A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times

Some Background

In spring 1960 I joined picketers in Ann Arbor who were supporting the national call for a boycott of Woolworth and Kresge stores. Sit-ins pressing for the desegregation of lunch counters had swept the South after students at the North Carolina Agriculture and Technical College got things started in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1. Our picketing showed our solidarity with their cause. After the local picketing had begun, a Conference on Human Rights in the North was convened in Ann Arbor in April 1960. Robert Alan “Al” Haber had planned this conference before the southern sit-ins changed the landscape of social action. This was but one of Haber’s farsighted plans that earned him the adjective “prophetic.” Al had understood that the “human rights” of Black people—then referred to as Negroes—were a national not just a regional issue.

Haber was a long-term Ann Arborite. His father, Professor William Haber, had been a prominent New Deal economist and would become dean of the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (1963–68). Al had become involved in SDS’s predecessor, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), through its Michigan chapter, the Political Issues Club, and he had risen to some responsibility in SLID’s small national membership.[1] Having been introduced to activism by the spring picketing, I attended the April conference—though only after contacting Haber and asking him to suspend the registration fee, which I could not afford. He did. Afterwards, Haber asked a number of the picketers and those who had been active at the conference to join him in the new incarnation of SLID, which he proposed to rename SDS. Those of us whom Haber recruited were each very young. I was finishing my first year in college and so too was my future roommate and successor as Ann Arbor SDS chapter leader, Dickie Magidoff. Sharon Jeffrey, who would soon be my cochair, was a second-year student. She was the daughter of ex-socialist Mildred Jeffrey, one of the United Auto Workers’ key political strategists. Haber had succeeded through long, patient one-on-one conversations in convincing us that democracy itself was a radical idea—the ultimate radical idea—and that on this basis, the schisms and sectarianisms of the past could be laid aside for a new vision.

At the June 1960 convention of the newly named SDS, I became—at the tender age of seventeen—a member of the reconstituted National Executive Committee. Soon thereafter, that body named me vice president, in strict accordance with Robert’s Rules of Order. I was nominated and voted in to fill a vice presidential vacancy created by the resignation of a member of the Yale chapter who distrusted the new activist turn of SDS. The total number of voters in this election was three.

Back in New York during summer 1960, I was an after-hours volunteer at the national SDS office on Nineteenth Street in Manhattan while holding down a seven-day-a-week job as a lifeguard and tennis court attendant near my home in the South Bronx. I stuffed envelopes and helped with production of newsletters. It was a bit like a summer course in political theory and praxis with Chairman Al, the Socratic seminar leader.

Over the next two years, we organized several chapters, the most vigorous and successful of which was at Michigan, where VOICE, a mass political party campaigned and won leadership with the student government. Tom Hayden and his associates Ken McEldowney and Andy Hawley, all senior editors at the Michigan Daily, had been the instigators and first organizers of VOICE, but Sharon Jeffrey and I made it a winner of elections and campaigns. As leaders of the SDS chapter, Sharon and I brought the local group into VOICE and then led VOICE to affiliate nationally with SDS.

Hayden had returned from a summer at the University of California, Berkeley, impressed by the pioneer New Left student organization SLATE, which had done the counterintuitive thing for student radicals and taken student government seriously. Largely the province of the Greek letter organizations, student governments were somewhere between the sandboxes for political toddlers and training grounds for future Young Democrats and Republicans. Hayden saw the possibility of making the student government a representative voice for students in real governance—and Sharon and I thought this was just the right thing to do, if democracy was the centerpiece of your thinking.

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

The experience Sharon and I had as VOICE representatives on the student government council shaped my views on “process,” a contentious issue later in the 1960s and beyond. Since the council was a formal body, with a constituency of twenty-five thousand student voters, its proceedings followed strict rules—and thus Sharon and I endured a crash course in parliamentary procedure. From that time on, I became, willy-nilly, one of the Movement’s experts on how to run large meetings. Our SDS/VOICE chapter settled decisions—when there was division—by a formal vote at a membership meeting. Mostly we made decisions in small groupings and votes were not required; but when the meetings were large and the decisions weighty, we voted, counted hands, and declared a winner.

