On the Uses of Participatory Democracy

...Flacks's article, and he of course will be given the opportunity to reply...

...More important than such procedural techniques has been the attempt to generate institutions which help to bind people to the organization, to see immediate benefits from participation...

...The more recent efforts of political organization initiated by the participatory democrats will certainly increase the degree of Negro representation in the political process...

...The slogan of "participatory democracy" has become a central point in the writing of the New Left...

...it is a new beginning...

...Shall urban renewal be shaped by the people whose neighborhood is being renewed...

...Democracy, in fact, is an issue for this generation of radicals largely because their political experience has been shaped by the Negroes' elemental struggle for a political voice in the U.S...

...Second, the emerging foreign policy public has plainly had an at least transitory impact on Congress...

...Thus far...

...The Nuremberg principle is now being used as a basis for legal defense of draft-refusal and civil disobedience at draft boards...

...The results of this situation are plain to see in every Northern city...

...history...

...First, the teach-ins and similar initiatives mark the emergence of an independent public in the foreign policy area—a body of people, satisfied neither with official policy nor with official justifications of policy, determined to formulate alternatives, stimulate debate and criticism, and obtain independent sources of information...

...Below, a former leader of Students for a Democratic Society, and now a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago, offers an exposition of what, in his view, the term means...

...But they are in no sense a substitute for political activity, direct action, and the development of a program...

...and it converges, interestingly enough, with "participatory democracy...

...the unchecked power of the government to mobilize support for its policies has been greatly enhanced by the invention of conscription, by the mass media and their centralization, by covert intelligence operations, etc...

...In America, today, the familiar mechanisms of social control—money, status, patriotic and religious symbols—are losing their force for a population (particularly the new generation) which has learned to be intensely self-conscious and simultaneously worldly...

...In recent years, there has been an enormous growth of unionization among schoolteachers and other white-collar workers, particularly among employees in the welfare bureaucracies...

...But the exciting time will come when such insurgency turns from protest over small grievances to a full-fledged realization of the possibilities for first-class citizenship within public bureaucracies and private corporations...

...In many ways the "two governments"—political and corporate—are merged, and this merger approximates an elitist corporatist model (hence breaking down even the modest pluralism which once characterized the system...

...Student reform efforts have increasingly shifted from protest and direct action to demands for a continuing voice in the shaping of university policy...

...1. The most frequently heard phrase used for defining participatory democracy is that "men must share in the decisions which affect their lives...

...all authority ought to be responsible to those "under" it...

...6. Thus the main intellectual problem for the new radicals is to suggest how patterns of decentralized decision-making in city administrations, and democratized authority structures in bureaucracies, can be meshed with a situation of greatly broadened national planning and coordination in the economy...

...Not only does this protest begin to shatter the foreign policy consensus, but it also shows signs of bringing about more permanent change in the structure of foreign policy decision-making...

...It is possible, then, that an unforeseen by-product of the highly developed society is the emergence of potential publics that are (a) competent to evaluate the propaganda of elites and (b) impatient with chauvinistic definitions of loyalty...

...7. These tasks were, less than a generation ago, declared by many American intellectuals to be no longer relevant...

...is in the area of foreign policy...

...Third, the attempts to find a non-religious moral ground for conscientious objection in time of war has led to a rediscovery of the Allied case at the Nuremberg Trials — a case which argued in essence that individuals were responsible for the actions of institutions taken in their name...

...This analysis leads to an emphasis on grass-roots organization and mobilization of the poor as the main way of ending poverty...

...4. The most authoritarian sector of public decision-making in the U.S...

...ensuring direct participation of the community in framing political platforms and in shaping the behavior of representatives...

...Such control is, of course, not missing in the United States...

...But the Berkeley situation has been repeated in less intense form on scores of campuses across the country...

...to quest for freedom and autonomy...

