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The Port Huron Statement, part two
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The Port Huron Statement
3. Institutions and practices which stifle dissent should be abolished,
and the promotion of peaceful dissent should be actively promoted. The
first Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly, thought, religion and
press should be seen as guarantees, not threats, to national security.
While society has the right to prevent active subversion of its laws and
institutions, it has the duty as well to promote open discussion of all
issues -- otherwise it will be in fact promoting real subversion as the
only means to implementing ideas. To eliminate the fears and apathy
from national life it is necessary that the institutions bred by fear
and apathy be rooted out: the House Un-
American Activities Committee,
the Senate Internal Security Committee, the loyalty oaths on Federal
loans, the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations, the
Smith and McCarren Acts. The process of eliminating these blighting
institutions is the process of restoring
Democratic participation.
Their existence is a sign of the decomposition and atrophy of the
participation.
4. Corporations must be made publicly responsible. It is not possible
to believe that true democracy can exist where a minority utterly
controls enormous wealth and power. The influence of corporate elites
on foreign policy is neither reliable nor Democratic; a way must be
found to be subordinate private American foreign investment to a
democratically-constructed foreign policy. The influence of the same
giants on domestic life is intolerable as well; a way must be found to
direct our economic resources to genuine human needs, not the private
needs of corporations nor the rigged needs of maneuvered citizenry.
We can no longer rely on competition of the many to insure that business
enterprise is responsive to social needs. The many have become the few.
Nor can we trust the corporate bureaucracy to be socially responsible or
to develop a "corporate conscience" that is Democratic. The community
of interest of corporations, the anarchic actions of industrial leaders,
should become structurally responsible to the people -- and truly to the
people rather than to an ill-defined and questionable "national
interest". Labor and government as presently constituted are not
sufficient to "regulate" corporations. A new re-ordering, a new calling
of responsibility is necessary: more than changing "work rules" we must
consider changes in the rules of society by challenging the unchallenged
politics of American corporations. Before the government can really
begin to control business in a "public interest", the public must gain
more substantial control of government: this demands a movement for
political as well as economic realignments. We are aware that simple
government "regulation", if achieved, would be inadequate without
increased worker participation in management decision-making,
strengthened and independent regulatory power, balances of partial
and/or complete public ownership, various means of humanizing the
conditions and types of work itself, sweeping welfare programs and
regional public government authorities. These are examples of measures
to re-balance the economy toward public -- and individual -- control.
5. The allocation of resources must be based on social needs. A truly
"public sector" must be established, and its nature debated and planned.
At present the majority of America's "public sector", the largest part
of our public spending, is for the military. When great social needs
are so pressing, our concept of "government spending" is wrapped up in
the "permanent war economy".
In fact, if war is to be avoided, the "permanent war economy" must be
seen as an "interim war economy". At some point, America must return to
other mechanisms of economic growth besides public military spending.
We must plan economically in peace. The most likely, and least
desirable, return would be in the form of private enterprise. The
undesirability lies in the fact of inherent capitalist instability,
noticeable even with bolstering effects of government intervention. In
the most recent post-war recessions, for example, private expenditures
for plant and equipment dropped from $16 billion to $11.5 billion, while
unemployment surged to nearly six million. By good fortune, investments
in construction industries remained level, else an economic depression
would have occurred. This will recur, and our growth in national per
capita living standards will remain unsensational while the economy
stagnates. The main private forces of economic expansion cannot
guarantee a steady rate of growth, nor acceptable recovery from
recession -- especially in a demilitarizing world. Government
participation in the economy is essential. Such participation will
inevitably expand enormously, because the stable growth of the economy
demands increasing "public" investments yearly. Our present outpour of
more than $500 billion might double in a generation, irreversibly
involving government solutions. And in future recessions, the
compensatory fiscal action by the government will be the only means of
avoiding the twin disasters of greater unemployment and a slackening
rate of growth. Furthermore, a close relationship with the European
Common Market will involve competition with numerous planned economies
and may aggravate American unemployment unless the economy here is
expanding swiftly enough to create new jobs.