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

Our practice as campaigners running for student government office in no way channeled or restricted our practice as social movement activists. Our local organizing in support of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and our demonstrations against the arms race continued apace. One virtue of the student government campaigns: they caused us to bring our ideas about democracy in the university and democratic participation in the society and economy face to face to thousands of folks who otherwise would never have come to a leftist rally or encountered our ideas.

In the course of reorganizing the old SLID, Haber, Hayden, and the rest of us were making what had been a fairly inert “discussion club” formation into a more activist organization. We also had to deal with SLID/SDS’s heritage as an extension of the social-democratic movement, which had staked out an anticommunist and, for better or worse, nonrevolutionary position. In December 1961 at a National Council meeting in Ann Arbor, members aligned with the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL, often pronounced “Yipsel”), the youth group of the Socialist Party, vigorously challenged the “anti-anticommunist” positions the new leadership had taken: rather than prohibiting any collaboration with Communist Party members, we took an “inclusionary” attitude, and we developed a critique of those liberals and laborites who acquiesced in the arms race and the Cold War.

For Tom, Al, and Sharon, each of different heritages but none of Communist parentage, the social-democratic fixation on anticommunist purity on the left was an overly sectarian and narrow view of the need for social reform here in the United States: this old antagonism, which dominated SLID’s parent, the New York–headquartered League for Industrial Democracy, was a sea anchor that kept us from moving with the winds of change.

For those of us whose parents had been influenced by the Communist movement (and thus were sometimes called “red diaper babies”), this social-democratic heritage was an insulting and threatening slur and a scary attack on our parents and their friends. We considered our elders—largely rank and filers—to be ultimately democratic; we gave little credence to the Cold War anticommunist charge that they were the carriers of totalitarianism. In fact, the culture that surrounded the young people in, around, and formerly of the Communist movement seemed so committed to democracy that when Haber preached democracy as the bedrock idea for radicalism, we felt comfortable, despite SDS’s anticommunist social-democratic parentage.

Port Huron and Participatory Democracy

The YPSL challenge to these emerging SDS attitudes made it apparent that some sort of defining statement, a manifesto, was needed to articulate a vision for a New Left. Tom Hayden, Al Haber, and I were named to a drafting committee, but immediately it became clear that Tom was the writer, and (while I cannot speak for Al) my job was encouragement.

If democracy was the radical umbrella, though, what was wrong with what we—the United States—had then and have now? Our critique of contemporary democratic practice leading up to Port Huron can be summarized briefly: citizenship as broadly understood was part-time and passive. You listened, you voted, and you were done. Democratic rights did not extend to the economy, so power over everyday life was exercised by corporate bureaucracies beyond the reach of workers and community members. Democratic rights were routinely denied to Black people by law and practice, while economic inequality excluded the poor from the community of citizens. And finally, the political parties were morally compromised and politically inert; potential opposition was entombed in Cold War orthodoxy and unable to challenge it—unable, that is, to speak truth to power.

Participatory Democracy

Tom read numerous statements from independent left thinkers. We were all influenced by C. Wright Mills, but Hayden was an omnivorous reader, and among those who particularly influenced him was one of our professors at the University of Michigan, Arnold Kaufman, a social philosopher.[2] At the core of Kaufman’s thought was the proposition that we can be more than isolated, self-absorbed, and narrow beings and that democratic participation can expand human capacities. Democratic activism, thought Kaufman, is a kind of redemption. These reflections on democracy and human capacity, which found their way into the very first paragraphs of the Port Huron Statement draft, were followed by critique of the economy, of poverty, of segregation, of the danger of nuclear war, and of the stifling of the developing world. A section focused on the segregationist Dixiecrat influence in the Democratic Party and called for the ouster of racist tribunes from that party. This was in fact a part of the social-democratic strategy favored by the Socialist Party activist Michael Harrington: an effort to “realign” the Democrats as a more consistently liberal-left party.[3] Ironically, the Voting Rights Act of 1965—and the Republican Party’s strategic choice to become the party of southern white people—did largely accomplish this. It had a historic downside too: persistent Republican majorities in the states of the former Confederacy.

