Michael Brie and Dieter Klein of the Institute for Critical Social Analysis at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Berlin, Germany, published a projective plan for social renewal in the 2011 journal of International Critical Thought which took up the concept of a “Solidarity Society”. They listed several important goals towards a transformational society that realized the classless democracy envisioned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Among these goals was ” the expansion of decentralized fields of activity: self-regulation and renewal from below (that) is the elixir of emancipatory transformation processes. Experiments in political change will only be successful if citizens are able ‘to set up not just one but several governing authorities at various levels’ instead of having to subordinate themselves to a central authority or the market mechanism.” The coordinating means of realizing such a democratic consensus in its manifold levels of organization is not detailed in this article, not because of length, but because of a lack of the communicative means groups of interrelated individuals must participate in to realize such a democratic reorganization of society. The Marxist Lucien Goldman addressed this oversight in 1952 in his critique and proposed augmentation of the field of Group Dynamics—a promising interpersonal methodology begun by Kurt Lewin and others in the 1930s.
I have been invited by the journal International Critical Thought to create a special issue addressing this need. My own article published a year ago took up the issue how best to integrate the field of Group Dynamics into Marxist efforts with others, as well as strategies among themselves, to educate individuals into these interpersonal skills so central to creating a functioning ‘solidarity’ society. I invite individuals to not only submit their own essays on this theme for this journal, but to become editors that potentially can cooperate in a book effort.
Mark E. Blum, Professor of History, University of Louisville, Louisville, Ky. 40292 mark.blum@louisville.edu
