It could also be the case that there was little point in worrying too much about relating ends and means because of the utter hopelessness of the strategic task in the face of a complacent majority culture. The aspirations of the young radicals were beyond the scope of rational planning. Not surprisingly, therefore, a strategy of absolute ends emerged, heroic and romantic, doomed to fail but magnificent in its ambition and noble in its honesty. The aim was to affirm existence rather than realize goals, and in this there was a nod across the Atlantic to the French existentialists with their deep musings about the human condition, full of absurdity, abandonment, and despair, but also stressing the unavoidability of choice. Jean-Paul Sartre might seem to dwell on the futility of action, but his point was that hopelessness was not in itself a reason for passivity. Indeed, choice was unavoidable for men were “condemned to be free.” They did not choose the circumstances of their existence, but they were obliged to respond. The quality of their responses, whether heroic or cowardly, was their responsibility and would eventually define their lives.7 More influential than Sartre, at least in the United States, was Albert Camus. Politically, Camus was closer to the anarchists than the communists, and his strong anti-Soviet views caused a break with Sartre. In 1940, he was a pacifist but the experience of occupation led him to join the resistance, eventually editing the underground journal, Combat. This was the inspiration for his allegorical 1947 novel, The Plague. As a plague almost overwhelmed the Algerian City of Oran, the citizens were in denial and then, instead of abandoning hope, the community found a way of defeating the disease and regained its solidarity in the process. The doctor, Bernard Rieux, summed up the philosophy: “All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”8 From Camus came the argument that rebellion made a life worth living, even when this meant acting in the face of overwhelming odds. So long as one was acting with integrity there was no need to worry about being an underdog, for integrity mattered more than consequences.
Mills and Power
C. Wright Mills died of a heart attack in his mid-40s in 1962. Mills was controversial at the time and has remained so since, not least because of his larger than life personality and his readiness to cast himself as a dissident.9 He was the classic inner-directed man, true to his own values, describing himself as a loner who never worked with a political group. The early years of his career saw him subjected to three influences, two of which remained critical for his own ideas. The pragmatists were the first influence, and the subject of his doctorate. He shared their belief in the public role of intellectuals. There was an affinity with James’s anti-militarism and Dewey’s advocacy of participatory democracy. At the same time, Mills was skeptical of Dewey’s quasi-scientific framework and over-mechanical view of politics, his reluctance to come to terms with the problem of power and to acknowledge its manipulative, emotional, and coercive elements.10 Yet Mills also appreciated Dewey’s commitment to intelligence as a form of power. Both were opinionated, although by contrast with Dewey’s ponderously functional prose, Mills’s was laced with invective and value-laden categories.
Hans Gerth, an émigré from the Frankfurt School, helped move Mills from philosophy to sociology, and introduced him to the work of Max Weber. From Weber, Mills then derived his basic explanatory framework, the interweaving of class, status, power, and culture, and the alarm at the role of large bureaucracies in all areas of life. Marx was not read or taken seriously by Mills until well into his career, after which Mills became progressively more Marxist. He was also becoming more of an activist intellectual toward the end of his life, defending the Cuban Revolution and developing links with the British New Left (composed of Marxists, often scholarly, who had left the Communist Party). Part of his appeal to students was that he already identified them as potential agents of change, ready to challenge the forces of inertia and conservatism.11
His books combined subtle analysis and research with a searing social critique. The critique became more strident during the course of the 1950s as his own international reputation as a dissenting intellectual grew. He was preoccupied with the structures of power: how in modern corporate America the elite no longer needed brute force or coercion to sustain its position but could instead rely on manipulation. His target was what came to be described as the “pluralist” school, which argued that democracy could function with a relatively low level of citizen participation. Since everybody got something out of the political process and had no cause for either excessive distress or joy, somehow it was working effectively and fairly.
The debate on power was an important one and Mills’s book, The Power Elite, was always cited on one side of the argument, often against Robert Dahl’s Who Governs: Democracy and Power in an American City.12 Part of the difficulty was that they reflected two different views of power and how to measure it, and both views were relevant to the developing debates about radical politics. Power was, and still is, regularly referred to as an attribute of a political entity, measured in terms of the more blatant indicators of military and economic strength. Yet it was evident that an ample stock of both did not guarantee favorable outcomes in all encounters. The powerful did not always get their way. Resources needed to be considered in the context of the problems they were supposed to solve. A card player might have great skill and a wonderful hand of cards for bridge but not for poker. There was therefore a difference between putative and actual power, between capabilities and effects, the potential and the act.13 Dahl’s definition stressed the ability to influence: “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.”14 It was not enough that A had capacity: it was only really power as revealed in quite specific relationships through measurable effects, by B being made subject to A’s will.
