Citizen power

...Since those earliest days of European settlement, citizens have fought against concentrations of power and wealth...

...Citizen power A new movement taps old traditions of community self-help and control Harry C. Boyte and John de Graaf If Ronald Reagan's Presidency signifies the collapse of New Deal Liberalism, what is to take its place...

...Indeed, a Washington Post poll of Reagan supporters in the fall of 1979 found most thought big business has too much power and should be regulated more, not less...

...He is the author of "The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement, "just published by Temple University Press...

...In the most successful cases, citizens' groups have begun to transform urban communities, including some of the most depressed districts...

...Those Americans who took Reagan's populist posturings at face value will soon find their hopes crushed by those for whom neighborhood, religious, and family values are to be discarded at the first sign of conflict with the desires of oil companies, Pentagon planners, or road builders...

...For Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights movement was a "Crusade for Citizenship" that was "carrying the whole nation back to the great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers...

...Although corporate strategists quickly sought to interpret the election as a mandate for pro-big-business policies, the public is clearly seeking something quite different...

...It appears when farmers fight high-voltage power lines crossing their land, when cattle ranchers battle Government plans to build the MX missile system, when urban neighborhoods band together to fight bank lending practices that starve them of capital, and when parents speak out against abusive television advertising aimed at small children...

...What is needed for the 1980s is a language and vision connecting them to the wellsprings of insurgency in our people's history, culture, and institutions...

...H Third, the Left must build directly on the traditions of the American people...

...Like Upton Sinclair, who was waging an End Poverty in California campaign to the South, they worked within the Democratic Party toward a cooperative commonwealth of "production for use instead of profit...

...taken up by urban and migrant workers, it wove through the militant rhetoric of the Industrial Workers of the World, formed in 1905 out of the merger of the Western Federation of Miners and the American Labor Union...

...Chapters have been formed throughout the state, winning particular support from a number of insurgent farming communities...

...We need to tap the wellsprings of insurgency in our own people's history Anew democratic movement built on these almost forgotten legacies would draw the support of millions of Americans...

...Running through all of these successful campaigns was the goal of economic democracy consisting of a mixture of economic institutions...

...It articulated the populist vision that inspired the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party of the 1880s and 1890s...

...Many of these networks are beginning to favor new forms of electoral organization, which can work with but also independent of the two-party system, in a way reminiscent of earlier populist political movements—the anti-monopoly clubs of the 1880s, which eventually laid the basis for the People's Party, and later the Nonpartisan League and the Washington Commonwealth Federation, which functioned as "people's political organizations" within the existing parties and finally took them over...

...Yet big-business policies are to be the hallmark of the new Administration, despite the quaint references to unbridled entrepreneurship heard during the Reagan campaign...

...Across the country, a massive citizen movement has begun to emerge in recent years, tapping old American traditions of civic idealism and community self-help...

...The CED has had a number of electoral successes, and its "Solarcal" campaign to convert California to renewable energy has gained widespread public support...

...In their struggles, insurgents again and again returned to past experience as raw material...

...Finally, significant space would be left to a private sector of small businesses and farms, whose production decisions would be influenced but not dictated by government policy...

...In the elections just before World War I, the American Socialist Party campaigned generally not for "socialism" but for the cooperative commonwealth and won scores of municipal victories...

...But there is a deeper, if less widely noted, significance to the Reagan Presidency...

...Many Americans are frustrated by the faltering economy and uneasy about new equations in sexual, racial, and international relations of power...

...It is the flag under which thousands died to abolish slavery...

...The roots of a democratic, cooperative politics have grown throughout the difficult circumstances of the past several years...

...Citizen ferment can be seen in the proliferating self-help groups, in women's centers, in the thousands of cooperatives that were created in the 1970s...

...On a national level, such groups as the Citizen Action Organizing Committee and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now have joined with labor unions and other progressive constituencies...

...In all sectors of the economy, the right of working people to bargain collectively and to organize into unions would be upheld and encouraged...