...Unless the Newt Left consciously accepts the task of restoring that tradition and of establishing a new political community, the democratizing revolts which it now catalyzes are likely to be abortive...

...Against this learning, the classic patterns of elite rule, bureaucratic authority, managerial manipulation, and class domination will have a difficult time sustaining themselves...

...Thus we find much of the same rhetoric and organizing technique being used by SNCC workers in Southern Negro communities, SDS organizers among poor whites in Chicago and Cleveland, and farm labor organizers among the multi-national grape workers in California...

...Although these new institutions are sometimes viewed as alternatives to participation in "organized society" (vide Staughton Lynd in DissENT—Summer, 1965), in practice, they are a very important way of sustaining a developing organization...

...The forms of such democratization could include further unionization of the unorganized, worker representation in management, young-turk overthrows of entrenched leaderships in the professions, and, ultimately, demands for elections and recall of managers and administrators, and for employee participation in the shaping of policies and regulations...

...Moreover the teach-in as a technique for disseminating information suggests, at least symbolically, a significant breakthrough in the effort to find alternatives to the propaganda media controlled or manipulated by the state...

...Such techniques include: rotation of leadership, eschewing by staff of opportunities to "speak for" the organization, the use of "consensus" to foster expression by the less-articulate...

...Moreover, the strength of these publics on the campus is now being reflected in the growing conflict over the role of the universities in national mobilization...

...The first impulse of modern managers faced with threats to authority has been to make small concessions ("improve channels of communications...

...The most dramatic and widely-known instance of this activity was that of the civil disobedience and student strikes at Berkeley in the fall of 1964...

...Student protest has spread from the elite, liberal campuses to Catholic schools, and from there to other clerical bodies...

...The demand for more national planning, once the major plank of American socialism, is now decidedly on the agenda of American political and corporate elites...

...The federal government has taken responsibility for national planning to avoid slump, to control wages and prices, and to avoid inflation...

...There are as yet no answers to this, or to the question of how to bring the large corporations under democratic control...

...The further development of this trend will foreclose any possibility for the achievement of democratic participation...

...In Newark, the Newark Community Union has established its own radio station...

...3. The values underlying participatory democracy have, so far, achieved their fullest expression in efforts to organize and mobilize communities of disenfranchised people, but such democratizing trends and potentialities also exist in other sectors of society...

...The talk at Catholic seminaries now prominently includes "participatory democracy," and "New Left" clergymen have gone so far as to propose the establishment of a trade union for priests...

...Maintaining close control over elected representatives...

...the impact of the student protest has been to generate a considerable degree of ferment, of re-examination and experimentation among college faculties and administrators, as well as efforts coervicely to repress the protest...

...They enable people to participate in an organization in a continuing fashion, help develop organizational resources, train people for leadership, and give people a sense of the possibilities for social change...

...it is the question of the relationship of the individual to institutional and state authority which assumes paramount importance...

...In fact, it is possible that one positive outcome of the war in Vietnam will have been its impact on the moral sensibility of many members of the intellectual and religious communities—forcing them to rethink their relationship to the state and to the institutions of war...

...In California, the Farm Worker Association established a credit union...

...It is clear that implicit in the New Left's vision is the notion that participatory democracy is not possible without some version of public control over the allocation of resources, economic planning, and the operation of large corporations...

...etc., which are developing in many urban slum and rural areas...

...But such mobilization can lead in two directions...

...Moreover, "participatory democracy," unlike black nationalist ideology, which also helps to mobilize grassroots Negroes, offers a possible bridge between Negroes and other groups of poor or voiceless people...

...each man can and should be a center of power and initiative in society...

...Just how is participatory democracy being applied to the organization of economically disadvantaged groups...

...It is not farfetched to predict that the idea of "Workers' control" will soon become a highly relevant issue in American life...

...It has been the experience of Negroes in the North, where voting rights have been formally guaranteed, that Negroes as a group have remained systematically under-represented in the political process and that, where Negro representation exists, it operates in behalf of Negro middle-class interests and is highly dependent on the beneficence of white-dominated political machines...

