Posted by admin on December 6, 2008 under African American, Antiwar, CCDS History, CCDS Today, Climate Change, Elections, Energy, Health Care, Labor, Nationalities, Obama, Organizing, Racism, Socialism, Strategy, Trade Unions, Women, Youth and Students | 
Third Revision June 30, 2009 –This will be this version discussed at the convention
For a Democratic and Socialist Future:
CCDS Goals and Principles
Prologue: Crisis and Opportunity
Crisis: A Convergence of Economic, Environmental and Imperial Crises
We are in a historic moment of interwoven social, economic, environmental, and foreign policy crises.
An economic crisis claims millions of jobs and undermines the basic security of working families across the nation. It deepens the crises in health care, housing, and education, accelerating a downward spiral of growing homelessness, loss of health care, and deteriorating public education. State and local governments caught in persistent budgetary shortfalls are shredding vital public services and cultural endeavors.
An environmental catastrophe looms. Scientists warn that the world may have already passed a point of qualitative climate change from carbon emissions – with alterations of weather patterns causing deep irreversible ecological damage. The inexorable demand of capitalism to put profit before all else aggravates the economic crisis and underlies the system’s resistance to confronting the consequences of its environmental pollution.
A costly military establishment is undermining national security. Militarism has impeded democracy, undermined peace and security, and caused incalculable suffering around the world. The military-industrial complex has contributed heavily to the present economic crisis by wasting precious funds needed to create jobs in a new economy based on ecological survival, sustainable growth, and social development. Expenditures for the largest military in history have run to trillions of dollars. The military is a prime polluter and despoiler of the environment. The “sole superpower” must yield to a new global policy based on abolishing nuclear weapons, reducing conventional forces, closing of foreign bases, and reliance on diplomacy over confrontation.
The convergence of these crises has serious implications for a rising progressive majority. The interconnected issues suggest that the different currents of progressivism must achieve new levels of unity and mutual support. A new political consciousness leading to new ways of organizing and coalition building is needed to defeat a wounded but still dangerous right wing. A new level of unity will advance the country and the world down the road to a human epoch of peace, security, and justice.
Opportunity: A New Political Era is Unfolding
The election of Barack Obama to the presidency is an historic affirmation of centuries of struggle against oppression and racism – a struggle that continues with new inspiration.
The 2008 election is a blow against right-wing reaction that portends a left-center realignment of the nation’s politics. It is the fruit of a rising progressive majority that matured in response to eight years of neoconservative policies representing the most reactionary sectors of US capital. The Obama election was driven by the emergence of a broad array of forces suffering immense damage domestically and globally from the Bush neo-conservative regime.
The multiracial working class in alliance with trade unions, youth, African Americans, Latinos and other people of color, women, and progressive clusters of business now form the promising components of the progressive majority. The profound challenge before all working people and their allies is to organize into a coherent force responsive to the various issues it confronts. The conscious element within that broad alliance arrayed against right-wing reaction must develop a strategy of building the left-center realignment of the nation’s politics in a progressive majority.
1. Multiple and Inseparable Crises of Capitalism
The gap between wealth and poverty is greater than ever. Gross Domestic Product-production of goods and services- has been declining steadily. The traditional pillar of national identity expressed in dreams of upward mobility is in tatters. Education, the lever of hope for a better life, is ridden by crisis with college beyond reach for many young people. Millions are ground down by gnawing insecurity; the bottom is falling out of people’s lives’ as jobs are lost in the tens of thousands every month; pensions are wiped out in stock market deflation, exposing retirees to frightening uncertainty.
The equity held by millions in home ownership is threatened by deflation with foreclosure exposing mortgagees to being cast into the streets. Families struggle to make ends meet against rising food and energy prices. Illness exposes millions to bankruptcy, as the cost of health care in a profit-driven system rises inexorably. The prison and jail population, disproportionately youth of color, increased from 380,000 in 1975 to nearly 2.5 million today. Undocumented immigrants face round up, criminalization, jail, and deportation.
African Americans and other people of color face a dire situation. Centuries of racial and national oppression, the legacy of chattel slavery, have left a residue of disproportionate deprivation and suffering in today’s economic crisis. Joblessness among African Americans is well over thirteen percent, with nearly sixteen percent for males. Unemployment claims among African Americans are rising at more than 150,000 a month. Detroit, a predominantly African American city, reports unemployment at over 20 percent, close to Great Depression levels. Joblessness among African American youth is extremely critical with many communities reporting more than fifty percent unemployed. Latino workers’ unemployment hovers close to twelve percent, up from seven percent in the previous year, while the rate among white jobless stood at close to eight percent. All these figures are understated.
The mortgage crisis has hit minority communities with particular force due to racial targeting by home mortgage and financial institutions. Housing foreclosures are destroying whole neighborhoods in cities like Detroit, Flint, and Cleveland along with the economic assets of families and individuals who have worked lifetimes to build a secure future.
The election of the nation’s first African American president was a significant milepost on the road to democracy and equality. But entrenched doctrines and practices of white supremacy remain – frustrating and undermining the aspirations of all working people. Institutional racism is a central source of exploitation and division aimed at weakening the working class. The battle to wipe out white supremacy in the struggle to build unity is an essential requirement for advancing the interests of all working people.
Capitalism’s depredations have never gone unchallenged – not in the past, not today. Capitalism is exhausted. But it will not pass from the historical stage without ceaseless struggle by the working class and its allies engaged in a conscious battle against far right reaction, for concrete improvement in the lives of the vast majority, and ultimately for the democratic power to build a new society.
