Introductory Note: This document represents the results of several
months of writing and discussion among the membership, a draft paper,
and revision by the Students for a Democratic Society national
convention meeting in \cf2 Port Huron\cf0 , Michigan, June 11-15, 1962. It is
represented as a document with which SDS officially identifies, but also
as a living document open to change with our times and experiences. It
is a beginning: in our own debate and education, in our dialogue with
society.
published and distributed by Students for a Democratic Society 112
East 19 Street New York 3, New York GRamercy 3-2181
INTRODUCTION: AGENDA FOR A GENERATION
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort,
housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we
inherit.
When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest
country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least
scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we
thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world.
Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the
people -- these American values we found good, principles by which we
could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.
As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling
to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human
degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry,
compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing
fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought
awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract
"others" we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at
any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all
other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate
and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as
individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.
While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled
our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see
complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The
declaration "all men are created equal . . . rang hollow before the
facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The
proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its
economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.
We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear
energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nationstates
seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that
incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is
destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still
tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind
suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous
abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty
years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of
international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping
of the earth's physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs
revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals
ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its
democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than "of, by, and for
the people."
Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only
did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was
discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as
the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era. The
worldwide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and imperialism,
the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the menace of war,
overpopulation, international disorder, supertechnology -- these trends
were testing the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy and freedom
and our abilities to visualize their application to a world in upheaval.
Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in
the experiment with living. But we are a minority -- the vast majority
of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world
as eternally-functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding
paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our
society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath
the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that
America will "muddle through", beneath the stagnation of those who have
closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there
simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion
not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the
press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of
the thought that at any moment things might thrust out of control. They
fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible
framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans,
all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual
sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize
for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the
minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly
dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus
limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved
society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case
for further change.
Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst
prosperity -- but might it not better be called a glaze above deeplyfelt
anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these
anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not
as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the
present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the
school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to
this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we
direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives
to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is
a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we
hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer this document of our
convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing
the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort
rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining
determining influence over his circumstances of life.
Values
Making values explicit -- an initial task in establishing alternatives -
Unlike youth in other countries we are used to moral leadership being
exercised and moral dimensions being clarified by our elders. But
today, for us, not even the liberal and socialist preachments of the
past seem adequate to the forms of the present. Consider the old
slogans; Capitalism Cannot Reform Itself, United Front Against Fascism,
General Strike, All Out on May Day. Or, more recently, No Cooperation
with Commies and Fellow Travellers, Ideologies Are Exhausted,
Bipartisanship, No Utopias. These are incomplete, and there are few new
prophets. It has been said that our liberal and socialist predecessors
were plagued by vision without program, while our own generation is
plagued by program without vision. All around us there is astute grasp
of method, technique -- the committee, the ad hoc group, the lobbyist,
that hard and soft sell, the make, the projected image -- but, if
pressed critically, such expertise is incompetent to explain its
implicit ideals. It is highly fashionable to identify oneself by old
categories, or by naming a respected political figure, or by explaining
"how we would vote" on various issues.
Theoretic chaos has replaced the idealistic thinking of old -- and,
unable to reconstitute theoretic order, men have condemned idealism
itself. Doubt has replaced hopefulness -- and men act out a defeatism
that is labeled realistic. The decline of utopia and hope is in fact
one of the defining features of social life today. The reasons are
various: the dreams of the older left were perverted by Stalinism and
never recreated; the congressional stalemate makes men narrow their view
of the possible; the specialization of human activity leaves little room
for sweeping thought; the horrors of the twentieth century, symbolized
in the gas-ovens and concentration camps and atom bombs, have blasted
hopefulness. To be idealistic is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded.
To have no serious aspirations, on the contrary, is to be "toughminded".
In suggesting social goals and values, therefore, we are aware of
entering a sphere of some disrepute. Perhaps matured by the past, we
have no sure formulas, no closed theories -- but that does not mean
values are beyond discussion and tentative determination. A first task
of any social movement is to convenience people that the search for
orienting theories and the creation of human values is complex but
worthwhile. We are aware that to avoid platitudes we must analyze the
concrete conditions of social order. But to direct such an analysis we
must use the guideposts of basic principles. Our own social values
involve conceptions of human beings, human relationships, and social
systems.
We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled
capacities for reason, freedom, and love. In affirming these principles
we are aware of countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in
the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that
he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs. We oppose the
depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things --
if anything, the brutalities of the twentieth century teach that means
and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to "posterity"
cannot justify the mutilations of the present. We oppose, too, the
doctrine of human incompetence because it rests essentially on the
modern fact that men have been "competently" manipulated into
incompetence -- we see little reason why men cannot meet with increasing
skill the complexities and responsibilities of their situation, if
society is organized not for minority, but for majority, participation
in decision-making.
Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction,
self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard
as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for
violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and
society should be human independence: a concern not with image of
popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally
authentic: a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of
powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one
which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full,
spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily
unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces
problems which are troubling and unresolved: one with an intuitive
awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and
willingness to learn.
This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism -- the
object is not to have one's way so much as it is to have a way that is
one's own. Nor do we deify man -- we merely have faith in his
potential.
Human relationships should involve fraternity and honesty. Human
interdependence is contemporary fact; human brotherhood must be willed
however, as a condition of future survival and as the most appropriate
form of social relations. Personal links between man and man are
needed, especially to go beyond the partial and fragmentary bonds of
function that bind men only as worker to worker, employer to employee,
teacher to student, American to Russian.
Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between
man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by
better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a
love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.
As the individualism we affirm is not egoism, the selflessness we affirm
is not self-elimination. On the contrary, we believe in generosity of a
kind that imprints one's unique individual qualities in the relation to
other men, and to all human activity. Further, to dislike isolation is
not to favor the abolition of privacy; the latter differs from isolation
in that it occurs or is abolished according to individual will.
Finally, we would replace power and personal uniqueness rooted in
possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in
love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.
As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of
individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the
individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and
direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage
independence in men and provide the media for their common
participation.
In a participatory democracy, the political life would be based in several root principles:
The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles:
Like the political and economic ones, major social institutions --
cultural, education, rehabilitative, and others -- should be generally
organized with the well-being and dignity of man as the essential
measure of success.
In social change or interchange, we find violence to be abhorrent
because it requires generally the transformation of the target, be it a
human being or a community of people, into a depersonalized object of
hate. It is imperative that the means of violence be abolished and the
institutions -- local, national, international -- that encourage
nonviolence as a condition of conflict be developed.
These are our central values, in skeletal form. It remains vital to
understand their denial or attainment in the context of the modern
world.
The Students
In the last few years, thousands of American students demonstrated that
they at least felt the urgency of the times. They moved actively and
directly against racial injustices, the threat of war, violations of
individual rights of conscience and, less frequently, against economic
manipulation. They succeeded in restoring a small measure of
controversy to the campuses after the stillness of the McCarthy period.
They succeeded, too, in gaining some concessions from the people and
institutions they opposed, especially in the fight against racial
bigotry.
The significance of these scattered movements lies not in their success
or failure in gaining objectives -- at least not yet. Nor does the
significance lie in the intellectual "competence" or "maturity" of the
students involved -- as some pedantic elders allege. The significance
is in the fact the students are breaking the crust of apathy and
overcoming the inner alienation that remain the defining characteristics
of American college life.
If student movements for change are rarities still on the campus scene,
what is commonplace there? The real campus, the familiar campus, is a
place of private people, engaged in their notorious "inner emigration."
It is a place of commitment to business-as-usual, getting ahead, playing
it cool. It is a place of mass affirmation of the Twist, but mass
reluctance toward the controversial public stance. Rules are accepted
as "inevitable", bureaucracy as "just circumstances", irrelevance as
"scholarship", selflessness as "martyrdom", politics as "just another
way to make people, and an unprofitable one, too."
Almost no students value activity as a citizen. Passive in public, they
are hardly more idealistic in arranging their private lives: Gallup
concludes they will settle for "low success, and won't risk high
failure." There is not much willingness to take risks (not even in
business), no setting of dangerous goals, no real conception of personal
identity except one manufactured in the image of others, no real urge
for personal fulfillment except to be almost as successful as the very
successful people. Attention is being paid to social status (the
quality of shirt collars, meeting people, getting wives or husbands,
making solid contacts for later on); much too, is paid to academic
status (grades, honors, the med school rat-race). But neglected
generally is real intellectual status, the personal cultivation of the
mind.
"Students don't even give a damn about the apathy," one has said.
Apathy toward apathy begets a privately-constructed universe, a place of
systematic study schedules, two nights each week for beer, a girl or
two, and early marriage; a framework infused with personality, warmth,
and under control, no matter how unsatisfying otherwise.
Under these conditions university life loses all relevance to some.
Four hundred thousand of our classmates leave college every year.
But apathy is not simply an attitude; it is a product of social
institutions, and of the structure and organization of higher education
itself. The extracurricular life is ordered according to in loco
parentis theory, which ratifies the Administration as the moral guardian
of the young. The accompanying "let's pretend" theory of student
extracurricular affairs validates student government as a training
center for those who want to spend their lives in political pretense,
and discourages initiative from more articulate, honest, and sensitive
students. The bounds and style of controversy are delimited before
controversy begins. The university "prepares" the student for
"citizenship" through perpetual rehearsals and, usually, through
emasculation of what creative spirit there is in the individual.
The academic life contains reinforcing counterparts to the way in which
extracurricular life is organized. The academic world is founded in a
teacher-student relation analogous to the parent-child relation which
characterizes in loco parentis. Further, academia includes a radical
separation of student from the material of study. That which is
studied, the social reality, is "objectified" to sterility, dividing the
student from life -- just as he is restrained in active involvement by
the deans controlling student government. The specialization of
function and knowledge, admittedly necessary to our complex
technological and social structure, has produced and exaggerated
compartmentalization of study and understanding. This has contributed
to: an overly parochial view, by faculty, of the role of its research
and scholarship; a discontinuous and truncated understanding, by
students, of the surrounding social order; a loss of personal
attachment, by nearly all, to the worth of study as a humanistic
enterprise.
There is, finally, the cumbersome academic bureaucracy extending
throughout the academic as well as extracurricular structures,
contributing to the sense of outer complexity and inner powerlessness
that transforms so many students from honest searching to ratification
of convention and, worse, to a numbness of present and future
catastrophes. The size and financing systems of the university enhance
the permanent trusteeship of the administrative bureaucracy, their power
leading to a shift to the value standards of business and administrative
mentality within the university. Huge foundations and other private
financial interests shape under-financed colleges and universities, not
only making them more commercial, but less disposed to diagnose society
critically, less open to dissent. Many social and physical scientists,
neglecting the liberating heritage of higher learning, develop "human
relations" or morale-producing" techniques for the corporate economy,
while others exercise their intellectual skills to accelerate the arms
race.
Tragically, the university could serve as a significant source of social
criticism and an initiator of new modes and molders of attitudes. But
the actual intellectual effect of the college experience is hardly
distinguishable from that of any other communications channel -- say, a
television set -- passing on the stock truths of the day. Students
leave college somewhat more "tolerant" than when they arrived, but
basically unchallenged in their values and political orientations. With
administrators ordering the institutions, and faculty the curriculum,
the student learns by his isolation to accept elite rule within the
university, which prepares him to accept later forms of minority
control. The real function of the educational system -- as opposed to
its more rhetorical function of "searching for truth" -- is to impart
the key information and styles that will help the student get by,
modestly but comfortably, in the big society beyond.
The Society Beyond
Look beyond the campus, to America itself. That student life is more
intellectual, and perhaps more comfortable, does not obscure the fact
that the fundamental qualities of life on the campus reflect the habits
of society at large. The fraternity president is seen at the junior
manager levels; the sorority queen has gone to Grosse Pointe: the
serious poet burns for a place, any place, or work; the once-serious and
never serious poets work at the advertising agencies. The desperation
of people threatened by forces about which they know little and of which
they can say less; the cheerful emptiness of people "giving up" all hope
of changing things; the faceless ones polled by Gallup who listed
"international affairs" fourteenth on their list of "problems" but who
also expected thermonuclear war in the next few years: in these and
other forms, Americans are in withdrawal from public life, from any
collective effort at directing their own affairs.
Some regard this national doldrums as a sign of healthy approval of the
established order -- but is it approval by consent or manipulated
acquiescence? Others declare that the people are withdrawn because
compelling issues are fast disappearing -- perhaps there are fewer
breadlines in America, but is Jim Crow gone, is there enough work and
work more fulfilling, is world war a diminishing threat, and what of the
revolutionary new peoples? Still others think the national quietude is
a necessary consequence of the need for elites to resolve complex and
specialized problems of modern industrial society -- but, then, why
should business elites help decide foreign policy, and who controls the
elites anyway, and are they solving mankind's problems? Others,
finally, shrug knowingly and announce that full democracy never worked
anywhere in the past -- but why lump qualitatively different
civilizations together, and how can a social order work well if its best
thinkers are skeptics, and is man really doomed forever to the
domination of today?
