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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: 
News and analysis from Mike Klonsky on corporate school reform and the privatization of public education
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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 Martin Ford CreateSpace
Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future
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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...
CCDS Discussion |
Sex and the Automobile in the Jazz Age
By Peter Ling in History Today: 'Brothels on wheels' thundered the moralists but Peter Ling argues the advent of mass motoring in the 1920s was only one of the changes in social and group relationships that made easier the pursuit of carnal desire.
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 A Memoir of the 1960s by Paul KrehbielAutumn Leaf Press, $25.64 | | Shades of Justice Video: Bringing Down a President, Ending a War |
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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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Voices from the Underground Press of the 1960s, Part 2- Foreword by Susan Brownmiller
- Preface by Ken Wachsberger
$37.50 + $6 shipping
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 November 2012: Getting Deeper into It
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 defend voter rights, 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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Only an insecure and ideologically bankrupt party has to game the rules to stay in power
By Steven Rosenfeld
Alternet.org
July 31, 2012 - As the 2012 presidential campaign takes a breather, we need to consider why today's Republicans are no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt or Richard Nixon, but instead a truly toxic aberration.
As James Fallows noted [3] a year ago in the Atlantic, the modern GOP's biggest sin is discarding "political norms" that everyone once understood would hurt the country-such as not paying [4] 74,000 federal air traffic controllers and construction workers to attack labor unions, a drama that played out last August.
Since then the GOP's bad behavior has only worsened. In the introduction to their recent book, It's Even Worse Than It Appears, centrists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote [5], "However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier-ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
Anyone who has been around a child throwing a temper tantrum would recognize the hallmarks of today's congressional Republican leadership: threats and bullying, finger-pointing, and running to his room and slamming the door. It's so transparent and it raises a basic question: what are they so afraid of? The answer is clear-losing power and influence in American politics and culture.
Today's Republicans cannot compete fairly and win. And when it comes to political tactics, there are three things today's GOP fears more than almost anything: majority votes in the U.S. Senate; national and state elections where all eligible citizens can vote; and revealing and standing by their top political donors in public.
Why do GOP partisans fear these three things? Because without gaming the rules in Congress, without limiting who votes in state and national elections, and without hiding their patrons from the American people, they know they'd lose-and lose badly....(Click title for more)
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Rally for Defense of Voting Rights in Harrisburg, PA
By Stephanie Luce and Saulo Colon
Organizing Upgrade, May 2012
Bob Wing wrote a useful and thought-provoking Organizing Upgrade piece on an inside-outside electoral strategy for the Left. Along with a post by Bill Fletcher (and following his "It's Time for the Left to get Serious" talk to Young Democratic Socialists), these pieces articulate an urgent challenge to the Left.
In light of not just the upcoming Obama election, but the Galloway win in England and the 3rd place finish of Le Pen versus two strong Left candidates, it is clear that the Left needs to discuss electoral strategies and not just whether it should have strategy (or not) in order to further social justice.
However, while we appreciate much of what they suggest, we feel Wing and Fletcher discuss electoral strategy as if the answer is just a "changing of the guards" which doesn't take into account the role and functions of the state.
We found much of Bob's piece persuasive, but feel he gives too little attention to a crucial piece of the puzzle, which he mentions briefly as the fourth point in his proposal where he writes: "We must have a governance strategy, not a strategy just of 'influence' or 'impacting public policy and debate.'"
In our view, this is a critical puzzle for the Left to solve, and one we need to give a lot more thought to. After all, progressives of various stripes have elected a number of candidates over the years, particularly at the municipal level (mayors from Harold Washington to Jean Quan), but also the state level (governors, Congress and Senate), and, in some countries, even to the presidency. But what happens once they get into office? If we look at examples in other capitalist countries, we see that the socialist or labor politicians are often equally responsible for austerity measures and attacks on unions, immigrants, and the environment.
We argue that a lot more strategic thinking is needed about how our Left form of governance will be different from the models that came before us. This raises at least four key questions:
1. Theory
While we think Bob Wing overstates the degree of unification on the right, our view is that he is correct in asserting that there is considerable coherence within it. We believe that a key component of that is an ideological commitment to "free market" capitalism (We put "free market" in quotes because in practice, the Right's version of capitalism often includes heavy government intervention and doesn't always look like the markets of Adam Smith.). However there is a general consensus around a political economic system that shapes how society produces, distributes and consumes. Certainly, there are differences within the Right on many things: the relationship between Christianity and the state; level of government intervention in markets; the commitment to US nationalism and so on. ...(Click title for more)
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Latino Protests in Anaheim Continue
By Jimmy Franco Sr.
