Order Now! New CCDS Booklet on Full Employment, Use It To Organize for Oct. 2

Posted by admin on July 29, 2010 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

Jobs Not War: Let’s Forge Ahead Together

Dear CCDSer

The progressive movement is at a crossroads. As pressure from finance capital builds for President Obama to gut or restrict his recovery agenda, the progressive majority is trying to organize a fight back. Public expression of the anger and frustration of the people whose hopes for change seem to meet so many obstacles must be organized. Mass action and political action together can bring change.

We have just published a new booklet that analyzes the roots of the current crisis and offers a program of struggle for full employment as the progressive way out of our crisis. It title is “Its Time to Fight for Full Employment.” We need your help now to fund the printing and distribution of this important publication, sponsored by the CCDS Labor Committee. Click here to purchase it via PayPal

It’s especially timely as a tool to build for the Oct. 2 mass march on Washington called by the NAACP, La Raza, the AFL-CIO and many others, demanding Jobs, Justice and Peace.

The weight of the economic crisis has been shifted from the bankers to the people through growing unemployment and slashed budgets for human needs and infrastructure. After looting the treasury the neo-liberal politicians cry “deficit” and refuse to fund continued unemployment compensation, COBRA healthcare support, extension of Medicare physicians compensation, and emergency funds to prevent massive layoffs of teachers and firemen by local governments.

Now the “deficit fetishists” are sharpening their knives to slash social security and Medicare while continuing their global war policy.

More than ever the progressive movement needs a socialist left that can help educate about the class basis of political developments and the interconnection of class, race and gender. With this understanding, CCDS participates in the struggles of the progressive majority, works to build unity of progressive forces, and promotes advanced demands like the struggle for full employment.

A full employment and industrial policy that promotes green jobs is essential to ending the economic crisis. A movement for full employment will change the political dynamic in our country from a defense against the far right to an offense against the financial-military-oil oligarchy.

Please chip in $5 or more to help us pay for an initial printing of 1,000 copies of our new booklet. We will send you a copy right away.

And please sign up to sustain CCDS now to help us grow our organization and build the movement for change.

If you want to sustain an independent movement, then CCDS needs your help. We need to raise at least $2,000 per month in sustainers in order to fund our fantastic team of organizers, writers, and others who drive CCDS forward.
Political independence is a direct function of financial independence. That’s why the institutions on the left that have continued to meaningfully pursue a progressive agenda are those that are financially independent.

Left organizations like CCDS need regular, predictable sources of revenue that allow them to plan and grow, freeing them from the impossible choice of either operating on free labor or being in constant fund raising mode. If we want left organizations, we have to consciously build and support them. We need your help.

Can you help reach our goal by contributing $5, or more to fund CCDS? Click here to donate and to sustain CCDS.

http://www.cc-ds.org/donation.htmlTo order the booklets in bulk, send queries to carld717@gmail.com
We thank you for all you do to support CCDS. None of this would be possible without your help. Thank you for stepping up again to sustain our movement.
Thank you, again.
Pat Fry

Carl Davidson

Renee Carter

Carl Bloice

Suggestions For Planning Our Future Work

Posted by admin on September 5, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

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 »

Economic Democracy: A Worthy Socialism That Would Really Work

Posted by admin on March 26, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

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.