A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times

The Making of the Port Huron Statement

When I arrived in New York in October 1961, I had just finished my year on the national board of the German SDS in Frankfurt. As its vice-chairman I had been responsible for developing a new international network of socialist student and youth organizations. We understood ourselves as parts of a new, unorthodox political current that came from England and, already in 1958, had named itself a “new left.”[1] As Edward Thompson wrote retrospectively in 1970, this “British ‘new left’ was among the first of this international family. It began in the mid-fifties as a strongly political movement, taking hostile views of both orthodox social democracy and communism, and since 1960 it has gone through many mutations.”[2]

In 1961, the New Left current consisted of dissidents inside and outside the old socialist international organizations in the developed countries, in the newly independent nations of the Third World, and in communist Eastern Europe. All these activists of a younger generation sensed that a new political opening had occurred, following the advance of decolonization and John Kennedy’s election, which, at that time, encouraged the hope for new, progressive electoral majorities in many countries. The activists were eager to contest the bureaucratic stalemate and authoritarian domination in the countries of the Eastern as well as the Western bloc. The new mood was manifest in the protest movements of Japanese and Turkish students, of the English and German Easter marches for nuclear disarmament, and by the antiracist civil rights movements emerging in the United States and in South Africa.

They did not expect change to come from powerful organizational structures, theoretical credos, or charismatic leaders like Kennedy. Instead it would arise from real social movements and mobilizations that were a product of the contemporary situation. But there was also a new appreciation of social theory. Most important in this respect was the British journal New Left Review. Simultaneously, in Germany and Italy, many dissidents of the early twentieth-century revolutionary left were rediscovered, among them Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, Wilhelm Reich, and Karl Korsch.

Arriving with this background, I got in touch with like-minded organizations in the United States. My most important contacts were Al Haber, president of SDS; Bob Ross, the vice president; and Dick Flacks, also engaged in transforming SDS into a New Left organization and movement. I also met socialists such as Michael Harrington and representatives of the Young People’s Socialist League.

In discussions with Al Haber I immediately found out that both of us were enthusiastic about a 1960 British collection of New Left essays edited by Edward Thompson.[3] This book offered to the amorphous currents of the New Left a common definition of the historical situation and the role of a New Left to “find a way out of apathy.”[4] It was not a declaration of principles but a concrete analysis of the manifold social contradictions that defined the new “‘bastard’ capitalism” (as Ralph Samuel called it in the book) and an analysis of the possibilities of renewed class conflicts and socialist movements.[5] When the book appeared in Europe, it immediately became the most important signal of a new and liberating practical and intellectual departure. It reached a wider international audience than even C. Wright Mills’s famous 1960 essay, “A Letter to the New Left,” which was read mainly in Britain and the United States.[6]

In early December 1961, Al Haber told me that SDS was planning its own public statement, which would apply the new ideas to the American situation. Tom Hayden produced a first draft of nine pages, circulated for discussion in March 1962. After months of discussions, in which I also took part, Tom transformed his first draft into a fully developed preconference draft of a manifesto. At the Port Huron conference in June 1962, we had no alternative but to understate our ambitions, calling it simply a “statement” named for the locale where we met to discuss and formulate the final draft.

The ambitious stance of the Port Huron Statement—to express the political perspectives of a whole younger generation—was not just intellectual hubris. It was encouraged by the new movements rising around the world. Its new language, markedly different from the stereotypical slogans of the Old Left, provided a fresh but erudite diagnosis of the historical situation. Given the rhetoric of reform that accompanied the new president’s administration—so different from the age of Eisenhower and Joseph McCarthy—the authors felt encouraged to proclaim the possibility of social change going well beyond Kennedy’s “New Frontier.” The Statement became a great synthesis of what was discussed in the international New Left. It analyzed the new social and political contradictions of the advanced, “affluent” capitalist societies. Moreover, it recognized the ways that these contradictions took the form of a generational conflict—as a conflict that broke out within social classes and within gender and ethnic groups.

But the Statement also went further. The term “participatory democracy” was offered as an integrative formula for the emerging movements. It allowed us to look back to a long tradition of emancipatory, communal, and labor movements in many countries that advocated economic democracy as well as personal freedom. The term became a common denominator for the manifold new movements renewing those traditions of genuine democracy. For us, at that time, there was no necessary contradiction between unionist, socialist, antiracist, emancipatory, and youth-cultural movements and organizations. This combination was symbolized by the fact that we adopted this manifesto at a camp on Lake Huron built by the United Automobile Workers (UAW) in the Detroit area during the Great Depression.

Indeed, the formula of participatory democracy brought together the different movements for personal and political emancipation. These would come to include gender emancipation as well as nonauthoritarian pedagogy, the emancipation of ethnical and cultural minorities, the establishment of democratic publics and popular control in politics and economics, and the ecological and pacifist reflections on the destructive consequences of one-dimensional modernization.

