Metropolitan Atlanta Local

Democratic Socialists of America
www.dsa-atlanta.org

Join the March for Jobs in Washington, D.C., Oct. 2nd

"Jobless recovery" is an oxymoron! There is no recovery without jobs, and Washington's "deficit hawks" are working hard to sabotage job-stimulating, social investment. The New York-based Hospital Workers Union 1199 and the NAACP called for a "March for Jobs" in Washington. The national AFL-CIO, SEIU, and DSA-USA have joined the march, as did the U.S. Social Forum and a growing number of other grass-roots organizations.

Plans call for something more like a rally than a march, extending from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, from noon to 4 p.m. Several ancillary political and social events are also taking shape, both before and after the rally.

The North Georgia Labor Council plans to organize bus transportation ($95 round-trip; perhaps also an Amtrak contingent, if there is interest), and several members of MA-DSA intend to attend. MS-DSA's Barbara Joye (barbara@freejoye.com) is acting as Atlanta march coordinator; please contact her if you plan to go or would like more information on travel options and march events.

4th Annual Douglass-Debs Dinner

Mr. Frederick Douglass and Mr. Eugene V. Debs would be honored by your attendance at MA-DSA's 4th Annual Douglass-Debs Dinner, to be held this year on February 6th at Paschal's Restaurant, 180 Northside Dr. SW.

Highlights will include Kim Bobo of Interfaith Worker Justice and author of "Wage Theft in America" as keynote speaker; and, as awardees: Anita Beatty of the Taskforce for the Homeless; Walt Andrews Executive Vice President of Georgia AFL-CIO; the Emory SODEXO Food Service students.

If you want a taste dinner, check out some of the goodies from last year's, listed in the "Hot Links" column to the left.

AFL-CIO Spearheads a Community Hearing and Rally to Hold Banks Accountable and Stop Foreclosures

The AFL-CIO joined forces with the Atlanta Fighting Foreclosure Coalition (see information below) for a hearing and rally on July 22, 2010. The hearing started at 10 a.m. in the First Iconium Baptist Church (542 Moreland Av. SE, Atlanta). and then moved by bus to the Wachovia/Wells Fargo Bank in Atlantic Village (171 17th St. NW, Atlanta) of some street action.

While Georgia is near the top of the list in foreclosures, it has also been on the forefront in fighting predatory lending and pernicious subprime mortgage scams -- not by shady Madoff types, but by the nation's leading banks.

State Senator Vincent Fort is a key players in the anti-foreclosure Coaliton; Bill Brennan and the Atlanta Legal Aid Society's Home Defense Program are the indefatigible champions of foreclosure victims. Both are featured in a recent book by Gary Rivlin, "Broke, U.S.A.: from Pawnshops to Proverty, Inc. -- How the Working Poor Became Big Business". Of all places! - Georgia, in 2002 to 2003, was in the vanguard in legislation against predatory lending. Join us at the hearing and on the streets to help put Georgia back on the progressive map.

Here are some excerpts of what Rivlin has to say:

Vincent Fort, a black state senator who jokingly describes his politics as "neo-confrontational," told me more or less the same story in a conference room across the street from the state capitol. "I'll tell you what, man," he said in a deep bass voice. "You just had to see the way they came after us to know that we were on to something." Like the 1999 North Carolina law, the bill that Fort drafted and Barnes refined was aimed at clamping down on predatory subprime loans but went one critical step further. It dictated that any entity taking possession of a "high cost" subprime loan including a big investment hank on Wall Street that held it only long enough to sell it off in small tranches to municipalities, pension funds, college endowments, and anyone else in the market for a mortgage-hacked security was legally liable for the integrity of that loan. The law defined high cost as a loan carrying more than five percentage points in up-front costs or an interest rate more than eight percentage points higher than the rates on a comparable Treasury bill. Perhaps if they knew they might get sued, the banks might have taken at least a cursory look at a loan's terms before snapping it up on a secondary market and selling it off in small slices to investors as far away as Reykjavik and Berlin.

....

