Blog of the Week:
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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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Quick Links...
CCDS Discussion
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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
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 |
Solidarity Economy:What It's All About
Edited by Jenna Allard, Carl Davidson and Julie Matthaei
Buy it here...
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 OWS in Transition:
Digging in for Winter
Plotting for Spring!
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... |
Breaking Chains, Storming Palaces
Bonfire at Occupy Oakland
Spring Confronts Winter
By Mike Davis
New Left Review Editorial
In great upheavals, analogies fly like shrapnel. The electrifying protests of 2011-the on-going Arab spring, the 'hot' Iberian and Hellenic summers, the 'occupied' fall in the United States-inevitably have been compared to the anni mirabiles of 1848, 1905, 1968 and 1989. Certainly some fundamental things still apply and classic patterns repeat. Tyrants tremble, chains break and palaces are stormed. Streets become magical laboratories where citizens and comrades are created, and radical ideas acquire sudden telluric power. Iskra becomes Facebook. But will this new comet of protest persist in the winter sky or is it just a brief, dazzling meteor shower? As the fates of previous journées révolutionnaires warn us, spring is the shortest of seasons, especially when the communards fight in the name of a 'different world' for which they have no real blueprint or even idealized image.
But perhaps that will come later. For the moment, the survival of the new social movements-the occupiers, the indignados, the small European anti-capitalist parties and the Arab new left-demands that they sink deeper roots in mass resistance to the global economic catastrophe, which in turn presupposes-let's be honest-that the current temper for 'horizontality' can eventually accommodate enough disciplined 'verticality' to debate and enact organizing strategies. It's a frighteningly long road just to reach the starting points of earlier attempts to build a new world. But a new generation has at least bravely initiated the journey.
Will a deepening economic crisis, now engulfing much of the world, necessarily speed a global renewal of the Left? The 'bullet points' that follow are my speculations. Designed to instigate debate, they're simply a thinking-out-loud about some of the historical specificities of the 2011 events and the outcomes they could shape in the next few years. The underlying premise is that Act Two of the drama will entail mostly winter scenes, played out against the backdrop of the collapse of export-led economic growth in the bric countries as well as continuing stagnation in Europe and the United States.
1. CAPITALIST NIGHTMARES
First, we must pay homage to fear and panic at the high tables of capitalism. What was inconceivable just a year ago, even to most Marxists, is now a spectre haunting the opinion pages of the business press: the imminent destruction of much of the institutional framework of globalization and undermining of the post-1989 international order. There is growing apprehension that the crisis of the Eurozone, followed by a synchronized world recession, might return us to a 1930ish world of semi-autarchic monetary and trade blocs, crazed by nationalist ressentiments. Hegemonic regulation of money and demand, in this scenario, would no longer exist: the us, too weak; Europe, too disorganized; and China, with feet of clay, too dependent upon exports. Every second-rank power would want its own enriched-uranium insurance policy; regional nuclear wars would become a possibility. Far-fetched? Perhaps, but so is the belief in time travel back to the roaring days of the 1990s. Our analogue minds simply cannot solve all the differential equations generated by the incipient fragmentation of the Eurozone or a blown gasket in the Chinese growth engine. While the explosion on Wall Street in 2008 was more or less accurately foreseen by various experts, what is now rushing toward us is well beyond the prediction of any Cassandra or, for that matter, three Karl Marxes. ...(Click title for more)
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Ten Winning Moments for the 99% in 2011
Workers Storm Wisconsin Capitol
By Sarah Jaffe
AlterNet | News Analysis
Dec. 28, 2011 - This year saw working people around the world begin to stand up and fight back. Ten organizers share their most inspiring moments from the U.S.'s year of action.
2011 will be remembered as the year the world woke up and began to fight back against a tiny minority that had held on to control-of money, of political power-for far too long.
Time Magazine named "The Protester" its person of the year, but the story is much deeper than that. Here in the US, the year began with despondency-a new class of Tea Party-supported legislators and governors were taking office around the country, and taking immediate steps to impose their anti-worker austerity agenda.
But the austerity class met resistance-first in Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker moved to take away workers' right to collective bargaining. The people in Wisconsin responded by occupying their Capitol building, kicking off a movement which spread through Ohio and Indiana, then seemed to subside before erupting in the fall with Occupy Wall Street.
But throughout the year, organizers were working around the country, fighting the power of Wall Street, big business, and the right-wing governors who do their bidding. We asked ten of them to talk about the moments that stood out for them this year, the moments that gave them hope. Some are moments you've heard of, some might have slipped past you. But all of them were signs of long-overdue change.
