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| Fifth Column |
| At its worst, however, Left Forum is Comic Con for Marxists‐Commie Con, if you will‐and an absolute shitshow of nerds and social rejects. |
| 2017-05-10 |
| [TheBaffler.com] A few weeks back in Manhattan, hundreds of socialists, communists, anarchists, and even few decent “small-d” democrats shuffled into the unlikely venue of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (ironically, best known as a “cop school”) for Left Forum 2015. If you aren’t up on your radical political symposiums, Left Forum evolved out of the now-defunct Socialist Scholars Conference, which was re-founded in 1981 after the original Socialist Scholars Conference petered out in the 1960s. The SSC grew into the largest, most prominent leftist summit in the United States, though nationwide university cuts eventually curtailed both budget and staff for the event. By 2004 it was renamed Left Forum, and it still commands a big draw: This year’s confab boasted 1,300 speakers and four hundred events under the salient title of “No Justice, No Peace: Confronting the Crises of Capitalism and Democracy.” Yeah, because democracy is a crisis. Jesus. At its best, Left Forum remains a reassuring beacon of cameraderie and ambition. In addition to seasoned journalists, organizers and academics, it usually snags a few big public intellectuals, like Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, and Angela Davis, while also peppering the bill with high-profile activists like Harry Belafonte and Michael Moore. The organizers sometimes even lure the odd political success story, most recently Kshama Sawant, Seattle City Council member and open socialist. Generally, both speakers and attendees are smart, friendly, and often quite young and good-looking (if I do say so myself). At its worst, however, Left Forum is Comic Con for Marxists—Commie Con, if you will—and an absolute shitshow of nerds and social rejects. There are bitter old codgers that will harangue you about a thirty-some-years-old internecine grudge, and there are politically unsophisticated kids with Che Guevara t-shirts and Adbusters subscriptions. There are sanctimonious Trotskyists, ridiculous Maoist Third-Worldists, condescending horizontalist anarchists, smug social democrats and a glut of ardent adherents to similarly esoteric ideological traditions, all competing for the title of Most Insufferable Anti-Capitalist. Left Forum is notorious for grueling Q&A sessions, often with nary a “Q” to be found. People like to demonstrate how many books they’ve read (or worse, have written and self-published) in embarrassing displays of pretension and/or machismo, and cynicism is frequently substituted for insight. But the grumps and the brats, the blowhards and the sectarians, the narcissists and the pessimists—all of these people are bearable to me, some even charming. No, the worst part of Left Forum is the crackpots, the paranoiacs, the hysterics, and all the other truly dysfunctional personalities attracted by the conference’s most infamous policy: no panel submission will be rejected. It's good to know that the Left has problems, too. |
| Posted by:Anguth Ebbitle2872 |
| #3 a few big public "intellectuals" /gotta make the "air quotes" signal as well |
| Posted by: Frank G 2017-05-10 08:42 |
| #2 Leftism does seem to be based on NPD. The idea that you can benefit people better than they can themselves is the height of arrogance and a total impossibility. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2017-05-10 08:23 |
| #1 Is this an opportunity for Chelsea, perhaps? She could benefit from the coverage. |
| Posted by: Omusoque Spolutch1486 2017-05-10 05:27 |