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Blog of the Week: 
New Books for Study Groups
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Edited by Carl Davidson Revolutionary Youth the the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and other Lost Writings of SDS
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. |
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...
 A Southern Strategy of Our Own...
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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From 'Mississippi Goddam' to 'Jackson Hell Yes'!
Chokwe Lumumba is the New Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi By Bob Wing
Progressive America Rising
June 5, 2013 - Chokwe Lumumba--a founder and leader of the Republic of New Afrika, the New Afrikan People's Organization and Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, defense attorney for Tupac Shakur and others, and a first term city councilman--is the new Mayor of Jackson, Miss.
His June 4 victory is a stirring tribute to the courageous Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers who fifty years ago on June 12, 1963 was gunned down at his Jackson home.
In a stunning turn of events Chokwe defeated Jackson's three-term incumbent and first African American mayor Harvey Johnson, the white Republican-financed young Black businessman Jonathan Lee, and others to win leadership of the city with the second highest percentage of Black people in the United States.
I was privileged to briefly participate in the victory of one of the most radical mayors in U.S. history, right in the heart of Dixie, and to glimpse a new Black-led progressive coalition that intends to fight for the state.
Nina Simone famously cussed Mississippi white supremacy in her 1964 civil rights anthem "Mississippi Goddam." The election of Chokwe Lumumba is now an occasion to say "Jackson Hell Yes!"  | | Nina Simone plays Mississippi goddam |
'Impressed with the People'Jackson has a partisan mayoral electoral system that allows all voters regardless of party affiliation to cast ballots in any party's primary election. With their deep pockets and high turnout bloc voting, this so-called "crossover primary" often enables Mississippi's ultra-conservative white voters and businessmen to influence the candidates of both parties.
Not this time. In a reversal the near unanimous financial and political support that whites gave Jonathan Lee backfired.
By depriving incumbent Johnson of their support, whites inadvertently helped Lumumba upset Johnson in the primary. And in the Lee/Lumumba runoff the full throated white backing of Lee helped most Black voters come crystal clear who he really represented in stark contrast to the powerful progressive grassroots candidacy of Chokwe Lumumba.
Lee flaunted his deep pockets by filling the airwaves with dire warnings of Lumumba's "militancy," "divisiveness" and "anti-Christianity," but a large Black majority went for Lumumba in huge percentages.
Lumumba told the Clarion Ledger, "I was even more impressed with the people and...their ability to, I think, take on the issues and to see through what I think in many instances was misdirection. They [voters] had a lot of distractions, and they saw through them." ...(Click title for more)
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 "When I got to an A.M.E. [African Methodist-Episcopal] church for a meeting called by the NAACP and saw that 70 percent of my audience was white, I knew that something was happening in North Carolina!" -- Rev. William Barber
By Dick J. Reavis
The Rag Blog
June 6, 2013 - RALEIGH, North Carolina -- Four weeks ago, on Monday, April 29, an encouraging but puzzling progressive movement was born in an unlikely locale, North Carolina.
It calls itself "Forward Together" or sometimes, "Moral Monday." It is led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and it began when a group of 17, thoroughly integrated by age, sex, and race, refused to disperse during a protest inside the state's General Assembly.
The "Moral Monday" protests have continued, and, at last notice, are gaining ground. On June 3, as a crowd estimated as high as 1,600 gathered, 151 demonstrators repeated the offense of the 17, bringing the total number of arrests to 309.
Most media observers believe that when and if the total surpasses 500, the campaign will attract significant national attention. Already the local press has got it right. "Moral Monday Achieves Mass" said the headline on a June 4 front-page story in the Raleigh News & Observer.
The movement is unquestionably onto something, but it's also a puzzler in several ways. In the context of state politics, it is essentially a racial and Democratic rising. In 2008, by the narrowest of margins, a majority of North Carolinians voted to elect Barack Obama. The state hadn't gone Democratic in a national election since 1976. The outcome was in part a reflection of racial demography: African Americans account for 22 percent of the state's population, nine points above the national average.
