There are four important aspects to a sound program for revolutionary change in corporate America during the Bicentennial Era and all four must be developed alongside one another. First, we must have a set of principles to draw upon for strength and resolve. These principles must be capable of articulating our highest aspirations as a people and of setting forth a vision of what we hope to accomplish for ourselves and for humanity. Second, we need to better understand the workings of our present-day American system. We've got to realize that the corporate capitalism of today is not the free enterprise that conservatives yearn for, nor is it the pluralistic paradise that liberals rave about and try to patch up, nor is it the finance capitalism of the American Communists who are frozen in their analyses of another day. We must research the American power structure. Huge corporations have come to dominate the economy, reaping fabulous, unheard of profits and avoiding their share of the taxes: their owners and managers, the corporate rich, are more and more coming to dominate all aspects of American life, including the government. An analysis of corporate capitalism can tell us what we can expect, what we can do, and what we should advocate. Third, we need to begin developing blueprints for a post-industrial America. We've got to show people concrete plans for improving their lot either spiritually or materially. There's no use boring them with vague slogans about participation and vague abstractions about dehumanization. We've got to get down to where people live, and we've got to get them thinking in terms of a better America. Fourth, and finally, we need a plan of attack, a program for taking power. Before most people get involved in revolutionary activity they take a mental look down the road. They want to know what they are getting into, what the chances are, and whether there is really anything positive in sight that is worth the gamble. The plan of attack has to come out of our own life experience; that is, out of the American experience, and not out of the experiences of Russia, or China or Cuba, all of which have been different from each other and are also different from the experience of the USA. The world moves, even in America, and as it does new realities arise and old theories become irrelevant. New methods become necessary. If we expect to be listened to, we have to take a fresh look and build our own plan, abandoning all the old sacred texts on what is to be done. A set of principles, an analysis of the system, a set of blueprints, and a program for gaining power. This is the general framework. The Bicentennial Declaration and the following P.B.C. programs have been initiated in the spirit of this fourpronged process for revolutionary change. We see these programs as a starting point for further discussion and action around the building of a revolutionary Bicentennial Movement with its sights set on the implementation of needed changes in American society to coincide with the 200th Anniversary of the founding of our nation in 1976. The American war is over, but this is far from the case with the American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed. -BENJAMIN RUSH (1787) As THE Revolution of 1776 was launched by the ringing language of grievances against the British Crown, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, so today unmet grievances against our governmental, economic, and social institutions compel us to launch a new struggle to recapture control over our lives: the next act in the drama of the American Revolution. Consider that today: The hunger, misery, and despair of thirty million Americans are met with silence. The frustration and bitterness of millions of working people, who see the fruits of their exhaustive labor syphoned off into the coffers of the very rich, are ignored. • Two hundred huge corporations dominate the American economy and the Government, manipulate the tax structure to their advantage, and engineer the very patterns of American life. • Our environment is being destroyed by these corporations and by the mass consumption they induce in the interest of profit and expediency. Subtle, and not so subtle, forms of coercion and intimidation continue to mock our Bill of Rights and bar the way to the people's full expression of their opinions. These acts of suppression and coercion are employed to deny the expression of unorthodox or cre ative thought, thus locking us into a condition of uniformity, obedience, and passivity. The Government's policy of genocide in Southeast Asia and its economic, political, and military exploitation throughout the world goes on in the face of overwhelming opposition by the American people. The terrifying specter of nuclear holocaust hangs over all of us as our leaders play out military fantasies of another age. The questions of racial and sexual exploitation, the neglect of old people, inadequate housing and health care, population congestion, chronic unemployment, urban decay, rural poverty, rising crime rates, anachronistic educational institutions, cumbersome bureaucratic mismanagement, political corruption and incompetence, and a host of other urgent problems that threaten our very survival, go unanswered. Our need as human beings to find meaning and value in our lives and to explore freely our relationship to all that is eternal and of the spirit is cruelly extinguished by the oppressive environment in which we live. These, in briefest outline, are among today's major assaults on the principles of our Declaration of Independence. To be true to its revolutionary origins, the new American Revolution must not be a revolution in rhetoric, but rather a revolution in fact. The new American Revolution must bring about fundamental changes in our social, economic, and political institutions. It must advocate and be prepared to implement solutions to the grievances that now go unredressed by our present American system. The clear need for revolution does not guarantee it will happen. As the political and economic crisis deep Adopted from "The Red, White, and Blue Left" by Jeremy Rifkin, THE PROGRESSIVE, November, 1971. ens in America, the present balance in numbers between those who believe that the root cause of our growing crisis is institutional and those who still believe that it is the fault of "Communists" and other "alien" and "subversive" forces is likely to shift dramatically toward one pole or the other. Such a shift would bring with it either demands for fundamental change or vehement repression to uphold the status quo. The development of popular programs to answer present grievances must go hand in hand with a clear understanding of the role which the American heritage plays in the formation of our political attitudes and behavior. With such an understanding, our history can contribute to building consciousness and promoting programs and demands for change in the spirit of the American revolutionary tradition. The American Heritage The American heritage embodies a set of principles or ideals which provides the great mass of people with a unique social identity. It is a statement of our beliefs -what we stand for and to what we dedicate ourselves as a people. We give our loyalty and allegiance to political and economic institutions which we regard as consistent with our collective beliefs and capable of translating promises into reality. An accurate analysis of the American spirit must take into account the fact that the American legacy is at once both reactionary and revolutionary. Our revolutionary beliefs-popularized through the words and deeds of such great Americans as Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush, Sam Adams, Henry Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Lucy Stone, Sojourner Truth, Eugene V. Debs, W. E. B. DuBois, Mark Twain, and A. J. Muste, and the movements they inspired or led-derive from the principle of the inherent unity and