There are no convincing apologies for the contemporary malaise. While
the world tumbles toward the final war, while men in other nations are
trying desperately to alter events, while the very future qua future is
uncertain -- America is without community, impulse, without the inner
momentum necessary for an age when societies cannot successfully
perpetuate themselves by their military weapons, when democracy must be
viable because of its quality of life, not its quantity of rockets.
The apathy here is, first subjective -- the felt powerlessness of
ordinary people, the resignation before the enormity of events. But
subjective apathy is encouraged by the objective American situation --
the actual structural separation of people from power, from relevant
knowledge, from pinnacles of decision-making. Just as the university
influences the student way of life, so do major social institutions
create the circumstances in which the isolated citizen will try
hopelessly to understand his world and himself.
The very isolation of the individual -- from power and community and
ability to aspire -- means the rise of a democracy without publics.
With the great mass of people structurally remote and psychologically
hesitant with respect to democratic institutions, those institutions
themselves attenuate and become, in the fashion of the vicious circle,
progressively less accessible to those few who aspire to serious
participation in social affairs. The vital democratic connection
between community and leadership, between the mass and the several
elites, has been so wrenched and perverted that disastrous policies go
unchallenged time and again.
Politics without Publics
The American political system is not the democratic model of which its
glorifiers speak. In actuality it frustrates democracy by confusing the
individual citizen, paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating the
irresponsible power of military and business interests.
A crucial feature of the political apparatus in America is that greater
differences are harbored within each major party than the differences
existing between them. Instead of two parties presenting distinctive
and significant differences of approach, what dominates the system if a
natural interlocking of Democrats from Southern states with the more
conservative elements of the Republican party. This arrangement of
forces is blessed by the seniority system of Congress which guarantees
congressional committee domination by conservatives -- ten of 17
committees in the Senate and 13 of 21 in House of Representatives are
chaired currently by Dixiecrats.
The party overlap, however, is not the only structural antagonist of
democracy in politics. First, the localized nature of the party system
does not encourage discussion of national and international issues:
thus problems are not raised by and for people, and political
representatives usually are unfettered from any responsibilities to the
general public except those regarding parochial matters. Second, whole
constituencies are divested of the full political power they might have:
many Negroes in the South are prevented from voting, migrant workers are
disenfranchised by various residence requirements, some urban and
suburban dwellers are victimized by gerrymandering, and poor people are
too often without the power to obtain political representation. Third,
the focus of political attention is significantly distorted by the
enormous lobby force, composed predominantly of business interests,
spending hundreds of millions each year in an attempt to conform facts
about productivity, agriculture, defense, and social services, to the
wants of private economic groupings.
What emerges from the party contradictions and insulation of privatelyheld
power is the organized political stalemate: calcification
dominates flexibility as the principle of parliamentary organization,
frustration is the expectancy of legislators intending liberal reform,
and Congress becomes less and less central to national decision-making,
especially in the area of foreign policy. In this context, confusion
and blurring is built into the formulation of issues, long-range
priorities are not discussed in the rational manner needed for policymaking,
the politics of personality and "image" become a more important
mechanism than the construction of issues in a way that affords each
voter a challenging and real option. The American voter is buffeted
from all directions by pseudo-problems, by the structurally-initiated
sense that nothing political is subject to human mastery. Worried by
his mundane problems which never get solved, but constrained by the
common belief that politics is an agonizingly slow accommodation of
views, he quits all pretense of bothering.
A most alarming fact is that few, if any, politicians are calling for
changes in these conditions. Only a handful even are calling on the
President to "live up to" platform pledges; no one is demanding
structural changes, such as the shuttling of Southern Democrats out of
the Democratic Party. Rather than protesting the state of politics,
most politicians are reinforcing and aggravating that state. While in
practice they rig public opinion to suit their own interests, in word
and ritual they enshrine "the sovereign public" and call for more and
more letters. Their speeches and campaign actions are banal, based on a
degrading conception of what people want to hear. They respond not to
dialogue, but to pressure: and knowing this, the ordinary citizen sees
even greater inclination to shun the political sphere. The politicians
is usually a trumpeter to "citizenship" and "service to the nation", but
since he is unwilling to seriously rearrange power relationships, his
trumpetings only increase apathy by creating no outlets. Much of the
time the call to "service" is justified not in idealistic terms, but in
the crasser terms of "defending the free world from communism" -- thus
making future idealistic impulses harder to justify in anything but Cold
War terms.
In such a setting of status quo politics, where most if not all
government activity is rationalized in Cold War anti-communist terms, it
is somewhat natural that discontented, super-patriotic groups would
emerge through political channels and explain their ultra-conservatism
as the best means of Victory over Communism. They have become a
politically influential force within the Republican Party, at a national
level through Senator Goldwater, and at a local level through their
important social and economic roles. Their political views are defined
generally as the opposite of the supposed views of communists: complete
individual freedom in the economic sphere, non-participation by the
government in the machinery of production. But actually "anticommunism"
becomes an umbrella by which to protest liberalism,
internationalism, welfarism, the active civil rights and labor
movements. It is to the disgrace of the United States that such a
movement should become a prominent kind of public participation in the
modern world -- but, ironically, it is somewhat to the interests of the
United States that such a movement should be a public constituency
pointed toward realignment of the political parties, demanding a
conservative Republican Party in the South and an exclusion of the
"leftist" elements of the national GOP.
The Economy
American capitalism today advertises itself as the Welfare State. Many
of us comfortably expect pensions, medical care, unemployment
compensation, and other social services in our lifetimes. Even with
one-fourth of our productive capacity unused, the majority of Americans
are living in relative comfort -- although their nagging incentive to
"keep up" makes them continually dissatisfied with their possessions.
In many places, unrestrained bosses, uncontrolled machines, and
sweatshop conditions have been reformed or abolished and suffering
tremendously relieved. But in spite of the benign yet obscuring effects
of the New Deal reforms and the reassuring phrases of government
economists and politicians, the paradoxes and myths of the economy are
sufficient to irritate our complacency and reveal to us some essential
causes of the American malaise.
We live amidst a national celebration of economic prosperity while
poverty and deprivation remain an unbreakable way of life for millions
in the "affluent society", including many of our own generation. We
hear glib reference to the "welfare state", "free enterprise", and
"shareholder's democracy" while military defense is the main item of
"public" spending and obvious oligopoly and other forms of minority rule
defy real individual initiative or popular control. Work, too, is often
unfulfilling and victimizing, accepted as a channel to status or plenty,
if not a way to pay the bills, rarely as a means of understanding and
controlling self and events. In work and leisure the individual is
regulated as part of the system, a consuming unit, bombarded by hardsell
soft-sell, lies and semi-true appeals and his basest drives. He is
always told what he is supposed to enjoy while being told, too, that he
is a "free" man because of "free enterprise."
The Remote Control Economy. We are subject to a remote control economy,
which excludes the mass of individual "units" -- the people -- from
basic decisions affecting the nature and organization of work, rewards,
and opportunities. The modern concentration of wealth is fantastic.
The wealthiest one percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of all
personal shares of stock. From World War II until the mid-Fifties, the
50 biggest corporations increased their manufacturing production from 17
to 23 percent of the national total, and the share of the largest 200
companies rose from 30 to 37 percent. To regard the various decisions
of these elites as purely economic is short-sighted: their decisions
affect in a momentous way the entire fabric of social life in America.
Foreign investments influence political policies in under-developed
areas -- and our efforts to build a "profitable" capitalist world blind
our foreign policy to mankind's needs and destiny. The drive for sales
spurs phenomenal advertising efforts; the ethical drug industry, for
instance, spent more than $750 million on promotions in 1960, nearly for
times the amount available to all American medical schools for their
educational programs. The arts, too, are organized substantially
according to their commercial appeal aesthetic values are subordinated
to exchange values, and writers swiftly learn to consider the commercial
market as much as the humanistic marketplace of ideas. The tendency to
over-production, to gluts of surplus commodities, encourages "market
research" techniques to deliberately create pseudo-needs in consumers --
we learn to buy "smart" things, regardless of their utility -- and
introduces wasteful "planned obsolescence" as a permanent feature of
business strategy. While real social needs accumulate as rapidly as
profits, it becomes evident that Money, instead of dignity of character,
remains a pivotal American value and Profitability, instead of social
use, a pivotal standard in determining priorities of resource
allocation.
Within existing arrangements, the American business community cannot be said to encourage a democratic process nationally. Economic minorities not responsible to a public in any democratic fashion make decisions of a more profound importance than even those made by Congress. Such a claim is usually dismissed by respectful and knowing citations of the ways in which government asserts itself as keeper of the public interest at times of business irresponsibility. But the real, as opposed to the mythical, range of government "control" of the economy includes only:
In short, the theory of government "countervailing" business neglects
the extent to which government influence is marginal to the basic
production decisions, the basic decision-making environment of society,
the basic structure or distribution and allocation which is still
determined by major corporations with power and wealth concentrated
among the few. A conscious conspiracy -- as in the case of pricerigging
in the electrical industry -- is by no means generally or
continuously operative but power undeniably does rest in comparative
insulation from the public and its political representatives.
The Military-Industrial Complex. The most spectacular and important
creation of the authoritarian and oligopolistic structure of economic
decision-making in America is the institution called "the militaryindustrial
complex" by former President Eisenhower, the powerful
congruence of interest and structure among military and business elites
which affects so much of our development and destiny. Not only is ours
the first generation to live with the possibility of world-wide
cataclysm -- it is the first to experience the actual social preparation
for cataclysm, the general militarization of American society. In 1948
Congress established Universal Military Training, the first peacetime
conscription. The military became a permanent institution. Four years
earlier, General Motor's Charles E. Wilson had heralded the creation of
what he called the "permanent war economy," the continuous use of
military spending as a solution to economic problems unsolved before the
post-war boom, most notably the problem of the seventeen million jobless
after eight years of the New Deal. This has left a "hidden crisis" in
the allocation of resources by the American economy.
Since our childhood these two trends -- the rise of the military and the
installation of a defense-based economy -- have grown fantastically.
The Department of Defense, ironically the world's largest single
organization, is worth $160 billion, owns 32 million acres of America
and employs half the 7.5 million persons directly dependent on the
military for subsistence, has an $11 billion payroll which is larger
than the net annual income of all American corporations. Defense
spending in the Eisenhower era totaled $350 billions and President
Kennedy entered office pledged to go even beyond the present defense
allocation of sixty cents from every public dollar spent. Except for a
war-induced boom immediately after "our side" bombed Hiroshima, American
economic prosperity has coincided with a growing dependence on military
outlay -- from 1941 to 1959 America's Gross National Product of $5.25
trillion included $700 billion in goods and services purchased for the
defense effort, about one-seventh of the accumulated GNP. This pattern
has included the steady concentration of military spending among a few
corporations. In 1961, 86 percent of Defense Department contracts were
awarded without competition. The ordnance industry of 100,000 people is
completely engaged in military work; in the aircraft industry, 94
percent of 750,000 workers are linked to the war economy; shipbuilding,
radio and communications equipment industries commit forty percent of
their work to defense; iron and steel, petroleum, metal-stamping and
machine shop products, motors and generators, tools and hardware,
copper, aluminum and machine tools industries all devote at least 10
percent of their work to the same cause.
The intermingling of Big Military and Big Industry is evidenced in the
1,400 former officers working for the 100 corporations who received
nearly all the $21 billion spent in procurement by the Defense
Department in 1961. The overlap is most poignantly clear in the case of
General Dynamics, the company which received the best 1961 contracts,
employed the most retired officers (187), and is directed by a former
Secretary of the Army. A Fortune magazine profile of General Dynamics
said: "The unique group of men who run Dynamics are only incidentally
in rivalry with other U.S. manufacturers, with many of whom they
actually act in concert. Their chief competitor is the USSR. The core
of General Dynamics corporate philosophy is the conviction that national
defense is a more or less permanent business." Little has changed since
Wilson's proud declaration of the Permanent War Economy back in the 1944
days when the top 200 corporations possessed 80 percent of all active
prime war-supply contracts.
Military Industrial Politics. The military and its supporting business
foundation have found numerous forms of political expression, and we
have heard their din endlessly. There has not been a major
Congressional split on the issue of continued defense spending spirals
in our lifetime. The triangular relation of the business, military and
political arenas cannot be better expressed than in Dixiecrat Carl
Vinson's remarks as his House Armed Services Committee reported out a
military construction bill of $808 million throughout the 50 states, for
1960-61: "There is something in this bill for everyone," he announced.
President Kennedy had earlier acknowledged the valuable anti-recession
features of the bill.
