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Blog of the Week:
Solidarity Economy' sU.S. Network Site
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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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David Montgomery, Presente!
An Appreciation written by Eric Foner
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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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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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Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Revolution
A Political Biography
By David S. G. Goodman
Routledge Press
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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...
 For 2012, Occupy!
vs War & Austerity
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 with the Occupy! movement 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... |
Austerity and The New Blue Collar
Temporary Work, Lasting PovertyAnd The American Warehouse
By Dave Jamieson
Progressive America Rising via HuffPost
Dec. 20, 2011 - JOLIET, Ill., and FONTANA, Calif. - Like nearly everyone else in Joliet without good job prospects, Uylonda Dickerson eventually found herself at the warehouses looking for work.
"I just needed a job," the 38-year-old single mother says.
 Dickerson came to the right place. Over the past decade and a half, Joliet and its Will County environs southwest of Chicago have grown into one of the world's largest inland ports, a major hub for dry goods destined for retail stores throughout the Midwest and beyond. With all the new distribution centers have come thousands of jobs at "logistics" companies - firms that specialize in moving goods for retailers and manufacturers. Many of these jobs are filled by Joliet's African Americans, like Dickerson, and immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.
But many bottom-rung workers like Dickerson don't work for the big corporations whose products are in the warehouses, or even the logistics companies that run them. They go to work for labor agencies that supply workers like Dickerson. Last year, she found work as a temp through one of the myriad staffing agencies that serve big-box retailers and their contractors. Thanks largely to the warehousing boom, Will County has developed one of the highest concentrations of temp agencies in the Midwest.
Dickerson, grateful to have even a temp job, was taken on as a "lumper" - someone who schleps boxes to and from trailers all day long. As unglamorous as her duties were, Dickerson became an essential cog in one of the most sophisticated machines in modern commerce - the Walmart supply chain. Walmart, the world's largest private-sector employer, had contracted a company called Schneider Logistics to operate the warehouse. And Schneider, in turn, had its own contracts with staffing companies that supplied workers. ...(Click title for more)
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Revolutions Don't Happen in a Day:
5 Ways OWS Can Stay Powerfuland Truly Build a Movement
By Yotam Marom
Progressive America Rising via Alternet.org
Dec. 21, 2011 - On September 17, we took Liberty Square, used it to begin to create the social norms and institutions of a society to come, and became the Occupy movement. We hit the streets fiercely, abandoning the metal barricades they once contained us in, rejecting the marching permits they offered us, refusing their sidewalks. We were dragged -- handcuffed -- into the front pages of people's minds, and brought with us a story many were trying to silence; a story about the massive profits made by the tiny few through the exploitation of the many, a story about deep and systemic economic, political and social injustice. We danced in the streets and parks we reclaimed, and then in the jail cells they took us to when they realized we weren't going home. We were confident, invincible; it's hard to be afraid when the sun is out.
But the season has changed. Autumn has ended and winter is upon us. We've lost Liberty Square, and each day brings news from across the country that another occupation has been evicted. Winter is here, and with it the cold; but it's more than that. Winter brings the sober understanding that we won't be in the headlines every day, that we need to be more than a string of events or actions or press releases, more than an endless meeting. Winter is the nagging truth that the next decade of organizing must be more sustainable than the first months we spent in the sun; that this is a struggle for the long-haul, that burn-out and martyrdom are no good for anyone and no good for the cause. Winter tells us to see our families and take a day off when we are sick, because the movement has to be healthy if it's going to last. Winter is here to remind us that revolution is not an event but a process, and that social transformation means not only harnessing a moment, but building a movement.
Winter is here. But winter is not sad, and it's not tragic; it's just real. We do not fear the cold, and we will not hibernate. We will use the winter to become the movement we know is necessary.
A To-Do List for the Winter
1. Grow. We will continue to build relationships with communities that have been fighting and building for decades already, from tenants organizing eviction defense in Bed-Stuy, New York to AIDS activists on Staten Island. We will grow by joining struggles that protect people from the daily assaults they experience, from austerity to police brutality, and by waging struggles to meet peoples' needs, like reclaiming foreclosed homes. We will transcend the open calls to action and the expectation that they are enough to build a movement; we will organize the hard way, because the hard way is the only way. We will have the million one-on-one conversations it takes to build a movement, door-to-door if we have to, and we will do it out in the open, because we have nothing to fear. ...(Click title for more)
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The Rising of the Women is the Rising of Us All
Mass March by Cairo Women in Protest Over Abuse by Soldiers
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
New York Times
CAIRO - Several thousand women demanding the end of military rule marched through downtown Cairo on Tuesday evening in an extraordinary expression of anger over images of soldiers beating, stripping and kicking female demonstrators in Tahrir Square.
