Notes on the Left Forum this past weekend in NYC. Sorry I missed some friends who were there.
I haven't been to it since 2010. This gathering seemed to include many more young(er) people. One of the speakers made that observation as well. There may have been some kind of migration from the ranks of the Occupy(s), which means those people are being exposed to 57 varieties of radical thought. I'd say the dominant ethos was social-democratic. I'd expected a more radical panorama, but I think you could sum up the programmatic concern as for a "green New Deal." So what is radical now is an ideology you could find in Americans for Democratic Action. One difference is that some of these folks reject the Democratic Party as the vehicle for their political aspirations. Another, more general, is that everybody acknowledged extra-parliamentary organizing, agitation, and disruption as the basis for any progress, as opposed to electoral activity. One of the plenaries featured Francis Fox Piven, Joe Schwartz, Bhaskar Sunkara, Sarah Leonard, and Yates McKee. There was some entertaining ranting in the Q&A period from hard-shell Leninists. Apparently Jackie DiSalvo, who was involved in OWS, thinks politics is about screaming at people. Good luck with that. The weakness in all the panel presentations, which one calm questioner did raise, was how the mass action that everyone luvs would translate into positive developments, either in the electoral arena or in terms of policy changes. My favorite panel was a lineup of Black Agenda Report writers. Henceforth I will pay much more attention to this website. I realized that the other panels I went to didn't talk much about some guy named Obama. After I heard them, I decided there wasn't much else to say and I went home earlier than planned. In the exhibits section I saw someone manning a table for Platypus and resisted the urge to go over and punch him in the face. Just on GP. A couple of light-bulbs that went off for me. If you like, you can file them in your "Hell, I knew that!" file and call me out of touch. * The contrast between electoral participation and political participation. The former expands while the latter contracts. The explanation: the more voting the better, since it ratifies all the shit the government does without involving people in the actual decisions. Elections as * anti-democratic*. Chomsky's speech was good on this. * If you look at data pertaining to African-Americans, the Obama Administration is REALLY BAD. This was brought out most by a panelist named Paul Street, who once did research for the Urban League.
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