Interview with CCDS's Carl Davidson at the Left Forum 2012
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Commenting on Obama, the nature of the university, Democrats, and ending wars
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Dialogue & Initiative 2012 The new annual edition of our journal of discussion and analysis is now out. More than 130 pages, it includes 13 articles related to the Occupy! movement, as well as seven others vital to study in this election year. Cost is $10 plus shipping. Or get one by becoming a new member or sustainer. Click the title to buy it directly.
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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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By Randy Shannon, CCDS
"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
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...In a new and updated 2nd Edition
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 |
Shades of Justice
An antiwar political history
by Paul KrehbielAutumn Leaf Press
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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...
 Upsurge vs. Legalized
Lynching in Our Time
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...
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Walking While Black:
Trayvon Martin's Fatal Short-cut
By Jay D. Jurie
The Rag Blog
March 22, 2012, SANFORD, Florida -- During the intermission of the NBA All-Star Game on February 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin of Miami, who was staying at the condominium of his father's fiance in Sanford's Retreat at Twin Lakes gated community, decided to visit the nearby 7-11.
Shortly after 7 p.m., 28-year-old self-appointed neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman called the Sanford Police Department on a non-emergency line to report a "suspicious person" who "looked like he was up to no good" in the neighborhood.
Shortly thereafter, several residents called 911 to report a disturbance and gunfire. After police were dispatched at 7:17 p.m., they arrived to find Martin face-down on the ground, with a gunshot wound to the chest, and apart from a pack of Skittles candy and a can of Arizona ice tea he'd purchased at the convenience store, he was unarmed. Martin was pronounced dead at 7:30 p.m.
That he was African-American, wearing a hoodie, and walking after dark in a neighborhood where he had every right to be constitutes the only evidence Martin was a "suspicious person." A junior in high school, math was his favorite subject, and he earned A's and B's. He played on the high school football team, was studying to be an engineer, was interested in flying, and attended flying school part time. Martin had no criminal record nor any history of violence.
Police found Zimmerman standing nearby with a 9mm handgun in his waistband, a bloody nose, blood on the back of his head, and grass on the back of his shirt. Zimmerman admitted at the scene that he had shot Martin.
Although Zimmerman, a Hispanic of stocky build, had no extensive criminal record, he did have previous run-ins with the law. In 2005 he was involved in a bar incident that included the use of profanity and was charged with resisting arrest. Entering a pre-trial diversion program, he avoided conviction.
That same year, domestic abuse injunctions were cross-filed by Zimmerman and his then-girlfriend. In 2008, he was involved in a court dispute that involved non-payment of credit card debt. Since that time, Zimmerman had enrolled in community college criminal justice classes, and had expressed an interest in becoming a police officer. At the time of the Feb. 26 shooting, Zimmerman's occupation was unknown
He possessed a concealed weapons permit and was "patrolling" the neighborhood in an SUV when he spotted Martin.
According to the National Neighborhood Watch Manual (2010), "[Neighborhood] patrol members should be trained by law enforcement. It should be emphasized to members that they do not possess police powers and they shall not carry weapons... Members should never confront suspicious persons who could be armed and dangerous."
There is no evidence that Zimmerman had ever received any training that might qualify him to serve as an effective neighborhood watch volunteer and he explicitly disregarded the imperatives not to carry a weapon and not to confront persons.
Self-appointed Sanford neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman is seen in a 2005 police mug shot provided by the Orange County, Fla., Jail.
Several news outlets have reported that Zimmerman had contacted Sanford Police 46 times within the past 15 months. In a previous encounter, Zimmerman alleged that someone had spat at him. After he called police on February 26 and disclosed that he was following Martin, the tape reveals the dispatcher told him "you don't need to be doing that."
Zimmerman is also clearly heard on that tape saying "these assholes, they always get away." Allegations have been raised that after saying "they always get away" barely audibly he said "fucking coons," but there is dispute as to whether he said that, or if -- in versions of the tape publicly released by Sanford Police -- that had been erased....(Click title for more)
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Trayvon Martin & the Deadly Legacy of Vigilantism
Author Koritha Mitchell giving a lecture at Indiana University with image of Ida B. Wells in the background. Photo: Courtesy of Koritha Mitchell
By Jamilah King
Colorlines.com
The unprovoked killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin has sparked widespread national outrage, particularly among black Americans. The particulars of the case are, at best, tragic, and at worst, horrifying: Martin was visiting a friend of his father's in a small gated community outside of Orlando, sporting a gray hoodie and armed with a pack of Skittles and a can of iced tea. Along the way he became a target of nearby resident George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old member of the local Neighborhood Watch, who thought the teen looked "suspicious." Zimmerman then shot and killed Martin-and, so far, it's been with legal impunity, protected in part by Florida's expansive definition of self-defense.
