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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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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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Solidarity Economy:
What It's All About
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Lenin Rediscovered:
What Is To Be Done in Context
By Lars T. Lih
Haymarket Books
880 Pages
$58.95
Why 'What Is To Be Done' Is a Champion of Democracy. Appendix includes a new translation of the original work.
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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
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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...
 Occupy! Goes Global:
A New Popular Front...
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... |
Blocking Evictions, Fanning the Flames:
A Report from Occupied Wall Street
By Carl DavidsonKeep On Keepin' On
Riding the New York City subways in a rush hour is always an adventure. But experiencing the crowds of people on the downtown train to Wall St at 5:30 am, Friday Oct 14, 2011 was a special treat. The closer we got to the financial district, the more workers with union jackets poured into the cars, in a militant and upbeat mood, ready to assert their power.
I was in town for a speaking engagement at a union hall the night before, when our small group got the word of an email blast from the national AFL-CIO, "Everyone who can, get down to Wall Street by 6 am. We're going to block the Mayor Bloomberg's attempt to evict the protestors with the police." The after-meeting chatter ended quickly, since we knew we need to get some sleep for a long day ahead.
It was still pitch dark as we climbed out of the Wall St station. We could hear the noise from Zuccotti Park, but batches of cops were everywhere, putting up barricades as a kind of obstacle course. I was with Pat Fry and Anne Mitchell, both SEIU staffers and leaders of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
"Goodness, look at all the media," said Pat, noting the hundreds of reporters, together with vans and cranes erecting their cameras. When we got to the park it was jammed packed with more than 1000 young people, mostly sitting in the dark with arms linked. The incoming thousands of supporters from labor and the general public began encircling the park until they were about three deep in front of the wall all around it. Anne spotted an open space on the wall. "Let's get up here," she said, as we each got a hand lifting us into position.
From our vantage point, even in the darkness, we could see an inspiring but intense scene unfolding. The police had paddy wagons and empty buses for mass arrests trying to find positions, but getting blocked by traffic. Every few minutes, hundreds more emerged from the subway stations as additional trains rolled in. You could tell who was there from the jackets, caps and T-shirts-Teamsters, SEIU, the Transit Workers Union and many more.
"No way there's going to be an eviction," I said to my partners. "The cops are way outnumbered and outmaneuvered. All they can do is teargas the entire plaza, but then what? That would create a fight shutting down the entire financial district. They're not ready for it yet."....(Click title to continue)
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Occupy Wall Street: Demographic
Survey Results Will Surprise You
By Carl Franzen
Talking Points Memo
Oct 19, 2011 - We now know what they want, what social networks and online tools they use and who doesn't like them. But just who are the Occupy Wall Street protesters?
Over a month since the demonstrations began in New York's Zuccotti Park, two demographic surveys of the movement and its supporters are now available online, both of them containing surprising, perhaps even counter-intuitive findings about the makeup of the movement and its supporters.
Survey One: Visitors to Occupy Wall Street Website
The first survey, the results of which appear in an academic paper written by Héctor Codero-Guzmán, PhD, a sociology professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), used visitors to the Occupy Wall Street movement's website (www.occupywallst.org) on October 5th as its sample size. The paper was published online on the Occupy Wall Street website on Wednesday.
Politically independent
Among other striking findings, Codero-Guzmán discovered that 70 percent of the survey's 1,619 respondents identified as politically independent, far-and-away the vast majority, compared to 27.3% Democrats and 2.4% self-identified Republicans.
"That finding surprised me based on what I had heard in previous conversations about the movement" said Codero-Guzmán in a telephone interview with TPM on Wednesday. "I wasn't expecting many Republicans, but I was expecting more self-identified Democrats. In recent years, there's been an increased interest in who political independents are and what political views are and what are their levels of interest in particular issues, which will only continue as the election cycle progresses."
Other findings in the paper include:
Participation level: Relatively weak Less than a quarter of the sample (24.2%) had participated in the Occupy Wall Street protests as of October 5, 2011. (But as Codero-Guzmán pointed out to TPM, the movement was still in its relative infancy at that stage.)
