Written in 1960 by a core group of the fledgling Students for a Democratic Society, the statement became a manifesto for the new left. Its embrace of participatory democracy and egalitarianism; its portrayal of American society as undemocratic, bureaucratic, and militaristic; and its vision of a community in which no one would suffer from isolation, alienation, or want, all struck a chord with thousands of young white college students. The analysis owed much to the writings of the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills, while the vision was inspired by the youthful radicalism of SNCC. The main author was Tom Hayden.
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 nation-states 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 be 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 deeply felt
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 inthe 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.
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 us 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, the 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 labelled 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 re-created; 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
"tough-minded."
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 convince
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 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 egotistic
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.
We would replace power 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 facilitate the attainment of goals; channels should be
commonly available to relate 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; selfdirected, 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, educational,
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 non-violence 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.
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 that 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 still rarities 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 citizens. 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 the 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 on a teacher-student relation
analogous to the parent child relation which characterizes in loco parentis. Further, academia includes a radical
separation of the 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 an exaggerated compartmentalization of study and understanding. This
has contributed to an overly parochial view, by faculty, of the role of its
research and scholarship; to a discontinuous and truncated understanding, by
students, of the surrounding social order; and to 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 the extracurricular structures,
contributing to the sense of outer complexity and inner powerlessness that
transforms the honest searching of many students to a ratification of
convention and, worse, to a numbness to 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 within the
university toward the value standards of business and the administrative
mentality. Huge foundations and other private financial interests shape the
underfinanced colleges and universities, making them not only 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 "moraleproducing"
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 institution,
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.
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, to 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 these 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....
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, 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 are 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 corporations, 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 illusions: 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 in campus and
community across the country. If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has
been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.