TIME FOR STOCK-TAKING
Cort, John C.
morality as something that governs the conduct of the person professing the morality, even if he happens to be a chief of state, who knows, he may get around to halling the CIA's reading of our...
...As Harrington put it, "full employment is the key to progress in every sector of the society"-racial and sexual discrimination in the" labor market, health insurance, foreign aid, development of the Third World, disarmament...
...As a start he proposed a publiclyowned gas and oil corporation, nationalization of railroads within a comprehensive plan for mass transit, public and employee representatives on the boards of all major corporations, incentives and requirements for banks and corporations to invest in socially desirable projects and policies...
...The Chicago convention was a time for stock-taking on this strategy...
...As Jack Clark, the intense, dedicated young secretary, reminded us, its Democracy '76 project mobilized an impressive spectrum of political, intellectual, feminist and trade union leaders behind a progressive program for change that had an important effect on the Democratic platform...
...Much of the credit for this must go to the chairman, Mike Harrington...
...But until Michael Harrington (not the Congressman, the other one) and DSOC came along, there was no organization that retained a distinctly socialist, leftleaning identity and still committed itself to the idea that the correct path for socialists in America lay within the left wing of the Democratic Party...
...The overwhelming emphasis of the convention was on holding the Democrats' feet to the fire of full employment...
...now working on a book about Christian Socialism...
...caps...
...That's splendid...
...The hardness of their time was in no way softened by American Stalinists who took the appeal out of "production for use and not for profit" by tying it to a Russian dictatorship...
...The place was simply the name of the last place that two big cheeses of the two big-cheese countries had met...
...He is not a religious man, but I couldn't help thinking as I watched him that his personal style is remarkably Christian...
...One sign of agreement is the editorial line of In These Times, the socialist weekly founded last fall by an interesting group of Old, New and Newer Leftists...
...We were too busy organizing ourselves, so that there might be other times in the future, so that we might take advantage of what everyone acknowledged was a new and growing interest in socialism on the part of religious Americans...
...There was a period--now hardly recallable--when Soviet-American relations were dominated by a constantly changing spirit of a place: Vienna, Camp David, Glassboro, N.J., wherever...
...One might have quoted St...
...One might have quoted Jesus, "I was hungry and you gave me not to eat . . . . Depart, you cursed...
...It was the most high where, like polished slate, the smooth and silent water nursed its gulls till dawn_9 Commonweal: 199...
...Unfortunately, there wasn't time...
...There was a good representation of Catholic socialists, including several priests and nuns, but in some ways the most intriguing member was a man sitting next to me, a non-DSOC visitor, who said, "I have trouble understanding what religion has to do with economics...
...DSOC's advocacy of public ownership is neither doctrinaire nor universal...
...FRANK GETLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS TI IE FOR STOCK- T KING "'Every valley shall be raised, the mountains and hills shall be brought low, and the crooked ways made straight...
...In general, however, the feeling was that no matter how disappointing Carter turns out to be, the hopes for the future are in better shape than if Ford had won another four years of veto power...
...JOHN C. CORT (1ohn C. Cort, fbrmerly one of the editors of Commonweal, is...
...Periodically SP members would split away, usually calling themselves Social Democrats and eventually supplying theoretical support for George Meany, Lyndon Johnson, the Vietnam war, welfare capitalism and the notion that guns and butter are both politically possible and desirable...
...Robinson is blind and his blindness seemed to add a peculiar power to the words of the prophet, you don't have to be religious to feel the wave of faith and hope that moved around the hall...
...9 The basic socialist principle is democraeybthe state belongs to its citizens, the factories belong to their workers...
...Henceforth also to be a little better organized and circulating some literature of its own, thanks to a Jewish member, Harlan Baker...
...Thomas, "A sufficiency of this world's goods is necessary for the good life...
...I recently spent a month with a Tibetan monk, a beautiful, spiritual man, and we didn't discuss economics once...
...Arms and war, it used to be genially agreed, must give way to competition in economics, agriculture, industry--read those last three words in ital...
...What impressed me at Chicago was the high level of intelligence, civility and humor...
...There were unkind words for some of Carter's appointments and kind words for some of his appointments...
...The question now is, can it convert the rank-and-file...
...Well, as things have worked out, the economic competition hasn't been all that competitive nor all that productive, nothing at all, for example, compared to the arms competition...
