For the APSA panel commemorating Peter Bachrach, I was asked to speak to the “notions of inequality and inequity” in his work. For a while the topic stumped me. Then I realized why. Talking about inequality in Peter Bachrach's work, I decided, is much like talking about just distribution in Marx. It misses the point.

In his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx (Reference Marx1875) argued against the Socialists, in essence, that the real issue was control of the means of production, not equal rights in distribution. So too I believe that Peter argued throughout his life that the real issue was control of the decisions that affect your life, not equality in the outputs of those decisions.

Peter never neglected the issue of equality in output. He and Morton Baratz wrote in their conclusion to Power and Poverty that they were concerned not only with who exercises power, but also with “equality in the distribution of values,” particularly in the “inequality in the distribution of benefits and privileges [that] tends to persist over time” (Reference Bachrach and Baratz1970, 105).

Yet in the entire corpus of Peter's work it is striking how rarely issues of distribution appear. For Peter, as with Marx in a different sphere, the issue was control.

Why control? One reason for control is that control allows you to get more of what you want, in the way of output. But just as for Marx control over the means of production changed the person in the process, so too for Peter control over decisions affecting one's life changed the person. I will briefly develop this deep theme in Peter's work.

First, let me situate Peter in his time. As we know, in the nineteenth century John Stuart Mill articulated an argument for political participation, building on what Tocqueville had seen in New England towns, that participation developed in citizens a “largeness” to their “conceptions and sentiments” and an interest in decisions that affected the whole (Reference Mill1861, chapter 3). But that insight had fallen onto hard times. Then, in the U.S., the greatest adolescent bulge in the population pyramid that the country had ever had before or would ever have again coincided with three other factors: an economy that allowed students to think there would always be jobs, a revitalization of political protest with the civil rights movement, and an opening of political opportunity with the election of a Democratic president and Congress. At the same time, chafing at societal demands for conformity, students were open to critiques of mass society. The students at the University of Michigan who started SDS were inspired by a young professor, Arnold Kaufman, whose Reference Kaufman and Friedrich1960 article, “Human Nature and Participatory Democracy,” coined the term “participatory democracy” and argued that the main reason for political participation was its contribution to human development—the development of our powers for “thought, feeling and action.”

In 1962, the Port Huron Statement of SDS affirmed that the students regarded human beings as “possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.” Human beings are incompetent only because they have been “manipulated into incompetence.” “We see little reason,” they stated, “why men cannot meet with increasing skill the complexities and responsibilities of their situation, if society is organized not for minority, but for majority, participation in decision-making.” Human beings “have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.” Political participation could develop these potentials.

A year later, after writing “The Two Faces of Power” (Reference Bachrach and Baratz1962), Peter and Morton Baratz used their second APSR article on non-decisions to raise the issue of the non-participatory and unrealized “mass,” writing that the mass often conformed to “the dominant behavior in a community … with little or no recognition of the problem nor awareness of complying” (Reference Bachrach and Baratz1963, 640).

Three years later, Jack Walker argued in his article on elitist theory that “classical” democratic theorists “were concerned [above all else] with human development, the opportunities which existed in political activity to realize the untapped potentials of men and to create the foundations of a genuine human community” (Reference Walker1966, 288). Peter too developed this theme in The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique. He drew on the Aristotle, Mill, and contemporary writers Graeme Duncan and Steven Lukes to point out that “classical democratic theory … is based on the premise that [citizen participation in all aspects of public affairs] is an essential means to the full development of individual capacities” (Reference Bachrach1967, 4).

This idea, I believe, took a deeper turn for Peter when he did the work in Baltimore that would eventuate in his book with Morton Baratz, Power and Poverty. The two wrote in that book:

African Americans in Baltimore in this era had little access to newspapers, radio, and TV; to the political parties; to established private interest groups; or to decision making in the voluntary agencies that dotted the city. Peter and Morton concluded that “blacks' isolation from the political system was made more complete and their political apathy fortified through what may be called a sustaining nondecision” that the elite classes often made unconsciously to preserve their positions (70).

A prime example came when CORE decided to mount a campaign in Baltimore to change the power structure. As soon as he heard of this plan, the liberal mayor leaped into action and established a series of task forces to determine—in Peter's and Morton's words—“what … can be done for the poor, within the established socio-political order” (72). The mayor's act of “successful preemptive co-optation,” pursued with well-meaning intent, meant that even “before CORE's organizers stepped off the train in Baltimore, their planned campaign was aborted” (71). A later campaign met much the same fate.

In part, Peter and Morton wrote, the problem was that “a great many, probably a clear majority, of Baltimore's Negroes wanted to avoid conflict.” They “clung to the belief that American society was moving toward racial integration” and “were distrustful, if not fearful, of those who preached ‘black power’ or any of its variants.” Others “were resigned to their oppressed and depressed lot in life. Each new injury to their economic, social or political well-being was seen as further confirmation that their exclusion from the political process was complete and everlasting. To describe these individuals as apathetic is to understate ….they were ‘turned off ’” (Reference Bachrach and Baratz1970, 78–79).

Within a few years much of this was changed by the 1968 riots in the inner city after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Even before that time, Peter and Morton had detected “a change in tone from that sounded a year earlier.” The black militants' voices “had become more strident, more self-assertive,” and there was a “new mood of exasperation and impatience” due in part to the previous “‘educational’ work of community organizers” but also mainly from the lessons that African Americans in Baltimore were learning from other cities—that “reasonableness coupled with patience would achieve little or nothing” (Reference Bachrach and Baratz1970, 86–87).