Latino Point of View
July 31, 2012 - Anaheim is the largest city in Southern California's conservative Orange County and home to Disneyland which is called "The Happiest Place on Earth". During the past week, the city has experienced two police killings that have resulted in a series of protests being organized against city and police officials by enraged Latino residents.
The immediate issue that ignited these angry protests was the killing of 25 year-old Manuel Diaz on July 21, 2012.
Diaz, who was unarmed and talking to friends, ran as the police approached and was shot in the leg and then in the back of the head as he lay face down on the ground.
An angry group of residents exited their homes and gathered to demand answers from the police at the scene. The police attempted to prevent any filming of the incident by witnesses instead of calling for an ambulance to aid the dying Diaz. An unnecessary confrontation was then created by the police as they resorted to violence rather than dialogue by firing rubber bullets and pepper balls at the growing crowd of concerned neighbors which included women and children.
The residents became even more infuriated as a police dog was unleashed which proceeded to attack them and a passing family with a young baby. A day later, another man named Joel Acevedo was shot and killed by police who alleged that he had fired at them.
This was the seventh officer-involved shooting by Anaheim police this year with five being fatal. On Tuesday, July 24, a protest drew over a thousand angry people to City Hall which the police declared to be an unlawful assembly. This then led to a violent clash as the police attempted to aggressively disperse the enraged protesters whose simmering frustration has been fueled by years of growing unemployment, inferior education, police harassment and neglect by city officials.
City Hall and the Police Department building were damaged and twenty-four people were subsequently arrested as tempers continued to flare over the heavy-handed police tactics and their history of harassment and use of force within the Latino community. Other recent protests were held this past weekend at Disneyland and other Anaheim locations as the city's mounted police along with police from other departments confronted over 300 protesters and pushed them off of the streets. Protest marches also took place in support of the Anaheim protesters in San Francisco and Denver.
A Latino majority governed by a minority of the well-to-do
The Chicano/Mexicano population of Anaheim has now exceeded 53% and primarily resides in the barrios of the flatlands. Meanwhile, the minority of higher-income whites live in the pricier Anaheim Hills and maintain a tight control over city government, the school board and the police department.
The attention of Anaheim's city officials is primarily focused upon Disneyland, the Anaheim Convention Center and hotel district, and the Angels baseball and Ducks hockey teams. All of these corporations have received millions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks in the past from the city's politicians at the expense of barrio residents and their social service needs.
Only three Latinos have ever been elected to the city council, however they were a conservative Democrat and two Republicans who did not do much to effect change. Latino voters who represent about one-third of the electorate have been hampered from electing any progressive representatives who are willing to make fundamental changes and improve conditions by the present system of at-large voting. Alleging that this system in Anaheim violates the Voting Rights Act, the American Civil Liberties Union has a lawsuit pending against the city whose objective is to eliminate this at-large system and implement a more democratic one whereby each council member is elected only by the voters of his or her district. ...(Click title for more)
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Climate Change 'Skeptic' Does an About Face
 | | Climate Skeptic Richard Muller Admits Global Warming is Real and Humans are the Cause |
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By Murray Smith
Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal
August 2, 2012 - The Left Front (Front de Gauche) emerged onto the political scene at the beginning of 2009. As the Left Front to Change Europe, it was established by three organisations -- the French Communist Party (PCF), the Left Party (PG, Parti de Gauche) and the Unitary Left (GU) -- with the aim of standing in the European elections of June 2009.
These three organisations were not of anything like equal weight. The Communist Party, though much weakened over the previous 25 years, was nevertheless still a mass party with well over 100,000 members and thousands of elected representatives at every level. More than that, it was an inseparable part of the history of the French workers' movement, which it had largely contributed to defining. The Left Party was a recent split from the Socialist Party, numbering at the time at most 2000 members. The Unitary Left was even smaller, having left the newly formed New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) just after its founding congress.
More important than numbers, however, were what the three organisations represented politically. In addition to being a mass party, the PCF represented the international current that had for decades been linked to the Soviet regime, though it began to take its distance from Moscow in the 1960s and has now pretty thoroughly settled its accounts with Stalinism. The Left Party came from the tradition of French social social democracy, its principal leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, having spent more than 30 years in the Socialist Party and the founding core of activists came from that party. The Unitary Left has its origins in one of the three main Trotskyist organisations in France, the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR). Never a mass force, the Trotskyist movement, and the LCR in particular, nevertheless had considerable political influence, especially after May-June 1968. So the Left Front brought together from the beginning political forces of different origins.