fraternity of all mankind. These aspirations have led to a set of beliefs that forms the revolutionary aspect of the American experiencehuman equality; respect for the judgment of the common man; distrust of those who command positions of power and privilege; allegiance to freedom of expression and the right to self-determination; cooperative enterprise; government of the people, by the people, for the people; conscience above property and institutions; sympathetic interest in the new, the untried, the unexplored; equality of opportunity, confidence in the ability of the people to create a more just and humane world; faith in the brotherhood of all mankind. Our reactionary beliefs-popularized through the words and deeds of such Americans as Alexander Hamilton, Jay Gould, John D. Rockefeller, and H. L. Hunt, come from the principle that hostility and war, the survival of the fittest and to hell with the rest-the public be damned-constitute the natural condition of man This principle is the basis of a set of beliefs that forms the reactionary aspect of the American experience the sacred value of private property; the ruthlessly competitive spirit as the motivating force for self-fulfillment; the authoritarian family; material accumulation as a measure of man's achievement on earth. The crisis of American beliefs lies in the increasing polarization of both the revolutionary and reactionary elements in the American legacy. The escalating political and economic crisis does not alter the basic positive truths of the American heritage. On the contrary, it would be impossible to point out the contradictions in the American system-to expose the exploitation and dehumanization at all levels of American life without in some way appealing to the revolutionary beliefs and ideals with which so many Americans identify. The growing crisis has brought into question the more reactionary aspects of the American tradition. Those beliefs which reinforce our economic system and which have, for so long, provided a rationalization for the individual's role within that system are under unprecedented attack. The bureaucracy and technology of our corporate economy have increasingly forced the average worker into the role of a small and insignificant cog in a vast, dehumanized production cycle. In the past, this process was tolerated and even accepted with varying degrees of enthusiasm for several reasons, all embedded within the American ideology. Implicit in the process was acceptance of the contradictory myth that one's economic and social role within the corporate system was essential to the common good, to the ultimate realization of the more revolutionary collective aspects of the American ideology, which means, as George Orwell might have put it, that a man can be free only if he is a slave. This contradictory myth is now being challenged on several levels. For example: Material Accumulation For many years, emphasis on material accumulation and economic security seemed to balance the negative effects and meaninglessness of one's own role in the economy. Yet within the last decade the rise in the numbers of middle-class families has-for many-been accompanied by a reduction in the psychic value of material accumulation as an end in itself. The decline in the psychic value of material possession has served to reinforce the feeling that one's automated position in the production process was largely insignificant and meaningless. The Family Though his economic position offered little in the way of recognition or status, the average working adult could, in the past, still take refuge in his position of unquestioned importance within the family. This is no longer the case, for a great many middleclass children and young adults have begun to reject the structure and authority of the family unit, as well as the role and values of their parents in the economic process. A significant portion of the youth community has come to attack and ridicule the entire set of assumptions upon which the average American adult has rationalized and justified his own existence within the family and society-including the concept of material accumulation, the notion of postponed gratification, the work ethic, competition, filial gratitude for parental sacrifice, and pre-marital chastity. The Work Ethic Political and economic events of the past decade have forced the middle class into a painful re-examination of the work ethic-the concept that work is ennobling in itself, no matter what it produces and what toll it takes from the worker. By exposing the tragic state of affairs within America in recent years, the forces of change have seriously damaged the myth that all corporate production is socially valuable, and, with it the individual's own justification for his economic contribution to society. Man and Technology Science and technology have been viewed, for the most part, as the means for man's salvation from the oppression of the physical world. The validity of technological "progress" as our "most important product" is now being challenged. Loss of faith in technology as a practical means for attaining total fulfillment, fear of its increasing control over human life, and its dehumanizing effects on the human species and the natural environment-these have led to a resurgence of religious fanaticism, drug culture, and back-to-theearth movements, especially among the sons and daughters of the middle and upper middle classesthe chief beneficiaries of the technological society. National Omnipotence For Americans more than for most peoples, the nation state has always stood for greatness untarnished by the humiliation of military defeat or surrender. Never having suffered defeat at the hands of another nation, Americans have come to accept "greatness" as a way of life. It follows that defeat is unthinkable and un-American. We never lose, we have assured ourselves, because we are never wrong. Other nations might seek conquest and empire and, therefore, deserve humiliation and defeat. The United States seeks only freedom and democracy for all nations and, therefore, must always triumph. In the past, Americans have found personal significance and self-confidence in identifying with the greatness of the nation. Today, after seven years of bearing witness to America's genocidal policy in Southeast Asia, of knowing (but not accepting for some time) that our cause was without honor, and, finally, of realizing that the United States might be defeated by a small country fighting for its independence, most Americans feel bewildered and confused. Consequently, they are beginning to question the very values and institutions which for so long were regarded as invincible and sacred. For many Americans, this constitutes a grave crisis of confidence. The State, as the ultimate extension of their own being, has been stricken with impotence in the international arena at the very moment when its domestic institutions are proving themselves incapable of coping with the demands for change at home. The traumatic change in American attitude from one of hope and progress to one of pessimism and despair is analyzed in two recent polls conducted by the Gallup and Roper organizations. Typical of many surveys of public opinion was this finding of the Gallup Poll: "Forty-seven per cent of the American people believe that unrest is likely to lead to a real breakdown in this country. Traditional optimism about the nation's steady progress has faltered. The average American feels that the United States has slid back over the past few years." The average American feels stripped of his identity: He feels increasingly isolated and powerless in a world that seems to have lost all meaning and purpose. The New Left The New Left movement of the 1960s was born out of this "crisis in meaning." In its celebrated Port Huron Statement of 1962, Students for a Democratic Society put it this way: "A New Left 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 |