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CCDS Discussion |
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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New Issue of Mobilizer
Check out what CCDS has been doing...
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Blog of the Week:  Radical Community Organizing
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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
Full Employment Booklets
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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. |
We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century
By Rod Bush, NYU Press, 1999
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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...
 As the Right Makes the US Ungovernable, What's The Left To Do?
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, plan for 2014 races now, oppose austerity, support the Congressional Progressive Caucus' 'Back to Work Budget' 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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The Most Ignored Answer to Unemployment:
HR 100, A Jobs-for-All Bill
Act would boost employment now for the many who need it, eliminate residual joblessness even in times of prosperity By Rep. John Conyers Jr. and Philip L. Harvey
Roll Call via Portside May 17, 2013 - It has been five years since the financial crisis struck, and progress in putting the unemployed back to work still lags, with no end in sight.
With almost 12 million Americans unemployed and millions more underemployed, we have waited long enough for government action. Listen to the stories of the unemployed, and you will realize that we are facing a national tragedy that we would never tolerate if it were caused by a natural disaster. The unemployed deserve swift action to address the devastation of unemployment.
During the calamity of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood the responsibility government bore to its citizens in a time of need. He recognized that it was unconscionable to allow millions of hardworking Americans to suffer while they waited for the economy to recover. Rather than stand idle in the face of such suffering, he created millions of temporary jobs for the jobless. They built roads and schools and parks; they filled schools with teachers and staffed public health projects. They preserved historic sites and brought music, drama and art to public spaces. They turned a national tragedy into a national revival.
Now is the time for us to implement similar job programs. It is time to put America back to work while we wait for the economy to complete its recovery - repairing America's infrastructure and improving our communities in the process. We can pay for the jobs we need as we go along with a small tax on the financial sector whose excesses led us into this recession.
To do this, we support HR 1000, the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Training Act. By advocating for this legislation, we intend to push Congress to take seriously the federal government's responsibility to put Americans back to work, and we intend to show that it can be done without raising deficits. This 21st-century New Deal strategy, pioneered in programs like the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, would create 3.1 million to 6.2 million full-time, market-wage jobs with health insurance benefits in the first two years of program operations, plus 1 million to 2 million private sector jobs from increased spending in the economy.
Over the longer run, this act is designed to eliminate the residual joblessness that burdens poor and disadvantaged workers, even in periods of general prosperity. Job vacancy data shows that our economy still suffers from a serious job shortage even when unemployment falls under 5 percent. Despite what many economists say, it is not full employment if there are not enough jobs available for everyone who wants to work. The Humphrey-Hawkins strategy would allow us to close this job gap without triggering the inflationary tendencies that constrain other job-creation strategies at such times.
This initiative would create several times as many jobs per stimulus dollar as alternative stimulus options, such as deficit spending and tax cuts. The jobs would also be created much faster and with a targeted focus where work is most needed. It also would provide American businesses with what they really need - paying customers with steady work. For those who want to see government assistance reduced or not given at all, making sure jobs are available for those who need them is the only solution.
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 | | What It's Like Living on a Low Wage |
By Laura Flanders
GRITtv
May 20, 2013 - What a difference five years make! In 2008, when a few hundred union workers at the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago voted to occupy their plant instead of submitting meekly to being laid off, theirs was a rare act of courage in a cold winter of crisis for organized labor. Five years on, as some of those same workers cut the ribbon on their own cooperatively-run business last week, it was yet another bold step by innovative workers in a season of daring by labor.
It's no easy thing to sign a lease, buy equipment and open a business with a group. Starting a coop is risky, just like walking off a low wage job. Asked why he and his fellows had decided to start a co-op, veteran window maker "Ricky" Maclin told me it was because they were tired of their lives being in someone else's hands. In the last five years, two different owners for two different sets of reasons had tried to lay them off. Now Maclin and his partners are owner/operators of a cooperative company called New Era and a similar sort of determination and defiance is being seen in city after city, from fed up workers who are taking to the streets.
Fast food workers went on strike in Milwaukee this week, the fifth city to see low wage workers walk out in one-day protests. Before Milwaukee it was New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit.
There's plenty to be fed up about. The same people slashing services are talking about an economic recovery, but if this is the economy in recovery, workers seem to have no place in it. Politicians and pundits are doing ok - in fact, for anyone with a stock portfolio, the economy's in the pink. But that old supposed pact between Big Labor and the Democrats is clearly broken. Labor unions invested millions in helping Democrats win the last election but they're getting nothing back - at least nothing that helps working people live and rear families and eat.
Wages remain rock bottom, millions are more or less permanently out of work and those that are working are working harder, for more bosses, in less secure workplaces, with nothing in the way of benefits.