When we assembled at Port Huron, attendees were confronted with the task of absorbing and amending Tom Hayden’s forty-nine-page draft—and making it their own. There and at virtually every SDS convention that was to follow, adherence to parliamentary procedure and forms of representation was normal.[4] Early on, the participants decided on a “bones and flesh” strategy of amendment and discussion. The document was broken down to sections, and these were assigned to small committees of three to five members. I participated in the group working on the labor movement and its relations to the student movement. Each group was to break down its section into “bones” (i.e., essential political or strategic points). These were matters to be debated and possibly revised. The bones, and any proposed changes in them, would be brought before a final plenary meeting, which would send instructions to a subsequent (postconvention) drafting committee. (There the “flesh”—or prose needed to elucidate the positions adopted by the plenary—would be added.) The small groups worked more or less informally, but the Port Huron final plenary was composed of thirty or forty people, who voted in a highly formal manner to pass, reject, or amend these bones. It took all night.

One of the moments I found most memorable occurred during the discussion of the section on the arms race and the Cold War. A YPSL member assailed the section and called many of the participants (pointedly myself) “paranoiac anti-anticommunists.” A majority vote defeated his attempt to change that “bone.”

The idea of participatory democracy was not originally or essentially about how to conduct meetings; it was about how to organize society and to conceive of citizenship. The Port Huron Statement contrasted “domination of politics and the economy by fantastically rich elites” with the alternative of “shared abundance.” We acknowledged the labor movement, which played a central role in improving workers’ lives, as the most democratic institution of the mainstream, but noted too that “‘union democracy’ is not simply inhibited by labor leader elitism, but by the unrelated problem of rank-and-file apathy to the tradition of unionism.”[5] Way ahead of its time, the Statement also remarked, “The contemporary social assault on the labor movement is of crisis proportions.”[6] In my view at the time, participatory democracy was an American phrase to encompass socialist democracy (and I still hold to that). In early SDS, many of us had a strong interest in worker-oriented democratic innovations abroad, ranging from the German codetermination law (putting union representatives on corporate boards) to Yugoslavian workers councils.[7]

In the period between Port Huron, in June 1962, and the March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam, in April 1965, SDS became steadily more well known through the work of its campus chapters and the writing and speaking of its talented national leaders, including Hayden, Haber, Todd Gitlin, and Paul Potter. Throughout this period—and beyond—internal decisions were made by more or less standard parliamentary procedures and representative democracy. In these few years, SDS grew slowly but steadily. The Port Huron Statement was widely circulated through the traditional mimeograph duplication process and also by the photocopying of the first typeset publication of the Statement in the Methodist collegiate magazine Motive.

The 1963 SDS National Convention considered and adopted (by formal majority votes) a successor to the Port Huron manifesto titled “America and the New Era.”[8] Unfortunately neglected by scholars, “America and the New Era” is a better guide to subsequent SDS views and behavior than any other document, including the Port Huron Statement. “America and the New Era” identifies the character of the Kennedy administration as “corporate liberalism”—note the parallel to the later usage “corporate globalization”—and calls for a politics of “local insurgency.”[9]

Beginning in 1964, most intensely with the Swarthmore College chapter, SDS began to think about community organizing as a radical practice. The Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) was launched in summer 1964 with groups working in ten cities. About six of these projects survived as multiyear organizations, and two or three were to have long-range impact on their cities and on the left: Newark, Cleveland, and Chicago. The ERAP initiative meant there were ex-student SDSers consisting of a large fraction of the de facto if not de jure leaders of the organization, who were now off campus in nonchapter groupings.

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

Robert’s Rules Save the Day

On December 31, 1964, the SDS National Council convened at a union meeting hall in lower Manhattan. Late in the evening, a member from New York, Jim Brook, then working as a letter carrier, made an impassioned call for SDS to initiate a demonstration against the impending escalation of the war in Vietnam. One will recall that in August 1964, the notorious incident in the Gulf of Tonkin had given Johnson and McNamara the excuse they apparently wanted to escalate US intervention. After alleged, and highly contested, attacks upon the destroyers Turner and Maddox Joy, the United States, for the first time, undertook a massive and openly acknowledged bombing of North Vietnamese targets. Plans for a major escalation in the use of US ground forces were in the works.

