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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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New Issue of Mobilizer
Check out what CCDS has been doing...
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Blog of the Week:  Budgeting as part of the Solidarity Economy
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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...
 May Day Shows Labor Moving Left
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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30,000 March Down Broadway for NYC May Day
By Estevan Nembhard & Gabe Falsetta
People's World
May 2 2013, NEW YORK - Some 30,000 flag-waving demonstrators marched down Broadway here on May Day demanding labor rights and immigration reform. They were among additional thousands who marched in other U.S. cities and millions who marched all over the world.
The peaceful crowd was composed mostly of union members, immigrants and supporters of immigration reform.
After rallying at Union Square, delegations from practically every union in the city marched into the streets and made their way down Broadway on the five-mile trek to City Hall. Sometimes an individual union had had so many members marching that the one group stretched for blocks. Wave after wave of union members joined the march, including hundreds and sometimes a thousand each from the Transport Workers, the Service Employees, the United Federation of Teachers, the Steelworkers, the Autoworkers, the Laborers, the Teamsters, the Musicians, the Communications Workers, and many more.
"I brought my three-year-old daughter here from Colombia 13 years ago because she was dying," said Alberto Velez, one of the marchers. "New York City is great. They saved her life in the hospital and here she is today," he said, as he put his arm around his now 16-year-old daughter, Rosie. "I work hard, we love this town and we are already good citizens in every way. Why not legalize us?"
"Workers rights and immigrant rights go hand in hand," said Saul Nieves, who said he does "member engagement" for his union, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees.
"These two issues are the glue that hold us together," he said, as he marched with a thousand of his union members, among them Latino janitors, African American building service workers, and Polish and Albanian office cleaners.
Immigration reform took on special importance at this and other May Day demonstrations as Congress considers legislation that would provide a path to citizenship for more than 11 million undocumented.
Thousands of the marchers yesterday were young, some of them at their first-ever May Day March.
Gregory Reynoso, 26, who delivers for a Domino's Pizza in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, was among he thousands of fast food workers who went out on one-day strikes recently, demanding a liveable wage.
"I'm marching today to show support for the union, Fast Food Forward," he said. "After I walked out they tried to harass me but I told them we would not stop trying to organize. We are strong because the union and the community backs us up."ted to this story......(Click title for more)
Photo: John Graham/PW
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We look at the origins of May Day with James Green, a professor of history and labor studies at the University of Massachusetts and the author of "Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America."
Today, May 1st, is known as May Day or International Worker's Day. The day is an official government holiday in most countries with mass demonstrations, rallies and marches being held to express labor solidarity and celebrate worker's rights. Here in the United States May Day is not a government-sanctioned holiday even though the commemoration originated here. However this year immigrant groups have chosen this day to stage a work strike and take part in a one-day economic boycott to protest anti-immigrant legislation being considered by Congress. Hundreds of thousands are expected to participate in the boycott and various other events taking place throughout the country.
We take a look at the origins of May Day, the Haymarket riot, which took place in Chicago in 1886.
James Green, professor of History & Labor Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the author of "Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America."
Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: We are joined in the studio by James Green, Professor of History and Labor Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, author of a new book called Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. We welcome you to Democracy Now!
JAMES GREEN: Good morning. Happy May Day!
AMY GOODMAN: It's good to be with you. Let's stay in Chicago, where our last guest was, Jorge Mujica. They have major plans for today. But it all began here 120 years ago.
JAMES GREEN: Yes, it did. 120 years ago, thousands of workers and their families were marching through the streets of Chicago. It was a Saturday. Everyone left work, because in those days people had to work on Saturday. ...(Click title for more)
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By Harold Meyerson
Prospect.org
April 25, 2013 - In Chicago's streets, in New Mexico, and at Wal-Marts around the nation yesterday, workers demanded a better deal-but not (for now) through contracts.
Yesterday-April 24th-was a red-letter day in the annals of worker mobilization in post-collective-bargaining America. In Chicago, hundreds of fast-food and retail employees who work in the Loop and along the Magnificent Mile called a one-day strike and demonstrated for a raise to $15-an-hour and the right to form a union. At more than 150 Wal-Mart stores across the nation, workers and community activists called on the chain to regularize employees' work schedules. And under pressure from an AFL-CIO-backed campaign of working-class voters who primarily aren't union members, the county supervisors of New Mexico's Bernalillo County voted to raise the local minimum wage.
The Chicago demonstration, which began in the dawn's early light of 5:30 a.m., included workers at McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts, and Subway, as well as Macy's, Sears, and Victoria's Secret, all of whom make the state minimum wage ($8.25) or just slightly more. Roughly one-third of the jobs in Chicago are low-wage, and more than half of the city's low-wage workers are older than 30. The demonstration was organized by the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago, which formed to demand a living wage for the city's retail and fast-food workers.
The "Workers Organizing Committee" is a name with a pedigree. Shortly after the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935 and a number of unions broke away from the AFL to organize the factory workers whom the AFL had refused to organize, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) formed to build union support among employees of U.S. Steel, Bethlehem Steel, and the other major companies in the industry. Following the wave of sit-down strikes in auto factories that led to the recognition of the United Auto Workers, the major steel companies signed a contract with the SWOC. The committee later changed its name to the more familiar United Steelworkers. ...(Click title for more)
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PDA Interviews Chicago Teachers Union
 | | Kristine Mayle, Chicago Teachers Union |
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How do we avoid the news story framework that gives us nothing but heroes and victims when tragedy strikes? How can those narratives, as seductive as they may be, possibly move us towards an honest search for the truth?