Today, after decades of neoconservative restoration, the spirit is still here, recently manifested by the international chain reaction of new democratic movements. In the Spanish May manifesto of 2011, protesters rediscovered the term “genuine democracy” along with the notion of “democratic participation.” To me, this continuity of emancipatory movements stems not only from a heritage of ideas but also from underlying changes in everyday culture and social structure. The slow but steady spread of grassroots activities among the younger generations today gives participatory democracy the appearance of what Raymond Williams once called a “long revolution” in his famous analysis of the revolution in culture, which unfolded alongside the democratic and industrial revolutions since the nineteenth century.[7]

The German Contribution to the Statement

Al Haber took a central role in organizing, motivating, and discussing the contributions to the manifesto draft and its different chapters. With his encouragement, I contributed two documents regarding the analysis of the Cold War and a possible disengagement of the military blocs. The key themes of those memos were included in the preconference, forty-nine-page draft of the manifesto that was circulated shortly before the Port Huron meeting. Also, a general comment I wrote on that long draft was circulated as well. There I raised the key question of who should bring about the social changes we demanded. I argued that Hayden, following Mills, may have put too much emphasis on the role of intellectuals as agents of social change. In my view, the intellectuals by themselves could only be mediators “but not the agency, the moving power itself.” That was still a task for the labor movement.

My main contributions, however, were the two papers on ending the Cold War. The first paper offered the perspectives of German SDS on the Cold War, adopted by our national conference in October 1961.[8] This motion had been formulated by our group in Berlin, where the division between the Eastern and Western blocs had been “cemented” by the infamous Berlin Wall since August 13, 1961.

Our proposal for ending the Cold War by diplomatic negotiation challenged the West German government’s Hallstein Doctrine, which refused diplomatic recognition of the East German state, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, on the grounds that this would grant moral support to an undemocratic regime and raise an insurmountable obstacle to future German reunification. To study the problem of diplomatic recognition more fully, I took part in a course on international law at Bowdoin. Advised by Professor Arthern Daggett, I wrote a paper demonstrating that, by the criteria of international law as well as by selected cases, diplomatic recognition had nothing to do with moral or political approval; rather, it had been, historically, a way to ease tensions. I integrated that perspective into a ten-page political analysis, “Berlin: Why Not Recognize the Status Quo?” On February 6, 1962, I sent the paper to Al Haber, and within a week, he had passed it on to Bob Ross for comments. He told me he would also “have it included in the TURN TOWARD PEACE packet,” produced by a coalition of sixty peace and liberal internationalist organizations chaired by Norman Thomas. Later, Haber told me that the National Student Association also distributed my Berlin paper.

The second paper was titled “A Hungarian Proposal for Depolarisation.” Its authors, the Hungarian émigrés Géza Ankerl, a political friend of mine, and Lazlo Huzsar, had been members of the Revolutionary Student Committee during the Budapest rebellion of 1956. Their plan for a military and political withdrawal of both military blocs in Europe, which concretized the much-discussed idea of disengagement, had already gained the attention of George Kennan, Adlai Stevenson, and other prominent politicians.

The ideas presented in those two papers regarding diplomatic recognition, military disengagement, ending nuclear tests and armament, and creating demilitarized zones between the Eastern and Western blocs were integrated into the final text of the Statement. Reflecting the views of West Germany’s non-Communist left, the Statement remarked, “We should recognize that an authoritarian [West] Germany’s insistence on reunification, while knowing the impossibility of achieving it with peaceful means, could only generate increasing frustrations among the population and nationalist sentiments which frighten its Eastern neighbors.”[9] To avoid this, we advocated mutual diplomatic recognition of the two German states and of Berlin’s divided status in order to diminish Cold War tensions.

Moreover, following my suggestions, this section of the Port Huron Statement emphasized that the Cold War was not merely a problem of Soviet-American conflict: “Even if Washington and Moscow were in favor of disengagement, both Adenauer and Ulbricht would never agree to it because Cold War keeps their parties in power.”[10] Our solution to this problem included a series of “disarmament experiments,” of which the most important would be the military disengagement by both world powers from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the two Germanys. By undermining the Russian argument for tighter controls in East Europe—that is, the “menace of capitalist encirclement”—such diplomacy, “geared to the needs of democratic elements in the satellites,” would develop a real bridge between East and West.[11] All of this resembled the Ostpolitik that Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader Willy Brandt began to pursue seven years later.

On my contribution, Tom Hayden later commented, “We saw the cold war only inside of the United States; United States versus Soviet Union. We weren’t thinking of the people on the ground in between the superpowers. So if you read the Port Huron Statement, you’ll see a German SDS influence on this long section about why the Cold War had to be ended and why it had to be ended with the involvement of European social movements. . . . I credit [Michael Vester] with conceiving and writing the entire Cold War section of the Port Huron Statement.”[12]

The Statement’s text made clear that politically, “as democrats,” its authors were “in basic opposition to the communist system”—which, of course, was also the position of the German SDS. However, this did not help us much in Germany, where we said “blind anticommunism” and hostility to the Soviet Union was used to shore up a conservative and constrained political culture at home. There, in an atmosphere of Cold War polarization, the SPD was in the process of expelling German SDS members from party membership on the pretext that we were Communists, which we definitely were not. Reconciliation did not take place until after 1969, when Willy Brandt became head of a new government and the spirit of a new departure finally spread to Germany. Brandt received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 for his efforts to lower Cold War tensions, almost exactly the same politics of détente and mutual diplomatic recognition that we had advocated in the early 1960s.

