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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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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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...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...
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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...
 Student Debt Bondage and the Politics of 2012
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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Wall Street-Inflated Student Debt Bubble
Hits $1 Trillion; Debtors Rally for Relief
By Sarah Jaffe
AlterNet.org
April 24, 2012 - You could call it a bubble, but it's more like a ball and chain. Bubbles are, after all, light and airy.
The collective weight of American student debt is now over $1 trillion, and that weight is a drag not just on those paying the debt, but on our entire economy. It's hard to calculate exactly, because the lenders are notoriously unwilling to hand over their data, and with students defaulting at ever-higher rates, interest rates and fees are always changing, adding constantly to the weight of the burden college graduates (and those who didn't graduate but still have to pay off the loans they took out in more hopeful times) carry.
Around the country, activists are marking the date with actions; in New York, a rally and march will be the centerpiece of what the Occupy Student Debt Campaign has dubbed 1-T day; the day the amount of debt we're carrying to pay for our education officially got too big to bear silently. The rallies aim to end the isolation that debtors often feel, to bring people together to understand that the problem they have is shared by millions of others-and that it calls for political solutions.
"I think that we in America have become so separated from one another, partially due to this debt," Pam Brown, an organizer with the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, told AlterNet. "The debt makes us very individual; we can't afford to help someone else, we can't afford to spend our time in a way that's not productive."
How did we get here, with more student debt than credit card debt, with student loans rising twice as fast as mortgage debt at the height of the housing bubble? Recent graduates face terrifying unemployment numbers-ThinkProgress reported that over half of all college grads under the age of 25 are either jobless or underemployed and median wages for grads with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000-and delinquencies on debt is steadily climbing. (Click title for more)
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Politics as Strategy, and as Self-Expression
My Frustration with the Left when It Comes to Electoral Politics
By Bill Fletcher
Progressive America Rising via Organizing Upgrade
I was recently asked to participate on a panel regarding the Left and electoral politics. I declined. For many people this may seem strange since I have been a very strong proponent of the Left looking at electoral politics strategically. Well, that is all true but I have encountered a problem and maybe you can help me resolve it.
Most Left "debates" on electoral politics take a very predictable route. It looks something like this:
Electoral politics will not bring about socialism and freedom. The Democrats have consistently sold us out. They are the party of the rich. The Republicans and the Democrats are two wings of the same evil bird of prey. We need an alternative. Therefore, either:
Abstain from electoral politics and wait till the masses, in their millions rise up against capitalism, or... Create a pure, anti-corporate (if not anti-capitalist) third party right now and start running in elections even if we do not have a snow-ball's chance in hell of winning.
What I have found striking about this line of thought, and the so-called debates that unfold around it, is that they are actually un-political and lack any sort of concrete analysis.
Let's be clear so that we do not have a needless exchange. Electoral politics under democratic capitalism will not result in our freedom. Second, the Democrats are not the party of the working class. So, now that we have that out of the way, what do we do?
Electoral politics is a field of struggle. It is an arena. On that arena, however, we on the Left can do two things: participate in the struggle for popular power and raise issues that have the possibility of gaining greater attention. Much of the Left focuses on the latter and ignores the former. Many who focus on the struggle for power, however, abdicate being Left altogether. Therein exists the challenge. (Click title for more)
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Generational Politics: Youth as a Critical Force
In These Times Looks at 'The Port Huron Statement': Still Radical at 50
A half-century after the Students for a Democratic Society adopted their seminal manifesto, 14 activists-including three people who helped shape the statement-assess its legacy.
BY Port Huron Respondents
'We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.'
The 14 respondents include:
Tom Hayden, Carl Davidson, Cole Stangler, Paul Booth, Frida Berrigan, Teresa Cheng, Todd Gitlin, Sady Doyle, James Thindwa, Micah Uetricht, Mickey Flacks, Maria Elena Sifuentes, Brittney Gault, Bill Ayers
For five days in June 1962, members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) gathered at a UAW camp near Port Huron, Mich., for the group's first national convention. The result was The Port Huron Statement: a 25,700-word manifesto that articulated the fundamental problems of American society and laid out a radical vision for a better future. It marked a seminal moment in the development of the New Left.