All these tendencies suggest that not only solutions to our present
social needs but our future expansion rests upon our willingness to
enlarge the "public sector" greatly. Unless we choose war as an
economic solvent, future public spending will be of a non-military
nature -- a major intervention into civilian production by the
government. The issues posed by this development are enormous:
- How should public vs. private domain be determined? We suggest
these criteria: 1) when a resource has been discovered or developed
with public tax revenues, such as a space communications system, it
should remain a public source, not be given away to private enterprise;
- when monopolization seems inevitable, the public should maintain
control of an industry; 3) when national objectives contradict seriously
with business objectives as to the use of the resource, the public need
should prevail.
- How should technological advances be introduced into a society? By
a public process, based on publicly-determined needs. Technological
innovations should not be postponed from social use by private
corporations in order to protect investment in older equipment.
- How shall the "public sector" be made public, and not the arena of a
ruling bureaucracy of "public servants"? By steadfast opposition to
bureaucratic coagulation, and to definitions of human needs according to
problems easiest for computers to solve. Second, the bureaucratic pileups
must be at least minimized by local, regional, and national economic
planning -- responding to the interconnection of public problems by
comprehensive programs of solution. Third, and most important, by
experiments in decentralization, based on the vision of man as master of
his machines and his society. The personal capacity to cope with life
has been reduced everywhere by the introduction of technology that only
minorities of men (barely) understand. How the process can be reversed
- and we believe it can be -- is one of the greatest sociological and
economic tasks before human people today. Polytechnical schooling, with
the individual adjusting to several work and life experiences, is one
method. The transfer of certain mechanized tasks back into manual
forms, allowing men to make whole, not partial, products, is not
unimaginable. Our monster cities, based historically on the need for
mass labor, might now be humanized, broken into smaller communities,
powered by nuclear energy, arranged according to community decision.
These are but a fraction of the opportunities of the new era: serious
study and deliberate experimentation, rooted in a desire for human
fraternity, may now result in blueprints of civic paradise.
- America should concentrate on its genuine social priorities:
abolish squalor, terminate neglect, and establish an environment for
people to live in with dignity and creativeness.
- A program against poverty must be just as sweeping as the nature of
poverty itself. It must not be just palliative, but directed to the
abolition of the structural circumstances of poverty. At a bare minimum
it should include a housing act far larger than the one supported by the
Kennedy Administration, but one that is geared more to low-and middleincome
needs than to the windfall aspirations of small and large private
entrepreneurs, one that is more sympathetic to the quality of communal
life than to the efficiency of city-split highways. Second, medical
care must become recognized as a lifetime human right just as vital as
food, shelter and clothing -- the Federal government should guarantee
health insurance as a basic social service turning medical treatment
into a social habit, not just an occasion of crisis, fighting sickness
among the aged, not just by making medical care financially feasible but
by reducing sickness among children and younger people. Third, existing
institutions should be expanded so the Welfare State cares for
everyone's welfare according to read. Social security payments should
be extended to everyone and should be proportionately greater for the
poorest. A minimum wage of at least $1.50 should be extended to all
workers (including the 16 million currently not covered at all). Equal
educational opportunity is an important part of the battle against
poverty.
- A full-scale public initiative for civil rights should be undertaken
despite the clamor among conservatives (and liberals) about gradualism,
property rights, and law and order. The executive and legislative
branches of the Federal government should work by enforcement and
enactment against any form of exploitation of minority groups. No
Federal cooperation with racism is tolerable -- from financing of
schools, to the development of Federally-supported industry, to the
social gatherings of the President. Laws bastcuing school
desegregation, voting rights, and economic protection for Negroes are
needed right now. The moral force of the Executive Office should be
exerted against the Dixiecrats specifically, and the national
complacency about the race question generally. Especially in the North,
where one-half of the country's Negro people now live, civil rights is
not a problem to be solved in isolation from other problems. The fight
against poverty, against slums, against the stalemated Congress, against
McCarthyism, are all fights against the discrimination that is nearly
endemic to all areas of American life.