By Anne Lewis
The Rag Blog
See a gallery of photos by Patrick Bresnan, Below.
April 30, 2013, AUSTIN TX -- This is about the fertilizer explosion in West, Texas, on the night of April 17, 2013. It's also about Patrick Bresnan who found himself in West on the night of the explosion and his photographs in the aftermath of the tragedy.
Governor Perry called it a crime scene; the progressive community says, yes, corporate crime. Neither the paranoid fantasy of Governor Perry who is stuck in an ideology that says that companies can do no wrong, nor the abstract politics of progressives blaming the state's lack of regulation -- "We shouldn't produce fertilizer anyway because it's not good for the planet," I overheard in a coffee shop -- seem to get at any real truth.
I ask myself the question: how one can be kind and dignified in the face of such sorrow and loss? I try to collect myself and cannot help but think about the Central Appalachian coalfields.
The dangers of coal mining both for the environment and the workers permeated my senses. I was married to an underground coal miner. I knew not to have an argument before he went to work. He might not come back. And we would patch things up, even when we shouldn't have. ...(Click title for more)
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By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Black Commentator
May 2, 2012 - When President Obama was first elected, in 2008, much of the world waited to see what sorts of changes he would introduce in the relationship of the US towards the rest of the planet. In fact, he was very prematurely awarded the Nobel Peace Prize based on expectations that the US would pull back from wars and bullying. Even skeptical leaders, such as the late President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Despite the hopes and prayers, this administration has done precious little to rebuild ties with countries that were threatened by the Bush administration. Case in point: Venezuela.
The most recent issue, which is highly ironic to say the least, has been the refusal of the Obama administration - at least as of the writing of this commentary - to recognize the results of the recent Venezuelan election. By a slim majority, President Nicolas Maduro won his race for office. The opposition in Venezuela cried foul, as was expected. Yet the Venezuelan elections have not been challenged by independent observers. Rather, there has been a recognition that the election results were close, a phenomenon with which we in the USA should be quite familiar.
What happened next was odd. The USA refused to recognize the results of the election claiming that there was a need for a recount. Now, let's get this one straight. From the country that in November 2000 had an election that was stolen (Bush v Gore) and where a recount was stopped by the Supreme Court, we have the audacity to demand that another country carry out a recount? In fact, the USA is asking a country that has elections that have consistently been proven to have been clean to conduct a recount?
Despite the fine rhetoric, the Obama administration has continued the tried and true path of most US administrations in treating Latin America as if it is the backyard of the United States. Rather than recognizing the sordid history of the relationship between the USA and Latin America, whereby the US has consistently intervened politically, militarily and economically in the internal affairs of the region, the Obama administration seems to be following a path of more subtle destabilization. It has offered fine rhetoric about better relationships with the rest of the hemisphere. At the same time it has reinforced a traditional US dominationist role. A case in point was the Honduran coup of 2009 where the Obama administration first condemned the coup. This was then followed by US efforts which undermined attempts to return the rightfully elected president to office.
The behavior of the Obama administration gives every Latin American and Caribbean leader pause since, in effect, it suggests that the USA will continue to exert its influence, not through diplomacy but through implied threats. In the case of Venezuela, the failure to recognize the legitimate Venezuelan elections is tantamount to giving the signal that a coup in Venezuela would be a legitimate response.
No more nice speeches, Mr. President. If you want to act like Teddy Roosevelt, let's be more honest.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfricaForum, and the author of "They're Bankrupting Us" - And Twenty Other Myths about Unions. He is also the co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice, which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.
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 Robert Redford's overambitious take on the Sixties underground: He clearly wanted to make an epic about then and now, about Sixties radicals and their kids, and he couldn't pull it off.
The Company You Keep, released in December 2012, was directed by Robert Redford with a screenplay by Lem Dobbs based on the novel of the same name by Neil Gordon.
By Jonah Raskin
The Rag Blog
May 1, 2013 -Robert Redford's new movie, The Company You Keep, boasts a huge cast of characters that includes cops, reporters, FBI agents, and former members of an organization of 1960s/1970s radicals that resembles the Weather Underground. A few of the characters are on the run and the target of a manhunt, while others have crept back into the halls of respectability and want nothing to do with their former comrades.
Redford himself certainly remembers that era of seemingly unending protest, resistance, and an invincible underground as well as anyone else in the movie industry today, except perhaps the director and screenwriter Haskell Wexler (best known for Medium Cool, 1969).
Indeed, Redford was near the height of his movie career when fugitives in the Weather Underground set off bombs in federal, state, and local government buildings to protest the war machine, the criminal justice system, along with imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, sexism, racism, and more.
Redford is, of course, also familiar with Sam Green's 2002 documentary, The Weather Underground, which tends to romanticize the fugitives and their clandestine organization. The picture was nominated for an Oscar after it made the rounds at Redford's Sundance Film Festival. ...(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!
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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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