Harry Targ
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 have hit the streets demanding a ceasefire in the Middle East and a humane
future for the Palestinian people. And now masses of activists reject the
military/industrial complex, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and the
brutalization of the environment.
The efforts of Venezuelans, Bolivians, Colombians, and
the Cubans who inspired us so much over the years are applauded. Now that energy is coming from all over the Global South. Important
debates about social market economies, workers’ management of large
enterprises, this or that candidate or political party particularly as modest
forms of democracy are under threat, 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. The Port Huron vision survives.