No wonder people are embracing new tactics. And surprise surprise, those tactics work....(Click title for more)
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By Jackson's NewsOne Staff
May 22, 2013 - Chokwe Lumumba has won the Democratic Primary in Jackson. The general election is June 4, 2013.
It's been a long time coming, but change is coming to Mississippi.
Former Ward 2 Councilman and Chokwe Lumumba, 65, (pronounced SHOW-kway Lu-MOOM-bah) is the winner of the mayoral primary runoff election in Jackson, Miss., reports WAPT.com.
 Lumumba defeated business Jonathan Lee, 35, 54 percent to 46 percent with 100 percent of the vote reporting. "I think we just had a very difficult fight in order to win this office and we came out successful," Lumumba said from his victory party at the Clarion Hotel. "I'm very proud of all of the people in my campaign who worked so diligently and I'm very proud of the people of Jackson because I think the people of Jackson have spoken and spoken very clearly."
Lumumba served four years on the Jackson City Council before running for mayor. He spent part of the '70s and '80s as vice-president of the Republic of New Afrika, an organization which advocated for "an independent predominantly black government" in the southeastern United States and reparations for slavery.
"The provisional government of Republic of New Afrika was always a group that believed in human rights for human beings," Lumumba told The Associated Press in a recent interview. "I think it has been miscast in many ways. It has never been any kind of racist group or 'hate white' group in any way.... It was a group which was fighting for human rights for black people in this country and at the same time supporting the human rights around the globe."
Read more from the Associated Press:
Lumumba was born in Detroit as Edwin Taliaferro, and changed his name in 1969, when he was in his early 20s. He said he took his new first name from an African tribe that resisted slavery centuries ago and his last name from African independence leader Patrice Lumumba. He moved to Jackson in 1971 as a human rights activist. He went to law school in Michigan in the mid-1970s and returned to Jackson in 1988.
During an April 30 debate, Lumumba carefully pronounced his name for the audience and said: "That's an African name. Like Barack Obama. It's not a Muslim name. ... I've been a Christian all my life."
As an attorney, Lumumba has represented Tupac Shakur in several cases, including one in which the rapper was cleared of aggravated assault charges in the shootings of two off-duty police officers who were in Atlanta but from another city. Shakur died in 1996.
Lumumba persuaded then-Gov. Haley Barbour to release Jamie and Gladys Scott from prison in Mississippi in early 2011. The sisters served nearly 16 years for an armed robbery they said they didn't commit. Barbour, a Republican, was considering a run for the presidency at the time.
Lumumba also said on the City Council website that he helped defend "former Black Panther heroine Assata Shakur," an aunt of Tupac Shakur. He represented her in 1977 in a murder case that was dismissed in New York, according to Lumumba's biography for a 2012 human rights conference. Also in 1977, Assata Shakur was sentenced to life in prison for the 1973 killing of a New Jersey state trooper. Lumumba said he was not involved in that case.
Lumumba will face 3 independent candidates in the June 4 general election.
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Arrests Continue: North Carolina & Voter Rights
 | | North Carolina is 'Ground Zero' in Fight Against GOP Voter Suppression |
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Solar power is getting much easier to store - and at a much cheaper price -but will the GOP neoliberals keep blocking it? 
A newly opened solar power energy and storage plant in Spain.
By John Aziz
SolidarityEconomy.net via The Week.
May 21, 2013 - The total solar energy hitting Earth each year is equivalent to 12.2 trillion watt-hours. That's over 20,000 times more than the total energy all of humanity consumes each year.
And yet photovoltaic solar panels, the instruments that convert solar radiation into electricity, produce only 0.7 percent of the energy the world uses.
So what gives?
For one, cost: The U.S. Department of Energy estimates an average cost of $156.90 per megawatt-hour for solar, while conventional coal costs an average of $99.60 per MW/h, nuclear costs an average of $112.70 per MW/h, and various forms of natural gas cost between $65.50 and $132 per MW/h. So from an economic standpoint, solar is still uncompetitive.
And from a technical standpoint, solar is still tough to store. "A major conundrum with solar panels has always been how to keep the lights on when the sun isn't shining," says Christoph Steitz and Stephen Jewkes at Reuters.
But thanks to huge advances, solar's cost and technology problems are increasingly closer to being solved.
(Bloomberg & New Energy Finance)
The percentage of light turned into electricity by a photovoltaic cell has increased from 8 percent in the first Cadmium-Telluride cells in the mid-1970s to up to 44 percent in the most efficient cells today, with some new designs theoretically having up to 51 percent efficiency. That means you get a lot more bang for your buck. And manufacturing costs have plunged as more companies have entered the market, particularly in China. Prices have fallen from around $4 per watt in 2008 to just $0.75 per watt last year to just $0.58 per watt today....(Click title for more)
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By Greg Palast
Vice Magazine via Beaver County Peace Links
"Now that the sonovabitch is dead, why is the US still angry with us?"
