Blog of the Week:
ShiftChange 
Website for a New Film-in-the-Works on U.S. Worker Coops, Mondragon, and Workplace Democracy |
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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:
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Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Belonging
Edited by Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber
$45, Syracuse University Press
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Tropic of Chaos
By Christian Parenti 
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Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
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Carl Davidson's Latest Book:
New Paths to Socialism
Essays on Mondragon, Marx, Gramsci and the Green and Solidarity Economies |
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 Whither Libya?
...and Other 'Long
Wars' Facing Us
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 oppose austerity, make solidarity and end the wars! 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... |
Qaddafi's Whereabouts Unknown -- But Is It
Too Soon to Declare Victory in Libya?
By Phyllis Bennis Alternet.org Aug 26, 2011 - Muammar Qaddafi's whereabouts are still unknown, and the defeat of his regime may be near at hand. But the consequences of that defeat remain uncertain. The origins of the Libyan transition emerged very much in the context of the Arab Spring - a popular uprising against a brutal dictatorship. But unlike others in the neighborhood - Egypt and Tunisia especially, but also Bahrain, even Syria - Libyans quickly took up arms on a large scale to challenge the regime's assault. That initial decision soon led to calls for a Western no-fly zone, and quickly to the welcoming of direct US/NATO/Qatari military intervention based on the UN resolution's "all necessary measures" language. Despite the resolution's focus on protecting civilians, it was U.S., European and NATO officials who made the actual decisions about the use of force - and quickly the NATO planes soon began what one al Jazeera reporter described as "openly functioning as the air force of the opposition army." Particularly in these last few days of fast-moving gains by the opposition, air power played a disproportionately important role. That means that the ability of opposition forces to move into Tripoli, take control of at least parts of the capital so quickly, and potentially accede to power, was dependent on NATO. The circumstances are different from other recent overthrows of Arab tyrants. The people visible overnight, celebrating in Tripoli\'s Green Square (renamed Martyrs Square by the opposition) were overwhelmingly armed rebels, largely coming into Tripoli from the mountains to the south. Unlike the celebrations in Tahrir Square in Egypt and other similar venues, there were virtually no women except for reporters. Many local residents had already fled the city, most others remained indoors, as violence continued to flare across Tripoli. Few were visible to greet the rebel forces as they entered the city. This may have been the continuing uncertainty of conditions in the city, but it also may reflect ambivalence or perhaps even stronger unease about the opposition forces among Tripoli\'s population, which accounts for about a third of Libya\'s people. In Benghazi, the rebel capital in eastern Libya, Sunday's celebrations went on all night. By mid-day Monday the head of Libya's Transitional National Council, the rebel leadership already recognized by the U.S. and numerous other countries as the rightful government of Libya, spoke at a press conference, congratulating the people of Tripoli and in effect claiming the expanding control by anti-Qaddafi forces as the achievement of the TNC. But the legitimacy of the TNC remains contested. It is a widely diverse, self-selected group already facing significant and sometimes lethal division within its ranks. It remains unclear how much popular support there was for the TNC's decision to ask for foreign military intervention... |
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Libya Rebels Have Won the War But
Biggest Battle Will Be Uniting Factions
 Building the foundations of a freer society is an urgent necessity that will make or break Libya's emerging new order
By Martin Chulov
Guardian, UK
Aug 22 2011 - Life after Colonel Gaddafi had been a distant utopia for Libya's rebels since they sacked Benghazi in February. Six months on, it may have come too soon.
The National Transitional Council (NTC) that has come to represent Libya's opposition has been slow to win the support of many who fight under its banner. As the civil war that enveloped the country descended into stagnation and setback, three distinct rebel factions developed - all with disparate identities and different tribal roots.
There were the originals in the east, drawn largely from a rebellious middle class; a second group in the centre, who fought the war's most intense battles; and the mountain men from the west who saw getting to the capital first as their higher calling.
In the end, the western rebels did just that, breaking through Gaddafi's weakened lines late last week and moving forward to storm fortress Tripoli. With their triumphant arrival in Green Square comes a sense of entitlement.
But for them and for the stragglers elsewhere, there will be little time for euphoria. Now comes the hard part.
The real race will be to build a state from the ruins of four decades of totalitarian control, where institutions remain feeble and immature. Building the foundations of a freer society is a necessity that will make or break Libya's emerging new order.
The lessons of what becomes of a Middle East state that suddenly loses its strongman are recent and raw. More than eight years after Baghdad fell with the same ignominious haste as Tripoli, it remains a basket case of competing agendas, a disengaged political class and citizens left with the reality that the state neither has the capacity or the will to look after them....