North Carolina had long been governed by "moderate" Democrats, but Obama's victory set off a white backlash that led to twin Republican victories, first in 2010 legislative races. In 2012, the state favored Romney and gave the GOP -- including numerous economic libertarians and Tea Party cranks -- veto-proof strength in both its legislative chambers.
Pat McCrory, an ostensibly business-as-usual Republican and mayor of Charlotte, the "Wall Street of the South," won the governor's race -- and immediately revealed an alliance with the ultra-right.
In a virtual blitzkrieg of activity, the General Assembly has passed or soon will pass bills whose consequences will upset almost everyone: measures to shorten the duration and amount of unemployment insurance payments, to impose a sales tax on medicines and groceries, and to abolish an enrollment cap on elementary classrooms.
Measures nixing federal funds to expand Medicaid, requiring voter IDs, and trimming voting hours are a part of the package, as is a bill to abolish inheritance taxes on estates of more than $5 million. The ultra-right's push has suffered only one setback: a bill declaring Christianity as the state's official religion didn't get out of committee.
North Carolina is the least-unionized state in the nation and its white Democrats are led by Blue Dogs; fervent opposition wasn't expected and hasn't come from either quarter. Inspiration has instead come from the Rev. William Barber, an African-American backcountry preacher, not so polished as the grave and decorous Martin Luther King, but nearly as rousing, more eclectic or inclusive, and, odd as it may seem -- funnier!
Barber is a Baptist who, noting that one of the legislative proposals currently threatening the state is called House Bill 666, quipped that, "Some of y'all liberals won't believe me, but I believe that even the computers numbering those bills are guided by the Word of God!" But Monday he turned his podium over to an LGBT spokesperson -- a white lesbian mother whose partner is black. Barber's style may be archaic, but his message isn't, as the old song says, "Gimme that old-time religion / It's good enough for me."
Internally, Barber's movement is more akin to King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) -- with an emphasis on "Christian" and "Leadership" -- than to that of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) or Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
The freewheeling debates of the Occupy movement, in which even fools could speak, are not a part of the scene. Instead, a coterie, including legendary white civil rights worker Bob Zellner and lawyer Al McSurely -- an organizer whose home was in 1967 bombed by the sheriff's department in Harlan County, Kentucky -- plan what the movement will do from day to day. ...(Click title for more)
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Immigrants actually raise the productivity of the economy, generating jobs en masse, including low-skill jobs for both American and immigrant workers.
By Michael A. Clemens
Boston Review via Alternet.org
June 4, 2013 - The heated debate over immigration reform continues in Washington. Much of the heat comes from one claim: immigration hurts low-skill US workers.
The idea is that immigration causes overall economic harm to low-skill US workers, because many immigrants are low-skill themselves and compete for the same jobs. This is a reasonable belief if all one has to go on is the kind of day-to-day experiences that everyone has-such as applying for jobs and competing with other applicants.
It is also wrong.
Many of the world's best labor economists have spent the last quarter century exhaustively looking all over the world for negative effects of immigration on low-skill workers. They cannot find such effects. This is one of the most robust findings in the labor economics research literature.
These economists take two main approaches. The first is to look for sudden, large increases in immigration to a particular area, and track what happens to native workers in that area. These include massive inflows of Cubans to Miami in 1980, Algerians to France in 1962, Russians to Israel in the early 1990s, all immigrants to different regions of Germany in the 1980s and to regions of the United Kingdom in the 80s and 90s, and Former Yugoslavians to the rest of Europe. Not one detects substantial effects of immigration on wages or employment.
In the second approach, economists chop up the data differently. They divide workers in the migrant-destination country not into different geographic regions but into different groups of broadly similar people-for example, 25-29 year-old males with a high school degree, 30-34 year old females with a college degree, and so on. They then watch what happens to wages and employment among native workers in each group, across the whole country, upon the arrival of immigrants with those characteristics. With this method, the leading-edge research is by Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri. In a paper published last year, they show that total, cumulative immigration to the United States between 1990 and 2006 had almost no net effect on the wages of American workers-including those with no high school degree.
How did our common-sense intuition get this crucial fact so wrong? Our best understanding now is that two broad forces yield this counterintuitive result. For the low-skill jobs that exist, there is extremely little competition between native workers and immigrant workers. And the indirect economic effects of low-skill immigrants' work are the reason that many low-skill jobs exist in the first place, including the ones filled by native workers.
