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Proletarian Novels in the 21st Century: They Also Make Excellent Gifts for the Season
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The new annual edition of our journal of discussion and analysis is now out. More than 170 pages, it includes dozens of articles on structural racism, fighting austerity, and 21st century socialism Click the title to buy it directly.
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by Paul Krehbiel
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| Shades of Justice Video: Bringing Down a President, Ending a War |
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By Giuseppe Fiori
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An Invitation to CCDSers
and Friends...
 Our Task: Build the
Common Front to
to Crush Trump and
Organize the Left
We're the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism...
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Most of all, it's important that you support a raise for low-wage workers, oppose militarized police and the ongoing 'long wars,' engage in 2016 races now, oppose austerity, support the 'Moral Mondays' in North Carolina and other states, the fight for the Green New Deal, a just immigration policy and the Congressional Progressive Caucus' 'Back to Work Budget'! 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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One motivator: keeping Donald Trump out of the White House.
By Elise Foley
Huffington Post
July 13, 2016 - After Bernie Sanders endorsed Democratic primary opponent Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, die-hard fans of the senator threatened that they wouldn't be as willing to transfer their allegiances to the presumptive nominee. But for all the talk of Sanders supporters moving to the Green Party, staying home or even voting for GOP candidate Donald Trump instead, already some of his backers are lining up behind Clinton.
Her campaign announced a spate of endorsements in the day after Sanders said he was backing her for president. It is also holding what it's calling "Stronger Together" events this week in swing states to emphasize the need for Democrats to come together behind her, some of them featuring those former Sanders supporters.
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) endorsed Clinton on Wednesday, writing in a blog post that he "was feeling the Bern" but that Clinton "offers strong progressive values, a remarkable tenacity of spirit, and has demonstrated a capacity to listen."
Eleven current and former elected officials from his state, most of whom endorsed Sanders, signed onto a letter backing Clinton on Wednesday, along with other progressives in the state.
In Michigan, three Sanders delegates issued a statement on Wednesday urging their fellow Sanders supporters to join Clinton. Three Pennsylvania delegates for the senator did the same on Tuesday, as did three Florida student leaders.
And in Colorado on Thursday, a Clinton press conference is to feature four Democrats who caucused for Sanders: former state House Speaker Terrence Carroll, state Sen. John Kefalas, Hillary for Colorado Campus Coordinator Spencer Carnes, and retired teacher Nancy Perlmutter.
Braddock, Pennsylvania, Mayor John Fetterman (D) appeared in a Clinton campaign video released Tuesday to explain why he supported her, calling himself "a proud former Bernie supporter" and saying "there is far too much at stake in this election to stand on the sidelines." ...Click title for more
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Former Ohio state senator and Bernie Sanders campaign surrogate Nina Turner speaking at the People's Summit in Chicago. (Photo:
Steve Stearns/cc/flickr
By Robert Borosage
Campaign for America's Future
July 13, 2016 - Even as Bernie Sanders was endorsing Hillary Clinton Tuesday in New Hampshire, expressions of dismay and outrage from his supporters flooded social media. Naturally, Donald Trump piled on, tweeting that Bernie Sanders "has totally sold out to corrupt Hillary Clinton," and that his supporters are "not happy that he is selling out."
Those gathering under #selloutsanders are, of course, a small minority of activists. Polls show that 85 percent of Sanders voters are ready to support Hillary Clinton, and that number will surely grow when the Democratic Convention launches her formal candidacy. But the sentiment is real. The Sanders insurgency was fueled by a revolt against the big-money politics that Clinton personifies. Clinton delivered one of her most populist speeches in response to the Sanders endorsement, but doubts about her commitments are widespread, even among those intending to vote for her.
Sanders, however, did not "sell out." His endorsement was carefully framed. He began by celebrating the extraordinary movement that grew behind his candidacy - 13 million votes, hundreds of thousands of volunteers, 2.5 million small donors, victories in 22 caucuses and primaries and 1,900 delegates. "Together, we have begun a political revolution to transform America and that revolution continues. Together, we continue the fight to create a government which represents all of us, and not just the one percent - a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice."