- The promise and problems of long-range Federal economic development
should be studied more constructively. It is an embarrassing paradox
that the Tennessee Valley Authority is a wonder to foreign visitors but
a "radical" and barely influential project to most Americans. The
Kennedy decision to permit private facilities to transmit power from the
$1 billion Colorado River Storage Project is a disastrous one,
interposing privately-owned transmitters between public-owned power
generators and their publicly (and cooperatively) owned distributors.
The contracy trend, to public ownership of power, should be generated in
an experimental way.
The Area Redevelopment Act of 1961 is a first step in recognizing the
underdeveloped areas of the United States, but is only a drop in the
bucket financially and is not keyed to public planning and public works
on a broad scale, but only to a few loan programs to lure industries and
some grants to improve public facilities to "lure industries." The
current public works bill in Congress is needed and a more sweeping,
higher priced program of regional development with a proliferation of
"TVAs" in such areas as the Appalachian region are needed desperately.
It has been rejected by Mississippi already however, because of the
improvement it bodes for the unskilled Negro worker. This program
should be enlarged, given teeth, and pursued rigorously by Federal
authorities.
d. We must meet the growing complex of "city" problems; over 90% of
Americans will live in urban areas in the next two decades. Juvenile
delinquency, untended mental illness, crime increase, slums, urban
tenantry and uncontrolled housing, the isolation of the individual in
the city -- all are problems of the city and are major symptoms of the
present system of economic priorities and lack of public planning.
Private property control (the real estate lobby and a few selfish
landowners and businesses) is as devastating in the cities as
corporations are on the national level. But there is no comprehensive
way to deal with these problems now midst competing units of government,
dwindling tax resources, suburban escapism (saprophitic to the sick
central cities), high infrastructure costs and on one to pay them. The
only solutions are national and regional. "Federalism" has thus far
failed here because states are rural-dominated; the Federal government
has had to operate by bootlegging and trickle-down measures dominated by
private interests, and the cities themselves have not been able to catch
up with their appendages through annexation or federation. A new
external challenge is needed, not just a Department of Urban Affairs but
a thorough national program to help the cities. The model city must be
projected -- more community decision-making and participation, true
integration of classes, races, vocations -- provision for beauty, access
to nature and the benefits of the central city as well, privacy without
privatism, decentralized "units" spread horizontally with central,
regional, Democratic control -- provision for the basic facility-needs,
for everyone, with units of planned regions and thus public, Democratic
control over the growth of the civic community and the allocation of
resources.
e. Mental health institutions are in dire need; there were fewer mental
hospital beds in relation to the numbers of mentally-ill in 1959 than
there were in 1948. Public hospitals, too, are seriously wanting;
existing structures alone need an estimated $1 billion for
rehabilitation. Tremendous staff and faculty needs exist as well, and
there are not enough medical students enrolled today to meet the
anticipated needs of the future.
f. Our prisons are too often the enforcers of misery. They must be
either re-oriented to rehabilitative work through public supervision or
be abolished for their dehumanizing social effects. Funds are needed,
too, to make possible a decent prison environment.
g. Education is too vital a public problem to be completely entrusted
to the province of the various states and local units. In fact, there
is no good reason why America should not progress now toward
internationalizing rather than localizing, its educational system --
children and young adults studying everywhere in the world, through a
United Nations program, would go far to create mutual understanding. In
the meantime, the need for teachers and classrooms in America is
fantastic. This is an area where "minimal" requirements hardly should
be considered as a goal -- there always are improvements to be made in
the educational system, e.g., smaller classes and many more teachers for
them, programs to subsidize the education of the poor but bright, etc.
h. America should eliminate agricultural policies based on scarcity and
pent-up surplus. In America and foreign countries there exist
tremendous needs for more food and balanced diets. The Federal
government should finance small farmers' cooperatives, strengthen
programs of rural electrification, and expand policies for the
distribution of agricultural surpluses throughout the world (by Foodfor
-Peace and related UN programming). Marginal farmers must be helped
to either become productive enough to survive "industrialized
agriculture" or given help in making the transition out of agriculture -
- the current Rural Area Development program must be better coordinated
with a massive national "area redevelopment" program.