Bill Brennan testified that day, as did one elderly African-American widow facing foreclosure and another seemingly on the verge of disaster. Fort had spent most of his first term championing an anti-hate law in Georgia but sitting in the audience that day he wondered how he could he on the sidelines when abusive lenders were targeting the city's black neighborhoods. A HUD study released shortly before Cuomo's visit found that a borrower living in a predominantly black community in 1998 was five times more likely to end up in a subprime loan as someone living in a community that was predominantly white. Even an upper-income African-American, the study found, was twice as likely to hold a subprime mortgage as a lower-income white homeowner. Worse, Fannie Mac had analyzed its portfolio of mortgages for that same year and discovered that half of all those paying the higher rates and fees on subprime mortgages qualified for conventional loans. Fort was so incensed by what he was learning that he stood up and audaciously declared that he would see to it that Georgia passed the country's strongest anti-predatory lending law.

[More excerpts from Rivlin's book, Chapter 11 "The Great What-If: Georgia 2002-2003, are available here.]

MS-DSA Members Present Forum at U.S. Social Forum in Detroit

The U.S. Social Forum was held the week of June 21st in Detroit. Among the 14,000 registered participants, including 500 organizations presenting 1,000 workshops, Milt Tambor, Barbara Joye and Minnie Ruffin repesented Atlanta DSAers. Other DSA members from thoughout the country were, of course, active and ubiquitous participants; Young Democratic Socialists hosted two workshops, "WTF is Socialism" and "21st Century Socialism".. Tambor and Joye presented a workshop on the activities and progress of the Atlanta Fighting Foreclosure Coalition.

Our friends at DSA-Ithaca have kindly provided us with a video of Barbara's and Milt's presentation. See the "Hot Links" column to the left for a download link.

A Great May Day Celebration: "Summit 2010: Towards an Economic Bill of Rights"

was held at the Geogia Hill Neighborhood Facility, 250 Georgia Ave. SE, Atlanta 30312

With speakers Joe Schwartz (national DSA vice-chair), Carl Davidson (co-chair, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism), Vincent Fort (Georgia State Senator), Charlie Fleming (Atlanta-North Labor Council), and Sandra Robertson (Georgia Citizens Coalition on Hunger).

(above) A DSA delegation joins MayDay Immigration rally; (below) Plenary at Georgia-Hill center.

Plus workshops on 1) Housing, Foreclosures and Homelessness; 2) Labor, Students and Working Families; 3) Defense budget impact, and students and the military; 4) Health Care and Grady Hospital; 5) Students and Teachers Confront the Crisis in Public Education.

For those of you who missed the excitement, or didn't get enough of it, we can help:

1. A copy of the program.

2. Links to videos by Artemis -

of Joe Schwartz - http://vimeo.com/11672392
of Carl Davidson - http://vimeo.com/11732262
of Paula Larke's music - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWo1IbHMxtk

3. If you prefer to download mp3's of the plenary and wrap-up talks, you can get them by following the link to the left.

Enjoy, participate, activate!

THE ATLANTA FIGHTING FORECLOSURE COALITION:

Who we are:

The Atlanta Fighting Foreclosures Coalition came together shortly after convening a forum on foreclosures and a call to action at the First Iconium Baptist Church this past April. The Coalition consists of 40 community organizations -- labor unions; civil rights, human rights and civil liberties groups; homeless shelters and faith-based organizations. The AFFC’s program is facilitated by a committee of eight co-chairs.

What we do:

The AFFC has called for mortgage companies and banks to
• end predatory lending
• declare a moratorium on foreclosures and
• meet with the Coalition to negotiate a process that would insure reasonable loan modifications so that Atlantans can remain in their homes.

Our initial target has been Wells Fargo/Wachovia. We have staged protests and emonstrations at their offices. We intend to continue and expand these actions until Wells Fargo officers meet with us and take steps to address these critical issues. We also know that other banks and mortgage companies engage in similar fraudulent practices, and we intend to make them accountable as well.

AFFC also provides information to our email network about sub-prime lending abuses and about federal lawsuits filed by Baltimore, the NAACP and the State of Illinois against Wells Fargo. We support the efforts of advocacy groups and the Atlanta
Legal Aid Society, in particular, who represent Atlantans facing foreclosures.

How to join:

You or your church, union or community organization are invited to join the Coalition and the fight against foreclosures. Representatives from AFFC are available to meet with groups who are interested in supporting our program.
For more information call 770 313 4628.