Sanders has it right. It will take a political revolution to transform our politics, revive our democracy, and make government the instrument of the many and not just the few. That is not a task of one campaign or one presidency. The movement has to build - in fits and starts, waves and tides - over time. And Sanders is right: The next step in building that movement is defeating Donald Trump and electing Hillary Clinton as president.
The Movement Must Work To Crush Trump
Populist movements in this country have often floundered on the shoals of race and nativism. The established are quick to play on racial division or fears of the other to divide working and poor people. The South perfected this politics, but it works, sometimes with greater subtlety, across the nation and across party lines. Clinton fended off Sanders' surge in part by contrasting her social liberalism - "breaking down barriers" for people of color and women - with what she termed Sanders' "single issue" focus on the economy. Sanders succeeded in winning the majority of votes of African Americans under 30, but the political revolution has work to do to consolidate a powerful multiracial movement for fundamental change.
Thrashing Donald Trump is the next step in that process. Trump has risen as a fake populist, preying on racial and nativist fears. His slurs against Mexican immigrants, Moslems, blacks and women are classic, if raw, politics of division. His bet is that he can profit from consolidating the votes of white working and middle-class men by stoking their fears and anger....Click title for more
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'This moment calls for the vigorous defense of our right to continued protest,' the author argues.
By Linda Burnham
Common Dreams
A thick strand in the history of U.S. policing is rooted back in the slave patrols of the 19th century. Patty rollers were authorized to stop, question, search, harass and summarily punish any Black person they encountered. The five- and six-pointed badges many of them wore to symbolize their authority were predecessors to those of today's sheriffs and patrolmen. They regularly entered the plantation living quarters of enslaved people, leaving terror and grief in their wake. Together with the hunters of runaways, these patrols had a crystal clear mandate: to constrain the enslaved population to its role as the embodiment and producer of massive wealth for whites and to forestall the possibility that labor subordinated to the lash might rebel at the cost of white lives.
How far have we come, really? Having extricated ourselves from a system of bottomless and blatant cruelty, we have evolved a system that depends on the patty rollers of today to constrain and contain a population that, while no longer enslaved, is ruthlessly exploited, criminally neglected and justifiably aggrieved. Ruthlessly exploited by the low-wage industries that depend on ample supplies of cheap labor, by the bottom feeders of capital - payday loan companies and slumlords come to mind - by the incarceration-for-profit industry, by the municipalities that meet their budgets by preying on poor people, generating revenue by way of broken taillights, lapsed vehicle registrations and failures to signal.
Criminal neglect by policy makers - 152 years' worth and counting - at every level of government. An education policy that appears to be: starve the public system until it collapses and to hell with the children whose parents have no alternative. Housing policy stubbornly stacked against the development and maintenance of low-income housing. Jobs policy that, against an ideological backdrop that touts personal fulfillment and prosperity through honest effort, reduces grown men to selling loosies and cd's on street corners to provide for their families.
Justifiably aggrieved because we still must assert, against the relentless accumulation of evidence to the contrary, that Black lives matter.
And all this on top of the foundational failure to financially repair or compensate the formerly enslaved or their descendants.
So today's patty rollers are expected to contain any overflow of bitterness and anger on the part of the exploited, neglected and aggrieved, maintaining order in a fundamentally - and racially - disordered system. Their mandate is as clear as that of their forefathers: to constrain a population whose designated role is to absorb absurdly high rates of unemployment and make itself available for low-wage, low-status work without complaint, much less rebellion. Those who fear a spiraling descent into disorder, know this: We are merely witnessing the periodic, explosive surfacing of entrenched disorders we have refused to face or fix.
Our narratives and debates about good cops and rogue cops, better training and community policing are important but entirely insufficient. No doubt the patty rollers of the 1850s could have been trained to reign in their brutality. Given the gloriously diverse dispositions of our human family, patrollers likely ranged from the breathtakingly cruel to the queasily reluctant enforcers of patent injustice. All that is, at bottom, beside the point. Whether cruel or kind, restrained or rogue, their job was to police - and by policing, maintain - a barbaric system.
Today's police can be better trained to recognize implicit bias, to dial back on aggression and deescalate tense encounters. All to the good, as far as it goes. But none of it changes their core mandate in poor Black communities: to control and contain, by any means necessary, a population that has every reason to be restive and rebellious.