...The Soviet Union has, of course, responded to Carter's allegations about human rights by pointing out, quite correctly, that the situation of human rights in the United States still leaves quite a bit to be desired...
...Even a capitalist organ like Business Week has called him "a good and honest man...
...At Chicago there were no audible regrets, although Irving Howe, a most distinguished speaker, brought the house down by pointing out that some of Carter's recession remedies were "no more than Gerry Ford disguised as a peanut...
...In that dim and distant epoch, there was always much talk about the means of competition between the two...
...morality as something that governs the conduct of the person professing the morality, even if he happens to be a chief of state, who knows, he may get around to halling the CIA's reading of our mail, the FBI's disruption of the legitimate political activities of groups that believe in universal medical care available to all and other wild-eyed Socialist schemes...
...This must be done by the bearers of the Word, the stories, the dreams that give the lie to the golden calf...
...One of its theorists, Erazim Kohak, had written in a DSOC leaflet, "State ownership of factories is no more socialist than capitalist ownership...
...It has made some distinguished converts, among the more recent being Walter Dean Burnham, Harvey Cox, James Farmer, Gloria Steinem and Lester Thurow...
...In effect, judgment suspended and delayed...
...The words were the words of Isaiah, but the voice was that of a large black man, Cleveland Robinson, a national officer of District 65, Distributive Workers of America, speaking to the third national convention of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee held in Chicago a few weeks ago...
...But .the rest of us have nothing to lose, much to gain, if the two governments take to pointing out publicly how abysmally each is treating its citizens...
...They were encouraged in this by the success of the McGovernites in winning control of the '72 convention...
...Garrett Evangelical Seminary at Evanston sent several representatives, notably Rosemary Ruether, the Catholic theologian, and James Will, One of the leaders was Jim Gorman, a Church of Christ pastor from Chicago who has written, "Atheistic humanism does not have the symbolic resources to confront the pollution of religious symbols (by capitalism...
...with exclamation points and visualize appropriate symbols of American enterprise, Soviet peasants and workers, that's it...
...Or one might have gone back to Isaiah, "This, rather, is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke, setting free the oppressed and the homeless, clothing the naked . . . . Then shall your light break forth like the dawn...
...Faith and hope, in fact, were conspicuous qualities throughout the convention...
...Most DSOC members worked for Fred Harris and/or Mo Udall, but in November the policy was to vote for Carter...
...The convention, recognizing that the structures of industrial democracy need to be more clearly defined, voted to set up a special committee of members and "sympathetic experts" to do so and to propose legislation that could move the country more quickly toward this goal...
...Such later developments as the election of Sam Brown in Colorado and the near success of Tom Hayden in California have persuaded even some on the New Left that this may be the smart strategy...
...One of the regular features of DSOC get-togethers is a meeting of "the religious caucus," henceforth to be known as the DSOC Committee on Religion and Socialism...
...The situation does indeed leave much to be desired, though there is certainly no comparison between conditions in the two superstates...
...Why not give human rights a try for the next round...
...Ever since Roosevelt and the New Deal took the starch and the membership out of the Socialist Party by borrowing much of its program, socialists in America have had a hard and lonely time...
...Liz McPike, an AFSCME union organizer, said she was glad she voted for Carter if only because he had the heart and the guts to send Amy to an integrated public school in Washington, but she warned that "Carter and 1 April 1977:198 the Democratic Congress were elected by the people who suffer the most from unemployment, inflation, inequality and deterioration of our cities--they can be forceful advocates for that constituency or they can walk a middle line that goes nowhere...
...DSOC is still a painfully small organization, but for a small and young organization it has done some useful things...
...The DSOC, founded in 1973, has lived long enough and accomplished enough to mark itself as a unique organization in the history of American politics...
...He stressed the need f o r a strong Humphrey-Hawkins bill and said that the retreat of many liberals on full employment marks the probable dissolution of the ideology formulated by the New Deal and underlines the necessity for a new push toward socialist solutions...
...Meanwhile, even Norman Thomas lost faith in the usefulness of tilting at windmills and running for president...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 DOM JULIAN STEAD DECEMBER NIGHT In the silence of the sea a new moon was the lamb of God ,that takes away the darkness of the world...
Vol. 104 • April 1977 • No. 7
