NAM: A Port Huron for the Seventies?

After several years of organizing, small collectives from all over came together at Davenport last month

We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom and love.

SDS Port Huron Statement, 1962.

Ho. Ho. Ho Chi Minh.

Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win. chant at 1969 SDS national convention

Our goal is simply to put socialism on the agenda for the seventies.   Michael Lerner at the NAM program conference, November, 1971.

C. Wright Mills had been the first to say that the pluralist, end-of-ideology emperor had no clothes, but SDS was the first organized attempt to challenge the smugness of the American celebration of the nineteen-fifties. In response to liberal academics like S.M. Lipset, Daniel Bell, and others who maintained that fundamental conflict was absent in post-industrial America, and that decisions about the direction of society were purely technical, SDS's founding charter--the Port Huron Statement--condemned a "perverted democracy" that permitted "disastrous policies to go unchallenged time and again." These charges--which seem mild in retrospect--represented a sharp break with the political past in a pre-Vietnam, pre-Watts America.

SDS traveled a long way during the sixties. After Port Huron, it went through a left-liberal stage ("Part of the way with LBJ") and quickened its ideological tempo as the American smugness evaporated in Southeast Asia and in the ghettos. By the 1969 convention, the organization was riddled with factions which split over such issues as whether blacks were a colony of the American Empire or a super-exploited part of the working class.

Yet one strain of consistency runs through the ideological meanderings of SDS. Its members were almost exclusively college students who were primarily concerned with campus and campus-related issues--student power and free speech, ROTC on campus, black studies, university expansion, and in general, the symbiotic relationship of the colleges and universities to an American government that repressed rebellions in the ghettos and revolutions overseas.

And since radical activity was concentrated in colleges and universities, it seemed the 'cooling of the campuses' happily reported by liberal journals over the past year signaled the end of the New Left. Much of what passed for cooling was in fact a mixture of university repression and accommodation. While some radicals were expelled by disciplinary committees, the majority of the student body was pacified by some reforms. Meanwhile, the struggle was moving off the campus and into the community.

The lack of any radical base outside the university provides a basis for understanding why SDS split in 1969. Although the American working class--both white and blue collar--became increasingly restive during the late sixties, the New Left failed to expand into the communities and offer answers to these grievances; its alienation from the American experience led to its increasing factionalization, elitism and estrangement from serious reality.

While SDS'ers debated the relative merits of the Chinese, Cuban or Vietnamese revolutions, the crisis of an advanced industrial society--a crisis epochs removed from revolutionary upheavals in peasant societies--accelerated in the Nation around them. It was more exciting to glorify Che or Ho or Mao than to do the dirty work of researching and organizing around issues like rank-and-file revolts in trade unions, tenant conditions or day care.

Weather people tried to 'smash the state' by breaking windows in cut-rate department stores in Chicago. PL continued to come up with gems of analysis; they attributed the hardhat attack on the peace demonstrators as provoked by the demonstrators' support for Ho Chi Minh--who the hardhats knew to be a sell-out because he was negotiating at Paris.

But a different--less visible--dynamic on the Left was simultaneously at work. Weary of irrelevant infighting, veteran Leftists dropped out of SDS in the late sixties and began organizing in unaffiliated collectives all over the country. In addition, people who entered the movement late in the sixties often found the existing organizations sterile and simply organized on their own, as independent radicals.

The new dynamic in the American Left surfaced last week with the formation of the New American Movement (NAM), which attracted 450 people to its first program conference in Davenport, Iowa, over Thanksgiving week-end. NAM--a growing organization with more than 25 chapters around the country--began on the west coast last spring. Community organizers--some with projects several years old--sensed that they needed some type of national coordination, and they responded favorably when Michael Lerner. Thierrie Cook and Chip Marshall, West Coast radicals, sent out a statement calling for NAM's formation.

The NAM statement made practical sense. NAM called itself an organization fighting for "a completely democratic form of socialism," rejecting both socialist bureaucracies and welfare statism. It criticized the classic errors of the New Left: extreme sectarianism, the cult of the Third World, persecution of people for not devoting all of their time to the movement, and downgrading of community action as somehow reformist.

