Harry Targ
Tom Hayden (1939-2016) was an activist and intellectual who,
with others, inspired a generation of young people to oppose racism and war. He
drafted a visionary statement that is still relevant today. He launched a youth
movement in the late 1950s when the larger society was still crippled by
virulent anti-communism and a sanctimonious view that the United States was the
leader of the “free world.” He remained an anti-war and human rights activist
throughout his life.
The ideas of community, empowerment,
and social justice were articulated for the Sixties in the Port Huron
Statement, written by founders of the Students for a Democratic Society, particularly
Tom Hayden. While written by and for a relatively privileged sector of
disenchanted youth in a period of booming economic growth and military
expansion, the document spoke to the passion for justice, participation, and
community, and an “…unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction,
self-understanding, and creativity.”
It called for the creation of “human
interdependence,” replacing “…power rooted in possession, privilege, or
circumstance…” by “power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason
and creativity.”
By the late Sixties many were
identifying a new society based on the Port Huron vision built on core
principles. These included:
- local control and participatory democracy;
- racial justice;
- gender equality;
- equitable distribution of resources and the collective product of human labor;
- commitments to the satisfaction of minimal basic needs for all of humankind;
- the development of an ethic that connects survival to human existence, not to specific jobs;
- human control over technology; and
- a new “land ethic” that conceives of humankind as part of nature, not in conflict with it.
The vision led to the exploration of
the impediments to the construction of a society based on human scale that
would celebrate both individual creativity and community. Growing
familiarization with the critique of capitalism suggested that the capitalist
mode of production, dominant over two-thirds of the world, was based upon the
exploitation, oppression, dehumanization, and repression of the vast majority
of humankind.
Incorporating an understanding of
the workings of capitalism reinforced the vision that philosopher Martin Buber
called the decentralized social principle embedded in Port Huron’s eloquent
call for “community.” Building a new society entailed class struggle which
would manifest itself in factories and fields, in rich and poor countries, and
in political venues from the ballot box to the streets.
Bringing about positive change was a
much more complicated affair than activists originally thought, but the
sustained and sometimes brutal opposition to visions, like that reflected in
The Port Huron Statement, validated the general correctness of them.
Today, new generations of activists,
along with older ones, are reflecting and participating in diverse social
movements in our cities and towns. They observe with enthusiasm the
mobilizations, the militancy, and the passion for justice still unfolding in
the Middle East.
The efforts of Venezuelans,
Bolivians, Ecuadorians, and the Cubans who inspired us so much over the years
are applauded. Important debates about social market economies, workers’
management of large enterprises, this or that candidate or political party, are
occurring on the Internet and in the streets.
Although the times are so different
from the 1960s, perhaps the vision of community that animated thinking then
(which we in turn learned from those who preceded us) may still be relevant for
today.
Tom Hayden and his comrades
proclaimed that we must remain committed to the sanctity of human life, to
equality, to popular control of all our institutions, to a reverence for the
environment, and to the idea that the best of society comes from communal
efforts to make living better for all. Hayden’s vision survives.
