The Movement for a Democracy of Content was arevolutionary political organisation active in the US from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. With groups in theUK, theUnited States,West Germany andSouth Africa, the Movement is best known for publishing the influential political magazineContemporary Issues - A Magazine for a Democracy of Content. Its German sister publicationDinge der Zeit, with much of the same content in German, published its last issue in August 1997 (exactly 50 years after their first issue). It is also known for its involvement in the1957 Alexandra bus boycott inJohannesburg.
The genesis of the Movement lay in the June 1947 publication of a magazine calledDinge der Zeit - Zeitschrift für inhaltliche Demokratie (Contemporary Issues). The first few issues of this magazine were shrouded in mystery, as nearly every contributor chose to write under apseudonym.
The man credited with being the Movement's leading theoretician was Josef Weber, a German former member of a Trotskyist group, the IKD (Internationale Kommunisten Deutschlands). Weber - also known as Ernst Zander, William Lunen and Erik Erikson - remained one of the most frequent contributors toContemporary Issues until his death in 1959. The most prominent members of the Movement in its early years tended to be German émigrés - a mix of former Trotskyists and social democrats such as Max Laufer, Ulrich Jacobs and Fritz Besser. There were also South Africans living in exile such as Pierre Watter, Richard McArthur and Stanley Trevor. The mathematiciansMartin Davis,Jacob T. Schwartz andHarold S. Shapiro were also members. Another famous member is the anarchistMurray Bookchin.[1]
The Movement opposed having a rigidideological programme, and its founders rejected the idea of giving "solemn assurances of promises".[2] The nearest thing it had to a programme of ideals was Weber's contribution toContemporary Issues in 1950, entitled "The Great Utopia".[3] Ideologically, it opposed Western notions ofparliamentary democracy andSoviet communism, seeing both "ideologies" as reinforcing one another. Yet the Movement for a Democracy of Content was not a political party in any conventional sense.
Its followers also rejected the traditionallyleftist notion of "class struggle", instead believing that a "majority revolution" was possible.[4] They hoped to undermine existing power structures by providing answers to a wide range of important, and frequently neglected, topics through the pages ofContemporary Issues.
Essays on topics such as theAboriginal experience inAustralia would often appear alongside articles discussing Diderot; while other writers would discuss everything fromnuclear power andurban development tofood biology. In the Issue 53, December 1988 ofDinge der Zeit,Paul Brass took a look back to 40 years of history of theMovement for a Democracy of Content.
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The Movement's influence on mainstream politics was marginal, and its leaders prone to feuding. However, it dedicated its energies to a number of important struggles in the 1950s. The German group was particularly active in opposingWest German remilitarization. TheNew York City group campaigned hard in support of the1956 Hungarian Uprising, while also causing a stir withMurray Bookchin's articles about synthetic chemicals in food.
TheJohannesburg group, founded byAfrikaans poet and activist Vincent Swart and his wife Lillian, experienced particular success campaigning against theApartheid government on several local issues. The most notable was the organisation and leadership shown byDan Mokonyane during the 1957 Alexandra bus boycott.[5] As part of one of six groups charged with organizing the Alexandra Township People's Transport Committee, Mokonyane successfully helped the people of the township to oppose a price hike by the local bus company.