After 50 years, Message of Participatory Democracy Marches On: Students Explore Student-Led Democracy Movements at 10 Conferences

Famed musical artist and troubadour of the Occupy movement, Tom Morello, will speak and perform at a special class on student-led democracy movements at UCLA Mar. 6. Also speaking will be Gionconda Belli, former information minister of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, now a celebrated poet, novelist and feminist. UCLA students will discuss the need to take action against a grim future marked by rising tuition, disappearing jobs and the shadow of global warming.

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Notes on Occupy and Labor

Because private corporate power had so many public consequences, the Port Huron Statement (PHS) argued for an economic democracy in which the “major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic regulation.” And workplace democracy experiments. The ethical issues was that work should involve incentives worthier than money or survival, educative, not stultifying, creative, not mechanical, self-directed, not manipulated…because this experience has crucial influence on our habits, perceptions and individual ethics.”

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American Students Led a Peace Movement for the First Time

The student movement on a mass scale against the Vietnam War was the first and only in American history. It was also fundamental to a “student-led democracy movement” because it opposed at least two undemocratic structures: first, 18 years olds could not vote, and second, they could be conscripted (drafted for war). The same movement also brought about the War Powers Act, a 1973 Congressional measure to make the executive branch more accountable.

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A Model of Social Movements and Change

Social change results from the clashes and accommodations between two contending forces, social movements and Machiavellians (or power elites). In the case of American history, reform is the perennial result, as opposed to either full repression or revolution.

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Thorne Dreyer: As Port Huron Turns 50

Courtesy Thorne Dreyer, two interviews with Tom Hayden on Rag Radio. Port Huron lives. Fifty years and counting.

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FBI Files on the Free Speech Movement

In December 1984, the San Francisco Chronicle published files it received after a 17-year litigation, revealing the important role of the FBI and CIA in spying on UC administrators, faculty and students during the Free Speech Movement and the Cold War era. The documents can be read here, at SF Gate: The Campus Files.

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The Port Huron Statement, Participatory Democracy, and the History and Vision of the 1960’s Student Movements

There is a theory of social change in The Long Sixties, described as “movements versus Machiavellians,” which should be studied as a basic framework for our class. This commentary attempts to understand the role of people like Charles McDew and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as they emerged in the early 60s.

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Fifty Years of Participatory Democracy, From Port Huron to Occupy Wall Street

The first principle of solidarity declared by Occupy Wall Street on September 17, 2011 called for “direct and transparent participatory democracy,” recalling the central aim of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society, issued fifty years earlier. All across the world this year, millions of people have demanded direct participation in the decisions affecting their lives.

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The Port Huron Statement @ 50 by Robert Cohen

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, the foundational document of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The anniversary comes at a time of renewed interests of student-led democracy movements around the world, in an online context we never dreamed about. The Occupy Wall Street movement even invokes “participatory democracy” in its recent manifesto. There will be major conferences on the Port Huron Statement this year at UCLA (where I am teaching a class), UCSB, NYU and elsewhere. Documents prepared for the Port Huron events will be posted periodically at this website.

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