TABLE OF CONTENTS
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.
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 -
is an activity that has been devalued and corrupted.
The conventional moral terms of the age, the politician moralities --
"free world", "people's democracies" -- reflect
realities poorly, if at all, and seem to function more as ruling myths
than as
descriptive principles. But neither has our
experience in the universities brought as moral enlightenment. Our professors
and administrators sacrifice controversy to
public relations; their curriculums change more slowly than the living
events of
the world; their skills and silence are purchased
by investors in the arms race; passion is called unscholastic. The
questions we might want raised -- what is
really important? can we live in a different and better way? if we wanted
to
change society, how would we do it? -- are
not thought to be questions of a "fruitful, empirical nature", and thus
are
brushed aside.
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:
that decision-making of basic social consequence
be carried on by public groupings;
that politics be seen positively, as the art
of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations;
that politics has the function of bringing
people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though
not
sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal
life;
that the political order should serve to clarify
problems in a way instrumental to their solution; it should provide outlets
for
the expression of personal grievance and aspiration;
opposing views should be organized so as to illuminate choices and
facilities the attainment of goals; channels
should be commonly available to related men to knowledge and to power so
that private problems -- from bad recreation
facilities to personal alienation -- are formulated as general issues.
The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles:
that work should involve incentives worthier
than money or survival. It should be educative, not stultifying; creative,
not
mechanical; selfdirect, not manipulated, encouraging
independence; a respect for others, a sense of dignity and a
willingness to accept social responsibility,
since it is this experience that has crucial influence on habits, perceptions
and
individual ethics;
that the economic experience is so personally
decisive that the individual must share in its full determination;
that the economy itself is of such social
importance that its major resources and means of production should be open
to
democratic participation and subject to democratic
social regulation.
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:
1.some limited "regulatory" powers -- which usually just
ratify industry policies or serve as palliatives at the margins of
significant business activity;
2.a fiscal policy build upon defense expenditures as pump-priming
"public works" -- without a significant emphasis on
"peaceful public works" to meet social priorities
and alleviate personal hardships;
3.limited fiscal and monetary weapons which are rigid
and have only minor effects, and are greatly limited by corporate
veto: tax cuts and reforms; interest rate
control (used generally to tug on investment by hurting the little investor
most);
tariffs which protect noncompetitive industries
with political power and which keep less-favored nations out of the large
trade mainstream, as the removal of barriers
reciprocally with the Common Market may do disastrously to emerging
countries outside of Europe; wage arbitration,
the use of government coercion in the name of "public interest" to hide
the
tensions between workers and business production
controllers; price controls, which further maintains the status quo of
big ownership and flushes out little investors
for the sake of "stability";
4.very limited "poverty-solving" which is designed for
the organized working class but not the shut-out, poverty-stricken
migrants, farm workers, the indigent unaware
of medical care or the lower-middle class person riddled with medical bills,
the "unhireables" of minority groups or workers
over 45 years of age, etc.
5.regional development programs -- such as the Area Redevelopment
Act
which have been
only "trickle down" welfare programs without broad authority for regional
planning and
development
and public works spending. The federal highway program has been more significant
than the
"depressed areas"
program in meeting the needs of people, but is generally too remote and
does not reach the
vicious circle
of poverty itself.
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:
1.Automation brings unemployment instead of mere leisure
for all and greater achievement of needs for all people in the
world -- a crisis instead of economic utopia.
Instead of being introduced into a social system in a planned and equitable
way, automation is initiated according to
its profitability. American Telephone and Telegraph holds back modern
telephone equipment, invented with public
research funds, until present equipment is financially unprofitable. Colleges
develop teaching machines, mass-class techniques,
and TV education to replace teachers: not to proliferate knowledge
or to assist the qualified professors now,
but to "cut costs in education and make the academic community more efficient
and less wasteful." Technology, which could
be a blessing to society, becomes more and more a sinister threat to
humanistic and rational enterprise.
2.Hard-core poverty exists just beyond the neon lights
of affluence, and the "have-nots" may be driven still further from
opportunity as the high-technology society
demands better education to get into the production mainstream and more
capital investment to get into "business".
Poverty is shameful in that it herds people by race, region, and previous
condition of infortune into "uneconomic classes"
in the so-called free society -- the marginal worker is made more
insecure by automation and high education
requirements, heavier competition for jobs, maintaining low wages or a
high
level of unemployment. People in the rut of
poverty are strikingly unable to overcome the collection of forces working
against them: poor health, bad neighborhoods,
miserable schools, inadequate "welfare" services, unemployment and
underemployment, weak politician and union
organization.