Imagine, on the other hand, $808 million suggested as an anti-recession
measure, but being poured into programs of social welfare: the
impossibility of receiving support for such a measure identifies a
crucial feature of defense spending: it is beneficial to private
enterprise, while welfare spending is not. Defense spending does not
"compete" with the private sector; it contains a natural obsolescence;
its "confidential" nature permits easier boondoggling; the tax burdens
to which it leads can be shunted from corporation to consumer as a "cost
of production." Welfare spending, however, involves the government in
competition with private corporations and contractors; it conflicts with
immediate interests of private pressure groups; it leads to taxes on
business. Think of the opposition of private power companies to current
proposals for river and valley development, or the hostility of the real
estate lobby to urban renewal; or the attitude of the American Medical
Association to a paltry medical care bill; or of all business lobbyists
to foreign aid; these are the pressures leading to the schizophrenic
public-military, private-civilian economy of our epoch. The
politicians, of course, take the line of least resistance and thickest
support: warfare, instead of welfare, is easiest to stand up for:
after all, the Free World is at stake (and our constituency's
investments, too).
Automation, Abundance, and Challenge. But while the economy remains
relatively static in its setting of priorities and allocation of
resources, new conditions are emerging with enormous implications: the
revolution of automation, and the replacement of scarcity by the
potential of material abundance.
Automation, the process of machines replacing men in performing sensory,
motoric and complex logical tasks, is transforming society in ways that
are scarcely comprehensible. By 1959, industrial production regained
its 1957 "pre-recession" level -- but with 750,000 fewer workers
required. In the Fifties as a whole, national production enlarged by 43
percent but the number of factory employees remained stationary, seventenths
of one percent higher than in 1947. Automation is destroying
whole categories of work -- impersonal thinkers have efficiently labeled
this "structural unemployment" -- in blue-collar, service, and even
middle management occupations. In addition it is eliminating employment
opportunities for a youth force that numbers one million more than it
did in 1950, and rendering work far more difficult both to find and do
for people in the forties and up. The consequences of this economic
drama, strengthened by the force of post-war recessions, are momentous:
five million becomes an acceptable unemployment tabulation, and misery,
uprootedness and anxiety become the lot of increasing numbers of
Americans.
But while automation is creating social dislocation of a stunning kind, it paradoxically is imparting the opportunity for men the world around to rise in dignity from their knees. The dominant optimistic economic fact of this epoch is that fewer hands are needed now in actual production, although more goods and services are a real potentiality. The world could be fed, poverty abolished, the great public needs could be met, the brutish world of Darwinian scarcity could be brushed away, all men could have more time to pursue their leisure, drudgery in work could be cut to a minimum, education could become more of a continuing process for all people, both public and personal needs could be met rationally. But only in a system with selfish production motives and elitist control, a system which is less welfare than war-based, undemocratic rather than "stockholder participative" as "sold to us", does the potentiality for abundance become a curse and a cruel irony:
The Stance of Labor. Amidst all this, what of organized labor, the
historic institutional representative of the exploited, the presumed
"countervailing power" against the excesses of Big Business? The
contemporary social assault on the labor movement is of crisis
proportions. To the average American, "big labor" is a growing cancer
equal in impact to Big Business -- nothing could be more distorted, even
granting a sizable union bureaucracy. But in addition to public
exaggerations, the labor crisis can be measured in several ways. First,
the high expectations of the newborn AFL-CIO of 30 million members by
1965 are suffering a reverse unimaginable five years ago. The demise of
the dream of "organizing the unorganized" is dramatically reflected in
the AFL-CIO decision, just two years after its creation, to slash its
organizing staff in half. From 15 million members when the AFL and the
CIO merged, the total has slipped to 13.5 million. During the post-war
generation, union membership nationally has increased by four million --
but the total number of workers has jumped by 13 million. Today only 40
percent of all non-agricultural workers are protected by any form or
organization. Second, organizing conditions are going to worsen. Where
labor now is strongest -- in industries -- automation is leading to an
attrition of available work. As the number of jobs dwindles, so does
labor's power of bargaining, since management can handle a strike in an
automated plant more easily than the older mass-operated ones.
More important perhaps, the American economy has changed radically in
the last decade, as suddenly the number of workers producing goods
became fewer than the number in "nonproductive" areas -- government,
trade, finance, services, utilities, transportation. Since World War II
"white collar" and "service" jobs have grown twice as fast as have,
"blue collar" production jobs. Labor has almost no organization in the
expanding occupational areas of the new economy, but almost all of its
entrenched strength in contracting areas. As big government hires more,
as business seeks more office workers and skilled technicians, and as
growing commercial America demands new hotels, service stations and the
like, the conditions will become graver still. Further, there is
continuing hostility to labor by the Southern states and their
industrial interests -- meaning " runaway plants, cheap labor
threatening the organized trade union movement, and opposition from
Dixiecrats to favorable labor legislation in Congress. Finally, there
is indication that Big Business, for the sake of public relations if
nothing more, has acknowledged labor's "right" to exist, but has
deliberately tried to contain labor at its present strength, preventing
strong unions from helping weaker ones or from spreading or unorganized
sectors of the economy. Business is aided in its efforts by
proliferation of "right-to-work" laws at state levels (especially in
areas where labor is without organizing strength to begin with), and
anti-labor legislation in Congress.
In the midst of these besetting crises, labor itself faces its own
problems of vision and program. Historically, there can be no doubt as
to its worth in American politics -- what progress there has been in
meeting human needs in this century rests greatly with the labor
movement. And to a considerable extent the social democracy for which
labor has fought externally is reflected in its own essentially
democratic character: representing millions of people, no millions of
dollars; demanding their welfare, not eternal profit. Today labor
remains the most liberal "mainstream" institution -- but often its
liberalism represents vestigial commitments self-interestedness,
unradicalism. In some measure labor has succumbed to
institutionalization, its social idealism waning under the tendencies of
bureaucracy, materialism, business ethics. The successes of the last
generation perhaps have braked, rather than accelerated labor's zeal for
change. Even the House of Labor has bay windows: not only is this true
of the labor elites, but as well of some of the rank-and-file. Many of
the latter are indifferent unionists, uninterested in meetings,
alienated from the complexities of the labor-management negotiating
apparatus, lulled to comfort by the accessibility of luxury and the
opportunity of long-term contracts. "Union democracy" is not simply
inhibited by labor leader elitism, but by the unrelated problem of rankand
-file apathy to the tradition of unionism. The crisis of labor is
reflected in the coexistence within the unions of militant Negro
discontents and discriminatory locals, sweeping critics of the obscuring
"public interest" marginal tinkering of government and willing
handmaidens of conservative political leadership, austere sacrificers
and business-like operators, visionaries and anachronisms -- tensions
between extremes that keep alive the possibilities for a more militant
unionism. Too, there are seeds of rebirth in the "organizational
crisis" itself: the technologically unemployed, the unorganized white
collar men and women, the migrants and farm workers, the unprotected
Negroes, the poor, all of whom are isolated now from the power structure
of the economy, but who are the potential base for a broader and more
forceful unionism.
Horizon. In summary: a more reformed, more human capitalism,
functioning at three-fourths capacity while one-third of America and
two-thirds of the world goes needy, domination of politics and the
economy by fantastically rich elites, accommodation and limited
effectiveness by the labor movement, hard-core poverty and unemployment,
automation confirming the dark ascension of machine over man instead of
shared abundance, technological change being introduced into the economy
by the criteria of profitability -- this has been our inheritance.
However inadequate, it has instilled quiescence in liberal hearts --
partly reflecting the extent to which misery has been over-come but also
the eclipse of social ideals. Though many of us are "affluent",
poverty, waste, elitism, manipulation are too manifest to go unnoticed,
too clearly unnecessary to go accepted. To change the Cold War status
quo and other social evils, concern with the challenges to the American
economic machine must expand. Now, as a truly better social state
becomes visible, a new poverty impends: a poverty of vision, and a
poverty of political action to make that vision reality. Without new
vision, the failure to achieve our potentialities will spell the
inability of our society to endure in a world of obvious, crying needs
and rapid change.
THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE WARFARE STATE
Business and politics, when significantly militarized, affect the whole
living condition of each American citizen. Worker and family depend on
the Cold War for life. Half of all research and development is
concentrated on military ends. The press mimics conventional cold war
opinion in its editorials. In less than a full generation, most
Americans accept the military-industrial structure as "the way things
are." War is still pictured as one more kind of diplomacy, perhaps a
gloriously satisfying kind. Our saturation and atomic bombings of
Germany and Japan are little more than memories of past "policy
necessities" that preceded the wonderful economic boom of 1946. The
facts that our once-revolutionary 20,000 ton Hiroshima Bomb is now paled
by 50 megaton weapons, that our lifetime has included the creation of
intercontinental ballistic missiles, that "greater" weapons are to
follow, that weapons refinement is more rapid than the development of
weapons of defense, that soon a dozen or more nations will have the
Bomb, that one simple miscalculation could incinerate mankind: these
orienting facts are but remotely felt. A shell of moral callous
separates the citizen from sensitivity of the common peril: this is the
result of a lifetime saturation with horror. After all, some ask, where
could we begin, even if we wanted to? After all, others declare, we can
only assume things are in the best of hands. A coed at the University
of Kentucky says, "we regard peace and war as fairy tales." And a child
has asked in helplessness, perhaps for us all, "Daddy, why is there a
cold war?"
Past senselessness permits present brutality; present brutality is
prelude to future deeds of still greater inhumanity; that is the moral
history of the twentieth century, from the First World War to the
present. A half-century of accelerating destruction has flattened out
the individual's ability to make moral distinction, it has made people
understandably give up, it has forced private worry and public silence.
To a decisive extent, the means of defense, the military technology
itself, determines the political and social character of the state being
defended -- that is, defense mechanism themselves in the nuclear age
alter the character of the system that creates them for protection. So
it has been with American, as her democratic institutions and habits
have shriveled in almost direct proportion to the growth of her
armaments. Decisions about military strategy, including the monstrous
decision to go to war, are more and more the property of the military
and the industrial arms race machine, with the politicians assuming a
ratifying role instead of a determining one. This is increasingly a
fact not just because of the installation of the permanent military, but
because of constant revolutions in military technology. The new
technologies allegedly require military expertise, scientific
comprehension, and the mantle of secrecy. As Congress relies more and
more on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the existing chasm between people and
decision-makers becomes irreconcilably wide, and more alienating in its
effects.
A necessary part of the military effort is propaganda: to "sell" the
need for congressional appropriations, to conceal various business
scandals, and to convince the American people that the arms race is
important enough to sacrifice civil liberties and social welfare. So
confusion prevails about the national needs, while the three major
services and the industrial allies jockey for power -- the Air Force
tending to support bombers and missilery, the Navy, Polaris and
carriers, the Army, conventional ground forces and invulnerable nuclear
arsenals, and all three feigning unity and support of the policy of
weapons and agglomeration called the "mix". Strategies are advocated on
the basis of power and profit, usually more so than on the basis of
national military needs. In the meantime, Congressional investigating
committees -- most notably the House Un-American Activities Committee
and the Senate Judiciary Committee -- attempt to curb the little dissent
that finds its way into off-beat magazines. A huge militant anticommunist
brigade throws in its support, patriotically willing to do
anything to achieve "total victory" in the Cold War; the government
advocates peaceful confrontation with international Communism, then
utterly pillories and outlaws the tiny American Communist Party.
University professors withdraw prudently from public issues; the very
style of social science writing becomes more qualified. Needs in
housing, education, minority rights, health care, land redevelopment,
hourly wages, all are subordinated -- though a political tear is shed
gratuitously -- to the primary objective of the "military and economic
strength of the Free World."
What are the governing policies which supposedly justify all this human
sacrifice and waste? With few exceptions they have reflected the
quandaries and confusion, stagnation and anxiety, of a stalemated nation
in a turbulent world. They have shown a slowness, sometimes a sheer
inability to react to a sequence of new problems.
Of these problems, two of the newest are foremost: the existence of
poised nuclear weapons and the revolutions against the former colonial
powers. In the both areas, the Soviet Union and the various national
communist movements have aggravated internation relations in inhuman and
undesirable ways, but hardly so much as to blame only communism for the
present menacing situation.
Deterrence Policy
The accumulation of nuclear arsenals, the threat of accidental war, the
possibility of limited war becoming illimitable holocaust, the
impossibility of achieving final arms superiority or invulnerability,
the approaching nativity of a cluster of infant atomic powers; all of
these events are tending to undermine traditional concepts of power
relations among nations. War can no longer be considered as an
effective instrument of foreign policy, a means of strengthening
alliances, adjusting the balance of power, maintaining national
sovereignty, or preserving human values. War is no longer simply a
forceful extension of foreign policy; it can obtain no constructive ends
in the modern world. Soviet or American "megatonnage" is sufficient to
destroy all existing social structures as well as value systems.