Member Organizations:

ACLU of Georgia, American Friends Service Committee, Amnesty International Southeastern Office, Atlanta-North Georgia Labor Council, Atlantans Building Leadership for Empowerment (ABLE), Concerned Black Clergy, CWA Local 3204, Eco-Action, Fifty Artists, Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, Georgia Citizens Coalition on Hunger, Georgia Coalition for a Peoples’ Agenda, Georgia District of Workers United (SEIU), Georgia Equality, Georgia for Democracy, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR), Georgia Living Wage Coalition, Georgia NAACP, Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition-Atlanta, Georgia Rural Urban Summit, Georgia Stand-Up, Georgia State AFL-CIO, Georgia WAND, International Action Center, Latino American and Caribbean Community Center, Open Door Community, Metro Atlanta Democratic Socialists of America, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 9 to 5- Atlanta Working Women, Phacts-People’s History Collective, Project South, Rainbow Push,Task Force for the Homeless, US Human Rights Network and WRFG-FM.

A Radical Proposal! (by FDR, 66 years ago!)

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.

The Metro Atlanta DSA "Action Calendar", displayed at the bottom of this page, logs local DSA events, and other actions in which we are involved as coalition partners. [Point your mouse on a colored date to get a short description; click to open a sub-window with details.]

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General Membership Meeting, September 25, 2010:

Georgia Hill Street Neighborhood Facility (for directions, see below)

250 Georgia Ave SE, Atlanta 30312. 2nd floor conference room

The agenda includes a discussion of DSA's "Social and Economic Bill of Rights" and MA-DSA's annual election of officers. The feature presentation is by Ray Miklethun from the Atlanta Bill of Rights Defense Committee:

"Hard Times: Making Sense of the Right-wing Takeover of America"

The domination of political discourse and policy in the United States by the Right-wing is not accidental, conspiratorial, nor inevitable. It is the flowering of 40 years of concerted, coordinated, intelligent hard work. The conservative movement came together, built institutions, and uses them to take power and advance their agenda. The result is our nearly unprecedented economic and social inequality and unchecked and expanding imperial and military reach. This presentation attempts to understand how conservative corporations, foundations, think tanks and advocacy groups have joined with populist right-wing movements and changed the face of America. It outlines, in the first place, how they have changed the terms of the political discussion. The next question: what can progressives learn and what can we do?

All told, an important meeting, not to be missed.

DSA General Membership meetings

are held in the Georgia Hill Street Neighborhood Facility, 250 Georgia Av. S.E., Atlanta 303012, in the 2nd floor conference room (check calendar for dates and topics).

Directions to the Hill Street Neighborhood Facility:

by MARTA. Bus 97 - Georgia Avenue (sometimes numbered as 10 / 97)
Bus 97 Georgia Avenue (the extension of route 10 - Peachtree St.) can be boarded in downtown Atlanta anywhere along Peachtree Street. Going down Peachtree St. the bus passes Five Points Station (as well as the North Line's Peachtree Center Station) The bus stops on Georgia Ave. in front of the Georgia-Hill Neighborhood Facility.
by car From NORTH Take I-75 South to Exit #246 (Fulton Street). Left or East on Fulton Street. In four or five blocks Fulton intersects with Hill Street. Right or South on Hill Street. In four or five blocks Hill Street intersects with Georgia Avenue. Georgia-Hill Neighborhood Facility. is on the corner of Hill Street and Georgia Avenue.
by car From SOUTH Take I-75 North to Exit #246 (Fulton Street). Right or East on Fulton Street. Duplicate directions from North.
by car From EAST Take I-20 West to Exit #58-B (Hill Street). Left or South on Hill Street. In four or five blocks Hill Street intersects with Georgia Avenue. Duplicate directions from the North.
by car From WEST Take I-20 East to Exit #56-B (Windsor/Spring Street). Right or South on Windsor to Fulton Street. Left or East on Fulton Street to Hill Street. Right or South to Georgia Avenue. Georgia-Hill Neighborhood Facility. is on the corner of Hill Street and Georgia Avenue.

Metro Atlanta DSA's Socialist Education Circle meets next:

Sunday, October 31, 2010, 3 - 5 p.m., at the Towne Square Condominium Common Room

"After Capitalism" by David Schweickart, published by Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. At this meeting we will discuss chapters 1 through 3; the remainder of the book will be discussed in a subsequent session.

[Towne Square Condominiums is at 225 East Ponce de Leon Avenue in Decatur. Immediately after McKinney's Apothecary there is a drivewaygoing into the visitor parking deck. Press the green button to raise the gate. We'll give you a token to get out. Walk back out of the parking deck to the street, and come to the front door of the condo, where Norm Markel will let you in. Just in case, Norm's cell phone is 404-245-8610.]