i. Science should be employed to constructively transform the
conditions of life throughout the United States and the world. Yet at
the present time the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and
the National Science Foundation together spend only $300 million
annually for scientific purposes in contrast to the $6 billion spent by
the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission. One-half of
all research and development in America is directly devoted to military
purposes. Two imbalances must be corrected -- that of military over
non-military investigation, and that of biological-natural-physical
science over the sciences of human behavior. Our political system must
then include planning for the human use of science: by anticipating the
political consequences of scientific innovation, by directing the
discovery and exploration of space, by adapting science to improved
production of food, to international communications systems, to
technical problems of disarmament, and so on. For the newly-developing
nations, American science should focus on the study of cheap sources of
power, housing and building materials, mass educational techniques, etc.
Further, science and scholarship should be seen less as an apparatus of
conflicting power blocs, but as a bridge toward supranational community:
the International Geophysical Year is a model for continuous further
cooperation between the science communities of all nations.
Alternatives to Helplessness
The goals we have set are not realizable next month, or even next
election -- but that fact justifies neither giving up altogether nor a
determination to work only on immediate, direct, tangible problems.
Both responses are a sign of helplessness, fearfulness of visions,
refusal to hope, and tend to bring on the very conditions to be avoided.
Fearing vision, we justify rhetoric or myopia. Fearing hope, we
reinforce despair.
The first effort, then, should be to state a vision: what is the
perimeter of human possibility in this epoch? This we have tried to do.
The second effort, if we are to be politically responsible, is to
evaluate the prospects for obtaining at least a substantial part of that
vision in our epoch: what are the social forces that exist, or that
must exist, if we are to be at all successful? And what role have we
ourselves to play as a social force?
- In exploring the existing social forces, note must be taken of the
Southern civil rights movement as the most heartening because of the
justice it insists upon, exemplary because it indicates that there can
be a passage out of apathy.
This movement, pushed into a brilliant new phase by the Montgomery bus
boycott and the subsequent nonviolent action of the sit-ins and Freedom
Rides has had three major results: first, a sense of self-determination
has been instilled in millions of oppressed Negroes; second, the
movement has challenged a few thousand liberals to new social idealism;
third, a series of important concessions have been obtained, such as
token school desegregation, increased Administration help, new laws,
desegregation of some public facilities.
But fundamental social change -- that would break the props from under
Jim Crown -- has not come. Negro employment opportunity, wage levels,
housing conditions, educational privileges -- these remain deplorable
and relatively constant, each deprivation reinforcing the impact of the
others. The Southern states, in the meantime, are strengthening the
fortresses of the status quo, and are beginning to camouflage the
fortresses by guile where open bigotry announced its defiance before.
The white-controlled one-party system remains intact; and even where the
Republicans are beginning under the pressures of industrialization in
the towns and suburbs, to show initiative in fostering a two-party
system, all Southern state Republican Committees (save Georgia) have
adopted militant segregationist platforms to attract Dixiecrats.
Rural dominance remains a fact in nearly all the Southern states,
although the reapportionment decision of the Supreme Court portends
future power shifts to the cities. Southern politicians maintain a
continuing aversion to the welfare legislation that would aid their
people. The reins of the Southern economy are held by conservative
businessmen who view human rights as secondary to property rights. A
violent anti-communism is rooting itself in the South, and threatening
even moderate voices. Add the militaristic tradition of the South, and
its irrational regional mystique and one must conclude that
authoritarian and reactionary tendencies are a rising obstacle to the
small, voiceless, poor, and isolated Democratic movements.
The civil rights struggle thus has come to an impasse. To this impasse,
the movement responded this year by entering the sphere of politics,
insisting on citizenship rights, specifically the right to vote. The
new voter registration stage of protest represents perhaps the first
major attempt to exercise the conventional instruments of political
democracy in the struggle for racial justice. The vote, if used
strategically by the great mass of now-unregistered Negroes
theoretically eligible to vote, will be decisive factor in changing the
quality of Southern leadership from low demagoguery to decent
statesmanship.
