Blog of the Week:
Organizing Upgrade
 Left Organizers Respond to the Changing Times...
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Lost Writings of SDS..
Revolutionary Youth the the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and other Lost Writings of SDS
Edited by Carl Davidson
Changemaker, 273pp, $22.50
For the full contents, click the link and view 'Preview' under the cover graphic.
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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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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 
Nation Books $18.95 at Powell's |
Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
Verso
Paperback
List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $8.00
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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...
 Street Heat
on Wall Street!
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... |
Why 2,000 People Needed to Occupy Wall Street
 Banks Are Raking in Profits While Taxpayers Are Getting Screwed
By Amy Goodman Alternet.org Sept 21, 2011 - If 2,000 Tea Party activists descended on Wall Street, you would probably have an equal number of reporters there covering them. Yet 2,000 people did occupy Wall Street last Saturday. They weren't carrying the banner of the Tea Party, the Gadsden flag with its coiled snake and the threat "Don't Tread on Me". Yet their message was clear: "We are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%." They were there, mostly young, protesting the virtually unregulated speculation of Wall Street that caused the global financial meltdown. One of New York's better-known billionaires, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, commented on the protests: "You have a lot of kids graduating college, can't find jobs. That's what happened in Cairo. That's what happened in Madrid. You don't want those kinds of riots here." Riots? Is that really what the Arab Spring and the European protests are about? Perhaps to the chagrin of Mayor Bloomberg, that is exactly what inspired many who occupied Wall Street. In its most recent communique, the Wall Street protest umbrella group said: "On Saturday we held a general assembly, two thousand strong. ... By 8pm on Monday we still held the plaza, despite constant police presence. ... We are building the world that we want to see, based on human need and sustainability, not corporate greed." ...
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Jobs Not Cuts! The Devilish
Detail of Obama's Speech
By John Nichols
Healthcare Now via NPR
Sept. 21 2011 - President Obama has erected what is likely to be the left flank in the debates of the Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction-the so-called "super-committee" that will define so much of this fall's fiscal and economic discourse.
That flank is sturdier than some of the president's critics on the left might feared it might be. But the flank is weak, very weak, in at least one key area: the defense of Medicare and Medicaid.
So what's the balance that progressives should strike with regard to the speech? Let's consider:
President Obama wants wealthy Americans to pay a little bit more.
That's good.
President Obama rejects House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan's schemes to turn Medicare and Medicaid into voucher programs that shift money away from carrying for the needy and toward the accounts of private insurers.
That's good.
President Obama rejects, at least for the time being, the prospect of increasing the Medicare eligibility age that he put on the table several months ago.
That's good.
But President Obama was still compromising with the Tea Party right when he delivered his remarks on Monday. Indeed, he proposed $580 billion in cuts to health and welfare programs, with $248 billion coming from Medicare and $72 billion from Medicaid.
That's bad.
Very bad.
The president would have us believe that the cuts can be made by addressing "waste, fraud and abuse." The reality is that cutting a quarter-trillion dollars from Medicare will undermine the quality of care for seniors and the disabled. The Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care estimates that Obama's approach would lead to $42 billion in cuts for post-acute care providers "placing patients, our workforce and local facilities at risk."
The proposed cuts to Medicare and Medicaid will put new stress on the economy by making it harder to maintain hiring levels at the skilled nursing facilities that have been some of the real job creators in a period of layoffs and rising unemployment rates....
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Palestine at the UN: Say Goodbye
to the Failed 'Peace Process'
 By Phyllis Bennis
AlterNet.org
Sept. 20, 2011 - Take away the crass political motives, and what is left in the U.S. plan to veto Palestinian membership in the UN can be summed up in one word: chutzpah. The U.S. is threatening to veto a resolution aimed at achieving something Washington claims it supports - a Palestinian state (truncated, still-occupied, demilitarized and divided but nominally independent) side by side with Israel - because it doesn't like the venue where this particular step toward statehood is underway.