Bibliography of past readings discussed by the Education Circle (most recent first):

July 23, 2010: we discussed several chapters from "A Contemporary Cuba Reader", edited by Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jimenez, John M. Kirk and William M. LeoGrande, and published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2008. For an alternative perspective, we consideed "How to Visit a Socialist Country" by Richard Levins, published in the Monthly Review, vol. 61, no. 11, April 2010, pp. 1-27. A copy of this reading can be had at http://www.monthlyreview.org/100401levins.php.

Apr. 18, 2010: we discussed George Lakoff's book "Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. The Essential Guide for Progressives".

Feb. 21, 2010: READING: Joseph Schwartz, "The Future of Democratic Equality: Rebuilding Social Solidarity in a Fragmented America" (Routledge, new edition 2009); discussion on chapters 5 - 8. Barbara Joye gave an overview, Bob Wohlhueter some commentary, and Bob Caine moderatde the discussion.

Larry Keating, Atlanta: Race, Class and Urban Expansion [2001, Temple University Press]

J. B. Foster and F. Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences [2009, Monthly Review Press]
Paulo Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed [originally published 1970; 30th anniversary edition 2009]
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America [1978]
V I Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism [1916], chapter X.
Friedrich Engels, Letter to Karl Marx (dated 1858 Oct 07)
Karl Marx, Letter to Meyer & Vogt (dated 1870 Apr 09)
Rosa Luxemburg, Concerning Morocco [1911]

Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, by Frances Fox Priven, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers (2006). New and used copies available at www.abebooks.com, or your favorite progressive book shop. Piven_cover

"Towards Freedom: Democratic Socialist Theory and Practice" by Joseph Schwartz and Jason Schulman. The article is available to view or download here.

Harrington, Michael; Socialism Past and Future; Arcade Publishing, New York (1989). Used copies at www.abebooks.com, and elsewhere.

Marx, Karl; Value, Price and Profit (1865). {Copies are available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit} MS-DSA member Charles Pierce has prepared notes on this speech Marx gave to the London Workingmen's Association.

weekend_cover

Murolo, Priscilla and A.B. Chitty, From the Folks Who Brought the Weekend: A Short Illustrated Historyof Labor in the United States;
The New Press, New York (2001). {New copies at www.amazon.com; used copies at www.abebooks.com}

And now for a little music... (everyday)

Your socialist education is hardly complete without learning the Internationale; here's the English version. You can almost imagine Delacroix' Ms. Liberty leading the chorus.

The Internationale

Eugène Delacroix "La Liberté guidant le peuple" (1830)

Stand up, all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might
Don't cling so hard to your possessions
For you have nothing, if you have no rights
Let racist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall
Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all

Chorus:
So come brothers and sisters
For the struggle carries on
The Internationale
Unites the world in song
So comrades come rally
For this is the time and place
The international ideal
Unites the human race

Let no one build walls to divide us
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
We'll live together or we'll die alone
In our world poisoned by exploitation
Those who have taken, now they must give
And end the vanity of nations
We've but one Earth on which to live

And so begins the final drama
In the streets and in the fields
We stand unbowed before their armour
We defy their guns and shields
When we fight, provoked by their aggression
Let us be inspired by like and love
For though they offer us concessions
Change will not come from above

Words: Billy Bragg Music: Pierre Degeyter

MA-DSA Member Publishes Novel

Ralph Freedman, retired professor of history at Iowa, Princeton and Emory Universities has written a novel "Rue the Day", published in 2009 by Twilight Times Books of Kingsport, TN. Dr. Freedman was born in Germany in 1920, and had previously published biographies of poets Heinrich Heine and Rainer Maria Rilke.

The novel is set in the McCarthyite era. An Italian anti-fascist partisana has married a German-American Army Intelligence officer, and settle down as academics at the University of Washington in Seattle. But her fight against Italian fascists and his haunted memories of Germany's "Kristal Nacht" provide no protection against the anti-communist witchhunt. A gripping story set in a turbulent time makes for provocative reading.

Local Chapter

The Metro Atlanta chapter of Democratic Socialists of America provides an opportunity to meet, discuss and act with DSA members in the Atlanta area. Anyone interested is invited to join our regular meetings (click on "Local DSA Events" tab) , which often include outside speakers on some special topic, and our Social Education Circle (click on "Socialist Education" tab). We are locally self-supporting, and do not receive funding from the national organization.