Frankfurt and the Historical Success of Workers’ Participation in Germany

As happens in wonderful friendships, the transport of ideas also went into the other direction, from the United States to Germany. Soon after Port Huron I returned to Frankfurt, where my colleagues and I continued building the new international network of New Left youth and student organizations.[13] Our collective efforts were made all the more urgent by the radically unstable times: the continuing Cold War confrontations in and over Berlin, the nuclear tests conducted by both the Soviet Union and the United States, the conflicts in Algeria and South Africa, and the eruption of movements against dictatorial regimes around the world.

Frankfurt in the early 1960s was a city where the New Left and the international socialist movement exchanged ideas and developed plans for action. The “critical theory” of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was very important for us, but so was the left wing of the labor movement, which had a strong base in the city. Frankfurt was home to many left-wing democratic socialists of the older generation who had been persecuted or driven into emigration during the Nazi years. In such a milieu, ideas and ideologies devoted to building workers’ democracy and fostering antiauthoritarian education were all part of an undogmatic socialism that posed an alternative to both authoritarian communism and the right-wing mainstream of Germany’s postwar social democracy. In particular, the rediscovered ideas and ideals of Rosa Luxemburg and Wilhelm Reich were extremely important.

Frankfurt’s socialist students sought to enhance democratic participation, both civic and industrial. In the pursuit of this aim, we relied not only on the new youth and intellectual movements of that era but also on the working-class intelligentsia (i.e., functionaries in the big industrial unions who had played important roles in the antifascist resistance).

After the war, strikes by the industrial unions had laid the foundation for a strong welfare state and helped ensure a voice for organized workers in the governance of the enterprise for which they worked. In 1949, big organized demonstrations of the metal workers and the miners moved West Germany’s parliament to concede the Mitbestimmungsgesetz (“Participation Act”) of 1951, which gave employee representatives 50 percent of the seats on the supervisory boards of the big coal and steel corporations.[14] One year later, the same majority conceded the Betriebsverfassungsgesetz (“Enterprise Constitutional Act”), which did not include employee representatives in the supervisory boards but gave strong minority rights to boards of elected employees’ representatives (“Betriebsräte”) in almost all enterprises in Federal Germany. Astonishingly enough, this working-class progress came when conservative governments were in power. From 1949 to 1963, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer tried to develop a new conservatism that was responsive to working-class demands and therefore a bulwark against the appeals of Communism or the return of the Nazis. In order to avoid severe social and political ruptures, Adenauer also ensured that Germany would remain a nation wedded to parliamentary institutions and formal democratic rights for its citizens.

The striving for workers’ participation after World War II followed in the tradition first established by the democratic workers’ councils of the 1918 German Revolution. Those councils had been decisive in introducing full parliamentarian democracy and the idea of industrial democracy to Germany after World War I. Many of the leftist union activists who now fought for Mitbestimmung (“Participation”) had been influenced by the legacy of 1918 and by their experience in the resistance to the Hitler regime. After World War II, such participatory workers’ movements were not limited to the Federal Republic. They remained a strong strain within the European and Latin American labor movement, especially in Italy, France, Britain, and Chile, as well as in the Portuguese and Nicaraguan revolutions of the 1970s.

The introduction of Mitbestimmung served as a key example of participatory empowerment in Arnold Kaufman’s famous essay of 1960, “Participatory Democracy and Human Nature,” which gave the Port Huron Statement its central slogan.[15] In an ambitious assault upon the work of Walter Lippmann, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Erich Fromm, Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Michels, and others skeptical of the human capacity for democratic and rational decision making, Kaufman argued that the main justification for a “democracy of participation” is the “contribution it can make to the development of human powers of thought, feeling and action. In this respect it differs, and differs quite fundamentally, from a representative system incorporating all sorts of institutional features designed to safeguard human rights and ensure social order. This distinction is all-important.”[16] Only by recognizing the distinction, he suggested, could the contributions of both participation and representative systems be understood and combined in practice.