First, the vast majority of low-skill immigrants are not competing with any U.S. worker at all. The problem is not that Americans entering the labor force aren't willing to take certain jobs. It's that there aren't enough Americans to do them. ...(Click title for more)
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By Carl Bloice
Black Commentator
Earlier this year, when the young boss of Fiat appeared in Turin to mark the Tenth Anniversary of the death of the automaker's founder, Gianni Agnelli, he noted the company's roots in the northern Italian city. Afterwards, a journalist stood up and said, "You want us to be happy about Fiat now being an international company. Fine, we are. But what about the people in Termini Imerese? They no longer have jobs."
The exchange was reported by Rachel Sanderson in the Financial Times, May 31 as a lead into a story about how Fiat is considering "moving its main corporate headquarters to the US from Turin after a merger with Chrysler that is expected later this year." The "roots" comment, by 37-year-old Fiat Chair, John Elkann, Sanderson wrote, "have been remembered with some bitterness in Italy in the last few days as Fiat and its sister company Fiat Industrial crank up what appears to be the final stages of a push to become US-listed multinationals."
The journalist was referring to the auto plant in Sicily that closed two years ago after it was sold to a Chinese firm that, in cooperation with an Israeli firm, is reportedly planning to put it back in operation sometimes next year.
"Like the takeover of UK chocolate maker Cadbury by Kraft of the US, Fiat's withdrawal from money-losing Italy as it becomes part of a global group has created a national sense of loss at a time when the country is struggling with a deep two-year-old recession and unemployment at a near-20 year high." wrote Sanderson.
Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne told the paper he "is looking at primary listings for the two groups in New York to gain better access to capital markets."
Max Warburton, a global autos analyst, told Sanderson that Marchionne's relocation plan is "genius." "This guy is saying, it is my job to run a profitable business," he said. "I'm a capital allocator and I'm not willing to sit here in Italy and burn cash into (sic) perpetuity. Leaving aside the national politics, no investors are going to complain about that, nor is the [Agnelli] family, nor should Fiat engineers and staff who will be part of a bigger and more secure business," Mr. Warburton says.
"Other analysts argue that Fiat has not gone far enough and should be closing more of its under productive factories in Italy and focusing on its 100 per cent productive plants in Brazil or Eastern Europe," wrote Sanderson.
Where, of course, wages are lower and benefits fewer.
The closure of the Sicilian auto plant and the corporate departure for New York underscore an essential truth about the economic and political situation in Europe today. Although most of commentary in the major mass media paints a picture of mismanaged and profligate countries in the southern part of the continent unwilling to carryout "reforms" necessary to overcome the effects of capitalism's contemporary crisis, the reality is something else indeed. What is underway is a drive to shift the burden of overcoming the system's malaise onto the backs of working people while maintaining the privileged position of the fortunate few - the one percent. ...(Click title for more)
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It's Time to Talk about the Burgeoning Robot Middle Class
By Illah Nourbakhsh
SolidarityEconomy.net via MIT Tech Review
In the book Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT's Sloan School of Management present a chart showing U.S. productivity, GDP, employment, and income from 1953 to 2011. The chart looks as you would expect from 1953 until the mid-1980s, with every one of the measures rising together: employees work more productively, companies make more money, and more hires occur as the middle class swells.
Then, during Reagan's tenure, the bad news begins to show its face. First, even though productivity and GDP continue their upward arc, median household income starts to level off. That is unsettling, since it suggests that companies can get richer and yet employees can stop benefiting from increasing GDP: what happened to trickle-down? A decade later, in the mid-1990s, more trouble crops up: employment flattens as GDP and productivity continue even faster growth.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that these are signs of a true sea change in the dynamics of productivity and employment. Contrary to popular conceptions that all we need is more technological innovation to increase employment, they argue, technological innovation is itself among the forces behind the change.
The elephant in the room is how robotics will play out for human employment in the long term.
New robots will take on advanced manufacturing, tutoring, scheduling, and customer relations. They operate equipment, manage construction, operate backhoes, and yes, even drive tomorrow's cars.