Missiles have (figuratively) thumbed their nosecones at national
boundaries. But America, like other countries, still operates by means
of national defense and deterrence systems. These are seen to be useful
so long as they are never fully used: unless we as a national entity
can convince Russia that we are willing to commit the most heinous
action in human history, we will be forced to commit it.
Deterrence advocates, all of them prepared at least to threaten mass
extermination, advance arguments of several kinds. At one pole are the
minority of open partisans of preventive war -- who falsely assume the
inevitability of violent conflict and assert the lunatic efficacy of
striking the first blow, assuming that it will be easier to "recover"
after thermonuclear war than to recover now from the grip of the Cold
War. Somewhat more reluctant to advocate initiating a war, but perhaps
more disturbing for their numbers within the Kennedy Administration, are
the many advocates of the "counterforce" theory of aiming strategic
nuclear weapons at military installations -- though this might "save"
more lives than a preventive war, it would require drastic, provocative
and perhaps impossible social change to separate many cities from
weapons sites, it would be impossible to ensure the immunity of cities
after one or two counterforce nuclear "exchanges", it would generate a
perpetual arms race for less vulnerability and greater weapons power and
mobility, it would make outer space a region subject to militarization,
and accelerate the suspicions and arms build-ups which are incentives to
precipitate nuclear action. Others would support fighting "limited
wars" which use conventional (all but atomic) weapons, backed by
deterrents so mighty that both sides would fear to use them -- although
underestimating the implications of numerous new atomic powers on the
world stage, the extreme difficulty of anchoring international order
with weapons of only transient invulnerability, the potential tendency
for a "losing side" to push limited protracted fighting on the soil of
underdeveloped countries. Still other deterrence artists propose
limited, clearly defensive and retaliatory, nuclear capacity, always
potent enough to deter an opponent's aggressive designs -- the best of
deterrence stratagems, but inadequate when it rests on the equation of
an arms "stalemate" with international stability.
All the deterrence theories suffer in several common ways. They allow
insufficient attention to preserving, extending, and enriching
democratic values, such matters being subordinate rather than governing
in the process of conducting foreign policy. Second, they inadequately
realize the inherent instabilities of the continuing arms race and
balance of fear. Third, they operationally tend to eclipse interest and
action towards disarmament by solidifying economic, political and even
moral investments in continuation of tensions. Fourth, they offer a
disinterested and even patriotic rationale for the boondoggling,
belligerence, and privilege of military and economic elites. Finally,
deterrence stratagems invariably understate or dismiss the relatedness
of various dangers; they inevitably lend tolerability to the idea of war
by neglecting the dynamic interaction of problems -- such as the menace
of accidental war, the probable future tensions surrounding the
emergence of ex-colonial nations, the imminence of several new nations
joining the "Nuclear Club," the destabilizing potential of technological
breakthrough by either arms race contestant, the threat of Chinese
atomic might, the fact that "recovery" after World War III would involve
not only human survivors but, as well, a huge and fragile social
structure and culture which would be decimated perhaps irreparably by
total war.
Such a harsh critique of what we are doing as a nation by no means
implies that sole blame for the Cold War rests on the United States.
Both sides have behaved irresponsibly -- the Russians by an exaggerated
lack of trust, and by much dependence on aggressive military strategists
rather than on proponents of nonviolent conflict and coexistence. But
we do contend, as Americans concerned with the conduct of our
representative institutions, that our government has blamed the Cold War
stalemate on nearly everything but its own hesitations, its own
anachronistic dependence on weapons. To be sure, there is more to
disarmament than wishing for it. There are inadequacies in
international rule-making institutions -- which could be corrected.
There are faulty inspection mechanisms -- which could be perfected by
disinterested scientists. There is Russian intransigency and
evasiveness -- which do not erase the fact that the Soviet Union,
because of a strained economy, an expectant population, fears of Chinese
potential, and interest in the colonial revolution, is increasingly
disposed to real disarmament with real controls. But there is, too, our
own reluctance to face the uncertain world beyond the Cold War, our own
shocking assumption that the risks of the present are fewer than the
risks of a policy re-orientation to disarmament, our own unwillingness
to face the implementation of our rhetorical commitments to peace and
freedom.
Today the world alternatively drifts and plunges towards a terrible war
The Colonial Revolution
While weapons have accelerated man's opportunity for self-destruction,
the counter-impulse to life and creation are superbly manifest in the
revolutionary feelings of many Asian, African and Latin American
peoples. Against the individual initiative and aspiration, and social
sense of organicism characteristic of these upsurges, the American
apathy and stalemate stand in embarrassing contrast.
It is difficult today to give human meaning to the welter of facts that
surrounds us. That is why it is especially hard to understand the facts
of "underdevelopment": in India, man and beast together produced 65
percent of the nation's economic energy in a recent year, and of the
remaining 35 percent of inanimately produced power almost three-fourths
was obtained by burning dung. But in the United States, human and
animal power together account for only one percent of the national
economic energy -- that is what stands humanly behind the vague term
"industrialization". Even to maintain the misery of Asia today at a
constant level will require a rate of growth tripling the national
income and the aggregate production in Asian countries by the end of the
century. For Asians to have the (unacceptable) 1950 standard of
Europeans, less than $2,000 per year for a family, national production
must increase 21-fold by the end the century, and that monstrous feat
only to reach a level that Europeans find intolerable.
What has America done? During the years 1955-57 our total expenditures
in economic aid were equal to one-tenth of one percent of our total
Gross National Product. Prior to that time it was less; since then it
has been a fraction higher. Immediate social and economic development
is needed -- we have helped little, seeming to prefer to create a
growing gap between "have" and "have not" rather than to usher in social
revolutions which would threaten our investors and out military
alliances. The new nations want to avoid power entanglements that will
open their countries to foreign domination -- and we have often demanded
loyalty oaths. They do not see the relevence of uncontrolled free
enterprise in societies without accumulated capital and a significant
middle class -- and we have looked calumniously on those who would not
try "our way". They seek empathy -- and we have sided with the old
colonialists, who now are trying to take credit for "giving" all the
freedom that has been wrested from them, or we "empathize" when pressure
absolutely demands it.
With rare variation, American foreign policy in the Fifties was guided
by a concern for foreign investment and a negative anti-communist
political stance linked to a series of military alliances, both
undergirded by military threat. We participated unilaterally -- usually
through the Central Intelligence Agency -- in revolutions against
governments in Laos, Guatemala, Cuba, Egypt, Iran. We permitted
economic investment to decisively affect our foreign policy: fruit in
Cuba, oil in the Middle East, diamonds and gold in South Africa (with
whom we trade more than with any African nation). More exactly:
America's "foreign market" in the late Fifties, including exports of
goods and services plus overseas sales by American firms, averaged about
$60 billion annually. This represented twice the investment of 1950,
and it is predicted that the same rates of increase will continue. The
reason is obvious: Fortune said in 1958, "foreign earnings will be more
than double in four years, more than twice the probable gain in domestic
profits". These investments are concentrated primarily in the Middle
East and Latin America, neither region being an impressive candidate for
the long-run stability, political caution, and lower-class tolerance
that American investors typically demand.
Our pugnacious anti-communism and protection of interests has led us to
an alliance inappropriately called the "Free World". It included four
major parliamentary democracies: ourselves, Canada, Great Britain, and
India. It also has included through the years Batista, Franco,
Verwoerd, Salazar, De Gaulle, Boun Oum, Ngo Diem, Chiang Kai Shek,
Trujillo, the Somozas, Saud, Ydigoras -- all of these non-democrats
separating us deeply from the colonial revolutions.
Since the Kennedy administration began, the American government seems to
have initiated policy changes in the colonial and underdeveloped areas.
It accepted "neutralism" as a tolerable principle; it sided more than
once with the Angolans in the United Nations; it invited Souvanna Phouma
to return to Laos after having overthrown his neutralist government
there; it implemented the Alliance for Progress that President
Eisenhower proposed when Latin America appeared on the verge of
socialist revolutions; it made derogatory statements about the
Trujillos; it cautiously suggested that a democratic socialist
government in British Guiana might be necessary to support; in inaugural
oratory, it suggested that a moral imperative was involved in sharing
the world's resources with those who have been previously dominated.
These were hardly sufficient to heal the scars of past activity and
present associations, but nevertheless they were motions away from the
Fifties. But quite unexpectedly, the President ordered the Cuban
invations, and while the American press railed about how we had been
"shamed" and defied by that "monster Castro," the colonial peoples of
the world wondered whether our foreign policy had really changed from
its old imperialist ways (we had never supported Castro, even on the eve
of his taking power, and had announced early that "the conduct of the
Castro government toward foreign private enterprise in Cuba" would be a
main State Department concern). Any heralded changes in our foreign
policy are now further suspect in the wake of the Punta Del Este foreign
minister's conference where the five countries representing most of
Latin America refused to cooperate in our plans to further "isolate" the
Castro government.
Ever since the colonial revolution began, American policy makers have
reacted to new problems with old "gunboat" remedies, often thinly
disguised. The feeble but desirable efforts of the Kennedy
administration to be more flexible are coming perhaps too late, and are
of too little significance to really change the historical thrust of our
policies. The hunger problem is increasing rapidly mostly as a result
of the worldwide population explosion that cancels out the meager
triumphs gained so far over starvation. The threat of population to
economic growth is simply documented: in 1960-70 population in Africa
south of the Sahara will increase 14 percent; in South Asia and the Far
East by 22 percent; in North Africa 26 percent; in the Middle East by 27
percent; in Latin America 29 percent. Population explosion, no matter
how devastating, is neutral. But how long will it take to create a
relation of thrust between America and the newly-developing societies?
How long to change our policies? And what length of time do we have?
The world is in transformation. But America is not. It can race to
industrialize the world, tolerating occasional authoritarianisms,
socialisms, neutralisms along the way -- or it can slow the pace of the
inevitable and default to the eager and self-interested Soviets and,
much more importantly, to mankind itself. Only mystics would guess we
have opted thoroughly for the first. Consider what our people think of
this, the most urgent issue on the human agenda. Fed by a bellicose
press, manipulated by economic and political opponents of change,
drifting in their own history, they grumble about "the foreign aid
waste", or about "that beatnik down in Cuba", or how "things will get us
by" . . . thinking confidently, albeit in the usual bewilderment, that
Americans can go right on like always, five percent of mankind producing
forty percent of its goods.
Anti-Communism
An unreasoning anti-communism has become a major social problem for
those who want to construct a more democratic America. McCarthyism and
other forms of exaggerated and conservative anti-communism seriously
weaken democratic institutions and spawn movements contrary to the
interests of basic freedoms and peace. In such an atmosphere even the
most intelligent of Americans fear to join political organizations, sign
petitions, speak out on serious issues. Militaristic policies are
easily "sold" to a public fearful of a democratic enemy. Political
debate is restricted, thought is standardized, action is inhibited by
the demands of "unity" and "oneness" in the face of the declared danger.
Even many liberals and socialists share static and repititious
participation in the anti-communist crusade and often discourage
tentative, inquiring discussion about "the Russian question" within
their ranks -- often by employing "stalinist", "stalinoid", trotskyite"
and other epithets in an oversimplifying way to discredit opposition.
Thus much of the American anti-communism takes on the characteristics of
paranoia. Not only does it lead to the perversion of democracy and to
the political stagnation of a warfare society, but it also has the
unintended consequence of preventing an honest and effective approach to
the issues. Such an approach would require public analysis and debate
of world politics. But almost nowhere in politics is such a rational
analysis possible to make.
It would seem reasonable to expect that in America the basic issues of
the Cold War should be rationally and fully debated, between persons of
every opinion -- on television, on platforms and through other media.
It would seem, too, that there should be a way for the person or an
organization to oppose communism without contributing to the common fear
of associations and public actions. But these things do not happen;
instead, there is finger-pointing and comical debate about the most
serious of issues. This trend of events on the domestic scene, towards
greater irrationality on major questions, moves us to greater concern
than does the "internal threat" of domestic communism. Democracy, we
are convinced, requires every effort to set in peaceful opposition the
basic viewpoints of the day; only by conscious, determined, though
difficult, efforts in this direction will the issue of communism be met
appropriately.
Communism and Foreign Policy
As democrats we are in basic opposition to the communist system. The
Soviet Union, as a system, rests on the total suppression of organized
opposition, as well as on a vision of the future in the name of which
much human life has been sacrificed, and numerous small and large
denials of human dignity rationalized. The Communist Party has equated
falsely the "triumph of true socialism" with centralized bureaucracy.
The Soviet state lacks independent labor organizations and other
liberties we consider basic. And despite certain reforms, the system
remains almost totally divorced from the image officially promulgated by
the Party. Communist parties throughout the rest of the world are
generally undemocratic in internal structure and mode of action.
