Democracy Now! on Snowden,
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Glenn Greenwald: As Obama Makes "False" Spy Claims, Snowden Risks Life to Spark NSA Debate
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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...
 Upheaval Abroad, Fierce Battles vs the Right at Home
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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Do We Hate Our Children? Or Why Is It that Germany Has Free Colleges and Capitalism Is Still Standing There?
The Insane System That Turns Young Adults into Indentured Servants By Joan Walsh
SolidarityEconomy.net via Salon.com
July 1, 2013 - Next time you're watching a college graduation, as you look out over the sea of caps and gowns, make sure you notice the ball and chain most graduates are wearing as they march onstage to receive their diplomas. That's student loan debt, which at over $1 trillion tops credit card debt in the U.S. today. The average burden is $28,000, but add in their credit cards and they're graduating with an average of $35,000 in debt. It's no wonder that people who've paid off their student loan debt are 36 percent more likely to own homes than those who haven't, according to new research by the One Wisconsin Now Institute and Progress Now [3].
What kind of society sends its young people from higher education into adulthood this way? I'm aware I'm only talking about those lucky enough to go to college, when roughly one-third of high school graduates don't - but if this is the way we treat our relatively lucky kids, the rest of them don't have a prayer. For many, the school to prison pipeline functions much more efficiently than the school to college one; California is one of at least 10 states that now spends more on prison than education (all education, not just higher education). According to the Federal Reserve Bank, two-thirds of college graduates leave with some debt, and 37 million Americans are repaying a student loan right now.
Unbelievably, interest rates on federally subsidized loans are doubling today, from 3.4 to 6.8 percent. As Congress bickers over alternatives, even Democrats are backing "market-based" plans that aren't as bad as GOP ideas, but aren't good either. I hope they can find a way to lower interest rates, but the real scandal isn't the rate hike. The real scandal is that we take for granted that young people must go into debt - at whatever interest rate - to pay for college.
Of course, the truly lucky kids - those blessed wealthy members of the Lucky Sperm Club - sail through higher education without debt. But today, even upper-middle-class kids are having to take out loans, as the average annual cost of a four-year public university soars above $22,000, while private schools are over $50,000. Who the hell thinks this is a good idea?
I used to find it endearing when President Obama talked about how he and Michelle finally paid off their student loans after he was elected to the Senate. But in a way, the president's folksy anecdote helped normalize what should be outrageous: that we expect young people to go deep in debt, well into middle age, to get a good education. Of course, the Obamas' story should come with an asterisk, since much of their debt was built up paying for Harvard Law School, and clearly, that paid off for them. The assumption that students should borrow money to pay for an undergraduate degree, and that the only debate is over how high their interest rate should be, is seriously crazy....(Click title for more)
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By Robert Fisk
The Independent (UK) via Portside
July 4, 2013 - The army's in charge. Call it a coup, if you like. But the Egyptian military - or the infamous "Supreme Council of the Armed Forces" as we must again call it - is now running Egypt. By threat at first - then with armour on the streets of Cairo. Roads blocked. Barbed wire. Troops round the radio station. Mohamed Morsi - at the time still the President - may have called it a 'coup' and claimed the old moral high ground ('legitimacy', democracy', etc) but long before we saw the soldiers in the city, he was pleading with the generals 'to return to barracks. Ridiculous; the generals didn't have to leave their barracks to put the fear of God (metaphorical or real) into his collapsing administration.
Morsi talked of shedding his blood. So did the army. This was grim stuff. Miserable was it to behold a free people applaud a military intervention, though Morsi's opponents would claim their freedoms have been betrayed. But they are now encouraging soldiers to take the place of politicians. Both sides may wave the Egyptian flag, which is red, white and black. The colour of khaki is no substitute.
Nor will the Muslim Brotherhood disappear, whatever Morsi's fate. Risible he may have been in power, lamentable his speeches, but the best organized political party in Egypt knows how to survive in adversity. The Brotherhood is the most misunderstood - or perhaps the most deliberately misunderstood - institution in modern Egyptian history. Far from being an Islamist party, its roots were always right-wing rather than religious, its early membership under Hassan al-Banna prepared to tolerate King Farouk and his Egyptian landlords providing they lived behind an Islamic façade.
