{"id":316,"date":"2020-04-20T17:54:36","date_gmt":"2020-04-20T21:54:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/rjsross\/?p=316"},"modified":"2020-04-20T17:54:36","modified_gmt":"2020-04-20T21:54:36","slug":"port-huron-and-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/rjsross\/port-huron-and-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Port Huron and Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chapter 10 in A New Insurgency, edited by Howard Brick, University of Michigan Press
\n126
\n Democracy, Labor, and Globalization:
\nReflections on Port Huron<\/strong><\/p>\n

by Robert J. S. Ross<\/p>\n

Participatory democracy, the central idea of the Port Huron Statement, is
\ntoday more relevant than ever before. The assault on labor rights launched
\nin Wisconsin and other Midwest states during 2011, the rise and fall of Occupy
\nWall Street as a movement against inequality, and the continuing
\ninstitutionalization of global capitalism and financial capital\u2019s power
\nwithin it all raise the question \u201cWhat does the concept of participatory
\ndemocracy mean in our era of crisis and hardship?\u201d Indeed, questions of
\norganization and decision making are relevant at all times when ordinary
\npeople seek to organize themselves for political and social action. So here
\nI shall focus on the meaning of participatory democracy as we founding
\nmembers of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) understood it and
\npracticed it, when we first sought to build a movement that could change
\nthe world at home and abroad. In the process I want to correct some propositions
\nabout that decision- making process that have, in my view, more
\ncurrency than accuracy.<\/p>\n

Some Background<\/strong><\/p>\n

In spring 1960 I joined picketers in Ann Arbor who were supporting the
\nnational call for a boycott of Woolworth and Kresge stores. Sit- ins pressing
\nfor the desegregation of lunch counters had swept the South after students
\nat the North Carolina Agriculture and Technology College got
\nthings started in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1. Our picketing
\nshowed our solidarity with their cause. After the local picketing had
\nbegun, a Conference on Human Rights in the North was convened in Ann
\nArbor in April 1960. Robert Alan \u201cAl\u201d Haber had planned this conference
\nbefore the southern sit- ins changed the landscape of social action. This
\nwas but one of Haber\u2019s farsighted plans that earned him the adjective \u201cprophetic.\u201d
\nAl had understood that the \u201chuman rights\u201d of Black people\u2014 then
\nreferred to as Negroes\u2014 were a national not just a regional issue.
\nHaber was a long- term Ann Arborite. His father, Professor William
\nHaber, had been a prominent New Deal economist and would become
\ndean of the University of Michigan College of Literature, Sciences, and the
\nArts (1963\u2013 68). Al had become involved in SDS\u2019s predecessor, the Student
\nLeague for Industrial Democracy (SLID), through its Michigan chapter,
\nthe Political Issues Club, and he had risen to some responsibility in SLID\u2019s
\nsmall national membership.1
\nHaving been introduced to activism by the spring picketing, I attended the April conference\u2014 though only after contacting Haber and asking him to suspend the registration fee, which I
\ncould not afford. He did. Afterwards, Haber asked a number of the picketers
\nand those who had been active at the conference to join him in the new
\nincarnation of SLID, which he proposed to rename SDS. Those of us
\nwhom Haber recruited were each very young. I was finishing my first year
\nin college and so too was my future roommate and successor as Ann Arbor
\nSDS chapter leader, Dickie Magidoff. Sharon Jeffrey, who would soon
\nbe my cochair, was a second- year student. She was the daughter of ex-
\nsocialist Mildred Jeffrey, one of the United Auto Workers\u2019 key political
\nstrategists. Haber had succeeded through long, patient one- on- one conversations
\nin convincing us that democracy itself was a radical idea\u2014 the
\nultimate radical idea\u2014 and that on this basis, the schisms and sectarianisms
\nof the past could be laid aside for a new vision.<\/p>\n

At the June 1960 convention of the newly named SDS, I became\u2014 at
\nthe tender age of seventeen\u2014 a member of the reconstituted National Executive
\nCommittee. Soon thereafter, that body named me vice president,
\nin strict accordance with Robert\u2019s Rules of Order. I was nominated and
\nvoted in to fill a vice presidential vacancy created by the resignation of a
\nmember of the Yale chapter who distrusted the new activist turn of SDS.
\nThe total number of voters in this election was three.<\/p>\n

Back in New York during summer 1960, I was an after- hours volunteer
\nat the national SDS office on Nineteenth Street in Manhattan while holding
\ndown a seven- day- a- week job as a lifeguard and tennis court attendant
\nnear my home in the South Bronx. I stuffed envelopes and helped with
\nproduction of newsletters. It was a bit like a summer course in political
\ntheory and praxis with Chairman Al, the Socratic seminar leader.
\nOver the next two years, we organized several chapters, the most vigor-
\nous and successful of which was at Michigan, where VOICE, a mass political
\nparty campaigned and won leadership with the student government. Tom
\nHayden and his associates Ken McEldowney and Andy Hawley, all senior
\neditors at the Michigan Daily, had been the instigators and first organizers of
\nVOICE, but Sharon Jeffrey and I made it a winner of elections and campaigns.<\/p>\n