Moreover, in most cases they subordinate radical programs to
requirements of Soviet foreign policy. The communist movement has
failed, in every sense, to achieve its stated intentions of leading a
worldwide movement for human emancipation.
But present trends in American anti-communism are not sufficient for the
creation of appropriate policies with which to relate to and counter
communist movements in the world. In no instance is this better
illustrated than in our basic national policy-making assumption that the
Soviet Union is inherently expansionist and aggressive, prepared to
dominate the rest of the world by military means. On this assumption
rests the monstrous American structure of military "preparedness";
because of it we sacrifice values and social programs to the alleged
needs of military power.
But the assumption itself is certainly open to question and debate. To
be sure, the Soviet state has used force and the threat of force to
promote or defend its perceived national interests. But the typical
American response has been to equate the use of force -- which in many
cases might be dispassionately interpreted as a conservative, albeit
brutal, action -- with the initiation of a worldwide military onslaught.
In addition, the Russian-Chinese conflicts and the emergency !!
throughout the communist movement call for a re-evaluation of any
monolithic interpretations. And the apparent Soviet disinterest in
building a first-strike arsenal of weapons challenges the weight given
to protection against surprise attack in formulations of American policy
toward the Soviets.
Almost without regard to one's conception of the dynamics of Soviet
society and foreign policy, it is evident that the American military
response has been more effective in deterring the growth of democracy
than communism. Moreover, our prevailing policies make difficult the
encouragement of skepticism, anti-war or pro-democratic attitudes in the
communist systems. America has done a great deal to foment the easier,
opposite tendency in Russia: suspicion, suppression, and stiff military
resistance. We have established a system of military alliances which of
even dubious deterrence value. It is reasonable of suggest the "Berlin"
and "Laos" have been earth-shaking situations partly because rival
systems of deterrence make impossible the withdrawal of threats. The
"status quo" is not cemented by mutual threat but by mutual fear of
receeding from pugnacity -- since the latter course would undermine the
"credibility" of our deterring system. Simultaneously, while billions
in military aid were propping up right-wing Laotian, Formosan, Iranian
and other regimes, American leadership never developed a purely
political policy for offering concrete alternatives to either communism
or the status quo for colonial revolutions. The results have been:
fulfillment of the communist belief that capitalism is stagnant, its
only defense being dangerous military adventurism; destabilizing
incidents in numerous developing countries; an image of America allied
with corrupt oligarchies counterposed to the Russian-Chinese image of
rapid, though brutal, economic development. Again and again, America
mistakes the static area of defense, rather than the dynamic area of
development, as the master need of two-thirds of mankind.
Our paranoia about the Soviet Union has made us incapable of achieving
agreements absolutely necessary for disarmament and the preservation of
peace. We are hardly able to see the possibility that the Soviet Union,
though not "peace loving", may be seriously interested in disarmament.
Infinite possibilities for both tragedy and progress lie before us. On
the one hand, we can continue to be afraid, and out of fear commit
suicide. On the other hand, we can develop a fresh and creative
approach to world problems which will help to create democracy at home
and establish conditions for its growth elsewhere in the world.
Discrimination
Our America is still white.
Consider the plight, statistically, of its greatest nonconformists, the "nonwhites" (a Census Bureau designation).
Even against this background, some will say progress is being made. The
facts bely it, however, unless it is assumed that America has another
century to deal with its racial inequalities. Others, more pompous,
will blame the situation on "those people's inability to pick themselves
up", not understanding the automatic way in which such a system can
frustrate reform efforts and diminish the aspirations of the oppressed.
The one-party system in the South, attached to the Dixiecrat-Republican
complex nationally, cuts off the Negro's independent powers as a
citizen. Discrimination in employment, along with labor's accomodation
to the "lily-white" hiring practises, guarantees the lowest slot in the
economic order to the "nonwhite." North or South, these oppressed are
conditioned by their inheritance and their surroundings to expect more
of the same: in housing, schools, recreation, travel, all their
potential is circumscribed, thwarted and often extinguished. Automation
grinds up job opportunities, and ineffective or non-existent retraining
programs make the already-handicapped "nonwhite" even less equipped to
participate in "technological progress."
Horatio Alger Americans typically believe that the "nonwhites" are being
"accepted" and "rising" gradually. They see more Negroes on television
and so assume that Negroes are "better off". They hear the President
talking about Negroes and so assume they are politically represented.
They are aware of black peoples in the United Nations and so assume that
the world is generally moving toward integration. They don't drive
through the South, or through the slum areas of the big cities, so they
assume that squalor and naked exploitation are disappearing. They
express generalities about "time and gradualism" to hide the fact that
they don't know what is happening.
The advancement of the Negro and other "nonwhites" in America has not
been altogether by means of the crusades of liberalism, but rather
through unavoidable changes in social structure. The economic pressures
of World War II opened new jobs, new mobility, new insights to Southern
Negroes, who then began great migrations from the South to the bigger
urban areas of the North where their absolute wage was greater, though
unchanged in relation to the white man of the same stratum. More
important than the World War II openings was the colonial revolution.
The world-wide upsurge of dark peoples against white colonial
domination stirred the separation and created an urgancy among American
Negroes, while simultaneously it threatened the power structure of the
United States enough to produce concessions to the Negro. Produced by
outer pressure from the newly-moving peoples rather than by the internal
conscience of the Federal government, the gains were keyed to improving
the American "image" more than to reconstructing the society that
prospered on top of its minorities. Thus the historic Supreme Court
decision of 1954, theoretically desegregating Southern schools, was more
a proclamation than a harbinger of social change -- and is reflected as
such in the fraction of Southern school districts which have
desegregated, with Federal officials doing little to spur the process.
It has been said that the Kennedy administration did more in two years
than the Eisenhower administration did in eight. Of this there can be
no doubt. But it is analogous to comparing whispers to silence when
positively stentorian tones are demanded. President Kennedy lept ahead
of the Eisenhower record when he made his second reference to the racial
problem; Eisenhower did not utter a meaningful public statement until
his last month in office when he mentioned the "blemish" of bigotry.
To avoid conflict with the Dixiecrat-Republican alliance, President
Kennedy has developed a civil rights philosophy of "enforcement, not
enactment", implying that existing statuatory tools are sufficient to
change the lot of the Negro. So far he has employed executive power
usefully to appoint Negroes to various offices, and seems interested in
seeing the Southern Negro registered to vote. On the other hand, he has
appointed at least four segregationist judges in areas where voter
registration is a desperate need. Only two civil rights bills, one to
abolish the poll tax in five states and another to prevent unfair use of
literacy tests in registration, have been proposed -- the President
giving active support to neither. But even this legislation,
lethargically supported, then defeated, was intended to extend only to
Federal elections. More important, the Kennedy interest in voter
registration has not been supplemented with interest in giving the
Southern Negro the economic protection that only trade unions can
provide. It seems evident that the President is attempting to win the
Negro permanently to the Democratic Party without basically disturbing
the reactionary one-party oligarchy in the South. Moreover, the
administration is decidedly "cool" (a phrase of Robert Kennedy's) toward
mass nonviolent movements in the South, though by the support of racist
Dixiecrats the Administration makes impossible gradual action through
conventional channels. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the South
is composed of Southerners and their intervention in situations of
racial tension is always after the incident, not before. Kennedy has
refused to "enforce" the legal prerogative to keep Federal marshals
active in Southern areas before, during and after any "situations" (this
would invite Negroes to exercise their rights and it would infuriate the
Southerners in Congress because of its "insulting" features).
While corrupt politicians, together with business interests happy with
the absence of organized labor in Southern states and with the $50
billion in profits that results from paying the Negro half a "white
wage", stymie and slow fundamental progress, it remains to be
appreciated that the ultimate wages of discrimination are paid by
individuals and not by the state. Indeed the other sides of the
economic, political and sociological coins of racism represent their
more profound implications in the private lives, liberties and pursuits
of happiness of the citizen. While hungry nonwhites the world around
assume rightful dominance, the majority of Americans fight to keep
integrated housing out of the suburbs. While a fully interracial world
becomes a biological probability, most Americans persist in opposing
marriage between the races. While cultures generally interpenetrate,
white America is ignorant still of nonwhite America -- and perhaps glad
of it. The white lives almost completely within his immediate, close-up
world where things are tolerable, there are no Negroes except on the bus
corner going to and from work, and where it is important that daughter
marry right. White, like might, makes right in America today. Not
knowing the "nonwhite", however, the white knows something less than
himself. Not comfortable around "different people", he reclines in
whiteness instead of preparing for diversity. Refusing to yield
objective social freedoms to the "nonwhite", the white loses his
personal subjective freedom by turning away "from all these damn
causes."
White American ethnocentrism at home and abroad reflect most sharply the
self-deprivation suffered by the majority of our country which
effectively makes it an isolated minority in the world community of
culture and fellowship. The awe inspired by the pervasiveness of racism
in American life is only matched by the marvel of its historical span in
American traditions. The national heritage of racial discrimination via
slavery has been a part of America since Christopher Columbus' advent on
the new continent. As such, racism not only antedates the Republic and
the thirteen Colonies, but even the use of the English language in this
hemisphere. And it is well that we keep this as a background when
trying to understand why racism stands as such a steadfast pillar in the
culture and custom of the country. Racial-xenophobia is reflected in
the admission of various racial stocks to the country. From the
nineteenth century Oriental Exclusion Acts to the most recent up-dating
of the Walter-McCarren Immigration Acts the nation has shown a
continuous contemptuous regard for "nonwhites." More recently, the
tragedies of Hiroshima and Korematsu, and our cooperation with Western
Europe in the United Nations add treatment to the thoroughness of racist
overtones in national life.
But the right to refuse service to anyone is no longer reserved to the
Americans. The minority groups, internationally, are changing place.
WHAT IS NEEDED?
How to end the Cold War? How to increase democracy in America? These are the decisive issues confronting liberal and socialist forces today. To us, the issues are intimately related, the struggle for one invariably being a struggle for the other. What policy and structural alternatives are needed to obtain these ends?
It is necessary that America make disarmament, not nuclear deterrence,
"credible" to the Soviets and to the world. That is, disarmament should
be continually avowed as a national goal; concrete plans should be
presented at conference tables; real machinery for a disarming and
disarmed world -- national and international -- should be created while
the disarming process itself goes on. The long-standing idea of
unilateral initiative should be implemented as a basic feature of
American disarmament strategy: initiatives that are graduated in their
~~~ potential, accompanied by invitations to reciprocate when done
regardless of reciprocation, openly ~~~ significant period of future
time. Their ~~~ should not be to strip America of weapon, ~~~ produce a
climate in which disarmament can be ~~~ with less mutual hostility and
threat. They might include: a unilateral nuclear test moratorium,
withdrawal of several bases near the Soviet Union, proposals to
experiment in disarmament by stabilization of zone of controversy;
cessation of all apparent first-strike preparations, such as the
development of 41 Polaris by 1963 while naval theorists state that about
45 constitutes a provocative force; inviting a special United Nations
agency to observe and inspect the launchings of all American flights
into outer space; and numerous others.
There is no simple formula for the content of an actual disarmament
treaty. It should be phased: perhaps on a region-by-region basis, the
conventional weapons first. It should be conclusive, not open-ended, in
its projection. It should be controlled: national inspection systems
are adequate at first, but should be soon replaced by international
devices and teams. It should be more than denuding: world or at least
regional enforcement agencies, an international civil service and
inspection service, and other supranational groups must come into
reality under the United Nations.
2. Disarmament should be see as a political issue, not a technical problem. Should this year's Geneva negotiations have resulted (by magic) in a disarmament agreement, the United States Senate would have refused to ratify it, a domestic depression would have begun instantly, and every fiber of American life would be wrenched drastically: these are indications not only of our unpreparedness for disarmament, but also that disarmament is not "just another policy shift." Disarmament means a deliberate shift in most of our domestic and foreign policy.
Russia cannot be expected to negotiate disarmament treaties for the
Chinese. We should not feed Chinese fanaticism with our encirclement
but Chinese stomachs with the aim of making war contrary to Chinese
policy interests. Every day that we support anti-communist tyrants but
refuse to even allow the Chinese Communists representation in the United
Nations marks a greater separation of our ideals and our actions, and it
makes more likely bitter future relations with the Chinese.
Second, we should recognize that an authoritarian 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 who have historical reasons to suspect Germanic intentions.
President Kennedy himself told the editor of Izvestia that he fears an
independent Germany with nuclear arms, but American policies have not
demonstrated cognisance of the fact that Chancellor Adenauer too, is
interested in continued East-West tensions over the Germany and Berlin
problems and nuclear arms precisely because this is the rationale for
extending his domestic power and his influence upon the NATO-Common
Market alliance.