Age varies widely 64.2% of respondents were younger than 34 years of age, but one in three respondents was over 35 and one in five was 45 or older.... (Click title for more)
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Anti-Austerity: Greeks Hit the
Streets in 'Mother of All Strikes'
By Al-Jazeera
Thousands of Greeks, furious at the government's austerity measures, gathered outside parliament in the capital Athens, as the second day of a general strike and mass protests began.
The mass action on Thursday comes as Greece's parliament takes a final vote on austerity laws, cutting wages and raising taxes.
Protesters began heading to the capital's main Syntagma Square outside Parliament, while one communist party-backed union vowed to encircle parliament in an attempt to prevent lawmakers from accessing the building for the vote.
On Wednesday, all 154 of the ruling Socialists' deputies voted in favour of the austerity measures, which face further scrutiny and votes on specific articles on Thursday before becoming law.
The implementation of the laws are crucial for the country to receive its next batch of bailout funds and avoid bankruptcy.
On Wednesday, demonstrators hurled stones and firebombs at police in front of the parliament as tens of thousands rallied on the first day of the 48-hour nationwide strike.
Protesters had pushed up to the steps in front of the parliament building itself, setting fire to a sentry box occupied by ceremonial guards at the adjacent Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Police responded by firing rounds of tear gas into the crowd to calm the anger that is growing in Athens' Syntagma Square, the plaza next to the parliament which has become a focal point for anti-austerity protests.
More than 7,000 police had been assigned to the city to deal with anticipated trouble with hundreds in riot gear stationed near the parliament building.
'Mother of all strikes'
Al Jazeera's Andrew Simmons, reporting from Athens, said the two-day shutdown was being described as "the mother of all strikes" as it involved every facet of public life.
"Protesters wanted it to be their day, to get their message across: 'No to more swingeing cuts! No to a whole different life ahead!' Simmons reported. (Click title for more)
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The Occupations, John Dewey and the Public Sphere
 OWS Forms a Public
By Masaccio
Fire Dog Lake
Oct 16, 2011 - Media reporting about OccupyWallStreet is bound up in its traditional mindset. The important things are clothes, demands, impact on the political horserace, police actions, and spectacle. Media pundits agree, trying to figure out what is happening here, using the usual categories, hippies, protesters, dirty, ignorant of reality on one side, and on the other side more positive terms, they speak for all of us, they raise important concerns that aren't being addressed, they are the equivalent of the Tea Party on the left.
OWS can't be understood in traditional terms. So far, at least, it has shown no collective interest in electoral politics, in legislative demands, in calls for regulation or deregulation, in complaints about process or even of not being heard. It looks like a simple statement: government isn't working to reflect the overwhelming concerns of the Public.
This word, Public, is the center of John Dewey's book, The Public and Its Problems, a collection of lectures he gave in 1926. Dewey thinks that the Public is the source of the organization of government. He starts with the fact that human actions have consequences. A transaction might just affect the people involved in it. One example is a conversation between two people. They talk and move on, and no one else is affected. That is a private transaction. Many human actions have indirect consequences for others, good or bad. When a group of people become aware of the bad indirect consequences of a transaction between others, and work together to control the behavior and the unpleasant consequences, Dewey sees the formation of a Public....(Click title for more)
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A Glimpse of the Mondragon Cooperative Complex
By Grady Ross Daugherty
HAVANA TIMES, Oct. 15 - My just-graduated-from-college son and I traveled to the Basque region of Spain recently for a one-week seminar and tour of the Mondragon Cooperative Complex (MCC), the famous worker-owned cooperatives. Our trip took place under the auspices of the Praxis Peace Center of Sonoma, California.
Since I comment frequently on articles in Havana Times, arguing for a modern cooperative re-definition of workable socialism-and for Cuba to become what we advocate for the United States, a modern socialist cooperative republic-it might be expected that I would come back shouting and waving my arms about this stunningly successful cooperative experiment. This however will only be partially the case. I will speak quietly and positively, and also quite briefly.
What I would like to do is provide a glimpse of a few aspects of Mondragon, and perhaps draw a few conclusions relevant to socialist Cuba.
The Basque region, situated partly on the north Atlantic coast of Spain and nestled among the foothills of the Pyrenees, is a remarkably beautiful country. We had seen Madrid and its environs from the air and airport, and had been disappointed by its plainness and Texas-like landscape. It is small wonder that the short hop into thoroughly modern Bilbao airport on the Basque coast, with green mountains all around, was a pleasant contrast.
