Bernie Sanders Wins at the End (tags)
Sanders has a quality that gives him an advantage in the US election campaign that is based largely on sympathies: authenticity...The logical consequence of "Not Me.Us" is that the individual fights for improvement of social conditions, not for himself and his personal success.
Video: Left Forum on Thomas Paine 1 hr, 23 min (tags)
BookTV going back more than ten years is an incredible resource turning life into an open door. The future could be open and dynamic, sharing work and exchanging roles, as cloud workers and dream catchers!
The Left, Labor and Occupy (tags)
Barely half a year after it burst on the scene, the Occupy Wall Street movement is splintering left and right. This was inevitable in a movement that was united only in what it opposed and could never put forward a positive program, whether of reformist "demands" on the capitalist state or of revolutionary action against it. Liberals, who latched onto Occupy hoping it could pressure the Democratic Party in a more populist direction, want to expel "black bloc" anarchists. Reformist social democrats rail against "ultraleftists" in Occupy and cozy up to the labor tops. On the other side, many (but not all) anarchists oppose unions. Some are simply arrogant petty-bourgeois labor haters. Others are grappling with real problems, but with skewed analysis and dead wrong conclusions. Discussion of recent workers' struggles, from Wisconsin to West Coast longshore, underlines that the key question is leadership, but not just replacing one set of bureaucrats with another. Unions have always faced vicious anti-labor laws, but we have the power to defeat them. It is necessary to drive out the pro-capitalist bureaucracy, the labor lieutenants of capital, in order to turn the unions into instruments of revolutionary class struggle.
"Students Should Become Anarchists": Noam Chomsky (tags)
Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. Then anarchists work at unmasking and mastering the structures, whether patriarchal families or the private tyrannies of the economy. Links to R Hahnel, C Milstein and M Albert.
Being a Leftist in the 21st Century (tags)
Each spring the Forum convenes the largest gathering in North America of the international Left. With close to one hundred panels and three major cultural events, the Left Forum brings together organizers and intellectuals from across the globe to share ideas.