"Us", in this conversation, are the Taliban. The SOB in question is Osama bin Laden.
The Taliban's frustration was relayed to me by Yahya Maroofi, Counsellor to Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai - Karzai's Kissinger, if Kissinger had a soul.
The Silk Road nation of Kazakhstan is an excellent place to encounter the dervishes of the Great Game for control of the camel-and-pipeline routes of the Central Asian steppes. Here we can witness the diplomatic-military idiocies of new empires pathetically attempting to ignore the dried skeletons of the imperial forces that went before them.
Maroofi was spending the day in Kazakhstan's capital on his way to little-noticed peace negotiations - little noticed because neither Uncle Sam nor Great-Uncle Britain were invited. Attendance is limited to those frontline states that will be left holding the grenade when the US and UK pull out the pin with the removal of their troops in 2014. The lineup includes Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan (birthplace of the Boston Bombers) and the big new swinging dick on the block, Turkey, as well as Iran, the nation most feared and despised by the Taliban. The unannounced guests, of course, are the Taliban themselves....(Click title for more)
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By Laura Flanders
Truthout | Interview
May 21, 2013 - Three years ago, Bhaskar Sunkara was a frustrated 20-year-old, fed up with what he calls, "the bloodless wonkery of Beltway liberals." The economy was clearly in crisis, along with our system of government. Big questions needed to be asked, and yet most media outlets were still pumping out guff about recovery, and politicians were worse.
As he puts it in this interview, "We've been sold an ideology that's based on the golden age of capitalism; based on the welfare state. We were told that if we work hard, if we keep our heads down, then we would be given, at the very least, a stable nine-to-five job, at the very least enough for a home, enough for a car, enough to raise a family. Workers for the last few decades have been finding out that that's a lie. The question is, what happens then?"
To have a place to ask radical questions (questions that go to the root of things) and to suggest possible answers, Sunkara founded a magazine: Jacobin, of which he is now editor and publisher.
The name comes from the same French revolutionaries who brought us the Reign of Terror, but Sunkara's not dusting off a guillotine just yet, only some sharp rhetoric.
You can watch the interview in full here.  | Jacobin: Stretching the boundaries of the Liberal Left Critique
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Laura Flanders: Talk about Jacobin. The New York Times described it as "jargon-free, neo-Marxism for the masses" and a "long-shot prospect," but maybe not so?
Bhaskar Sunkara: I think it was originally, but we're doing quite well now, in part because of the unexpected attention from the mainstream media and other sources, but the neo-Marxism label kind of wearies me. I'm fine with just Marxism, even paleo-Marxism, but not the neo, that adds a bit of a weird vibe to it.
LF: Right. I think of DayGlo colors or something....(Click title for more)
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Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
 The struggle for our nation's future has intensified. The rainbow coalition and multi-class alignment that coalesced around the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama defeated the far- right appeal to racism, misogyny, homophobia and rejection of science.
This reflects the growing strength and cohesion of the multiracial labor movement and its allies within a larger progressive majority. Yet the 1% retains power and strives to manage economic crises in a way that sticks working people with the bill.
Unemployment, hunger and homelessness increase, union membership declines, and too many impoverished, crisis-shocked communities, especially in the South, remain captive to messages of hate. A rational response to the existential crisis of humanity-accelerating climate change-is blocked by capitalism's irrational profit drive. The 99% can solve these problems on the basis of our common humanity.
Pressures of war, austerity and climate danger demand new levels of unity and struggle. New forms of labor activism lead beyond traditional trade union organizing toward a broader working class movement. The uprisings from Wisconsin to Occupy to Wal-Mart, and from Trayvon Martin to the UndocuBus, represent an emerging democracy movement. Based in the working class, linked with the community, and following the path boldly taken by the civil rights movement, today's movements can win new demands.
Through years of experience, the Left has learned that building lasting unity among allies involves tactful, constructive and unrelenting struggle. Our work can replace neo-liberal influences with class, political, cultural and moral solidarity and democracy. CCDS focuses on the intersection of class, race and gender as fundamental to both an objective social analysis and an effective political agenda. The Left is indispensable to weaving the threads of struggle into a mass formation independent of the 1%.
Polls reveal a growing plurality of youth that prefer socialism to capitalism. With determination, we socialists proceed toward our common future. In pre-convention discussion, we will examine the economy, the environment, civil society, the commons and the state within the context of the class struggle. Now CCDS calls upon its members and allies to convene in Pittsburgh in July, 2013 to assess our experience and to plan for the future.
Access the Main Pre-Convention Discussion Documents at http://ccds-discussion.org
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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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