By chance, I saw that the 2013 iteration of the Left Forum is this weekend instead of its usual Spring break timing. While I'm sure that some worthwhile things get said during it, I began skimming the long list of scheduled lectures and panel discussions wondering how much of any actual change ever came out of it, what changed laws, what successful agitation leading in changed laws or effective action has come from it. Not exactly doubting that ever happened but wondering if it's ever been documented. If not, then it would seem to me that a major focus of a next Left Forum should be on the habit of the left to put its efforts and resources into things like this when there is remarkably little to show for it. If anyone who has participated in past Forums would like to point to any actual change in real life that came from it, I'd like to know.
Given the focus of my recent blogging, I did a topic search for Forum events related to religion and got five out of "the more than 350 panels, workshops, and events happening this weekend". Considering that well over 90% of the population of the United States are religious and the huge force that religion has been in past, successful struggles, that puny percentage of Forum time spent on that topic would seem to be a willful denial of reality. The only one of the five listed that seemed to be specifically concerned with religious participation in lefitst political struggle is "Prosperity Gospel and the Moral Poverty of the Modern Church: What Path for the Future?"
You can contrast that to the far larger numbers returns by the Forum search engine for "Marxism, Anarchism and Theory" which produced more than forty events. Or even the skimpy 14 returned by "Art". Personally, I think I'd pass by "Let Fury Have the Hour: Art Confronts Leftist Politics." The description of the movie by that name doesn't exactly appeal to me, either*. And if it were up to me I'd combine the sessions on Hip Hop and Pussy Riot, which I can imagine might have some interesting and worth while things to say to each other. Perhaps producing some of that Fury.
I'm not writing this to make fun of the Forum or its participants, many of whom are sincere and well meaning, some of them even have that rare item in such gatherings, past accomplishments in making real change in real peoples' real lives and the real environment we all rely on. I would imagine a good number of the sessions contain valuable, perhaps even interesting material. But while rehashing of the rapidly receding events of late 1940s and early 50s New York City seems to be receding, the kind of inbred, incestuous, ideological politics that are represented in far too many of the sessions look likely to reinforce the habits that led to sterility during the period during which the Forum came into being. Looking at the program for this year and comparing it to that of the Socialist Scholar's Conference in 1966, it doesn't look any more likely to generate political change, being focused on the theoretical and academically prestigious instead of the practical. We don't have the funding of CPAC, we can't afford the impractical. We certainly can't afford the unrealistic, divorced from the realities or the wider public from which any progress will come. Scholars might have ideas, they might even occasionally have good ideas but they don't have the political force to move them. The guys at The Nation and other places trying to look hip and still with it into advancing middle age won't do it. More of that, in 47 years it will still be a left-out forum. Its theme can be, "94 Years of Political Failure."
* In his feature directorial debut, acclaimed author, visual artist, and filmmaker Antonino D'Ambrosio has fashioned a lively social history that chronicles how a generation of artists, thinkers, and activists used their creativity—and their creations—as a response to the reactionary politics that came to define our culture in the 1980s. An exuberant, mixed media collage that incorporates graphic art, music, animation, and spoken word, the film spans three decades of change--from the cynical heyday of Reagan and Thatcher through today-- and brings together over 50 writers, playwrights, painters, poets, skateboarders, dancers, musicians, and rights advocates, all of whom attest to the fact that we can re-imagine the world we live in and take an active role in making that vision a reality.
The reality was that Reagan-Bush, using, among other things, expressive outrageousness and attention getting offensiveness and acts that could be easily ridiculed into three terms, leading to the far from leftist reaction in the Clinton years, all preparing us for Bush II and the world we live in today. William Bolcom's Songs of Innocence and Experience, A View From The Bridge, and McTeague are more powerful and truly subversive than most of that kind of stuff that I saw or heard. I mean, skateboarders?
Rewind as Update: Here, from an earlier post I did about the March of Futility
When I see how far the left of the early 1970s has degenerated, it's time to dump those who have brought us here.
------
Happening to look at the 2011 program of the Left Forum at Pace University, the most recent listed on its website and saw a forest of the same blather I've seen on the left since the early 60s. If that was going to work, it would have by now. I searched the long list of programs for terms relevant to the lives of people today, “Poverty”, “homeless”, “children”, “HIV” and came up with nothing. I will assure you that those are more important to just about everyone, including those participating in the Left Forum than the absolutely dead as a door nail issues of Marx and Engles ( The Bourgeois Revolution: from Marx's point of view, really, The Bourgeois Revolution: from Marx's POV) and the rehashing the Rosenbergs for going on sixty years.
“AIDS” got one hit and that was only because the letters appear in "Laughing Left: Spreading The Word With F-bombs, Oily Mermaids and Clowns On Bikes". I'd gone there as part of my ongoing blog brawl with "goldmarx" a porn-prostitution industry shill pretending to be a feminist.
No comments:
Post a Comment