Brook came before the council at roughly eleven o’clock at night. Already, some of the women had begun setting up food and drink for a New Year’s party at the back of the room. (Yes, that is the way it was then.) In opposition to Brook’s anti-imperialist plea for action, a number of the more senior and well-respected leaders of SDS, who were now situated in ERAP community organizing projects, rose to express doubt about the proposal. They argued that antiwar work would make SDS too single-issue, not the comprehensively radical organization it had always aspired to be, and they also thought that the effort to organize antiwar work would not connect to the poor white and black constituents of the ERAP projects and thus would detract from the work of the community organizers.

Among other highly influential people expressing these doubts, Tom Hayden figured prominently. It’s more than a bit ironic given his future role as a major leader of antiwar action during the Vietnam conflict and after, but Brother Tom made a Buddha-like intervention, wondering what would happen if we called a demo and nobody came. I note openly that Tom has a different memory of this moment than I do. The motion to sponsor the march failed, with people like me—with one foot in community organizing and another on campus as a graduate student—torn. I voted against.

The meeting recessed for party preparation, and in the interim my former roommate, Dickie Magidoff, then working in the Cleveland ERAP project, urgently brought me to a side conversation. “This is a big deal” was the burden of his whispered plea. We can’t let this pass by. We have got to change it. And I was the man to do it, because, as you will recall, I had learned the technics of parliamentary procedure cold when I had been a University of Michigan student government leader. One of Robert’s Rules of Order’s little miracle escape hatches is this: an individual may move to reconsider a question if and only if he or she has voted on the prevailing side. Dickie knew this, as did I.

As the clock approached midnight and we prepared for partying, the meeting reconvened to finish things off. I moved to reconsider. I cannot claim to have made any important intervention in the debate. SDS national secretary Clark Kissinger, a University of Wisconsin radical who had attended Port Huron, made the last and most persuasive plea about the moral responsibility to oppose an outright imperialist war. On a reconsideration vote, the motion passed and history was thus bent through the use of Robert’s Rules of Order.

So, on April 17, 1965, SDS led the first big Washington demonstration against the war in Vietnam, the March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam. At that time it was the largest demonstration against an American war policy since the Spanish-American War. The old guard of anticommunist social democrats was scandalized by our nonexclusionary policy: Y’all come, we said, if you agree with the main slogan: “End the War in Vietnam.” They were more concerned that Communists would join the March than they were that the March would succeed. That the March did galvanize public opinion and mobilize a new wave of public opposition to the war was perhaps the definitive sign that the Cold War on the left was over—or irrelevant—and that the New Left was now the culturally and politically hegemonic left.

For SDS the march—the very act of calling for the march—was transformative. At the University of Chicago, where I was forming a new chapter in my first year of graduate school, our meetings of fifteen to twenty-five became meetings of one hundred. We sent five buses to Washington from Chicago. We had one chapter in Chicago before the March; by the time the buses returned, we had at least three, including those at Roosevelt University and Northwestern. SDS had become, overnight, a mass organization.

Reflecting on Participatory Democracy

These reflections on how individual SDS chapters governed themselves, and on how the national body came to call for the March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam, set in motion an alternative understanding of what has all too often become a canonical interpretation of what we at Port Huron meant by participatory democracy. In subsequent years many commentators have trivialized the idea of participatory democracy or defined it as impractical and utopian in the worst sense.

While rigorous participation and direct involvement in decisions was the ideal, the notion that no one could or should be represented—that voting for a representative was inherently undemocratic—would have been viewed as silly by Port Huron participants. We voted for our national officers; we voted for chapter leaders; we voted for resolutions and for constitutional alterations. Whatever I may say later about the problems of democracy in a global setting, Port Huron veterans and those who joined SDS in later years were not silly. We thought of ourselves as vigorously participating citizens—and some, at times, would have said revolutionaries.