3.Surplus and potential plenty are waste domestically
and producers suffer impoverishment because the real needs of the
world and of our society are not reflected
in the market. Our huge bins of decomposing grain are classic American
examples, as is the steel industry which,
in the summer of 1962, is producing at 53 percent of capacity.
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
when vision and change are required, our government
pursues a policy of macabre dead-end dimensions -- conditioned,
but not justified, by actions of the Soviet
bloc. Ironically, the war which seems to close will not be fought between
the
United States and Russia, not externally between
two national entities, but as an international civil war throughout the
unrespected and unprotected human civitas
which spans the world.
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).
1.Literacy: One of every four "nonwhites" is functionally
illiterate; half do not complete elementary school; one in five
finishes high school or better. But one in
twenty whites is functionally illiterate; four of five finish elementary
school; half
go through high school or better.
2.Salary: In 1959 a "nonwhite" worker could expect to
average $2,844 annually; a "nonwhite" family, including a
college-educated father, could expect to make
$5,654 collectively. But a white worker could expect to make $4,487 if
he worked alone; with a college degree and
a family of helpers he could expect $7,373. The approximate Negro-white
wage ratio has remained nearly level for generations,
with the exception of the World War II employment "boom" which
opened many better jobs to exploited groups.
3.Work: More than half of all "nonwhites" work at laboring
or service jobs, including one-fourth of those with college
degrees; one in 20 works in a professional
or managerial capacity. Fewer than one in five of all whites are laboring
or
service workers, including one in every 100
of the college-educated; one in four is in professional or managerial work.
4.Unemployment: Within the 1960 labor force of approximately
72 million, one of every 10 "nonwhites" was unemployed.
Only one of every 20 whites suffered that
condition.
5.Housing: The census classifies 57 percent of all "nonwhite"
houses substandard, but only 27 percent of white-owned
units so exist.
6.Education: More than fifty percent of America's "nonwhite"
high school students never graduate. The vocational and
professional spread of curriculum categories
offered "nonwhites" is 16 as opposed to the 41 occupations offered to the
white student. Furthermore, in spite of the
1954 Supreme Court decision, 80 percent of all "nonwhites" educated
actually, or virtually, are educated under
segregated conditions. And only one of 20 "nonwhite" students goes to college
as opposed to the 1:10 ratio for white students.
7.Voting: While the white community is registered above
two-thirds of its potential, the "nonwhite" population is registered
below one-third of its capacity (with even
greater distortion in areas of the Deep South).
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?
1.Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence
and arms control as the national defense goal. The strategy of
mutual threat can only temporarily prevent
thermonuclear war, and it cannot but erode democratic institutions here
while
consolidating oppressive institutions in the
Soviet Union. Yet American leadership, while giving rhetorical due to the
ideal
of disarmament, persists in accepting mixed
deterrence as its policy formula: under Kennedy we have seen first-strike
and second-strike weapons, counter-military
and counter-population inventions, tactical atomic weapons and guerilla
warriors, etc. The convenient rationalization
that our weapons potpourri will confuse the enemy into fear of misbehaving
is absurd and threatening. Our own intentions,
once clearly retaliatory, are now ambiguous since the President has
indicated we might in certain circumstances
be the first to use nuclear weapons. We can expect that Russia will become
more anxious herself, and perhaps even prepare
to "preempt" us, and we (expecting the worst from the Russians) will
nervously consider "preemption" ourselves.
The symmetry of threat and counter-threat lead not to stability but to
the
edge of hell.
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.
1.It will involve major changes in economic direction.
Government intervention in new areas, government regulation of
certain industrial price and investment practices
to prevent inflation, full use of national productive capacities, and
employment for every person in a dramatically
expanding economy all are to be expected as the "price" of peace.
2.It will involve the simultaneous creation of international
rulemaking and enforcement machinery beginning under the
United Nations, and the gradual transfer of
sovereignties -- such as national armies and national determination of
"international" law -- to such machinery.
3.It will involve the initiation of an explicitly political
-- as opposed to military -- foreign policy on the part of the two major
superstates. Neither has formulated the political
terms in which they would conduct their behavior in a disarming or
disarmed world. Neither dares to disarm until
such an understanding is reached.
4.A crucial feature of this political understanding must
be the acceptance of status quo possessions. According to the
universality principle all present national
entities -- including the Vietnams, the Koreans, the Chinas, and the Germanys
--
should be members of the United Nations as
sovereign, no matter how desirable, states.
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.
1.The United States' principal goal should be creating
a world where hunger, poverty, disease, ignorance, violence, and
exploitation are replaced as central features
by abundance, reason, love, and international cooperation. To many this
will
seem the product of juvenile hallucination:
but we insist it is a more realistic goal than is a world of nuclear stalemate.
