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TOWARDS
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
Every effort to end the Cold War and expand the
process of world industrialization is an effort hostile to people and
institutions whose interests lie in perpetuation of the East-West military
threat and the postponement of change in the "have not" nations
of the world. Every such effort, too, is bound to establish greater democracy
in America. The major goals of a domestic effort would be:
1. America must abolish its political party stalemate.
Two genuine parties, centered around issues and
essential values, demanding allegiance to party principles shall supplant
the current system of organized stalemate which is seriously inadequate
to a world in flux. It has long been argued that the very overlapping
of American parties guarantees that issues will be considered responsibly,
that progress will be gradual instead of intemperate, and that therefore
America will remain stable instead of torn by class strife. On the contrary:
the enormous party overlap itself confuses issues and makes responsible
presentation of choice to the electorate impossible, that guarantees Congressional
listlessness and the drift of power to military and economic bureaucracies,
that directs attention away from the more fundamental causes of social
stability, such as a huge middle class, Keynesian economic techniques
and Madison Avenue advertising. The ideals of political democracy, then,
the imperative need for flexible decision-making apparatus makes a real
two-party system an immediate social necessity. What is desirable is sufficient
party disagreement to dramatize major issues, yet sufficient party overlap
to guarantee stable transitions from administration to administration.
Every time the President criticizes a recalcitrant
Congress, we must ask that he no longer tolerate the Southern conservatives
in the Democratic Party. Every time in liberal representative complains
that "we can't expect everything at once" we must ask if we
received much of anything from Congress in the last generation. Every
time he refers to "circumstances beyond control" we must ask
why he fraternizes with racist scoundrels. Every time he speaks of the
"unpleasantness of personal and party fighting" we should insist
that pleasantry with Dixiecrats is inexcusable when the dark peoples of
the world call for American support.
2. Mechanisms of voluntary association must be
created through which political information can be imparted and political
participation encouraged.
Political parties, even if realigned, would not
provide adequate outlets for popular involvement. Institutions should
be created that engage people with issues and express political preference,
not as now with huge business lobbies which exercise undemocratic power,
but which carry political influence (appropriate to private, rather than
public, groupings) in national decision-making enterprise. Private in
nature, these should be organized around single issues (medical care,
transportation systems reform, etc.), concrete interest (labor and minority
group organizations), multiple issues or general issues. These do not
exist in America in quantity today. If they did exist, they would be a
significant politicizing and educative force bringing people into touch
with public life and affording them means of expression and action. Today,
giant lobby representatives of business interests are dominant, but not
educative. The Federal government itself should counter the latter forces
whose intent is often public deceit for private gain, by subsidizing the
preparation and decentralized distribution of objective materials on all
public issues facing government.
3. Institutions and practices which stifle dissent
should be abolished, and the promotion of peaceful dissent should be
actively promoted.
The first Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly,
thought, religion and press should be seen as guarantees, not threats,
to national security. While society has the right to prevent active subversion
of its laws and institutions, it has the duty as well to promote open
discussion of all issues -- otherwise it will be in fact promoting real
subversion as the only means to implementing ideas. To eliminate the fears
and apathy from national life it is necessary that the institutions bred
by fear and apathy be rooted out: the House Un-American Activities Committee,
the Senate Internal Security Committee, the loyalty oaths on Federal loans,
the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations, the Smith and
McCarren Acts. The process of eliminating these blighting institutions
is the process of restoring democratic participation. Their existence
is a sign of the decomposition and atrophy of the participation.
4. Corporations must be made publicly responsible.
It is not possible to believe that true democracy
can exist where a minority utterly controls enormous wealth and power.
The influence of corporate elites on foreign policy is neither reliable
nor democratic; a way must be found to be subordinate private American
foreign investment to a democratically-constructed foreign policy. The
influence of the same giants on domestic life is intolerable as well;
a way must be found to direct our economic resources to genuine human
needs, not the private needs of corporations nor the rigged needs of maneuvered
citizenry.