Prehistory
In what political context did it appear? The prehistory of the Left Front was certainly the mass -- and successful -- campaign against the European constitutional treaty in the referendum of 2005. The key element on the left was the united campaign involving the PCF, the LCR, the current of Jean-Luc Melenchon in the Socialist Party, and a range of ecologist and alternative left forces, whose emblematic figure was Jose Bove.
This campaign was innovative in the way it both brought together different political forces. It would be an understatement to say that there is not exactly of a tradition of the PCF conducting joint campaigns with Trotskyists. And while a considerable number of Socialist Party members publicly opposed the treaty and some campaigned against it in various ways, only Melenchon's current actively took part in the united campaign with the other forces. At the time people spoke of the campaign of the three Bs (Bove, Olivier Besancenot of the LCR and Marie-George Buffet, national secretary of the PCF). The M, however, was just as significant....(Click title for more)
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By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
FreedomRoad.org, June 28 2012
This article was originally published on the website: Philosophers for Change, philosophers.posterous.com.
A discussion of the future of socialism and social transformation must be grounded in two realities.
The first reality is the broader economic, environmental and state-legitimacy crises in which humanity finds itself. In other words, the convergence of these three crises means that the necessity for a genuine Left capable of leading masses of people is more pressing than ever. It means that while one cannot sit back and wait for the supposed "final" crisis of capitalism to open up doors to freedom - since capitalism is largely defined by its continual crises - it is the case that the convergence of these three crises brings with it a level of urgency unlike any that most of us have experienced.
Not only is there a need for a progressive, if not radical set of answers to these crises at the level of immediate reforms, but the deeper reality is that capitalism - as a system - is incapable of providing legitimate, sustainable answers to these crises, whether individually or collectively.
The second reality, and the central focus of this essay, is that any discussion of a progressive post-capitalist future must come to grips with the realization of the crisis of socialism in which every trend in the global Left has been encased.
This has been a crisis at the levels of vision, strategy, state power and organization. It is a crisis that cannot be avoided by either a retreat to pre-Bolshevik Marxism or slipping into the abyss of post-modernism. The reality of the crisis of socialism can only be avoided at our own peril.
The crisis of socialism can be said to have emerged in the context of the Stalinist hegemony over the international communist movement, creating challenges for the global Left (and not just the orthodox communist movement) at multiple levels. One level has been that of the question of the post-capitalist socialist state. The revelations regarding the authoritarian rule of the Stalinist Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) shattered the sense of a genuine socialist democracy, even if one applauded the social accomplishments of the Soviet Revolution and its courageous sacrifices in the struggle against fascism.
In addition to the question of the socialist state, there emerged also the question of socialist strategy. There was the matter of strategy in what has come to be known as the "global South" and the "global North." In the global South, the Left-led national democratic revolutions, based on the alliance of workers and peasants, represented a major breakthrough in what had been a very Eurocentric Marxism. The impact of the Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban Revolutions, to name only three, not only reshaped Marxism, but also had an impact on other Left as well as progressive nationalist political tendencies. Yet by the 8th decade of the 20th century, these revolutionary currents seemed to have stalled. The Chinese Revolution, with the death of Mao, altered course and ultimately embraced what can only be described, non-rhetorically, as a capitalist road. Movements and state systems that Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin has described as "national populist projects," i.e., anti-imperialist projects led by elements of the nationalist petty bourgeoisie (and in some cases the national bourgeoisie) that never fully broke with capitalism, found themselves drifting either back toward the global North or following a cynical embrace of the Soviet bloc.
Strategy plagued Marxist-led movements in the global North. Parties and movements that embraced social democracy all but abandoned anything other than the rhetoric of socialism and quite comfortably assumed the role of guardians of the welfare state under democratic capitalism. ... (Click title for more)
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 Richard Levins reviews Edward O. Wilson's 'The Social Conquest of Earth'
"Failing to take class division into account is not simply a political bias. It also distorts how we look at human evolution as intrinsically bio-social and human biology as socialized biology."
Introduction by Ian Angus
ClimateandCapitalism.com
In 1975, in the bestselling book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson argued that human traits such as aggression, racism and gender bias are controlled by our genes, the product of evolution. His theories were hailed by some as a breakthrough that explained human nature, and condemned by others for attributing social problems to biological causes.