A world war over Berlin would be absurd. Anyone concurring with such a
proposition should demand that the West cease its contradictory advocacy
of "reunification of Germany through free elections" and "a rearmed
Germany in NATO". It is a dangerous illusion to assume that Russia will
hand over East Germany to a rearmed re-united Germany which will enter
the Western camp, although this Germany might have a Social Democratic
majority which could prevent a reassertion of German nationalism. We
have to recognize that the cold war and the incorporation of Germany
into the two power blocs was a decision of both Moscow and Washington,
of both Adenauer and Ulbricht. The immediate responsibility for the
Berlin wall is Ulbricht's. But it had to be expected that a regime
which was bad enough to make people flee is also bad enough to prevent
them from fleeing. The inhumanity of the Berlin wall is an ironic
symbol of the irrationality of the cold war, which keeps Adenauer and
Ulbricht in power. A reduction of the tension over Berlin, if by
internationalization or by recognition of the status quo and reducing
provocations, is a necessary but equally temporary measure which could
not ultimately reduce the basic cold war tension to which Berlin owes
its precarious situation. The Berlin problem cannot be solved without
reducing tensions in Europe, possibly by a bilateral military
disengagement and creating a neutralized buffer zone. Even if
Washington and Moscow were in favor disengagement, both Adenauer and
Ulbricht would never agree to it because cold war keeps their parties in
power.
Until their regimes' departure from the scene of history, the Berlin
status quo will have to be maintained while minimizing the tensions
necessarily arising from it. Russia cannot expect the United States to
tolerate its capture by the Ulbricht regime, but neither can America
expect to be in a position to indefinitely use Berlin as a fortress
within the communist world. As a fair and bilateral disengagement in
Central Europe seems to be impossible for the time being, a mutual
recognition of the Berlin status quo, that is, of West Berlin's and East
Germany's security, is needed. And it seems to be possible, although
the totalitarian regime of East Germany and the authoritarian leadership
of West Germany until now succeeded in frustrating all attempts to
minimize the dangerous tensions of cold war.
The strategy of securing the status quo of the two power blocs until it
is possible to depolarize the world by creating neutralist regions in
all trouble zones seems to be the only way to guarantee peace at this
time.
4. Experiments in disengagement and demilitarization must be conducted
as part of the total disarming process. These "disarmament experiments"
can be of several kinds, so long as they are consistent with the
principles of containing the arms race and isolating specific sectors of
the world from the Cold War power-play. First, it is imperative that no
more nations be supplied with, or locally produce, nuclear weapons. A
1959 report of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences predicted that
19 nations would be so armed in the near future. Should this prediction
be fulfilled, the prospects of war would be unimaginably expanded. For
this reason the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union should
band against France (which wants its own independent deterrent) and
seek, through United Nations or other machinery, the effective
prevention of the spread of atomic weapons. This would involve not only
declarations of "denuclearization" in whole areas of Latin America,
Africa, Asia and Europe, but would attempt to create inspection
machinery to guarantee the peaceful use of atomic energy.
Second, the United States should reconsider its increasingly outmoded
European defense framework, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Since its creation in 1949, NATO has assumed increased strength in
overall determination of Western military policy, but has become less
and less relevant to its original purpose, which was the defense of
Central Europe. To be sure, after the Czech coup of 1948, it might have
appeared that the Soviet Union was on the verge of a full-scale assault
on Europe. But that onslaught has not materialized, not so much because
of NATO's existence but because of the general unimportance of much of
Central Europe to the Soviets. Today, when even American-based ICBMs
could smash Russia minutes after an invasion of Europe, when the Soviets
have no reason to embark on such an invasion, and when "thaw sectors"
are desperately needed to brake the arms race, one of at least
threatening but most promising courses for American would be toward the
gradual diminishment of the NATO forces, coupled with the negotiated
"disengagement" of parts of Central Europe.
It is especially crucial that this be done while America is entering
into favorable trade relations with the European Economic Community:
such a gesture, combining economic ambition with less dependence on the
military, would demonstrate the kind of competitive "co-existence"
America intends to conduct with the communist-bloc nations. If the
disengaged states were the two Germanies, Poland and Czechoslovakia,
several other benefits would accrue. First, the United States would be
breaking with the lip-service commitment to "liberation" of Eastern
Europe which has contributed so much to Russian fears and intransigence,
while doing too little about actual liberation. But the end of
"liberation" as a proposed policy would not signal the end of American
concern for the oppressed in East Europe. On the contrary,
disengagement would be a real, rather than a rhetorical, effort to ease
military tensions, thus undermining the Russian argument for tighter
controls in East Europe based on the "menace of capitalist
encirclement". This policy, geared to the needs of democratic elements
in the satellites, would develop a real bridge between East and West
across the two most pro-Western Russian satellites. The Russians in the
past have indicated some interest in such a plan, including the
demilitarization of the Warsaw pact countries. Their interest should be
publicly tested. If disengagement could be achieved, a major zone could
be removed from the Cold War, the German problem would be materially
diminished, and the need for NATO would diminish, and attitudes
favorable to disarming would be generated.
Needless to say, those proposals are much different than what is
currently being practised and praised. American military strategists
are slowly acceeding to the NATO demand for an independent deterrent,
based on the fear that America might not defend Europe from military
attack. These tendencies strike just the opposite chords in Russia than
those which would be struck by disengagement themes: the chords of
military alertness, based on the fact that NATO (bulwarked by the German
Wehrmacht) is preparing to attack Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union.
Thus the alarm which underlies the NATO proposal for an independent
deterrent is likely itself to bring into existence the very Russian
posture that was the original cause of fear. Armaments spiral and
belligerence will carry the day, not disengagement and negotiation.
The Industrialization of the World
Many Americans are prone to think of the industrialization of the newlydeveloped countries as a modern form of American noblesse, undertaken sacrificially for the benefit of others. On the contrary, the task of world industrialization, of eliminating the disparity between have and have-not nations, is as important as any issue facing America. The colonial revolution signals the end of an era for the old Western powers and a time of new beginnings for most of the people of the earth. In the course of these upheavals, many problems will emerge: American policies must be revised or accelerated in several ways.
Quite fortunately, we are edging away from the Dullesian "either-or"
foreign policy ultimatum towards an uneasy acceptance of neutralism and
nonalignment. If we really desire the end of the Cold War, we should
now welcome nonalignment -- that is, the creation of whole blocs of
nations concerned with growth and with independently trying to break out
of the Cold War apparatus.
Finally, while seeking disarmament as the genuine deterrent, we should
shift from financial support of military regimes to support of national
development. Real security cannot be gained by propping up military
defenses, but only through the hastening of political stability,
economic growth, greater social welfare, improved education. Military
aid is temporary in nature, a "shoring up" measure that only postpones
crisis. In addition, it tends to divert the allocations of the nation
being defended to supplementary military spending (Pakistan's budget is
70% oriented to defense measures). Sometimes it actually creates crisis
situations, as in Latin America where we have contributed to the growth
of national armies which are opposed generally to sweeping
democratization. Finally, if we are really generous, it is harder for
corrupt governments to exploit unfairly economic aid -- especially if it
is to plentiful that rulers cannot blame the absence of real reforms on
anything but their own power lusts.
5. America should show its commitment to democratic institutions not by
withdrawing support from undemocratic regimes, but by making domestic
democracy exemplary. Worldwide amusement, cynicism and hatred toward
the United States as a democracy is not simply a communist propaganda
trick, but an objectively justifiable phenomenon. If respect for
democracy is to be international, then the significance of democracy
must emanate from America shores, not from the "soft sell" of the United
States Information Agency.
6. America should agree that public utilities, railroads, mines, and
plantations, and other basic economic institutions should be in the
control of national, not foreign, agencies. The destiny of any country
should be determined by its nationals, not by outsiders with economic
interests within. We should encourage our investors to turn over their
foreign holdings (or at least 50% of the stock) to the national
governments of the countries involved.
7. Foreign aid should be given through international agencies,
primarily the United Nations. The need is to eliminate political
overtones, to the extent possible, from economic development. The use
of international agencies, with interests transcending those of American
or Russian self-interest, is the feasible means of working on sound
development. Second, internationalization will allow more long-range
planning, integrate development plans adjacent countries and regions may
have, and eliminate the duplication built into national systems of
foreign aid. Third, it would justify more strictness of supervision
than is now the case with American foreign aid efforts, but with far
less chance of suspicion on the part of the developing countries.
Fourth, the humiliating "hand-out" effect would be replaced by the joint
participation of all nations in the general development of the earth's
resources and industrial capacities. Fifth, it would eliminate national
tensions, e.g. between Japan and some Southeast Asian areas, which now
impair aid programs by "disguising" nationalities in the common pooling
of funds. Sixth, it would make easier the task of stabilizing the world
market prices of basic commodities, alleviating the enormous threat that
decline in prices of commodity exports might cancel out the gains from
foreign aid in the new nations. Seventh, it would improve the
possibilities of non-exploitative development, especially in creating
"soft-credit" rotating-fund agencies which would not require immediate
progress or financial return. Finally, it would enhance the importance
of the United Nations itself, as the disarming process would enhance the
UN as a rule-enforcement agency.
8. Democratic theory must confront the problems inherent in social
revolutions. For Americans concerned with the development of democratic
societies, the anti-colonial movements and revolutions in the emerging
nations pose serious problems. We need to face these problems with
humility: after 180 years of constitutional government we are still
striving for democracy in our own society. We must acknowledge that
democracy and freedom do not magically occur, but have roots in
historical experience; they cannot always be demanded for any society at
any time, but must be nurtured and facilitated. We must avoid the
arbitrary projection of Anglo-Saxon democratic forms onto different
cultures. Instead of democratic capitalism we should anticipate more or
less authoritarian variants of socialism and collectivism in many
emergent societies.
But we do not abandon our critical faculties. Insofar as these regimes
represent a genuine realization of national independence, and are
engaged in constructing social systems which allow for personal meaning
and purpose where exploitation once was, economic systems which work for
the people where once they oppressed them, and political systems which
allow for the organization and expression of minority opinion and
dissent, we recognize their revolutionary and positive character.
Americans can contribute to the growth of democracy in such societies
not by moralizing, nor by indiscriminate prejudgment, but by retaining a
critical identification with these nations, and by helping them to avoid
external threats to their independence. Together with students and
radicals in these nations we need to develop a reasonable theory of
democracy which is concretely applicable to the cultures and conditions
of hungry people.
TOWARDS AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
Every effort to end the Cold War and expand the process of world industrialization is an effort hostile to people and institutions whose interests lie in perpetuation of the East-West military threat and the postponement of change in the "have not" nations of the world. Every such effort, too, is bound to establish greater democracy in America. The major goals of a domestic effort would be:
Every time the President criticizes a recalcitrant Congress, we must ask
that he no longer tolerate the Southern conservatives in the Democratic
Party. Every time in liberal representative complains that "we can't
expect everything at once" we must ask if we received much of anything
from Congress in the last generation. Every time he refers to
"circumstances beyond control" we must ask why he fraternizes with
racist scoundrels. Every time he speaks of the "unpleasantness of
personal and party fighting" we should insist that pleasantry with
Dixiecrats is inexcusable when the dark peoples of the world call for
American support.
2. Mechanisms of voluntary association must be created through which
political information can be imparted and political participation
encouraged. Political parties, even if realigned, would not provide
adequate outlets for popular involvement. Institutions should be
created that engage people with issues and express political preference,
not as now with huge business lobbies which exercise undemocratic power,
but which carry political influence (appropriate to private, rather than
public, groupings) in national decision-making enterprise. Private in
nature, these should be organized around single issues (medical care,
transportation systems reform, etc.), concrete interest (labor and
minority group organizations), multiple issues or general issues. These
do not exist in America in quantity today. If they did exist, they
would be a significant politicizing and educative force bringing people
into touch with public life and affording them means of expression and
action. Today, giant lobby representatives of business interests are
dominant, but not educative. The Federal government itself should
counter the latter forces whose intent is often public deceit for
private gain, by subsidizing the preparation and decentralized
distribution of objective materials on all public issues facing
government.
3. Institutions and practices which stifle dissent should be abolished,
and the promotion of peaceful dissent should be actively promoted. The
first Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly, thought, religion and
press should be seen as guarantees, not threats, to national security.
While society has the right to prevent active subversion of its laws and
institutions, it has the duty as well to promote open discussion of all
issues -- otherwise it will be in fact promoting real subversion as the
only means to implementing ideas. To eliminate the fears and apathy
from national life it is necessary that the institutions bred by fear
and apathy be rooted out: the House Un-American Activities Committee,
the Senate Internal Security Committee, the loyalty oaths on Federal
loans, the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations, the
Smith and McCarren Acts. The process of eliminating these blighting
institutions is the process of restoring democratic participation.
Their existence is a sign of the decomposition and atrophy of the
participation.