It's hardly news that the U.S. only supports a Palestinian state created under its own control, within the parameters of its own U.S.-dominated "peace process," whose 20 painful years have achieved only failure - and worse. The U.S. only supports a Palestinian "state" shaped by the realities of U.S. and Israeli power, not one based on human rights and international law.
The debate over Palestinian statehood and UN membership at this year's General Assembly meeting has brought the usually staid opening debate to a fever pitch of U.S. pressure, Israeli threats, European division and Palestinian ambiguity. (It shouldn't be so fraught - according to the Guardian, countries that recognize Palestine represent about 80 percent of the global population, while the ones that don't have 75 percent of the world's cash.) Pretty much everyone agrees there's not a chance that the decision, whatever it might be, will actually change anything on the ground. So why the near-hysteria in the diplomatic world?
The answer lies in three separate but interlocking realities: the changing U.S. policy toward the Middle East in the midst of the Arab Spring; the UN unchanging U.S. policy toward Israel in the midst of election politicking; the divided opinion among Palestinians about the wisdom and significance of the initiative. ...
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How Clara Zetkin Helps Us Understand Evo Morales
By John Riddell
Johnriddell.wordpress.com
Sept 18, 2011 - Is Bolivia "a case of a workers' government in the sense the early Comintern/Zetkin meant it?" The question comes from Pham Binh in a comment on this website. In my view, the "workers' government" concept is certainly relevant but must be used with caution.
My article "Clara Zetkin's Struggle for the United Front" states:
 Zetkin was an exponent of the concept of a workers' government, that is, a government based on the mass movement of working people and acting in their interests. This was an application of the united front that originated in Germany and became part of the political tool chest of communists in Lenin's time.
The government of Bolivia headed by President Evo Morales can indeed be viewed as a "workers' government" of the type discussed by the German revolutionary Clara Zetkin and the Communist International (Comintern) in the early 1920s.
The "workers' government" concept is valuable above all to open our minds to the fact that there is more to class rule than the counterposition of capitalist power and workers' power. There are also situations where - for a limited time - workers form governments ruling within the capitalist state. Here we need to view the working class in an inclusive sense as an ensemble of all toilers and oppressed people.
In a broad, generic sense, that is what has happened in Bolivia. Indeed, Bolivian Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera has called the Morales regime a "government of the social movements." (García Linera 2011, p. 12)
Zetkin was ahead of most other Comintern leaders of her time in understanding the need to extend the united front beyond the proletariat (that is, employed industrial workers) and draw in women, farmers, other exploited non-waged workers, and rebellious petty-bourgeois layers. In that sense Zetkin thought in terms applicable to Bolivia today....
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Longshoremen Block Shipment at Oregon Terminal
By MIKE BAKER
The Associated Press
LONGVIEW, OR Sept 22, 2011 - Longshoremen returned to the railroad tracks near a Columbia River grain terminal with union members' wives and mothers Wednesday, blocking a shipment and facing more arrests in their battle for jobs.
Two union officers and about 10 of the women were detained, International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 21 President Dan Coffman said in a statement. Coffman was among those involved despite a judge's repeated orders that the union not block entrance to the site.
Law enforcement officers brought a massive force to various parts of the railroad tracks, including two tactical vehicles, canine units and about a dozen personnel in full riot gear. At least two protesters were treated after being hit with pepper spray, and the train eventually made its way into the EGT Development facility.
Union leaders decried the law enforcement activity, saying it amounts to a private security force paid for by taxpayers. "Longview Longshoremen stood down from their jobs for 30 minutes in silence as a unit train rolled into EGT under the escort of police paid for by the very workers in the community of Cowlitz County that the company is undermining and exploiting," Leal Sundet, ILWU Coast Committeeman, said in a statement.