Today, the Occupy movement has lit a match not unlike the one struck at Port Huron. To mark the 50th anniversary of Port Huron-and what we hope is the dawn of an enduring youth movement-In These Times asked 14 activists, ranging in age from 21 to 72, including three people who attended the Port Huron convention, to reflect on what that statement offers us today. Their responses follow, preceded by the portion of the statement they found significant. -The Editors
Carl Davidson: "Our Identity as a New Left"
"We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit."
This simple but eloquent assertion is what drew me. It defined politics as generational, and given that we were the leading edge of what was being described as the "baby boom" - of coming-of-age youth - we were more generationally conscious than most. The "silenced generation" of the 1950s stood between us and the labor-oriented politics of the 1930s and the popular front politics of the early 1940s. McCarthyism had separated us from deeper roots, leaving us with our own forms of cultural alienation and revolt - the Beat Generation, crossing the color line, the emergence of rock 'n' roll - to help shape our identity as a New Left.
Carl Davidson, 68, an activist based in Pittsburgh, was vice president and national secretary of SDS from 1966 to 1968.
Cole Stangler: "The Obama Generation"
"It has been said that our liberal and socialist predecessors were plagued by vision without program, while our own generation is plagued by program without vision. All around us there is astute grasp of method, technique-the committee, the ad hoc group, the lobbyist, that hard and soft sell, the make, the projected image-but, if pressed critically, such expertise is incompetent to explain its implicit ideals."
I've been told countless times that the era of mass movements, systemic critiques and utopian vision have long passed. Politics, as Francis Fukuyama told us, has been reduced to "economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands." In many ways, the dilemma of "program without vision" rings perhaps even truer for my generation than for those SDSers who gathered in eastern Michigan 50 years ago.
Many of us came of age politically during the Obama campaign. It's safe to say that the president's actions during his first three years in office have confirmed that "hope" and "change" were less emblems of a lofty long-term vision than mere slogans, tools for winning an election.
The Occupy movement is, in many ways, the maturation of the Obama generation. At its core, politics has always been about vision. Reducing it to mere electoral machination and ritual is a fallacy that my generation, like Tom Hayden's, must challenge.
Cole Stangler, 21, is a former In These Times intern and a junior at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. (Click title for more)
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A Good Problem to Have?
A Practical Guide to Co-option
 By Jonathan Matthew Smucker
Published in Occupy! #4. Occupy! is an OWS-inspired Gazette
April 26, 2012 - Almost immediately after a small band of activists first occupied Zuccotti Park in September of last year, many in the movement started expressing concern about potential co-option by more established and moderate forces.
These concerns have become more central in 2012, an election year. Wariness is certainly warranted. But angst about an over-generalized sense of co-option may be an even bigger problem. We cannot build a large-scale social movement capable of achieving big changes without the involvement of long-standing broad-based institutions. OWS should actively and strategically forge relationships with many of these institutions, while preserving the role of OWS as an "outsider" force.
Good problem to have
In the wake of the initial successes of Occupy Wall Street, establishment Democrats-including the White House-started clamoring to figure out how to ride the anti-Wall Street populist wave. Some Democratic Party strategists asked what electoral use they might get out of the new movement. Judd Legum of the Center for American Progress (CAP) told the New York Times in early October that "Democrats are already looking for ways to mobilize protesters in get-out-the-vote drives for 2012."
The hypocrisy of a party that is deeply in the pocket of Wall Street trying to ride an anti-Wall Street surge was widely ridiculed. Salon's Glenn Greenwald scoffed at efforts "to exploit these protests into some re-branded Obama 2012 crusade and to convince the protesters to engage in civil disobedience and get arrested all to make themselves the 2012 street version of OFA [Organizing For America]." Greenwald was right, and was echoing a widespread sentiment inside Zuccotti Park and the other occupations around the country. Very few of the committed folks sacrificing time, safety, and comfort to make the occupations and street protests happen are going to switch uncritically into re-elect Obama mode. (Click title for more)
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France's Left Front Hopes to 'Reinvent' Left
The far-left alliance has never before competed in a presidential race, but is helping forge a new European alternative.