The real reason for NAM's quick popularity was the growing realization--simultaneously occurring to many radicals who have been steeped in the harsh realities of day-to-day local organizing for several years--that the fight for socialism is going to be long and hard One does not try and tell an American worker to support or oppose Mao's China if he is not yet convinced that his union does not serve his interest or that his government serves the ruling class. NAM has replaced nonsensical talk about seizing state power with a band of Yippies by seriously considering the best programs and organizing techniques with which to reach working people and make them consider socialism as a real alternative. NAM sees itself as performing an interim function for the seventies: co-founder Lerner summarizes its modest goal as putting "socialism on the national agenda."

People of all kinds responded to the NAM statement and went to Davenport. Many, as previously mentioned, were ex-student radicals in their mid-twenties who now consider themselves part of the working class--white collar or blue collar--and have been organizing in communities on a variety of issues. Some of them were former SDS'ers--several people had been at Port Huron--but many were independent radicals who found NAM appealing because of its realism and openness.

(PL was the only group specifically banned from attending: the group feared that they would attempt to take over the conference. Two PL'ers showed up and were asked to leave.)

The NAM people have spent the past several years, looking for political activity with which to complement--and not exclusively dominate--their lives. "I was into the women's movement for a while," said a woman from Washington, D.C., "but they were giving French lessons at two in the afternoon. I work and can't go traipsing off to study French. I found NAM much more relevant."

The 25 NAM chapters which already exist (which have 10-20 members each) represented a fairly even cross-section of American communities. Only the South was under-represented. The traditional radical centers, Cambridge. New York and Berkeley, sent contingents--along with groups from less likely places such as Baltimore. Durham, and Davenport itself. The largest chapter is in Pittsburgh.

Even the old-time populists were represented. Firtz V. Stover, a weather-beaten Iowa farmer in his sixties who nominated Henry Wallace at the 1948 Progressive Party convention. ("I knew soon enough though that he was a sell-out"), told the farm workshop about the plight of the small farmers being bought out by agribusiness. "It's almost as bad as the Hoover Depression," he lamented.

Staughton Lynd and James Weinstein were the radical celebrities in attendance. Lynd, who formerly taught at Yale, has been at the center of many of the radical turbulences of the past decade. He presently teaches at a city college in Chicago, lives in a working class black neighborhood on the city's South Side, and has spent the past several years organizing steel-workers in Gary, Ind. Lynd has been in NAM since its inception and his reputation and calm bearing were an important mediating force at the conference.

Weinstein, author of The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State and presently working with Socialist Revolution magazine, came to the conference skeptical of NAM. But by the end of the week-end he had changed his mind. "I now believe that NAM can become an effective democratic socialist organization," he said.

The NAM conference had two basic objectives: to coordinate the emerging local efforts with some form of national structure, and to select 'program priorities'--issues of national importance which chapters would work on in addition to engaging in local work. The overriding question at the conference was how the national structure would function and how the inherent tension between local needs and national priorities could be resolved.

The original proposal--initiated by the West Coast founders--was for a fairly centralized National Interim Committee (NIC) that would aid in organizing new chapters and publicize NAM by publishing a national newspaper. In addition, the founders proposed that the conference select three program priorities which all chapters would work on in addition to local projects.

The conference watered down the centralization plan. This was done for two reasons: a desire to broaden the organization's base by remaining decentralized and the desire to avoid the possibility that a central power structure might direct NAM in undemocratic ways. People remembered the SDS experience, when at times the national office would war with various factions by controlling the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes, and by scheduling conferences and conventions in locations where a preferred faction would be likely to predominate.

The conference limited the power of the NIC--which will serve until NAM's official 'coming out' at a founding convention in June--by specifying that regions will form their own conferences instead of allowing the NIC to organize regional conferences and by providing that the newspaper be published in a different city from the NIC headquarters. The conference also required that at least 7 of the 13 NIC members be women--in response to charges by people of both sexes--that NAM was dominated by men.

The conference considered 13 priority proposals before selecting three. Both the proposals and the plans for organizing reflected a broadening of the New Left's traditional base. To the old radical stand-by concerns of imperialism and racism, the group added issues like the problems of the small farmer, industrial health and safety, and the establishment of food and automobile co-ops.

The group shifted its emphasis away from foreign policy--a move that disturbed many of its members. Perhaps underlying the shift was the somber realization that an imperialist foreign policy--above all--is determined with impunity by the ruling class, and that changing society through community and national organizing is a precondition for halting imperialism.

