This article, appearing in the April 16, 2012 issue of The Nation, is an excellent treatise on a historical perspective of modern participatory democracy. This is the fiftieth anniversary year of the Port Huron Statement, the founding declaration of Students for a Democratic Society, issued as a “living document” in 1962. The SDS call for a participatory democracy echoes today in student-led democracy movements around the world, even appearing as the first principle of the Occupy Wall Street September 17. 2011 declaration.
It may be sobering for today’s Wall Street critics to read in the Port Huron Statement original draft that despite the radical reforms of the 1930s, the share of wealth held by the 1 percent in 1960 had remained constant since the 1920s.
What did they mean by participatory democracy. As is today with the Occupy Wall Street movement, tt was the common desire to participate in making their own destiny, and in response to the severe limitations of an undemocratic system that they saw as representing an oligarchy. It was a way of empowering the individual as autonomous but interdependent with other individuals, and the community as a civic society.
“The Statement’s economic program was an extension of the New Deal and a call for deeper participatory democratic reform. Proposals for a government-led poverty program and “medical care…as a lifetime human right” anticipated the Medicare legislation that came in 1965, and the PHS’s concept of a government-led anti-poverty program foreshadowed the Office of Economic Opportunity, a project envisioned by John F. Kennedy and adopted by Lyndon Johnson.
“But the Statement also called for economic democracy, as distinct from the New Deal’s more bureaucratic approach: the major resources and means of production should be ‘open to democratic participation and subject to democratic regulation.’”
The Port Huron Statement articulated a strategy of “political realignment,” in which the goal was to end the “organized stalemate” in Washington and open the possibility of a more progressive party.
“The overall strategy of realignment envisioned participatory democracy directly connected to a new social movement, one capable of forging a new governing majority on a national scale, with young people as shock troops building a ‘bridge to political power’ composed of liberal Democrats, peace groups, organized labor and the civil rights movement. For the first time, students were thinking of themselves as ‘agents of social change.’”
The authors describe the system itself, or the powerful paradigm the movement defied but could not defeat. By “paradigm” they meant an understanding of power as cultural hegemony or dominance, a thought system in which there seems to be no alternative.
The experience of seeing trillions spent on weapons instead of investing in economic development, healthcare and education. President Eisenhower had a name for this system—the military-industrial complex—and it should be noted that he dared name it only as he was leaving office.
The authors also document how the power elite ruled beyond, or behind, elected officials.
Finally came Occupy Wall Street as a rebirth of the original participatory democracy movement.
“What is clear enough is that the Occupy movement began without pundit predictions, without funding, without organization, with only determined people in tents, countless Davids taking on the smug Goliath in spontaneous planetary resistance. While Occupy could not and would not agree on making detailed demands, it did agree, as noted earlier, on “direct and transparent participatory democracy” as its first principle.”
Once again today, there are questions about whether reform is legitimate or enough. Strict anarchist theory suggests that any reforms only legitimize and strengthen structures that should be toppled or dissolved. but minimizing the state means narrowing the domain within which public influence can be expressed and strengthening the private sectors. While Occupiers do not all appose reform, there is a broad suspicion of seeking reforms that require alliances with top-down organizations, especially with progressive elected officials.
“There is a utopian belief that downloading and freeing information, especially secret information, will bring about a decentralized revolution—anonymously, one might say. The download replaces the overthrow in the imagination of some in this new movement. The invention of open-source technology may be the single greatest pathway to participatory democracy in our lifetimes, not only in coordinating social movements but in making democratic decision-making possible without passing through representatives or gatekeepers. But like it or not, organizing the reform of existing institutions is also needed, if only to protect the open source or the whistleblowers. The vast constituency of Occupy surely knows that a participatory future cannot be protected without engaging in some sort of politics in the present.”
The authors conclude:
“This year marks the first presidential campaign in our lifetime when the gluttony of Wall Street, the failures of capitalism, the evils of big money in politics and a discussion of fundamental reform will be front and center in election debates. No doubt the crisis that gave rise to Occupy will not be fixed by an election, but that’s beside the point. Elections produce popular mandates, and mandates spur popular activism. It’s time to organize a progressive majority, and the vision and strategy of Port Huron is worth considering as a guide.”
The source of hope to bring about the necessary change to create a truly participatory democracy, one based on a policy shift to broaden productive capital ownership simultaneously with economic growth, is the technological revolution of the Internet and social media. If we do not rechart this country’s direction, further development of technology and globalization will undermine the American middle class and make it impossible for more than a minority of citizens to achieve middle-class status. The working class will be further dissipated and the poor will bccome poorer.
While Americans believe in political democracy, political democracy will not work without a property-based free market system of economic democracy. The system is the problem, but it can and must be overhauled. The two prerequisites are political power, which is the power to make, interpret, administer, and enforce laws, and economic power, the power to produce products and services, whether through labor power or productive capital.
Binary economist Louis Kelso wrote: “In the distribution of social power, whether it be political power or economic power, all things are relative. The essence of economic democracy lies in the elimination of differences of earning power resulting from denial of equality of economic opportunity, particularly equal access to capital credit. Differences of economic status resulting from differences in advantages taken and uses made of differences based on inequality of economic opportunity, particularly those that give access to capital credit to the already capitalized and deny it to the non- or -undercapitalized, are flagrant violations of the constitutional rights of citizens in a democracy.”
Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man’s greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won’t use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
The end result of nstituting policies and programs to broaden private, individual ownership of new productive capital is that citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing current global trends where all citizens will eventually become dependent for their economic well-being on our only legitimate monopoly –– the State –– and whatever elite controls the coercive powers of government.
What we really need in this 2012 presidential election year is a national discussion on the topic of the importance of capital ownership and how we can expand the base of private capital ownership simultaneously with the creation of new capital formation, with the aim of building long-term financial security for all Americans through accumulating a viable capital estate.
We need a recognition in America that we should deliberately begin to broaden the capital ownership base in a way that is consistent with the laws of property and the Constitutional safeguards of the rights of men and women to own property and be productive.
What needs to be adjusted is the opportunity to produce, not the redistribution of income after it is produced.
The government should acknowledge its obligation to make productive capital ownership economically purchasable by capitalless Americans using capital credit, and, as Kelso states, “substantially assume financial responsibility for the economy through establishing and supervising the implementation of an economic, labor and business policy of democratized economic power.” Historically, capital has been the primary engine of industrialization. But as used, as Kelso has argued, has, as well, “been the chief cause of the institutional deformities that have created and maintained two incompatible classes: the overcapitalized and the undercapitalized.”
The Occupy Wall Street movement has an opportunity to advocate for this Third Way platform, which will result in greater prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice for ALL American citizens.