More important, the new emphasis on the vote heralds the use of
political means to solve the problems of equality in America, and it
signals the decline of the short-sighted view that "discrimination" can
be isolated from related social problems. Since the moral clarity of
the civil rights movement has not always been accompanied by precise
political vision, and sometimes not every by a real political
consciousness, the new phase is revolutionary in its implication. The
intermediate goal of the program is to secure and insure a healthy
respect and realization of Constitutional liberties. This is important
not only to terminate the civil and private abuses which currently
characterize the region, but also to prevent the pendulum of oppression
from simply swinging to an alternate extreme with a new unsophisticated
electorate, after the unhappy example of the last Reconstruction. It is
the ultimate objectives of the strategy which promise profound change in
the politics of the nation. An increased Negro voting race in and of
itself is not going to dislodge racist controls of the Southern power
structure; but an accelerating movement through the courts, the ballot
boxes, and especially the jails is the most likely means of shattering
the crust of political intransigency and creating a semblence of
Democratic order, on local and state levels.
Linked with pressure from Northern liberals to expunge the Dixiecrats
from the ranks of the Democratic Party, massive Negro voting in the
South could destroy the vice-like grip reactionary Southerners have on
the Congressional legislative process.
2. The broadest movement for peace in several years emerged in 1961-62.
In its political orientation and goals it is much less identifiable than
the movement for civil rights: it includes socialists, pacifists,
liberals, scholars, militant activists, middle-class women, some
professionals, many students, a few unionists. Some have been
emotionally single-issue: Ban the Bomb. Some have been academically
obscurantist. Some have rejected the System (sometimes both systems).
Some have attempted, too, to "work within" the System. Amidst these
conflicting streams of emphasis, however, certain basic qualities
appear. The most important is that the "peace movement" has operated
almost exclusively through peripheral institutions -- almost never
through mainstream institutions. Similarly, individuals interested in
peace have nonpolitical social roles that cannot be turned to the
support of peace activity. Concretely, liberal religious societies,
anti-war groups, voluntary associations, ad hoc committees have been the
political unit of the peace movement, and its human movers have been
students, teacher, housewives, secretaries, lawyers, doctors, clergy.
The units have not been located in spots of major social influence, the
people have not been able to turn their resources fully to the issues
that concern them. The results are political ineffectiveness and
personal alienation.
The organizing ability of the peace movement thus is limited to the
ability to state and polarize issues. It does not have an institution
or the forum in which the conflicting interests can be debated. The
debate goes on in corners; it has little connection with the continuing
process of determining allocations of resources. This process is not
necessarily centralized, however much the peace movement is estranged
from it. National policy, though dominated to a large degree by the
"power elites" of the corporations and military, is still partially
founded in consensus. It can be altered when there actually begins a
shift in the allocation of resources and the listing of priorities by
the people in the institutions which have social influence, e.g., the
labor unions and the schools. As long as the debates of the peace
movement form only a protest, rather than an opposition viewpoint within
the centers of serious decision- making, then it is neither a movement
of Democratic relevance, nor is it likely to have any effectiveness
except in educating more outsiders to the issue. It is vital, to be
sure, that this educating go on (a heartening sign is the recent
proliferation of books and journals dealing with peace and war from
newly-developing countries); the possibilities for making politicians
responsible to "peace constituencies" becomes greater.
But in the long interim before the national political climate is more
open to deliberate, goal-directed debate about peace issues, the
dedicated peace "movement" might well prepare a local base, especially
by establishing civic committees on the techniques of converting from
military to peacetime production. To make war and peace relevant to the
problems of everyday life, by relating it to the backyard (shelters),
the baby (fall-out), the job (military contracts) -- and making a turn
toward peace seem desirable on these same terms -- is a task the peace
movement is just beginning, and can profitably continue.
