Open up any collection of primary source documents from the 1960s and you will find the “values” section of the Port Huron Statement (PHS). Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the biggest and most influential of that decade’s student organizations, had drafted the PHS in the summer of 1962 to serve as a manifesto for the growing numbers of young people who had grown disenchanted with the world handed down to them by the previous generation.
The chief inspiration for both SDS and the PHS was the civil rights movement, particularly as represented by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC supplied both animating spirit and brave souls for the sit-ins that, beginning in North Carolina in February 1960, signaled the emergence within the movement of a more confrontational style of activism. SDS partisans saw that activism as the local expression of a more general rebelliousness manifest most clearly in the anti-colonial revolutions that flourished amidst the rubble of the Second World War. The PHS was designed to help students in American colleges and universities find a proper role for themselves in these events.
The “values” section of the PHS appears right after a brief, “agenda for a generation” introduction. Tom Hayden, who composed the original draft, believed that “making values explicit” – getting clear on just what they believed in – was necessary at the outset if the ideas and proposals discussed thereafter were to appear sound. Any alternatives pitched against the flawed thinking and failed policies of the reigning authorities needed to be grounded in a moral vision appropriate at once to the hard challenges young people faced and the exciting possibilities they now perceived, as a new kind of radical caught up in a global uprising, for meeting them. This was not a time for technocratic tinkering.
Like most political declarations, the PHS’s diagnosis of the disorder it proposed to remedy determined much of what it chose to prescribe. Hayden did not claim to have discovered congenital institutional failure – indeed, at the end of the manifesto he placed his hopes for redress in institutions located squarely in the middle of American life. Rather, he targeted apathy and, beneath that, the hopelessness that seeps into the minds of people who believe that those institutions are now beyond their understanding and control. Accordingly, he emphasized the capacities all humans possess for directing their own affairs and, more generally, for “reason, freedom, and love.” These capabilities equip people to act independently and creatively even in the complex, bureaucratic society they find themselves. When acting in consort with others, they are bound by “fraternity and honesty,” as befits a people who strive above all for “human brotherhood … as a condition for survival and the most appropriate form of social relations.”
Hayden’s search for a political form that might allow all these capacities to blossom led him to “participatory democracy,” the defining commitment of the New Left that SDS and SNCC brought into being. Individuals must have a voice in the decisions that affect them and society must be reorganized so that those decisions carry real weight. Politics properly conceived should work to “bring people out of isolation and into community.” That could not happen if people satisfied their civic obligations by checking a few boxes in a curtained booth every four years. Voting, by SDS standards, was a poor excuse for political participation; it more reaffirmed than rectified citizen powerlessness.
The PHS, and the New Left generally, have been scrutinized from all angles by scholars and pundits trying to tie down the meaning of the 1960s. Rather than enter that fray, I want to view it from where we stand in the present. In particular, I would like us to consider what seems from that perspective to be a glaring defect – the same one present in much thinking about how we might overcome the hopelessness we feel in our struggles against seemingly invincible antagonists.
Put simply: there is a noticeable lack of fit between the desired ends and the recommended means of achieving them. It is hard to imagine a more generous articulation of the human capacity for doing good. The ideals Hayden invokes to flesh out this characterization – fraternity, dignity, freedom, love, self-direction, honesty, creativity – glow with promise and benevolence. A just society, by his definition, is one where these ideals become manifest in our relationships and civic life.
How do we get there? At the end of the PHS, Hayden assembles a list of the “forces” moving in the direction of change. On this list he includes several social movements (civil rights, peace, student) and two institutions (organized labor, the Democratic Party). Of these, the political party is the most important: to exercise power as agents of lasting change, these disparate forces must come together “to demand a Democratic Party responsible to their interests.”
Needless to say, that Democratic Party never materialized. Both major parties during these years felt an obsessive obligation to fight the Cold War on every imaginable front. That circumstance boosted the prospects of the civil rights movement, as the well-publicized indignities of the Jim Crow system proved a liability in efforts by US policymakers to court newly independent nations in Asia and Africa. Judges and politicians whose views on racial equality fell well shy of enlightened nonetheless found themselves issuing rulings and passing legislation outlawing the forms of white supremacy prevalent in the South. The peace movement was rewarded for its adventures in pressure politics with the wholesale escalation, by a liberal Democratic administration, of the Vietnam War.
When court rulings and laws proved insufficient for eradicating such injustices as had taken root on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, civil rights gave way to Black Power. Simultaneously, student activists turned to various Third World Marxisms for help in understanding and contesting the no-holds-barred militarism of Johnson and Nixon. By the end of the decade, the vision of politics conjured up in the PHS was deemed hopelessly naive.
That verdict opened the door to the cynicism that, I believe, has dominated American politics ever since. The Right has always favored a bleak, social Darwinian view of human nature, which is one reason even small-government conservatives feel duty-bound to beef up the military and security arms of the state and make extravagant welfare payments (subsidies, tax breaks) to capitalism’s “fittest.” The Left abandoned the visionary mode for allegedly more practical styles of wielding influence, even as that meant working within a Democratic Party loyal in deed (words, as they say, are cheap) to those same corporate and financial interests. We all have reason to hold our noses when entering a voting booth. Nothing so high-minded as an ideal circulates any longer in official or oppositional channels.
