A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times

Looking for Political Strategy

The Port Huron Statement was much more of a manifesto than a guide to political action. But a second SDS statement, adopted at its 1963 convention and called “America and the New Era,” did offer a more politically strategic outlook. That document (which I helped draft) argued that the main political threat to democratic possibility in the United States was not the traditional right but rather the consolidation of a highly flexible reformism by the dominant political, corporate, and institutional elites, typified in the early 1960s by the Kennedys and figures ranging from progressive industrialists like IBM’s Tom Watson to mandarin intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, and Robert McNamara (first of Ford Motor Company and an Ann Arbor resident, then of the US Department of Defense, and still later head of the World Bank). It was a point that Mills had already anticipated in The Power Elite, in which he argued that the national elites had appropriated liberal rhetoric and accommodation to the welfare state to justify their policies. His analysis was greatly extended by students at the University of Wisconsin under the tutelage of William Appleman Williams. The Madison work, much of it first published in Studies on the Left, launched in 1959, argued that, early in the twentieth century, a “corporate liberalism” constituted the ideology and praxis of key business leaders and their intellectual allies. Their purpose was to blunt grassroots protest through a combination of moderate reform, timely concession, and subtle repression, and the same perspective had been utilized to justify and advance American global empire. SDS­ers and others in the early New Left observed that the same strategy was being applied by the Kennedys to channel and contain the southern civil rights struggle.

As defined by the early New Left, corporate liberalism referred to the emergence of an advanced, bureaucratically organized technique and expertise to anticipate discontent and engineer consent. Participatory democracy provided the basis for a moral and practical critique of corporate liberalism. That critique was embodied in the manifestoes of SDS as well as in the eloquence and activism of SNCC in the Black Belt, insisting on a political voice for the poor as an integral feature of welfare state reform, challenging the legitimacy of top-down styles of leadership, and making use of civil disobedience and direct action alongside efforts to use the ballot box. “Let the people decide” was the slogan of struggles in both the South and North. In September 1964, the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of California, Berkeley, challenged what it explicitly labeled corporate-liberal management of the “multiversity.” Indeed, university president Clark Kerr, the liberal, prolabor theorist of managerial capitalism came to symbolize much of what FSM sought to challenge. In the mid-1960s, the SDS organizing efforts in poor communities of the North aimed to create community unions of the poor to challenge the bureaucratic welfare state and emerging corporate partnership with urban political machines.

“America and the New Era” saw such “new insurgency” as the key to a strategy for change. Not only might such an insurgency compel democratization of public institutions and state bureaucracies, but it also might help transform the global position of the United States: “A serious effort by serious men attacking our domestic problems with the pressure of a popular movement behind them would be nothing less than a reordering of priorities for our society . . . [It] would require a vast shift of resources away from the arms race and away from efforts to implement an American Grand Design on the world . . . The poor and dispossessed could force a cessation of the arms race. The objective meaning of their demands . . . would be to make continued support for massive military programs untenable.”[2]

We assumed that what some have called the welfare-warfare state was going to continue to be the governing model for the ruling elites. Both the warfare and welfare aspects of the equation contributed to a Keynesian framework for government-corporate partnership that would stave off economic depression, promote technological development, and maintain full employment and growth. It was a working recipe for US global domination and domestic stability. The strategic and moral stance of the New Left was to challenge this model, in part because its benefits were distributed inequitably but more fundamentally because it was inherently a framework for an increasingly bureaucratic, authoritarian state. We certainly supported further development of the welfare state—as promised by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, Medicare, federal investment in education, and other Great Society measures. But our strategy was to press not only for “more” public sector benefits but also for democratic participation and community control of such programs for the building up of grassroots self-organization (like the community unions SDS sponsored in northern poor neighborhoods) and for democratic governance of social institutions (starting with “student power” in the schools).