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"Was he colored?" That's what my grandmother would say whenever she heard news about a criminal act. She knew that if the alleged perpetrator was "colored," his criminality would be read not simply as the act of an individual, but as an expression of an ingrained racial tendency. Somehow being Black meant that the actions of every random thief, rapist or murderer who was also Black redounded to you and your people. I imagine most Black families had a version of "Was he colored?" And I wouldn't be surprised if Muslim American families have an equivalent expression today. Untying the knot of individual culpability and the consequences of racial belonging is nowhere near as straightforward as it might seem.
I was on a dance floor on Thursday night, desperately trying to shake off the news from Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights. My phone was in my back pocket and, like an idiot, when it buzzed with an incoming text, I left the dance floor and stepped outside to the news from Dallas. Though the action was still unfolding, I immediately surmised that the shooter was "colored," and that he had been trained by the U.S. military.
It has fallen to President Obama, time and again, to make sense out of the incomprehensible and bind the wounds of a nation apparently bent on self-destruction. In the aftermath of Dallas, Obama quickly condemned the despicable violence of a demented, troubled individual. The president's intent was clear and laudable. He sought to defuse tensions by definitively asserting that the shooter's action was not associated with a political movement or a particular organization, that his murderous deeds should in no way be linked to African Americans in general. He struggled to shift the focus from "Was he colored?" to "Clearly he was crazy, right?"...Click title for more
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By Richard North Patterson
Huffington Post
July 12, 2016 - The warning comes from the Hebrew book of Hosea: "Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind."
So it is with the Republican Party and Donald Trump.
True, Trump personifies a fear and hatred of "the other" embodied by some of our history's more frightening and despicable figures: Father Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace. This has led to some of our most shameful chapters - lynchings, anti-immigrant violence, the internment of Japanese-Americans. Because such tragedies are so searing, we view them as unique.
But they do not arise from nowhere. Nor did Donald Trump. Those who are shocked by his success have given scant notice to the darker forces which stain our society and roil our politics. Or, more likely, they pretended not to notice.
Most deplorably, the Republican Party.
The terrible tragedies of last week have muted, for all too brief a moment, the racial politics which suffuse the Trump campaign. But they are there, and will persist. So there will never be a better time than now to examine how the Trump became the Republican nominee.
From his entry on the political scene, Trump has left no doubt as to how he proposed to rise. He began by fomenting the birther hysteria against Barack Obama, neatly fusing racism - the fear of Blacks; nativism - Obama must be from Kenya; and xenophobia - our president is a closet Muslim. An avid audience awaited him within the white working-class base of the Republican party - fearful of minorities, immigrants and the tide of globalization. Even now, a near-majority of Republicans believe Obama to be a foreign-born Muslim.
Small wonder, then, that Trump secured the Republican nomination by targeting nonwhites - at home or abroad - as the preeminent threats to our way of life.
He labeled undocumented Mexican immigrants criminals, murderers, and rapists. He promised to deport all 11 million, including children who grew up here. He pledged to build a wall on the border and make the Mexican government pay for it. When his rallies grew "a little boring," he bragged, "I just say, 'We will build the wall!' and they just go nuts."
Among Republican primary voters, his poll numbers shot upwards.
In the wake of terrorist shootings, he started going after Muslims. He suggested registering American Muslims on a national database. He proposed monitoring Muslim neighborhoods and mosques. He promised to bar all Muslims from entering United States - including refugees from the tragic slaughter in Syria. And he began winning primary after primary.
He fomented violence at rallies, once pledging to pay the legal fees of a man who assaulted a black protester. Ever the opportunist, he paid special attention to protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement. He falsely suggested that the greatest concentration of crime occurs in cities which, not so coincidentally, had a substantial African-American population. And, consistently, he used black demonstrators as foils.
In early May, he completely vanquished his last opposition, and became the GOP's de facto nominee.
To what, one wonders, did the Republican establishment attribute his astonishing coup?
True, he also inveighed against free trade agreements, and promised to impose tariffs on the Mexicans in Chinese. Even this, of course, had its ration of xenophobia. But no sentient Republican could miss that the predominant share of the GOP electorate had embraced Trump's war on non-white enemies.
Now he is forcing them to live with it - or not.
