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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 sustainer. Click the title to buy it directly.
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Blog of the Week: Logos
Special Issue on the 2012 Elections 
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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...
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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Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement
By Don Hamerquist
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 Down to the Wire: 2012 Still a Cliffhanger
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, get out the vote, 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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By Jim Hightower
The Hightower Lowdown
October 8, 2012 - During the past several years, a mess of plutocratic myths has been growing like kudzu across our political landscape. This aggressive ideological vine has crept from place to place, incrementally covering over the vital spirit of egalitarianism that defines us as Americans and unites us as a society. Deliberately planted and nurtured by various Koch-funded front groups, these invasive myths (let's dare call them lies) have been spread by assorted Ayn-Randian acolytes, advancing the anti-democratic notion that corporations and the wealthy are America's most able, virtuous, and deserving citizens.
Now, with the presidency and total control of Congress up for grabs in this election year, the Koch-Randians are going all out to entangle the national policy debate in their lies, the essence of which comes down to this overriding whopper: Government is an immoral, blundering menace that must be shoved aside so a virtuous society run by gifted, self-reliant "strivers" and efficient corporations can flourish. If you swallow that bucket of Kool-Aid, you might then be able to accept all sorts of the right-wing's current phantasmagoric policy proposals:
- Medicare must be replaced with a privatized "VoucherCare" (or, more accurately, "WeDon'tCare") medical system;
- All poverty programs must be slashed or eliminated to "free"poor people from a crippling and shameful dependency on public aid;
- The government framework that sustains a middle class (from student loans to Social Security) must be turned over to Wall Street so individuals are free to "manage" their own fates through marketplace choice;
- Such worker protections as collective bargaining, minimum wage, and unemployment payments must be stripped away to remove artificial impediments to the "natural rationality" of free market forces;
- The corporate and moneyed elites (forgive a bit of redundancy there) must be freed from tax and regulatory burdens that impede their entrepreneurial creativity;
- The First Amendment must be interpreted to mean that unlimited political spending of corporate cash equals free speech; and
- tcetera, ad nauseam, ad infinitum.
The whopperites are trying to pass this stuff off as some sort of deep political "philosophy" rather than confessing that it is what it is: Shameless kleptocratic doggerel intended to disempower the many and enthrone the privileged few. So, this issue of the Lowdown takes them on, debunking The Big Three Major Fables of Plutocratic Theology they've put out to try and frame the 2012 election.
1. THE "SELF-MADE" MYTH:
The greatness of America, goes this one, is derived from the individual efforts of the strong. These are the "producers"--the worthy ones who make it on their own, never needing a helping hand or accepting any kind of freebie (certainly not from the government). The claim is that these admirable achievers often rise from the humblest of origins to create a business and attain personal success, overcoming such hurdles as union organizers, government meddlers, and other "parasites." ...(Click title for more)
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By Daniel Ellsberg
Reader Supported News
Oct 18, 2012 - It is urgently important to prevent a Republican administration under Romney/Ryan from taking office in January 2013.
The election is now just weeks away, and I want to urge those whose values are generally in line with mine -- progressives, especially activists -- to make this goal one of your priorities during this period.
An activist colleague recently said to me: "I hear you're supporting Obama."
I was startled, and took offense. "Supporting Obama? Me?!"
"I lose no opportunity publicly," I told him angrily, to identify Obama as a tool of Wall Street, a man who's decriminalized torture and is still complicit in it, a drone assassin, someone who's launched an unconstitutional war, supports kidnapping and indefinite detention without trial, and has prosecuted more whistleblowers like myself than all previous presidents put together. "Would you call that support?"
My friend said, "But on Democracy Now you urged people in swing states to vote for him! How could you say that? I don't live in a swing state, but I will not and could not vote for Obama under any circumstances."
My answer was: a Romney/Ryan administration would be no better -- no different -- on any of the serious offenses I just mentioned or anything else, and it would be much worse, even catastrophically worse, on a number of other important issues: attacking Iran, Supreme Court appointments, the economy, women's reproductive rights, health coverage, safety net, climate change, green energy, the environment.