A. Crisis: The Cause is Capitalism
The collapse of the financial sector and repeated multi-billion dollar bailouts of insolvent banks and investment houses has provoked unprecedented public outrage. The transfer of trillions of taxpayer funds into the pockets of corrupt and incompetent Wall Street speculators, while millions of working people face foreclosure on their homes and loss of employment, has triggered demands for ‘bailouts of working people, not bailouts of banks.”
The Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations had systematically gutted the regulation of banking and investment practices. Regulations employed to save capitalism from its own worst abuses were jettisoned in the name of the “free market.” The unprecedented power of finance capital, accumulated since the Reagan era, enabled the greed and mindless criminal behavior on Wall Street, as well as the control of the political class and the regulatory agencies.
The collapse of the great financial fraud has led to widespread questioning of capitalism itself, especially among young people. The root cause of the economic crisis is capitalism itself. That is amplified by a review of basic political economy.
Labor is the source of value from which profit is derived. Surplus value is the difference between the full value of labor reflected in commodity exchange, and the wages and benefits paid to workers. The price of labor is determined by what is required for its survival and by its own struggles for a greater share of the value it creates. But capital seeks through exploitation to appropriate the maximum share of the value that labor creates and to minimize labor’s share.
While the economic crisis was precipitated by fraud in the credit sphere, economic instability had been building in the sphere of production in the real economy as capital appropriated an ever-greater share of surplus value from labor. Since the Reagan era, labor has been subjected to a relentless attack on its living standards. That attack has been focused on undermining labor unions, shifting production to low wage “right to work” states, and destroying the social safety net. The increased exploitation of labor was manifest in longer hours, discrimination, temporary and part-time work, speedup, layoffs, and anti-union employer campaigns.
The result is a crisis of overproduction at the same time that labor is increasingly saddled with debt. Overproduction brings about a decline in new production and workers are thrown out of work; joblessness means further decline in market demand; production is further slowed as businesses are forced into bankruptcy or simply closed. Surplus capital in the form of buildings and machinery is destroyed.
Each block of capital strives to expand – to increase profit, to produce and sell more products. Driven by the pressures of competition and the anarchy of the marketplace, capitalists have no choice but to seek to increase profits by reducing the amount of labor that goes into the product. Idle capital is an existential threat. Capital becomes devalued if it is halted at any stage of its circulation, as unsold goods or idle money. Marx pointed out that the optimum for capitalism is to move from production to exchange, from commodity to money, ‘at the speed of thought’.
Cyclical crises are driven also by competition that forces capitalists to buy new equipment to reduce costs of production to raise profits. The cyclical accumulation of capital in the form of factories and equipment to produce an abundance of goods eventually comes into conflict with the private accumulation of profit. At a certain point in the economic cycle the average rate of profit falls as too much capital is producing too little profit.
With greater capital investment, machinery increasingly replaces human beings. In essence: the more capital, the more production, the less labor-power is employed. The disproportion between the expansion of capital and the relative stagnation of workers’ consumption of goods is the ultimate cause of crisis. The effect on working people is constant downward pressure on their ability to buy what they make.
The crisis lasts until overproduction is expended by the devaluation of productive capital, including destruction of factories and machinery, until new productive needs emerge. This process was described by Marx in the Communist Manifesto: “…industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce…. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.”
Marx in Capital summed up the essence of capitalist relations: “The absolute general law of capitalist accumulation makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labor, slavery, ignorance, brutalization, and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.”
This contradiction at the heart of capitalism is the source of this latest cycle of boom and bust. With their unprecedented looting of trillions of dollars of the future earnings of the working class, it is likely that the financial sector will make a rapid recovery. The inexorable logic of capital will lead to another round of financial speculation in debt, equities, and commodities. The destruction of productive capital will keep Main Street in a prolonged depression of joblessness and depressed property values.
Many claim that the collapse of the system was caused by bad choices and bad behavior, and that the system can be restored by re-regulation, banking reform and/or currency reform. But the system itself, not the abuses of it, ultimately generated this crisis. It is very likely that another deeper financial crisis will further cripple the economy before the end of the Obama administration unless the financial center banks are nationalized, the troops are brought home, and a tremendous campaign of infrastructure and green jobs capital investments is begun.
B. The Crisis of Financialization
In recent decades, capitalism has staved off crisis by lending out ever more of the profits, by confiscating workers’ savings in retirement and pension funds, and by monetizing the earnings of future generations of workers to stimulate consumption. This works for a while, but the underlying contradictions inevitably surface and the period of expansion is replaced by economic contraction. When this credit expansion reached its inevitable limit, a financial panic ensued that triggered a spiraling collapse into depression.
Over the past four decades, capitalism’s inherent falling rate of profit has accelerated due to rising global competition, a work force producing more while being squeezed by technological advances, rising prices of core natural resources, and other factors. Investments in production of goods and services were increasingly shifted to shady financial instruments with money being created solely from debt, without the cost of real production. The surplus appropriated by capital no longer found outlet in material production and spilled into financial schemes and speculative bubbles, spreading pain and upheaval throughout the global economic system.
This is “financialization,” driven by massive debt imposed upon working people.