"Drag me, strip me, my brothers' blood will cover me!" they chanted. "Where is the field marshal?" they demanded of the top military officer, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi. "The girls of Egypt are here."
Historians called the event the biggest women's demonstration in modern Egyptian history, the most significant since a 1919 march against British colonialism inaugurated women's activism here, and a rarity in the Arab world. It also added a new and unexpected wave of protesters opposing the ruling military council's efforts to retain power and its tactics for suppressing public discontent.
The protest's scale stunned even feminists here. In Egypt's stiffly patriarchal culture, previous attempts to organize women's events in Tahrir Square during this year's protests almost always fizzled or, in one case in March, ended in the physical harassment of a small group of women by a larger crowd of men.
"It was amazing the number of women that came out from all over the place," said Zeinab Abul-Magd, a historian who has studied women's activism here. "I expected fewer than 300."
The march abruptly pushed women to the center of Egyptian political life after they had been left out almost completely. Although women stood at the forefront of the initial revolt that ousted President Hosni Mubarak 10 months ago, few had prominent roles in the various revolutionary coalitions formed in the uprising's aftermath. Almost no women have won seats in the early rounds of parliamentary elections. And the continuing demonstrations against military rule have often degenerated into battles in which young men and the security police hurl rocks at each other. ...(Click title for more)
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Occupy! and the Tasks of Socialists
By Pham Binh
Via Links
December 14, 2011 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Occupy is a once in a lifetime opportunity to re-merge the socialist and working-class movements and create a viable broad-based party of radicals, two prospects that have not been on the cards in the United States since the late 1960s and early 1970s. The socialist left has not begun to think through these "big picture" implications of Occupy, nor has it fully adjusted to the new tasks that Occupy's outbreak has created for socialists. In practice, the socialist left follows Occupy's lead rather than Occupy follow the socialist left's lead. As a result, we struggle to keep pace with Occupy's rapid evolution.
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) mobilised more workers and oppressed people in four weeks than the entire socialist left combined has in four decades. We would benefit by coming to grips with how and why other forces (namely anarchists) accomplished this historic feat.
The following is an attempt to understand Occupy, review the socialist response, and draw some practical conclusions aimed at helping the socialist left become central rather than remain marginal to Occupy's overall direction.
Occupy's class character and leadership
Occupy is more than a movement and less than a revolution. It is an uprising, an elemental and unpredictable outpouring of both rage and hope from the depths of the 99%.
Occupy is radically different from the mass movements that rocked US politics in the last decade or so: the immigrants' rights movement that culminated on May 1, 2006, in the first national political strike since 1886, the Iraq anti-war movement of 2002-2003 and the global justice movement that began with the Battle of Seattle in 1999 and ended on 9/11. All three were led by liberal non-governmental organisations (NGOs). They sponsored the marches, obtained the permits and selected who could and could not speak from the front of the rallies. Militant, illegal direct action tended to be the purview of adventurist Black Bloc elements or handfuls of very committed activists.
Compared to these three movements, the following differences stand out: Occupy is broader in terms of active participants and public support and, most importantly, is far more militant and defiant. Tens of thousands of people are willing to brave arrest and police brutality. The uprising was deliberately designed by its anarchist initiators to be an open-ended and all-inclusive process, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of the failed conventional single-issue protest model. The "people's mic", invented to circumvent the New York Police Department's (NYPD) ban on amplified sound, means that anyone can be heard by large numbers of people at any time.
One of the most important elements that makes Occupy an uprising and not merely a mass movement is its alleged leaderlessness. Of course as Marxists we know that every struggle requires leadership in some form, and Occupy is no exception. The leaders of Occupy are those who put their bodies on the line at the encampments and get deeply involved in the complex, Byzantine decision-making process Occupy uses known as "modified consensus". Occupy's leaders are those who make the proposals at planning meetings, working group, and general assemblies (GAs) that attract enough support to determine the uprising's course of action.
The people leading the uprising are those who are willing to make the biggest sacrifices for it.
Since Occupy is self-organising and self-led by its most dedicated participants, attempts to make its decision-making process more accessible to those who are not willing or able to dedicate themselves to Occupy 24 hours a day, seven days a week will fall flat. "All day, all week, occupy Wall Street!" is not just a chant, it is a way of life for Occupy's de facto leadership. ...(Click title for more)
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Poor White Blight: Hip-Hop's Eye on Trailer Parks
 One of rap's brightest young stars, Yelawolf (and Eminem before him), interprets the mobile home-and its corresponding economic reality.
By B Michael Payne
Alternet.org
Dec 22, 2011 - Trailer parks are more American than apple pie. (The English invented that.) The trailer park, populated by mobile homes, has its roots not in its mobility, but in its birthplace: Mobile, Alabama. At their outset, mobile homes helped a flood of GIs get affordable housing without enduring a lengthy construction time. Now, the mobile home and trailer parks have become another way to say poor.