4. Corporations must be made publicly responsible. It is not possible
to believe that true democracy can exist where a minority utterly
controls enormous wealth and power. The influence of corporate elites
on foreign policy is neither reliable nor democratic; a way must be
found to be subordinate private American foreign investment to a
democratically-constructed foreign policy. The influence of the same
giants on domestic life is intolerable as well; a way must be found to
direct our economic resources to genuine human needs, not the private
needs of corporations nor the rigged needs of maneuvered citizenry.
We can no longer rely on competition of the many to insure that business
enterprise is responsive to social needs. The many have become the few.
Nor can we trust the corporate bureaucracy to be socially responsible or
to develop a "corporate conscience" that is democratic. The community
of interest of corporations, the anarchic actions of industrial leaders,
should become structurally responsible to the people -- and truly to the
people rather than to an ill-defined and questionable "national
interest". Labor and government as presently constituted are not
sufficient to "regulate" corporations. A new re-ordering, a new calling
of responsibility is necessary: more than changing "work rules" we must
consider changes in the rules of society by challenging the unchallenged
politics of American corporations. Before the government can really
begin to control business in a "public interest", the public must gain
more substantial control of government: this demands a movement for
political as well as economic realignments. We are aware that simple
government "regulation", if achieved, would be inadequate without
increased worker participation in management decision-making,
strengthened and independent regulatory power, balances of partial
and/or complete public ownership, various means of humanizing the
conditions and types of work itself, sweeping welfare programs and
regional public government authorities. These are examples of measures
to re-balance the economy toward public -- and individual -- control.
5. The allocation of resources must be based on social needs. A truly
"public sector" must be established, and its nature debated and planned.
At present the majority of America's "public sector", the largest part
of our public spending, is for the military. When great social needs
are so pressing, our concept of "government spending" is wrapped up in
the "permanent war economy".
In fact, if war is to be avoided, the "permanent war economy" must be
seen as an "interim war economy". At some point, America must return to
other mechanisms of economic growth besides public military spending.
We must plan economically in peace. The most likely, and least
desirable, return would be in the form of private enterprise. The
undesirability lies in the fact of inherent capitalist instability,
noticeable even with bolstering effects of government intervention. In
the most recent post-war recessions, for example, private expenditures
for plant and equipment dropped from $16 billion to $11.5 billion, while
unemployment surged to nearly six million. By good fortune, investments
in construction industries remained level, else an economic depression
would have occurred. This will recur, and our growth in national per
capita living standards will remain unsensational while the economy
stagnates. The main private forces of economic expansion cannot
guarantee a steady rate of growth, nor acceptable recovery from
recession -- especially in a demilitarizing world. Government
participation in the economy is essential. Such participation will
inevitably expand enormously, because the stable growth of the economy
demands increasing "public" investments yearly. Our present outpour of
more than $500 billion might double in a generation, irreversibly
involving government solutions. And in future recessions, the
compensatory fiscal action by the government will be the only means of
avoiding the twin disasters of greater unemployment and a slackening
rate of growth. Furthermore, a close relationship with the European
Common Market will involve competition with numerous planned economies
and may aggravate American unemployment unless the economy here is
expanding swiftly enough to create new jobs.
All these tendencies suggest that not only solutions to our present social needs but our future expansion rests upon our willingness to enlarge the "public sector" greatly. Unless we choose war as an economic solvent, future public spending will be of a non-military nature -- a major intervention into civilian production by the government. The issues posed by this development are enormous:
The Area Redevelopment Act of 1961 is a first step in recognizing the
underdeveloped areas of the United States, but is only a drop in the
bucket financially and is not keyed to public planning and public works
on a broad scale, but only to a few loan programs to lure industries and
some grants to improve public facilities to "lure industries." The
current public works bill in Congress is needed and a more sweeping,
higher priced program of regional development with a proliferation of
"TVAs" in such areas as the Appalachian region are needed desperately.
It has been rejected by Mississippi already however, because of the
improvement it bodes for the unskilled Negro worker. This program
should be enlarged, given teeth, and pursued rigorously by Federal
authorities.
d. We must meet the growing complex of "city" problems; over 90% of
Americans will live in urban areas in the next two decades. Juvenile
delinquency, untended mental illness, crime increase, slums, urban
tenantry and uncontrolled housing, the isolation of the individual in
the city -- all are problems of the city and are major symptoms of the
present system of economic priorities and lack of public planning.
Private property control (the real estate lobby and a few selfish
landowners and businesses) is as devastating in the cities as
corporations are on the national level. But there is no comprehensive
way to deal with these problems now midst competing units of government,
dwindling tax resources, suburban escapism (saprophitic to the sick
central cities), high infrastructure costs and on one to pay them. The
only solutions are national and regional. "Federalism" has thus far
failed here because states are rural-dominated; the Federal government
has had to operate by bootlegging and trickle-down measures dominated by
private interests, and the cities themselves have not been able to catch
up with their appendages through annexation or federation. A new
external challenge is needed, not just a Department of Urban Affairs but
a thorough national program to help the cities. The model city must be
projected -- more community decision-making and participation, true
integration of classes, races, vocations -- provision for beauty, access
to nature and the benefits of the central city as well, privacy without
privatism, decentralized "units" spread horizontally with central,
regional, democratic control -- provision for the basic facility-needs,
for everyone, with units of planned regions and thus public, democratic
control over the growth of the civic community and the allocation of
resources.
e. Mental health institutions are in dire need; there were fewer mental
hospital beds in relation to the numbers of mentally-ill in 1959 than
there were in 1948. Public hospitals, too, are seriously wanting;
existing structures alone need an estimated $1 billion for
rehabilitation. Tremendous staff and faculty needs exist as well, and
there are not enough medical students enrolled today to meet the
anticipated needs of the future.
f. Our prisons are too often the enforcers of misery. They must be
either re-oriented to rehabilitative work through public supervision or
be abolished for their dehumanizing social effects. Funds are needed,
too, to make possible a decent prison environment.
g. Education is too vital a public problem to be completely entrusted
to the province of the various states and local units. In fact, there
is no good reason why America should not progress now toward
internationalizing rather than localizing, its educational system --
children and young adults studying everywhere in the world, through a
United Nations program, would go far to create mutual understanding. In
the meantime, the need for teachers and classrooms in America is
fantastic. This is an area where "minimal" requirements hardly should
be considered as a goal -- there always are improvements to be made in
the educational system, e.g., smaller classes and many more teachers for
them, programs to subsidize the education of the poor but bright, etc.
h. America should eliminate agricultural policies based on scarcity and pent-up surplus. In America and foreign countries there exist tremendous needs for more food and balanced diets. The Federal government should finance small farmers' cooperatives, strengthen programs of rural electrification, and expand policies for the distribution of agricultural surpluses throughout the world (by Foodfor -Peace and related UN programming). Marginal farmers must be helped to either become productive enough to survive "industrialized agriculture" or given help in making the transition out of agriculture -
Alternatives to Helplessness
The goals we have set are not realizable next month, or even next
election -- but that fact justifies neither giving up altogether nor a
determination to work only on immediate, direct, tangible problems.
Both responses are a sign of helplessness, fearfulness of visions,
refusal to hope, and tend to bring on the very conditions to be avoided.
Fearing vision, we justify rhetoric or myopia. Fearing hope, we
reinforce despair.
The first effort, then, should be to state a vision: what is the perimeter of human possibility in this epoch? This we have tried to do. The second effort, if we are to be politically responsible, is to evaluate the prospects for obtaining at least a substantial part of that vision in our epoch: what are the social forces that exist, or that must exist, if we are to be at all successful? And what role have we ourselves to play as a social force?
This movement, pushed into a brilliant new phase by the Montgomery bus
boycott and the subsequent nonviolent action of the sit-ins and Freedom
Rides has had three major results: first, a sense of self-determination
has been instilled in millions of oppressed Negroes; second, the
movement has challenged a few thousand liberals to new social idealism;
third, a series of important concessions have been obtained, such as
token school desegregation, increased Administration help, new laws,
desegregation of some public facilities.
But fundamental social change -- that would break the props from under
Jim Crown -- has not come. Negro employment opportunity, wage levels,
housing conditions, educational privileges -- these remain deplorable
and relatively constant, each deprivation reinforcing the impact of the
others. The Southern states, in the meantime, are strengthening the
fortresses of the status quo, and are beginning to camouflage the
fortresses by guile where open bigotry announced its defiance before.
The white-controlled one-party system remains intact; and even where the
Republicans are beginning under the pressures of industrialization in
the towns and suburbs, to show initiative in fostering a two-party
system, all Southern state Republican Committees (save Georgia) have
adopted militant segregationist platforms to attract Dixiecrats.
Rural dominance remains a fact in nearly all the Southern states,
although the reapportionment decision of the Supreme Court portends
future power shifts to the cities. Southern politicians maintain a
continuing aversion to the welfare legislation that would aid their
people. The reins of the Southern economy are held by conservative
businessmen who view human rights as secondary to property rights. A
violent anti-communism is rooting itself in the South, and threatening
even moderate voices. Add the militaristic tradition of the South, and
its irrational regional mystique and one must conclude that
authoritarian and reactionary tendencies are a rising obstacle to the
small, voiceless, poor, and isolated democratic movements.
The civil rights struggle thus has come to an impasse. To this impasse,
the movement responded this year by entering the sphere of politics,
insisting on citizenship rights, specifically the right to vote. The
new voter registration stage of protest represents perhaps the first
major attempt to exercise the conventional instruments of political
democracy in the struggle for racial justice. The vote, if used
strategically by the great mass of now-unregistered Negroes
theoretically eligible to vote, will be decisive factor in changing the
quality of Southern leadership from low demagoguery to decent
statesmanship.
More important, the new emphasis on the vote heralds the use of
political means to solve the problems of equality in America, and it
signals the decline of the short-sighted view that "discrimination" can
be isolated from related social problems. Since the moral clarity of
the civil rights movement has not always been accompanied by precise
political vision, and sometimes not every by a real political
consciousness, the new phase is revolutionary in its implication. The
intermediate goal of the program is to secure and insure a healthy
respect and realization of Constitutional liberties. This is important
not only to terminate the civil and private abuses which currently
characterize the region, but also to prevent the pendulum of oppression
from simply swinging to an alternate extreme with a new unsophisticated
electorate, after the unhappy example of the last Reconstruction. It is
the ultimate objectives of the strategy which promise profound change in
the politics of the nation. An increased Negro voting race in and of
itself is not going to dislodge racist controls of the Southern power
structure; but an accelerating movement through the courts, the ballot
boxes, and especially the jails is the most likely means of shattering
the crust of political intransigency and creating a semblence of
democratic order, on local and state levels.
Linked with pressure from Northern liberals to expunge the Dixiecrats
from the ranks of the Democratic Party, massive Negro voting in the
South could destroy the vice-like grip reactionary Southerners have on
the Congressional legislative process.
2. The broadest movement for peace in several years emerged in 1961-62.
In its political orientation and goals it is much less identifiable than
the movement for civil rights: it includes socialists, pacifists,
liberals, scholars, militant activists, middle-class women, some
professionals, many students, a few unionists. Some have been
emotionally single-issue: Ban the Bomb. Some have been academically
obscurantist. Some have rejected the System (sometimes both systems).
Some have attempted, too, to "work within" the System. Amidst these
conflicting streams of emphasis, however, certain basic qualities
appear. The most important is that the "peace movement" has operated
almost exclusively through peripheral institutions -- almost never
through mainstream institutions. Similarly, individuals interested in
peace have nonpolitical social roles that cannot be turned to the
support of peace activity. Concretely, liberal religious societies,
anti-war groups, voluntary associations, ad hoc committees have been the
political unit of the peace movement, and its human movers have been
students, teacher, housewives, secretaries, lawyers, doctors, clergy.
The units have not been located in spots of major social influence, the
people have not been able to turn their resources fully to the issues
that concern them. The results are political ineffectiveness and
personal alienation.
The organizing ability of the peace movement thus is limited to the
ability to state and polarize issues. It does not have an institution
or the forum in which the conflicting interests can be debated. The
debate goes on in corners; it has little connection with the continuing
process of determining allocations of resources. This process is not
necessarily centralized, however much the peace movement is estranged
from it. National policy, though dominated to a large degree by the
"power elites" of the corporations and military, is still partially
founded in consensus. It can be altered when there actually begins a
shift in the allocation of resources and the listing of priorities by
the people in the institutions which have social influence, e.g., the
labor unions and the schools. As long as the debates of the peace
movement form only a protest, rather than an opposition viewpoint within
the centers of serious decision- making, then it is neither a movement
of democratic relevance, nor is it likely to have any effectiveness
except in educating more outsiders to the issue. It is vital, to be
sure, that this educating go on (a heartening sign is the recent
proliferation of books and journals dealing with peace and war from
newly-developing countries); the possibilities for making politicians
responsible to "peace constituencies" becomes greater.