Though his offenses against tolerance have become notorious, it is worth taking inventory of what he has said and done since securing the nomination - not simply because of his venom and persistence, but because of the underlying meaning for the Republican Party and our society as a whole....Click title for more
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By Libero Della Piana
Ourfuture.org
July 14, 2016 - President Obama gave yet another historic speech Wednesday at the mass memorial service for the five Dallas police officers gunned down during a protest of the police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minn.
In a way few can do, Obama called the country together to reach across the gaping divide that was exposed this week. He summed up the divided understanding many Blacks and whites have about policing and police violence. He suggested reality is more complex than the simple rhetoric we hear in the media and encourage all sides to empathize with the other.
"Because with an open heart," said Obama, "we can learn to stand in each other's shoes and look at the world through each other's eyes, so that maybe the police officer sees his own son in that teenager with a hoodie who's kind of goofing off but not dangerous and the teenager - maybe the teenager will see in the police officer the same words and values and authority of his parents."
Of course empathy is important and we should encourage it. But the president falls short; empathy alone will never end the regular and widespread killing of black people in disproportionate numbers. It's a racist system, not a few individual racist police that devalues black lives and leaves us dead so easily.
Narratives on all sides of the police issue often make the same mistake as the president. They understand police killings as simply a matter of individual actions that are solved by individual culpability.
One version of the narrative says that the majority of police are good and don't go around killing people without warrant. Those who shoot innocents are aberrations, bad apples who should be separated from the rest. They need better training or more rigorous screening.
Another version says that many police officers are just plain racist. They are bigots who are either afraid or hateful of black people or both. Police need individual prosecution and punishment for their crimes.
Certainly we need better training and recruitment procedures in police departments. We also need serious consequences for police misconduct, brutality and murder. But none of those things will likely end the long history of police abuse and killings of people of color. That's because police killings are a natural outgrowth of institutions that have implicitly biased policies and practices.
If police systematically target poor communities and communities of color; disproportionately stop, arrest and charge people of color in similar circumstances to whites; and then try, convict and levy longer sentences for people of color, does it not follow as a matter of course that African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos will be shot and killed at rates disproportionate to their numbers in the population? Police killings are just the most visible, painful and horrifying aspect of a racist system of mass incarceration and criminalization....Click title for more
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By Jacob Barker
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
July 14, 2016 - A longtime St. Louis civil rights group and big labor are working to build closer ties in an effort the two groups say is part of a new focus that will continue beyond election season.
AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre was in St. Louis Thursday to meet with more than just area labor leaders. He also made a stop at the St. Louis-based Organization for Black Struggle's office and community center in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood in north St. Louis.
Longtime Organization for Black Struggle leader Jamala Rogers said the two groups are collaborating to help build local organizers and get them involved in the political process and labor organizing. She wants to see the creation of a "black worker center" in the neighborhood, which she said is struggling from decades of disinvestment.
"That does call for an educated, enlightened electorate, particularly workers, and for us, that's black workers," Rogers said. "That's our focus."
The two groups haven't necessarily been focused on the same issues. The Organization for Black Struggle has monitored local police conduct and spoken out against alleged abuses long before the unrest in Ferguson. In recent years, it worked to organize protests with the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of Michael Brown's death in August 2014.
The AFL-CIO focuses on helping workers organize, assisting the many unions under its umbrella and mobilizing voters during elections. But Gebre said the huge labor organization needs to look beyond its traditional activities and build relationships with other groups that last after the election season furor dies down.
For instance, Gebre said, mass incarceration is an area that civil rights groups have focused on, and it affects workers, too. People can't make a decent wage if a portion of their community are ex-felons or in prison, he said.
William Spriggs, the AFL-CIO's chief economist and a former official with President Barack Obama's administration, said areas of high joblessness like north St. Louis hurt all workers.
"If black workers are being treated unfairly and are unable to access jobs in a fair way, it means you have a set of workers who are desperate and have to take wages that are low, and that hurts all workers," Spriggs said.
The worker centers like the one planned in St. Louis will help area residents get information on training, employment and union organizing, he added.
"We can't be the labor movement if we only represent the people the bosses tell us we can represent, we have to be America's labor movement," Spriggs said. "These people aren't paying dues, but we have to represent them too."