In his latest book, The Social Conquest of Earth (Liverwright 2012), Wilson offers his current views on the connections between evolution, biology and society. He has changed his views on some subjects, notably kin selection, but he still argues, in his publisher's words, that "the sources of morality, religion, and the creative arts are fundamentally biological in nature."
I could think of no person more qualified to review this book than Dick Levins, co-author of two of my all-time favorite Marxist books on science, The Dialectical Biologist (Harvard University Press 1985) and Biology Under the Influence (Monthly Review 2007).
I'm pleased and honored that he agreed - his review, written specifically for Climate and Capitalism, is below.
Richard Levins is John Rock Professor of Population Sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health. In addition to academic journals, he writes frequently for the Marxist journal Monthly Review. His recent articles for MR include Continuing Sources of Marxism, and How to Visit a Socialist Country.
In 2001 he was awarded the 30th Anniversary Medal of the Cuban Academy of Sciences for his work on pest management and new diseases in Cuba. He was also given the title of research collaborator of the Ministry of Science, Technology, and the Environment.
Edward O. Wilson. The Social Conquest of Earth. Liverwright Publishing, New York, 2012
reviewed by Richard Levins
In the 1970s, Edward O. Wilson, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould and I were colleagues in Harvard's new department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. In spite of our later divergences, I retain grateful memories of working in the field with Ed, turning over rocks, sharing beer, breaking open twigs, putting out bait (canned tuna fish) to attract the ants we were studying..
We were part of a group that hoped to jointly write and publish articles offering a common view of evolutionary science, but that collaboration was brief, largely because Lewontin and I strongly disagreed with Wilson's Sociobiology.
Reductionism and Sociobiology
Although Wilson fought hard against the reduction of biology to the study of molecules, his holism stopped there. He came to promote the reduction of social and behavioral science to biology. In his view:
"Our lives are restrained by two laws of biology: all of life's entities and processes are obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry; and all of life's entities and processes have arisen through evolution and natural selection." [Social Conquest, p. 287]
This is true as far as it goes but fails in two important ways.
First, it ignores the reciprocal feedback between levels. The biological creates the ensemble of molecules in the cell; the social alters the spectrum of molecules in the biosphere; biological activity creates the biosphere itself and the conditions for the maintenance of life.
Second, it doesn't consider how the social level alters the biological: our biology is a socialized biology....(Click title for more)
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By Chris Garlock
AFL-CIO Blog
If The Wall Street Journal is complaining about it, "The Newsroom" must be doing something right for working people.
"For the second week in a row, Charles and David Koch were strafed by HBO's show 'The Newsroom,' the one-hour drama about a fictional cable TV news show and its volatile anchorman," huffed The Wall Street Journal yesterday in "HBO's 'Newsroom' Takes Aim at Koch Brothers."
In recent 'Newsroom' episodes, anchor Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels) has not only exposed the Koch brothers' extensive funding of conservative causes and groups, from the Citizens United court case to Americans for Prosperity-which has fueled state-level attacks on unions-but has explicitly said that this massive infusion of money from corporations and the wealthy is a threat to our democracy.
No wonder The Wall Street Journal felt compelled to come to the aid of its billionaire pals.
In the latest episode, broadcast last Sunday, the show directly linked last year's uprising against tyranny in Egypt with the occupation of the Capitol in Madison, Wis., as workers rebelled against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's attacks on their bargaining rights. "I wanted to compare and contrast...the protests in Cairo and the protests in Wisconsin," says show creator Aaron Sorkin, who also created "West Wing" as well as writing the script for 2010's hit movie "The Social Network."
Sunday's episode also noted that Citizens United would have failed if Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had recused himself from the case. Many say Thomas should have recused himself from the case because of his ties to the Koch Brothers.
Given the McAvoy character has vowed to "follow the money," despite warnings from the spineless president of "The Newsroom's" fictional cable news network to back off the Koch brothers- whose companies are major advertisers- viewers of "The Newsroom" can expect to see more critiques on the influence of big money on our nation's media and political future.
That'll undoubtedly continue to irritate The Wall Street Journal and the Koch brothers, who prefer to wield their influence behind the scenes and not on a major premium cable TV show. The bad news for them- and good news for the rest of us-is that "The Newsroom" has just been picked up for another season.
HBO's "The Newsroom" airs Sunday nights at 10 p.m. EST.
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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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