Participatory Democracy from SNCC through Port Huron to Women's Liberation to Occupy

The Occupy movement and the anniversary of Port Huron have sparked some reconsiderations of the New Left, particularly its call for participatory democracy, which was its core and predominant theme. We can only do that well, however, if we begin to think historically about what we mean by New Left, a category too much associated exclusively with the white student-intellectual movement that coalesced around campus and antiwar activism, then broke up into sectarian fragments from 1968 to 1970. That definition misses the continuity, the span, and the influence of the American New Left. From my perspective, that of a historian of social movements, it is important to understand the American New Left as an umbrella movement, a “cluster concept,” ¹ that began in the 1950s with civil rights, traveled through the white student movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the women’s-liberation movement, and the gay-liberation movement, taking in also the environmentalism that continued throughout. ² These movements shared an anti-authoritarian impulse, a recognition of the need for new analyses of injustice and exploitation, a strategic orientation toward defiance, a tactical reliance on direct action and civil disobedience, a rejection of conformist culture, and a creativity in pioneering new cultural and communitarian forms. Recognizing this “long New Left” is vital for examining the flow of participatory-democracy ideas and prefigurative politics.