With the weakening of the industrial structure, financialization has become capitalism’s cash cow. Traditionally, credit has functioned as an engine to start and sustain enterprises and to compensate for the inability of labor to buy back all it creates. In the past, capitalists paid interest on credit by turning over a portion of value created by labor to financial institutions. Today, a “financial industry” has subjugated the real production of goods. Riding a tide of “free market” deregulation, exchanges of speculative paper have become the sources of dizzying fortunes that created no new wealth but are the fruit of cynical Ponzi schemes, symbolized by collateralized debt obligations, that ultimately depleted the shrinking resources of the working class.
Faced with collapse of a financial system plundered by greed and bereft of real value in real production, the Bush administration and the 112th Congress made a critical choice: rather than attempting to shore up the economy by creating jobs, the government committed $13.9 trillion of future earnings of the working class to banks and investment houses. The Obama administration and the 113th Congress are continuing on this path while promising change that is yet to come. This trend is deeply immoral and underscores the political and social bankruptcy of the financial oligarchy clinging to power. The growing impoverishment of millions of working people and local government agencies caught up with Wall Street’s speculative binge is deepening the present crisis. The credit system again proved incapable of cushioning the fatal contradiction of capitalism: an exploited labor force without the resources to sustain the system.
C. The Crisis of Capitalist Globalization
Capitalism has been global from its earliest days-seeking markets and sources of raw material from every corner of the world to increase profits. A newly integrated global capitalist system has been driven by vast technological changes that facilitate rapid capital movement. A transnational capitalist class with global interpenetration of ownership and with its own global interests has emerged. Over the last four decades, globalization intensified as the problems and contradictions of capitalism deepened.
Major sectors of U.S. industry virtually shut down as capitalists sought to stem the falling rate of profit by shifting production to low wage countries with favorable tax policies and hostility to labor unions. With transnational production and sale of goods and services, industry and government have assaulted unionization nation by nation. With a sharp decline in union protections and union growth, wages have stagnated. Labor has been pressed to greater productivity under the threat of removal of production to low wage countries.
Having turned their backs on domestic support for education, health care, and social services for working people, globalized capital has fostered a decline of schools, deteriorating cities, and serious neglect of the nation’s infrastructure. It has gutted welfare, marginalized and increased the poor and unemployed, and created a growing prison-industrial complex. Global capital has sought to privatize social benefits and deny working people the entitlements won by decades of struggle.
At the same time, those with economic and political power have exalted individual greed while preaching a doctrine of “personal responsibility” for the working class. Global corporations have pressed a “race to the bottom” in search of maximum profits, burdening much of the developing world with intractable debt. Wall Street bankers have spread toxic mortgages around the world, seriously undermining the banking and credit systems of Europe and Asia, while also spreading the philosophy of deregulation that accelerated the financial collapse. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank impose “structural adjustment programs” to privatize public wealth, savage the poor through demands for debt repayment, cut government benefits, and enact neoliberal “free trade” policies. This only benefits foreign investors and the domestic elites who exploit their own national labor force. This has accelerated disease, hunger, and grinding poverty, widening the great disparity between rich and poor on a world scale.
However, new social movements have arisen all over the world to challenge global capital’s neoliberal “free market” domination of the economies of developing regions. South America is now a primary area of struggle against the IMF and other agencies of capitalist globalization. Brazil has led the effort to throttle Washington’s effort to form a Free Trade Area of the Americas. The Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America (ALBA) promotes socialist principles of cooperative indigenous economic activity. Its Banco del Sur offers development financing based on regional solidarity.
New centers of emerging economic and political power such as Brazil, China, Indonesia, India, Mexico, Russia and Turkey are less prone to accept Washington’s unilateral domination of the global system. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, embracing China, Russia and the resource-rich states of Central Asia is a serious challenge to Washington’s global hegemony.
Whether the United States adapts peacefully to new world realities or continues to support the transnational capitalists’ domination of the global system through wars, military threats, and unbridled exploitation will depend in large measure on the demands of a growing progressive majority here and abroad for a new foreign economic policy based upon fair bi-lateral trade agreements and constructive peaceful relations with the other nations of the world.
D. The Crisis of the War Economy and the National Security State
The United States emerged as a superpower after World War II with a vastly expanded industrial capacity untouched by wartime destruction. With a huge advantage in nuclear weapons, the Cold War buildup of conventional forces established a war economy and the largest military in history. The emerging military-industrial complex became the lever to challenge radical, socialist, and communist movements, and eliminate alternatives to global capitalism.
Massive military spending was also advanced to stimulate a high growth manufacturing economy, serving as a right wing alternative to social spending and infrastructure improvement to deal with capitalism’s cyclical breakdowns. The military-industrial-government complex has been the underpinning for US militarism. It has launched scores of large and small interventions over the past sixty years that have killed and maimed millions, bringing unimaginable suffering and tragedy to many parts of the world. The imperial war on Iraq was fomented by criminal deception. The escalating war in Afghanistan underscores the senselessness of using military force to bring about “regime change.”
The US public has had its fill of costly misadventures that have produced near universal enmity against the United States. Military spending in the trillions of dollars over the last quarter century has overwhelmed annual budgets. The economic consequence of the war economy has not been economic stability, but the opposite: a major drain on national wealth and a crucial factor in undermining economic recovery. Production of increasingly expensive weapon systems ends in exorbitant piles of lethal technology, failing to generate new value through new economic activity. Such production drags down the civilian economy that increasingly needs new investment to sustain itself.