Kaufman’s intervention came in a historical situation where, since the 1950s, the possibility of workers’ participation was again discussed internationally as an alternative to authoritarian structures in state-socialist as well as capitalist enterprises. This discussion was spurred by the widely noted “experiments in Germany, Yugoslavia, Poland and elsewhere.”[17] Kaufman referred to an international symposium on Workers’ Participation in Management held in 1956 by the International Sociological Association. The question was whether “workers could assume managerial functions with good results both for the workers themselves and for the larger society.”[18] While the German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf asserted that “the appointment of workers to managerial or quasi-managerial positions is bound to defeat its own ends,” another participant considered “the possibility of eliminating conflict through an extensive rotation of managerial jobs.”[19] To resolve such debates, Kaufman called for an empirical program to study practical examples of democratic participation defined by the criteria that it “essentially involves actual preliminary deliberation (conversations, debate, discussion) and that in the final decision each participant has a roughly equal formal say.”[20]

In fact, the research Kaufman proposed was pursued already by West German sociologists of labor relations.[21] In Dortmund, Popitz, Bahrdt, and others had conducted a famous empirical study on how Mitbestimmung had reshaped authority relations in the industry and how workers’ social consciousness was now structured. In Frankfurt, the Institute for Social Research was responsive to the city’s radical political culture in its research on the democratic potentials within the West German population. Our underlying common aim was to prevent a return of fascism in Germany. In cooperation with the labor union left, professors Ludwig von Friedeburg, Gerhard Brandt, and Manfred Teschner coordinated substantial research in industrial sociology and on workers’ mentality. Jürgen Habermas, von Friedeburg, and others conducted influential studies on students’ attitudes toward democracy and on educational opportunities. Helge Pross initiated the institute’s work in feminist studies. In all these fields, former Frankfurt students developed further research when they won posts in many German universities during the movement years until the 1970s.

Important impulses came from the studies on authoritarian and democratic personality formation initiated in the 1930s and 1940s by Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Wilhelm Reich, who had emigrated to the United States. They motivated many of us to become active in promoting democratic, nonauthoritarian pedagogy. Monika Seifert-Mitscherlich and her friends founded the first antiauthoritarian kindergarten in Frankfurt, which was soon replicated all over the country.[22] Since the 1970s, the Frankfurt School studies of changing attitudes toward democracy and of class mentalities were carried on especially at the University of Hannover, where the approaches of Adorno, Fromm, and Reich were combined with the approaches of Pierre Bourdieu and with New Left cultural studies.[23]

Preparing a New Participatory Mobilization

Around 1960 in Germany, the participatory elements of Mitbestimmung were still embedded in a societal context with many constraints, including a paternalistic family model and the conservative consensus fostered by the Cold War. In our view and the view of the unions, the participatory reforms achieved so far were strong but not sufficient.

How could we break that oppressive sense of constraint? When, around 1960, most of the local German SDS groups began to consider themselves part of a New Left, we developed a multilevel idea of how to mobilize people for participatory politics. Many SDS members became active in workers’ education and the politics of the big industrial labor unions. We also tried to build a national “left wing” or “labor wing” inside the Social Democratic Party. And we joined forces with the most critical and active parts of all progressive democratic organizations. These were not only the labor union and SPD youth and the leftist socialist youth organizations (the Red Falcons and the Friends of Nature) but also other activists who had turned left during the Cold War conflicts: student government leaders, activists from the student press at high schools and universities, and even activists of the different scouting organizations.

By combining these different levels of engagement, the German SDS mobilized and coordinated working-class and general youth activities, especially in the fields of labor movement education in the high schools and universities. In the early 1960s, this was a rather slow process, but after the mid-1960s, it gained momentum by merging with the broad, worldwide cultural revolt of youth directed against authoritarianism of all kinds. This historical coincidence of sociostructural changes and active political groups finally, in 1969, led to the sweeping electoral victory of Willy Brandt, which in turn opened space for many institutional reforms demanded by the social movements of the New Left.

These beginnings were connected with a socialist-inflected, transatlantic labor internationalism. One outstanding representative of that tradition was Hans Matthöfer, a friend of German SDS, an official in the Frankfurt headquarters of metal industry employees’ union IG Metall, and the grandson of a Polish immigrant. Matthöfer had spent a year working in the United States with the UAW. From 1960 to 1972, he organized the large educational program for the 2.2 million IG Metall members. After the left-wing Frankfurt Social Democrats sent him to the Federal parliament in 1961, he helped build the nationwide party left and then became its voice in the governments headed by SPD chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt from 1969 to 1982.

On the theoretical and political level, Peter von Oertzen from Göttingen was a most important partisan of participatory democracy. His studies of workers’ councils and on workers’ participation proved influential in German SDS as well as in the field of union education. Ludwig von Friedeburg from Frankfurt became similarly influential for a new generation of radical industrial and educational sociologists at German universities. After 1968, both became ministers of culture and initiated radical participatory reforms in the school and university systems of the SPD-governed states, von Oertzen in Lower Saxony and von Friedeburg in Hesse.

Responding to Liberal and New Left Ideas from the United States

After returning from the United States, I served as an editor of neue kritik, the national magazine of German SDS, published in Frankfurt. I wrote a series of comprehensive articles on the United States for the journal, with special attention to the peace and civil rights movements and to the changes and problems of postwar American capitalism.[24] These articles helped initiate discussions that, as historian Martin Klimke has put it, extended the “range and intensity of the American influence on the German SDS.”[25]

Even before my US sojourn, Anglo-Saxon developments were important to us. In 1961, the journal published a review of Thompson’s Out of Apathy by Gerhard Brandt of the Frankfurt Institute.[26] Those New Left essays responded to new challenges that had rendered the Old Left helpless: the astonishing revival of capitalism and conservatism after 1945 and the improvements of working-class living standards, developments suggesting to some observers that capitalism now could provide endless growth and a material and mental integration of the working class into petty bourgeois or consumerist schemes. Contrary to that view, the Out of Apathy authors maintained that there were still contradictions in capitalism and conflicts between classes but that these could only be grasped by developing an undogmatic understanding of Marx and openness to what could be learned about Keynesian economics and the everyday culture of the working class.