For many observers, Zimmerman's vigilantism exists in a long and deadly history for black Americans in the United States, one that dates at least as far back as the country's lynching epidemic of the early 20th century. Over 4,700 lynchings occurred in the United States between 1887 and 1968, and the vast majority of them-an estimated 3,446-were black. Many of the victims were black men accused of raping white women and were often burned and maimed in front of large mobs of white onlookers.
living_lynching_book.jpgKoritha Mitchell, an English professor at the Ohio State University, takes an unusual approach to tackling this history in her new book, "Living With Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930." Her goal was to recount the ways in which black folks told their own stories of heartbreak and survival after the brutal lynchings. In it, she focuses on early 20th century black playwrights including Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina Weld Grimke, Mary Burrill, and Georgia Douglas Johnson.
Mitchell spoke with Colorlines.com about the significance of the plays, the dangers of black success, and the moments throughout history - like this one - where community dialogue becomes a crucial point for communities of color.
The history of lynching in the U.S is really horrific and painful for a lot of black Americans. Why was it important for you to tell this story, in particular?
As painful as it is, we have not necessarily shied away from it - which I think is a good thing. One of the ways we haven't shied away from it is through our support of and our facing it through the "Without Sanctuary" exhibition - those gruesome lynching photographs which had a stint at the Martin Luther King, Jr. center in Atlanta. That was one of the bigger moments where people really remarked upon how much black families were coming to it and using it as a way to grieve losses through generations.
What I found is that by using those photographs only as our way of trying to grapple with what lynching meant in our nation's history, we really did ourselves a disservice. We weren't able to engage with what black people who survived this violence had left us in terms of understanding what the violence meant.
The "Without Sanctuary" photographs are a big reason of why it was important for me to tell the story through the lynching plays because the lynching plays tells us exactly what the photographs cannot tell us because the photographs are from a white perspective. You needed to be somewhat safe at the lynching to take those photographs. You've got this isolated black victim surrounded by a mob of righteous-looking whites and that is all that we knew about lynching. But the construction of those photographs is very specific: it's to make sure that you think this was an isolated man who didn't have any connection to community. The plays give us a sense of just how connected to community and family those victims were....(Click title for more)
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What OWS Should Do Now:
Out of the Parks, Into the Mainstream
By Danny Schechter
Huffington Post
March 22, 2012 - For years, in the last century, when I was in school and learning about the early days of journalism, we were taught that author Horace Greeley, who founded the New York Herald Tribune, was famous for saying, "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country."
One problem, as we learned recently, is that he may not have coined the phrase but only popularized it. (Another media mistake involving a top dog in the media!) Indiana newspaper writer John Soule may have given the advice in 1851, and it would serve as the mantra for 19th century "action" in the form of Westward migration.
These days, those good and great men and women who won their struggle stripes in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements have a new mantra for action.
Some, who recently appeared at New York's annual Left Forum, were sharing it with younger people, "Go Left."
They would probably agree with Mitt Romney who said recently he can't think of any reason for any young person to support a Democrat -- but for different reasons.
Those who are going left have left the Democrats behind.
Even Bruce Springsteen, who campaigned for President Obama and played at his inauguration, is singing a different tune these days.
He recently told a Music festival in Texas about the first songs he loved. "They were a revelation... the first records of full-blown class consciousness I ever heard," he explained, playing a bit of "We Gotta Get Out of This Place." After reaching the line, "There's a better life for me and you," he added:
That's every song I've ever written. That's all of them. I'm not kidding, either. "Born to Run." "Born in the USA." Everything I've done for the past 40 years, including all the new ones... That was the first time I felt I heard something cross the radio that mirrored my home life, my childhood.
Many of today's more conscious young people seem to be gravitating not into traditional radical class consciousness, but into the ranks of the Occupy Movement, even as the movement's main tactic seems stuck on liberating public space, not on organizing youth or other communities.
Their philosophy of "horizontalism" has been effective in inspiring young activists because of its small "d" democratic and participatory ethic.
Yet this process, to many, seems more important than the product or result. Propelling an "action faction" or camping as a community is not the same thing as challenging power or remaking it.
Clashes with the police play right into their hands when the story becomes one of confrontation, not of pursuing a clear political agenda. The media's love of "when it bleeds, it leads" is well known. (click title for more)
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Testing: Our Schools As Educational Plantations?