As leaders of the SDS chapter, Sharon and I brought the local group
\ninto VOICE and then led VOICE to affiliate nationally with SDS.
\nHayden had returned from a summer at the University of California,
\nBerkeley, impressed by the pioneer New Left student organization SLATE,
\nwhich had done the counterintuitive thing for student radicals and taken
\nstudent government seriously. Largely the province of the Greek letter organizations,
\nstudent governments were somewhere between the sandboxes
\nfor political toddlers and training grounds for future Young Democrats
\nand Republicans. Hayden saw the possibility of making the student
\ngovernment a representative voice for students in real governance\u2014 and
\nSharon and I thought this was just the right thing to do, if democracy was
\nthe centerpiece of your thinking.<\/p>\n

Even before Port Huron, then, a local practice was emerging in Ann Arbor
\nand other soon- to- be affiliated SDS chapters, which saw democratic
\npractice as relevant to university governance and educational issues. We
\nbutted heads with student government conservatives and centrists, who opposed
\nour desire to have the council make pronouncements on political issues
\nof national and international consequence (e.g., passing a resolution
\nagainst the Bay of Pigs Invasion). But we were also vitally concerned with
\ncampus issues. Thus we campaigned to prohibit racial discrimination in the
\nGreek letter societies that wished to use university facilities (which was all of
\nthem). Another issue was our campaign against the principle and practices
\nof in loco parentis, whereby universities acted in place of parents and thus
\nenforced curfews that applied to women and constrained our lives with
\nother regulations we considered far too intrusive. Eventually we won this
\nfight and the dorms were \u201cliberated\u201d: dorm hours were eventually abolished,
\nand men and women could entertain visitors of the opposite sex. And, of
\ncourse, after a while, co- ed dorms emerged.<\/p>\n

The experience Sharon and I had as VOICE representatives on the student
\ngovernment council shaped my views on \u201cprocess,\u201d a contentious issue
\nlater in the 1960s and beyond. Since the council was a formal body,
\nwith a constituency of twenty- five thousand student voters, its proceedings
\nfollowed strict rules\u2014 and thus Sharon and I endured a crash course
\nin parliamentary procedure. From that time on, I became, willy-nilly, one
\nof the Movement\u2019s experts on how to run large meetings. Our SDS\/VOICE
\nchapter settled decisions\u2014 when there was division\u2014 by a formal vote at a
\nmembership meeting. Mostly we made decisions in small groupings and
\nvotes were not required; but when the meetings were large and the decisions
\nweighty, we voted, counted hands, and declared a winner.<\/p>\n

I do have one vivid memory of such an occasion. During the Cuban Missile
\nCrisis of October 1962, our leftist community in Ann Arbor was, to say
\nthe least, tense. Tom Hayden, Dick and Mickey Flacks, and others were
\nhuddled around the shortwave radio of a friend of ours, the social psychologist
\nBill Livant, listening to an English- language broadcast of Radio Moscow,
\nwhich they somehow thought would give them new or different information
\nthan that which came from US media sources. Mickey headed for
\nWashington, DC, to demonstrate with Women Strike for Peace, which
\nwanted a United Nations\u2013 mediated solution. Meanwhile, fully resigned to
\nbeing momentarily powerless, I drafted the VOICE political party platform
\nfor the upcoming elections to student government. My draft of the platform
\ncondemned the Kennedy administration threat to start a nuclear war over
\nthe Cuban missiles. When the VOICE membership later met to consider the
\ndraft, we took formal majority votes on each part.<\/p>\n

Our practice as campaigners running for student government office in
\nno way channeled or restricted our practice as social movement activists.
\nOur local organizing in support of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
\nCommittee (SNCC) and our demonstrations against the arms race continued
\napace. One virtue of the student government campaigns: they
\ncaused us to bring our ideas about democracy in the university and democratic
\nparticipation in the society and economy face to face to thousands
\nof folks who otherwise would never have come to a leftist rally or encountered
\nour ideas.<\/p>\n

In the course of reorganizing the old SLID, Haber, Hayden, and the rest
\nof us were making what had been a fairly inert \u201cdiscussion club\u201d formation
\ninto a more activist organization. We also had to deal with SLID\/SDS\u2019s heritage
\nas an extension of the social- democratic movement, which had staked
\nout an anticommunist and, for better or worse, nonrevolutionary position.<\/p>\n