Some will say this is a hope beyond all bounds:
but is far better to us to have positive vision than a "hard headed"
resignation. Some will sympathize, but claim
it is impossible: if so, then, we, not Fate, are the responsible ones,
for we
have the means at our disposal. We should
not give up the attempt for fear of failure.
2.We should undertake here and now a fifty-year effort
to prepare for all nations the conditions of industrialization. Even
with far more capital and skill than we now
import to emerging areas, serious prophets expect that two generations
will
pass before accelerating industrialism is
a worldwide act. The needs are numerous: every nation must build an adequate
intrastructure (transportation, communication,
land resources, waterways) for future industrial growth; there must be
industries suited to the rapid development
of differing raw materials and other resources; education must begin on
a
continuing basis for everyone in the society,
especially including engineering and technical training; technical assistance
from outside sources must be adequate to meet
present and long-term needs; atomic power plants must spring up to
make electrical energy available. With America's
idle productive capacity, it is possible to begin this process immediately
without changing our military allocations.
This might catalyze a "peace race" since it would demand a response of
such
magnitude from the Soviet Union that arms
spending and "coexistence" spending would become strenuous, perhaps
impossible, for the Soviets to carry on simultaneously.
3.We should not depend significantly on private enterprise
to do the job. Many important projects will not be profitable
enough to entice the investment of private
capital. The total amount required is far beyond the resources of corporate
and philanthropic concerns. The new nations
are suspicious, legitimately, of foreign enterprises dominating their national
life. World industrialization is too huge
an undertaking to be formulated or carried out by private interests. Foreign
economic assistance is a national problem,
requiring long range planning, integration with other domestic and foreign
policies, and considerable public debate and
analysis. Therefore the Federal government should have primary
responsibility in this area.
4.We should not lock the development process into the
Cold War: we should view it as a way of ending that conflict.
When President Kennedy declared that we must
aid those who need aid because it is right, he was unimpeachably
correct -- now principle must become practice.
We should reverse the trend of aiding corrupt anti-communist regimes.
To support dictators like Diem while trying
to destroy ones like Castro will only enforce international cynicism about
American "principle", and is bound to lead
to even more authoritarian revolutions, especially in Latin America where
we
did not even consider foreign aid until Castro
had challenged the status quo. We should end the distinction between
communist hunger and anti-communist hunger.
To feed only anticommunists is to directly fatten men like Boun Oum, to
incur the wrath of real democrats, and to
distort our own sense of human values. We must cease seeing development
in
terms of communism and capitalism. To fight
communism by capitalism in the newly-developing areas is to fundamentally
misunderstand the international hatred of
imperialism and colonialism and to confuse and needs of 19th century industrial
America with those of contemporary nations.
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:
1.America must abolish its political party stalemate. Two
genuine parties, centered around issues and essential values,
demanding allegiance to party principles shall
supplant the current system of organized stalemate which is seriously
inadequate to a world in flux. It has long
been argued that the very overlapping of American parties guarantees that
issues will be considered responsibly, that
progress will be gradual instead of intemperate, and that therefore America
will remain stable instead of torn by class
strife. On the contrary: the enormous party overlap itself confuses issues
and
makes responsible presentation of choice to
the electorate impossible, that guarantees Congressional listlessness and
the
drift of power to military and economic bureaucracies,
that directs attention away from the more fundamental causes of
social stability, such as a huge middle class,
Keynesian economic techniques and Madison Avenue advertising. The
ideals of political democracy, then, the imperative
need for flexible decision-making apparatus makes a real two-party
system an immediate social necessity. What
is desirable is sufficient party disagreement to dramatize major issues,
yet
sufficient party overlap to guarantee stable
transitions from administration to administration.
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:
1.How should public vs. private domain be determined? We
suggest these criteria: 1) when a resource has been
discovered or developed with public tax revenues,
such as a space communications system, it should remain a public
source, not be given away to private enterprise;
2.when monopolization seems inevitable, the public should
maintain control of an industry; 3) when national objectives
contradict seriously with business objectives
as to the use of the resource, the public need should prevail.
3.How should technological advances be introduced into
a society? By a public process, based on publicly-determined
needs. Technological innovations should not
be postponed from social use by private corporations in order to protect
investment in older equipment.
4.How shall the "public sector" be made public, and not
the arena of a ruling bureaucracy of "public servants"? By
steadfast opposition to bureaucratic coagulation,
and to definitions of human needs according to problems easiest for
computers to solve. Second, the bureaucratic
pileups must be at least minimized by local, regional, and national
economic planning -- responding to the interconnection
of public problems by comprehensive programs of solution.