We can no longer rely on competition of the many
to insure that business enterprise is responsive to social needs. The
many have become the few. Nor can we trust the corporate bureaucracy to
be socially responsible or to develop a "corporate conscience"
that is democratic. The community of interest of corporations, the anarchic
actions of industrial leaders, should become structurally responsible
to the people -- and truly to the people rather than to an ill-defined
and questionable "national interest". Labor and government as
presently constituted are not sufficient to "regulate" corporations.
A new re-ordering, a new calling of responsibility is necessary: more
than changing "work rules" we must consider changes in the rules
of society by challenging the unchallenged politics of American corporations.
Before the government can really begin to control business in a "public
interest", the public must gain more substantial control of government:
this demands a movement for political as well as economic realignments.
We are aware that simple government "regulation", if achieved,
would be inadequate without increased worker participation in management
decision-making, strengthened and independent regulatory power, balances
of partial and/or complete public ownership, various means of humanizing
the conditions and types of work itself, sweeping welfare programs and
regional public government authorities. These are examples of measures
to re-balance the economy toward public -- and individual -- control.
5. The allocation of resources must be based
on social needs. A truly "public sector" must be established,
and its nature debated and planned.
At present the majority of America's "public
sector", the largest part of our public spending, is for the military.
When great social needs are so pressing, our concept of "government
spending" is wrapped up in the "permanent war economy".
In fact, if war is to be avoided, the "permanent
war economy" must be seen as an "interim war economy".
At some point, America must return to other mechanisms of economic growth
besides public military spending. We must plan economically in peace.
The most likely, and least desirable, return would be in the form of private
enterprise. The undesirability lies in the fact of inherent capitalist
instability, noticeable even with bolstering effects of government intervention.
In the most recent post-war recessions, for example, private expenditures
for plant and equipment dropped from $16 billion to $11.5 billion, while
unemployment surged to nearly 6 million. By good fortune, investments
in construction industries remained level, else an economic depression
would have occurred. This will recur, and our growth in national per capita
living standards will remain unsensational while the economy stagnates.
The main private forces of economic expansion
cannot guarantee a steady rate of growth, nor acceptable recovery from
recession -- especially in a demilitarizing world. Government participation
in the economy is essential. Such participation will inevitably expand
enormously, because the stable growth of the economy demands increasing
"public" investments yearly. Our present outpour of more than
$500 billion might double in a generation, irreversibly involving government
solutions. And in future recessions, the compensatory fiscal action by
the government will be the only means of avoiding the twin disasters of
greater unemployment and a slackening rate of growth. Furthermore, a close
relationship with the European Common Market will involve competition
with numerous planned economies and may aggravate American unemployment
unless the economy here is expanding swiftly enough to create new jobs.
All these tendencies suggest that not only solutions
to our present social needs but our future expansion rests upon our willingness
to enlarge the "public sector" greatly. Unless we choose war
as an economic solvent, future public spending will be of a non-military
nature -- a major intervention into civilian production by the government.
The issues posed by this development are enormous:
A: How should public vs. private domain be determined?
We suggest these criteria: 1) when a resource has been discovered or
developed with public tax revenues, such as a space communications system,
it should remain a public source, not be given away to private enterprise;
2) when monopolization seems inevitable, the public
should maintain control of an industry; 3) when national objectives
contradict seriously with business objectives as to the use of the resource,
the public need should prevail.
B: How should technological advances be introduced
into a society? By a public process, based on publicly-determined needs.
Technological innovations should not be postponed from social use by
private corporations in order to protect investment in older equipment.
C: How shall the "public sector" be
made public, and not the arena of a ruling bureaucracy of "public
servants"? By steadfast opposition to bureaucratic coagulation,
and to definitions of human needs according to problems easiest for
computers to solve. Second, the bureaucratic pileups must be at least
minimized by local, regional, and national economic planning
-- responding to the interconnection of public problems by comprehensive
programs of solution. Third, and most important, by experiments in decentralization,
based on the vision of man as master of his machines and his society.