It is time for not just economists but roboticists, like me, to ask, "How will robotic advances transform society in potentially dystopian ways?" My concern is that without serious discourse and explicit policy changes, the current path will lead to an ever more polarized economic world, with robotic technologies replacing the middle class and further distancing our society from authentic opportunity and economic justice.
So how do we deal with the impending mass migration of robots into our middle class? Perhaps we should start by talking about it over dinner (robots don't eat with us yet). I submit to you four dinnertime conversation starters, each of which I believe captures something essential to understanding why the impending Robot Revolution may be nothing like the Industrial Revolution.
Robots won't have to be as good as the humans they replace.
Consider the automated checkout line at your local grocery store. It makes more mistakes than a human clerk, it is harder to use, and it is slower because of the rotating error light that loves to interrupt the whole process every few minutes. Is it better than a human? Of course not. It is simply good enough. And so begins the march of mediocre robots that can defensibly replace humans, not because they advantage the customer, but because they save money for a corporation. Robots will be able to fix your car poorly before they can fix it well. They will cook food that is bland and mealy before they garner a Michelin star. But they will take on middle-class jobs and win, not because of their qualitative merits, but because they look good in the antiseptic light of financial balance sheets.
Take a look at the new robot Baxter, from Rethink Robotics. It is Baxter's price tag-$20,000-that makes it potentially revolutionary. The return on investment for a company that replaces a single human employee is realized before year's end. Does Baxter need to do everything the laid-off human could have done? Not quite. It just has to do enough to justify the replacement: one machine for one warm body's fractional salary. ...(Click title for more)
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John Fogerty's 'Wrote a Song for Everyone'
 | | John Fogerty : Fortunate Son |
By David Fricke Rolling Stone
May 23, 2013 - In the late Sixties and early Seventies, John Fogerty was rock & roll's Voice of America. On the five Top 10 LPs and seven straight Top Five singles that he wrote, sang and produced with Creedence Clearwater Revival from late 1968 to 1971, Fogerty recharged the scruffy, fundamental poetry of folk, country, blues and rockabilly with shredded-vocal passion, searing-guitar hooks and taut, incisive observations on the state of our democracy. The America in "Proud Mary," "Lodi" and "Fortunate Son" was bloodied by inequity and rough justice, yet rich in promise and bound for glory, rendered by Fogerty with a reporter's concision and a dreamer's conviction.
Wrote a Song for Everyone is a testament to the continuing truth and power in Fogerty's greatest hits. For this album, he has recut a dozen classics, most from the Creedence era, in dynamic collaborations with an astute cast of younger stars and kindred voices including Bob Seger, My Morning Jacket, Keith Urban, Miranda Lambert and Foo Fighters. The result is some of the best new music Fogerty has made since, well, Creedence. His singing is strong and engaged, even scalding when he goes up against Kid Rock in "Born on the Bayou," and the current state of Fogerty's guitar playing is summed up in his shootout with country picker Brad Paisley in "Hot Rod Heart," from 1997's Blue Moon Swamp. The twang flies clean and fast, as Fogerty answers Paisley's staccato flash and whip-curl flourishes with a bracing-treble fusion of James Burton, Carl Perkins and George Harrison.
Looking back at these songs, in this company, has brought out a fire and nerve in Fogerty. He sounds as renewed in these performances as the riffs and stories. With the Foos, in a roaring "Fortunate Son," Fogerty - who was drafted during the Vietnam War and spent time in the Army Reserve - trades verses with Dave Grohl with extra, howling ire, like he can't believe the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan, made at the same dear cost. Fogerty revisits the country-dance party "Almost Saturday Night," from 1975's John Fogerty, with the real stuff: Urban's tangy banjo work and saloon-brother harmonizing. And in a bold choice, Seventies-California revivalists Dawes help Fogerty resurrect a fine, lost ballad - "Someday Never Comes," from Creedence's last LP, 1972's Mardi Gras - with a poignant twist. Fogerty based the song on a painful childhood conversation he had with his father. Here, in the opening verse, Dawes' Taylor Goldsmith is the plaintive, questioning son; Fogerty plays the elder with the darker voice, dispensing the tough wisdom.