...It is not surprising that foreign policy has been the special province of elites in America and, since World War II, has been carried on within a framework of almost total popular acquiescence...

...Who is to decide the dispensation of welfare payments...

...The revival of Congressional independence with respect to foreign policy would be a signal advance of democracy in America...

...The ideology of "participatory democracy" has been useful in this effort, since it provides a rationale for avoiding premature "coalition" of grassroots groups with more powerful white or middle-class organizations, for effectively criticizing "charismatic" styles of leadership which prevent rank-and-file people from learning political skills, for criticizing tendencies toward bureaucratism, demagoguery, and elitism which are predictable in mass movements...

...2. The first priority for the achievement of a democracy of participation is to win full political rights and representation for all sectors of the population...

...Other ways of stating the core values are to assert the following: each man has responsibility for the action of the institutions in which he is imbedded...

...This principle, taken seriously, is revolutionary in its implications for individual—state relations...

...it inspires professors to refuse to grade their students and become thereby accomplices to Selective Service...

...All this learning is a consequence of increasingly sophisticated educational opportunities, of increasingly liberated standards in family and interpersonal relations, of affluence itself...

...may be a significant outcome of the war in Vietnam...

...It has influenced the analysis of the problem of poverty in an affluent society, by stressing political voicelessness and lack of organization as a root cause of deprivation...

...This public is to be found largely in universities but now spills over to include much of the intellectual community in the country...

...Ideology, it was argued, had no place in highly developed societies where problems of resource allocation had become technical matters...

...by establishing community-run foundations and corporations...

...The civil rights movement, in its direct-action phase, began the process of bringing Negroes and the poor into the political arena—and the results, in terms of political alignments and issues, have already been substantial...

...to expect love and self-fulfillment...

...But the reverse may be true: that ideological questions—that is, questions about the structure and distribution of power—are especially pertinent when societies have the capacity to solve the merely technical problems...

...It seems clear, then, that the poor are being organized and mobilized...

...and by taking seriously such a vision, they seek to extend the conception of citizenship beyond the conventional political sphere to all institutions...

...The virtue of "participatory democracy," as a basis for a new politics, is that it enables these new sources of social tension to achieve political expression...

...it inspires intellectuals and artists to acts of public defiance and witness...

...The outcome of this particular struggle could be important in democratizing the structure of foreign policy decision-making...

...An alternative to this path is embodied in the vision of participatory democracy—the development of community-based, self-determining organizations, having the following functions: Achieving community control over previously centralized functions, through local election of school and police administrators...

...American industrial unions have largely had to sacrifice the struggle for control in the work place for higher wages and fringe benefits...

...But the University and the Church are not the only institutions witnessing challenges to existing authority structures...

...This means that the social theory of the New Left must be centrally concerned with the development of relevant models for democratic control over public decisions at the national level...

...running and electing poor people to public office...

...The authority structure of the modern bureaucratic organization is plainly unsuited for a work force which is highly educated and fully aware of its competence to participate in decision-making...

...In other words, participatory democrats take very seriously a vision of man as citizen...

...It seems clear that the issue in a highly developed society is not simply economic exploitation...

...The most obvious example is the nationwide effort by university students to change the authority structure in American higher education...

...On the one hand, there is the strong probability that the newly developed constituencies will take their place alongside other ethnic and interest groups, bargaining for benefits within the framework of the Democratic party...

...These publics do not have the power to change the course of this war, but the spread of their influence may be a factor in transforming the issues and alignments of American politics in the coming period...

...Who makes the rules in the welfare bureaucracies...

...The question for the Left has become how to dcmocratize that planning...

...Due largely to student initiative, we are witnessing more protest during time of war than in any other comparable period in U.S...

...These, and not the development of "parallel institutions," constitute the main functions of the local political parties, community unions...