In this book Peter first articulated, as far as I know, his distinction between the politics of confrontation (deliberate disruptions of routine operations) and the politics of conflict (sustained engagement in political struggle in key centers of decision making) (Reference Bachrach and Baratz1970, 79–80). He later argued that the gains of confrontation were “often illusory” (Reference Bachrach1971, 5).

It may have been these empirical experiences that gave depth to an article that meant a great deal to me—an article entitled “Interest, Participation, and Democratic Theory” in the 1975 NOMOS volume on participation. In that article, a year after Lukes's Power: A Radical View (Reference Lukes1974), Peter took the deep understanding he had of the many ways that elites kept people from even recognizing that they had conflicts of interest with the powerful, and joined this with his existing commitment to the developmental functions of participation. The result was—to me at any rate—a real breakthrough in participatory developmental theory. Whereas earlier writers had stressed, like Mill, how participation could give participants a “largeness” of view and a commitment to the common good, Peter showed how participation could strip away commitments to a false common good and expose underlying conflict. Political struggle could help subordinate groups distinguish between, in his words, their “real and apparent interest.” In Peter's words, participation in “making decisions that significantly affect him and his community” is “an essential means for the individual to discover his real needs” (Reference Bachrach, Pennock and Chapman1975, 40).

This point had great meaning for me because my own participation in the women's movement beginning in 1969 had made me aware that situations I had previously interpreted as ones of common interest were in fact obfuscations of underlying conflict.

So, Peter continued, what is the kind of participation that can strip away false commonality and reveal conflict? Such participation is ideally a process “that is more or less continuous, conducted on a face-to-face basis[,] in which participants have roughly an equal say in all stages, from formulation of issues to the determination of policies.” The standard combination of political confrontation, pressure group bargaining, and the electoral process “do not, singly or together, constitute [that kind of] democratic participation” (Reference Bachrach, Pennock and Chapman1975, 41).

For this reason, Peter advocated worker control in the workplace. He wrote:

It was Peter's commitment to this “more or less continuous” process of open-ended and revelatory participation that led to his confrontation with Benjamin Barber over the question of instituting national referenda in the U.S. In 1977, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on the Constitution held hearings on the issue of referenda not just in the states but in the nation as a whole. Peter said in his testimony that he was in “the uncomfortable position” of “being the sole person here who is opposed to this resolution.” But he had several reasons for his opposition.

First, such referenda would be class biased. Groups that had money, organization, and power would be able to mount the most successful campaigns.

Most importantly, however, the referenda would tap into the opinions of Americans who were “apathetic, alienated, and cynical toward the political system” because “they have not had the opportunity to be politically educated” by experiencing “political combat within the context of the American rules of the game” (Reference Bachrach1977, 59). Instead of referenda, Peter argued, the American public need “new participatory structures to afford the people political experience.” Without such experience, he said, “the kind of issues which the elites will present will be more or less hate issues,” such as “busing, pornography, Government supported abortion and the like” (60). And he guessed that the populace would vote against “important issues such as unemployment and city decay.” He gave the example of a referendum in Maine on a proposal to equalize school funds among the rich and poor districts of the state. In the referendum the voters voted two to one against the proposal. Even voters from the poorer districts voted against it. “We have case after case,” he concluded, “where voters who stood to gain from a vote on a bond voted against it because of their feeling of powerlessness and their feeling of being ripped off by the government … They are that much turned off ” (61).

When the senators asked him to explain what kind of participation he thought would be educative, Peter answered, “If we were more imaginative and thought about that issue of how to bring one-third of the population back into the political system, one way of doing that would be to expand the political arena to include large corporations so that the individual within the workplace could make a decision on something which he knows something about and is very much concerned with” (Reference Bachrach1977, 63–64). Senator Hatch interjected, “I don't understand that.” Senator Abbourezk echoed, “I don't understand what you mean” (Reference Bachrach1977, 64). Peter explained that “the giant nature of the corporation today in America is really a political entity” and ought to be run democratically. He added, “We could also experiment with neighborhood governments.” Now Senator Hatch understood. He responded, “I disagree violently with that point” (64).

Benjamin Barber, who supported the referendum, was disappointed with Peter's stance. He wrote, “[I]t is particularly disheartening to see critics of elitism who spring from the popular Left join the outcry against such populist institutions as the referendum in America.” Robert Michels, he continued, had predicted this kind of thing when he wrote that “socialists for the most part reject … practical applications of democracy” (Reference Barber1998, 133, note 30; see also Barber Reference Barber1984, 154, note 16).

Peter had not succeeded in getting across what he called his “basic point” that the referendum effort was wrongly focused. “It should be focused,” he told the senators, “on what Congress can do to bring the nonvoter, the alienated, into the political system in a sustained, educative and meaningful way” (Reference Bachrach1977, 60). Or, as he had said two years before in the article that meant so much to me, the cycle of political apathy and ignorance can be broken “only if the polity as a whole develops democratic structures that facilitate political reflection and action by people from all groups in society.” In this process, he wrote, “man becomes aware of his political interests only as he becomes a communicative being” (Reference Bachrach, Pennock and Chapman1975, 43).

That is the thought that reminds me so positively of the early Marx and the Marx who criticized the Gotha Program. Just as Marx thought that it was by actually exercising control over the means of production on a continuous basis that humans could develop into their potential as species beings, so Peter thought it was by actually exercising control over political decisions on a continuous basis that human beings could become aware of their political interests and develop into communicative beings. More equitable distribution would follow.