Society of the Spectacle
A New Left Situationist Classic
by Guy Debord
Black & Red
Paperback
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By Randy Shannon, CCDS
choice "Everyone has the right to work, to free of employment, to
just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against
unemployment."
- United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948
I. Introduction
The "Great Recession" that began in 2007 has caused the greatest
percent of job losses since the Great Depression of 1929. This crisis is
the end of an era of unrestrained 'neo-liberal' capitalism that became
public policy during the Reagan administration. The crisis marks a new
level of instability with the growth of a global financial elite that
targeted US workers and our trade unions after World War II. |
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Order Our Full Employment Booklets
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Capitalism may well collapse under its own excesses, but what would one
propose to replace it? Margaret Thatcher's mantra was TINA...There Is No
Alternative. David Schweickart's vision of "Economic Democracy"
proposes a serious alternative. Even more fundamentally, it opens the
door to thinking about alternatives. His may or may not turn out to be
the definitive "successor system," but he is a leader in breaking out of
the box. |
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Quick Links...
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Solidarity Economy:
What It's All About
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What If John
Brown Had Won?
Fire on the Mountain (Spectacular Fiction)
by Terry Bisson
PM Press
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
April 4 Rallies Were
a Boot Camp to
Prepare for Battle!
We're the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism...Do you have friends who should see this? Pass it on...Do you have a blog of your own? Others you love to read every day? Well, this is a place where you can share access to them with the rest of your comrades. Just pick your greatest hits for the week and send them to us at carld717@gmail.com! Most of all, it's urgent that you start the New Year right. We're doing more than ever, and have big plans. So pay your dues, make a donation and become a sustainer. Do it Now! Check the link at the bottom... |
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April 4 'We Are One' Events: Uniting Labor
and Community For an Upsurge in Class War
 | | Steelworker contingent steps off in Pittsburgh |
By Carl Davidson
Beaver County Blue
Working-class solidarity actions involving thousands of workers were among the lead news items in the headlines in nearly 1200 cities and town around the country over the April 4 weekend. The Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Eastern Ohio 'rust belt' region was no exception.
The occasion commemorated the anniversary of the April 4, 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during his effort to help striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee win union recognition. The entire U.S. labor movement seized the time to organize public protest against the outrageous rightwing attacks on worker rights in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio. The AFL-CIO knows full well that more attacks are coming, and its 'We Are One' campaign for the day was a grassroots dress rehearsal and consciousness-raising effort to prepare both its troops and its community-based allies for more battles to come.
"We are one! We are one!' and 'What's Disgusting? Union busting!' were among the chants echoing off the concrete and glass walls of downtown Pittsburgh. Somewhere between 500 and 1000 marchers waved V-signs at passersby in cars and buses-but more often than in a long time, one saw a sea of the more militant clenched fist salutes as well. As usual, different contingents of workers wore their color coded T-Shirts for the day-camouflage for the UMWA, dark blue for the Steelworkers, red for Unite Here! hotel workers, and purple for SEIU service workers....
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The Passing of Manning Marable: Democracy Now Interviewss
Bill Fletcher and Michael Eric Dyson on 'Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention': Marable's New Biography of the Civil Rights Leader
JUAN GONZALEZ: On Friday, renowned African American historian Manning Marable passed away at the age of 60, days before the publication of his monumental biography of Malcolm X. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is published today by Viking. Two decades in the making, the nearly 600-page biography is described as a reevaluation of Malcolm's life, providing new insights into the circumstances of his assassination, as well as raising questions about the Malcolm X's original autobiography.
To discuss the legacy of Manning Marable, we're joined in Washington, D.C., by Michael Eric Dyson, university professor of sociology at Georgetown University. He was named by Ebony as one of the hundred most influential black Americans. He has written 16 books, most recently, Can You Hear Me Now?: The Inspiration, Wisdom, and Insight of Michael Eric Dyson. He's also the author of Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X.
We're also joined on the phone by Bill Fletcher, Jr., longtime labor, racial and justice and international activist. He's an editorial board member and columnist for blackcommentator.com, and he's a founder of the Black Radical Congress.