In December 1961 at a National Council meeting in Ann Arbor, members
\naligned with the Young People\u2019s Socialist League (YPSL, often pronounced
\n\u201cYipsel\u201d), the youth group of the Socialist Party, vigorously challenged the
\n\u201canti- anticommunist\u201d positions the new leadership had taken: rather than
\nprohibiting any collaboration with Communist Party members, we took an
\n\u201cinclusionary\u201d attitude, and we developed a critique of those liberals and
\nlaborites who acquiesced in the arms race and the Cold War.<\/p>\n

For Tom, Al, and Sharon, each of different heritages but none of Communist
\nparentage, the social- democratic fixation on anticommunist purity
\non the left was an overly sectarian and narrow view of the need for social
\nreform here in the United States: this old antagonism, which dominated
\nSLID\u2019s parent, the New York\u2013 headquartered League for Industrial Democracy,
\nwas a sea anchor that kept us from moving with the winds of change.<\/p>\n

For those of us whose parents had been influenced by the Communist
\nmovement (and thus were sometimes called \u201cred diaper babies\u201d), this
\nsocial- democratic heritage was an insulting and threatening slur and a
\nscary attack on our parents and their friends. We considered our elders\u2014
\nlargely rank and filers\u2014 to be ultimately democratic; we gave little credence
\nto the Cold War anticommunist charge that they were the carriers
\nof totalitarianism. In fact, the culture that surrounded the young people
\nin, around, and formerly of the Communist movement seemed so committed
\nto democracy that when Haber preached democracy as the bedrock
\nidea for radicalism, we felt comfortable, despite SDS\u2019s anticommunist
\nsocial- democratic parentage.<\/p>\n

Port Huron and Participatory Democracy<\/strong><\/p>\n

The YPSL challenge to these emerging SDS attitudes made it apparent that
\nsome sort of defining statement, a manifesto, was needed to articulate a
\nvision for a New Left. Tom Hayden, Al Haber, and I were named to a drafting
\ncommittee, but immediately it became clear that Tom was the writer,
\nand (while I cannot speak for Al) my job was encouragement.
\nIf democracy was the radical umbrella, though, what was wrong with
\nwhat we\u2014 the United States\u2014 had then and have now? Our critique of contemporary
\ndemocratic practice leading up to Port Huron can be summarized
\nbriefly: citizenship as broadly understood was part- time and passive.
\nYou listened, you voted, and you were done. Democratic rights did not extend
\nto the economy, so power over everyday life was exercised by corporate
\nbureaucracies beyond the reach of workers and community members.
\nDemocratic rights were routinely denied to Black people by law and practice,
\nwhile economic inequality excluded the poor from the community of
\ncitizens. And finally, the political parties were morally compromised and
\npolitically inert; potential opposition was entombed in Cold War orthodoxy
\nand unable to challenge it\u2014 unable, that is, to speak truth to power.<\/p>\n

Participatory Democracy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tom read numerous statements from independent left thinkers. We were
\nall influenced by C. Wright Mills, but Hayden was an omnivorous reader,
\nand among those who particularly influenced him was one of our professors
\nat the University of Michigan, Arnold Kaufman, a social philosopher.2
\nAt the core of Kaufman\u2019s thought was the proposition that we can be more
\nthan isolated, self- absorbed, and narrow beings and that democratic participation
\ncan expand human capacities. Democratic activism, thought
\nKaufman, is a kind of redemption. These reflections on democracy and
\nhuman capacity, which found their way into the very first paragraphs of
\nthe Port Huron Statement draft, were followed by critique of the economy,
\nof poverty, of segregation, of the danger of nuclear war, and of the stifling
\nof the developing world. A section focused on the segregationist Dixiecrat
\ninfluence in the Democratic Party and called for the ouster of racist tribunes
\nfrom that party. This was in fact a part of the social- democratic
\nstrategy favored by the Socialist Party activist Michael Harrington: an effort
\nto \u201crealign\u201d the Democrats as a more consistently liberal- left party.3
\nIronically, the Voting Rights Act of 1965\u2014 and the Republican Party\u2019s strategic
\nchoice to become the party of southern white people\u2014 did largely
\naccomplish this. It had a historic downside too: persistent Republican majorities
\nin the states of the former Confederacy.<\/p>\n

When we assembled at Port Huron, attendees were confronted with
\nthe task of absorbing and amending Tom Hayden\u2019s forty- nine- page draft\u2014
\nand making it their own. There and at virtually every SDS convention that
\nwas to follow, adherence to parliamentary procedure and forms of representation
\nwere normal.4<\/p>\n