1. Melissa Ryan, New Media Director at New Organizing Institute - Wisconsin Leads the Fight Back
"For Wisconsin I think the big moment was when the 14 Democratic State Senators left the state [to avoid a vote on Walker's collective bargaining bill]. I really think that's what triggered the energy around the recall of the Senators, really triggered the energy around the recall of Walker. It changed from people taking to the streets because they didn't know what to do to really having the energy to change something.
All these years when we've been begging Democrats to stand up, and here were 14 people who not only not caved but who put everything on the line to defend worker's rights. It's been a year of moments, really in Wisconsin, but that's something that still inspires me a year later.
To me that was the lightning rod for everything."
2. Nelini Stamp, Working Families Party/Occupy Wall Street
"On September 16th I was in a meeting for a couple of hours about how the progressive left can change the narrative from cuts to economic inequality. The next day, little did I realize while I was sleeping on cardboard at Liberty Plaza, the national narrative would change. Occupy Wall Street has changed the narrative for the millions all over the country who have been suffering for a very long time."...(Click title for more)
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OWS & 2012: Spectacle vs. Counter-Spectacle
How Protests at the Conventions Will Change Our 'Politics-as-Usual'
By Matt Stoller
AlterNet.org
Dec. 30, 2011 - Every era has an iconic image, like a protester standing up to a tank in Tiananmen Square, a military officer shooting a handcuffed Vietnamese prisoner in the head at point-blank range, or the famous zeppelin Hindenburg crashing in flames. These images can end wars, destroy industries or memorialize a moment for a nation forever. The image speaks to us through its raw potency and ability to freeze an instant into a frame. It becomes iconic because it captures a particular cultural zeitgeist. These two elements - authenticity and timeliness - grant such images power.
In the autumn of 2011, a video of the casual pepper-spraying of peaceful student protesters at UC Davis by a police officer dressed in full paramilitary gear gave America a new iconic domestic political image. The video, posted on YouTube, immediately became a cultural sensation, showcasing the willingness of American security forces to use chemical weapons on peaceful Americans posing no physical threat. This iconic video didn't appear from thin air, but was preceded by months of organizing work and a network of tent cities set up around the country. It now stands as a visual accompaniment to linguistic innovation, the creation of a new language of 21st century depression: the 99% versus the 1%.
The message of these tent cities was simple: America is in a depression; do something! And elites did. They used pepper spray and military force to evict the protesters. The action was casual and detached, like an exterminator patiently ensuring he had sprayed enough cockroaches. The cavalier attitude among officials was nationwide. After clearing Zuccotti Park in a late-night paramilitary raid, Mayor Bloomberg later boasted that the police were his "private army" and that New York City has the seventh largest armed forces in the world.
That is why the video became iconic, that such a moment was frozen in time.
The Pepper-Spray Precursor
In 2008, in a similar episode, journalist Amy Goodman was arrested outside the Republican National Convention. The arresting officer didn't like that she was standing where she was standing, so he took her into custody. And he did it right in front of a video camera. This action became a widely circulated YouTube video that reached nearly a million views, and Goodman later won a large settlement against the police for her troubles. At both the Republican conventions and in the Occupy protests, constraining and arresting journalists was par for the course.
Yet this moment, a precursor to the Occupy arrests in the face of a para-militarized, federally funded local police force, catalyzed no lasting cultural resonance. The creativity of the activists and journalists in Minneapolis/St. Paul equaled that of the occupiers, with independent videographers at the Minnesota video journalist outfit the Uptake, anonymous Twitter feeds, and zombified protesters holding funny signs ("Zombies don't kill for oil" and "Brains not bombs"). Security in Minneapolis/St. Paul was provided by a quasi-military presence of men in wraparound sunglasses driving Humvees through a downtown cordoned off and divided into colored zones, funded by the federal government through a multi-million-dollar "anti-terrorism" grant. There were lavish parties funded by corporate lobbyists inside the convention area, attended by politicians, delegates and journalists. Meanwhile, protesters were constrained in official "Free Speech Zones" where the rabble were penned up to offer their meek chanting far from the earshot of the powerful. You couldn't find a better example of the 99% versus the 1%.
The creeping authoritarianism that has become part of the normal landscape of politics was on display in 2008, but that was the moment of hope, change and post-partisanship. Goodman's plight and what it revealed about the true nature of power in post-9/11 America and the chilling creation of paramilitary zones around our political conventions were left out of the narrative.