...It demonstrates respect for the work of those who struggled before us that our lives might be richer, allowing us to learn from their successes and mistakes and to imagine that our own children and grandchildren will do the same for us...

...In contrast, the Republican platform praised at some length the "human scale" and "civic action" found at local levels...

...It can be seen in the tremendous increase in the number of volunteers working to solve community problems—an increase from twenty-four million in the mid-1960s to thirty-seven million a decade later...

...And even activists often question the centralist and statist themes that the term "socialism" suggests, and feel wary about the dangers of human and cultural diversity implicit in dominant strains of left-wing and Marxist theory...

...Other large enterprises would be controlled by worker and community representatives...

...Shortly after the election, the Gallup organization released polls showing that people's confidence in big business has declined steadily since the mid-1970s, and that people now have less confidence in big business than in any other major institution...

...In the state of Washington, middle-class socialists likewise abandoned the linguistic purity of the Socialist Party and formed the Commonwealth Builders, Inc., in 1934...

...In San Antonio, 6,000 community activists attended the annual convention of the Communities Organized for Public Service, a community organization working to counter corporate and development interests with its own development plans...

...Human rights and individual freedoms guaranteed in democratic capitalist countries would be preserved, extended, and strengthened...

...John de Graaf, a political activist and prize-winning filmmaker, is producing documentaries on the populist movements in Minnesota and...

...Such an approach seems at least as important today as it did from 1875 to 1945...

...In 1934, the platform of the victorious party declared, "Only a complete reorganization of our social structure into a cooperative commonwealth will bring economic security and prevent further suffering among the people...

...The organization expanded with the addition of trade union affiliates and neighborhood reform groups in 1935, becoming the Washington Commonwealth Federation (WCF...

...The Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota used the same populist language to describe its radical program...

...Indeed, such material constitutes the fabric of the American populist heritage as it has stirred people's imaginations throughout the nation's history...

...Though they failed to bring about socialism, they produced lively newspapers and supported the strikes of...

...Harry C. Boyte directs the American People's Heritage Center in Minneapolis...

...A movement based on the best in our history has the power to awaken hope and interest...

...Washington state...

...In developing an insurgent politics around the vision of the cooperative commonwealth, several considerations are of major importance: 11 First, the Left must develop a program that combines anti-corporate sentiments with popular objections to "big Government...

...Indeed, new populist political organizations have begun to emerge in several parts of the country...

...To regain the offensive, the Left must reconsider its conventional rhetoric and begin to build on some of the very themes the Reagan campaign addressed: our nation's traditions of civic idealism, volunteerism and mutual aid, religious faith...

...In Oakland, California, the city-wide organization of neighborhoods, Oakland Community Organization, has brought scores of communities back to life and is widely credited with helping to reverse the skyrocketing rate of crime...

...Cashing in on efforts across the country to organize neighborhoods, the Republicans pledged to "nurture the spirit of self-help and cooperation through which so many neighborhoods have revitalized themselves...

...In North Carolina, a populist group called the People's Alliance has sought to renew the state's progressive traditions...

...The organization has, moreover, elected a number of city councillors and state legislators on programs stressing grass-roots democracy, opposition to nuclear power and weapons, and human rights...

...As some on the Left had predicted, last November's election confirmed the ability of well-funded corporate and right-wing interests to channel such discontent into a politics of international bombast and domestic self-absorption...

...It was able to assume that posture because the Left had largely given up its natural association with the American insurgent heritage and because its rhetoric had slighted the democratic themes of today's grass-roots citizen activism...

...That vision is expressed in the old language of the "cooperative commonwealth," a language worth remembering...

...First popularized by socialist author Laurence Gronlund in 1884, the term "cooperative commonwealth" fused democratic and egalitarian thought into a language appealing to the small farmers of the rural South and Middle West...

...most of its leaders had a Socialist Party background but had decided that the formal language of socialism would make little headway among farmers in their state...

...In the 1890s, a dozen or so "cooperative colonies" ringed Puget Sound...