A chartered bus whisked us sixty kilometers east toward the mountainous village of our destination, and we became aware immediately that the Spanish highway system is state-of-the-art. There were tunnels all along the way, with entrances and exits beveled to the contour of the hills. Traffic flowed in a fast but totally relaxed manner.
During the forthcoming week, as we went through many small villages on our tour, we would realize that Basque region traffic almost never stops. They employ everywhere there a thing called a "roundabout," in order to avoid stop signs and keep the traffic moving. (What an unpleasant shock later on to return to the US and have to stop dozens of times to go even a short distance.)
One of our first stops on the tour was a Fagor washing machine factory in Mondragon. Our curious two-dozen-all US citizens except for one Canadian-trooped single-file through the giant factory, marveling at the technological vastness.
It was difficult to accept that all this, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln's words, was "of the workers, by the workers and for the workers." What was most noteworthy however was that so few workers were in evidence, and that there was not a manager in sight.
We learned that most middle management is not needed in a worker-owned cooperative factory, for worker-associates tend to manage themselves superbly....(Click title for more)
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Film Review: Reintroducing Paul Goodman,
'Public Intellectual' of 'Growing Up Absurd'
 A new documentary film, "Paul Goodman Changed My Life," tells the at-times risqué story of the seminal public intellectual of the American left whose impact evaporated after his death in 1972.
Paul Goodman Changed My Life
A Documentary Film by Jonathan Lee
Zeitgeist Flims
By Lewis Beale
Miller-McCune Features
Paul Goodman was an influential thinker whose influence all but died with him in 1972.
Once upon a time, there was something called a "public intellectual," and writer/pacifist/political radical/bisexual Paul Goodman was practically its template. Brilliant and witty, a New Left guru and regular TV presence on shows like William F. Buckley's Firing Line, Goodman was particularly famous thanks to his enormously influential 1959 book, Growing Up Absurd, in which he argued that society was so morally corrupt, youthful rebellion and disaffection actually signified mental health.
"He's a wonderful example of an intellectual who was active as a citizen, who cared about young people, and that there were things that were deficient in our society that were upsetting them," says Jonathan Lee, director of Paul Goodman Changed My Life, a new documentary showing around the country on October 19.
"[Goodman] really appointed himself to be this public intellectual," adds Lee, "and he was reaching people by what he was saying, how he was saying it. He sparked something in young people, that there's not something wrong with you."
If nothing else, Lee's film is a terrific introduction to Goodman's life and work, especially since his death in 1972, Goodman has been almost forgotten....(Click on title for more)
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Making of AIDS epidemic: Chimp Hunting, Colonialist Medicine & Ton-ton Macoute's Blood Work
 Note by Mike Ely, Kasama Project: The following is a remarkable scientific history describing how AIDS went from an isolated illness of chimpanzees to a worldwide human epidemic infecting 60 million lives. It starts in the 1920s with the arming of hunters in equatorial Africa with guns, the expansion of chimp killing alongside an explosion of colonial immunization campaigns - and then it jumps through a series of "amplifiers" to Haiti's blood bank system and U.S. sex tourism , and from there to the gay bar and bathhouse scenes of the early 1980s.
This is a cultural history involving the domination of colonial powers, the impact of world war, and the horrific desperation of African women forced into prostitution. It involves the criminal use of non-sterilized needles in African inoculation campaigns where people immunized against one disease are (by the same act) given another.
This article documents the work of Dr. Jacques Pépin, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, whose book "The Origins of AIDS,"was published last week by Cambridge University Press. It first appeared in the New York Times.
Chimp to Man to History Books: The Path of AIDS
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Our story begins sometime close to 1921, somewhere between the Sanaga River in Cameroon and the Congo River in the former Belgian Congo. It involves chimps and monkeys, hunters and butchers, "free women" and prostitutes, syringes and plasma-sellers, evil colonial lawmakers and decent colonial doctors with the best of intentions. And a virus that, against all odds, appears to have made it from one ape in the central African jungle to one Haitian bureaucrat leaving Zaire for home and then to a few dozen men in California gay bars before it was even noticed - about 60 years after its journey began....(Click tile for 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
Ladder,' drawing on the lessons of the movement in the South in the
1950s and 1960s.
Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS |
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