Captured Narratives
I remember that year of narrative-scrubbing well. It was everywhere, but particularly focused on then-nominee Barack Obama. Obama's neoliberal leanings in Illinois were well-understood. They showed via his pivotal support of Joe Lieberman in 2006, his participation in Bob Rubin's Hamilton Project, and his backing of the education privatization group Democrats for Education Reform. Most prominently he explicitly lied about his position on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the bill that immunized telecommunications companies from prosecution against illegal wiretapping. After pledging to oppose such a bill during the primary while under pressure from liberal voters, he voted for it after such pressure had lifted in the general.
Those parts of Obama's record were excluded from the liberal narrative so he could become a candidate of hope and change, and then execute the policy framework to protect the banks that had been the initial investors in his presidential ambitions. This wasn't particularly secretive, much as Goodman's arrest reached a million views on YouTube yet was broadly ignored by the press. It was part of what Jay Rosen calls the "sphere of deviance," or the "set of political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard."
A Different Kind of Year
There are signs that 2012 may be a different kind of year.
For starters, we can expect significant protests at the party conventions, and this time, I suspect the press will pay attention. Political conventions are the center of political discourse in America. From 1980 to 2008, stale, corporate political infomercials matched the stale, corporate political state of our politics. The lavish spreads of food and drink, the heavy credentialing and associated social climbing, VIP rooms within VIP rooms, hustlers, groupies, hacks and lobbyists, delegates and party regulars -- all of it will represent the dominance of the 1%. The two- to four-day festivals of scripted schwag-infested boredom will remain as stale as they always were, but the exciting bit, the real debates over how our culture will be organized, will be in the streets....(Click title for more)
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Books: One Thousand Nights in Solitude
The Prison Life of Marwan Barghouti
By Joseph Dana
Counterpunch via The National
Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza celebrated the return of their loved ones last Sunday as the final wave of prisoners were released in an exchange between Hamas and Israel. However, one prisoner was notably absent. Marwan Barghouti, the jailed Fatah leader known by many Palestinians as the "prince of resistance", remains behind bars in Israel despite promises from the Palestinian leadership that his freedom would be secured through the exchange of captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. On the eve of the prisoner swap, Barghouti released a 255-page book, written secretly behind bars and smuggled out via lawyers and family members, detailing his experience in Israeli jails.
Barghouti is a figure of towering reverence among Palestinians and even some Israelis, regardless of political persuasion. Yet, he was reluctant to begin a life in the political spotlight. In fact, the Israeli occupation came to him, his long-time friend Sa'ad Nimer noted during a long conversation in a dank Ramallah coffee shop. When Barghouti was just 15, living in the small village of Kober just outside Ramallah, Israeli soldiers shot his beloved dog during a military sweep of the village. From that moment on, Nimer said in a haze of nostalgia, the occupation was a personal issue for Barghouti.
A natural leader with admirable charisma and an unwavering hatred of Israeli occupation, Barghouti has been an active political leader since the early 1980s. At age 18, during one of his early stints in an Israeli prison for political organising, he was elected the prisoner representative, a task which required him to unify competing political affiliations of prisoners and negotiate with Israeli authorities. The appointment foreshadowed a long career of uniting Palestinians regardless of political agenda.
Despite his vocal support for the two-state solution and attempts at reconciliation with Israeli civil society, Barghouti has remained a puzzling and aggressive figure for Israel. "When Marwan got out of jail the second time [in 1982 at age 23], the Israelis did not know what to do with him," said Nimer, who is the director of the Free Marwan Baghouti Campaign based in Ramallah. In the early 1980s, Barghouti was a primary organiser in the Shabibia movement, a Fatah-based student group that campaigned for better education standards in Palestine. The movement, still active in the West Bank, was a primary organising vehicle of the First Intifada....(Click title for more)
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Why Isn't There a More Massive Climate Movement?
By Ted Glick
Grist Magazine
Dec. 29, 2011 - Eight years ago I decided that I needed to change my life. The reason? The late summer heat wave which hit Western Europe in August, 2003, leading to 30,000 or more deaths.
I knew about the issue of global warming before 2003. Indeed, in 2002, during a Green Party of New Jersey campaign for the U.S. Senate, it was one of my major issues. Prominent in my basic brochure was this statement: "Move towards energy independence, reverse global warming and create jobs through a crash program to get energy from the sun, the wind and other renewable fuels."
