Industrial Democracy Group Will Renew Activities in Fall

Next fall, the Harvard Society for Industrial democracy will renew its activities, Stephen J. Seligman '52 announced yesterday. The organization, inoperative since 1948, the group suspended its meetings for lack of active members. With the greater number of non-veterans, the new group hopes to regain the popularity that it had before the formation of the American Veterans' Committee.

Cooperative

Under the faculty advisership of Albert S. Coolidge '15, lecturer in Chemistry, the group next year will present a series of lectures and discussion meetings to air current problems in social economics. A trip to the cooperative stores in Maynard. Massachusetts and correspondence with foreign sympathists are also on the 1949 program.

Planned Economy

The stimulus to the reactivation of the society was the research program of the Economics Department in the field of welfare economics. In their meetings the society will supplement the program by discussing such topics as "Can economic planning be democratic?" and "Is the concept of collective bargaining compatible with a government guarantee of full employment?"

As Seligman expressed it, the purpose of the organization will be to "preserve traditional civil liberties and to establish a consciousness of the problems of economic security." Members of the faculty as well as students, he said, have expressed a need for an ideological meeting ground between American and foreign groups who are interested in the formation of a third social force as an alternative to the extremes of the Left and Right.

Norman Thomas

Before its period of inactivity the society regularly presented lectures by out-standing socialists. Norman Thomas, Fritz Sternberg, and Alfred Baker Lewis spoke on the SID's programs. For 1949, the group hopes to present the same calibre of speakers.

'Cliffe Too

As part of nationwide revival of college interest in social economic problems the Harvard society will try to establish a similar at Radcliffe. As was the practice before its inactivity, the society will correspond with socialist organizations in other American colleges.