Īlthough written more than 4,000 miles apart, these texts came out of a certain global context. Footnote 2 The original draft was confiscated but a redraft was circulated in secret from hand to hand and internationally. Modzelewski and Kuroń were arrested, put on trial in July 1965 and sentenced to three years in prison. They called for freedom of speech, meeting, research and artistic creation, a plurality of political parties, trade unions that were independent of the state and had the right to strike, and workers’ councils to be set up in factories. The letter accused their communist rulers of having forgotten their anti-fascist and Marxist ideals and of erecting a “central political bureaucracy” that regarded youth, the working class and peasants as their enemy. Two years later, in November 1964, two Polish students, Karol Modzelewski and Jacek Kuroń, drafted an open letter to the Polish Workers’ Party, the ruling party of communist Poland. Their demands for a “participatory democracy” that involved ordinary citizens in decision-making at the grassroots became the founding manifesto of the New Left. While they had been raised on the American dream of “freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people,” they were now confronted by what they called “the Southern struggle against racial bigotry” and “the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb,” the “military-industrial complex” and the “Warfare State.” The current political system, they held, was “an organized political stalemate” based on the “paranoia” of anti-communism, which shut down social and political criticism, even in the universities. In June 1962 a meeting of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Port Huron, Michigan, of whom Tom Hayden was the leading light, published a statement expressing anxiety about the current situation in the United States.
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