The personal capacity to cope with life has been reduced everywhere
by the introduction of technology that only minorities of men (barely)
understand. How the process can be reversed -- and we believe it can
be -- is one of the greatest sociological and economic tasks before
human people today. Polytechnical schooling, with the individual adjusting
to several work and life experiences, is one method. The transfer of
certain mechanized tasks back into manual forms, allowing men to make
whole, not partial, products, is not unimaginable. Our monster cities,
based historically on the need for mass labor, might now be humanized,
broken into smaller communities, powered by nuclear energy, arranged
according to community decision. These are but a fraction of the opportunities
of the new era: serious study and deliberate experimentation, rooted
in a desire for human fraternity, may now result in blueprints of civic
paradise.
6. America should concentrate on its genuine
social priorities: abolish squalor, terminate neglect, and establish
an environment for people to live in with dignity and creativeness.
A: A program against poverty must be just
as sweeping as the nature of poverty itself. It must not be just palliative,
but directed to the abolition of the structural circumstances of poverty.
At a bare minimum it should include a housing act far larger
than the one supported by the Kennedy Administration, but one that is
geared more to low-and middleincome needs than to the windfall aspirations
of small and large private entrepreneurs, one that is more sympathetic
to the quality of communal life than to the efficiency of city-split
highways. Second, medical care must become recognized as a lifetime
human right just as vital as food, shelter and clothing -- the Federal
government should guarantee health insurance as a basic social service
turning medical treatment into a social habit, not just an occasion
of crisis, fighting sickness among the aged, not just by making medical
care financially feasible but by reducing sickness among children and
younger people. Third, existing institutions should be expanded so the
welfare state cares for everyone's welfare according to read.
Social security payments should be extended to everyone and should
be proportionately greater for the poorest. A minimum wage of
at least $1.50 should be extended to all workers (including the 16 million
currently not covered at all). Equal educational opportunity
is an important part of the battle against poverty.
B: A full-scale public initiative for civil rights
should be undertaken despite the clamor among conservatives (and liberals)
about gradualism, property rights, and law and order. The executive
and legislative branches of the Federal government should work by enforcement
and enactment against any form of exploitation of minority groups. No
Federal cooperation with racism is tolerable -- from financing of schools,
to the development of Federally-supported industry, to the social gatherings
of the President. Laws bastcuing school desegregation, voting rights,
and economic protection for Negroes are needed right now. The moral
force of the Executive Office should be exerted against the Dixiecrats
specifically, and the national complacency about the race question generally.
Especially in the North, where one-half of the country's Negro people
now live, civil rights is not a problem to be solved in isolation from
other problems. The fight against poverty, against slums, against the
stalemated Congress, against McCarthyism, are all fights against the
discrimination that is nearly endemic to all areas of American life.
C: The promise and problems of long-range Federal
economic development should be studied more constructively. It is
an embarrassing paradox that the Tennessee Valley Authority is a wonder
to foreign visitors but a "radical" and barely influential
project to most Americans. The Kennedy decision to permit private facilities
to transmit power from the $1 billion Colorado River Storage Project
is a disastrous one, interposing privately-owned transmitters between
public-owned power generators and their publicly (and cooperatively)
owned distributors. The contracy trend, to public ownership of power,
should be generated in an experimental way.
The Area Redevelopment Act of 1961 is a first
step in recognizing the underdeveloped areas of the United States, but
is only a drop in the bucket financially and is not keyed to public
planning and public works on a broad scale, but only to a few loan programs
to lure industries and some grants to improve public facilities to "lure
industries." The current public works bill in Congress is needed
and a more sweeping, higher priced program of regional development with
a proliferation of "TVAs" in such areas as the Appalachian
region are needed desperately. It has been rejected by Mississippi already
however, because of the improvement it bodes for the unskilled Negro
worker. This program should be enlarged, given teeth, and pursued rigorously
by Federal authorities.