But it was that European heat wave that literally drove me to serious study about this issue, and by the end of the year I was convinced that the climate crisis was much more serious, much more imminent, than I had thought. Ever since, work in support of a renewable energy revolution has been my top priority.
There's no question but that today, compared to eight years ago, there is much more consciousness about and work on this most overarching and urgent of issues. As the climate crisis has led to stronger, more frequent and more destructive weather impacts-droughts, floods, powerful winds, rain and snow deluges, deadly hurricanes, huge tornadoes and more-so has it led to a stronger international climate movement. In 2010 there were 7,300 local actions in 188 countries around the world on the same 10/10/10 day of action organized by 350.org.
But the deeper truth is that, certainly in the United States, there is a disconnect between the urgency of this civilizational crisis and the response to it on the part of the broad progressive citizenry, those tens of millions of people who believe generally in human rights and fact-based decision-making. One recent example is the late summer and fall campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline. Although this was a victorious campaign, temporarily, the fact is that there were no more than 12,000 people at the biggest event of the campaign, the November 6th encircle-the-White-House demonstration....(Click title for more)
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Books: 'Black Like Me' Redux
Has It Really Been 50 years?
A Commemorative Collection
By AJOWA NZINGA IFATEYO
Geo.coop
Fifty years ago this November John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me stunned white America with a truth it did not want to see: a virulent, soul-killing racism against African people was rampant within this reputed "democracy."
In a bold and dangerous act, Griffin, a white man, darkened his skin to pass as a black man. Traveling throughout the South, he wanted to know for himself how it felt to be discriminated against. Black Like Me [1] is a shocking chronicle of his six- week experience riding public transportation, searching for work and living accommodations, and even something as basic as a restroom. The book is still an enlightening read today for people of all colors.
Griffin taught great lessons about racism in general, unconscious racism in particular, and even internalized racism (the acceptance of the racist belief of themselves by people of color) -way back then. (The lessons are often not "spelled out," but they are there in his narrative.) Because whites did not want to face up to the white supremacist nature of America 50 years ago - and for the most part still do not want to today, we are still at a very primitive stage of black-white relationships, and all other relationships.
In some ways, things have changed a lot for the better. For one, contemporary blacks do not have to contend, in most places, with the white "hate stare" that Griffin described. They can also dine or live wherever they want (provided they manage to have the money), and can even be President. However, in other ways, despite these important changes, the situation has gotten worse due to effects of structural and institutional racism-unemployment is believed to be 50% in places like Detroit, and 30% in parts of Washington, DC, while overall unemployment among blacks is 15-17%, twice that of whites; more than a million black men are in U.S. prisons, many economic gains have been reversed.[3] Blacks remain economically and politically powerless in a white supremacist culture....(Click title for more)
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Music: Woody Guthrie's Belated Welcome Home
 Oklahoma Keeps the Bittersweet Tradition of Honoring Prophets After Their Time
Bound for Local Glory at Last
By PATRICIA COHEN
New York Times
Dec 27, 2011 - TULSA, Okla. - Oklahoma has always had a troubled relationship with her native son Woody Guthrie. The communist sympathies of America's balladeer infuriated local detractors. In 1999 a wealthy donor's objections forced the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City to cancel a planned exhibition on Guthrie organized by the Smithsonian Institution. It wasn't until 2006, nearly four decades after his death, that the Oklahoma Hall of Fame got around to adding him to its ranks.
But as places from California to the New York island get ready to celebrate the centennial of Guthrie's birth, in 2012, Oklahoma is finally ready to welcome him home. The George Kaiser Family Foundation in Tulsa plans to announce this week that it is buying the Guthrie archives from his children and building an exhibition and study center to honor his legacy.
"Oklahoma was like his mother," said his daughter Nora Guthrie, throwing back her tangle of gray curls as she reached out in an embrace. "Now he's back in his mother's arms."
The archive includes the astonishing creative output of Guthrie during his 55 years. There are scores of notebooks and diaries written in his precise handwriting and illustrated with cartoons, watercolors, stickers and clippings; hundreds of letters; 581 artworks; a half-dozen scrapbooks; unpublished short stories, novels and essays; as well as the lyrics to the 3,000 or more songs he scribbled on scraps of paper, gift wrap, napkins, paper bags and place mats. Much of the material has rarely or never been seen in public, including the lyrics to most of the songs. Guthrie could not write musical notation, so the melodies have been lost. ...(Clck title 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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