Early on, the participants decided on a \u201cbones
\nand flesh\u201d strategy of amendment and discussion. The document was broken
\ndown to sections, and these were assigned to small committees of
\nthree to five members. I participated in the group working on the labor
\nmovement and its relations to the student movement. Each group was to
\nbreak down its section into \u201cbones\u201d (i.e., essential political or strategic
\npoints). These were matters to be debated and possibly revised. The bones,
\nand any proposed changes in them, would be brought before a final plenary
\nmeeting, which would send instructions to a subsequent (postconvention)
\ndrafting committee. (There the \u201cflesh\u201d\u2014 or prose needed to elucidate
\nthe positions adopted by the plenary\u2014 would be added.) The small
\ngroups worked more or less informally, but the Port Huron final plenary
\nwas composed of thirty or forty people, who voted in a highly formal
\nmanner to pass, reject, or amend these bones. It took all night.
\nOne of the moments I found most memorable occurred during the
\ndiscussion of the section on the arms race and the Cold War. A YPSL
\nmember assailed the section and called many of the participants (pointedly
\nmyself) \u201cparanoiac anti- anticommunists.\u201d A majority vote defeated
\nhis attempt to change that \u201cbone.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea of participatory democracy was not originally or essentially
\nabout how to conduct meetings; it was about how to organize society and
\nto conceive of citizenship. The Port Huron Statement contrasted \u201cdomination
\nof politics and the economy by fantastically rich elites\u201d with the alternative
\nof \u201cshared abundance.\u201d We acknowledged the labor movement,
\nwhich played a central role in improving workers\u2019 lives, as the most democratic
\ninstitution of the mainstream, but noted too that \u201c\u2018union democracy\u2019
\nis not simply inhibited by labor leader elitism, but by the unrelated
\nproblem of rank- and- file apathy to the tradition of unionism.\u201d5<\/p>\n

Way ahead
\nof its time, the Statement also remarked, \u201cThe contemporary social assault
\non the labor movement is of crisis proportions.\u201d6
\nIn my view at the time,
\nparticipatory democracy was an American phrase to encompass socialist
\ndemocracy (and I still hold to that). In early SDS, many of us had a strong
\ninterest in worker- oriented democratic innovations abroad, ranging from
\nthe German codetermination law (putting union representatives on corporate
\nboards) to Yugoslavian workers councils.7<\/p>\n

In the period between Port Huron, in June 1962, and the March on
\nWashington to End the War in Vietnam, in April 1965, SDS became
\nsteadily more well known through the work of its campus chapters and the
\nwriting and speaking of its talented national leaders, including Hayden,
\nHaber, Todd Gitlin, and Paul Potter. Throughout this period\u2014 and
\nbeyond\u2014 internal decisions were made by more or less standard parliamentary
\nprocedures and representative democracy. In these few years,
\nSDS grew slowly but steadily. The Port Huron Statement was widely circulated
\nthrough the traditional mimeograph duplication process and also by
\nthe photocopying of the first typeset publication of the Statement in the
\nMethodist collegiate magazine Motive.<\/p>\n

The 1963 SDS National Convention considered and adopted (by formal
\nmajority votes) a successor to the Port Huron manifesto titled \u201cAmerica
\nand the New Era.\u201d8
\nUnfortunately neglected by scholars, \u201cAmerica and the
\nNew Era\u201d is a better guide to subsequent SDS views and behavior than any
\nother document, including the Port Huron Statement. \u201cAmerica and the
\nNew Era\u201d identifies the character of the Kennedy administration as \u201ccorporate
\nliberalism\u201d\u2014 note the parallel to the later usage \u201ccorporate
\nglobalization\u201d\u2014 and calls for a politics of \u201clocal insurgency.\u201d9
\nBeginning in 1964, most intensely with the Swarthmore College chapter,
\nSDS began to think about community organizing as a radical practice.
\nThe Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) was launched in
\nsummer 1964 with groups working in ten cities. About six of these projects
\nsurvived as multiyear organizations, and two or three were to have long-
\nrange impact on their cities and on the left: Newark, Cleveland, and Chi-
\ncago. The ERAP initiative meant there were ex- student SDSers consisting
\nof a large fraction of the de facto if not de jure leaders of the organization,
\nwho were now off campus in non-chapter groupings.<\/p>\n

This transition was the setting for a dramatic and critical incident in
\nwhich the future of SDS and the antiwar movement hinged upon an obscure
\nparliamentary maneuver. I tell this tale both because it is fun to remember
\nit and also because it so thoroughly refutes the idea that SDS advocated
\na democratic process without strong procedures or majority votes.<\/p>\n