The good news is that they are circulating profusely outside of those channels. The noble ideals that Hayden set loose in the PHS are cropping up apology-free in the manifestoes and proclamations now issuing forth in rapid succession within degrowth/localization circles. The reason seems to me self-evident: those ideals first emerged, and even now can only be meaningfully put into practice, within kin groups and face-to-face communities. That is their natural habitat. They have grown scarce for the same reason so many species are barely hanging on – their habitat is shrinking. The PHS was not naive in its rosy vision of human capabilities but in its unfounded belief that big institutions, private or public, can be pressured to act in accordance with principles that anyone would presume to call moral. They are designed, down to the last detail, for other purposes. An empty slogan in the chambers of national politics, participatory democracy is the normal order of business in any kind of local decision-making body.
Most of the people now mobilizing to meet the challenges ahead seem determined to repeat Hayden’s mistake. Activists still operate as if the major corporations and political parties will be responsive to their demands for change. But their cards are now on the table for all to see: neither party will do anything that threatens the profit margins of the fossil fuel companies. That is the common thread running through every “green” technology promoted by big corporations and “green” policy enacted by big governments. The current administration dresses up some token gesture as a substantive concession and the major environmental organizations fall for it, take credit for it even. They applaud decisions that will have no impact whatsoever on the amount of oil and gas piped out of the ground and sold on the global market to buyers who will most certainly be burning it. Progressives litter their news sites with headlines like “500 scientists demand … ” or “112 educators recommend … ” as if anyone making policy decisions pays any mind to such appeals. We might as well expect results from this one: “500 bunnies demand an end to raptor predation from the sky.” Sorry, bunnies, but hawks and eagles gonna do what hawks and eagles do. As is fossil fuel capitalism and the political parties that maintain it.
We might think of degrowth and localization, then, as another kind of habitat restoration. Humane values, if they are to find a field of exercise, must be broadcast over a terrain populated by institutions that operate at human scale. Some people in the 1960s recognized this – the longhairs who fled the violence and posturing of the post-1968 radical scene to found communes and homesteads in rural parts of the country. They aspired to live the ideals in the PHS rather than hope, against hope in this case, that they might be legislated into existence by existing political institutions. Peace, love, freedom, kindness, fellowship, honesty – these are not so hard to find if you know where they feed.
The Left and the Right found common cause in maligning back-to-the-land communards as “lifestyle radicals.” The term implied a lack of seriousness – an obliviousness to the reality of power and a consequent incapacity to develop the theoretical and tactical expertise needed to make any headway against it. From where we sit now, straining to figure out how to survive the breakdown of nearly everything, those hippies are starting to look wise. We do, it turns out, need a new way of living together on the Earth.
Most of the efforts made during the commune heyday to build durable, self-sufficient agricultural settlements fizzled out in short order, but we might learn from their failures. Mainly, these were young people who had more enthusiasm for this work than knowledge about how to do it. They might have established channels of cooperation with folks who had long experience on the land but in most cases they did little to endear themselves to the locals. Their lifestyle radicalism was reactive, as it sprang from a determination to overturn all that had been handed down to them. Monogamy, marriage, privacy, self-discipline, tradition – these were bourgeois hang-ups that could not be allowed to inhibit their right to be free of all customary restraints. This pretty much guaranteed the emergence of chaotic living conditions and rampant freeloading. The owners of the land or the communal houses typically got fed up, kicked everyone out, and carried on as some kind of nuclear family. For their part, rural neighbors worried what their kids might get caught up in should they wander over to see what those crazy hippies were up to. With rare exception the locals viewed the hippies as disruptive interlopers who had insufficient respect for the codes of behavior they had lived by for generations.
Our prospects are much brighter. The 1960s back-to-the-landers had the Whole Earth Catalog but we have entire publishing houses turning out hundreds of books yearly on the ways and means of smallholder self-sufficiency. And we are not waging scorched-earth generational warfare. We are fighting for survival. In that role we are joining a struggle that indigenous people have been waging for centuries. We seem keen to learn from them.
We might open our eyes a bit wider to what we can learn from rural and small-town folk. These people also see their way of life disappearing. A thirst for vengeance has made them amenable to the appeals of Trump and his ilk but the lifestyle they are trying to hang on to is also local and face-to-face. They too believe that honesty, decency, freedom, and all the rest are best pursued in small settings. If these localists are to be drawn away from the spiteful politics that bewitch them now, it will not be the work of a party that is openly siding with fossil-fuel globalism.
It could be our work. There is a broad swath of common ground uniting indigenous cultures, rural domains in the overdeveloped world, and the small communities that people in the degrowth/localization/transition movement now champion as our best option for navigating the disasters underway. If we could get everyone moving in the same direction that coalition could acquire the power to alter the course of events.
Members of this coalition do not have a theory guaranteeing how it will all turn out or an ideology to which all must subscribe before work can begin. We share something far more reliable – a love for the land and a determination to protect it from those who hunger for money and will ravage the land and all who live on it to satisfy that hunger. It is a coalition united by a desire to live in intimate contact with a bit of territory, to know it well and care for it responsibly, cooperating with it to secure the means of life rather than forcing it to submit with an onslaught of chemicals, machinery, and mind-numbing arrogance. We have either learned by hard experience or known all along that there is value in tradition – the importance of family, the power of ritual, the wisdom that comes from hands-on familiarity, the etiquette practiced by those who put their back into their living.
Or there is the PHS option, the one still being pursued by liberals, progressives, and socialists in our day. Which seems to you most plausible – most likely to get us where we need to go? If you think it is critical to align values with scale, the procedure Hayden did not perform in 1962, the choice is clear.