Welcome to you both. I'd like to start with Michael Eric Dyson. First, your reaction on hearing of the death of this giant of scholarship and activism in America, and also a colleague of yours?.... |
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Attacking Planned Parenthood with
Rightwing 'Crisis Pregnancy Centers'
By Akiba Solomon Colorlines.com
March 28, 2011 - These days, keeping up with anti-choice laws, racist billboards, genocide claims, and attacks on Planned Parenthood feels like a 24-hour job. I suspect that's the point of the GOP's and Christian right's recent blitzkrieg-to make women's bodies, lives, and personal reproductive health decisions a time-sucking political football in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election. Issues for folks already on the Earth like, say, mass unemployment? Not so much.
Anyway, for my colored girls who have considered tweeting, facebooking, tumblring, blogging, marching or cussing somebody out when the silence ain't enuff, keep the following anti-choice biggies on your radar. Trust, you're on theirs.
1. South Dakota's New Law
Last Tuesday, South Dakota passed the toughest anti-abortion law in the land. It will increase the required waiting period from 24 to 72 hours and require those women who have already decided to terminate their pregnancies to visit an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center (CPC) first.
Now, CPCs, which are also known as pregnancy help centers, have one purpose: To talk girls and women out of having abortions. For instance, overtly Christian Alpha Center of Sioux Falls, which is led by abortion foe Leslie Unruh, claims to offer "a comprehensive range of services to women and men involved in unplanned pregnancies."
But unlike actual health care providers, Alpha doesn't provide prenatal care or HIV testing and treatment (although they will charge clients $23-cash only-to find out if they have chlamydia or gonorrhea). They can't even guarantee an ultrasound; "volunteer client advocates" determine who gets one. Alpha clients do have full access to ideologically-based talking points such as "second virginity" and hopelessly distorted health information including "abortion side effects."
South Dakota is overwhelmingly white. (I'm looking into how this law might affect its Indigenous population.) I'm willing to bet every unfertilized egg in my body that copycat laws will be introduced or resurrected in more diverse states soon.... |
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Must Watch Video: Alice Walker reads Sojourner Truth
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Tea Party Nation Warns of
'White Anglo-Saxon Extinction'
 By Devin Burghart
IRHRE
As if Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips' embrace of the "birther" position and his support for restricting voting rights of non-property owners weren't enough, now his national Tea Party faction appears to be moving closer towards the embrace of full-fledged white nationalism.
On March 29, Tea Party Nation sent out an email to TPN members entitled "Destroy the Family, You Destroy the Country!" The email featured an article by Rich Swier, a Tea Party Nation member and a contributing editor to the anti-Muslim group Family Security Matters. Swier mourned the falling birthrate of native-born Americans, and warned that "American culture" will soon perish since the "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population is headed for extinction."
Swier weaves homophobia and nativism into a white nationalist rant that would make David Duke blush:
"What is keeping America's fertility rate up are immigrants - both legal and illegal. There are those in America who are continuously attacking the family, bent on redefining marriage and have established anti-family government programs. This has led to downward pressure on our national total fertility rate. All of these actions are done in the name of various causes such as: reducing unwanted pregnancies, delaying child bearing to further career goals and even promoting childlessness and promoting adoption as a better option.
Child bearing has become something distasteful to many women, an unwanted and painful experience to be avoided rather than embraced.
All of these programs, ideals and ideologies are doing one thing and one thing only - reducing America core TFR [Total Fertility Rate] to the point of no return. The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population in America is headed for extinction and with it our economy, well-being and survival as a uniquely America culture.
This county is dying not because it is aging, it is dying because of infertility as public policy."
The notion of white dispossession has been a staple of white supremacist organizing since the early 1970s. The theme was echoed in Pat Buchanan's 2002 book, The Death of the West, and now some Tea Partiers are intent upon carrying this bigoted politic into the future.
Devin Burghart is vice president of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights. He recently co-authored the IREHR special report, Tea Party Nationalism: A Critical Examination of the Size, Scope, and Focus of the Tea Party Movement and Its National Factions.
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History and Theory: How Stalin Distorted Marxism
 By Phil Amadon
Political Affairs April 4 2011
On May Day 1932, the Communist Party USA released "Toward Soviet America," penned by William Z. Foster who was at that time the Communist candidate for president of the U.S.
Photo: Stalin and Bukharin This book presented the program and policies of the CPUSA and was in line with the political perspective of the world communist movement under the leadership of Stalin, who had unseated Bukharin from the leadership of the Communist International not long before this period. Foster's book contained the policy and perspective that the late Gus Hall, former chair of the Communist Party USA, would later refer to as "the greatest mistake we ever made."