D. We must meet the growing complex of "city"
problems; over 90% of Americans will live in urban areas in the next
two decades. Juvenile delinquency, untended mental illness, crime increase,
slums, urban tenantry and uncontrolled housing, the isolation of the
individual in the city -- all are problems of the city and are major
symptoms of the present system of economic priorities and lack of public
planning. Private property control (the real estate lobby and a few
selfish landowners and businesses) is as devastating in the cities as
corporations are on the national level. But there is no comprehensive
way to deal with these problems now midst competing units of government,
dwindling tax resources, suburban escapism (saprophitic to the sick
central cities), high infrastructure costs and on one to pay them. The
only solutions are national and regional. "Federalism" has
thus far failed here because states are rural-dominated; the Federal
government has had to operate by bootlegging and trickle-down measures
dominated by private interests, and the cities themselves have not been
able to catch up with their appendages through annexation or federation.
A new external challenge is needed, not just a Department of Urban Affairs
but a thorough national program to help the cities. The model
city must be projected -- more community decision-making and participation,
true integration of classes, races, vocations -- provision for beauty,
access to nature and the benefits of the central city as well, privacy
without privatism, decentralized "units" spread horizontally
with central, regional, democratic control -- provision for the basic
facility-needs, for everyone, with units of planned regions and
thus public, democratic control over the growth of the civic community
and the allocation of resources.
E. Mental health institutions are in dire
need; there were fewer mental hospital beds in relation to the numbers
of mentally-ill in 1959 than there were in 1948. Public hospitals, too,
are seriously wanting; existing structures alone need an estimated $1
billion for rehabilitation. Tremendous staff and faculty needs exist
as well, and there are not enough medical students enrolled today to
meet the anticipated needs of the future.
F. Our prisons are too often the enforcers
of misery. They must be either re-oriented to rehabilitative work through
public supervision or be abolished for their dehumanizing social effects.
Funds are needed, too, to make possible a decent prison environment.
G. Education is too vital a public problem
to be completely entrusted to the province of the various states and
local units. In fact, there is no good reason why America should not
progress now toward internationalizing rather than localizing, its educational
system -- children and young adults studying everywhere in the world,
through a United Nations program, would go far to create mutual understanding.
In the meantime, the need for teachers and classrooms in America is
fantastic. This is an area where "minimal" requirements hardly
should be considered as a goal -- there always are improvements to be
made in the educational system, e.g., smaller classes and many more
teachers for them, programs to subsidize the education of the poor but
bright, etc.
H. America should eliminate agricultural policies
based on scarcity and pent-up surplus. In America and foreign countries
there exist tremendous needs for more food and balanced diets. The Federal
government should finance small farmers' cooperatives, strengthen programs
of rural electrification, and expand policies for the distribution of
agricultural surpluses throughout the world (by Foodfor -Peace and related
UN programming). Marginal farmers must be helped to either become productive
enough to survive "industrialized agriculture" or given help
in making the transition out of agriculture -- the
current Rural Area Development program must be better coordinated with
a massive national "area redevelopment" program.
I. Science should be employed to constructively
transform the conditions of life throughout the United States and the
world. Yet at the present time the Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare and the National Science Foundation together spend only
$300 million annually for scientific purposes in contrast to the $6
billion spent by the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission.
One-half of all research and development in America is directly devoted
to military purposes. Two imbalances must be corrected -- that of military
over non-military investigation, and that of biological-natural-physical
science over the sciences of human behavior. Our political system must
then include planning for the human use of science: by anticipating
the political consequences of scientific innovation, by directing the
discovery and exploration of space, by adapting science to improved
production of food, to international communications systems, to technical
problems of disarmament, and so on. For the newly-developing nations,
American science should focus on the study of cheap sources of power,
housing and building materials, mass educational techniques, etc. Further,
science and scholarship should be seen less as an apparatus of conflicting
power blocs, but as a bridge toward supranational community: the International
Geophysical Year is a model for continuous further cooperation between
the science communities of all nations.
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