I told him: "I don't 'support Obama.' I oppose the current Republican Party. This is not a contest between Barack Obama and a progressive candidate. The voters in a handful or a dozen close-fought swing states are going to determine whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are going to wield great political power for four, maybe eight years, or not."
As Noam Chomsky said recently, "The Republican organization today is extremely dangerous, not just to this country, but to the world. It's worth expending some effort to prevent their rise to power, without sowing illusions about the Democratic alternatives."
Following that logic, he's said to an interviewer what my friend heard me say to Amy Goodman: "If I were a person in a swing state, I'd vote against Romney/Ryan, which means voting for Obama because there is no other choice."
The election is at this moment a toss-up. That means this is one of the uncommon occasions when we progressives -- a small minority of the electorate -- could actually have a significant influence on the outcome of a national election, swinging it one way or the other.
The only way for progressives and Democrats to block Romney from office, at this date, is to persuade enough people in swing states to vote for Obama: not stay home, or vote for someone else. And that has to include, in those states, progressives and disillusioned liberals who are at this moment inclined not to vote at all or to vote for a third-party candidate (because like me they've been not just disappointed but disgusted and enraged by much of what Obama has done in the last four years and will probably keep doing).
They have to be persuaded to vote, and to vote in a battleground state for Obama not anyone else, despite the terrible flaws of the less-bad candidate, the incumbent. That's not easy. As I see it, that's precisely the "effort" Noam is referring to as worth expending right now to prevent the Republicans' rise to power. And it will take progressives -- some of you reading this, I hope -- to make that effort of persuasion effectively....(Click title for more)
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 By Bruce Wilson
Alternet.org
Oct 18, 2012 - Back in 2011 a series of attacks from leading conservative evangelicals darkly warned that Ayn Rand devotees, Paul Ryan included, might be worshiping at the altar of crypto-satanism.
Now, within the last 24 hours, a flurry of mainstream media articles [3]cover a controversy erupting after evangelism superstar Billy Graham prayed with [4](and in effect endorsed) candidate Mitt Romney and observers noticed that an article on the website of Graham's flagship Billy Graham Evangelistic Association identified [5] Mormonism as a "cult".
Yes, really: This year, the Party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower is championed by one candidate conservative evangelical Christians suspect of worshiping odd, fecund Gods who live, love, and multiply on strangely-named foreign planets, and by another candidate enthralled by an economic philosophy that helped birth [6]Anton LaVey's Church of Satan.
This train wreck wasn't supposed to happen.
A few months ago, despite ongoing, savage swipes from prominent fundamentalist pastors who called Mormonism a "cult", the Republican Party sloughed off evangelical right challengers in the 2012 presidential primaries, along with its "anyone but Mitt" syndrome, to pick a Mormon as the GOP standard bearer in the 2012 presidential election.
Then, Mitt Romney doubled down on the "cult" issue by picking, as his vice presidential running mate, a Congressman who as recently as 2010 (in official campaign ads [7]no less) had praised a libertarian philosopher accused [8], in mid 2011 by a leading hard-right Catholic journal, of promoting a thinly-veiled form of satanism.
For a party that not too long ago under George W. Bush had managed to artfully wrap its bloodier instincts in the evangelical cloak of many colors that was "compassionate conservatism", Paul Ryan's radical budget - that provoked ire from across [9] the Catholic political spectrum - and Mitt Romney's apparentdisgust [10] at the mooching "47% percent" of America - threatened to open up a rift between religious conservatives who see some sort of proper role for government in mitigating the worst effects of laissez faire capitalism, and secular conservatives who envision anarcho-capitalism as the road to a glorious, Ayn Rand-inspired utopia in which the "producers" would finally relegate the mooching masses to their proper, subordinate status in great chain of being.
It didn't help that Paul Ryan's plan for privatizing Social Security was, at base, a rehash of the Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian Piņera Plan cooked up under the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet - whose military regime helped refine torture methods later employed in Iraq at Abu Ghraib and has become known for "disappearing" thousands of its citizens, often by pushing them out of helicopters into the sea.
