Revolution by the Book The AK Press Blog

This year’s Left Forum will focus on the age-old theme of solidarity: the moral act of imagination underpinning working class victories everywhere. It will undertake to examine the new forms of far-reaching solidarity that are both necessary and possible in an increasingly global world.

The spread and intensification of capitalism across the globe binds people together in complex interdependencies – as producers, consumers, victims, and insurgents. And as this process continues, the connections between people become more evident. The rebel Zapatistas in the Lacandon jungle understood clearly that the North American Free Trade Agreement forged in Washington was a direct threat to their traditional way of life and their aspirations for the future.

The potential for transformative struggles in the 21st century depends on new chains of solidarity—between workers in the rich world and workers in the global south, indigenous peasants and more affluent consumers, students and pensioners, villagers in the Niger Delta and environmental campaigners in the Gulf of Mexico, marchers and rioters in Greece and Spain, and unionists in the United States and China.

This year’s Left Forum will contribute to the intellectual underpinnings of new and tighter forms of world-wide solidarity upon which all successful emancipatory struggles of the future will depend.

Please join us once again in building upon the successes of last year’s conference – 200+ panels, 600+ speakers, 3000+ attendees, art shows and theater performances, and plenaries that included Arundhati Roy, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Noam Chomsky.