3. Central to any analysis of the potential for change must be an
appraisal of organized labor. It would be a-historical to disregard the
immense influence of labor in making modern America a decent place in
which to live. It would be confused to fail to note labor's presence
today as the most liberal of mainstream institutions. But it would be
irresponsible not to criticize labor for losing much of the idealism
that once made it a driving movement. Those who expected a labor
upsurge after the 1955 AFL-CIO merger can only be dismayed that one year
later, in the Stevenson-Eisenhower campaign, the AFL-CIO Committee on
Political Education was able to obtain solicited $1.00 contributions
from only one of every 24 unionists, and prompt only 40% of the rankand
-file to vote.
As a political force, labor generally has been unsuccessful in the postwar
period of prosperity. It has seen the passage of the Taft-Hartley
and Landrum-Griffin laws, and while beginning to receiving slightly
favorable National Labor Relations Board rulings, it has made little
progress against right-to-work laws. Furthermore, it has seen less than
adequate action on domestic problems, especially unemployment.
This labor "recession" has been only partly due to anti-labor
politicians and corporations. Blame should be laid, too, to labor
itself for not mounting an adequate movement. Labor has too often seen
itself as elitist, rather than mass-oriented, and as a pressure group
rather than as an 18-million member body making political demands for
all America. In the first instance, the labor bureaucracy tends to be
cynical toward, or afraid of, rank-and-file involvement in the work of
the Union. Resolutions passed at conventions are implemented only by
high-level machinations, not by mass mobilization of the unionists.
Without a significant base, labor's pressure function is materially
reduced since it becomes difficult to hold political figures accountable
to a movement that cannot muster a vote from a majority of its members.
There are some indications, however, that labor might regain its missing
idealism. First, there are signs within the movement: of worker
discontent with the economic progress, of collective bargaining, of
occasional splits among union leaders on questions such as nuclear
testing or other Cold War issues. Second, and more important, are the
social forces which prompt these feelings of unrest. Foremost is the
permanence of unemployment, and the threat of automation, but important,
too, is the growth of unorganized ranks in white-collar fields with
steady depletion in the already-organized fields. Third, there is the
tremendous challenge of the Negro movement for support from organized
labor: the alienation from and disgust with labor hypocrisy among
Negroes ranging from the NAACP to the Black Muslims (crystallized in the
formation of the Negro American Labor Council) indicates that labor must
move more seriously in its attempts to organize on an interracial basis
in the South and in large urban centers. When this task was broached
several years ago, "jurisdictional" disputes prevented action. Today,
many of these disputes have been settled -- and the question of a
massive organizing campaign is on the labor agenda again.
These threats and opportunities point to a profound crisis: either
labor continues to decline as a social force, or it must constitute
itself as a mass political force demanding not only that society
recognize its rights to organize but also a program going beyond desired
labor legislation and welfare improvements. Necessarily this latter
role will require rank-and-file involvement. It might include greater
autonomy and power for political coalitions of the various trade unions
in local areas, rather than the more stultifying dominance of the
international unions now. It might include reductions in leaders'
salaries, or rotation from executive office to shop obligations, as a
means of breaking down the hierarchical tendencies which have detached
elite from base and made the highest echelons of labor more like
businessmen than workers. It would certainly mean an announced
independence of the center and Dixiecrat wings of the Democratic Party,
and a massive organizing drive, especially in the South to complement
the growing Negro political drive there.
A new politics must include a revitalized labor movement; a movement
which sees itself, and is regarded by others, as a major leader of the
breakthrough to a politics of hope and vision. Labor's role is no less
unique or important in the needs of the future than it was in the past,
its numbers and potential political strength, its natural interest in
the abolition of exploitation, its reach to the grass roots of American
society, combine to make it the best candidate for the synthesis of the
civil rights, peace, and economic reform movements.
The creation of bridges is made more difficult by the problems left over
from the generation of "silence". Middle class students, still the main
actors in the embryonic upsurge, have yet to overcome their ignorance,
and even vague hostility, for what they see as "middle class labor"
bureaucrats. Students must open the campus to labor through
publications, action programs, curricula, while labor opens its house to
students through internships, requests for aid (on the picket-line, with
handbills, in the public dialogue), and politics. And the organization
of the campus can be a beginning -- teachers' unions can be argued as
both socially progressive, and educationally beneficial university
employees can be organized -- and thereby an important element in the
education of the student radical.
