Posted by admin on September 5, 2009 under Uncategorized | 
After the Convention:
Some Suggestions
For a Plan of Action
By Carl Davidson
Following this Convention, CCDS needs to hit the ground running with a clear program of action. We want clear and concise answers to the question often posed, ‘What is CCDS Doing?’ While it’s never been the case than the vast majority of our members have been inactive, it’s also been the case that we haven’t always focused our diverse activities in a way that made the organization more effective, more visible and thus better able to grow.
We need to better organize our activities on two fronts at once, the mass democratic and the socialist. The two are necessarily linked, but not the same.
ON THE MASS DEMOCRATIC FRONT:
--Peace and solidarity. We need to press for ‘Out Now’ as a demand expressing the urgency of ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and any other similar conflicts that might arise. If Obama doesn’t reverse course and is suckered in by the ‘Long War’ advocates, it will destroy him, his presidency and anything decent he wants to accomplish. The fight for peace and the fight for economic justice are linked in a way that has never been more clear. Obama can chart a path to recovery or he keep us in the quagmire of unjust wars. But he can’t do both, and we need to be the clear, insistent and determined voice delivering exactly that message. Educational work within the working class around the Gaza crisis and the Agent Orange crimes also stands out as a priority in solidarity work. Read more of this article »
Posted by admin on May 23, 2009 under Socialism |
Eleven Talking Points
On 21st Century Socialism
By Carl Davidson
SolidarityEconomy.net
May 1, 2009
The current discussion around socialism in left and progressive circles in the U.S. needs to be placed in a more substantive arena. This is an effort to do so. I take note in advance of the criticism that the following eleven working hypotheses are rather dry and formal. But in light of the faux ‘socialisms’ bandied about in the headlines and sound bytes of the mass media in the wake of the financial crisis, especially the absurd claim in the media of rightwing populism that the Obama administration is Marxist and socialist, I felt something a little more rigorous might be helpful. Obviously, criticism and commentary is invited.
1. Socialism’s fundamental building blocks are already present in US society. The means of production, for the most part, are fully developed and in fact are stagnating under the political domination of finance capital. The US labor force, again for the most part, is highly skilled at all levels of production, management, marketing, and finance. The kernels of socialist organization are also scattered across the landscape in cooperatives, socially organized human services, and centralized and widespread mass means of many-to-many communication and supply/demand data management. Many earlier attempts at socialism did not have these advantages. Read more of this article »
Posted by admin on March 26, 2009 under Uncategorized |
By David Schweickart
First, the context: ‘Economic Democracy: A Worthy Socialism that Would Really Work’ laid out a model that was to form the basis of my book, ‘Against Capitalism,’ published by Cambridge University Press in 1993.
The article, like the book itself, was a theoretical response to the triumphalism of the TINA crowd (There Is No Alternative) that followed the collapse of Soviet Union and the rejection of socialism by its satellite states in Eastern Europe. ‘A Worthy Socialism’ was intended to demonstrate rigorously that there is an alternative, at least in theory: an economically viable form of socialism that would be more democratic than capitalism and at least as efficient.
‘Against Capitalism’ made the same point, but extended the argument further. Economic Democracy would be not only as efficient as capitalism and more democratic, but also more rational in its growth, more stable, more egalitarian, less prone to high unemployment, more ecologically friendly.
Read more of this article »
Posted by admin on March 4, 2009 under Elections, Obama, Organizing, Strategy |
Notes on an Orientation to the Obama Presidency
By Linda Burnham
The election of Obama, while enthusiastically embraced by most of the left, has also occasioned some disorientation and confusion.
Some have become so used to confronting the dismal electoral choice between the lesser of two evils that they couldn’t figure out how to relate to a political figure who held out the possibility of substantive change in a positive direction.
Others are so used to all-out, full-throated opposition to every administration that they wonder whether and how to alter their stance.