We had reason to hope that by initiating such grassroots organizing in the spirit of SNCC, established labor and liberal leadership would be moved to support such movement building. One start along this line was made by the United Auto Workers (UAW), which began a program to support organization of community unions. This soon was incorporated into the War on Poverty as the federally funded Community Action Program, headed by veteran UAW staffer Jack Conway. Religious institutions were also interested (the Catholic church had for some years been a key sponsor of the Saul Alinsky neighborhood organization efforts). The federal War on Poverty legislation included requirements for “maximum feasible participation” of the poor in antipoverty programs—language that gave considerable leverage in some cities for grassroots organization and leadership development.[3] Meanwhile, the Welfare Rights Organization, sparked by sociologist Richard Cloward’s analysis of the potential power of the poor, was mobilizing welfare mothers to claim their entitled benefits and to democratize welfare offices. The authoritarian character of the welfare state and its marked budgetary constraints were creating the space and the impetus for a movement that would seek to move beyond its confines and become a force for economic as well as social democracy.

Meanwhile, the southern movement, one hundred years after emancipation, was finally achieving its immediate goal. The federal government was now compelled to enforce the Constitution in the Deep South, ending all forms of legalized segregation, pushing for desegregation, and protecting the right to vote. The political enfranchisement of southern blacks was about to be achieved. Johnson’s War on Poverty was at least a token appreciation that the struggle for equality was shifting toward economic justice and opportunity and that its terrain would be national rather than regional. The promise and the weakness of the Great Society programs were soon dramatized by explosive urban rebellions all across the country. These rebellions for a time spurred some elite support for an expanding public sector, expressed in the Kerner Commission and other elite “reports” advocating structural change and public investment (as well as more effective policing). For the New Left, the promises made in this fashion provided further impetus for grassroots organizing. Self-organization of minority and poor communities seemed increasingly possible and promising, with experiments and ideas swirling for new forms of enterprise and new political leadership to challenge entrenched urban machines and power structures. The expression of these efforts took many forms, most visibly in varieties of “nationalism” and a rhetoric that, by the later 1960s, was often wildly inflamed.

In long retrospect, the thread of participatory democracy ties together a great deal of the movement upsurge throughout the decade. And—to emphasize my starting point for this historical recollection—all of this was based on the assumption, then taken for granted, that the welfare-warfare state was inherent to corporate liberal public policy. Our job was to find the means to create an authentically democratic alternative.

The concept of “corporate liberalism” turned out to be an inadequate guide to either the ideology or the politics of the US ruling class. Even when the warfare-welfare state was evidently flourishing in the 1950s and 1960s, the ruling elites were probably more deeply divided on the welfare state than it appeared to us then. Clark Kerr, for example, never held the confidence of California’s business elite, and even as he fought student radicals at Berkeley, he was the object of investigation and defamation by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

The corporate liberal paradigm began to unravel in the early 1970s as the relative prosperity that had characterized American capitalism in the early postwar decades was replaced by a far harsher economic climate. Major US-based corporations faced new global competition and sought to reduce labor costs. At the same time, costs of financing both a warfare and welfare budget were increasingly resisted by corporate elites. Contrary to SDS hopes in the mid-1960s, it was warfare rather than welfare that was preferred by the power centers of the corporate elite.

As the 1960s turned into the 1970s, the alleged liberalism of corporate elites was being replaced by a turn away from the welfare state and corporate-labor collaboration and toward a more classic commitment to state-assisted profit maximization—what many would later call “neoliberalism.” By the 1980s, the once moribund far right had been restored to political viability, and Ronald Reagan’s election as president (something that would have been thought unimaginable a decade earlier) helped crystallize a drive to roll back the welfare state.

Accordingly, many of the political activists who had grown up in the early New Left turned their energies to a defense of welfare state policies they had once thought both oppressive and inadequate. Likewise, they sought to defend or restore a social contract that, in the 1960s, they had believed to be a source of elite collaboration and managerial hegemony.

In the decades since Reagan’s advent, being “left” in the United States has come to represent advocacy and action on behalf of “government” as a necessary vehicle for promoting equity and the regulation of “private” activity in the broad public interest.

In these years, the left has been defined, first of all, by support for equal rights for marginalized and subordinated social identities: demands for full equality between the sexes, for gay rights, and for advancement and protection of rights of racial/ethnic minorities. In the 1960s, the New Left tried to envision how such struggles would go beyond goals of inclusion and integration by inspiring cultural revolution—transformation of consciousness and values. In recent years, inclusion and integration and a more modest vision of multicultural mutuality defines left political discourse on these matters.

A multicultural United States seems within reach because a successful politics of inclusion has achieved major victories in policy and in the hearts and minds of the American majority. This, however, does not match the cultural revolution SDS had imagined—one that would challenge corporate values and bureaucratic institutions. That vision is now hardly remembered.