After several days of debate, the conference selected three priority programs, but--fearing over-centralization--said only that local chapters "should" participate in one of them. The three priorities selected were: the economy, anti-corporate organizing and war and imperialism. A child care proposal--which dealt with the entire question of child socialization--was narrowly defeated in the closest vote of the conference. In a compromise settlement, its important provisions were tacked on to the economy proposal. All the priorities were long and somewhat vague; local chapters will be able to interpret them broadly.

The proposal on the economy--probably an inherent priority--was concerned with devising a radical response to Nixon's new economic policy. Questions of income distribution--thrown into sharp relief by the wage-price guidelines--are fundamental questions that NAM chapters can organize around.

The conference agreed that workers should be organized, but disagreed over whether the most effective place to organize is at the workplace or in the community. The six-page economy proposal reflected both points of view. It supported "all strikes which attempt to break the wage guidelines" and gave priority to "wildcat, illegal and profit-limiting strikes," and called on unions to fight the divisiveness of racism and sexism and supported rank-and-file union insurgents.

The statement also called for community organizing to "combat oligopoly pricing" and tax inequities. It attacked the decline in the quality of government social programs. Above all, the proposal called for "people's control of the economy" and advised chapters to raise questions of "Who decides?" In specific projects so that working people can see where American power is and try to seize it for themselves.

The war and imperialism priority was passed with overwhelming support, placating to some extent people who felt that the conference was slighting questions of foreign policy. The statement called the Indochina war "an acute crisis demanding continued action" and recommended continued action" and recommended continued local and national demonstrations and other anti-war actions. It supported anti-war GI's and veterans, and called for local NAM chapters to devote resources to "education around the international aspects of imperialism."

The anti-corporate priority contended that corporations are "pervasive and ubiquitous" and said that "any organization which aims at radical change in the U.S. must attack the corporation." It called for local chapters to choose a local corporate target and "develop sustained long-range research action projects" against the target.

Other priority proposals--which were not selected but which the conference emphasized should not preclude chapters from working on them--included: health care, ecology, election strategy (primarily local), campus organizing, justice and law, the media, and the problems of the small farmer.

The priority programs--because of their broadness--serve more as a statement of NAM's purpose than as an actual everyday organizing too. Disagreements over the programs were often vociferous but were never really expressed along sectarian lines, with the accompanying caucusing and chanting.

The conference's primary success--beyond relatively technical matters of structure and policy--was the sense of cohesiveness and solidarity that it generated. People who had spent the past several years organizing in isolated communities drew strength from meeting people with parallel experiences and sharing ideas and strategies.

NAM seems to have a good chance to avoid the problems that have crippled the New Left in recent years. The organization is grounded in reality: it seems to be broadly based and it attracts people who have proved that they are serious about changing American society by persevering through several years of difficult and frustrating organizing experiences. People returned to their home communities from Davenport with a kind of hold-your-breath optimism.

Yet there are difficulties with NAM that make its success problematic. The organization is still very small; it will have to grow quickly and dramatically if it is to avoid becoming just another one of the sects or sectlets that dot the American Left's landscape. The organization's broad base makes this possible but not inevitable.

NAM must also expand to include life-long workers and not just students-turned-workers. It must come to grips with how it will relate to black. Puerto Rican and Chicano movements, a consideration conspicuously absent from the Davenport conference.

And finally, the organization will have to help rekindle the student movement. The experience of the sixties teaches one lesson above all: universities are not idyllic places removed from conflict, but play a key role in generating ideology and providing personnel and technical expertise to buttress the American corporate state and empire. Universities are centers of conflict; NAM will have to involve students so that conflict can be continued and new generations of students educated.

The problems are staggering: the struggle will be long and hard; but a cautious optimism seems to be growing. The movement has passed into a new phase and seems to be seriously repudiating the mistakes of the past and looking to the future with hope. Many people at the Davenport conference sensed that NAM may be as significant for the seventies as Port Huron was for the sixties. Perhaps that is being overly optimistic, but the spirit of Port Huron--a break with the past, a renewal and an optimistic willingness to grasp the future--was recaptured in Davenport.

Copyright by Daniel A. Swanson, 1971.