Back in January, Chris Hedges - a writer I greatly admire - wrote a savage attack on the Left Forum (and the Tikkun Conference in Washington) as worthless, sterile, navel-gazing exercises disconnected from real social movements in the U.S. Hedges argues that the Left Forum is dominated by the worst kind of academic radicals who delude themselves into believing the conference contributes anything to the building of a vigorous left movement. On the contrary, he argues the conference does more to blunt real activism, trading in a cowardly defeatism designed to accommodate rather than challenge the capitalist war-state. Because real commitment to radical politics would entail genuine risks, the academic intellectuals who organize the conference traffic in a phony radicalism of political correctness and empty posturing. To quote from Hedges:
These conferences are not fundamentally about change. They are designed to elevate self-appointed liberal apologists who seek to become advisers and courtiers within the Democratic Party. The conferences produce resolutions no one reads. They build networks no one uses. But with each conference liberals get to do what they do best - applaud their own moral probity. They make passionate appeals to work within systems, such as electoral politics, that have been gamed by the corporate state. And the result is to spur well-meaning people toward useless and ultimately self-defeating activity.
The organizers of the Left Forum conference scheduled for this March at Pace University in New York City also communicate in the amorphous, high-blown moral rhetoric that is unmoored from the actual and real....
The conference agenda, which sounds like a parody of a course catalogue description, includes the requisite academic jargon of “moral act of imagination” and “chains of solidarity.” This language gives to the enterprise a lofty but undefined purpose. And this is a specialty of the liberal class - to grandly say nothing. The last thing the liberal class intends to do is fight back. Left Forum brings in a few titans, including Noam Chomsky, who is always worth hearing, but it contributes as well to the lethargy and turpitude that have made the liberal class impotent....
If the liberal class remains gullible and weak, if it continues to speak to itself and others in meaningless platitudes, it will remain as responsible for our enslavement as those it pompously denounces.
While there is merit to some of Hedges' arguments, I think he is wrong on a number of counts. There is nothing inherently wrong with an annual conference where people who study, write about, and participate in radical politics gather to share their ideas and try to figure out how to advance socialism. Whether the label "Left Forum" is the best way to describe this gathering is a good question - the old name was probably more accurate - but in all my years of attending the conference I never encountered anyone who confused it with an organized left, a community activist organization, a labor movement, or a political party. When people leave the conference they go right back to the work they do in their own communities, sometimes better equipped and sometimes not.
It is accurate to say that most of the people who offer presentations and panels at Left Forum are employed at colleges and universities, and this fact does stamp the conference with a certain character at times; but the conference also draws a large number of non-academics to speak, including a multitude of community organizers and activists, union activists, independent journalists and film-makers, artists, youth activists, and people from other countries with no academic affiliations. The result is something very far from the sound of one hand clapping, and people who try to steer conference attendees toward working "within the system" usually find themselves facing a barrage of criticism, especially in recent years.
Conference attendees are not shy about challenging presenters and panelists, either. Many people who attend Left Forum have years of experience as organizers and activists in their communities and as a result are quite capable of thinking on their feet and formulating powerful arguments on the spot. Yes, sometimes people at the conference can be pompous, or pretentious, or overly sectarian, or given to holier-than-thou posturing, or -most often - just plain long-winded. More often than not, however, I encounter people who are passionately committed to democratic socialism and all it entails and who find clear, compelling ways to communicate useful ideas and insights from their experiences to others. They are caring, mensch-like people.
This year the events in North Africa, Wisconsin, and elsewhere provided the backdrop to the discussions at Left Forum. Although U.S. imperial wars - now expanded into Libya - and the ongoing class war now waged through the economic depression still constitute formidable challenges for us all, the atmosphere was clearly marked by the positive energy and creativity demonstrated by these emerging social movements. The overriding sense among participants was one of hopefulness and an urgency to get more involved with building the vision and organization necessary to grow and sustain these movements into a more powerful force. Most of the voices I heard this weekend called explicitly for working vigorously OUTSIDE the corrupt electoral system rather than within it - at least in the first instance - and in building power among workers even if this means - as it usually does - defying union leaderships by forming reform caucuses that will eventually be capable of taking power.
Something else I found encouraging this was the sharp increase in conference attendees. The 2010 conference drew about 3,000 registrants, but this weekend that number rose to 5,000, with significant representation from young people. Assuming they're not all paid spies dispatched by the Koch brothers and the FBI, this is a very hopeful sign.
Building power based on a vision of hope; carrying that hope forward into concrete organizing at the community level and in the workplace; and confronting the corrupt and repressive power of the state and the corporate elite as we move forward: this was what I carried from this year's Left Forum. The process will include demonstrations, and we will spend a lot of energy continuing to respond to onslaughts from the corporate state ... but the most important thing we can do now is break with a "reactive" politics and start setting the agenda, start asking what we want, and start fighting for it. As I tell my pals in New Jersey: I don't want to worry about what Chris Christie and the Democratic state legislature in New Jersey are going to do (as though we don't know) - I want Chris Christie and the Democrats to worry about what WE are going to do. It's time to put the other side on the run.
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