This is the dilemma - will modern American conservatism continue to pay at least lip service to traditional Christian social justice teaching, or will it break [11]with that moral touchstone and remake itself as a party which cleaves to a Hobbesian social contract that reduces American society to an atomized struggle of all against all, nasty, brutish, and short?...(Click title for more)
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Bill Moyers on Bill O'Reilly's 'Alternate Universe'
 | | Moyers SLAMS O'Reilly PBS Lies & Misrepresentations - Moyers & Company |
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 By Arun Gupta
Truthout News Analysis
Caught between an unyielding corporation and crumbling solidarity, striking steelworkers in Ohio find history is both their ally and enemy as they ponder the uncertain future of organized labor.
Oct 10, 2012, Niles, Ohio - My childhood was made of steel.
In 1969 my family moved to Baltimore, where my father designed ships at Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point Shipyard - what one historian notes "was once the largest steelworks in the world."
It was a place of forbidding grandiosity: miles of clanking mills, blackened smokestacks and hellish furnaces, armies of grimy workers and supertankers in dry dock that blotted out the sky. I took pride in the millions of tons of steel forged annually, lived in a stable (if racist) working-class neighborhood near the plant and spent summers frolicking in the Olympic-size pool at the Sparrows Point Country Club.
Sparrows Point shut down its blast furnaces this past June, perhaps for the last time. A workforce that numbered 26,500 when we arrived in the United States had wasted away to 1,975 employees when its latest owner threw in the towel. The story is the same for much of the country. The golden era of industry is gone, but it weighs on workers who lament the passing of the American Dream, while anxiously confronting a future that seems to be one of perpetual decline.
The ripples of history surface in areas like Ohio's Mahoning Valley, known as the "Ruhr Valley of America," for the 28 mills that once lined the region. This year, 2012, is the 75th anniversary of the "Little Steel Strike" that turned the valley into a battlefield as steelmakers violently quashed unionization efforts. It's also the 70th anniversary of the founding of the United Steelworkers of America (USW) and the 35th anniversary of "Black Monday," when more than 5,000 workers lost their jobs after the demise of Youngstown Sheet & Tube's Campbell Works in 1977.
It's local lore that people would point to soot from steel mills dusting fresh snow and say, "That's gold," meaning that's what paid the bills. That's no more. The gigantic blast furnaces have long been demolished save for a few modern plants like V&M Star, which casts pipes for natural-gas fracking (and which was aided by $20 million in federal stimulus money). Steelmaking in the valley is otherwise limited to warehouse operations employing dozens of workers in jobs such as cutting metal parts.
One such facility is Phillips Manufacturing in the town of Niles, which straddles the Mahoning River. Workers there produce drywall and steel corner beads and studs used in building construction. Except Phillips is now using "replacement workers" to fill orders. On Sept. 13, 44 members of USW Local 4564-02 shut off their machines before noon. Instead of breaking for lunch, they walked out and struck over wage, benefits and seniority issues....(Click title for more)
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By Eric Ribellarsi
Kasamaproject.org
June 18, 2012 - "Dare to struggle, dare to win... You have to have the courage to be in it, and fight, and have faith in the people."
"KOE believes the people need new values: Solidarity over individualism. Dignity against corruption. Emancipation over dependence.
"This is a very hard struggle for us. It means the transformation of the people.
"It is why we take active part in things like giving healthcare to immigrants who are not legal. And we have been part of movements like 'The Potato Movement' where the farmers in the North gave free potatoes to people starving in the South. We were facilitators and activists in this. This is solidarity, not charity."
"Today we fight for the independence, real democracy, and the reconstruction of Greece.
"We believe if we can implement these profound changes, we will be in a new situation for revolution."
Eric Ribellarsi met with ten young members of the Communist Organization of Greece (KOE). They discussed their backgrounds, experiences, the student movement, the orthodox Communist Party in Greece (KKE), revolutionary strategy, and the political choices of revolutionary communists within the Greek crisis.
This interview is part of the Winter Has Its End project - and there is much more to come.
Can you tell me how some of you became communists? How did you come to join KOE?
Danae: I was involved with the anarchist movement. In 2006, I was a part of the student movement against the privatization of education. It was massive, four hundred departments were occupied. I came to see the need for organization and organized struggle, and I decided I would join KOE.
I had realized that in groups of anarchism, there is informal leadership. They informally lead, and it is not controlled. I realized that we needed leaders who were formal and acknowledged.