Still others sat out the election, for a variety of political and organizational reasons, and were taken by surprise at how wide and deep ran the current for change.
Now there’s an active conversation on the left about what can be expected of an Obama administration and what the orientation of the left should be towards it.
There are two conflicting views on this:
Read more of this article »
Posted by admin on February 21, 2009 under Climate Change, Energy, Socialism, Strategy |
[This was submitted by the Northern California CCDS for discussion, and then as a proposal for adoption.]
“The world is suffering from a fever due to climate change,
and the disease is the capitalist development model.”
Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, September 2007
Humanity’s Choice
Humanity today faces a stark choice: ecosocialism or barbarism.
We need no more proof of the barbarity of capitalism, the parasitical system that exploits humanity and nature alike. Its sole motor is the imperative toward profit and thus the need for constant growth. It wastefully creates unnecessary products, squandering the environment’s limited resources and returning to it only toxins and pollutants. Under capitalism, the only measure of success is how much more is sold every day, every week, every year — involving the creation of vast quantities of products that are directly harmful to both humans and nature, commodities that cannot be produced without spreading disease, destroying the forests that produce the oxygen we breathe, demolishing ecosystems, and treating our water, air and soil like sewers for the disposal of industrial waste.
Read more of this article »
Posted by admin on February 16, 2009 under Climate Change, Elections, Energy, Labor, Nationalities, Obama, Organizing, Socialism, Strategy, Trade Unions, Youth and Students |
Eco-Socialism Conference
Oakland, California
January 10-11, 2009
Plenary Panel Remarks
By Carl Bloice
People look at me and roll their eyes when I offer the opinion that potential for international peace and cooperation would be greatly enhanced were it discovered that a large object was hurtling toward Earth and threatening great destruction to the planet. Science fiction would become science and possibly we would pull together to find a way to divert the menace from its path. As I said, people look at me like I’m a brother from another planet so I won’t go any further into it here. But still I think the scenario works as an analogy. So does the Economist magazine. Imagine my surprise when in its latest edition, it began its story on global warming with these words:
“Imagine that some huge rocky projectile, big enough to destroy most forms of life, was hurtling towards the earth, and it seemed that deep international co-operation offered the only hope of deflecting the lethal object. Presumably, the nations of the world would set aside all jealousies and ideological hangups, knowing that failure to act together meant doom for all. Read more of this article »
Posted by admin on January 8, 2009 under Elections, Obama, Organizing, Strategy |
Discussion on Our Future:
What Next for Progressives for Obama?
An Organizing Proposal
for a Left-Progressive
National Network and Clearinghouse
by Carl Davidson and Bill Fletcher, Jr.
How can the people brought together by the `Progressives for Obama’ project make a transition into a broader and ongoing post-election nationwide network? How can that network continue to serve as a left- progressive pole within the broader alliance of Obama activists and voters, while contributing to the organization of the instruments for popular political power? What follows is an outline of the organizing tasks and components of such an effort, with an invitation to wider discussion among our community of supporters and activists.
Starting Points
The most important node on the new network is the base community. This is a grassroots group of left- progressive voter-activists situated where people live, work or go to school. Read more of this article »
Posted by admin on January 7, 2009 under African American, Climate Change, Energy, Organizing, Trade Unions, Youth and Students |
Photo: Van Jones and ‘Green Collar’ Workers
[Note from CarlD: While this is a article rather than a paper, I think it contains a vital plank in any jobs program we would want in our basic problem, jobs with new skills for those who need them most.]
It’s Not EasyBecoming Green
By David Roberts
In These Times
One early July morning in Austin, Texas, I sat slumped in a cavernous, featureless conference hall on the last day of Netroots Nation, the annual gathering of progressive bloggers. Half the attendees had already split town. Two days of events and two nights of vigorous celebration had left those who remained bleary-eyed, weakly nursing their bad coffee and stale muffins.