Most duet projects are awkward, unfulfilling affairs, as if the tunes and pairings were picked and cut at gunpoint. "Proud Mary" - too literally taken to New Orleans in an arrangement conducted by Allen Toussaint - is the only miscalculation here, and that's because Ike and Tina Turner own the song's mighty-water soul now. In fact, much of Wrote a Song is just a real good time, especially the country action: the Paisley and Urban tracks; the obvious fun Fogerty and Zac Brown Band have with the jaunty warning of "Bad Moon Rising."
Fogerty, who arranged and produced the album, also has a sharp ear for emotional harmony. Seger's appearance in "Who'll Stop the Rain," from 1970's Cosmo's Factory, is a revealing match. The two road soldiers share the chorus in weathered empathy, to a Silver Bullet Band-style arrangement that makes you wonder if Seger used to cover the song at Michigan club gigs. Fogerty lets My Morning Jacket bend another Cosmo's song, "Long as I Can See the Light," to their drowsy-country ways - it fits them, and him, like a ranch hand's glove.
Fogerty's smartest leap of faith is in the title song, from 1969's Green River: He gives half of it to country spitfire Lambert. Fogerty wrote the song in the thick of Creedence insanity (they put out three albums that year), as the cost to his home life mounted. Lambert counters his irony ("Wrote a song for everyone/And I couldn't even talk to you") with wounded but warming poise, as if she's trying to meet that frustration halfway. Tom Morello's sudden whooping-spirals of lead guitar actually sound like a success gone out of control. Then Fogerty and Lambert go back to the harder, quiet work of truce and comforting.
In a sense, Fogerty has been waiting a lifetime to have this much fun and challenge with his old songs. "All the miles I've been travelin'/Headin' back to the light," he sings in "Mystic Highway," one of two new songs here. Creedence's garage-rock purity and the pace at which they made their records left a lot of the roots and branches in Fogerty's writing unexplored. The group's bitter end and decades of lawsuits didn't help.
There's another volume lurking in this songbook. I'd like to see Fogerty try "Walk on the Water" with the metal band Mastodon or the tramp-band stomp "Down on the Corner" with a young bluegrass crew like Old Crow Medicine Show. But Wrote a Song for Everyone does not replace anything Fogerty did the first time around. It affirms the living history in his greatest hits - that of a great nation still being born. ...(Click title for more)
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 | | Star Trek Into Darkness Official 3D Trailer |
By Sandy Schaefer
Screenrant
Star Trek Into Darkness Villain Name Star Trek Into Darkness Early Reviews An Exciting and Satisfying Star Trek Movie
Paramount J.J. Abrams' 'Star Trek Into Darkness' arrives four years after Abrams proved able to breath fresh life into the geek-favorite sci-fi franchise - which is nearing the 50 years of existence (and relevance) benchmark - with his critically-acclaimed and lucrative cinematic reboot.
Does the final result justify the, by and large, highly-secretive marking buildup (maybe less secretive in recent weeks)? We've collected together informative excerpts from the initial wave of Star Trek Into Darkness reviews to arrive online, so you can hear it straight from the horses' mouth.
(NOTE: The review excerpts below are all SPOILER-FREE):
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The Guardian
Director JJ Abrams has followed up his sensational 2009 Star Trek reboot with a sparkling 3D sequel... And the flashes of crackling, knowing comedy have been retained, punctuating the shuddering fight scenes and chase sequences that are the very currency of the action blockbuster... Everyone is a little more battered, a little less dewy-eyed. People are unlikely to charge out of the cinema with quite the same level of glee as they did in 2009; but this is certainly an astute, exhilarating concoction.
Time Out London
'Star Trek Into Darkness' is a brisk, no-nonsense sci-fi action sequel built around a conflict between the crew of the Starship Enterprise with a slick, slippery new villain, John Harrison [who's] played with relish and poise by Benedict Cumberbatch... The result [this time] is a stop-gap tale that's modest, fun and briefly amusing rather than one that breaks new ground or offers hugely memorable set pieces.