In "Toward Soviet America," Foster asserts, "The policy of the Social Democracy is basically that of Fascism.... The principal difference is that Social Democracy hides its Fascism.... Thus, in the period of the decline of capitalism, Social Reformism becomes Social Fascism." Foster goes on, "Developing Fascism in the United States has a main foundation in the leadership of the American Federation of Labor." Later, Foster quotes Stalin, "Fascism is a militant organization of the bourgeoisie resting upon the active support of Social Democracy" (177-178, 191).
This equation of social democracy with fascism helped bring about the horrible defeat of the working class in Germany and only after this defeat was Bukharin's policy of the peoples front against fascism adopted and presented by Dimitrov in the form we recognize today as the center-left alliance against the ultra right. (This I Cannot Forget, Larina pp. 11-37)... |
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High Design for Clean Energy : Experimental Direct Solar Steam Generation Power Plant Opens in Spain
By Ben Coxworth
Gizmag.com
April 4, 2011 - An experimental new direct solar steam generation power plant generates electricity by using the Sun's rays to heat water and create steam
When most of us think of sunlight being used to generate power, we likely picture photovoltaic cells. Concentrated solar power plants however, use lenses or mirrors to heat fluid - such as synthetic oil - which in turn is used to generate high-pressure steam to drive a conventional turbine. A new experimental solar steam generation power plant that opened last week in southern Spain is aiming to improve on the efficiency of existing systems by using water as the direct working fluid and incorporating novel methods for storing the energy, so it can be dispensed even on cloudy days or at night.
The pilot plant is located in the municipality of Carboneras, and is the result of a collaboration between the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, or DLR) and Spanish utility company Endesa. It was officially put into use on March 31st.
The water in the receiver tubes is kept at a pressure of up to 120 bar (1740 psi), which results in the creation of superheated 500C (932F) steam. That higher temperature allows the whole process to work more efficiently, bringing down the cost of solar thermal power generation and making it a more viable option.... |
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Book Review: 'Beyond the Fields'
 Beyond the Fields
By Randy Shaw Reviewed By Steve Early
Spring 2011
No modern American union has a larger alumni association or a bigger shelf of books about itself than the United Farm Workers (UFW).
Even at its membership peak thirty years ago, this relatively small labor organization never represented more than 100,000 workers. Yet, in the 1960s and '70s, the UFW commanded the loyalty of many hundreds of thousands of strike and boycott supporters throughout the U.S. and Canada.
While the union is now a shell of its former self, the UFW diaspora - from young organizers who flocked to its banner to key farm worker activists shaped by its struggles - remain an influential generational cohort in many other fields: public interest law, liberal academia, California politics, labor and community organizing, social change philanthropy and the ministry. Like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) several decades later, with its "Justice for Janitors" campaigns, the UFW generated widespread public sympathy and support because it championed low-paid, much-exploited workers - people of color courageously struggling for dignity and respect on the job. Its original multi-racial campaigns were inspiring and their legacy is lasting.
Most other late 20th century labor organizations had an inadequate social justice orientation and a far more insular approach; at best, they tried to improve workplace conditions for their own members, in a single occupation or industrial sector, and helped secure protective labor legislation for everyone else. Their appeals for solidarity from non-labor groups tended to be few in number and transactional in nature. Few unions, except during the 1930s, ever became such an important training ground for future organizers of all kinds or built as many lasting ties with far-flung community allies. As San Francisco lawyer, journalist, and housing activist Randy Shaw documents in Beyond The Fields [3], there is a strong historical link between the UFW in its heyday and myriad forms of progressive activism today. UFW alumni, ideas, and strategies have influenced Latino political empowerment, the immigrant rights movement, union membership growth, and on-going coalitions between labor, community, campus, and religious groups. During the 2008 presidential race, the union's old rallying cry--"Yes, we can!"-- even became the campaign theme of a former community organizer from Chicago who now resides in the White House. The same determined chant can still be heard, in its original Spanish, at marches, rallies, and union events involving Latino workers throughout the country.... |
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Become a CCDS member today!
 The
time is long past for 'Lone Rangers'. Being a socialist by your self is
no fun and doesn't help much. Join CCDS today--$36 regular, $48
household and $18 youth.
Better yet, beome a sustainer at $20 per month,
and we'll send you a copy of Jack O'Dell's new book, 'Climbing Jacobs
Ladder,' drawing on the lessons of the movement in the South in the
1950s and 1960s.
Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS |
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