Robert\u2019s Rules Save the Day<\/strong><\/p>\n

On December 31, 1964, the SDS National Council convened at a union
\nmeeting hall in lower Manhattan. Late in the evening, a member from
\nNew York, Jim Brook, then working as a letter carrier, made an impassioned
\ncall for SDS to initiate a demonstration against the impending escalation
\nof the war in Vietnam. One will recall that in August 1964, the
\nnotorious incident in the Gulf of Tonkin had given Johnson and McNamara
\nthe excuse they apparently wanted to escalate US intervention. After
\nalleged, and highly contested, attacks upon the destroyers Turner and
\nMaddox Joy, the United States, for the first time, undertook a massive and
\nopenly acknowledged bombing of North Vietnamese targets. Plans for a
\nmajor escalation in the use of US ground forces were in the works.
\nBrook came before the council at roughly eleven o\u2019clock at night. Already,
\nsome of the women had begun setting up food and drink for a New
\nYear\u2019s party at the back of the room. (Yes, that is the way it was then.) In
\nopposition to Brook\u2019s anti- imperialist plea for action, a number of the
\nmore senior and well- respected leaders of SDS, who were now situated in
\nERAP community organizing projects, rose to express doubt about the
\nproposal. They argued that antiwar work would make SDS too single-
\nissue, not the comprehensively radical organization it had always aspired
\nto be, and they also thought that the effort to organize antiwar work would
\nnot connect to the poor white and black constituents of the ERAP projects
\nand thus would detract from the work of the community organizers.
\nAmong other highly influential people expressing these doubts, Tom
\nHayden figured prominently. It\u2019s more than a bit ironic given his future
\nrole as a major leader of antiwar action during the Vietnam conflict and
\nafter, but Brother Tom made a Buddha- like intervention, wondering what
\nwould happen if we called a demo and nobody came. I note openly that
\nTom has a different memory of this moment than I do. The motion to
\nsponsor the march failed, with people like me\u2014 with one foot in commu-
\nnity organizing and another on campus as a graduate student\u2014 torn. I
\nvoted against.<\/p>\n

The meeting recessed for party preparation, and in the interim my former
\nroommate, Dickie Magidoff, then working in the Cleveland ERAP
\nproject, urgently brought me to a side conversation. \u201cThis is a big deal\u201d
\nwas the burden of his whispered plea. We can\u2019t let this pass by. We have got
\nto change it. And I was the man to do it, because, as you will recall, I had
\nlearned the technics of parliamentary procedure cold when I had been a
\nUniversity of Michigan student government leader. One of Robert\u2019s Rules
\nof Order\u2019s little miracle escape hatches is this: an individual may move to
\nreconsider a question if and only if he or she has voted on the prevailing
\nside. Dickie knew this, as did I.<\/p>\n

As the clock approached midnight and we prepared for partying, the
\nmeeting reconvened to finish things off. I moved to reconsider. I cannot
\nclaim to have made any important intervention in the debate. SDS national
\nsecretary Clark Kissinger, a University of Wisconsin radical who
\nhad attended Port Huron, made the last and most persuasive plea about
\nthe moral responsibility to oppose an outright imperialist war. On a reconsideration
\nvote, the motion passed and history was thus bent through
\nthe use of Robert\u2019s Rules of Order.<\/p>\n

So, on April 17, 1965, SDS led the first big Washington demonstration
\nagainst the war in Vietnam, the March on Washington to End the War in
\nVietnam. At that time it was the largest demonstration against an American
\nwar policy since the Spanish- American War. The old guard of anticommunist
\nsocial democrats was scandalized by our non-exclusionary
\npolicy: Y\u2019all come, we said, if you agree with the main slogan: \u201cEnd the
\nWar in Vietnam.\u201d They were more concerned that Communists would
\njoin the March than they were that the March would succeed. That the
\nMarch did galvanize public opinion and mobilize a new wave of public
\nopposition to the war was perhaps the definitive sign that the Cold War on
\nthe left was over\u2014 or irrelevant\u2014 and that the New Left was now the culturally
\nand politically hegemonic left.<\/p>\n

For SDS the march\u2014 the very act of calling for the march\u2014 was transformative.
\nAt the University of Chicago, where I was forming a new chapter
\nin my first year of graduate school, our meetings of fifteen to twenty-
\nfive became meetings of one hundred. We sent five buses to Washington
\nfrom Chicago. We had one chapter in Chicago before the March; by the
\ntime the buses returned, we had at least three, including those at Roosevelt
\nUniversity and Northwestern. SDS had become, overnight, a mass organization.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on Participatory Democracy<\/strong><\/p>\n