The war economy and related military adventurism are bankrupting the country. Estimates of the long-term costs of the Iraq war alone are three trillion dollars. Funds expended on weapons systems undercut urgent domestic needs for education, health care, clean energy, and rebuilding of the country’s roads bridges, railways and waterways at decent paying jobs. Those mandatory objectives cannot be met without ending the war economy.
With the dawn of the Cold War, the US government unveiled a policy to control and stifle dissent against the emerging military-industrial colossus. The national security state was born. In the name of fighting communism, US citizens were subjected to job loss, jailing and denial of the constitutional right to free association. After the McCarthyism of the high Cold War years, the national security state as an essential aspect of political rule went through ebbs and flows, but did not disappear. Government agents regularly infiltrated and spied on peace groups, phones were illegally tapped, and provocateurs disrupted demonstrations.
After 9/11, the “war on terror” gave renewed life to the national security state through the repressive Patriot Act. Widespread illegal wiretapping of US citizens, relentless harassment and assault on immigrants, illegal kidnapping and rendition, mistreatment and torture, denial of habeas corpus to prisoners held without charge for years-have all undermined the claims of US moral authority and earned worldwide disapproval.
The national security state, the source of systemic violations of constitutional rights, is inseparably tied to the war economy. The Obama administration, fueled by the efforts and aspirations of the progressive majority, should dismantle the national security state and end the violations of constitutional rights. To begin to restore full democracy the warfare state must be diminished and finally abolished. This administration must fundamentally revise the neo-conservative policy of global empire that projects US military power to every corner of the world. It must shrink the military’s global footprint and end its interventionist policies. That perhaps, is the most transforming and basic challenge facing President Barack Obama and his administration – and a challenge to all who want a world of peace and justice.
E. The Crisis of Climate Change and Unsustainable Resources
Two decades of detailed study by scientists from all over the world has ended in stark consensus: the climate crisis is real, urgent, and threatens massive human misery and habitat destruction. Three hundred and fifty parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere is what many scientists, climate experts, and progressive national governments are now saying is the safe upper limit. Our current level is 387 parts per million. Consumption of fossil fuels, melting of the polar ice caps, increased frequency of devastating hurricanes, and wrenching changes in weather patterns – are all inextricably linked.
The depth of the climate crisis demands an end to the exceptional waste of natural and human resources under capitalism. The crisis demands that billions be invested and tens of thousands employed replacing 19th century carbon based fuels with energy drawn from sun, wind, and geothermal sources. The country needs new energy grids, non-polluting mass transportation, homes retrofitted to curb carbon emissions, and new global agreements to end the emission of pollutants, to reduce deforestation, and to share the world’s energy resources efficiently and equitably.
Inherently wasteful capitalist growth is not consistent with sustaining human life. The wealthy countries, led by the United States have consumed the bulk of the world’s resources. Justice demands that those who have gorged on consumption bear the greatest burden in the rationing of non-renewable resources in a finite world where emerging nations now aspire to greater consumption.
Billions of people are stripped of resources by global capitalism. A quarter of all deaths in the world are linked to environmental destruction, to the disruption of indigenous agriculture by global agribusiness, and to political pressure for developing countries to end subsidies to their own farmers. As energy resources shrink, food prices rise – causing widespread malnutrition and disease among three quarters of the world’s rural poor.
Disruption of traditional agriculture by global agribusiness has brought huge migrations to cities around the world where displaced rural masses are forced to fight for survival. At the core of such upheavals is the persistent racism reflected in the indifference of political leaders, the silence of media, and the continuing destructive activities of capitalists. The sense of justice and the self-interest of all human beings demand international cooperation to address and solve those basic violations of human rights and dignity.
II. The Progressive Majority: A Strategy for Change
CCDS’s principal strategy is to build and sustain a progressive majority. The concept was forged from an analysis of the country’s history and traditions that mandate the building of broad democratic alliances able, on the basis of their programs and activities, to defeat reaction and to place the country firmly on the road to progress that leads to deeper economic and social change.
The systemic basis of the interconnected crises of social life, the economy, climate, and empire makes the solution of any one crisis dependent upon progress in solving the others. The unity of the many currents of struggle around these issues into a conscious progressive majority is a prerequisite to attaining sufficient power to establish popular democratic control of our society. The political and social power of the progressive majority can achieve basic economic and social changes that lead to socialism.
The contours of that majority were strikingly manifested in the historic victory of Barack Obama, built with a coalition of both traditional and new political forces. The election represented a new high tide for popular democracy in the United States. The growing anger and frustration of the American people suffering decades of declining living standards, imperial wars, racism, and erosion of democratic rights has turned into a mighty wave of organized voters.
The election underscored the inseparable connection of issues and constituencies in the progressive majority rooted in race, class, and gender. The backbone of that majority is the combined force of the working class, communities of color, women, and youth. Articulation of the needs and demands of those constituencies in the first place is essential to advancing and consolidating the progressive majority.
The labor movement had accumulated several election cycles of experience developing its electoral organization and the cadre necessary to fully wield its power. Though seriously weakened by the anti-union policies of recent neo-conservative administrations, it effectively led the fight against racism and reaction, especially in the older industrial states of the Midwest. The role of the unions in challenging white workers to vote their interests rather than their prejudices represented the finest traditions of the labor movement going back to the great industrial organizing drives of the 1930′s that were largely built on interracial solidarity. This experience paid off in 2008.