But the new politics is still contained; it struggles below the surface
of apathy, awaiting liberation. Few anticipate the breakthrough and
fewer still exhort labor to begin. Labor continues to be the most
liberal -- and most frustrated -- institution in mainstream America.
4. Since the Democratic Party sweep in 1958, there have been
exaggerated but real efforts to establish a liberal force in Congress,
not to balance but to at least voice criticism of the conservative mood.
The most notable of these efforts was the Liberal Project begun early in
1959 by Representative Kastenmeier of Wisconsin. The Project was
neither disciplined nor very influential but it was concerned at least
with confronting basic domestic and foreign problems, in concert with
sever liberal intellectuals.
In 1960 five members of the Project were defeated at the polls (for
reasons other than their membership in the Project). Then followed a
"post mortem" publication of the Liberal Papers, materials discussed by
the Project when it was in existence. Republican leaders called the
book "further our than Communism". The New Frontier Administration
repudiated any connection with the statements. Some former members of
the Project even disclaimed their past roles.
A hopeful beginning came to a shameful end. But during the demise of
the Project, a new spirit of Democratic Party reform was occurring: in
New York City, Ithaca, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Texas, California,
and even in Mississippi and Alabama where Negro candidates for Congress
challenged racist political power. Some were for peace, some for the
liberal side of the New Frontier, some for realignment of the parties --
and in most cases they were supported by students.
Here and there were stirrings of organized discontent with the political
stalemate. Americans for Democratic Action and the New Republic,
pillars of the liberal community, took stands against the President on
nuclear testing. A split, extremely slight thus far, developed in
organized labor on the same issue. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
preached against the Dixiecrat-Republican coalition across the nation.
5. From 1960 to 1962, the campuses experienced a revival of idealism
among an active few. Triggered by the impact of the sit-ins, students
began to struggle for integration, civil liberties, student rights,
peace, and against the fast-rising right wing "revolt" as well. The
liberal students, too, have felt their urgency thwarted by conventional
channels: from student governments to Congressional committees. Out of
this alienation from existing channels has come the creation of new
ones; the most characteristic forms of liberal-radical student
organizations are the dozens of campus political parties, political
journals, and peace marches and demonstrations. In only a few cases
have students built bridges to power: an occasional election campaign,
the sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and voter registration activities; in some
relatively large Northern demonstrations for peace and civil rights, and
infrequently, through the United States National Student Association
whose notable work has not been focused on political change.
These contemporary social movements -- for peace, civil rights, civil
liberties labor -- have in common certain values and goals. The fight
for peace is one for a stable and racially integrated world; for an end
to the inherently volatile exploitation of most of mankind by
irresponsible elites; and for freedom of economic, political and
cultural organization. The fight for civil rights is also one for
social welfare for all Americans; for free speech and the right to
protest; for the shield of economic independence and bargaining power;
for a reduction of the Arms Race which takes national attention and
resources away from the problems of domestic injustice. Labor's fight
for jobs and wages is also one labor; for the right to petition and
strike; for world industrialization; for the stability of a peacetime
economy instead of the insecurity of the war economy; for expansion of
the Welfare State. The fight for a liberal Congress is a fight for a
platform from which these concerns can issue. And the fight for
students, for internal democracy in the university, is a fight to gain a
forum for the issues.
But these scattered movements have more in common: a need for their
concerns to be expressed by a political party responsible to their
interests. That they have no political expression, no political
channels, can be traced in large measure to the existence of a
Democratic Party which tolerates the perverse unity of liberalism and
racism, prevents the social change wanted by Negroes, peace protesters,
labor unions, students, reform Democrats, and other liberals. Worse,
the party stalemate prevents even the raising of controversy -- a full
Congressional assault on racial discrimination, disengagement in Central
Europe, sweeping urban reform, disarmament and inspection, public
regulation of major industries; these and other issues are never heard
in the body that is supposed to represent the best thoughts and
interests of all Americans.