These reflections on how individual SDS chapters governed themselves,
\nand on how the national body came to call for the March on Washington
\nto End the War in Vietnam, set in motion an alternative understanding of
\nwhat has all too often become a canonical interpretation of what we at
\nPort Huron meant by participatory democracy. In subsequent years many
\ncommentators have trivialized the idea of participatory democracy or defined
\nit as impractical and utopian in the worst sense.
\nWhile rigorous participation and direct involvement in decisions was
\nthe ideal, the notion that no one could or should be represented\u2014 that voting
\nfor a representative was inherently undemocratic\u2014 would have been viewed
\nas silly by Port Huron participants. We voted for our national officers; we
\nvoted for chapter leaders; we voted for resolutions and for constitutional
\nalterations. Whatever I may say later about the problems of democracy in a
\nglobal setting, Port Huron veterans and those who joined SDS in later years
\nwere not silly. We thought of ourselves as vigorously participating citizens\u2014
\nand some, at times, would have said revolutionaries.<\/p>\n

How did participatory democracy come to be trivialized as a meeting
\nrule for small groups? One guess is mistakes by journalists and misinterpretations
\nby new recruits. If a journalist came to a small local chapter
\nmeeting, he or she might observe a kind of consensus- seeking process
\ntaking place. Given the prominence of the rhetoric about participatory
\ndemocracy, this might then become what the journalist thought it was all
\nabout. By thus reporting it, the idea became a self- fulfilling prophecy. In
\naddition, SDS grew so rapidly that there was little \u201csocialization\u201d of newer
\nmembers by older members.10<\/p>\n

A kind of na\u00efve literalism was fueled, perhaps,
\nby a romantic cultural memory of America\u2019s own anarcho-syndicalist
\npast. New Leftists venerated the memory of the Industrial Workers of the
\nWorld (IWW): many agreed with the famous IWW motto \u201cWe are all
\nleaders.\u201d There was also a sort of cultural affinity between a rejection of
\nrepresentation and the hyper-individualism of parts of American culture at
\nthat time: \u201cI am unique; no one can represent me.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the second decade of the twenty- first century, the notion of participatory
\ndemocracy as a philosophy of group process had enough currency
\nto be adopted uncritically by the Occupy Wall Street anarchist tendency.
\nThey too found an American phrase for a European- origin ideology, but
\nthis time it was not socialism but rather a variant of anarchism. This was
\nsustained by a certain cultural ambience that has been a factor of continuity
\nbetween SDS and successor organizations like Occupy Wall Street that
\nidentify with its heritage. Former SDS vice president and quipster Paul
\nBooth once made the semi-facetious remark that SDSers think \u201cfreedom is
\na constant meeting.\u201d Another time he said we might be \u201cstudents for a
\nsmall society.\u201d It is assumed that the element of continuity lies in an emphasis
\non process, community, and participation rather than formal majoritarian
\nrules of debate and decision.<\/p>\n

The most trivial interpretation of participatory democracy understands
\nit as a way to conduct face- to- face meetings. Usually this interpretation
\nconjures up consensus seeking as the fundamental goal and invents
\na variety of procedures for reaching it. What formal standards like venerable
\nRobert\u2019s Rules of Order do\u2014 however dense and forbidding they
\nseem\u2014 is to offer procedural safeguards assuring majority rule while also
\npreserving minority rights. In contrast, a doctrine of consensus allows obstinate
\nminorities to obstruct the will of the majority. Cases in point
\nabound, including the highly consequential use of a sixty- vote requirement
\nfor cloture in the US Senate. A more absurdist example came during
\nan Occupy Wall Street meeting in Atlanta one morning in October 2011
\nwhen an eccentric individual blocked Congressman John Lewis from
\nspeaking, an obstruction at variance from what appeared to be the will of
\nan overwhelming majority of those present.<\/p>\n

Of course, meeting facilitators and prudent activists will seek consensus
\nunder many circumstances. These include situations when there are
\nvery small groups of decision makers or when the stakes are extremely
\nhigh and members of the group risk legal or physical jeopardy. Nonetheless,
\nthe national SDS still worked by majority vote when it took up matters
\nthat carried legal jeopardy in opposing the Vietnam War draft.<\/p>\n

What did participatory democracy evoke as a phrase for the Port Huron
\ncohort that, following Tom Hayden\u2019s writing, made it their own? Broadly
\nspeaking, my claim\u2014 as I mentioned previously\u2014 is that it was an American
\nlanguage for socialism and in particular for, of all things, industrial democracy.
\nI can testify directly to the many conversations I had with comrades
\nabout worker control, German codetermination laws, the Yugoslav industrial
\nexample, and Wobbly syndicalist ideas. If bureaucratic power (in C.
\nWright Mills\u2019 dim view of it) was Satan, and Paul Goodman\u2019s simple anarchism
\nwas Eden, we were the democratic Adam as yet innocent.<\/p>\n