How did participatory democracy come to be trivialized as a meeting rule for small groups? One guess is mistakes by journalists and misinterpretations by new recruits. If a journalist came to a small local chapter meeting, he or she might observe a kind of consensus-seeking process taking place. Given the prominence of the rhetoric about participatory democracy, this might then become what the journalist thought it was all about. By thus reporting it, the idea became a self-fulfilling prophecy. In addition, SDS grew so rapidly that there was little “socialization” of newer members by older members.[10] A kind of naive literalism was fueled, perhaps, by a romantic cultural memory of America’s own anarchosyndicalist past. New Leftists venerated the memory of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW): many agreed with the famous IWW motto “We are all leaders.” There was also a sort of cultural affinity between a rejection of representation and the hyperindividualism of parts of American culture at that time: “I am unique; no one can represent me.”

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the notion of participatory democracy as a philosophy of group process had enough currency to be adopted uncritically by the Occupy Wall Street anarchist tendency. They too found an American phrase for a European-origin ideology, but this time it was not socialism but rather a variant of anarchism. This was sustained by a certain cultural ambience that has been a factor of continuity between SDS and successor organizations like Occupy Wall Street that identify with its heritage. Former SDS vice president and quipster Paul Booth once made the semifacetious remark that SDSers think “freedom is a constant meeting.” Another time he said we might be “students for a small society.” It is assumed that the element of continuity lies in an emphasis on process, community, and participation rather than formal majoritarian rules of debate and decision.

The most trivial interpretation of participatory democracy understands it as a way to conduct face-to-face meetings. Usually this interpretation conjures up consensus seeking as the fundamental goal and invents a variety of procedures for reaching it. What formal standards like venerable Robert’s Rules of Order do—however dense and forbidding they seem—is to offer procedural safeguards assuring majority rule while also preserving minority rights. In contrast, a doctrine of consensus allows obstinate minorities to obstruct the will of the majority. Cases in point abound, including the highly consequential use of a sixty-vote requirement for cloture in the US Senate. A more absurdist example came during an Occupy Wall Street meeting in Atlanta one morning in October 2011 when an eccentric individual blocked Congressman John Lewis from speaking, an obstruction at variance from what appeared to be the will of an overwhelming majority of those present.

Of course, meeting facilitators and prudent activists will seek consensus under many circumstances. These include situations when there are very small groups of decision makers or when the stakes are extremely high and members of the group risk legal or physical jeopardy. Nonetheless, the national SDS still worked by majority vote when it took up matters that carried legal jeopardy in opposing the Vietnam War draft.

What did participatory democracy evoke as a phrase for the Port Huron cohort that, following Tom Hayden’s writing, made it their own? Broadly speaking, my claim—as I mentioned previously—is that it was an American language for socialism and in particular for, of all things, industrial democracy. I can testify directly to the many conversations I had with comrades about worker control, German codetermination laws, the Yugoslav industrial example, and Wobbly syndicalist ideas. If bureaucratic power (in C. Wright Mills’s dim view of it) was Satan, and Paul Goodman’s simple anarchism was Eden, we were the democratic Adam as yet innocent.

Labor and Participatory Democracy

The Port Huron Statement was notable for addressing universities and students as potential agents of democratic change. Yet the document was conscious of the organization’s historical ties to labor and the working-class movement. Contrary to the subsequent stereotype of SDS as “antilabor,” Port Huron attendees included many with family and other connections to unionism. Some, like myself, came from working-class trade union families or families with trade union officials (such as VOICE cochair Sharon Jeffrey); others came from families of New Dealers with commitments to labor rights (such as Paul Booth). We should remember that SDS evolved from SLID. That the parent League for Industrial Democracy had become ossified in the course of the Cold War did not negate the proposition that workers’ enfranchisement at work and in the broader economy was central to any vision of democracy. It remained central in ours.