DSA-USA

To become a regular member of the local chapter you must become a member of the national organization, DSA-USA. The easiest way to accomplish this is to visit the national organization's website and join up there. Alternatively, you can download, print and mail in an application form.

join_us

photo credit: Reid Freeman Jenkins

photo credits: Reid Freeman Jenkins

Metro Atlanta Democratic Socialists of America

Local publications and meeting protocols

The drop-down menu gives you access to MA-DSA's newsletters and records of past meetings.

Executive Officers

Four elected officers of the chapter plus three members-at-large comprise the Executive Committee; officers are elected at the September general meeting for a term of one year; current officers are:

Chair: Milt Tambor (phone 770.313.4628; email chair@dsa-atlanta.org

biographical sketch: Milt Tambor moved to Atlanta from Detroit in 2001 and is currently retired. He worked for Michigan American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees Council 25 as a staff representative and education coordinator. As staff representative he represented public sector workers in collective bargaining and grievance appeals. As labor educator he conducted classes in collective bargaining, steward training, labor history, economics, strategic planning and health and safety. With a Ph.D. in Sociology, Milt also taught classes as an adjunct faculty at Wayne State University's School of Social Work. He has served as Metro Atlanta DSA chair since 2006.

Membership Secretary: Norm Markel (email membership@dsa-atlanta.org)

biographical sketch: Norm Markel received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Chicago in 1960. He was Professor of Communication, Linguistics & Anthropology at the University of Florida from 1964-99. He is currently Professor Emeritus and resides in Decatur, Georgia. In 1975 he was elected the first president of the United Faculty of Florida (AFT/NEA), which represented faculty in all 10 state universities. He has served as Metro Atlanta DSA membership secretary since 2006.

Recording Secretary: Barbara Joye

biographical sketch: Barbara Joye moved to Atlanta from New York City in 1966. She taught college English for several years before serving in a series of public policy research and communications jobs for government and nonprofit agencies, including a year in Washington DC with the Safe Energy Communications Council. In Atlanta she volunteered for the city’s “underground” newspaper, The Great Speckled Bird; the Atlanta Independent Media Center; and (for many years) the community radio station WRFG-FM. She recently retired from the State of Georgia’s Department of Human Resources, Office of Communications. A veteran of SDS and Movement for a Democratic Society in the ‘60’s, she has been active in various progressive groups, including an affiliate of the Mexico Solidarity Network; Amnesty International; Women’s Action for New Directions; and the U.S. Social Forum. She is now in her second term as recording secretary for MA-DSA, and serves on the National Political Committee of national DSA.

Treasurer: Marcia Borowski

biographical sketch: Marcia Borowski got her BA in philosophy from Wellesley College and her Masters of Arts in Teaching from Wayne State U. She spent 3 years on Kibbutz Lahav in Israel where her husband Oded was a member before she lured him to the US. Back in the States she was a social worker, taught American Government in community colleges before coming to Atlanta, where she served as the director of Metro Fair Housing for a number of years. She then went to law school and practiced law primarily in civil rights and representing labor unions until she retired. She now volunteers with WAND, Fund for Southern Communities, the Democratic Party, Atlanta Legal Aid; she gardens and, most importantly, is grandmother 4 spectacular grandkids.

Members of the Executive Committee at large:

Barbara Landay, Barbara Segal, Bob Wohlhueter

Webmaster: for comments on site presentation please email webmaster@dsa-atlanta.org

DSA: Who are we?

Federal Theatre Project poster (ca. 1936)

Metro Atlanta Democratic Socialists of America is one of more than 30 local DSA organizations in the US. As democratic socialists we envision a society and a world where resources are democratically controlled. In pursuing this goal, we educate the public about socialist values and policies and build progressive coalitions committed to fighting for economic and social justice. Since our formation in 2006, our local has supported the work of the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition, Coalition for a Peoples' Agenda, Minimum Wage Coalition, Atlanta Jobs with Justice, Grady Hospital Coalition and the Up and Out of Poverty Now Coalition. Our members have led workshops at the Georgia Progressive Summit, raised money for the Benie Sanders senate campaign, participated in the planning and promotion of the US Social Forum and hosted the national DSA convention in Atlanta. We meet monthly and regularly hold forums on issues ranging from universal health care to the Employee Free Choice Act. Our other activities include issuing a newsletter, meeting as study circle to discuss readings on socialism and organizing an annual Douglass Debs Dinner.