...In its ten-year history, the WCF was able to control almost half the Washington legislature and pass some of America's most progressive legislation...

...fellow laborers in the region...

...In returning to the vision of a "cooperative commonwealth," we arrive at what was for sixty years the main point of intersection for socialist and populist movements in America...

...Ronald Reagan's convention speech, drawing heavily on the words of such American rebels as Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln, called for "a government that can do the people's work without dominating their lives...

...For the 1980s, this will mean returning certain social services to the communities themselves, and recognizing the role that voluntary, civic, and other community-based institutions have to play in democratic social policy...

...As the populists understood, the American flag is the people's flag, "not the flag of Wall Street...

...In such a task, the old legacy of the cooperative commonwealth offers durable foundations for the present, and hope for the future...

...If the nation has "shifted to the Right," what does this mean for the Left...

...it is the flag that workers carried before them in great Twentieth Century strikes at Lawrence, Paterson, and Flint...

...And in Minnesota, the Farmer-Labor Association, based on the traditions of the Farmer-Labor Party, has achieved considerable influence in the state Democratic Party with its call for a "cooperative commonwealth" and its Citizens'-Party-like program...

...The Prairie Campaign for Economic Democracy has influenced North Dakota's Democratic Party platform with its anti-corporate program and concern for reviving the radical heritage of the Non-Partisan League...

...All the power and sway has got into the hands of the rich," lamented Nathaniel Bacon in 1676...

...Eugene V. Debs and several other founders of the American Socialist Party were at one point part of an organization called the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth, which sent farm laborers and industrial unionists to establish colonies in the state of Washington...

...On one level there are, indeed, signs of a public longing to revert to a less threatening past...

...A reborn democratic movement must also, out of these themes, articulate a new economic vision in which human values and common concerns form the touchstone for social policy...

...Within a year, the WCF had won control of the Washington Democratic Party, writing a platform so radical that Postmaster General James Farley jokingly proposed a toast "to the forty-seven states and the Soviet of Washington...

...The new movement quickly became the leading left-wing force in Canadian politics and finally won control of the province of Saskatchewan in 1944...

...In a cooperative commonwealth, natural resources and such giants as communications, transportation, and finance would be owned by national and local governments and operated democratically to meet human needs...

...Recent events in the "socialist" world—the fratricidal wars in Asia, the invasion of Afghanistan, the collapse of Maoist Utopian fantasy, the outpouring of refugees from Cuba and Vietnam—have further discredited conventional left-wing language for many Americans...

...In the same way, the Nonpartisan League came into power in North Dakota in 1916...

...The Right came to power on November 4 partly as the rhetorical champion of the people...

...Several colony leaders later played key roles in the Seattle General Strike of 1919, published Seattle's radical daily newspaper, The Union Record, and helped build a mass political movement in the 1930s...

...1[ Second, a movement must appropriate the powerful symbols of flag, faith, and family...

...For example, speakers at the Democratic National Convention focused on Federal programs to solve various social problems, but made no mention of "neighborhoods...

...Events in 'socialist' countries have discredited left-wing language for many Americans The cooperative commonwealth vision, with its variety of economic institutions and its emphasis on individual rights and decentralized power, provided what the terminology of socialism lacked—a reassuring appeal to those who distrusted corporate power but feared the specter of a collectivized, state-dominated way of life...

...Thus, the Seneca Falls women's rights conventions of 1848 refashioned the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal...

...Moreover, to win back broad support for Governmental initiatives, the Left must appropriate the criticism that existing Government programs are often insensitive to local folkways, initiative, and resourcefulness...

...A major sector of the economy would be the province of voluntary producer and consumer co-ops, encouraged through the fiscal policy of the state and its bank and governed by their own members...

...The most noticeable has been California's Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), which was based in part on Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California movement of the 1930s...

...Reagan proclaimed his philosophy as "five simple, familiar words: family, work, neighborhood, peace, freedom...

...North of the border, Canadian socialists and populist farmers established the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in 1932...