Even when the 2011 revolution was at its height and millions of anti-Mubarak demonstrators had pushed into Tahrir Square, the Brotherhood was busy trying to negotiate with Mubarak in the hope they could find some scraps on the table for themselves. The Brotherhood's leadership never stood alongside the people during Egypt's uprising. This role was fulfilled by Egypt's strongest secular base - the trade union movement, especially the cotton workers of Mahalla north of Cairo....(Click title for more)
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 By Emery P. Dalesio
Talking Points Memo
June 28, RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - With changes to its unemployment law taking effect this weekend, North Carolina not only is cutting benefits for those who file new claims, it will become the first state disqualified from a federal compensation program for the long-term jobless.
State officials adopted the package of benefit cuts and increased taxes for businesses in February, a plan designed to accelerate repayment of a $2.5 billion federal debt. Like many states, North Carolina had racked up the debt by borrowing from Washington after its unemployment fund was drained by jobless benefits during the Great Recession.
The changes go into effect Sunday for North Carolina, which has the country's fifth-worst jobless rate. The cuts on those who make unemployment claims on or after that day will disqualify the state from receiving federally funded Emergency Unemployment Compensation. That money kicks in after the state's period of unemployment compensation - now shortened from up to six months to no more than five - runs out. The EUC program is available to long-term jobless in all states. But keeping the money flowing includes a requirement that states can't cut average weekly benefits.
Because North Carolina leaders cut average weekly benefits for new claims, about 170,000 workers whose state benefits expire this year will lose more than $700 million in EUC payments, the U.S. Labor Department said.
Lee Creighton, 45, of Cary, said he's been unemployed since October, and this is the last week for which he'll get nearly $500 in unemployment aid. He said he was laid off from a position managing statisticians and writers amid the recession's worst days in 2009 and has landed and lost a series of government and teaching jobs since then - work that paid less half as much. His parents help him buy groceries to get by.
"I'm just not sure what I'm going to do," said Creighton, who has a doctorate. "What are we to do? Is the state prepared to have this many people with no source of income?"...(Click title for more)
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The Lumumba Economy: New Challenge for Jackson, Mississippi
Chokwe Lumumba believes the best way to lift Jackson's economy is to put money in the pockets of the city's poor residents.
By R.L. Nave
Jackson Free Press
June 19, 2013 - During his yearlong campaign, Mayor-elect Chokwe Lumumba did not tout big-box stores, movie theaters, waterfronts or Farish Street as the silver-bullet solution to economic development in the capital city.
Lumumba believes the real key to business growth is investment in people, not necessarily individual projects. His campaign website lists as top priorities broadening participation of Jackson residents in city contracting and business ownership, building cooperatives and growing "green" businesses. Other priorities include marketing Jackson nationally and internationally, infrastructure repair and developing such major corridors and districts as Highway 18 and Highway 80, Medgar Evers and, yes, Farish Street.
"First off, you have to put money into the pockets of the poor. You have to make them not poor," Lumumba told the Jackson Free Press during an April interview. "What that does is that creates a better economy for everybody."
Lumumba's economic philosophy is partly rooted in the cooperative economic principal known as ujamaa--familyhood in Swahili--espoused by Tanzania's first president, Julius Nyere. Nyere, a committed socialist, wrote of ujamaa in 1968: "The doctrine of self-reliance does not mean isolationism. For us, self-reliance is a positive affirmation that for our own development, we shall depend upon our own resources."
As Lumumba prepares to take the reins of the mayor's office, Jackson might be poised for growth. The capital city's 8.6 unemployment rate, while lower than the state's 9.1 percent average, remains above the rate of unemployment nationally. Jackson's population is also trending upward--albeit slowly.
#But Lumumba, who rejects what he deems "rank capitalism," isn't calling for a municipal version of the nationalization of Jackson's existing economy but rather for ensuring the local citizens can enjoy the benefits of economic development in the city.
"I'm not about to make a declaration that we're going to seize all the businesses in Jackson and turn them over the people. That's not going to happen," Lumumba said.
"In fact, I don't have the power to do that. But what I am going to do, I'm going to say to businesses that come here and businesses that are here is that we're in Jackson, and 60 percent of your employees need to come from Jackson. I'm not talking about mom-and-pop businesses but businesses with substantial (numbers of) people."
Currently, the city has a goal of 8 to 12 percent African American participation in city contracts. It is unclear whether the mayor can impose quotas on business owners.
Another important component of Lumumba's economic roadmap comes from the Jackson Plan, written by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement--which Lumumba co-founded--and calling for the development of a "solidarity economy." The Jackson Plan states: "Our conception of Solidarity Economy is inspired by the Mondragon Federation of Cooperative Enterprises based in the Basque region of Spain but also draws from the best practices and experiences of the Solidarity Economy and other alternative economic initiatives already in motion in Latin America and the United States."