An Agenda Towards an Economic Justice

DSA's 2007 national convention adopted the legislative platform "Towards an Economic Justice Agenda." We hope this proposal will lead to a consensual legislative and political program around which a broad coalition of progressive groups can coalesce. It is presented for use in outreach and discussion, and to elicit feedback from members and non-members alike. It is available here. A shorter version designed for easy distribution will be available soon.

What is Democratic Socialism?

Howard Bay's set design for "Life and Death of an American"

Democratic Socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically — to meet public needs, not to make profits for a few. To achieve a more just society, many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed through greater economic and social democracy so that ordinary Americans can participate in the many decisions that affect our lives. Democracy and socialism go hand in hand. All over the world, wherever the idea of democracy has taken root, the vision of socialism has taken root as well — everywhere but in the United States. Because of this, many false ideas about socialism have developed in the US. With this pamphlet, we hope to answer some of your questions about socialism. {A longer answer to this question, developed by DSA-USA, can be viewed here.}

Some History

"A Brief History of the American Left" is written by Maurice Isserman

"Promising indeed," Eugene Debs wrote in September l900, "is the outlook for Socialism in the United States. The very contemplation of the prospect is a wellspring of inspiration." Debs, a gifted and militant leader of America's railroad workers, seemed to have been granted a prophetic gift. When he ran for President in 1900 as the candidate of the newly unified socialist movement, he attracted a mere one hundred thousand votes. As the Socialist Party's standard-bearer twelve years later, he won nearly a million votes, some 6 percent of the total. In some states, such as Oklahoma, Washington, and California, the Socialist share of the vote climbed into the double digits. Over the same twelve-year period, the Socialist Party expanded its membership from 10,000 to nearly 120,000. Twelve hundred of these Socialists were elected to public office across the United States, including mayors from Flint, Butte, and Berkeley.

Haymarket Memorial, Chicago, erected 2004, 118 years after the massacre

Socialists were influential in the leadership of some major American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions, as well as in independent unions such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Socialist and non-Socialist radicals in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) pioneered in the organization of unions among immigrant workers in mass production industries in cities like Lawrence and Patterson, and among migrant workers in the lumber camps and mining towns of the far west. While the Socialist Party was not immune to the racism endemic in turn of-the-century America, Socialists were among the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The ideas of the Socialist movement attracted a growing following on college campuses, in church groups, and in the settlement house and women's movements. The key to the Socialist Party's success in the 1910s was unity in diversity. Its members disagreed with each other on some issues (whether, for example, to put their main emphasis on electoral or union organizing), but for a while the common goal of democratic socialism seemed more important than tactical or ideological differences.

In the long run, Debs's optimism proved misplaced. The year 1912 was the high-water mark of Socialist strength. The party fell on hard times with the coming of the First World War. Pre-existing internal tensions were exacerbated by debates over the party's attitude towards American involvement in the war, followed by debates over whether (or how best) to support the Russian Revolution. Official repression of antiwar dissent led to the imprisonment of Debs and dozens of other Socialist leaders, while Socialist legislators were expelled from public office and the Socialist press was banned from the mails. As a Communist Party on the Russian model split from the Socialist Party, and the IWW went into a sharp decline, the radical movement in general slipped into the doldrums in the 1920s.

With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, however, faith in American capitalism went into a tail-spin, and the fortunes of the radical movement revived. Despite the deep divisions that beset the left, radicals from a number of different groups -- Socialists, Communists, and Trotskyists among them -- played a central role in the struggles of the unemployed to win adequate relief in the early 1930s, and in the vast expansion of industrial unionism through the organization of the new Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) in the later 1930s. Socialists helped to organize Detroit autoworkers and southern sharecroppers; Communists were influential in drives to organize the auto, steel, electrical, and longshore industries, among others.

Depression era Federal Theatre Project "Living Newspaper" drama inspired by FDR's 2nd inaugural address ".. I se one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished."