By Yasmine Ryan
Al-Jazeera
Paris, France - The bid of Jean-Luc Melenchon for the French presidency, while ultimately unsuccessful, has given the Left Front, an alliance of far-left parties, massive visibility in France.
The Left Front's candidate won fewer votes than was widely expected, after opinion polls suggested he could sway as many as 16 or 17 per cent of voters.
Nonetheless, with the leftist coalition's candidate's score of 11.1 per cent, placing him in fourth place out of some ten candidates, the far-left has managed to reassert itself and regain a place in the political conversation of the nation.
Al Jazeera's Yasmine Ryan spoke with the Left Front's Raquel Garrido, a longtime ally of Melenchon. Along with Melenchon, Garrido also quit the French Socialist Party in late 2008 to take part in the new movement.
Yasmine Ryan: You left the Socialist Party right when the financial crisis was beginning. Did that crisis help trigger the group's decision to leave the Socialists?
 Raquel Garrido: It helped, it's true, because we knew that times were going to get harder and that the left needed to face the speculative attacks and the financial crisis with a harsher standpoint than that which the Socialist Party, and Social Democrats in general in Europe, were ready to take.
But we actually did start thinking about leaving the Socialist Party before, a long time ago. We first started questioning our strategy when we started seeing in Latin America left-wing governments coming into power, but not with your traditional Social Democrat party.
To the contrary, most of those experiences - in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia - were being triggered by new parties. New political instruments that were organised outside of Social Democratic, left-wing, traditional parties. (Click title for more)
And the methods they were employing were radical, whether it be in their fight against the IMF, or whether it be in the means of remobilising their societies through constitutional assemblies. (Click title for more)
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From Folk to Folk Rock and Onward: Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs and Folk Music's Westward Drift
By Noel Murray
A.V. Club
April 18, 2012 - In the early 1950s, during one of the periodic booms in popularity for traditional folk music in the United States, Pete Seeger was in one of the biggest groups going, The Weavers.
Then Seeger was tagged as a communist, and placed on the unofficial "blacklist" by radio, film, and TV executives-where he remained for the next decade, even after the McCarthy era faded and folk music resurged.
By 1960, Seeger was supporting himself by touring steadily and stealthily, performing "community concerts" on college campuses and elsewhere.
This week, Smithsonian Folkways released The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960, a nearly two-hour recording of one of those Seeger gigs. It's a superlative example of Seeger's approach to folk music, which is at once pedagogical and participatory. Seeger was never like one of those professors who passes out syllabi and writes each day's lesson plan on the whiteboard; he was more the kind who wanders in a few minutes late, starts talking extemporaneously about the ritual chanting of South American tribespeople, and then gets the entire class to start singing in unison before they've fully grasped what's happening.
That's also a fair description of what happened in the contagious, uncontrolled Greenwich Village folk scene of the early '60s. Goosed in part by Seeger's evangelizing, young people around the world began to pick up banjos and acoustic guitars, and many of them migrated to New York City, where they could make a few bucks playing in coffeehouses while shlepping their original songs around to publishing companies.
Unlike the more clean-cut likes of The Weavers and The Kingston Trio, the newcomers were scruffier and more competitive; raised on R&B and rock 'n' roll, they kept one eye on Woody Guthrie and one on Elvis Presley. During the pre-Beatles years when popular music seemed capable of shifting at any moment to yet another trend, folk music briefly became so popular that ABC even aired a weekly folk-themed variety show, Hootenanny, filmed at the kind of college campuses that Seeger had taken by storm a few years earlier. (Seeger, of course, wasn't allowed to appear on Hootenanny because of the blacklist, and some of folk's biggest names boycotted the show in solidarity, though Seeger always encouraged his protégés to participate, insisting that anything that helped popularize folk was welcome.)