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Meanwhile on the Home Front, Between
Haves, Have-nots, an Ever Greater Gulf
Massachusetts poorest make less income than in 1979, new study finds, while upper incomes climb 
Photo: Mindy Shoestock saved fries from her McDonald's job in North Adams for her sons, Jazz Dean (left) and Unique Dudley. Mindy Shoestock saved fries from her McDonald's job in North Adams for her sons, Jazz Dean (left) and Unique Dudley. (Bill Greene/Globe Staff)
By Megan Woolhouse
Boston Globe Staff
Aug 21, 2011, NORTH ADAMS - Economic inequality has grown across Massachusetts, but no one has to tell Mindy Shoestock that.
Laid off several years ago from a $12-an-hour job as a housekeeping supervisor at a ski lodge, she took a job at a local McDonald's, where she earns just $9 a hour. Cable TV and a phone are luxuries she simply cannot afford; some months she runs out of money to buy food for her two children.
"I feel like I'm going backwards,'' Shoestock said, hot and tired after a recent shift. "Sometimes I feel like I work just to work.''
Shoestock, 29, is part of a forgotten economy. While family incomes across Massachusetts have generally risen over the past three decades, the state's poorest residents have fallen behind. And nowhere have they fallen farther than here in Western Massachusetts, where families in the bottom fifth of the income scale have seen inflation-adjusted earnings drop below 1979 levels, according to a new study by University of Massachusetts economists.
The study paints a stark picture of two commonwealths, in which the gap between rich and poor, east and west is growing. For example, the inflation-adjusted median income of affluent families in Greater Boston has grown 54 percent since 1979, to $230,000 from $150,000 a year, largely due to high-paying technology jobs.
In Berkshire County and the Pioneer Valley, where decades of plant closings have left hollowed-out economies, the inflation-adjusted median income of the poorest families fell 24 percent, from $21,000 a year in 1979 to $16,000 - on par with some of the most impoverished parts of Appalachia.
"No real income growth over three decades is what we're seeing - no improvement in the standard of living,'' said Michael D. Goodman, one of the study's authors. "It's a lost generation of families.''
Those families live in places like North Adams, in the shadow of Mount Greylock along the state's westernmost edge. North Adams's population has declined every decade since 1950 as mills and other manufacturers disappeared. Rising poverty and the recent recession took another toll when bedrock employers, such as the local hospital and city government, laid off workers....
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Verizon Strike in Pittsburgh: 'Class War'
 | | 4-Minute Video: On the Verizon Picket Lines in Pittsburgh |
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Chilean Student Movement Leads to Wider
Uprising For Transformation of the Country
By Roger Burbach
New America Media
August 13, 2011 - Chile is becoming a part of the global movement of youth that is transforming the world bit by bit-the Arab Spring, the sit-ins and demonstrations in the Spanish plazas, and the rebellion of youth in London.
Weeks of demonstrations and strikes by Chilean students came to a head August 9, as an estimated 100,000 people poured into the streets of Santiago. Joined by professors and educators, they were demanding a free education for all, from the primary school level to the university.
In the riotous confrontations that took place between bands of youth and the police, tear gas canisters were fired into the crowds, and 273 people were arrested. Later on, in the cool winter evening, the deafening noise of people banging on their pots and pans in support of the students could be heard throughout Santiago, the country's capital city of six million.
Under the 17-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, much of Chile's educational system was privatized, and even after he left power in 1990, private education continued to prevail. Today, 70 percent of university students attend private institutions. Private education is sustained by the constitution drawn up during the Pinochet regime, and educational entrepreneurs capitalized on it.
Camila Vallejo, the elected president of the Student Federation of the University of Chile and one of the main leaders of the national protests, proclaims: "We need quality education for everyone. It is a right. Chilean society cannot move forward without it."
Twenty students from the secondary schools are currently on a hunger strike and are willing to forego the academic year, even die for the cause.
Alina Gonzales, a 16-year-old participant in the secondary school strike, told NAM: "We will do what it takes to change this system and our lives."
The students are part of a broader movement that is calling for the transformation of Chile. In recent months, copper mine workers have gone on strike, massive mobilizations have taken place to stop the construction of a huge complex of dam and energy projects in the Bio Bio region of southern Chile, gay rights and feminist activists have marched in the streets, and the Mapuche indigenous peoples have continued to demand the restoration of their ancestral lands....
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Review: Peter Thomas' 'The Gramscian Moment'
 Gramsci, hegemony and the united front
Reviewed by Chris Nineham
Antonio Gramsci was one of the 20th century's most original Marxists. Chris Nineham reviews a new study that argues his ideas matter for anyone fighting for a better world today.
Peter Thomas has done the left a big favour by shining fresh light on Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, one of the most important works of Marxist theory of the twentieth Century.
Though he argues his case in sometimes obscure academic terms, Thomas's conclusions are important for anyone trying to map the revolutionary road in the twenty first century.
Amongst the book's most important achievements are to illuminate the relationship between state and civil society in the Notebooks, to show that Gramsci's stress on hegemony came from a critique of 'economism' not a retreat from revolution, and to successfully defend Gramsci's conception of Marxist philosophy as a 'philosophy of praxis'.