...Participatory democracy symbolizes the restoration of personal freedom and interpersonal community as central political and social issues...

...Since the people involved lack political skill, organization requires a full-time staff, initially composed of students and ex-students, but soon involving "indigenous" leadership This staff has the problem of allaying the fear, suspicion, and sense of inadequacy of the community— hence there has been a strong emphasis on building a sense of community between staff and rank-and-file, and of finding techniques which will facilitate self-expression, enable new leadership to emerge, enable people to gain dignity by participation, and the organization to become self-sustaining...

...That no such programs and models now exist is, of course, a consequence of the disintegration of the socialist tradition in America and of the continuing fragmentation of American intellectual life...

...In Cleveland, the SDS Community Project established a traveling street theater...

...Moreover, the postwar period has seen a tremendous increase in public subsidy of the corporate economy—through the defense budget, urban redevelopment, investment in research and education, transportation and communication, etc...

...These efforts are now being emulated by more established and less insurgent agencies— Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, for example, in the massive organizing campaign in Chicago, used many of the techniques and rhetorical devices developed by SNCC and SDS...

...Acting like a trade union in protecting the poor against exploitative and callous practices of public and private bureaucracies, landlords, businessmen, etc...

...Some students now have demanded representation on administrative committees...

...The scope of Presidential power has, of course, been greatly expanded by the technology of modern war...

...but at union conventions, control over working conditions is repeatedly urged as a high-priority bargaining demand...

...Thus, in Missis sippi, alongside the political organization (the Freedom Democratic party), a variety of related "projects" have grown up—community centers, freedom schools, a Poor People's Corporation to help finance small business enterprise, cooperatives, and the like...

...It is not the end of ideology...

...The impetus for making such a demand paramount, however, may first come from the ranks of whitecollar and professional employees...

...by forming community-run cooperatives in housing, social services, retail distribution and the like...

...5. The development of democratic consciousness in communities, organizations, and foreign policy decision-making will mean little if the national distribution of power remains undisturbed...

...The organization of such publics in the U.S...

...Shall the police be held accountable by the community...

...This struggle has not been simply for the right to vote—though even this right has not yet been guaranteed—but, more broadly, it has been an effort to win a share of political power by poor Negroes...

...Others have looked to the formation of organizations along the trade union model—organizations which would be independent of and could bargain with university administrators, rather than becoming participants in administration...

...The emphasis on participatory democracy has helped these developing grass-roots organizations formulate and articulate issues and programs...

...The simultaneous occurrence of the Vietnam War and the emergence of a New Left in America may generate change in this situation...

...The outcome of these grass-roots organizing efforts, of course, cannot be predicted...

...Who controls the ghetto...

...The American Constitution gives enormous power to the President to make foreign policy without substantial built-in checks from Congress...

...Thus the main thrust of radicals in the civil rights movement has to do less with breaking the barriers of legal segregation and formal exclusion than with attempting to build viable grass-roots organizations of poor Negroes, which would actually represent the needs of the poor and remain independent of white and middle-class domination...

...Although the constituencies of these organizations include the most impoverished sectors of society, it is remarkable that—particularly in the Northern cities—the main activity of these organizations has not been focused on economic issues...

...The current campaign to prevent university participation in the Selective Service induction process may portend a more profound effort to make universities centers of resistance to encroaching militarization...

...Now one can also observe ferment within the professions: young doctors and young lawyers are developing organizations dedicated to challenging the authority of the highly conservative professional societies, and to bringing an active sense of social responsibility to their professions...

...They have, rather, been struggling over issues of control, self-determination and independence: Shall the poor have a voice in the allocation of War on Poverty funds...

...In our next issue Paul Goodman and Tom Kahn will continue the discussion with critical observations concerning Mr...

...For the most part, this activity has been directed at protest against arbitrary restrictions of student political expression, and against paternalistic regulations limiting students' rights to privacy and self-expression...