While neither Socialists nor Communists were able to replicate the electoral successes of the Debsian era, the Socialists were able to attract a million votes for Norman Thomas, their Presidential candidate in 1932. Running in the Democratic primary, the Socialist novelist Upton Sinclair captured the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in California in 1934. And during the "Popular Front" era of the later 1930s, when Communists sought to build a broad-based American movement not so explicitly tied to the Soviet model, the Communists developed a considerable political base and measure of influence within the Democratic Party in such states as Washington, Minnesota, and California, and in the American Labor Party in New York. The Thirties did not usher in "the Revolution," contrary to the expectations of many at the start of the decade. Nevertheless, much had changed for the better in American politics in the space of a few years. While Franklin Roosevelt's administration was never the hotbed of radicalism it was portrayed as in right-wing propaganda, it is certainly true that radicals helped play midwife at the birth of the liberal-labor "New Deal coalition" that would shape the contours of Democratic Party politics over the next three decades.

Radicals were not, however, in a position to take independent advantage of the new political possibilities opening before them. The Socialist Party finished the decade once again in disarray, wounded by an internal factional battle with Trotskyists (with whom they shared little beyond a hatred of Stalinism), and divided over the question of whether they should abandon their long-standing refusal to back Democratic Party candidates. The Communist Party, though nominally more "revolutionary" than the Socialists, had proven tactically more flexible, and its tacit alliance with Roosevelt had helped it to grow to perhaps as many as 75,000 members by 1938 (with another 20,000 in the Young Communist League). After a bruising few years when its international guide, Stalin, was allied with Hitler, the American Communist Party seemed to emerge triumphant during the years of the "Grand Alliance," when the United States and the Soviet Union were allied against fascism and it was possible to be both "patriotic" and "pro-Soviet." But with the onset of the Cold War in 1945, radicalism of any sort was again suspect, and the Communists came under particularly ferocious attack.

By the mid-1950s, dozens of Communist Party leaders had been imprisoned under the Smith Act, while thousands of rank and file Communists were harassed by the FBI, dragged before Congressional investigating committees, denied passports, and in many instances fired from their jobs. Several of the most unscrupulous men in postwar American political life, including Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, built their careers on the shrewd manipulation of anticommunist hysteria. In the end, the Communist Party was able to survive McCarthyism. What finally led to its demise as the most important force on the left was its own internal disagreements, brought to a head in 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of his now safely-dead predecessor Stalin. This "de-Stalinization crisis" led many American Communists to question not only their previous unquestioning support of Soviet policies, but also the undemocratic nature of Soviet-style socialism and the authoritarian nature of their own movement. Most of these dissenters left the party after 1956.

Diego Rivera "Man at the Crossroads" (1934), a 63- foot mural originally in Rockafeller Center, NY, but removed largely because of its depiction of Lenin

Even as the Communist Party disintegrated in the mid-1950s, a new wave of radical activism began to take shape. This time, however, it would not be the traditional socialist parties of the left that would lead the way, nor would the organization of the industrial working class be the main concern of the new radicals. Starting with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and accelerating with the sit-in movement launched by black students in Greensboro and a dozen other southern cities in 1960, movements emerged that were destined to change the U.S. political landscape. White students, inspired by the example of their black counterparts in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), were drawn into civil rights protests, and from there into a wide range of movements for peace, university reform, and social change. Many joined a new campus group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which became the main organizational vehicle for what was beginning to be called the "new left".

A series of developments in mid-decade -- including John F. Kennedy's assassination, the murder of civil rights activists in the South, and the mounting escalation of the Vietnam war -- spurred the growth of the new left, while tarnishing the optimism of the early 1960s. Over the years in which the war in Vietnam raged on, a loose coalition of radical activists developed the broadest and most diverse antiwar movement in American history. It was, to be sure, a turbulent and in many ways a tragic era. Some student protesters, in despair over bringing the war to an end (and sometimes egged on by government agents), turned to selfdefeating violent street confrontations and even to bombings. But it should also be remembered that, by the end of the 1960s, antiwar sentiment had spread from elite Ivy League universities to working-class community colleges and high schools, and that groups like the Vietnam Veterans Against the War were playing an increasingly prominent role in antiwar demonstrations. The general cultural and political ferment of the decade also gave rise to a revived feminist movement and a new gay liberation movement.

At the end of the 1960s the left again faltered. If the old left Socialists and Communists had been too wedded to the "New Deal coalition" of urban ethnics and industrial workers to respond adequately to the new black, youth, and women's insurgencies, nevertheless those new constituencies alone could not build a stable base for a mass new left. Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968 hastened the demise of the civil rights movement, while SNCC and SDS collapsed from sectarian excesses. The antiwar movement held on into the early 1970s but, by the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, had lost most of its momentum. And not only was the left collapsing, but this time the New Deal coalition itself -- the mass base for American liberalism -- was showing signs of increasing instability, as Richard Nixon's victories in 1968 and 1972 indicated. This liberal weakness became progressively clearer as Nixon's fall in the Watergate scandal led, not to a revival of the New Deal coalition, but to a long-term revival of radical conservatism in the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan.