But in the long interim before the national political climate is more
open to deliberate, goal-directed debate about peace issues, the
dedicated peace "movement" might well prepare a local base, especially
by establishing civic committees on the techniques of converting from
military to peacetime production. To make war and peace relevant to the
problems of everyday life, by relating it to the backyard (shelters),
the baby (fall-out), the job (military contracts) -- and making a turn
toward peace seem desirable on these same terms -- is a task the peace
movement is just beginning, and can profitably continue.
3. Central to any analysis of the potential for change must be an
appraisal of organized labor. It would be a-historical to disregard the
immense influence of labor in making modern America a decent place in
which to live. It would be confused to fail to note labor's presence
today as the most liberal of mainstream institutions. But it would be
irresponsible not to criticize labor for losing much of the idealism
that once made it a driving movement. Those who expected a labor
upsurge after the 1955 AFL-CIO merger can only be dismayed that one year
later, in the Stevenson-Eisenhower campaign, the AFL-CIO Committee on
Political Education was able to obtain solicited $1.00 contributions
from only one of every 24 unionists, and prompt only 40% of the rankand
-file to vote.
As a political force, labor generally has been unsuccessful in the postwar
period of prosperity. It has seen the passage of the Taft-Hartley
and Landrum-Griffin laws, and while beginning to receiving slightly
favorable National Labor Relations Board rulings, it has made little
progress against right-to-work laws. Furthermore, it has seen less than
adequate action on domestic problems, especially unemployment.
This labor "recession" has been only partly due to anti-labor
politicians and corporations. Blame should be laid, too, to labor
itself for not mounting an adequate movement. Labor has too often seen
itself as elitist, rather than mass-oriented, and as a pressure group
rather than as an 18-million member body making political demands for
all America. In the first instance, the labor bureaucracy tends to be
cynical toward, or afraid of, rank-and-file involvement in the work of
the Union. Resolutions passed at conventions are implemented only by
high-level machinations, not by mass mobilization of the unionists.
Without a significant base, labor's pressure function is materially
reduced since it becomes difficult to hold political figures accountable
to a movement that cannot muster a vote from a majority of its members.
There are some indications, however, that labor might regain its missing
idealism. First, there are signs within the movement: of worker
discontent with the economic progress, of collective bargaining, of
occasional splits among union leaders on questions such as nuclear
testing or other Cold War issues. Second, and more important, are the
social forces which prompt these feelings of unrest. Foremost is the
permanence of unemployment, and the threat of automation, but important,
too, is the growth of unorganized ranks in white-collar fields with
steady depletion in the already-organized fields. Third, there is the
tremendous challenge of the Negro movement for support from organized
labor: the alienation from and disgust with labor hypocrisy among
Negroes ranging from the NAACP to the Black Muslims (crystallized in the
formation of the Negro American Labor Council) indicates that labor must
move more seriously in its attempts to organize on an interracial basis
in the South and in large urban centers. When this task was broached
several years ago, "jurisdictional" disputes prevented action. Today,
many of these disputes have been settled -- and the question of a
massive organizing campaign is on the labor agenda again.
These threats and opportunities point to a profound crisis: either
labor continues to decline as a social force, or it must constitute
itself as a mass political force demanding not only that society
recognize its rights to organize but also a program going beyond desired
labor legislation and welfare improvements. Necessarily this latter
role will require rank-and-file involvement. It might include greater
autonomy and power for political coalitions of the various trade unions
in local areas, rather than the more stultifying dominance of the
international unions now. It might include reductions in leaders'
salaries, or rotation from executive office to shop obligations, as a
means of breaking down the hierarchical tendencies which have detached
elite from base and made the highest echelons of labor more like
businessmen than workers. It would certainly mean an announced
independence of the center and Dixiecrat wings of the Democratic Party,
and a massive organizing drive, especially in the South to complement
the growing Negro political drive there.
A new politics must include a revitalized labor movement; a movement
which sees itself, and is regarded by others, as a major leader of the
breakthrough to a politics of hope and vision. Labor's role is no less
unique or important in the needs of the future than it was in the past,
its numbers and potential political strength, its natural interest in
the abolition of exploitation, its reach to the grass roots of American
society, combine to make it the best candidate for the synthesis of the
civil rights, peace, and economic reform movements.
The creation of bridges is made more difficult by the problems left over
from the generation of "silence". Middle class students, still the main
actors in the embryonic upsurge, have yet to overcome their ignorance,
and even vague hostility, for what they see as "middle class labor"
bureaucrats. Students must open the campus to labor through
publications, action programs, curricula, while labor opens its house to
students through internships, requests for aid (on the picket-line, with
handbills, in the public dialogue), and politics. And the organization
of the campus can be a beginning -- teachers' unions can be argued as
both socially progressive, and educationally beneficial university
employees can be organized -- and thereby an important element in the
education of the student radical.
But the new politics is still contained; it struggles below the surface
of apathy, awaiting liberation. Few anticipate the breakthrough and
fewer still exhort labor to begin. Labor continues to be the most
liberal -- and most frustrated -- institution in mainstream America.
4. Since the Democratic Party sweep in 1958, there have been
exaggerated but real efforts to establish a liberal force in Congress,
not to balance but to at least voice criticism of the conservative mood.
The most notable of these efforts was the Liberal Project begun early in
1959 by Representative Kastenmeier of Wisconsin. The Project was
neither disciplined nor very influential but it was concerned at least
with confronting basic domestic and foreign problems, in concert with
sever liberal intellectuals.
In 1960 five members of the Project were defeated at the polls (for
reasons other than their membership in the Project). Then followed a
"post mortem" publication of the Liberal Papers, materials discussed by
the Project when it was in existence. Republican leaders called the
book "further our than Communism". The New Frontier Administration
repudiated any connection with the statements. Some former members of
the Project even disclaimed their past roles.
A hopeful beginning came to a shameful end. But during the demise of
the Project, a new spirit of Democratic Party reform was occurring: in
New York City, Ithaca, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Texas, California,
and even in Mississippi and Alabama where Negro candidates for Congress
challenged racist political power. Some were for peace, some for the
liberal side of the New Frontier, some for realignment of the parties --
and in most cases they were supported by students.
Here and there were stirrings of organized discontent with the political
stalemate. Americans for Democratic Action and the New Republic,
pillars of the liberal community, took stands against the President on
nuclear testing. A split, extremely slight thus far, developed in
organized labor on the same issue. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
preached against the Dixiecrat-Republican coalition across the nation.
5. From 1960 to 1962, the campuses experienced a revival of idealism
among an active few. Triggered by the impact of the sit-ins, students
began to struggle for integration, civil liberties, student rights,
peace, and against the fast-rising right wing "revolt" as well. The
liberal students, too, have felt their urgency thwarted by conventional
channels: from student governments to Congressional committees. Out of
this alienation from existing channels has come the creation of new
ones; the most characteristic forms of liberal-radical student
organizations are the dozens of campus political parties, political
journals, and peace marches and demonstrations. In only a few cases
have students built bridges to power: an occasional election campaign,
the sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and voter registration activities; in some
relatively large Northern demonstrations for peace and civil rights, and
infrequently, through the United States National Student Association
whose notable work has not been focused on political change.
These contemporary social movements -- for peace, civil rights, civil
liberties labor -- have in common certain values and goals. The fight
for peace is one for a stable and racially integrated world; for an end
to the inherently volatile exploitation of most of mankind by
irresponsible elites; and for freedom of economic, political and
cultural organization. The fight for civil rights is also one for
social welfare for all Americans; for free speech and the right to
protest; for the shield of economic independence and bargaining power;
for a reduction of the arms race which takes national attention and
resources away from the problems of domestic injustice. Labor's fight
for jobs and wages is also one labor; for the right to petition and
strike; for world industrialization; for the stability of a peacetime
economy instead of the insecurity of the war economy; for expansion of
the Welfare State. The fight for a liberal Congress is a fight for a
platform from which these concerns can issue. And the fight for
students, for internal democracy in the university, is a fight to gain a
forum for the issues.
But these scattered movements have more in common: a need for their
concerns to be expressed by a political party responsible to their
interests. That they have no political expression, no political
channels, can be traced in large measure to the existence of a
Democratic Party which tolerates the perverse unity of liberalism and
racism, prevents the social change wanted by Negroes, peace protesters,
labor unions, students, reform Democrats, and other liberals. Worse,
the party stalemate prevents even the raising of controversy -- a full
Congressional assault on racial discrimination, disengagement in Central
Europe, sweeping urban reform, disarmament and inspection, public
regulation of major industries; these and other issues are never heard
in the body that is supposed to represent the best thoughts and
interests of all Americans.
An imperative task for these publicly disinherited groups, then, is to
demand a Democratic Party responsible to their interests. They must
support Southern voter registration and Negro political candidates and
demand that Democratic Party liberals do the same (in the last Congress,
Dixiecrats split with Northern Democrats on 119 of 300 roll-calls,
mostly on civil rights, area redevelopment and foreign aid bills; and
breach was much larger than in the previous several sessions). Labor
should begin a major drive in the South. In the North, reform clubs
(either independent or Democratic) should be formed to run against big
city regimes on such issues as peace, civil rights, and urban needs.
Demonstrations should be held at every Congressional or convention
seating of Dixiecrats. A massive research and publicity campaign should
be initiated, showing to every housewife, doctor, professor, and worker
the damage done to their interests every day a racist occupies a place
in the Democratic Party. Where possible, the peace movement should
challenge the "peace credentials" of the otherwise-liberals by
threatening or actually running candidates against them.
The University and Social Change. There is perhaps little reason to be
optimistic about the above analysis. True, the Dixiecrat-GOP coalition
is the weakest point in the dominating complex of corporate, military
and political power. But the civil rights and peace and student
movements are too poor and socially slighted, and the labor movement too
quiescent, to be counted with enthusiasm. From where else can power and
vision be summoned? We believe that the universities are an overlooked
seat of influence.
First, the university is located in a permanent position of social
influence. Its educational function makes it indispensable and
automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social
attitudes. Second, in an unbelievably complicated world, it is the
central institution for organizing, evaluating, and transmitting
knowledge. Third, the extent to which academic resources presently is
used to buttress immoral social practice is revealed first, by the
extent to which defense contracts make the universities engineers of the
arms race. Too, the use of modern social science as a manipulative tool
reveals itself in the "human relations" consultants to the modern
corporation, who introduce trivial sops to give laborers feelings of
"participation" or "belonging", while actually deluding them in order to
further exploit their labor. And, of course, the use of motivational
research is already infamous as a manipulative aspect of American
politics. But these social uses of the universities' resources also
demonstrate the unchangeable reliance by men of power on the men and
storehouses of knowledge: this makes the university functionally tied
to society in new ways, revealing new potentialities, new levers for
change. Fourth, the university is the only mainstream institution that
is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint.
These, at least, are facts, no matter how dull the teaching, how paternalistic the rules, how irrelevant the research that goes on. Social relevance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness
1. Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real
intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection
as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an
adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.
2. A new left must be distributed in significant social roles
throughout the country. The universities are distributed in such a
manner.
3. A new left must consist of younger people who matured in the postwar
world, and partially be directed to the recruitment of younger
people. The university is an obvious beginning point.
4. A new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for
their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in
the system. The university is a more sensible place than a political
party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their differences and
look for political synthesis.
5. A new left must start controversy across the land, if national
policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university
is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on
communities beyond.
6. A new left must transform modern complexity into issues that can be
understood and felt close-up by every human being. It must give form to
the feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see
the political, social and economic sources of their private troubles and
organize to change society. In a time of supposed prosperity, moral
complacency and political manipulation, a new left cannot rely on only
aching stomachs to be the engine force of social reform. The case for
change, for alternatives that will involve uncomfortable personal
efforts, must be argued as never before. The university is a relevant
place for all of these activities.
But we need not indulge in allusions: the university system cannot
complete a movement of ordinary people making demands for a better life.
From its schools and colleges across the nation, a militant left might
awaken its allies, and by beginning the process towards peace, civil
rights, and labor struggles, reinsert theory and idealism where too
often reign confusion and political barter. The power of students and
faculty united is not only potential; it has shown its actuality in the
South, and in the reform movements of the North.
The bridge to political power, though, will be built through genuine
cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new
left of young people, and an awakening community of allies. In each
community we must look within the university and act with confidence
that we can be powerful, but we must look outwards to the less exotic
but more lasting struggles for justice.
To turn these possibilities into realities will involve national efforts
at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty. They must
wrest control of the educational process from the administrative
bureaucracy. They must make fraternal and functional contact with
allies in labor, civil rights, and other liberal forces outside the
campus. They must import major public issues into the curriculum --
research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding
example. They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant,
the common style for educational life. They must consciously build a
base for their assault upon the loci of power.
As students, for a democratic society, we are committed to stimulating
this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program is campus
and community across the country. If we appear to seek the
unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to
avoid the unimaginable.