By Mark Naison
With a Brooklyn Accent via Alternet
March 23, 2012 - This is a strange time to be involved in education. Either those shaping education policy on the state and federal level -- many of whom have never been teachers -- are incapable of imagining the consequences of their policies in actual classrooms, or they are cynically trying to destroy public education in the United States.
No better example of this is the now widely practiced policy of rating teachers based on student test scores, and using variations in those scores, through the "value added" formula, as the basis for determining teachers professional standing. All throughout the nation teachers are being told that if they don't raise student test scores, they could lose their tenure, lose their jobs, and in some places be publicly humiliated as an "incompetent teachers." If they work in a high poverty school, their school could be closed and their entire teaching staff fired.
While this performance based model may make sense in a business environment, it can have dangerous consequences in a class room, especially in high poverty schools. When teachers are told they can lose their jobs if they don't get students to perform well on standardized tests, it puts them in an adversarial relationship with young people who are often wounded, needy, and in desperate need of individual attention. Nowhere is this tension more manifest than in the community [where] I have the deepest connection to people working in the public schools: the Bronx.
Yesterday, I received the following email from a retired teacher involved in teacher training and mentoring:
"I was just talking to close friend who works in PS 33 Bx. Jerome, near Fordham. He told me of three young teachers crying, saying they couldn't take it any more. One was taken away in an ambulance with panic attack. This is why we have to speak out."
I wish I could say this situation was idiosyncratic. But last spring, one of my former students, a brilliant young English teacher at a Bronx high school, left her job because she couldn't stand the pressure to achieve results on standardized tests in the face of the overwhelming personal issues her students confronted. When she told her students that she was going, one wrote, "Why do the best ones always leave."
Tough luck you might say. These young people clearly aren't suited to be teachers in the new standards and performance based environment we are creating.
But you can only say that, I contend, if you don't know the young people in Bronx schools. Many come emotionally wounded, some are hungry (literally), others are sleep deprived, many have language issues due to their recent immigrant status. All can learn, but some need special help in acquiring skills, and others, many others, need emotional support and nurturing. In this setting, abstract discipline universally imposed rarely works; multiple strategies based on individual relationships with children are required, reinforced by activities and relationships that extend outside the classroom.... (Click title for more)
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Occupations: New Labor Militancy on the Rise
Worker 'Occupations' in Three States Yield Successes, but Counterattack Begins
Worker 'Occupation' in West Virgina
By Mike Elk
Progressive America Rising via In These Times
March 13, 2012 - In the last few months, workers in three different states-at the Serious Materials factory in Chicago, at a Century Aluminum factory in Ravenswood, West Va., and at AT&T's regional headquarters in Atlanta-have engaged in "occupations" that quickly produced small results for those workers. These actions-one an actual factory occupation, the other two highly visible encampments outside company facilities-have underscored the enormous potential of direct action to give workers leverage in negotiating with employers.
But just as Congress quickly outlawed the type of auto industry sit-down strikes that were so effective during the 1930s, anti-union groups are now advocating measures to counteract the success of these recent protests. The backlash has begun: Last week, a Georgia State Senate Committee passed [4] SB 469, which would ban picketing outside of the home of CEOs and give a company the right to ask a judge to force protesters-whether union or nonunion-to stop picketing outside of any business.
If these members do not stop picketing after a judge's order, the courts could fine individuals $1,000 a day. Any organization or union that sponsored the protests would be fined $10,000 a day. The bill could severely limit the ability of unions and other groups to bring aggressive anti-union employer actions to the public's attention.
Three actions, with varying successes
Last month, workers in Chicago made headlines [5] for occupying their plant for a second time to protest its abrupt closing (the first time was in December 2008, when it was operated by the Republic Windows and Doors company). Workers there won a short-term victory when the owner of the plant agreed to keep the plant open for 90 days and help the workers search for another buyer of the plant.
At around the same time, a group of retired United Steelworker union members had been camping out on a median strip in front of the shuttered Century Aluminum plant (the union calls it an "occupation"). Veterans of the famous early 1990s Ravenswood lockout-now in their 60s, 70s and even 80s-protested the company's move to cut off retiree healthcare benefits. (To learn more about the famous 1990s Ravenswood lockout, I highly recommend Kate Bronfenbrenner and Tom Juravich's book Ravenswood: The Steelworkers' Victory and the Revival of American Labor).
In February 2009, Century Aluminum had shut down the plant, laying off 651 workers. Then in January 2011, Century Aluminum told its retirees that it would end all retiree healthcare-even for those not old enough to qualify for Medicare.
After learning that Century Aluminum was seeking $20 million from the state of West Virginia to re-open the smelter in Ravenswood, retirees-inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement-decided to occupy the space in front of the plant to make it known that they wouldn't let it be re-opened until their healthcare benefits were reinstated. They camped out from mid-December to last Friday.
