On October 22, 1982, U.S. Congressional Representative Kweisi Mfume and City Council Member Mary Pat Clark gathered on the steps of a former Enoch Pratt Library building in east Waverly with Cliff DuRand, an activist professor from Morgan State University, to cut the ribbon beginning the celebration of the opening of the Progressive Action Center. Thus, the building, originally constructed in 1911, began a new history as a public space for the Left in Baltimore. That evening the late Michael Harrington, author of The Other America and co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, gave a keynote address on politics and the Left to a packed audience.

Mfume is now President of the NAACP, Clark is a political commentator, and DuRand has retired from teaching philosophy to enjoy the vistas of a mountain top in West Virginia and the beaches of Cuba and Mexico. But, the PAC, as it is called, celebrates its twentieth anniversary this weekend and remains a place of progressive activism.

The PAC was founded in the period after the Baltimore Rent Control Campaign, which had won with 74,000 votes in referendum, but, as law, was thrown out by the courts, and the first years of the Reagan administration. The founders, who formed a limited partnership called Research Associates, were activists who were participants in the movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. The initial group included a librarian, a machinist, a truck-driver, a dockworker, two lawyers, a few social workers, and several professors. Their politics were council communist, democratic socialist, Gramscian, independent Marxist, Maoist, and socialist-feminist. Research Associates bought the building from Baltimore City for $1,000. Then, with a $48,000 loan from the City's Commercial Revitalization Program, the building was completely renovated during the summer of 1982 with much volunteer labor.

The first organizations located at the PAC were the Alternative Press Center, Baltimore Information Cooperative, Central America Solidarity Committee (CASC), Democratic Socialists of America, Red Wagon Child Center, and Workers Action Press. Of these, three have remained the solid foundations of the PAC--Alternative Press Center, Baltimore Action for Justice in the Americas (formerly CASC), and Red Wagon. The "founding" groups were joined by the Radical Philosophy Association and its Cuba Conference and, more recently by the Baltimore Green Party and the Baltimore Independent Media Center. Over time many organizations have been based at the PAC, including the Baltimore Rainbow Coalition, Community Share, Industrial Workers of the World (Baltimore), and Women's Express.

In 1987, Research Associates dissolved its partnership and contributed its assets to Research Associates Foundation (RAF), a tax-exempt organization with educational purposes to sponsor research and educational programs and to "further the understanding ... of local problems in their relationship to broader forces." RAF has offered programs which have addressed issues of class, economics, gender, politics, and race making connection to national trends with the hope of furthering social justice movements. Highlights have included discussions with

* Rudolf Bahro, former East German dissent and author of The Alternative in Eastern Europe and From Red to Green
* Barbara Ehrenreich, feminist activist, former columnist of Time Magazine, and author of Nickel and Dimed
* Manning Marable, author of How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America and editor of Souls: a Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture & Society
* Ralph Miliband, author of Socialism for a Skeptical Age and founding editor of the Socialist Register
* David Noble, author of America by Design: Science, Technology & Rise of Corporate Capitalism
* Paul Sweezy, author of The Theory of Capitalist Development and founding editor of Monthly Review: an Independent Socialist Magazine.

Research Associates also organized the People's History Tour of Baltimore, a bus trip to places of important struggles of African-Americans, women, and workers. This bus tour has traveled around the City many times and resulted in The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History edited by Elizabeth Fee, Linda Shopes, and Linda Zeidman and published by Temple University Press. (See www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/516_reg.html )

It has been twenty years since 1982, the year of the Progressive Action Center's founding. 1982 was also the year that PAC co-founder David Harvey, then a professor at Johns Hopkins University, published The Limits to Capital, a book which has been described by the New Left Review as a "major work of economic theory" (NLR, No. 4, July August 2000). The Limits to Capital was Harvey's rethinking of Marx's critique of political economy, but from the perspectives of a geographer. Since publishing this work through seven more books, most famously The Condition of Postmodernity, and numerous articles, Harvey has developed a Marxian theoretical approach he calls "historical-geographical materialism" using Baltimore, Paris, and other cities, as objects of inquiry. According to world systems analyst Giovanni Arrighi, David Harvey "has done more than anyone else to demonstrate the centrality of geographical space in the evolution of human society under capitalism."

David Harvey, now at the City University of New York, will present the First Annual Ric Pfeffer Lecture as the keynote to kick-off the 20th Anniversary Celebration of the Progressive Action Center. He will discuss "The New Imperialism" in an attempt to understand the current period of capital accumulation on a global scale and the continued dominance of the United States in world affairs. This lecture will be Friday, October 25th at 7:30pm. The weekend as a whole will focus on neoliberal globalization, its political consequences, and the response of the participatory democratic Left and global justice movements.

Ric Pfeffer, a co-founder of the PAC and past president, died in May of this year. Pfeffer was a political science professor at Johns Hopkins who, after being denied tenure for political reasons, worked for twenty years as a lawyer in the Department of Labor for the Occupational Health and Safety Administration making a significant contribution to workers' rights. A fund was established in his name to bring intellectuals of the Left to the Progressive Action Center to articulate analysis relevant to the theory and practice of radically democratic social change. Contributions to the fund are tax-deductible. (See "The Legacy of Ric Pfeffer" by Cliff DuRand at baltimore.indymedia.org/feature/display/1318/index.php )

According to Cliff DuRand, a co-founder of the PAC and its coordinator for 20 years, Research Associates Foundation pays off the renovation loan later this year. So, while it seems that the situation of the Left after the September 11 terrorist attacks and Bush's "war against terrorism" is weak, there is much to celebrate about here in Baltimore the weekend of October 25, 2002.

For a listing of events at the Progressive Action Center's anniversary celebration, see baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display/1947/index.php

(The author was one of the original founders of the Progressive Action Center)