One of the most important and lasting challenges to this view came not from Mills but two political scientists, Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, in a 1962 article:
Of course power is exercised when A participates in the making of decisions that affect B. But power is also exercised when A devotes his energies to creating or reinforcing social and political values and institutional practices that limit the scope of the political process to public consideration of only those issues which are comparatively innocuous to A. To the extent that A succeeds in doing this, B is prevented, for all practical purposes, from bringing to the fore any issues that might in their resolution be seriously detrimental to A’s set of preferences.15
This second face of power had an almost insidious quality: it was about how A sustained a position in a power structure, of power over others, by keeping issues off the agenda and creating a background consensus that denied B the opportunity to begin to challenge A, never mind defeat A in a direct confrontation. It was this line of critique that by the end of the decade had been embraced by the radicals, although often in a far cruder, “false-consciousness” way than these authors intended. Mills avoided the simple Marxist analysis of government being the executive committee of the ruling class or of mass consciousness being shaped by bourgeois ideology. His description of the power elite was more about a bureaucratic convergence of interests, including corporate executives and the “warlords,” than an organized conspiracy, but he insisted that the system of checks and balances was no longer working and so encouraged the view of a vital resource being monopolized by a privileged view, so that they could get what they wanted when they wanted it.16
Mills became as much of a pamphleteer as a scholar, “prepared to step forth and brazenly pin his indictment like a target to the enemy’s chest.”17 His catchy rhetoric remained nonetheless an extension of his sociology. His impatience with mainstream sociology was reflected in his book The Sociological Imagination,18 in which he derided what he saw to be the two false paths of mainstream sociology: self-important grand theory on the one hand and abstracted empiricism, full of microscopic studies that remaine
d marginal to the big questions of the day, on the other. The true purpose, he insisted, should be to connect private troubles with social and political structures. If an individual was unemployed that was a private trouble: if 20 percent of the population was unemployed that was a structural issue and thus a task for sociology. In this role, he argued, sociology could be the master discipline of politics. The sociological imagination would feed the political imagination. “Before you are through with any piece of work, no matter how indirectly on occasion,” he insisted, “orient it to the central and continuing task of understanding the structure and the drift, the shaping and the meanings, of your own period, the terrible and magnificent world of human society in the second half of the twentieth century.”
The Port Huron Statement
Tom Hayden was a natural wordsmith and was the first to find fresh language to convey a new mood. The Port Huron Statement, for which he was the lead author, was discussed in June 1962 by a group of about sixty people, feeling—as he later remarked—that they “were giving voice to a new generation of rebels.”19 There were a number of influences. Arnold Kaufman, Hayden’s philosophy professor at Michigan, had introduced him to John Dewey as an exponent of the democratization of all social institutions. From Camus came a way of thinking about rebellion as a way of life, and from C. Wright Mills a critique of the prevailing distribution of power, but also something more personal. It was partly that they were both lapsed Catholics. But it was also that what unsettled him about his own family could be explained. As he read Mills, Hayden saw a portrait of his father, an accountant for Chrysler: “proud in his starched white collar, occupying his accountant’s niche above the union work force and below the real decision makers, penciling in numbers by day, drinking in front of the television at night, muttering about the world to no one in particular.”20
Mills explained for Hayden “the factors that made people uninterested and apathetic in the face of Camus’s plague.” Bureaucratic elites welcomed passivity and had no incentive to encourage true democracy. Mills had written of the emergence of the “cheerful robot,” a creature of mass society with an illusion of freedom but unable to influence the larger structures of power. “Between the little man’s consciousness and the issues of our time, there seems to be a veil of indifference. His will seems numb; his spirit meager.” In this spirit the Port Huron Statement opened, acknowledging the awkwardness of the position of students: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably at the world we inherit.” They did not claim to be speaking for the masses but were a self-declared minority observing that “the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts.” Students “don’t even give a damn about the apathy.”21
A Millsian analysis was offered of why people felt so powerless and had succumbed to indifference: “People are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might be thrust out of control. They fear change, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos from them now.” Yet here was optimism about humanity. “We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.” If core values could be rediscovered in a “moral realignment” then there was a possibility of a “political realignment.”22 Politics was not a means to an end. It was an end in itself, participation and engagement serving to heal the divide that had opened up between people and their society. The New Left, the statement insisted,
must transform modern complexity into issues that can be understood and felt close-up by every human being. It must give form to the feelings of helplessness and indifference so that people may see the political, social and economic sources of their private troubles and organize to change society. In a time of supposed prosperity, moral complacency and political manipulation, a new left cannot rely on only aching stomachs to be the engine of social reform.23
The immediate cause for the students was civil rights in the South. This met their appetite for activism and provided experiences that were more instructive and meaningful than anything that could be gained through studying the political classics. But that could only take the movement so far. The aim was to move the demand for rights into all institutions rather than just the electoral process. The starting point for their demands to be heard was therefore their own institutions—the universities. Here they were expected to conform, accept what they were told in class without demur, and follow all rules at risk of expulsion. Gradually this new mood made itself felt. A clash over the rights of CORE to organize on the San Francisco Berkeley campus led to the first big student demonstrations.