Jack Beal (1976), "A History of Labor in American - 19th Century", U.S. Department of Labor

From the beginning of this long period of deepening conservatism in the early 1970s, several groups continued to uphold the traditions of the American left. Two in particular sought to recreate the broad and tolerant spirit of the Debsian Socialist Party, while absorbing also the new lessons, causes, and constituencies over which the left had stumbled in the intervening decades. The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) had been founded by Michael Harrington out of some fragments of the old Socialist Party. DSOC continued to operate, in the old Socialist or Communist manner, as the left-wing of the New Deal coalition, clearly now not as a separate political party but as an explicitly socialist force within the Democratic Party and the labor movement. It met with some success in attracting young activists disenchanted with the Democratic Party's drift and seeking ways to galvanize the ailing party coalition. DSOC also drew to its banner a number of well-known public figures, such as Machinists' Union leader William Winpisinger, feminist Gloria Steinem, gay rights activist Harry Britt, actor Ed Asner, and California Congressman Ron Dellums, the first avowed socialist in Congress since World War Two.

The New American Movement (NAM) emerged at about the same time, more from the new left than from the old, though it counted in its number some former Communists who had left their party after 1956. NAM, true to these new left origins, was more skeptical about the long-term future of the New Deal coalition, and accordingly devoted its energies more than did DSOC to the new movements of the 1960s, especially feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, and local community organizing.

But neither NAM nor DSOC saw their heritages and organizing areas as mutually exclusive, and by the early 1980s -- especially considering the weakness of the American left -- came to see themselves as complementary, completing a formal merger in 1983. The merged organization, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), for the first time since the First World War brought together the various splinters of left opinion in America: former Socialists and Communists, former old leftists and new leftists, and many who had never been leftists at all. The decades of disunion had taken their toll. The hundreds of thousands of Debs's day had dwindled to mere thousands. But a new beginning now seems possible in the 1990s As the old Cold War polarities break down, DSA has an opportunity to demonstrate that the history of the American left had reached a turning-point, not an end.

Maurice Isserman teaches history at Hamilton College. A DSAer, he is author of If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and Birth of the New and co-author of Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party.

We are not alone!

While socialism informs our perspective on politics and the economy, we act in concert with socially and politically progressive people in the Atlanta area. Listed here are websites of organizations with which we have a strong working partnership.

www.dsausa.org: The national organization of DSA is a rich resource of socialist history, literature and position papers.

www.gcpagenda.org: The Coalition for the People's Agenda, convened by Dr. Joseph Lowry, is active in Atlanta and throughout the Southeast. It sponsors a weekly Stand for Peace and works for voter empowerment.

www.gpjc.org: Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition - "We believe there can only be peace in the presence of justice, so as we oppose war, we also work for justice and the protection of human rights for all."

georgiapeace.org is the independent website of the Atlanta group of GPJC, with the banner "No War on Iran".

www.humanrightsatlanta.org, Human Rights Atlanta is a grassroots organization promoting the sixtieth anniversary of the 1948 signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

www.soaw.org keeps you informed of activities of the "School of the Americas Watch", which convenes the annual demonstrations at the gates of Fort Benning.

georgialivingwage.org: The Minimum Wage Coalition addresses the causes of poverty and its detriment to democracy.

www.wrfg.org: for 35 years WRFG-FM - Radio Free Georgia - has been serving the Atlanta community with progressive news and grassroots cultural programming at 89.3 FM.

www.atlantaprogressivenews.com: Atlanta Progressive News is your web source for new stories you won't get in the AJC

www.atlanta.indymedia.org: Atlanta Indymedia brings a progressive perspective to news stories from the whole world.

keepgradypublic.org: is the web face of the Grady Hospital Coalition. Health care is a human right, and Grady is essential to health care for all in Atlanta.

www.atlantawand.org: local chapter of the Women's Action for New Directions throws a sharp light on the relationship between excessive military spending and unmet human and environmental needs.

Local chapter members Barbara Joye and Barbara Segal at joint retreat with Young Democratic Socialists, August 2008