Third, and most important, by experiments
in decentralization, based on the vision of man as master of his machines
and
his society. The personal capacity to cope
with life has been reduced everywhere by the introduction of technology
that
only minorities of men (barely) understand.
How the process can be reversed
and we believe
it can be -- is one of the greatest sociological and economic tasks before
human people today.
Polytechnical
schooling, with the individual adjusting to several work and life experiences,
is one method. The
transfer of
certain mechanized tasks back into manual forms, allowing men to make whole,
not partial, products, is
not unimaginable.
Our monster cities, based historically on the need for mass labor, might
now be humanized,
broken into
smaller communities, powered by nuclear energy, arranged according to community
decision. These
are but a fraction
of the opportunities of the new era: serious study and deliberate experimentation,
rooted in a
desire for human
fraternity, may now result in blueprints of civic paradise.
5.America should concentrate on its genuine social priorities:
abolish squalor, terminate neglect, and establish an
environment for people to live in with dignity
and creativeness.
6.A program against poverty must be just as sweeping as
the nature of poverty itself. It must not be just palliative, but
directed to the abolition of the structural
circumstances of poverty. At a bare minimum it should include a housing
act far
larger than the one supported by the Kennedy
Administration, but one that is geared more to low-and middleincome
needs than to the windfall aspirations of
small and large private entrepreneurs, one that is more sympathetic to
the quality
of communal life than to the efficiency of
city-split highways. Second, medical care must become recognized as a lifetime
human right just as vital as food, shelter
and clothing -- the Federal government should guarantee health insurance
as a
basic social service turning medical treatment
into a social habit, not just an occasion of crisis, fighting sickness
among the
aged, not just by making medical care financially
feasible but by reducing sickness among children and younger people.
Third, existing institutions should be expanded
so the Welfare State cares for everyone's welfare according to read.
Social security payments should be extended
to everyone and should be proportionately greater for the poorest. A
minimum wage of at least $1.50 should be extended
to all workers (including the 16 million currently not covered at all).
Equal educational opportunity is an important
part of the battle against poverty.
7.A full-scale public initiative for civil rights should
be undertaken despite the clamor among conservatives (and liberals)
about gradualism, property rights, and law
and order. The executive and legislative branches of the Federal government
should work by enforcement and enactment against
any form of exploitation of minority groups. No Federal cooperation
with racism is tolerable -- from financing
of schools, to the development of Federally-supported industry, to the
social
gatherings of the President. Laws bastcuing
school desegregation, voting rights, and economic protection for Negroes
are needed right now. The moral force of the
Executive Office should be exerted against the Dixiecrats specifically,
and
the national complacency about the race question
generally. Especially in the North, where one-half of the country's
Negro people now live, civil rights is not
a problem to be solved in isolation from other problems. The fight against
poverty, against slums, against the stalemated
Congress, against McCarthyism, are all fights against the discrimination
that is nearly endemic to all areas of American
life.
8.The promise and problems of long-range Federal economic
development should be studied more constructively. It is an
embarrassing paradox that the Tennessee Valley
Authority is a wonder to foreign visitors but a "radical" and barely
influential project to most Americans. The
Kennedy decision to permit private facilities to transmit power from the
$1
billion Colorado River Storage Project is
a disastrous one, interposing privately-owned transmitters between
public-owned power generators and their publicly
(and cooperatively) owned distributors. The contracy trend, to public
ownership of power, should be generated in
an experimental way.
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 -
the current Rural Area Development program
must be better coordinated with a massive national "area redevelopment"
program. i. Science should be employed to
constructively transform the conditions of life throughout the United States
and the world. Yet at the present time the
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the National Science
Foundation together spend only $300 million
annually for scientific purposes in contrast to the $6 billion spent by
the
Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission.
One-half of all research and development in America is
directly devoted to military purposes. Two
imbalances must be corrected -- that of military over non-military
investigation, and that of biological-natural-physical
science over the sciences of human behavior. Our political system
must then include planning for the human use
of science: by anticipating the political consequences of scientific innovation,
by directing the discovery and exploration
of space, by adapting science to improved production of food, to international
communications systems, to technical problems
of disarmament, and so on. For the newly-developing nations, American
science should focus on the study of cheap
sources of power, housing and building materials, mass educational
techniques, etc. Further, science and scholarship
should be seen less as an apparatus of conflicting power blocs, but as
a
bridge toward supranational community: the
International Geophysical Year is a model for continuous further
cooperation between the science communities
of all nations.
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?
1.In exploring the existing social forces, note must be
taken of the Southern civil rights movement as the most heartening
because of the justice it insists upon, exemplary
because it indicates that there can be a passage out of apathy.
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
these together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.
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.