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

For more information, please write porthurontooccupy@gmail.com or contacthayden@gmail.com.

LOS ANGELES - 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.

The occasion is an all-day winter-quarter UCLA class taught by Tom Hayden, a former state senator and author of the 1962 agenda for an activist generation, the Port Huron Statement. To mark the fiftieth year anniversary, conferences and forums are springing up across the US, at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, New York University, MIT, Harvard, Clark, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and the Miami and Los Angeles Times festivals of books.

Historian Michael Kazin writes, “the Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society is the most ambitious, the most specific and the most eloquent manifesto in the history of the American Left.” Its core message is still relevant today, says Hayden, citing the September 17 declaration of Occupy Wall Street, whose first principle was direct and transparent participatory democracy.

The same principles drive the student-led democracy movements across the Middle East and the wave of social movements and electoral victories in Latin America since the Nineties, he adds.

Demands for fuller access and more direct citizen participation in decision-making will only grow and become more practical in the information-age, he predicts, as the Internet, social media like Facebook, and participatory sites like Wikipedia circumvent the closed walls of bureaucratic elites and spur global movements demanding deeper and inclusive democracy.

“Looking back, the Port Huron generation of 1960-64 destroyed southern Jim Crow, initiated campus free-speech movements and organized the first teach-ins against the secretive Vietnam war. By the end of the decade, 26 million more Americans were voting, freedom-of-information was the law, 20 million participated in the first Earth Day, the draft was ended and two presidents were driven from office by the force of public opinion. Judging from today’s movements, the next great wall to fall could be Wall Street itself.”