Thus we paid attention to left-leaning Keynesian analyses of changes in capitalism since the Great Depression and New Deal. Especially important were John Kenneth Galbraith’s studies of American capitalism, especially his views on the countervailing power of labor unions and the contradiction between private affluence and public-sector poverty. I contributed to the discussion and criticism of Galbraith in a broad analysis of the new phase of capitalist development, in light of new debates on the American left.[27]

In this respect, C. Wright Mills—whose books were first published in German in 1962 and 1963—had a great influence on many of us.[28] The Sociological Imagination was enthusiastically welcomed by younger sociologists, who endorsed Mills’s criticism of both the positivist empiricism identified with Columbia University’s Paul Lazarsfeld and the grand sociological theorizing of Harvard’s Talcott Parsons. We also welcomed Mills’s The Power Elite, which struck us as a new, sophisticated way of explaining how a contemporary ruling class exercises power. Although we doubted Mills’s claim that intellectuals were now a prime agent of social change, we did not question Mills’s idea that a Keynesian war economy had helped generate a new ruling elite composed of an alliance of big corporations, the state apparatus, and the military, an uneasy constellation that offered the world an irresponsible risk of nuclear war. Nor did we question his assessment of widespread apathy toward politics.

Consequently, my articles on the American scene described the apparent stabilization of postwar capitalism by Keynesian state intervention (combined with rising armament and partly welfare expenditures) and the rise of mass consumption (connected with a “colonization” of everyday life by capitalism) and showed that this stabilization was not definite but produced new risks, instabilities, and social conflicts. My critique was summed up with a Millsian flourish: “The countervailing powers are like hyenas fighting for prey. The hegemony of the power elite remains untouched.”[29] The discussions were continued in Frankfurt, especially in a seminar held in 1964–65 by Jürgen Habermas, who was generally very interested in efforts to import left-wing American scholarship to Frankfurt.

We differed with Mills, however, because we did not see all this as a one-dimensional and irresistible tendency in either America or Europe. Like the authors of Out of Apathy, we insisted that capitalism was still contradictory and that participative action on the part of the working classes was still a possibility. For us, the role of critical intellectuals in the media and in politics was not to replace the working classes but to help them to understand that their private grievances had political causes—a formula borrowed from Mills himself.

We revisited this question in 1964, when Herbert Marcuse visited from the United States to present his new book One-Dimensional Man. At a meeting with the Frankfurt SDS group, Marcuse passionately attacked our position and especially a paper of mine that argued there was still a potential of socialist change within the working classes. Considering my position on a surrender to the right-wing leadership of a reformist social democracy, Marcuse insisted that radical change could only come from those who were oppressed by or excluded from the benefits of the affluent society, such as racial minorities and colonial subjects.

Thus we found ourselves in conflict with someone we had earlier considered our mentor (particularly for his philosophical writings on Marx). In our view Marcuse may have been influenced unduly by the disappointing recent history of trade unionism in the United States. He was not at all familiar with the new situation in Europe, where space seemed to be opening up for a social and political mobilization of the working classes. Marcuse would gain a certain influence later in the decade of the 1960s, especially among movement activists a half-generation younger than us, whose hopes for a revolutionary transformation were linked to Third World insurgencies and the awakening of racial and ethnic minorities still marginalized in the nations of the First World.

Nonetheless, the working-class-oriented New Left remained strong in Germany and the rest of Western Europe. In contrast to both Marcuse and the old, social-democratic left, we argued that economic immiseration was hardly the only injustice facing the working class, because the experience of social injustice in all its dimensions, not only the economic but also the moral and the political, was decisive in shaping consciousness. For this approach, our discussions of Anglo-Saxon scholarship again became influential, especially monumental works by E. P. Thompson and Barrington Moore. At the same time, there was substantial European research on structural change within the working class, showing that the “affluent workers” and the growing groups of technical experts and white collar workers did not represent an end of class but a new stage of class society, in which institutionalized conflicts and a more rational understanding of class interests became important. Consequently, militant conflicts might still take place.

The Effect of American Direct Actionism in Splitting the German Student Left

Movement politics in the United States had an enormous impact on the young left in Germany and helped precipitate a split in our organization from top to bottom. Until 1965, German SDS had been an explosive but unified mixture of changing and controversial orientations, many connected with the new international movements. The big groups in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Göttingen were now the leaders of a new majority that wanted to break free from small intellectual ghettoes and bureaucratic organizational forms in order to explore a new antiauthoritarian and participatory movement strategy. I was asked to formulate these basic principles for the SDS majority in an article for neue kritik. It appeared in June 1965, in the midst of ardent debates that preceded the national SDS conference of that year. It was titled “The Strategy of Direct Action.”[30] It developed the perspective that the still prevailing apathy of the popular majority toward politics could not be overcome by propagating, from above, abstract intellectual ideas or doctrines. The left could only leave its ghetto when it tried to mobilize people by raising issues germane to their everyday experiences and grievances. To gain moral support and to carry the cause into politics, nonviolence and grassroots democratic participation would be the best approach.