Dick Flacks, a young academic closely involved with the Port Huron Statement, observed the tension between the developing movement as a way of life and as an agency of change. The way of life he called “existential humanism,” which required no more than acting according to core beliefs, constantly striving “to approach an ethical existence,” but he saw that this could be irresponsible, searching “for a personally satisfying mode of life while abandoning the possibility of helping others to change theirs; of placing tremendous hope in the movement of the immediate community for achieving personal salvation and gratification—then realizing that these possibilities are, after all, limited and, consequently suffering disillusionment.” As did Weber, Flacks sought to reconcile convictions with responsibility. This meant acting “politically because our values cannot be realized in any durable sense without a reconstruction of the political and social system.” Politics, however, apart from an existential ethic would be “increasingly manipulative, power-oriented, sacrificial of human lives and souls,”—in short, “corrupted.” The answer, suggested Flacks, was “strategic analysis,” though he acknowledged the prevailing suspicion of an “explicit and systematic preoccupation with strategy” as imposing artificial constraints, restricting spontaneity, and reducing responsiveness to what people really wanted. As it was the property of a few, “acting in terms of strategy is elitist.” Unfortunately, without strategy there would be no sense of priorities, inarticulateness, and “almost random behavior among students who want to do effective social action.”24
This described the problem rather than identified solutions. As with previous generations of radicals, the only way out of the dilemma appeared to be to get among the people, working with them to address their issues without claiming that they had all the answers. So it was that Hayden joined a community program, the Economic Research and Action Project, in Newark. The prohibition on elitism was limiting. There were other “liberal forces” in the area with whom it might be advisable to coalesce, but Hayden found them “extremely self-serving,” with “wide community contact but no active and radical membership base” and programs that “would do very little to change the real lives of the poor.” Entering into “political bartering” would violate “the basic trust we have with the neighborhood people. Our place is at the bottom.”25 Liberal strategies assumed that the “masses are apathetic and can only be roused because of simple material needs or during short periods of great enthusiasm.” Because of this, “they need skilled and responsible leaders.” The complaint then followed a familiar path: leaders presumed that only they could maintain the organization. Because people reacted with “disinterest or suspicion” to such elitism, the leadership was able to call the masses apathetic, although he also acknowledged a worrying tendency to “think subserviently.”
Hayden was considering not the broad masses of Marxist mythology but a minority underclass.26 He recoiled from the obvious answer, which was to form coalitions or at least make temporary arrangements with the powerful. This was rejected because no more than “welfare-state reforms” would be on offer, bound to fail because they were “not conceived by the poor people they are designed for” and allowed the middle class to relax “into the comfortable sense that everything is being managed well.” His focus was so relentles
sly about power, and avoiding appearing to want it, that the assumption had to be that if those at the bottom had power they would do well by themselves and others. But would they want the things that the activist believed they ought to want? If their minds had been turned by years of powerlessness and a consumerist culture, might their demands and the efforts they were prepared to put behind be disappointing?
Unsurprisingly, he was left with a “mystery” when looking for a “workable strategy.” His aim was “a thoroughly democratic revolution,” reversing the abdication of power to “top-down organizational units,” out of which a “new kind of man” might emerge who could not be manipulated because it was “precisely against manipulation that he has defined his rebellion.” The poor would transform decision-making by acting on their aspirations, working against the grain of “an affluent and coercive society.” As he later accepted, the flaw in this analysis was assuming that the aspirations of the poor would be any different from the middle-class society whose values he personally derided. He already was aware of the difficulty of finding leaders who could forswear an interest in the organization for its own sake or a rank and file who understood and committed themselves to the movement’s goals.27
While Hayden was struggling to sustain his commitment to participatory democracy, SNCC was in the process of abandoning it. James Forman, as executive secretary, had argued in 1964 for a proper mass organization rather than uncoordinated activists to compete with other civil rights organizations. To the centralizers, this simply required individuals to subordinate their own issues to the needs of the collective.
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