Walzer Joins Call for a New Socialist Group

The chairman of Harvard's Social Studies Department, Michael L. Walzer, professor of Government, joined 45 prominent left-liberal activists last week to call for a convention to found a new socialist organization.

The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee issued the call, but the group will choose a new name at the convention, scheduled for October 13-14 in New York City's McAlpin Hotel.

Walzer said the new organization will engage in "intellectual and educational" activity, form a socialist caucus within the Democratic Party, and "try to collect the remnants of the Left and organize around common problems."

Former Socialist Party chairman Michael Harrington organized the new group. Harrington, the author of The Other America, Socialism, and other books, recently left the Social Democrats, U.S.A., (the Socialist Party's successor organization), because of what he called its "obsessive anti-Communism."

Once the party of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas, the Social Democrats have leaned towards Senators Hubert Humphrey and Henry M. Jackson in recent years.

Other sponsors of the new group include writers, professors and union leaders who disapproved of George Meany's support of the Indochina war and "neutrality" in the 1972 Presidential election.

The organization's program calls for an end to "the domination of the corporations or the commissars." It also advocates "the free provisions of the necessities of life"--beginning with medicine--to be paid for by progressive income taxes. Ultimately the free necessities would include housing, food and clothing.

Patrick E. Gorman, secretary-treasurer of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workers of North America; David Selden, president of the American Federation of Teachers; Victor Reuther, former international-affairs director of the United Automobile Workers; Irving Howe, editor of Dissent magazine; and historian Christopher Lasch were among those who signed the appeal for a convention.

"We felt it was time for a regrouping of the Left after the debacle of the last few years," said Walzer, who chaired the Faculty's liberal caucus after the 1969 strike here.

"My sense is that the people who were at odds with Mike Harrington or me or Dissent over the last few years are much less hostile now," he went on. "Christopher Lasch, for instance, was always to our left and never involved in social-democratic politics before."

Harrington and others in the new group expect to run for delegates' positions at the Democratic Party's charter convention next year, The New York Times reported last week. Last June the group applied for membership in the Socialist International, which includes West Germany's Social Democratic Party, France's Socialist Party, and England's Labor party. The current American affiliate is the Social Democrats, U.S.A.

David Lewis, parliamentary leader of Canada's increasingly successful New Democratic party, will address a preconvention public meeting at New York University.