Mondragon, which employs 83,869 people and generates 14.8 billion euros (about $19.6 billion) in revenues annually, is comprised of worker-owned cooperatives that includes insurance businesses, manufacturing of appliances, bicycles and office furniture, as well as construction and retail.
Lumumba is hopeful that the city can grow its summer jobs program, which employs about 500 teenagers each year.
"Look, people want to work. That's not the problem. We've got to put people in the position where they can work and get the skills that's necessary," Lumumba said.
"That's my economic transition. As we transition in Jackson, I want to be an influence on transitioning other parts of the state."...(Click title for more)
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 Pro-choice demonstrators at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Sunday, June 23, 2013. More than 1,000 packed the place on Sunday and the numbers kept growing during the week. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
By Ted McLaughlin
The Rag Blog
June 27, 2013 - The Week that Was! As the Supreme Court made landmark decisions about voting rights (two thumbs down) and gay marriage (it's about time!), thousands of cheering pro-choice Texans -- wearing orange shirts that read "Stand With Texas Women" and rooted on by Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, daughter of the late and great Texas Gov. Ann Richards -- filled the rotunda and packed the galleries of the State Capitol of Texas in Austin for their own marathon filibuster. The enthusiasm was intoxicating.
It was a massive three-day show of opposition to Texas Republicans' attack on women's health in the form of a draconian new abortion law -- and of support for Texas Sen. Wendy Davis and her dramatic filibuster in the Senate chambers. Davis has emerged as a superstar and a legitimate candidate for higher office in Texas. The events captured the imagination of the nation. As MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said Tuesday night: "Texas: Who knew!" Oh, and coming next week: "Kill the Bill, Volume 2." See you there. -- Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog]  AUSTIN, Texas -- The teabagger governor of Texas announced Wednesday, June 26, 2013, that he is calling a second special session of the Texas legislature. Three issues are on the agenda -- transportation funding and juvenile justice (both of which died in the last session because Republicans wasted the whole 30-day session trying to shut down the state's abortion clinics), and, of course, the same old anti-choice legislation that was filibustered to death in that first special session. Perry seems determined to keep the issue alive, and give Democrats something to make sure their supporters remain energized and engaged.
Texas Democrats have been a dispirited bunch for a long time now. It has been more than 20 years since a Democrat held statewide office, and prospects for the future seemed dim because there were really no politicians in the party with true statewide appeal.
That changed dramatically on Tuesday night, when a couple of female State Senators put themselves in the limelight to stop (at least temporarily) an odious anti-choice bill that would almost certainly close 37 out of 42 clinics in the state that do abortion procedures -- and in the process they inspired and renewed thousands of Democrats across the state.
Texas Senators Wendy Davis, left, and Leticia Van de Putte in the Texas Senate Chamber, Tuesday, June 26, 2013. Photo from Jobsanger.
The new Texas political stars are Sen. Wendy Davis and Sen. Leticia Van de Putte. Davis got the ball rolling by declaring she would filibuster the bill (which had to be approved by midnight, when the session ended, or it would die).
She got the floor about 11:15 a.m. and began her filibuster -- and then she held the floor for over 10 hours. She was helped by the other 11 Democratic senators who lobbed her "softball" questions to keep her filibuster growing, but the real work of the filibuster was on her capable shoulders -- and she performed admirably.
With only a couple of hours to go before midnight, the Republican majority was able to stop her by claiming for the third time that she was not being germane to the bill with her discourse. It was arguably not true, but truth or rules have never been very important to Texas Republicans. The other 11 Democratic senators stepped forward with a barrage of parliamentary maneuvers (points of order, parliamentary questions, etc.).
One of the most prominent of these senators who sprang to the defense of Sen. Davis was Sen. Van de Putte. And with only about 15 minutes until midnight, she challenged the Senate president by demanding to know, "At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?" The crowd in the gallery began to applaud her, and that applause turned into more than 20 minutes of shouting and applauding that delayed a vote on the GOP bill.