Gebre said the national labor organization will look for ways to "to make OBS as strong as possible."...Click title for more
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By Maureen Ryan
Variety
May 24, 2016 - In this age of niche networks and splintered audiences, there's no controversy in noting that the updated version of the iconic "Roots" miniseries, simulcast May 30 on History, A&E, and Lifetime, is unlikely get the huge audience garnered by the original that aired on ABC nearly 40 years ago.
Yet this new take on the saga should be viewed by as wide an audience as possible, from families to school kids to viewers interested in important chapters of the American saga. The lessons the new "Roots" teaches over the course of its eight hours, which air on four consecutive nights, are worth revisiting, and a number of outstanding performances enliven this retelling of the story of Kunta Kinte and his descendants.
The word "lessons" in the previous sentence is used advisedly. This miniseries shares the same impulse to instruct and enlighten that was a hallmark of the original, which was part of a wave of mainstream '70s programs - among them shows as divergent as "Holocaust" and "All in the Family" - that attempted to challenge audiences even as they questioned viewers' understanding of their world.
The new "Roots" is essentially a series of interlinked TV movies, each one focused on a particular generation of the progeny of Kunta Kinte (Malachi Kirby). The transitions can be bumpy as new characters are established and relationships are quickly - and sometimes thinly - sketched out. That said, the first installment, directed by Phillip Noyce, starts out strongly and chronicles Kunta's life in Gambia with a great deal of energy.
Though the horrors of the Middle Passage are depicted with sensitivity by Noyce (one of four directors on the project), much of the rest of the opener tells the story of Kunta and his world in the years before he landed as a slave in Maryland. Babatunde Olusanmokun makes a strong impression as Kunta's father, Omoro, and Derek Luke is similarly memorable as that old movie standby, the tough drill instructor who ensures that his warriors have the skills they need to survive. The palpable detail and atmosphere of Kunta's home and culture strongly ground everything that comes after, especially his pride, his strength and his continual resistance to the shackles imposed on him.
In America, Kunta never accepts his lot, and Kirby gives his character the hyper-aware energy of a man perpetually on the lookout for an opportunity to flee. "Why don't they run?" he wonders as he gets his first glimpse of plantations with dozens of slaves and only one overseer. But like the men and women whose labor creates the wealth of the Waller plantation, Kunta finds that the bonds of family complicate matters, and the dangers of escape are many.
"You can't buy a slave. You've got to make a slave," says one tyrannical overseer who tries to break Kunta's will. And in many ways, "Roots" is an exploration of the different ways in which individuals resist what is unjust and inhumane. A strong link to her ancestors grounds the implacable inner resistance of Kizzy (Anika Noni Rose), a house servant for Tom Lea (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a selfish gambler determined to raise himself into the upper tiers of Southern society. Like James Purefoy and Matthew Goode, who also play slave owners, Meyers ably fills out his entitled, frequently petulant role. But the focus here is on the black men and women who are, on some level, always on alert. Even as they create meaningful personal lives for themselves, they are frequently reminded that their families could be torn apart at any time....Click title for more
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 Chaos & Caliphate:
Jihadis and the West in
the Struggle for the Middle East
By Patrick Cockburn
OR Books (2016)
By Rod Such
The Electronic Intifada
July 8, 2016 - Patrick Cockburn's Chaos & Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East is a 14-year chronicle of the civil wars and sectarian violence that followed Western intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen and gave rise to the caliphate established by the Islamic State group in parts of Syria and Iraq.
An Irish journalist who reports principally for the British newspaper The Independent, Cockburn has assembled entries in a diary he kept while covering regional conflicts from the years 2001 to 2015. The diary entries are contemporary with the events they describe. However, Cockburn also provides an introduction to each section to bring readers up to date, along with an afterword in which he summarizes his conclusions.
The result is a sweeping survey of the chaos, war crimes, atrocities, political shifts and incalculable human suffering brought about by the various civil wars plaguing the region. The sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq has also swept up the Kurds and Yazidis in both Iraq and Syria and the Houthis in Yemen, while leaving Libya in a state of anarchy. Cockburn also documents the role played by regional actors in the conflicts, including the Persian Gulf states, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
US central to regional chaos
Cockburn's diary entries are remarkably prescient at times, so much so that one begins to wonder if they weren't updated after the fact. But this is an astute and experienced reporter in the region who brings a skeptical ear to every claim made by a government official and who has first-hand experience on the ground as a front-line reporter. Although often lacking in historical background, the book partly makes up for this deficiency with a thorough knowledge of the current military and political strengths and weaknesses of the various forces in conflict.