Gramsci was one of the leaders of the factory council movement that helped bring Italy to the brink of revolution in 1920.
The movement was crushed for want of a national network of revolutionaries. He helped set up the Italian Communist Party in 1921 but found himself isolated from the mass of Italian workers by the sectarian nature of the Communist split from the Italian Socialist Party.
The resulting fragmentation of the left allowed the Mussolini to lead the fascists to take power. Gramsci was arrested by the fascists in 1926 and imprisoned until near his death in 1937.
During these years of painful isolation Gramsci struggled with the lessons of his own experience and the strategic problems of taking on modern day capitalism. The Prison Notebooks are the extraordinarily rich and penetrating result. Thomas defends the unity and coherence of Gramsci's work against critics who claim it is muddled, and he places Gramsci back into the tradition of revolutionary Marxism, and particularly the Leninist tradition, from which many have tried to extract him....
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Eric Quezada, Longtime Mission District Community Organizer, Dies in the Bay Area
Photo: Eric Quezada, a founding co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, with a group of supporters during his campaign for District 9 Supervisor. Photo credit: by sashax, flickr
By: Rigoberto Hernandez
Mission Local.org
Aug 24, 2011 - Eric Quezada, 45, a critical figure in the affordable housing movement in the Mission, died early this morning at his home in Bernal Heights.
Quezada, the son of Guatemalan immigrants, moved to the Mission with his family in 1971 after their San Fernando Valley home was destroyed in an earthquake. In the '90s he emerged as the center of many social justice movements throughout the city, especially those involving affordable housing, land-use issues and immigrant rights.
He was a founding member of the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition, and at the time of his death was the executive director of Dolores Street Community Services.
Only those close to Quezada knew he had cancer. In 2004 he was diagnosed with alveolar soft-part sarcoma, a rare, slow-moving cancer that afflicts mostly children and young adults. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with it are dead within five years. Quezada would survive for seven.
During that time he ran a grassroots campaign for supervisor of District 9 in 2008; had a daughter, Ixchel, now 3; married another community organizer, Lorena Melgarejo; was elected to the Democratic County Central Committee; and mentored a generation of community activists.
"He always had a lot folks around him and was always building a strong movement with strong leaders," said Charlie Sciammas of the environmental justice organization PODER, who worked closely with Quezada at the Mission Housing Development Corporation. "He was building something for the long term. It's not just one person, it's many that build it together and work in those struggles and those movements."
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Film Review: Better This World
By Robert Koehler
Variety
"Better This World" centers on pals Brad Crowder and David McKay, who were arrested during the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn.
A Loteria Films presentation in co-production with the Independent Television Service and in association with Picturebox/Motto Pictures/Passion Pictures/the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley/American Documentary/POV. Produced by Katie Galloway, Kelly Duane de la Vega, Mike Nicholson. A case of solid journalism that happens to be cinematically interesting, "Better This World" traces the curlicues and conspiracies surrounding the trials of two protestors arrested during the 2008 Republican National Convention. Filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega sympathize with the protestors, but they also consider the facts of the case by listening to the key players. Result is a docu thriller with twists that will catch many by surprise. Sept. 6 airing on PBS' "POV" makes Stateside theatrical chances slim, but global biz and fest play should be terrific.
Playing out against the high drama of the GOP gathering in St. Paul, Minn., compounded by the U.S. policy of targeting terrorists as a top priority, "Better This World" delivers the kind of case study, rich in national and personal dimensions, that would have made the New Journalists of the '60s and '70s swoon. In a sense, the film represents the next generation of that movement in subject and style: The street-based opponents of the GOP vividly recall Vietnam-era protesters, and the film integrates facts and re-enactments, as well as some clearly prearranged scenes, to tell its story.
The saga centers on longtime pals Brad Crowder and David McKay, both in their early 20s and from Midland, Texas, who became increasingly active in oppositional politics before 2008. While Crowder grew up in a rodeo family, McKay developed as a self-described artist-athlete, but their shared outrage at the U.S. invasion of Iraq triggered their activism in high school.
Enter one of the more memorable figures in recent American docs: Brandon Darby, a grassroots activist with a legend as an uncompromising, kick-ass leftist, who successfully secured aid and support for displaced New Orleans residents after Hurricane Katrina through a group called Common Ground Relief (which he co-founded with Scott Crow). Film clips reveal Darby as a handsome figure with sharp eyes and a tough-minded sensibility.
Early in the film, the talking heads of FBI agents such as Christopher Langert abound, suggesting the Feds already had the "revolution" surrounded. In preparation for the anti-GOP demos, Darby met in Austin with McKay, Crowder and James Clark, who provides an eyewitness account of how aggressive their leader was, treating his new recruits with the kind of militant machismo more...
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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
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1950s and 1960s.
Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS |
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