The essay developed a sociological approach based on a narrative analysis of the US demonstrations, marches, and participatory movements up to spring 1965. The American SDS, now growing rapidly, seemed to offer the German New Left an example of democratic and emancipatory mobilization. Of course, in Germany and Great Britain, nonviolent protests such as the Easter marches against nuclear armaments had not been unknown. But in the United States, protest movements seemed fresh and new, if only because they attracted a much greater number of participants and went beyond an audience of those who were already convinced.

My neue kritik article reported on three kinds of new, “direct” actions in the United States. First, the civil rights movement had made massive civil disobedience a powerful weapon, initially in the Montgomery bus boycott, then in the lunch counter sit-ins, and finally in the effort to register black voters in the South. Second, I described how issues of poverty, slum housing, poor schools, and political powerlessness in the urban North were brought to public attention when SDS began its community organizing work, sometimes involving rent boycotts, in working-class and African American ghettos of the North. A third leap forward involved the incorporation of civil rights methods into the universities. In February 1965, Günter Amendt had already reported on the Berkeley Free Speech movement, which mobilized thousands of students and won support from part of the liberal public. In my article on direct action, I reported a further breakthrough: the American peace movement within the universities—particularly, the invention of the antiwar teach-in at the University of Michigan. With the help of student radio stations all over the United States, the Ann Arbor initiative had caused an avalanche of coordinated teach-ins on America’s foreign policy at universities in thirty-five states.

My advocacy of direct participatory action evoked enormous controversy inside German SDS. The organization polarized into two coalitions or camps. These were the “Traditionalists,” who had much support in Marburg, led by SDS national chairman Helmut Schauer; and the “Anti-Authoritarians,” whose leadership came from the Frankfurt, Berlin, and Göttingen student groups. Schauer saw himself as a traditional socialist and a Marxist who wanted SDS to form a set of alliances with parties, unions, and other organizations. At the SDS national convention in October 1965, our Frankfurt group therefore broke with the traditionalists and made a majority coalition with the Berlin group, which had turned to the antiauthoritarian left by admitting Rudi Dutschke and his friends to membership. We also allied with a Munich group whose members were influenced by the provocative Situationist International. Situationist confrontations and occupations would soon create a stir in Berlin. But as this coalition could not yet present a candidate for the German SDS presidency, Schauer was reelected and used his term to defend socialist traditionalism (in its noncommunist strain, of course) starting from the view that capitalism was bound to collapse in a crisis and that it was an illusion to appeal to the left-liberal mainstream. Instead, SDS, as the only socialist organization in Germany, should mobilize and expand its membership by developing a program and an organizational nucleus with a clear socialist outlook. This implied that in the end, an economic crisis would enable a socialist party to win a parliamentary majority and thereby introduce socialist change by political measures from above.

This seemed to me a battle plan taken right out of the nineteenth century. It reproduced the German Old Left socialist tradition, which differed markedly from what I had seen at Port Huron, where a flexible combination of Marxism, Keynesianism, and John Dewey’s pragmatism—together comprising a participatory and humanist tradition—became the basis for a set of principles deployed not as a dogmatic blueprint but heuristically (i.e., as the tools for a fresh experience- and data-based analysis of the situation). At the 1966 national convention of German SDS, Schauer was replaced by Reimut Reiche, a young Frankfurt activist who had analyzed the social-structural dimensions of the Berkeley and Berlin student revolts in neue kritik. His election as chairman signaled a fundamental change away from programs and parties and toward movements and participation. Now the antiauthoritarian majority transformed SDS into a real social movement with all sorts of public actions and campaigns.

In Frankfurt we developed two sorts of campaigns that soon spread all over the country. On the one hand, we were highly active in support of anti-imperialist and anticolonial movements in the Third World, especially in terms of our opposition to the US war in Vietnam. The other dimension was the everyday experience of the younger generation to which our actions were directed. German SDS activists founded the first antiauthoritarian kindergartens and supported new movements of high school students and of apprentices in their opposition to authoritarian structures and conservative sexual morals. Books on sexual liberation by Günter Amendt and Reimut Reiche sold many hundreds of thousands of copies. Activists conducted sit-ins in the universities and on tramway rails, occupied empty houses as part of the squatter’s movement, and welcomed the rise of late 1960s feminism, including those protests directed against male leaders of SDS. From Berlin came the more spectacular political actions. Very soon, the protests against the shah of Iran and against America’s war in Vietnam made the German student movement a mass phenomenon, one that would challenge the established social and political powers until at least the 1980s and even then remained a force that resisted the neoliberal rollback in the decades that followed.