The second defining theme of the contemporary left revolves around defending and completing what in the United States is thought of as the “New Deal agenda” and in Europe is labeled “social democracy.” Veterans of the 1960s New Left have taken the lead in staunchly defending Social Security and other established components of the social wage against the intense and heavily financed drive to reduce the safety net for the aged, the unemployed, and the poor. In the 1960s and 1970s, some SDS veterans went on to lead labor organizing, especially among public-sector workers; gains made by such unions are now prime targets of conservative attacks. Meanwhile, millions of people who graduated from college in the heyday of student activism embarked on careers in public service. The sixties students who envisioned, with both fear and hope, some kind of revolutionary apocalypse went on to serve in the front lines of social amelioration. They became schoolteachers and social workers, urban planners and government staffers, public interest lawyers, community organizers, public health educators, nurses, and nonprofit administrators—working in public agencies or creating their own NGOs with the conscious purpose of combining their hope to make a better world with some means of livelihood. But as economic growth stalled and the fiscal crisis intensified, their work entailed helping people cope and thereby helping maintain a fraying social order. These are people who were experiencing firsthand what the right-wing agenda meant for the society and for people’s lives. Instead of a language of revolution, the New Left generation learned how to justify and explain the welfare state and to initiate and support politically possible reforms that would make its institutions more effective and life a bit more livable for working people as corporate and financial elites were undertaking a new class war.

Thus 1960s activists who had begun as sharp critics of the national state of bureaucratic labor unions and liberal lobbies and had dreamed of a democratic march through the institutions of society have devoted their minds and hearts, out of necessity, to a struggle to defend those institutions. As a result, some key institutions are in fact more democratic and leftward today than they had been forty years ago. Likewise, despite the numerical shrinkage of organized labor, the union political and social agenda is now far more inclusive and progressive, in part because some sixties activists ascended to top leadership positions in the labor movement. University curricula are, in our time, far more reflective of the cultural and social impacts of social movements, and university policies regarding admissions, governance, and staffing are far more inclusive than at the time of the 1960s student revolt. Mass media, despite corporate consolidation, are far more culturally and ideologically pluralistic because of the ways the Internet and other technological developments have created forms of media access and usage that undermine corporate control. In many communities, a more genuinely pluralist politics has developed, in part because of the thousands of post-1960s activists who embedded themselves and organized within towns and cities once thought to be bastions of conservative culture and business domination. At the same time, the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s—especially feminism, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, and environmentalism—have become established centers of political influence locally and nationally. And most importantly, demographic change coinciding with grassroots organizing and activism has provided the basis for a new majority coalition whose base is nonwhite, nonmale, and “millennial.” This is the coalition that elected an African American president, and its potential numerical strength is growing.

A political history of the last few decades, when it is written, will therefore note not only the rightward turn of the corporate elite, and accordingly of national public policy, but also the ways that some of the institutional aims first charted at Port Huron have, in fact, continued to be advanced by forms of political activism and cultural expression rooted in the movements of the 1960s. The ideologically defensive posture of today’s lefts—and not only in the United States—has meant, however, that there is lately little left-wing capacity to articulate larger societal and institutional alternatives. Even if the antiglobalization movement carries banners reading “another world is possible,” it is hard now to find ideas about what that other world might look like.

Participatory Democracy as Cognitive Praxis

Fifty years later, the central theme of the Port Huron Statement remains, I think, highly relevant to any effort to redefine a radical vision and program.

It is often claimed that the New Left conceived of participatory democracy as the fostering of small-group, face-to-face interaction as its political ideal—and therefore failed to figure out how to make participatory democracy a basis for practical action at the national and global level. But such notions miss a great deal about the thinking and practices of new social movements during the last several decades as well as about the discourse at Port Huron and in the early New Left more broadly.

Some of us Port Huron veterans have always resented the conflation of participatory democracy with methods of decision making internal to movement organizations. That issue has certainly been an important one since the 1960s, revived recently by the group processes used by Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots, which resulted in a great deal of debate within and criticism of the Occupy movement. But the Port Huron Statement’s uses of the term, in fact, referred to society and its institutions. The intention was to provide a framework useful for the articulation of core values and defining features of social transformation.

