Join Monthly Review and many others from around the world at this year’s Left Forum conference at Pace University in New York City, June 7 to 9. Left Forum is the largest annual gathering of left activists and scholars in the United States. Please see below for more information on MR-sponsored and related panels, and don’t forget to visit the Monthly Review Press table for discounts on a wide range of MR Press titles, new and old!
Closing Plenary
Featuring: John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, and author, most recently, of The Endless Crisis (with Robert W. McChesney); Alvaro Garcia Linera, Vice President of Bolivia; Catherine Mulder, John Jay College of Criminal Justice-CUNY and CUNY’s Murphy Institute; and Tadzio Muller, political scientist, climate justice activist, and translator, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation
Sunday, June 9th, 5:30 pm, Pace University’s Schimmel Auditorium, 1 Pace Plaza, New York City, NY
Perspectives on the Struggles of Farmworkers and Agriculture Today
Featuring: Bruce Neuburger, author of Lettuce Wars; Carly Fox, Worker Justice Center of NY; Fred Magdoff, Monthly Review
This panel brings together three unique perspectives to address the agricultural industry and the struggles of farmworkers. Bruce Neuburger is the author of Lettuce Wars, an account of the decade he spent as a farmworker and radical organizer in California in the 1970s. Carly Fox of the Worker Justice Center of NY will discuss the struggle for farmworker justice today. And Fred Magdoff, an expert on agriculture and frequent contributor to Monthly Review, will discuss broader implications of the agricultural industry.
Session 2, W608, Sat 12:00pm – 01:40pm
NATO’s Catastrophic Failure in Libya
Featuring: Horace Campbell, author of Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, Syracuse University; Younes Abouyoub, Columbia University; Wazir Mohamed, Indiana University East
This panel examines the catastrophic failure of the new model of warfare that was experimented in Libya by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The panel will examine the justifications for NATO’s intervention and situate this military exercise in the context of the massive rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. The panel will examine the contours of the intervention, especially in relation to the current capitalist crisis. In so far as NATO is the instrument through which the capitalist class of North America and Europe seeks to impose its political will on the rest of the world, this panel will examine the outcomes of that intervention focusing on the increased instability in Libya and the security situation which exploded in Benghazi in September 2012. The intervention in Libya—characterized by bombing campaigns, military information operations, third party countries, and private contractors—exemplifies exposed a new experiment. The panel will contend that this experiment has failed.
Session 2, W616, Sat 12:00pm – 01:40pm
The Question of Strategy after Occupy
Featuring: Vivek Chibber, NYU, Socialist Register; Barbara Epstein, University of California-Santa Cruz; Sam Gindin, former Research Director of the Canadian Autoworkers Union, York University; Charles Post, NY Solidarity; Michalis Spourdalakis, Syriza/Athens University
This panel will build on analysis presented in the 2013 edition of the Socialist Register, The Question of Strategy, to examine left strategy around in the world in the wake of the Occupy movement.
Session 4, W510, Sat 05:30pm – 07:10pm
TINA and OCCUPY: Two Forms of Meszarian Consciousness
Featuring: Mario Rendon, American Institute of Psychoanalysis; Douglas Greene, Monthly Review Internet Panel on Mészáros; Chip Smith, Monthly Review Internet Panel on Mészáros
The two slogans of our time, TINA, and OCCUPY! represent the two forms of consciousness that István Mészáros talks about, based on two types of social structure. TINA started with Hegel and developed to Hayek and others now embodied in neoliberalism. It represents hopelessness because its logical foundation is formal and the expression of a dying social organism. OCCUPY on the contrary has deep implications psychologically and practically; it represents hope through action of the class that has the banner of progress. Its foundation is dialectical. The false consciousness represented in TINA has done irreversible damage to the mind, as well as ecological damage.
Session 1, W520, Sat 10:00am – 11:50am
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