This year’s Left Forum conference theme is:
Rage, Rebellion, Revolution: Organizing our Power
This year’s Left Forum – May 20 – 22 – will offer something fundamentally different from conventional politics and from this year’s presidential election mainstream media hype. The Left Forum will gather and build on the growing consciousness that basic social problems are sharpening in ways that traditional politicians, journalists, and academics rarely admit and do not even begin to solve. The Left Forum will again engage the forces and movements making basic progressive social change the big issue that will no longer be kept out of the public discussion.
The left now generates an increasingly powerful and effective criticism of contemporary capitalism and the mushrooming social problems it worsens. Ever more people are becoming active: from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter and the Fight for $15; from escalating climate justice demands to the massive national support for Bernie not despite but because he wears the label socialist. Something profound is shaking.
From the streets and the offices, from campuses, factories, and stores, disgust with traditional society, politics, rules, and conventions is growing. The left starts there to build a program for change. We can do better than capitalism and its catastrophic wars. We reject the corporate dominance that corrupts our politics while delivering endless cycles of depressions, unemployment, and austerities. Our fellow citizens share our horror at the grotesque inequalities of today’s corporate system: its discriminations against and oppressions of vast populations and its destruction of our environment. There are far better alternatives. Join us to share, discuss, and debate those alternatives and how best to achieve them.
Please consider submitting a panel or workshop for the 2016 gathering.