In the years since, the term itself—and the social relations it condenses—continued to animate a wide range of social movements and programs. Participatory democracy, in the first instance, points to impulses and ways of thinking that seem to come naturally when people in large numbers step out of their daily routines and private lives and join together to challenge conditions and make demands. By naming those impulses as expressions of a participatory democratic vision, those who challenge authority are able to frame their claims and grievances not only in particular and immediate terms but also as part of a more universal struggle for human emancipation. In the last few years, seemingly local mass occupations and uprisings are understood by many involved in them as expressions of a global democratization process. Indeed, the language of participatory democracy seems to enable international solidarity far more than the language of socialism and class struggle once promised to do. It speaks for commonalities among uprisings rooted in very different religious, ethnic, racial, class, and generational identities.

But the uses of participatory democracy as a foundation for constructing societal alternatives go well beyond the rhetorical. Participatory democracy provides a standard by which existing social arrangements can be judged and criticized. It calls on us to push for arrangements that allow for voice, for direct participation or empowerment, and not just for security or equity. It poses questions such as these: To what extent do those affected by decisions and operations have a voice in governance? To what extent are the rules by which members’ activity is controlled set by them? To what extent are members free to express dissent or challenge institutional authority?

In our time, the legitimation of institutional authority structures depends on providing some semblance of a democratic response to such questions. Established authority is particularly vulnerable to questions about voice and participation because even small groups can take actions that make such questions potent. These questions serve as guides for activists and organizers in the practice of making transformational demands. They inspire and sustain action and help shape the substance of structural reform. They are, in short, stimuli for envisioning how and why another world is possible.

One should provide a detailed listing of concrete examples of these points. Instead of such a list, I want to refer to the work of two intellectuals who are documenting (and theorizing about) a vision, strategy, and program rooted in principles of participatory democracy. In both cases, a youthful connection with SDS had some significance in inspiring their current projects. Both projects are ambitious and yet have received little attention in the media of both mainstream and left-wing awareness. Looking at their work will prove rewarding for those wondering how participatory democracy has played out in the practice and potential of community-based activism.

Erik Olin Wright, recently president of the American Sociological Association, began a project in the 1990s to develop systematic thinking about alternative institutional models and strategies. This is the “Real Utopias Project,” which is described this way: “The basic idea is to combine serious normative discussions of the underlying principles and rationales for different emancipatory visions with the analysis of pragmatic problems of institutional design.” Based in the University of Wisconsin sociology department, the project has published six books and a number of conferences, resulting in a wealth of studies and ideas and providing material for revitalizing visionary politics. How to enable this material to be utilized by activists and organizers is, of course, a continuing problem.[4]

More politically and strategically focused are efforts led by Gar Alperovitz, one of SDS’s early mentors, to describe and promote locally based initiatives that go “beyond capitalism” by democratizing wealth and fostering social enterprises at a local level. Alperovitz argues that it is unlikely that capitalism can be reformed simply by hoping to win electoral and legislative gains at the national level. Corporate power at national and global levels captures the state and promotes austerity. But he is hopeful that deepening economic and environmental crises are compelling a search for alternatives. He sees many promising efforts actually happening below the radar. Important examples include community and public banks, participatory budgeting, community development strategies that promote local stability and reinvestment, worker-owned enterprises and consumer cooperatives, and environmental rules that force corporate producers to pay for toxic waste they create. He has embarked on an ambitious effort to promote these ideas. His most recent book, What Then Must We Do?, is deliberately designed to reach progressive activists with a usable intellectual framework and concrete ideas for transformational action—ideas rooted in the democratization of wealth and community empowerment.[5]

These projects have documented the many ways that the dream of the early New Left for a worldwide democratization movement has shaped much of the history of the last half-century. These projects are also fulfillments of the Port Huron Statement’s call for people housed in universities to provide some of the theorizing, the information, the language, and the space for imagining and experimenting with possibilities for alternative institutional and community structures and processes.

If we wrote the history of the last fifty years in the United States and globally in terms of the theme of democratization, such a history might reveal that more democratic gain has been won in this half-century than is usually acknowledged. And such a history might help identify the intellectual and political strategies needed for possible breakthroughs. Perhaps the celebration of the Statement’s fiftieth anniversary will further advance that project. Speaking as a veteran of Port Huron, I of course hope so.