Labor and Participatory Democracy<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Port Huron Statement was notable for addressing universities and students
\nas potential agents of democratic change. Yet the document was con-
\nscious of the organization\u2019s historical ties to labor and the working- class
\nmovement. Contrary to the subsequent stereotype of SDS as \u201cantilabor,\u201d
\nPort Huron attendees included many with family and other connections to
\nunionism. Some, like myself, came from working- class trade union families
\nor families with trade union officials (such as VOICE cochair Sharon Jeffrey);
\nothers came from families of New Dealers with commitments to labor
\nrights (such as Paul Booth). We should remember that SDS evolved from
\nSLID. That the parent League for Industrial Democracy had become ossified
\nin the course of the Cold War did not negate the proposition that workers\u2019
\nenfranchisement at work and in the broader economy was central to any
\nvision of democracy. It remained central in ours.<\/p>\n

While the inclusion of the working class and the labor movement in a
\nvision of participatory democracy was near universal among the early
\nfounders of SDS, criticism of the labor movement from the standpoint of
\ndemocracy was also widespread. In some ways the early SDS perception of
\nthreats to the labor moment was way ahead of its time. The document
\nanticipates the attack on and decline of the labor movement, even while
\nthe social science and big picture political observers of the day were still
\ntalking about \u201cbig labor.\u201d Like AFL- CIO president George Meany, we
\nthought of labor as \u201cbig,\u201d but in the Port Huron Statement we did accurately
\nforesee its incremental defeat as a movement and institution. The
\ninitial formation of our consciousness about such matters came from, on
\nthe one hand, the liberal- labor coalition itself, embodied, for example, in
\nJohn Kenneth Galbraith\u2019s theory of countervailing powers, which saw big
\nlabor, big government, and big corporations as in some sense balancing
\neach other.11<\/p>\n

On the other hand, although we were not fully in contact
\nwith the rumblings in the labor movement itself, there were in fact members
\nand places that were\u2014 for example, Kim Moody in Baltimore. So the
\nsection on the labor movement written and revised in 1962 is strikingly up
\nto date: it bemoans bureaucratic lethargy, notes grassroots democratic discontent,
\nand recognizes movements arising within unions to address these
\nmatters. Further, the Port Huron Statement notes threats to the existing
\nlabor movement from the shift away from manufacturing and toward
\nservice- producing industries. Reading it now affirms Haber and Hayden\u2019s
\nprophetic insight: if one subjects every institution to scrutiny from the
\npoint of view of democracy and participation, much of what is wrong will
\nbe clear and much of its development can be predicted.<\/p>\n

Substantial fractions of our critique of the labor movement were based
\non its own understanding of itself as strong, included in power, but\u2014 in
\nour view\u2014 too conservative. We saw the cliff upon which union influence
\nwas so precariously perched, but because most of its official leadership did
\nnot, SDS was sometimes characterized as hostile to the labor movement.
\nThe discussion was not extended. The urgency of war and then the apocalypse
\nof racial conflict\u2014 the urban \u201ccivil disturbances\u201d of 1964 to
\n1968\u2014 distracted our attention from so many other avenues of reflection.
\nIn any case the final draft of the Port Huron Statement has an amended
\nreference to labor and students at the end. It is terribly written (solely because
\nI wrote the revision), but it actually states a neglected proposition:
\nTo turn these possibilities into realities will involve national efforts
\nat university reform by an alliance of students and faculty. They
\nmust wrest control of the educational process from the administrative
\nbureaucracy. They must make fraternal and functional contact
\nwith allies in labor, civil rights, and other liberal forces outside the
\ncampus. They must import major public issues into the curriculum\u2014
\nresearch and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding
\nexample. They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic
\ncant, the common style for educational life. They must
\nconsciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of powe<\/em>r.12
\nHowever clumsily stated, it seems to me ultimately appropriate to focus
\non the cooperation of young intellectuals, students and faculty alike,
\nwith labor, immigrant, and minority interests to remake more nearly
\ndemocratic institutions and culture. The struggles of the last decade have
\nin fact seen the burgeoning of just such coalitions.
\nThe distance between SDS and the labor movement has usually been
\nexaggerated. SDS had links to and strong sympathy with what would now
\nbe understood as \u201cthe labor left.\u201d That so many SDS veterans gravitated
\ntoward all parts of the labor movement is testimony to the central importance
\nit played then and still does in viable visions of a democratic commonwealth.
\n13<\/p>\n

If one takes democratic participation as a keystone value,
\nthen where else in American society, outside of the labor movement, do
\nordinary people have a say in conditions under which they work?<\/p>\n