With time running out, the GOP tried to hold their vote -- but as Democratic senators pointed out, the vote was not finished before midnight, and by Texas law, the session was over at midnight. This caused a big mess -- as Republicans claimed the bill was passed, since the vote started before midnight, and the Democrats claimed the bill was dead since the vote was not finished before midnight....(Click title for more)
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Jazz: the Transformation from Subversive Expression to Mainstream Entertainment
 A Book Review of 'Jazz: New York in the Roaring Twenties' by Robert Nippoldt and Hans-Jürgen Schaal. By Sarah Churchwell
The New Statesman - UK
Jazz: New York in the Roaring Twenties
Robert Nippoldt, Hans-Jürgen Schaal
Taschen, 144pp, £34.99
June 27, 2013 - In February 1924, Paul Whiteman and his orchestra debuted a symphony in jazz at the Aeolian Hall in New York City by a young composer named George Gershwin. The piece was called Rhapsody in Blue and was an instant triumph. At some point over the next two months, F Scott Fitzgerald seems to have heard it (he was a regular at the Palais Royal, where Whiteman headlined) and it made its way into The Great Gatsby, which he wrote in 1924, as Vladimir Tostoff's Jazz History of the World, the jazz composition that is played at Jay Gatsby's first party.
An earlier draft of the novel included a long description of the music, which was clearly based on Gershwin's experimental new composition. One of the moments that reviewers have enjoyed mocking in Baz Luhrmann's new adaptation of Gatsby is when we finally meet our hero, in the familiar form of Leonardo DiCaprio, while the soaring strains of Rhapsody in Blue reach a crescendo behind us, but it's one of the more historically authentic details in the film.
A less authentic detail in Luhrmann's depiction of the New York jazz scene in 1922 (the year in which Gatsby is set) is when Gatsby takes Nick Carraway to a speakeasy in midtown Manhattan and they descend into a glamorous, mixed-race world in which black and white audiences cheerfully mingle, drinking, dancing together, listening to black jazz musicians and watching black dancers. This affable scene makes jazz-age New York look very jolly but the reality was less comradely. There is a reason why Whiteman's orchestra and audience were all white - although the bandleader's name is presumably just a coincidence. Even in the comparatively cosmopolitan New York, life in the jazz age remained strictly, often violently, racially segregated. In October 1922, a black man had to be rescued from a lynch mob of nearly 2,000 white people for allegedly trying to kiss a white girl - an incident that occurred in midtown Manhattan, only a few streets away from where Fitzgerald located his cellar speakeasy (just off Times Square).
A month later, America's first woman senator was sworn in. Her name was Rebecca Latimer Felton, she was 87 years old and she was a former slave-owner, white supremacist and proponent of lynching. Happily, the repellent Felton only served as a senator for one day. The idea that the racist Tom Buchanan, who spouts theories of Aryan supremacy when we first meet him, would be hanging out at a mixed-race speakeasy in midtown (had such a thing even existed) is preposterous.
In 1923, a gangster named Owney Madden opened a nightclub in Harlem called the Cotton Club. It featured black jazz musicians and entertainers and black staff. The Cotton Club was immensely popular - but even in African American Harlem, it catered only to white customers. Had black customers been admitted, most would not have been able to afford its prices.
In his 1931 essay "Echoes of the Jazz Age", Fitzgerald explains the evolution of the term "jazz": "The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music." He fails to mention that its putative origins were in the slang term "jism"; he also fails to mention that its progress towards "respectability" had to entail its progressive whitening, its transformation from a black subcultural and subversive expression to a mainstream entertainment.
This process forms a subtext of Jazz: New York in the Roaring Twenties, by Robert Nippoldt and Hans-Jürgen Schaal. Newly translated from the German, it promises the story of 24 influential musicians who shaped the jazz age in what is touted as "a scrupulously researched page-turner". Like most books produced by Taschen, it is a handsome, visually striking and hefty volume (both in weight and in price). Unlike most, it also comes with a curated CD of original recordings.
Jazz sounds very exciting but calling it a "page-turner" is misleading, to say the least, since it has no narrative arc except what is implicitly created by a chronological sequence. It reads instead like a mammoth book of liner notes (some quite abbreviated), somewhat disjointed and at times anticlimactic, interspersed with enormous, often double-page ink drawings that some will enjoy more than others.
After a potted history of the great migration of black southern workers to the north at the beginning of the 20th century, it is, in essence, a catalogue of vignettes about a handful of great musicians. Some of these descriptions turn usefully towards musicology; others are content with light-hearted anecdote. Learning that Fats Waller once ate nine hamburgers at a sitting is rather less edifying than the explanation of "cutting contests", the epic dance hall duels between piano players.
Some notes are less "scrupulously researched" than others. For example, the authors declare that Whiteman "refused on principle" to hire black musicians but other jazz historians hold that Whiteman was blocked by his management from creating the racially integrated band he wanted but continued to hire black arrangers and to promote and support black musicians when he could.