The actions appeared to defy the National Labor Relations Board and the orders of a federal judge who has already held the union in contempt and is considering fines for previous actions. The ILWU believes its members have the right to work at the new $200 million terminal. EGT has hired another firm that is staffing with workers from a different union, Oregon-based Operating Engineers Local 701.
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Why We Fight: Three Ideas on Why Revolutionaries Should Do Mass Work and a Salvo on How
 By Comrade Tennessee
Freedom Road.org
Sept 7, 2011 - I've been having a kind of existential crisis about my mass work recently-a real, deep crisis, like getting beat up over and over again by a question you can't shake. Eight years into my movement work, whole possible lives that weren't lived in service and commitment and unity of this struggle I find myself asking my comrade: how is what we're doing going to get us from here to there, to revolution? I confess that I'm in the kind of hard times when I more plainly see the end of the world as we know it than the beginning of the world we're fighting for, the world we want. So I'm doing a lot of thinking and asking questions about the mass work, how we do it, what we're doing even, and that really fundamental and existential question: why do we do this at all? Why fight?
It turns out I'm not alone -- many comrades share the same question or variations on it. We're stumped a little, maybe in a little bit of shock about the shared lack of clarity and certainly in contemplation on that most basic question. We know we're surely not the first to ask it, but can't remember an answer ever being given to us. We want to be strategic, and so we're afraid that we find ourselves doing this kind of thing out of the powerful forces of habit and history instead of a shared and unified vision for how we make revolution out of-prepare yourself for scare quotes-"reform" work we're doing together.
We've spent a lot of time pooh-poohing the kind of revolutionaries who have convinced themselves that the masses aren't worth struggling alongside, and that the enlightenment of their communist ideas need only be pushed and carried and shoved in by way of paper and polemic. We have no patience for bloggers, for those who you see at every conference but have never seen do a task, for those whose failure to engage with any segment of the literally billions of oppressed people in this world has resulted in their commitment to "theoretical work" from isolation behind a computer screen. No love for the tourist-activists-those moving and hopping from one place to the next. We have held up the tireless and dogged social movement fighters next to those who have really helped lead a people to make revolution. But here we are, asking ourselves: Why?
Here's an outlay of some of our ideas about "why we fight":
--We do this work to find one another, which is unquestionably and without doubt foundationally necessary for what we are trying to do. We need to connect with those who are like us, to develop unity from personal and political struggle together, to learn together. And then we need to move forward together in higher and more developed ways, even as we continue to search for and be searched for in our movements.
--We do this work to make the sea in which revolutionaries can swim. We are unconvinced that revolution is the spontaneous organization and then struggle of a class to overthrow its oppressors; rather, those liberatory moments in the history of people when we have taken such action have come in the context of a society that is already being shaken by the friction of movements and struggles. We cannot swim in an ocean without water; we cannot make revolution in a society that lacks struggle. We need the greatest possible amount of agitation and antagonism between our class and the one we seek to overthrow and take power from before forces exist that can do just that.
--We do this work to serve the people. Mao's precious slogan is not lost on us, and in the absence of a force that is moving forward with making revolution in our lifetimes, it is only the ideologically bankrupt that don't, and can't, fight alongside and win victories and changes in the lives of the people. We think that our ideas will be taken up not just by the rightness and wrongness of our line, but by the trust we have earned, the knowledge we have gotten together, and the shared experience of fighting next to one another. We think we need to earn our leadership, and not substitute our own belief in the righteousness of our ideology with the belief that other people will have in it. Communists are justifiably scary people: we talk openly and with desire about overthrowing the government, of changing everything about the existing social order. We fight because it makes other people scary with us, and makes us less scary to them....
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New Book: Judith Toy's 'Murder as a Call to Love'
 | | Judith Toy: Murder as a Call to Love |
The book on Zen and Forgiveness
is now published and available at:
Cloud Cottage
PO Box 652
Black Mountain, NC 28711
Email cloudcottage@bellsouth.net
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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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