More descriptive than analytical, the book carries the weight of considerable authority and insight. Thankfully, it avoids the Orientalism that plagues the accounts of so many Western journalists who attempt to locate the problem in the Arab or Afghan mind or culture or in the religion of Islam. When Cockburn interviews those on all sides of ethnic and sectarian divides, it's their humanity that comes across more vividly than anything else, though their experiences are often grounded in whether they are Alawite, Christian, Houthi, Kurd, Pashtun, Shia, Sunni, Tajik or Yazidi.
Iraq, Cockburn notes, is at the "heart of this book," because the US invasion and occupation destroyed "Iraq as a unified country" and "opened up a period in which Iraq's three great communities - Shia, Sunni and Kurds - are in a permanent state of confrontation, a situation that has had a deeply destabilizing impact on all of Iraq's neighbors." Cockburn believes that at least three countries - Iraq, Syria and Yemen - will never "come together as unitary states again."
Cockburn examines again and again the role played by the US government, pointing out that both the US and Israel "openly exulted" at the Syrian rebellion against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. They, along with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, hoped the rebellion would lead to the defeat or isolation of predominantly Shia Iran, a Syrian ally, and the Shia-led Hizballah in Lebanon that played a major role in ousting Israel from South Lebanon and fought Israeli land forces to a standstill in 2006. Iran and Hizballah in turn, Cockburn argues, see the defeat of al-Assad's regime as an existential threat that puts Iran's capital, Tehran, in peril.
Cockburn largely fails to bring much light to the origins of the Syrian uprising in yet another example of reporting that lacks historical background. In a July 2011 entry, he points to the bravery of those who peacefully protested against al-Assad "despite so many being shot down."...Click title for more
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Why I Joined CCDS
By Paul Krehbiel
I joined the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism because:
1. I wanted to be a part of an organization that was bigger than myself. I had been involved in many progressive, labor, anti-war, anti-racist and left campaigns but I felt a need to work together with other like-minded people to multiply my efforts.
2. I wanted to be a part of an organization that I agree with and feel at home within. There are many organizations on the left, and many do good work. But I felt at home in CCDS because it is an organization that is guided by principles and analysis that I agree with. CCDS is guided by Marxism but is not dogmatic, and is open to and supportive of the ideas of many other thinkers, and the actions of a wide array of social justice activists.
3. I wanted to be a part of an organization that is thoughtful, and encourages deep probing and questioning, and lively but friendly debate and discussion.
4. I wanted to be a part of an organization where members are rooted in mass movements and constituencies, and are really rooted among and with the American people and their organizations.
5. I wanted to be a part of an organization that gives special attention to the most exploited and oppressed, African Americans and other people of color, women and others who suffer discrimination. I want to be a part of an organization that is multi-racial, and reflects the diversity of the people of our country, knowing that it is right and makes us stronger.
6. I wanted to be a part of an organization that gives special attention to the working -class, especially the labor movement and all working people.
7. I wanted to be a part of an organization that believes in coalitions, knowing that the left and people's movements are stronger when we work together in alliances, and is actively working to bring these alliances into being.
8. I wanted to be a part of an organization that believes in democracy, and uses deeply democratic practices, inclusiveness and transparency in all areas of its work.
9. I wanted to be a part of an organization that knows how to link reform and revolution, that understands how to fight for immediate popular reforms today in a way that lays the groundwork for achieving something better, ultimately a socialist society.
10. I wanted to be a part of an organization that believes in international solidarity, especially with working people and the oppressed all over the world, and those who have freed themselves from the domination of oppressors, both foreign and domestic.
11. I wanted to be a part of an organization that has a general path forward and is creative. It's important to have a plan to achieve a better society, and also to recognize that it is a work in progress. CCDS encourages creativity, and testing different ideas and approaches as necessary steps to progress along the road to real freedom.
12. I wanted to be a part of an organization that is made up of a lot of nice people, people who have mutual respect for each other, help each other, and become good friends with each other. CCS respects the individual, and the collective. It's a lot easier and more enjoyable to work in that kind of organization.
That's CCDS. Join me and many others. Join CCDS today.
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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