The morning’s only featured speaker was African-American activist Van Jones, co-founder of the national advocacy group Green for All, who had come straight off a plane from the North Pole. (Really.) Given his exhaustion — and ours — Jones could have been forgiven for phoning it in.
Instead, he began joking, cajoling and provoking, weaving an urgent narrative out of class, race, activism and the existential threat of global climate change. Sleepy bloggers sat up a little straighter and closed their laptops. They began nodding, then cheering, then rising to their feet, stomping and shouting. After a half hour, the previously somnolent room hummed with energy.
Read more of this article »
Posted by admin on January 2, 2009 under Climate Change, Socialism, Strategy |
Photo: Green jobs installing solar panels
IS SUSTAINABLE
CAPITALISM
AN OXYMORON?
[Note from CarlD: To spur some discussion on both climate change and socialism, I'm posting this article, widely circulated among environmentalists by Rachel's List. Rachel's Introduction: Growth of the human enterprise is wrecking the planet, so we must develop a steady-state economy -- one in which the use of energy and materials remains constant (or declines) instead of always growing. Unfortunately, we have very few concrete proposals for such an economy. David Schweickart of Loyola University in Chicago has proposed an economy that could grow, but does not have to grow, based on competitive markets plus public ownership of productive facilities (factories, farms), renting them to producer co-ops, with investment capital raised by a flat tax on productive assets and distributed each year to all regions of the nation on a per-capita basis. It is time to give these ideas a proper hearing. Schweickart's short book After Capitalism is must reading.--P.M.]
By David Schweickart
The subtitle of Joel Kovel’s The Enemy of Nature (Zed Books, 2007) states his thesis bluntly: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? Kovel thinks we need a revolution — although he is fully cognizant as to how remote that prospect seems.
Growing numbers of people are beginning to realize that capitalism is the uncontrollable force driving our ecological crisis, only to become frozen in their tracks by the awesome implications of this insight. (p. xi)
Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins also think we need a revolution, but of a different sort than the one envisaged by Kovel. Natural Capitalism (Little, Brown, 1999) is subtitled Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. President Clinton is reported to have called it one of the five most important books in the world today.
Hawken and the Lovinses agree with Kovel that the current model of capitalism is problematic. “Capitalism, as practiced, is a financially profitable, non-sustainable aberration in human development” (p. 5). But they do not see the problem as residing in capitalism itself. They distinguish among four kinds of capital, all necessary for production: human capital, financial capital, manufactured capital and natural capital. The problem with the current form of capitalism, they argue, is its radical mispricing of these factors. Current market prices woefully undervalue — and often do not value at all — the fourth factor: the natural resources and ecological systems “that make life possible and worth living on this planet.”
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Read more of this article »
Posted by admin on December 10, 2008 under African American, Elections, Labor, Nationalities, Obama, Organizing, Strategy, Trade Unions, Women, Youth and Students |
The Bumpy Road Ahead:
New Tasks of the
Left Following
Obama’s Victory
By Carl Davidson
CCDS National Committee
American progressives have won a major victory in helping to defeat John McCain and placing Barack Obama in the White House. The far right has been broadly rebuffed, the neoconservative war hawks displaced, and the diehard advocates of neoliberal political economy are in thorough disarray. Of great importance, one long-standing crown jewel of white supremacy, the whites-only sign on the Oval Office, has been tossed into the dustbin of history.
The depth of the historical victory was revealed in the jubilation of millions who spontaneously gathered in downtowns and public spaces across the country, as the media networks called Obama the winner. When President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama took the platform in Chicago to deliver his powerful but sobering victory speech, hundreds of millions-Black, Latino, Asian, Native-American and white, men and women, young and old, literally danced in the streets and wept with joy, celebrating an achievement of a dramatic milestone in a 400-year struggle, and anticipating a new period of hope and possibility.
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Read more of this article »
Tags: Carl Davidson, Elections, Nationalities, Obama, Organizing, Racism, Socialism, Strategy, Trade Unions, Women, Youth and Students