The rapper Yelawolf, another product of Alabama, is lately adding to the American vernacular for destitution. Yelawolf is a lanky white rapper with an elevated verbal flow. He raps with vivid concision and celerity. He distinguished himself with an artistically accomplished 2010 that saw the release of an inspired mixtape, Trunk Muzik. In 2011, Yelawolf was on the cover of XXL and found himself signed to a major label, by Eminem himself.
Eminem is, of course, the controversial rapper who, after receiving Dr. Dre's blessing, used his considerable wit, talent, and skill to sell millions of albums. The most compelling thing about Eminem, though, is that this is just one iteration of him; he's also the deeply misogynistic homophobe who brought hip-hop's radio-unfriendly politics into suburban homes; he's also the best rapper alive; he's also a symbol for poor white America, hailing from Detroit, one of America's most deeply fucked up cities. (Click title for more)
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GOP Engaging In Mass Vote Theft
Julian Bond, center, in the SNCC days of the early 1960s
Voting Rights: Which Side Are You On?
By Julian Bond
Progressive America Rising via Chicago Tribune
Dec. 18, 2011 - Our democracy is threatened today in ways I could not imagine we'd face in the 21st century, when back in 1960, as a 20-year-old, I helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. We were called the "shock troops of the civil rights movement" and our sit-ins and other nonviolent protests energized the movement. A new generation of youth is now occupying the public debate, changing how we discuss social and economic justice, forcing us to rethink class and privilege. But they dare not take for granted the hard-won gains of a previous generation, who secured the vote as a fundamental right, not a privilege only for those with means.
In the 1960s, at great personal risk, we fought poll taxes and literacy tests to ensure that every eligible American could vote. Today, there is a nationwide attempt to dismantle the protections put in place by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In addition, in the last few years some states have passed laws requiring government-issued IDs to vote. Millions of Americans don't have these documents.
There is no evidence that voter impersonation - the only thing voter IDs at the polls could prevent - exists. These laws are intended as a barrier to the ballot.
Other states are limiting early voting, making it harder for working people to vote. Some states are making it so difficult to register new voters that the League of Women Voters won't register people in Florida for the first time in its history.
These new voter-suppression laws make it difficult for poor people, racial minorities, the elderly, students and the disabled to vote because of added costs and undue burdens, in essence a 21st century poll tax. This is a direct assault on democracy and the biggest threat voters have faced since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
The overt obstacles of the Jim Crow era and the voter-suppression efforts today are different only in their tactics, not their intent. In the 1960s, intimidation came from fire hoses, police dogs and a culture of white supremacy. Today, the tactics may be less obvious but they are equally insidious. The results are the same: Fewer people on the margins of our democracy will vote, tilting the system even more toward the powerful interests it already serves.
In America's first national election in 1792, approximately 5 percent of the adult population (white, male, landowners) was eligible to vote. Expanding access to the ballot has been a hallmark of our history ever since. From Reconstruction-era reforms giving the vote to nonwhite men, to suffrage securing the vote for women, the civil rights struggle to end Jim Crow and language and access accommodations made for naturalized citizens and the disabled, wave after wave of Americans have claimed this fundamental right.
In the 1960s, as we marched for our freedoms we sang of them. As I watch another generation of youth protest and drum and chant, I am reminded of one lyric in particular: "My daddy was a freedom fighter, and I'm my daddy's son. And I will fight for freedom, until everybody's won. Which side are you on, boy? Which side are you on?"
When it comes to preserving the power of each American's right to vote, and encouraging everyone eligible to vote, which side are you on?
Julian Bond is a professor at American University and the University of Virginia and chairman emeritus of the NAACP.
Copyright © 2011, Chicago Tribune
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Someplace Like America - Amazing Photo Story, with an Introduction by Bruce Springsteen
Link to photo album in Washington Post
 University of California Press
Hardcover, 256 pages ISBN: 9780520262478 June 2011 $29.95, £20.95
In Someplace Like America, writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael S. Williamson take us to the working-class heart of America, bringing to life-through shoe leather reporting, memoir, vivid stories, stunning photographs, and thoughtful analysis-the deepening crises of poverty and homelessness.
The story begins in 1980, when the authors joined forces to cover the America being ignored by the mainstream media-people living on the margins and losing their jobs as a result of deindustrialization.
Since then, Maharidge and Williamson have traveled more than half a million miles to investigate the state of the working class (winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process). In Someplace Like America, they follow the lives of several families over the thirty-year span to present an intimate and devastating portrait of workers going jobless. This brilliant and essential study-begun in the trickle-down Reagan years and culminating with the recent banking catastrophe-puts a human face on today's grim economic numbers. It also illuminates the courage and resolve with which the next generation faces the future.
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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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