It should be kept in mind that these enormous escalations of participatory movements of all kinds cannot be explained as the mere product of voluntaristic group activism. Our earlier experience as activists had taught us modesty. The ingredients for a radical oppositional movement—the ideas and potential leaders—were present in Germany from 1960 on, but they did not get a wider hearing until after 1965. That change depended on the experience of the younger generation, mediated through changes taking place in the fundamental structure of society. Even the spectacular student rebellions of the late 1960s were only the tip of a huge iceberg, consisting of radical changes in everyday culture, particularly a youth culture that was increasingly antiauthoritarian, participatory, and solidaristic. For us, this change of everyday culture, the end of the economies of scarcity, the potential for the emancipation and development of all individuals was also a product of capitalism in its contradictions. The young generation that the Port Huron Statement spoke for—whether political or not and whether intellectual or working class—had the feeling that the old rules of social order and discipline and hierarchy were outdated. This impetus of youth culture was largely supported by new developments of rock music, especially the Beatles. In all this, there was an opening of social space that translated into politics, too. You could feel this every day when you opened the papers: you saw that things became possible that had been unthinkable before.

This change toward participation also included the working classes as productive forces (i.e., the culture at work). The waves of spontaneous movements for workers’ participation that accompanied the new movements until the mid-1970s can also be explained by this deeper structural change. Capitalism needed a better educated labor force, which implied higher competences and more autonomy at work. Industrial workers as well as the growing number of service employees had experienced the rising possibilities of participation in everyday culture and politics; they wanted the same to be realized at work.

Opening the Political Field for Participatory Change: The Making of a New Political Camp in Germany

In Germany, these social changes coincided with a remarkable political opening for the left. Here we find a striking contrast to the experience of the United States. When reading the historical accounts of the 1960s by Todd Gitlin, Dick Flacks, and Tom Hayden, I was again shocked by the series of demoralizing political setbacks that took place during that decade.[31] These started with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the subsequent refusal of the Democratic Party to incorporate the political wing of the civil rights movement into its structure, and the progressive entanglement of Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War. In 1968, hope was again destroyed when Robert Kennedy was shot just a few months after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. As the Democratic Party failed to mobilize its progressive potential, a Republican, Richard Nixon, became president. And this came only one year after Ronald Reagan, who was to crush the student movement at Berkeley, was elected governor in California.

Developments in Germany contrasted sharply with this demoralizing sequence of setbacks in the United States. Until the 1970s or even the 1980s, many authoritarian initiatives could be turned into public mobilizations that significantly enlarged the ground for alternative politics. This pattern appeared first in 1962, when the conservative government’s arrest of editors at the liberal weekly Der Spiegel—charging them with treason for investigative reporting on security issues—provoked an outcry that led to an expansion of civil liberties and a shift away from the Federal Republic’s authoritarian political culture. Consequently, in October 1963, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was forced to resign. With him fell the architect and symbol of authoritarian conservatism. While social space would soon be closed for the American movements, it opened in Germany.

Similarly, in 1967, when a police bullet killed a student protester, Benno Ohnesorg, an avalanche of direct student and civic protest actions followed; the same pattern recurred in spring 1968 when the Berlin student leader Rudi Dutschke was shot and gravely injured. The Springer press, fount of reactionary attacks on the radical student movement, was confronted with huge demonstrations. In contrast to the right-wing backlash in the United States following the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Germany saw relatively few government reprisals, legal or political. Instead, the German movements could translate into new political majorities in regional elections and especially in Willy Brandt’s electoral win in 1969 and his more sweeping victory in 1972.

How had this been possible? Of course, the burning memory of the incredible crimes in Germany’s Nazi past inhibited a return of right-wing extremist politics in West Germany. Moreover, the new conservatism designed by Adenauer, though gradual and incremental, had done much to replace German nationalism with the project of European integration, while at the same time taming a capitalist economy through the construction of a robust, though conservative, welfare state offering the working class a set of participatory rights in industry governance.

This political context had helped open a space for New Left action in Germany. Because there was not such a sustained and successful backlash from the right or from the conservative center, the strivings of the social movements could be increasingly translated into influence in democratic institutions. Thus did movement activists become increasingly well organized in the left-wing youth section of the SPD, the Young Socialists or so-called Jusos. They determinedly pursued antiauthoritarian, participatory politics and successfully began to conquer many sections of the party. This had started in Frankfurt already very early, in 1961, when the Jusos had helped elect Hans Matthöfer to the Bundestag. This policy accelerated from the mid-1960s on. It resulted in the growth of a strong, mainly Juso-based left wing in the SPD and in the Social Democratic factions of the federal and state parliaments. This was combined with a successful mobilization of the liberal intelligentsia—journalists, writers, actors, film makers, and so on—as C. Wright Mills had envisaged.