The biggest star to emerge from the early-'60s Greenwich scene was of course Bob Dylan, whose combination of talent, charisma, and opportunism helped him outpace his contemporaries, including friendly (and sometimes not-so-friendly) rival Phil Ochs. While Dylan was more overtly Guthrie-ish in his overall persona, Ochs tended to be more like Seeger, with his sweet voice and passion for political songs. Dylan once famously said to Ochs, "You're not a folksinger... you're a journalist," and was known to rib Ochs for writing so many specific songs about civil rights and the Vietnam War. But Ochs' keen intellect and focused outrage made him a cult favorite, and his early albums All The News That's Fit To Sing and I Ain't Marching Anymore became touchstones for the rising generation of activists.
As the decade progressed, though, the biggest issue dividing folkies was whether they were committed to the message first and foremost, or to the music. Dylan adapted as necessary. He openly swiped tunes from old folk songs, and even arrangements from his peers-neither of which were uncommon practices-and when his songs began making their way into the repertoires of pop, soul, country, and rock artists, Dylan "went electric" himself, scandalizing some of the purists who felt he'd sold out the movement.
Ochs wasn't one of those purists. He coveted Dylan's fame, and signed on with Dylan's manager for a time, until he realized he'd always be a lower priority. Then in 1967, as the Village was being overwhelmed by druggies and opportunists (similar to what happened to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco), Ochs switched labels from Elektra to A&M, and moved to California to remake himself as a folk-rocker. (Click title for more)
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Socialist Party History in West Virginia
New Book: Working Class Radicals
By Ben Adducchio
W VA Public Broadcasting
April 25, 2012 ˇ The word "socialist" brings to mind many - sometimes not too flattering - ideas and opinions. A new book about the history of that political party in West Virginia is now out.
 Fred Barkey is the author of the book "Working Class Radicals: The Socialist Party in West Virginia, 1898-1920."
Barkey is the founder of the West Virginia Labor Association and professor emeritus of Marshall University.
In the book, Barkey examines how the party became popular in the state at the end of the 19th century to its eventual decline after the First World War.
Barkey says the party got its state roots in the Wheeling area.
"Although you have these national figures, really it's local Socialists who do most of the leg work. They are people as industrialism really begins to take hold in this state. They are drawn in here, who come into the state and bring more than their skill. They also bring ideas," he said.
In 1910, Socialists in local communities elected candidates to office.
In the 1912 Presidential election, more than 15 thousand people voted for the Socialist Presidential candidate, Eugene Debs - a famous Socialist - who ran for President several times.
Debs visited West Virginia frequently and even served time at West Virginia State Penitentiary at Moundsville for a time.
"He played a significant role, particularly up North, in the Wheeling area. He came in there quite early in the late 1890s, to assist in the coal strike, and while he's there, he's in there making connections quite early," Barkey said.
"A lot of people are converted to Socialism upon hearing Debs; he's one of these charismatic speakers."
Members of the Socialist Party were from various lines of work: miners, farmers, glassblowers, even bartenders.
Barkey says there is no typical caricature that can describe a Socialist of the time.
"The Socialist Party is not a monolithic thing; it's made up of component parts, so that you can find a modestly interesting variety of people who are Socialists," Barkey said.
"You would find small business people, middle class people, and yet they were Socialists. In fact there's a couple of writers on Socialism generally in the United States who maintain really party was based on disaffected middle class people," he said, "who didn't like the system and who sort of more or less dropped out and decided they would be the champions of the working people."
But by World War I, support began to wane for the party.
The Socialist Party was anti-war. Barkey says American involvement toward the end of the war had a direct influence on the party's decline.
"Once America is threatened, it seems to me that that has a tendency to make a lot of them say well; we've got to put aside these almost sectarian ideas, and get on the Uncle Sam bandwagon," he said.
The book is published by West Virginia University Press.
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Become a CCDS member today!
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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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