Eva: Growing up, my father was in Synaspismos, which made me think I didn't like communists. When I decided to join KOE, he would always lecture me about Stalin and Mao, and joke
"The Maoists are going to take you up in the mountains!"
I had attended a week long summer camp of KOE where we would speak all day about different political questions. And yes, we would have to wake at 8AM and work hard, but I thought to myself
"I like this. I wish the whole world could be like this."
I decided to join KOE.
So can you tell me a little bit about your work inside the universities?
Christos: We are a part of "Left Unity," a student coalition related to SYRIZA inside the student union. In Left Unity, there are all the parties of SYRIZA. It is a coalition for organizing inside the universities. It is organizationally independent from SYRIZA, but politically related.
The way our universities work is that all students are members of the student union, but not all students are members of a student coalition in the union (like Left Unity or one of the coalitions of KKE, New Democracy, PASOK, or ANTARSYA).
[Editors note: KKE is the corrupt parliamentary mainstream party called the Communist Party of Greece -- it inherits the name of the influential post-WW2 communist movement in Greece and it expresses its politics in the language of nostalgia and orthodoxy. New Democracy and PASOK are the mainstream center-right and center-left parties. ANTARSYA is an a smaller, separate radical left political coalition that believes "anti-capitalist" unity is the necessary platform for this moment].
We in KOE struggle for a common line in Left Unity that fights against the austerity Memorandum, and we work to connect the struggle of the Greek society to the students.
Eva: In 2006, Greece had a successful student movement around public universities after attempts to privatize the public universities. The bourgeois parties said they would "raise the value of our degrees", but in practice they were lowering the quality of the knowledge and skills developed in the universities.
We had mass assemblies and occupations of the universities, and the police could not enter because of the determined resistance and because we have laws that prevent the police from entering the universities. We successfully stopped these privatizations from happening.
Then, in 2008: there was the death of Aleksandros, who was shot by the police. At that time, KOE made an analysis that this was the result of both a social and an economic crisis. [Alexandros Grigoropoulos was murdered by police, and a great upsurge of rebellion swept over Greek youth.]
After this point, we decided that the students of KOE would fight for the consciousness of the students to focus on the general political situation, and not on specifically the issues in the universities themselves.
If you wanted to be active, you have to fight against the IMF. If you do not generalize the struggle, you will be isolated and crushed.
Danae: The government tried to divide us into little individual struggles and petty interest groups through the reforms they offered. At this time, the KKE and ANTARSYA chose to attack us for not struggling over the direct student issues.
Meanwhile, PASOK and New Democracy get people to join their student union by having skiing trips, parties, and dinners.
Eva: Unlike the other parties, we were active not just around elections, but around the political, social, and economic struggle of the whole society.
Danae: Before the some of the other parties in the SYRIZA would only be active around the elections, but the situation has forced them to change as well....(Click title for more)
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The OUL Is Dedicated To 'Changing Our Thinking, Changing Opinion, Changing The World.'
By Jay D. Jurie
The Rag Blog
 Are you interested in learning more about society and the world we inhabit, how it all got to be the way it is, and of most importance, how it might be changed for the better? If so, there's a new school at your fingertips, a good place to search for some answers, one that doesn't saddle its students with a lifetime of loan debt.
Officially opened on January 1, 2012, the Online University of the Left (OUL) made its website debut in April at the Left Forum, an annual gathering of left-wing academics and organizers in New York City.
Dedicated to "changing our thinking, changing opinion, changing the world," the OUL is largely the brainchild of Carl Davidson, twice a national officer of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the 1960s, and currently co-chair of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. OUL was created by wedding the "free schools" of the 1960s, the radical education project of SDS, and older expressions of democratic and left-wing education, with present-day technology.
Growing up in Pennsylvania, Davidson had an early interest in science and technology. This was followed by an interest in the philosophy of science, which led to philosophy and then Marxism, and eventually a return to his roots. He began using technology in media outreach and other political work that included teaching computer repair and internet skills to ex-offenders and former gang members. In Chicago, Davidson was a founder of a face-to-face "Open University of the Left" that sponsored class meetings and events at locales throughout the city.
