For political theorists, what came out of the Statement was a version of democratic theory that had hardly existed previously, “participatory democracy.” To be sure, under an earlier rubric, “Direct Action,” it had a long history in theory and practice: especially in Britain, and in the United States through the sit-ins of the 1930s. In fact, as is emphasized in this collection, in the United States the Statement was the way station in a radicalizing process that began in the 1930s, was revived in the late 1950s, and was represented primarily by the Civil Rights movement but also the antinuke peace movement—shortly to be transmogrified into the more widespread antiwar movement, for which, fittingly, the first manifestation was a teach-in at the University of Michigan.

In the realm of academic social science, the work of C. Wright Mills was critical, but even more so was the publication in the United States of Marx’s long-neglected early writings, first in Louis Feuer’s 1959 anthology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, then more decisively in Erich Fromm’s Marx’s Concept of Man (1961). There, in his exposition of the concept of “Alienated Labor,” Fromm made available to American audiences, especially young faculty and student audiences, a version of Marx without Marxism, and radicalism without state socialism. My own experience of philosophical awakening was, I imagine, typical.

In political science, the invocation of “participatory democracy” underwrote a turn in the discipline epitomized by the formation of the Caucus for a New Political Science in 1967. The New (Political Science) Left, greatly influenced by Mills, brought into being an agenda of disillusionment with the conventional liberal version of representative government, a mode of political decison making from which mass or direct action was almost entirely excluded: a disillusionment first made manifest at Port Huron. What the Statement added to negative critique was a forward-looking program of democratization and egalitarianism that had virtually gone out of existence during the Cold War. By the 1970s, the democratic movement generally, in theory and in to some extent in practice, reached a kind of momentary climax (just before the Deluge): enough so to send Samuel P. Huntington into paroxysms of dismay at the “excess of democracy.”

That was an historical moment. However, in the wake of the Billionaire’s Relief Act, more euphemistically known as the decision in Citizens United, the debate about “pluralism” versus class theory among democratic theorists has lost its salience. Entire state legislatures have been bought and paid for by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC); while, to take just one among countless examples, in the current session of Congress the Koch brothers have personally torpedoed an apparently firm liberal/libertarian alliance over sentencing and incarceration. Even the old-fashioned (once American Political Science Association–endorsed) liberal idea of legislative agendas being set by “responsible” political parties led by elected representatives of “the people” now seems quaint. And as for the idea that the roots of democracy are ultimately established “in the streets” by mass action, in a time when the leading candidate for one party’s presidential nomination straightforwardly uses neo-Nazi rhetoric about Muslims to widespread acclaim, it seems almost quixotic to be remembering and in some sense celebrating the most radical manifesto of the postwar era, and apotheosizing its aftermath.

Now, with hindsight, what strikes me more than anything is the extent to which so many of us believed at a fairly deep level in the myth of Progress: an updated version of Marx’s prediction that socialism would come when capitalism reached its productive peak. We did not foresee the impact of global competition, decomposition of the labor force, the failure of productive institutions, the onset of uncontrolled financialization, and above all capital’s declaration of ferocious class war. As for the looming juggernaut of automation, it was, we speculated, not opposed to individual self-realization but might even encourage it. This hopefulness about automation’s liberating potential clearly undergirded the subsequent (1964) “Triple Revolution” manifesto (signed by Tom Hayden and myself, among many others), but is also implicit in the Statement. It is thus not going too far, I think, to say that while conservatives bet on the failure of socialism, the Left in effect bet on the success of capitalism. Their prediction seemingly bore fruit in 1989; ours preceded a still-ongoing period of disarray and collapse that has never recovered from the first oil embargo—the end of a seemingly unending era of imperial exploitation predicted by very few Western observers. The result looks like a battlefield denuded of the hopes that Bob Dylan summed up in “The Times They Are A-Changin’”: “Come senators, congressmen/ Please heed the call/ Don’t stand in the hallway/ Don’t block up the hall.”

Concomitantly, although Tom Hayden reminds us that the immediate inspiration for the Statement’s authors was the Civil Rights movement’s struggle to achieve the right to vote—the basic tool of both participation and representation—what I remember quite strongly was our rhetorical and emotional slighting of the idea of representative government: an understandable but premature turning away from the basis of “actually existing democracy.” Representation, as we have come to realize, cannot be replaced by participation, but rather can only be more truly achieved by it. At a moment when democratic representation is in danger of disappearing altogether, through the combined power of unleashed wealth, large-scale gerrymandering, and an assault on the fundamental right to vote that is unique in the history of supposedly democratic societies, this realization is belated.

Where do these reflections leave participatory democracy today? The stirrings of a revival can be seen in Occupy Wall Street—though that is an abstraction in most people’s lives; in “Black Lives Matter”—though that is not in itself easily productive of direct action; and in renewed student activism—that today only fitfully addresses the realities of social structure. At the moment, my own thinking about where an immediate attempt to address the goals of the Statement might be most salient circles around two issues that touch the fundamentals of life in the American polity. The first is the onrushing degradation of the environment, which in every way has a hugely differential impact on social classes and minority groups. In this respect, the conflict over equal access to clean water, clean air, and unspoiled land will be the major battle of the future, and the battle lines are already being drawn, as the tragedy of Flint, Michigan, attests. This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis’ documentary about local resistance to global corporate and governmental forces, and regional mass actions against environmental despoliation, updates the spirit and strategies of the Statement for this conflict. In the United States, as state and local governments dominated by big money despoil the environments they should be protecting, there will be many Flints, many Keystone Pipelines, calling for an uncompromising response.

Finally, the ongoing assault on democratic rights is no more legitimate, despite the willful efforts of a partisan Supreme Court majority, than if it were being conducted by the Birmingham City Council and the Ku Klux Klan in 1962; and it can only be stopped if the spirit of the Civil Rights movement is revived, extending the impetus of Black Lives Matter into direct action, beyond what at the moment looks like a forlorn attempt to overcome the surrender of (in theory) one person one vote, to one dollar one vote. The Democratic Party needs to be encouraged to resist: to engage in uncompromising legislative strikes and a refusal to conduct business as usual in the face of the antidemocratic incursion. But more than that, the most appropriate practice of participatory democracy should be a march on polling stations everywhere that the opportunity to vote is being denied or constricted, forcing a confrontation that will demonstrate how, now as then, and behind the facade of a partisan Supreme Court majority, white power ultimately rests on sheer force. If not in the streets, the place for democracy is now at the ballot boxes.