Labor’s ability to assess and address the political tasks necessary to defeat reaction was exemplified by AFL-CIO Vice President Richard Trumka’s famous speech denouncing racism at the July 1, 2008 USW Convention: “…there’s no evil that’s inflicted more pain and more suffering than racism – and it’s something we in the labor movement have a special responsibility to challenge. It’s our special responsibility because we know, better than anyone else, how racism is used to divide working people.” Polling data clearly reveals that union households embraced progressive ideas with greater conviction and clarity than non-union households. Rebuilding and reenergizing the labor movement are fundamental strategic aspects of advancing a strong progressive majority.
The election again confirmed that the African American community is in the forefront of progressive struggle and is a cornerstone of the progressive majority. The election of an African American president represented for millions of African Americans and many others an affirmation of centuries of struggle for equality. But institutional racism is far from dead. The impact of the gathering depression falls heaviest on communities of color, which continue to face the highest home foreclosure rates, the highest joblessness, the poorest public education, the greatest lack of adequate health care, and the highest rates of incarceration, especially among youth. The struggle against racism in all its forms is absolutely essential to building and fortifying the progressive majority. The left, with its experience and outlook, is called upon to play a leading and vital role in eradicating every form of racism as essential to advancing the progressive majority.
Women voted for progress in the greatest numbers. They are demanding effective action to curb the ravages of the gathering depression, especially in fighting for the interests of the majority of families with children caught in the mortgage crisis and the three quarters of mothers who are in the labor force struggling to cover the rising costs of child care, healthcare, and food. The strengthening of the progressive majority requires resolute action by all sectors of the progressive community to finally eradicate the disparities between male and female in work opportunities, wages and promotion, health care and education. A clear and persistent effort to eradicate sexism in all its forms is also mandatory to assuring the strength and solidarity of the progressive majority.
Latinos, the most dynamically growing segment of the population, have become a vital part of the progressive majority and were instrumental in moving western states into the progressive column. Motivated largely by battles to end discrimination, for fair and humane treatment of undocumented immigrants, and for fair trade policies with Latin American countries, the growing presence of Latino communities in the progressive majority will become increasingly significant.
A major strategic objective in advancing the progressive majority has to be the attainment of unity in struggle among labor, African Americans, Latinos, Asians and other communities of color, youth, and women. The young generation has emerged as a powerful force for progress and equality. Young people were the spark and early foundation for the vast new social movement that marched under the Obama banner and constitute a backbone for the future of the progressive majority.
Gays and lesbians have been a leading force in the fight for equal rights and have brought to the progressive majority enormous energy and political clarity on the fundamental need to preserve and extend constitutional rights. Their presence in the progressive majority is a force for commitment to democratic principles and strategies based on defending and extending equality in all areas.
In addition to those crucial social forces based on class, race and gender – the progressive majority embraces mass social movements generally – peace and justice, seniors, environmental movements, immigrant rights, civil liberties, reproductive choice, and sustainable agriculture. With those constituencies, a fundamental objective is to build a powerful fortification against a right-wing resurgence. That unifying objective must necessarily embrace additional social forces, segments of all classes, including elements of the corporate and business sector that have rejected the right wing and its policies as inimical to their own interests and aspirations.
Thus, CCDS distinguishes itself by strategically relating to the broadest constellation of progressive forces – those on the left as well as those in the middle between the poles of left and right. We seek to unite the left, win over the middle, and isolate and defeat the right.
The basis of left unity is recognition of and support for the progressive majority. There is no basis for strategic cooperation with those who attack mass movements and denigrate the progressive majority and its developing leadership.
With others on the left, CCDS seeks to help deepen our understanding of the nature of the present crisis and the dynamics of the social system that feeds it. We are encouraged that majorities or pluralities exist in support of most progressive issues. With others on the left, we work to advance an understanding of the interconnectedness of those issues, offering to the broad progressive majority a coherent and compelling insight into the working of the system as a basic means of serving that majority and strengthening its unity.
With others on the left, we reach out to those in the middle of the political spectrum to win their support for solidly progressive measures – “health care, not warfare,” single payer health care, strengthening public education, the right to organize unions, jobs with a “green” economy, and bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The stakes in the fight for a survivable present and a secure future are enormous. A huge, wasteful military machine did not exist in the thirties. The global capitalist system was not wired as tightly as today with a near universal breakdown. In the thirties, unemployment exceeded 25%, but the industrial structure had not been heavily dismantled as it is today. Thus, today’s battle is more complex and challenging – requiring the broadest unity of all progressive forces.
The strength of a united progressive community is required to push back against the power of the financial industry, the military-industrial complex, and the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Without counter pressure from the progressive majority, those regressive forces can be expected to prevail with the Obama administration.
At this historic juncture, the fight to preserve and extend democracy is central to all demands and is the basis for advancing towards a socialist future. The fight for an effective stimulus to create “green” jobs, to prevent climate catastrophe, to enact single payer universal health care, to give substantive relief to those losing their homes, to stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to end the projection of military power in support of a fading empire – all hinge on the ability of the progressive majority to both safeguard and advance democratic openings.
The preservation and extension of democracy point down the road to new directions in our nation’s domestic and global policies: democratic control of the Federal Reserve, channeling stimulus funds to workers, not bankers; public ownership of banking and financial institutions that would finally place the people’s resources in their own hands; nationalization of energy as the assured road to eliminating fossil fuels, and opening the door to clean energy; giving the workers a controlling stake in the auto industry; the devolution of power to the local level such as neighborhood councils, community development corporations, parents’ school councils as genuine organs of power, alongside workers’ councils in the factories, offices and other job sites; reform of the electoral process to advance democracy and provide an arena for alternative progressive politics.