For eight years he was the lead organizer of the Midwest Radical Scholars and Activist Conference. For 16 years he was a participant in the "Chicago Third Wave Study Group" which put some of its classes online. This background pointed toward the possibilities of a broader online university which could be facilitated by greater speed and broader reach.
These possibilities were coupled with the awareness that many working people with busy lives, even if they can afford it, don't have the time to devote to learning in a traditional classroom setting. Influenced by the writings of Italian social theorist Antonio Gramsci, Davidson perceived that people can become "organic intellectuals" capable not only of learning but participating in the events that shape their lives. OUL's online approach readily lends itself to these forms of exploration and growth.
Among the "top video courses" displayed on the OUL's home page is a dialog about capitalism, socialism, and related topics between Charlie Rose, David Harvey and Richard Wolff; a documentary about the Occupy Wall Street Movement entitled "Rise Like Lions"; a talk by Angela Davis about slavery and the prison-industrial complex; and a discussion of Gramsci by the recently-deceased British historian Eric Hobsbawm.
One of the most captivating videos is "The U.S. in 2012: What's Class Got to Do with It?" a roundtable discussion with Bill Fletcher, Jr., Juan Gonzalez, Bob Herbert, Frances Fox Piven, and Michael Zweig. Also shown on the home page are "top course outlines and materials," including a Todd Nigel article comparing and contrasting Gramsci and Mao on the role of organic intellectuals, a link to the Solidarity Economy web site, and "Learning About Unions" by the AFL-CIO.
Presently featured on the OUL site are 20 academic departments, including political economy, solidarity economy, African American Studies, English & Literature, Womens Studies, History, Gay & Lesbian Studies, Global Studies, Psychology, Latino Studies, and Urban Studies, among others. In other words, something for almost everyone. Some of the departments offer subdivisions. ...(Click title for more)
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Wanda Jackson: Unfinished Business New Release from Sugar Hill]
By Holly Gleason
Paste Magazine
Oct 9, 2012 - With a voice like a chainsaw swallowed by a little girl, Wanda Jackson's brand of "shake 'em up, baby" is as kitten-with-a-whip as ever. The 75-year-old rockabilly queen's sex is still on fire: taunting the boys with Steve Earle's "Graveyard Shift," the retro staccato bomp "Pushover" and blues-country compulsion "Old Weakness."
 | | Wanda Jackson: "Unfinished Business" Album Preview - featuring Justin Townes Earle |
Lust isn't something Jackson shies from. Embracing legends (Townes Van Zant), modern progressives (Greg Garing) and classic soul (Bobby Womack), Jackson sounds randy, ready and able to bounce whatever comes her way with full-tilt vigor. As the high hat snaps, back up singers rise like cats in heat and the guitars spin like individual beams of neon, the woman who gave young Elvis a run for erotic-thrust savors it all.
After an infusion of hip via roots-necrophiler Jack White on last year's The Party Ain't Over, it's Justin Townes Earle who steps in this time around for a slightly more fluid presence for the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer. Maybe it's his DNA, perhaps his organic fascination with vintage hillbilly/soul/rock 'n' roll, but Earle brings freshness and vitality to what could be leadenly archival.
Even the revival-tent gospel of Van Zant's "Two Hands," all shook tambourine over a Tennesse Two train beat, is rapturous in its sanctity, making salvation visceral.
That immersion is unbridled in Jackson's throat: the steel guitar melting turpentine tears across Earle's "What Do You When You're Lonesome," while Jackson channels Kitty Wells' "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" for a core country reminiscence that's part dance hall, part stoic stroll.
Quick, fast and dirty, like 45s from the '50s, this is a stack of songs that sets the mood for the party-and never looks back.
 | | Wanda Jackson in the 50s- Hard Headed Woman |
It's not until Business' closing "California Stars," from the Woody Guthrie/WIlco collaboration, that things slow down. Reflecting on all that her life has been, it's not a dirge for the living with one foot in the grave, but an assessment of where one's been, the beauty of it all and the reality of what it is.
A philosophical benediction, "California Stars" lifts the package of firecrackers to a more balanced place. Not just a jaunty broad still feeling her oats, Jackson's a diva in fringe who ain't afraid to live, but she isn't denying the depth of what the ride is made of either.
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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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