Star Trek Into Darkness Kirk Spock Black Shirts 570x311 Star Trek Into Darkness Early Reviews An Exciting and Satisfying Star Trek Movie
Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto in 'Star Trek Into Darkness'
The Telegraph
[The 2009 'Star Trek' reboot] represented a fresh start for the Trek canon, and was fired by a swashbuckling spirit and full-blooded sense of adventure... This sequel starts in the same confident frame of mind, but after around 45 minutes it finds a comfortable spot [and] reverts to old bad habits.... A large portion of Star Trek's audience may well be satisfied by a film that amounts to not much more than an incredibly pretty and sporadically funny in-joke. [But] that pioneer spirit? It's gone.
Film Ink
And so, after all the hype, the secrecy and the manipulations of the marketing machine, the final question remains; is the film any good? Thankfully the answer, for the most part, is a resounding yes... Visually, Star Trek Into Darkness is stunning... And yes, J.J.'s trademark lens flare runs rampant once again, which occasionally plays havoc with the film's otherwise impressive 3D transfer... [This] is a big film, building on the foundations of its predecessor and holding true to the nature of the franchise. Combining humour, action and drama, Abrams once again delivers an original experience that feels nostalgic without any hint of being either stagnant nor stale. It's an impressive feat, and one worth catching on the big screen.
Digital Spy
Cast members describing Into Darkness as "relentless" weren't kidding... A tad more calm interspersed with the storm wouldn't have gone amiss, but when those rare quiet beats come, they matter... It feels like Abrams still not quite trusting his own rebooted universe, where in every other instance he treads the line between new ground and nostalgia with supreme confidence. Star Trek Into Darkness earns its title, but the dark shades are still primary colors... It's an exhilarating, emotionally rich and utterly pleasurable journey that wears its love for Trek fans old and new on its sleeve.
Star Trek Into Darkness International Trailer Enterprise Star Trek Into Darkness Early Reviews An Exciting and Satisfying Star Trek Movie
HeyUGuys
Star Trek Into Darkness... is by no means flawless [but director J.J. Abrams] has made another fine, and fun, Star Trek film... [The sequel] is permeated with Trek lore, some elements expected, others not, but more often than not the story is served well. The excitement, however, comes from the new... The trip into darkness is as good as its predecessor [but] it misses the greatness it might have achieved if it had kept to the crooked path it was leading away from its past.
Total Film
Mostly, ['Star Trek Into Darkness'] is fantastic fun: a two-hours-plus blockbuster that doesn't bog down in exposition or sag in the middle. There are reversals and rug-pulls galore, most of them executed with whiplash skill. Trouble is, at a certain point peril-fatigue starts to creep in, putting the story (like the overtaxed Enterprise) at the risk of burning out... But man of the match is, of course, [director J.J. Abrams]. His aim with Into Darkness was to mint a standalone adventure, one that welcomed total Trek neophytes at the door. Mission accomplished...
Graffiti with Punctuation
The J.J. Abrams chorus of writers Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof aren't in a rush to progress their characters to their 'mythic' status... This isn't repetitious or laborious, in fact it's a great device to reveal and explore the essential ingredient of each of the individual iconic crew members... J.J. Abrams applies that big-budget action spectacle to the Trek franchise, whilst staying true to the brand... Star Trek Into Darkness isn't ready to stretch to the unknown pockets of the universe just yet; instead it relishes in the evolution of the key characters in the wake of their defining challenge. It's a rousing adventure and Abrams has laid the platform for a healthy and long lasting franchise.
Star Trek Into Darkness Early Reviews An Exciting and Satisfying Star Trek Movie
Benedict Cumberbatch in 'Star Trek Into Darkness'
So, to summarize, the early consensus is:
- Star Trek Into Darkness isn't a franchise game-changer along the lines of The Empire Strikes Back or The Dark Knight, but it offers as much - if not more - entertainment value than J.J. Abrams' 2009 reboot.
- The sequel blends earnest nostalgia for classic Trek lore with innovation and plot/character development, but not always in well-balanced portions.
- This is an enjoyable viewing experience for older and younger Trekkies, as well as those who just love a good action-packed sci-fi blockbuster.
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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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