Throughout the world, people at the grassroots who have been subjected to the ravages of neoliberal globalization have turned to each other for survival in what is known as the “solidarity economy.” Fighting for control of resources from the bottom up, the solidarity economy involves the creation of new wealth in a green way with a component of worker and community ownership and control built into its structures from the start. It takes the form of worker-owned firms, peasant cooperatives, community owned credit unions and local schools and many other forms of mutual aid among the poor and unemployed.
Few have the illusion that the solidarity economy will turn into a wave overcoming capitalism of its own accord. Rather it is seen as one tactic among many – along with public ownership of financial institutions, workers’ equity in industries, etc. – that can help the most distressed among the progressive majority to secure strong points in their communities. When combined with independent political action and a platform of deep structural reforms that alter power relations, the solidarity economy can also point to wider economic democracy and the bridge to a socialist future.
Our core communities – workplace, neighborhood, senior center, school, etc. – should be arenas to reach out to those looking for progressive change, especially the legions that joined the Obama movement and now are seeking ways to remain connected to progressive politics and are seeking greater change. From there, issues can be raised, and crucially linked into a coherent progressive platform to be pursued through a variety of organized local activities. From an organized base, coalitions of organizations can be established with new paradigms. Alliances can be created based upon groups supporting those organizations best equipped to deal with the most urgent issue at the moment.
The progressive majority is predicated on the need to build the broadest unity to defeat a rabid right wing that is down but not out. It is the basis for dialogue, joint action and long-term cooperation between center and left. It is the way to defend democracy and the path to extend it into all political, economic and social realms. CCDS is committed to work with all progressive forces seeking to achieve a powerful and organized progressive majority on the road to a socialist future.
III. A Vision of Socialism
In the historic 2008 presidential election, the word “socialism” was bandied about as never before. The Republican attack machine accused Barack Obama of wanting to “spread the wealth around” through moderate adjustments to restore some equity in tax policy. That hardly constitutes socialism. But it has aroused public interest and has widened the field for discussion of the concept. For many, the notion of “spreading the wealth around” sounds good when the top one percent in the United States gained $600 billion annually in income while the bottom eighty percent lost the same $600 billion from 1979 to 2008, translating into an average gain of $500,000 for each person at the top and a loss of $8,000 for those at the bottom. That also translates into a swelling of the ranks of the working poor and unemployed, a surge in poverty, growing inequality, rising despair and financial panic among millions of working people of all ages.
Socialism has honorable roots in the nation’s history. Socialist aspirations and experiments predate the Civil War when efforts were launched to form cooperative communities built on shared labor, shared production, and a shared commitment to the common good. Many streams fed socialism in the United States from utopianism to Marxism. The populist movement that swept the Midwest and South in the late 19th century, while not avowedly socialist, advocated public ownership of banks and railroads as means to stave off economic crisis facing farmers and workers. The Socialist Party in the early twentieth century was a significant movement for public ownership of the means of production. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, large numbers looked to the Communist Party and other organizations for struggle against the ravages of crisis and for a vision of a transformed society shorn of the divisiveness, exploitation, and the inhumanity of capitalism.
Socialism does not emerge from sentiment, ideology, or wish fulfillment. Socialism emerges from recognition of necessity by a conscious working class in struggle. When the feudal mode of production could no longer accommodate the interests of the rising class of capitalists the system was replaced by a new economic and social order that arose from the conscious struggle led by the capitalist class and including the working class. Today, capitalism’s growing inability to provide a decent living for working people, its environmental devastation, its militarism and war, its fomenting of racism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia, its inability to use new technology without casting workers into joblessness, its overweening greed, its nagging overproduction and destruction of productive capital, and dependence on bogus financial manipulation to enhance profits informs the struggles and consciousness of the working class.
Today it is widely noted that capitalism “socializes losses and privatizes profits.” Underlying that observation is a deeper reality: under capitalism production is increasingly socialized while the wealth created by that production is privatized into fewer and fewer hands. That is the fruit of exploitation of labor and the core contradiction of a system whose relations of production can no longer accommodate advances in the productive forces of society without ultimately impoverishing working people in growing numbers.
As the contradictions inherent in capitalism sharpen, the banner of democracy raised by that system in its early days is trampled by its ruling class as discourse in the public media becomes monopolized. The ruling oligarchy of capital seeks to marginalize dissent and ideas about social change. They attempt to limit politics as solely a preserve of the system’s rulers.
In contrast, socialism is the preservation and extension of democracy into all realms of activity, especially the economic arena. It is a political, cultural, economic, and ethical project: a struggle to transform power relations within a society dominated by a tiny minority for the benefit of the overwhelming majority of working people.
History and contemporary reality do not yield a schematic blueprint for socialism. However, a Marxist historical analysis of experiences in social struggle, combined with a critique of objective circumstances, suggest some guiding principles for the building of socialism.
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 lacked these advantages.
Socialism is first of all a democratic political system where the interests and organizations of the working class and its allies have attained and hold the preponderance of political power and thus play the critical leading role in society. It is still a class society, but one in a protracted transition to a future classless society as exploiting class privileges are gradually abolished, and classes and class distinctions generally decline. Because it will be a mixed economy, with both public and private ownership, socialism will have classes, including some capitalists, for some time,. There will still be a need for entrepreneurial startups, both as worker cooperatives and as private firms serving the common good.