The tracks on the accompanying CD are number-coded in the text, so that each recording is provided with a narrative context. Unfortunately, about half of these are misnumbered, which is surprising not only because Taschen usually produces books to a very high standard but also because there are only 20 tracks on one CD, so they shouldn't have been very hard to count.
The recordings are well chosen but, at close to £35 for the book and compilation, the reader might be hoping for something more comprehensive. We get Jelly Roll Morton pounding out stride piano in "Freakish" and Fats Waller's improvisational piano in a duet with Alberta Hunter singing "Beale Street Blues" (misspelled as "Beal" in the text, it is the song that Daisy Buchanan and her friends dance to in The Great Gatsby). Hunter, for one, is given short shrift: a mere 100-word precis of her extraordinary life and career.
There's a very early recording of James P Johnson playing "The Harlem Strut" in 1921 and Fletcher Henderson's orchestra, which included a young trumpeter named Louis Armstrong and a saxophonist called Coleman Hawkins, performing "Money Blues" in 1925. A recording of "One Hour" by the Mound City Blue Blowers in the same year turns out to have a certain Glenn Miller on the trombone. Bessie Smith and Armstrong sing "Saint Louis Blues" and Bix Beiderbecke plays "Big Boy" in 1924. There's "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" by Duke Ellington with Ethel Waters and we end with the slick showman Cab Calloway singing his trademark "Minnie the Moocher".
Fitzgerald's books offer impressions of life in New York during the Roaring Twenties, with a smattering of references to its soundtrack. Nippoldt and Schaal offer a soundtrack with only a smattering of New York. A truly page-turning narrative account that combines the city with the music that shaped it - a jazz history of its streets - remains to be written.
Sarah Churchwell's "Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of 'The Great Gatsby'" is published by Virago (£16.99)...(Click title for more)
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The Disney Channel's Wizards of Waverly Place.
By Nick Schager
Village Voice
I recognize that, even coming from a father of two preteen daughters, that might sound alarmist, so let me elaborate-the Disney Channel and its prime competitor, Nickelodeon's Teen Nick, are a pox upon our tween nation, corrosive forces that impart more awful messages than any of Disney's retrograde princess films (and attendant merchandising).
If the Mouse House's recent, quickly reversed decision to "beautify" Brave's redheaded warrior heroine Merida was a sad commentary on pop culture's continuing endorsement of ridiculous feminine ideals, that incident remains a minor blip compared to the loathsome lessons being taught on a daily basis, in 22-minute form, by Disney Channel sitcoms like Shake It Up, Jesse, Wizards of Waverly Place, and Austin & Ally, and Teen Nick's similarly noxious (and, mercifully, just canceled, albeit endlessly replayed) Victorious and How to Rock.
At first, these might seem to be disposable comedies about navigating school and teaming up with friends to triumph at love, popularity, and the arts. But if you actually watch them, you'll see that the latest breed of girl-targeted tween sitcoms -- more than either their milder predecessors (Zooey 101) or their blander boy-centric compatriots (currently, Disney XD's testosterone-y Lab Rats and Kickin' It; Nickelodeon's goofy Bucket & Skinner's Epic Adventures) -- promote an adult-free universe in which (as SNL nailed in this spoof) wise-cracking tartlets mug for the camera in too-revealing mall-wear while prevailing over social obstacles through a combination of you-go-girl obnoxiousness and slapstick idiocy. That the shows aren't the least bit funny -- I dare anyone to laugh -- is inarguable. Yet far more distressing is the unpleasant lessons they teach about humility, civility, individuality, and what it really means to be an adolescent girl.
F for Attitude
Sitcoms may be predicated on a constant stream of one-liners, but Disney and Teen Nick take that formula to the next level, offering nothing but witless witticisms delivered with maximum grinning-jackass hamminess. The reigning queens of this routine are Bella Thorne and Zendaya, the preternaturally perky and affected starlets of Shake It Up, who've assumed the mantle recently abdicated by Victoria Justice and Victorious' strenuously wacky supporting cast.
The problem, however, is endemic to the entire genre, which is built on smug overacting, and which celebrates as a virtue the practice of caustically putting down rivals and sarcastically mocking friends. In each of these programs, everyone is endlessly ridiculing everyone else in order to showcase their own playful impudence, thereby equating coolness with smart-assery. Such verbal bluster is matched by hip-shaking, shoulder-shrugging physical posturing and exaggerated facial expressions that are equally repellent, so that an episode of, say, Jesse -- which is populated by a multicultural cast of Red Bull-hyper tykes -- is a crash course in precocious rudeness, and a veritable competition of put-down one-upsmanship....(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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