While the inclusion of the working class and the labor movement in a vision of participatory democracy was near universal among the early founders of SDS, criticism of the labor movement from the standpoint of democracy was also widespread. In some ways the early SDS perception of threats to the labor moment was way ahead of its time. The document anticipates the attack on and decline of the labor movement, even while the social science and big picture political observers of the day were still talking about “big labor.” Like AFL-CIO president George Meany, we thought of labor as “big,” but in the Port Huron Statement we did accurately foresee its incremental defeat as a movement and institution. The initial formation of our consciousness about such matters came from, on the one hand, the liberal-labor coalition itself, embodied, for example, in John Kenneth Galbraith’s theory of countervailing powers, which saw big labor, big government, and big corporations as in some sense balancing each other.[11] On the other hand, although we were not fully in contact with the rumblings in the labor movement itself, there were in fact members and places that were—for example, Kim Moody in Baltimore. So the section on the labor movement written and revised in 1962 is strikingly up to date: it bemoans bureaucratic lethargy, notes grassroots democratic discontent, and recognizes movements arising within unions to address these matters. Further, the Port Huron Statement notes threats to the existing labor movement from the shift away from manufacturing and toward service-producing industries. Reading it now affirms Haber and Hayden’s prophetic insight: if one subjects every institution to scrutiny from the point of view of democracy and participation, much of what is wrong will be clear and much of its development can be predicted.

Substantial fractions of our critique of the labor movement were based on its own understanding of itself as strong, included in power, but—in our view—too conservative. We saw the cliff upon which union influence was so precariously perched, but because most of its official leadership did not, SDS was sometimes characterized as hostile to the labor movement. The discussion was not extended. The urgency of war and then the apocalypse of racial conflict—the urban “civil disturbances” of 1964 to 1968—distracted our attention from so many other avenues of reflection.

In any case the final draft of the Port Huron Statement has an amended reference to labor and students at the end. It is terribly written (solely because I wrote the revision), but it actually states a neglected proposition:

However clumsily stated, it seems to me ultimately appropriate to focus on the cooperation of young intellectuals, students and faculty alike, with labor, immigrant, and minority interests to remake more nearly democratic institutions and culture. The struggles of the last decade have in fact seen the burgeoning of just such coalitions.

The distance between SDS and the labor movement has usually been exaggerated. SDS had links to and strong sympathy with what would now be understood as “the labor left.” That so many SDS veterans gravitated toward all parts of the labor movement is testimony to the central importance it played then and still does in viable visions of a democratic commonwealth.[13] If one takes democratic participation as a keystone value, then where else in American society, outside of the labor movement, do ordinary people have a say in conditions under which they work?

Democracy at Scale

If participatory democracy and the Port Huron Statement envisioned both social and economic democracy and envisioned empowered working people in alliance with educated youth, they nevertheless did not have, and the American left still does not have, an adequate response to the problem of scale. It is all very well to say that one wants to have a say in the decisions that affect one’s life. Does that mean a group of upper-class property owners on Nantucket Sound should be able to frustrate a state or nation’s desire for wind-powered energy? Does democracy mean that a board of selectmen or town meeting in a small village should be able to deny a building or zoning permit to a halfway house for emotionally disturbed juveniles or a Planned Parenthood facility? Leftists hearken when working-class neighborhoods resist toxic waste sites, but we don’t have a consistent decision rule for when a small group of the people should decide or when larger aggregations of the people should decide. The Statement is not a guide to the problem of scale, and none of us—so far as my own small brain knows—have thought this through to a conclusion. The future of democratic movements and theory is open in other and even more dramatic ways than this.

For all its vision, the Port Huron Statement—as did every other midsixties understanding of global affairs—missed the impending change in the structure of global capital. The Statement is fairly naive about industrialization and its potential growth in those new nations that were once European or American colonies. It does not contemplate the use of low-income countries to pound down standards of living of workers in those nations bordering the North Atlantic.

So the problem of the race to the bottom is a whole new frontier for today’s democratic movements—the reconciliation of workers’ needs on a global basis. The matter has become increasingly painful. Oligarchical power elites steer key decision-making institutions: the central banks, the international financial institutions, the financial conglomerates, the regulatory agencies captured by the interests they are supposed to regulate, and transnational political institutions like the European Union or the World Trade Organization. The distance between those rulers and ordinary citizens is truly titanic. Accountability, no less participation, seems more exotic a hope each week. It is clear that democrats everywhere await—or should work to hasten—the day that workers of the world understand and find ways to cooperate so they all lose their chains.