The public action attracted attention to the actions of Century Aluminum. West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin announced that if the company wanted to re-open the plant it had to first restore healthcare benefits. Last Thursday, the company announced a deal [6] with the union in which they would restore retiree benefits to all workers.
"It is notable that the retiree committee, with support from politicians in their state and local community, were able to come together with the company to find a solution for an increasingly difficult issue across America," said United Steelworkers International Vice President Tom Conway in a press release [7]. "It's a settlement that will work for our retirees by giving them some stability and decent levels of health care coverage."
600 miles to the south, in Atlanta, AT&T workers continue to protest on the sidewalk in front of the company's headquarters. The "occupation" by Communication Workers of America (CWA) union members and Occupy activists began on February 13, after AT&T announced it would lay off 740 workers in the Southeast and likely shift the union work out to nonunion contractors. (Click title for more)
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21st Century Socialism and Cooperatives:
By Marce Cameron
SolidarityEconomy.net via GreenLeft Weekly
March 11, 2012 - Cuban President Raul Castro has urged the Caribbean nation's citizens to contribute to a free and frank debate on the future of Cuba's socialist project.
For the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), the aim of this debate is twofold: to strive for consensus on a new Cuban model of socialist development and to empower Cuba's working people to implement what has been decided.
In other words, to advance a socialist renewal process in the face of entrenched opposition from within the administrative apparatus.
It is first and foremost a debate about the economy. A draft policy document, the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines, was submitted to a national debate for three months before to its adoption by the Sixth PCC Congress in April last year.
The core principles and objectives of the draft were conserved, but the final version of the Guidelines was substantially modified on the basis of this public debate.
The PCC said total attendance at the 163,000 local debates held in workplaces, study centers and neighborhoods was about 8.9 million, with many people attending more than one.
More than three million interventions were noted and grouped into 781,000 opinions, about half of which were reflected in the final document. A summary detailing each modification and its motivation, and the number of interventions in favour, was published after the congress.
The Guidelines is not a theoretical document. The government commission responsible for overseeing its implementation has been charged with drafting, as Castro put it, "the integral theoretical conceptualization of the Cuban socialist economy".
Rather, the Guidelines is a set of principles and objectives that point to a new Cuban socialist-oriented economic model.
Yet implicit in them is a reconception of the socialist-oriented society in Cuba's conditions.
Transitional society
The ultimate objective of the socialist revolution is a global classless society in which technology enables minimal human labour to produce goods and services, allowing these to be freely distributed to satisfy people's rational needs.
Socially owned, this system of production would free everyone from the compulsion to work for others. It would allow a flowering of the human personality that is stunted by capitalist exploitation and alienation, both of which are embodied in the capitalist market.
What blocks this transition is not a lack of technology, but private ownership of most productive wealth and the class rule of the corporate rich over society.
The transition from capitalism to socialism is marked by tension between planning and the market. Democratic planning to meet social needs first becomes increasingly dominant, then ultimately the sole determinant of economic activity. ...(Click title for more)
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Book Review: 'Who Killed Che?
 Democracy Now! Report and Interview
Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith are the co-authors of a new book about the U.S. role in the killing of Cuban revolutionary, Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
Born in Argentina in 1928, Che rose to international prominence as one of the key leaders of the 1959 Cuban Revolution that overthrew U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. After a period in the new Cuban government leadership, Che aimed to spark revolutionary activity internationally. On October 8, 1967, he was captured by Bolivian troops working with the CIA. He was executed one day later.
 | | "Who Killed Che? How CIA Got Away With Murder": Book Ties Johnson Admin to Guevara's Death |
In their book, "Who Killed Che?" Ratner and Smith draw on previously unpublished government documents to argue the CIA played a critical role in the killing. "The line of the [U.S.] government was that the Bolivians did it, we couldn't do anything about it. That's not true," Smith said. "This whole operation was organized out of the White House by Walt Whitman Rostow. And the CIA, by this time, had become a paramilitary organization."
On Che's significance, Ratner says Che became "a symbol for revolutionary change... He still remains, of course, that today. If you go to Occupy Wall Street, if you go to Tahrir Square, you will see people who are wearing Che T-shirts, because they understand that their obligation, their necessity, is to take on the 1 percent. And that's what Che was about. And that's why I think he remains such a hero for people in the streets today." (Click title for more)
Michael Steven Smith, co-author of Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away with Murder. He is New York City-based attorney and a board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Michael Ratner, co-author of Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away with Murder. He is president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City and past president of the National Lawyers Guild.
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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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