Socialism at the base is a transitional economic system anchored in the mode of production brought into being by capitalist development over several centuries. Its economic system is necessarily mixed, and makes use of markets, especially in goods and services, which are regulated, especially regarding the environment. But capital markets and wage-labor markets can be sharply restricted and even abolished in due time. Markets are a function of scarcity, and all economies of any scale in a time of scarcity have them. In addition to regulated markets, socialism will also feature planning, especially where markets have failed. Planning will especially be required to face the challenges of uneven development and harsh inequalities on a global scale, as well as the challenge of moving to an energy system based on renewable green energy sources.
Socialism will be organized in public and worker ownership of the main productive forces and natural resources. This can be achieved by various means: a) buying out major failing corporations at penny stock status, then leasing them back to the unions and having the workers run them; b) workers directly taking ownership and control over failed and abandoned factories; c) eminent domain seizures of resources and factories, with compensation; d) public funding for startups of worker-owned cooperative businesses. Socialism will also require public ownership of most finance capital institutions. Lease payments from publicly owned firms will go into a public investment fund, which will in turn lend money to community and worker owned banks and credit unions. A stock market will still exist for remaining publicly traded firms and investments abroad, but will be strictly controlled. A stock transfer tax will be implemented. Gambling in derivatives will be outlawed. Fair trade agreements with other countries will be on a bilateral basis for mutual benefit.
Socialism will require democracy in the workplace of public firms and encourage it in all places of work. Workers have the right to independent unions to protect their social and daily interests, in addition to their rights as worker-owners in the governance of their firms.
Socialism will largely be gained by the class-conscious working class and its allies winning the battle for democracy in society at large, especially taking down the structures and backward laws of class, gender and racial privilege. An important first step is campaign finance reform to curb the influence of wealth in our electoral system. It will need a true multiparty system, with fusion voting, proportional representation and instant runoff. All trends are guaranteed the right to speak, organize, petition and stand for election. These are the structural measures that can allow the majority of the people, especially the working class and its allies, to secure the political leadership of government and instruments of the state by democratic means, barring sabotage by reactionary forces.
Socialism will be a democratic political order with a representative government and state power. But the government and state components of the current order, corrupted with the thousand threads connecting it to the old ruling class, will have to be broken up and replaced with new ones that are transparent and serve the majority of the people. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights can remain the initial basic organizing principle for a socialist government and state. The democratic rights it has gained over the years will be protected and enhanced. Government will also be needed to organize and finance social development and environmental protection. Forces that try to overturn and reverse the new socialist government illegally will be broken up and brought to justice. Our society will need a state power for some time to come, even as its form changes. Still, government power has limits; the powers of any government necessarily will be restricted and subordinate to the universal and natural rights of all humankind. Attempts to ignore or reject these principles have severely harmed socialist governments and movements in the past.
Socialism will be a society in harmony with the natural environment. The nature of global climate change necessitates a high level of planning. We need to redesign communities, introduce healthier foods, and rebuild sustainable agriculture-all on a global scale with high design, but on a human scale with mass participation of communities in diverse localities. We need intelligent growth in quality and wider knowledge with a lighter environmental footprint. A socialism that simply reproduces the wasteful expansion of an earlier capitalism creates more problems than it solves.
Under socialism the government will serve as the employer-of-last-resort. Minimum living-wage jobs will be provided for all who want to work. Socialism is committed to genuine full employment. Every citizen will have a right to work.
Socialism values equality, and will be a society of far greater equality of opportunity, and far less economic inequality. All citizens and residents will have equitable access to a “universal toolbox” of paid-up free public education for all who want to learn, for as far as they want and are able to go; universal public pre-school care; a minimum income for all who create value, whether in a workplace or otherwise. Parents raising children, students learning skills, elders educating and passing traditions to younger generations – all create value that society should reward. Universal single-payer health care with retirement benefits at the level of a living wage is critical to start. Jobs for all who are able to work and no irrational barriers to achievement.
Socialism is a society where religion can be freely practiced, or not, and no religion is given any special advantages over any other. As important theologists have long pointed out, a Marxist critique of capitalism with its vision of a classless society is compatible with both belief and non-belief in God.
The role of armed forces under socialism will be transformed. Their mission will be to defend the people, secure their interests, and help in times of natural disasters. It will not be their task to expand markets abroad and defend the property abroad of the exploiting classes. Armed forces also include local police, under community control, as well as a greatly reduced prison system, based on the principle of restorative justice. Non-violent conflict resolution and community-based rehabilitation will be encouraged.
Socialism is internationalism. It extends a hand of cooperation to the rest of the world. It does not need or seek dominance over other nations. It propels mutually fair trade with others; it seeks to improve the conditions of working people the world over; it seeks to learn from the experiments in social justice and socialism proliferating around the world. At the same time, US socialism has no dogmatic attachment to other models, but respects and expresses solidarity with all who are trying to build just, humane, and secure societies.
The world has moved beyond the 20th century experiments in socialism. Those efforts went through uncharted territory under severe coercion from outside capitalist powers. In those contexts, the democratic soul of socialism was seriously undermined; the essential need for popular participation in building the system was largely unrealized; and economic advances were distorted by dogma.
We learn from those failures as we probe deeply into our own national history and traditions to create a vibrant and successful socialist vision. Most of all, socialism is the proximate solution to the intractable problems of an exhausted capitalism devoid of hope.