An imperative task for these publicly disinherited groups, then, is to
demand a Democratic Party responsible to their interests. 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). Labor
should begin a major drive in the South. 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.
Demonstrations should be held at every Congressional or convention
seating of Dixiecrats. A massive research and publicity campaign should
be initiated, showing to every housewife, doctor, professor, and worker
the damage done to their interests every day a racist occupies a place
in the Democratic Party. Where possible, the peace movement should
challenge the "peace credentials" of the otherwise-liberals by
threatening or actually running candidates against them.
The University and Social Change. There is perhaps little reason to be
optimistic about the above analysis. True, the Dixiecrat-GOP coalition
is the weakest point in the dominating complex of corporate, military
and political power. But the civil rights and peace and student
movements are too poor and socially slighted, and the labor movement too
quiescent, to be counted with enthusiasm. From where else can power and
vision be summoned? We believe that the universities are an overlooked
seat of influence.
First, the university is located in a permanent position of social
influence. Its educational function makes it indispensable and
automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social
attitudes. Second, in an unbelievably complicated world, it is the
central institution for organizing, evaluating, and transmitting
knowledge. Third, the extent to which academic resources presently is
used to buttress immoral social practice is revealed first, by the
extent to which defense contracts make the universities engineers of the
Arms Race. Too, the use of modern social science as a manipulative tool
reveals itself in the "human relations" consultants to the modern
corporation, who introduce trivial sops to give laborers feelings of
"participation" or "belonging", while actually deluding them in order to
further exploit their labor. And, of course, the use of motivational
research is already infamous as a manipulative aspect of American
politics. But these social uses of the universities' resources also
demonstrate the unchangeable reliance by men of power on the men and
storehouses of knowledge: this makes the university functionally tied
to society in new ways, revealing new potentialities, new levers for
change. Fourth, the university is the only mainstream institution that
is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint.
These, at least, are facts, no matter how dull the teaching, how
paternalistic the rules, how irrelevant the research that goes on.
Social relevance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness
- these together make the university a potential base and agency in a
movement of social change.
1. Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real
intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection
as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an
adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.
2. A new left must be distributed in significant social roles
throughout the country. The universities are distributed in such a
manner.
3. A new left must consist of younger people who matured in the postwar
world, and partially be directed to the recruitment of younger
people. The university is an obvious beginning point.
4. A new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for
their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in
the system. The university is a more sensible place than a political
party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their differences and
look for political synthesis.
5. A new left must start controversy across the land, if national
policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university
is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on
communities beyond.
6. A new left must transform modern complexity into issues that can be
understood and felt close-up by every human being. It must give form to
the feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see
the political, social and economic sources of their private troubles and
organize to change society. In a time of supposed prosperity, moral
complacency and political manipulation, a new left cannot rely on only
aching stomachs to be the engine force of social reform. The case for
change, for alternatives that will involve uncomfortable personal
efforts, must be argued as never before. The university is a relevant
place for all of these activities.
But we need not indulge in allusions: the university system cannot
complete a movement of ordinary people making demands for a better life.
From its schools and colleges across the nation, a militant left might
awaken its allies, and by beginning the process towards peace, civil
rights, and labor struggles, reinsert theory and idealism where too
often reign confusion and political barter. The power of students and
faculty united is not only potential; it has shown its actuality in the
South, and in the reform movements of the North.
The bridge to political power, though, will be built through genuine
cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new
left of young people, and an awakening community of allies. In each
community we must look within the university and act with confidence
that we can be powerful, but we must look outwards to the less exotic
but more lasting struggles for justice.
To turn these possibilities into realities will involve national efforts
at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty. They must
wrest control of the educational process from the administrative
bureaucracy. They must make fraternal and functional contact with
allies in labor, civil rights, and other liberal forces outside the
campus. They must import major public issues into the curriculum --
research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding
example. They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant,
the common style for educational life. They must consciously build a
base for their assault upon the loci of power.
As students, for a Democratic society, we are committed to stimulating
this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program is campus
and community across the country. If we appear to seek the
unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to
avoid the unimaginable.