This joint liberal and left mobilization was the precondition for Willy Brandt’s electoral victories, which many of us thought paralleled the effect of Kennedy’s 1960 election in symbolizing an opening to the left. The Brandt years brought a remarkable expansion of welfare state and civil rights politics. Hans Matthöfer stuck to his antifascist and participatory convictions even when he became a member of the Brandt and Schmidt SPD governments. Actively supporting the resistance against Franco’s fascist regime in Spain, he was honored with the nickname the “Deputy of Barcelona.” In 1973, when he was parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Economic Cooperation, he publicly attacked the military putschists of Chile as a “gang of murderers”—and helped many people get out of Chile with the assistance of the German embassy. In 1974, he became minister of research and technology, launching a huge research program on the “humanization of work.”

Not unlike the Swedish developments of that time, the early 1970s in West Germany also translated many movement aims into legislation, ending legal discrimination of women and the criminalization of homosexuality and of abortion; enlarging the participatory rights of pupils, apprentices, and students; expanding and opening the schools and universities for the popular classes; raising welfare state benefits; and enlarging the rights of employees at their work places. But there were also politics of containment. Already under Brandt, measures were taken to keep so-called extremists out of educational institutions.

After Brandt’s resignation, the governments of the right-wing Social Democratic chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, from 1974 to 1982 systematically continued these containment politics. Students’ and employees’ rights to participate in the self-government of universities were cancelled. Also, the Mitbestimmungsgesetz of 1976 was a brake and containment on employees’ participation in management. The right-wing majority of the SPD defended the construction of nuclear power plants and, in the late 1970s, cooperated with the United States when highly controversial plans were made to station medium-range nuclear missiles on German soil.

As a consequence, the left and liberal forces that had brought Brandt to power now lost influence in the political parties—even though they had gained ground in the growing social movements, in the alternative youth cultures, in liberal public opinion, and in the mass media. By this time, the organized student left had broken apart. Several distinct currents within German SDS differed on how to respond to the extremely contradictory scene of 1968: defeats in France and Czechoslovakia that showed the strength of “the establishment,” a still-growing mass support for student movements and spontaneous strikes, and electoral victories for reformist social democratic parties. In 1971 German SDS formally dissolved. The movement’s main current—focused in the new organization, the Socialist Bureau (SB)—consisted of left-wing reformism, Third World internationalism, and emancipatory antiauthoritarianism, though it also included smaller groups that did not survive the 1970s, such as the Situationists. Other currents emerged in the form of Maoist fundamentalism as well as a small, increasingly isolated minority that engaged in underground terrorist activities.

Although the German left was deeply divided in the 1970s, it was not defeated or marginalized. Because of its New Left principles—its commitment to participatory democracy and nonviolence—the SB found rising general support for its programs. This political tendency joined forces with the left-liberal mainstream when, after the 1973 oil crisis, rising civic mobilizations responded to the ecological and social risks of modernization and growth, recurring unemployment, insufficient civic rights and participation, urban and infrastructural problems, and nuclear armament and energy. And, of course, with its participatory principles, the SB current also constituted an attractive alternative to the Maoists and the terrorist cells. When, after 1977, those groups collapsed, the SB current gained an uncontested hegemony on the left. From 1979 to the early 1980s, a huge peace, intercultural, antinuclear, and ecological movement arose, often linked to feminism and a “second youth revolt.” It was widely supported by the growing left currents in the churches, in the labor unions, and among liberal opinion leaders.

This progress provoked an escalation of the existing conflicts between the different wings inside the established political parties. In these confrontations, the movement activists began to form their own political camp, separated by deep cleavages from the old party majorities. Since 1980, they began to form a separate “green” party, which soon commanded a stable electorate between 5 and 10 percent of the voters. Many movement sympathizers also remained inside the old parties, forming strong “green” wings, especially within the SPD. Simultaneously, civic participation was professionalized and institutionalized. Acceptance by the left part of the mainstream implied an increase of political realism, of institutionalization, and of adapting utopian idealism to practical everyday ways of life.

This progress, however, also provoked more countermobilizations from the right, encouraged by the electoral victories of Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the United States. The Free Democratic Party (FDP) became the spearhead of neoliberalism in Germany. In 1982, it left the government of Helmut Schmidt to form a majority government with the Christian Democrats (CDU), headed by Helmut Kohl until 1998. Kohl promised “a spiritual and moral turn.” But as in the decades before, German development again took a course that differed markedly from the British and US developments. As in Britain and the United States, welfare state securities were whittled down, but this occurred at a much slower pace due to the resistance of the labor unions, the labor left wing, and voters of the CDU itself. A return to authoritarian politics (in the fields of gender, immigration, civil rights, democratic participation, ecology, and foreign politics) was limited by strong counterpressures from the “Greens” and the “green” wings in all political camps.

The scales were tipped only gradually toward the neoliberal side, but that tilt was accentuated through the 1990s. After 1989, the external confrontations of the Cold War, which had in fact given the German New Left much of its appeal as an alternative, were replaced by a different political constellation in which any alternative to global capitalism appeared to be absent. For a time a neoliberal current proved near hegemonic. But much remained of the democratic culture generated by the participatory New Left in the 1960s: with its large base, that current retained its role as one factor among a plurality of camps.