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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:
- 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;
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Comments
"Towards American Democracy," Point 4 in the Port Huron Statement,
calls for the strengthening of civil society (the creation and expansion of
many single-issue and multi-issue groups). In recent years we did see the growth
and proliferation of such groups, but lately they seem to be withering on the
vine. Post-9/11, it's been hard for folks to get past the "need" for
vengeance and to revert to an oppositional mode. This needs to change, and I
have every expectation that it will with the worsening of the economy, with
all the layoffs an evictions that entails. The movement for social change must
move beyond a small number of people arguing with each other. If we can make
and maintain contact with large numbers of people, starting with our coworkers,
neighbors and friends, those of us who are being affected by the downturn, then
we can move beyond "a small circle of friends." We need to do just
that if we are to radically democratize this society. We should not only bu!
ild alternative parties like the Greens. We should also attend local ward committee
meetings, even if it's just to make contacts, and not get ourselves elected
as delegates. We should take part in our local neighborhood councils or community
development corporations, and work toward more fiscal and political responsibility
devolving toward them. Then we can gradually have more of a participatory democracy
Greg King