75 Hear Walzer at a Meeting Of Democratic Socialist Club

About 75 people attended the introductory meeting last night of the H-R Democratic Socialist Club, and heard Michael L. Walzer, professor of Government, call for "the extension of democracy to economics."

The club is a new group in sympathy with the New York-based Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee's recent call for gradual organization for socialism, particularly through the Democratic party.

Stay Radical

Walzer told the Emerson Hall gathering that the new group's function should be to "maintain a clear commitment to radical politics in the United States and at the same time address itself to immediate, political issues."

Walzer, the main speaker at the meeting, said it would be difficult to move away from the late '60s, when "being socialist, radical, revolutionary, was extraordinarily easy, when the Left was the forum for all forms of political exhibitionism," to a period of more "tentative efforts."

But he added, "the one thing that we can be sure of is that we will have another chance."

Walzer was one of 45 left-liberal activists, including writers, professors, and some union leaders, who signed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee's call last month for a founding convention for a new socialist group.

To Go To N.Y.

Members of the new Harvard group are organizing car pools to take people to the convention, to be held October 13 and 14 in New York City. They also plan to engage in other activities; Walzer referred specifically to his own experience as an undergraduate with a Marxist study group at Brandeis.

"We had a study group last year for a while," Michael S. Bernick '74, an organizer of the meeting, told the group, "although it was more Harrington than Marx." Michael Harrington, former chairman of the Socialist party, was another signer of the Organizing Committee statement.

Fraternity

Several speakers at the last night's meeting decried sectarianism, and one announced that the New American Movement, another Harvard Socialist group, had been invited to send "fraternal observers" to next week's convention.