sign up for our free daily newsletter, along with occasional offers for programs that support our journalism. Again and again, SNCC organizers heard rural black people emphasize how much they wanted that right. The Statement would need major updating, but its passionate democratic core was of permanent value. While the Port Huron Statement was criticized by an older generation as too far left, an opposite attack came from the mid-1960s generation. The secrecy of the state expanded even in times of peace. The Port Huron Statement was a broad critique of the political and social system of the United States for failing to achieve international peace and economic justice. There was a third obstacle to the PHS dream, besides the assassinations and the Vietnam War. The kind of democracy we were proposing was more than a blueprint for structural rearrangements. [4] Also known as the "Agenda for a Generation", it "brought the term 'participatory democracy' into the common parlance". Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “Port Huron Revisited.” About This is Democracy. I don’t know whether history begins anew or just repeats its sputtering cycles again and again. Jesse Jackson would eventually run impressive presidential campaigns where none had been possible in the previous century. It meant a greater role for citizens in the ultimate questions of war and peace, then considered the secret realm of experts. But the New Deal itself was driven by a chaotic, eclectic, sectarian, combative, fanatic and passionate energy, and included anarchists, communists, musicians, muralists, liberals, progressives, prairie populists, industrial union organizers and, yes, reformers, from Al Smith to Upton Sinclair to Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1966 new SDS leaders rejected the PHS as “too reformist.” It was certainly true; the PHS did envision reforms—substantive rather than token, rapid though not overnight—and revolution was seen more as an undefined aspiration or long-term hope. J. Edgar Hoover’s orders to “neutralize” protest leaders are well documented. Even a philosophical anarchist (or “libertarian socialist”) like Noam Chomsky has written in favor of radical reform: There is a state sector that does awful things, but it also happens to do some good things. In the concurrent Cold War environment, such a statement of inclusion for the heretofore "evil" Communist ideology, and by extension, socialist concepts, was definitely seen as a new, radical view contrasting with the position of much of the traditional American Left. The new SDS leaders, in search of an ideology, turned steadily to Marxism, then to Marxism-Leninism and Maoism. It advocated for participatory democracy … The legacy of McCarthyism, if continued in the 1960s, would mean that all our work, from the sit-ins to the Freedom Rides to the Port Huron Statement, would be marginalized as taking the wrong side in the cold war. Why Cuba Matters (Seven Stories). Sale made two observations about the Statement: First, the PHS contained “a power and excitement rare to any document, rarer still in the documents of this time, with a dignity in its language, persuasiveness in its arguments, catholicity in its scope, and quiet skill in its presentation…a summary of beliefs for much of the student generation as a whole, then and for several years to come.”, Second, “it was set firmly in mainstream politics, seeking the reform of mainstream institutions rather than their abolition, and it had no comprehension of the dynamics of capitalism, of imperialism, of class conflict, certainly no conception of revolution. And in response, new movements arose across the planet against war, sweatshops, hunger and environmental destruction. First, there was the assassination of John Kennedy, which devastated any rational basis for strategy. Across the Western world, the smoldering division is becoming one between unelected wealthy and foreign private investors and the participatory democracies of civic societies with their faltering elected governments. Bob Moses, perhaps the single greatest influence on the early SDS and SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), could be described as a Socratic existentialist. SNCC’s early organizing method was based on listening to local people and taking action on behalf of their demands. To take one example among many, official disclosures in 1984 revealed that John McCone, Kennedy’s CIA director, head of the Atomic Energy Commission and Bechtel executive, conspired with the FBI in a “psychological warfare campaign” against the Free Speech Movement and to elect Ronald Reagan governor of California. Port Huron Statement - Participatory Democracy. 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. Participatory Democracy and Occupy Wall Street. But none of that mattered.” More recently, historian Michael Kazin wrote that the Statement “is the most ambitious, the most specific, and the most eloquent manifesto in the history of the American Left.”, 1963 SDS National Council Meeting (C. Clark Kissinger), I wrote the first notes for the Port Huron Statement in December 1961, when I was briefly in an Albany, Georgia, jail cell after a Freedom Ride to fight segregation in the South. 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). The Port Huron Statement, ultimately, was a document of idealism, a philosophical template for a more egalitarian society, a call to participatory democracy where everyone was engaged in issues that affected all people - in civil rights, in political accountability, in labor rights, and in nuclear disarmament. 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. They also criticized the United States for its exaggerated paranoia and exclusive condemnation of the Soviet Union, and blamed this for being the reason for failing to achieve disarmament and to assure peace. What became the New Deal was pushed from below by insurrectionary strikes in Seattle, factory occupations in Flint, and writings and art from government-subsidized poets and intellectuals who interviewed the poor, the migrants and the unemployed, and who created great works like “This Land Is Your Land” and The Grapes of Wrath. The famous 1962 Port Huron Statement by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) introduced the concept of participatory democracy to popular discourse and practice. [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. In the North, reform clubs (either independent or Democratic) should be formed to run against big city regimes on such issues as peace, civil rights, and urban needs. We carefully avoided adopting any of the previous ideologies of the left, including anarchism, in our search for something new. By “paradigm” I mean an understanding of power as cultural hegemony or dominance, a thought system in which there seems to be no alternative. The Vietnam escalation was accompanied by hundreds of uprisings in black communities, with the cost in lives still uncounted and billions of dollars wasted. 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? The power of the independent movement came first, but it was also necessary to pressure the president to follow, to recognize and legitimize and legalize the victory and pursue a transition to a more participatory and egalitarian democracy. But we believed that social movements should insist on the democratic reform of state and corporation, not expect their overthrow or implosion. On the other hand, the right-wing AFL-CIO foreign affairs department carried on the anti-communist crusade with its covert operations. 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. American combat in Vietnam was unseen over the horizon, though the PHS opposed US support for the “free world’s” dictators, including South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem. Barack Obama, born in 1961, the year the Freedom Rides began, very much owes his election to the voting rights reforms that brought about this realignment. When the UAW finally broke from Meany and demanded a cease-fire in Vietnam, SDS and SNCC were too radicalized and factionalized for it to matter anymore. 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. Vietnam seemed to prove that militarism and imperialism were central to American society, whether liberals or conservatives were in power. 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 and foreign policy spheres—these themes constitute much of today’s progressive sensibility. 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 Reuther wing was tied to Johnson’s leadership and unwilling to break from Meany. 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.”. Rampant conspiracy theories seemed to negate the prospects of popular movements and peaceful transitions through elections. The PHS was even prophetic in condemning the. For Reprints and Permissions, click here. Of course, there are differences between the Port Huron Statement and the Occupy Wall Street manifesto, but they should not be overstated. SDS developed from the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth branch of a socialist educational organization known as the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). No doubt the crisis that gave rise to Occupy will not be fixed by an election, but that’s beside the point. But the Port Huron vision of a participatory democracy, of a society in which all people have the right to a voice in the decisions affecting their lives, still resonates. This argument may be criticized as purely hypothetical, but it tries to capture the immensity of our dream and how close it seemed to our grasp. If that was true, what was the point of depending on mainstream public opinion? In Inspiring Participatory Democracy Tom Hayden, one of the principal architects of the statement, analyses its historical impact and relevance to today's movements. Historical Amnesia About Slavery Is a Tool of White Supremacy. Porto Alegre showcased a model of “participatory budgeting,” in which local citizens are directly involved in decisions to allocate public funds for neighborhood needs. 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.