Democracy at Scale<\/strong><\/p>\n

If participatory democracy and the Port Huron Statement envisioned both
\nsocial and economic democracy and envisioned empowered working
\npeople in alliance with educated youth, they nevertheless did not have,
\nand the American left still does not have, an adequate response to the
\nproblem of scale. It is all very well to say that one wants to have a say in the
\ndecisions that affect one\u2019s life. Does that mean a group of upper- class
\nproperty owners on Nantucket Sound should be able to frustrate a state or
\nnation\u2019s desire for wind- powered energy? Does democracy mean that a
\nboard of selectmen or town meeting in a small village should be able to
\ndeny a building or zoning permit to a halfway house for emotionally disturbed
\njuveniles or a Planned Parenthood facility? Leftists hearken when
\nworking- class neighborhoods resist toxic waste sites, but we don\u2019t have a
\nconsistent decision rule for when a small group of the people should decide
\nor when larger aggregations of the people should decide. The Statement
\nis not a guide to the problem of scale, and none of us\u2014 so far as my
\nown small brain knows\u2014 have thought this through to a conclusion. The
\nfuture of democratic movements and theory is open in other and even
\nmore dramatic ways than this.<\/p>\n

For all its vision, the Port Huron Statement\u2014 as did every other mid-sixties
\nunderstanding of global affairs\u2014 missed the impending change in the
\nstructure of global capital. The Statement is fairly na\u00efve about industrialization
\nand its potential growth in those new nations that were once European
\nor American colonies. It does not contemplate the use of low- income
\ncountries to pound down standards of living of workers in those nations
\nbordering the North Atlantic.<\/p>\n

So the problem of the race to the bottom is a whole new frontier for
\ntoday\u2019s democratic movements\u2014 the reconciliation of workers\u2019 needs on a
\nglobal basis. The matter has become increasingly painful. Oligarchical
\npower elites steer key decision- making institutions: the central banks, the
\ninternational financial institutions, the financial conglomerates, the regulatory
\nagencies captured by the interests they are supposed to regulate,
\nand transnational political institutions like the European Union or the
\nWorld Trade Organization. The distance between those rulers and ordinary
\ncitizens is truly titanic. Accountability, no less participation, seems
\nmore exotic a hope each week. It is clear that democrats everywhere
\nawait\u2014 or should work to hasten\u2014 the day that workers of the world understand
\nand find ways to cooperate so they all lose their chains.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chapter 10
\n1. SLID was the distant offspring of a 1905 organization\u2014 the Intercollegiate Socialist
\nSociety\u2014 started by prominent intellectuals including the novelists Upton Sinclair
\nand Jack London and the great lawyer Clarence Darrow. In the course of its historical
\nevolution it had become the student group of the social- democratic League for Industrial
\nDemocracy (LID).
\n2. A. Javier Trevino, \u201cInfluence of C. Wright Mills on Students for a Democratic
\nSociety: An Interview with Bob Ross,\u201d Humanity & Society 22, no. 3 (1998): 260\u2013 77;
\nRobert J. S. Ross, \u201cAt the Center and Edge: Notes on a Life In and Out of Sociology and
\nthe New Left,\u201d Critical Sociology 15, no. 2 (1988): 79\u2013 93.
\n3. Maurice Isserman, The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (New
\nYork: Public Affairs, 2000), 105\u2013 74.
\n4. Richard Rothstein, \u201cRepresentative Democracy and SDS,\u201d in Toward a History of
\nthe New Left: Essays from within the Movement, ed. R. David Myers (New York: Carlson,
\n1989), 49\u2013 62.
\n5. Port Huron Statement, reprinted in Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement: The
\nVisionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (New York: Thunder\u2019s Mouth Press, 2005), 85.
\n6. Ibid., 82.
\n7. Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini, eds., Ours to Master and to Own: Workers\u2019
\nControl from the Commune to the Present (Chicago: Haymarket, 2011).
\n8. \u201cAmerica and the New Era,\u201d Students for a Democratic Society, 1963, http:\/\/archive.
\nlib.msu.edu\/DMC\/AmRad\/americanewera.pdf.
\n9. Dick Flacks was the lead drafter of \u201cAmerica and the New Era\u201d with, according to
\nKirkpatrick Sale, \u201cconsiderable help from the theoretical apparatchik: Booth, Haber,
\nHayden, Ross,\u201d SDS: The Rise and Development of the Students for a Democratic Society
\n(New York: Vintage, 1973), 48, http:\/\/www.antiauthoritarian.net\/sds_wuo\/sds_documents\/
\nsds_kirkpatrick_sale.pdf.
\n10. Robert J. Ross, \u201cPrimary Groups in Social Movements: A Memoir and Interpretation,\u201d
\nJournal of Voluntary Action Research 6, nos. 3\u2013 4 (1977): 139\u2013 52.
\n11. John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing
\nPower (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Books, 1993).
\n12. Port Huron Statement, 168.
\n13. Peter B. Levy, The New Left and Labor in The 1960s (Champaign: University of Illinois
\nPress, 1994).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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