CCDS considers educating and organizing to build the path to socialism to be the primary task of our organization and all who wish to bring the human epoch into existence.
IV. CCDS: Its Outlook and Role
The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism is a national organization, united by a common commitment to struggle for democracy and socialism. CCDS embodies the legacy of the great social movements for peace, freedom, and democracy led by the working class, and racially and nationally oppressed people. CCDS carries forward the courageous traditions of the American democratic socialist and left leaders and activists.
We are governed by principles that empower our members to determine the policies, activities, and leadership of our organization. We strive for an organization that is multiracial and of all generations, both in membership and in elected bodies. Every member of CCDS is entitled to full participation in every aspect of the organization, in every level of leadership, in every formulation of policy, and in every democratically determined activity.
CCDS adheres to the principles of democracy and transparency, including full disclosure of all aspects of our organization and the decisions that we make. We welcome constructive criticism offered in the spirit of mutual respect. All members participate in decisions made by majority rule and are expected to participate in implementing the program and activities of CCDS.
CCDS views the concrete struggles against the depredations of capital as the basis for the development of class and socialist consciousness. The theoretical framework of dialectical and historical materialism that is Marxism provides CCDS the scientific and philosophical basis for collective conscious development. We draw upon Marxism, not as “revealed truth” but as a guide to understanding the dynamics of historical development and change, and as a scientific tool to discover the essential societal relations and social forces that advance the struggle for democracy and socialism.
Our organization has no theoretical test for membership-only a willingness to study, explore, debate, act upon, and develop the principles of human liberation exemplified by the theory and practical works of Marxists.
Our study embraces the many global currents that have nourished Marxist thought over nearly two centuries from Europe, to Asia, to Africa, and the Americas. It explores the meaning of Marx’s view of class struggle at the core of all history. It considers the meaning of the role of the working class as the essential agent of social transformation. It seeks to develop the struggle for equality drawing from the rich Marxist theory and practice developed in the movements for national liberation.
It seeks to understand Marx’s work in relation to the vast changes in science, technology, and the whole of human productive forces since his time. It explores the contradictions between modern advances in science and the fetters placed upon those advances by contemporary capitalism. It examines the dialectical relationship between nature and society; how external circumstances impact consciousness and how consciousness, in turn, acts upon nature.
CCDS seeks to promote a dialogue, a correspondence, between generations. Marxism is not static; it is always evolving with changing times. It is understood and acted upon by different generations in different ways. The dialogue between generations is aimed at a productive synthesis between past and present. It aims to merge the experience of older generations with the fresh outlook of the young, forging a deeper understanding by all of how past history informs the present and provides a vision of a socialist future.
CCDS seeks to understand and convey the history of all oppressed people as central to the struggle for the liberation of all. From that standpoint we stress the inseparable relationship between the struggles of all nationally oppressed people and the struggles of the working class for a new society. We have an unambiguous commitment to the leadership of people of color and of women, acknowledging both the essential historic and current contributions of these groups to all major progressive achievements.
CCDS stresses the dialectical relationship between theory and practice in the spirit of Marx’s critique of preceding philosophers: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
In that spirit, CCDS advances an inseparable program of socialist education and democratic action. As a socialist organization, we engage in advanced theoretical and educational work to explore and refine the road to socialism; we conduct research and policy development aimed at charting and amplifying public and workers’ ownership. We study varying roads to socialism through discussion and organized travel to countries charting their particular paths to transformation. We seek to better understand and popularize socialism through study groups, forums and media.
At a historic moment filled with portents of change, our socialist education is an essential element of our program. Our Socialist Education Project is charged with developing web-based course outlines for study groups on a wide range of subjects relating to capitalism and socialism, to organize public forums, to participate in academic and movement conferences, to organize a speakers’ bureau, to develop popular programs through film and other media. In these endeavors we urge and welcome the full participation of our members.
In the realm of democratic action, we engage in mass campaigns for peace, justice, and economic security. We work to promote the consciousness and leadership of the working class in all struggles. At the core of this engagement is our determination to build and unite the progressive majority. We seek to build mutual respect and cooperation among all progressive forces through mature, honest, open relations and through primary commitment to the interests of the mass movements.
CCDS extends a hand to all who share a commitment to the interests of the working majority and a determination to help forge the broadest movement as the sure path to social transformation.
In political struggle, CCDS works in both electoral and non-electoral arenas, recognizing the dialectical connection between these spheres of activity. Thus, in advancing democratic action, CCDS favors a full range of tactics: electoral activity, lobbying, mass action, civil disobedience, picket lines, and strikes without mechanically favoring any particular tactic, while always acting based on a scientific analysis of concrete conditions.
We advocate a realignment of the nation’s politics, recognizing that the parties of the capitalist class cannot be agents of qualitative change. We also recognize that such realignment can only be achieved through mass movements and mass struggles. Socialists and progressives must participate fully in those currents – consulting, influencing, organizing, working to change the electoral system to accommodate new parties, and forging relationships inside and outside the current two-party system.
CCDS seeks to build cooperative relationships with other socialists and progressives, organized and unorganized. We seek our proper space on the political landscape by commitment to study, learning, and contributing to struggle based on developing socialist consciousness and Marxist theory. We strive to contribute a mature, principled, respectful voice to dialogue on the left. We seek to play an active role in effective movements to liberate the working class and its allies and to build a socialist future. We look forward to that future with anticipation and confidence.
