The 2012 Left Forum will be held this month, on 16-18 March at Pace University in New York City. This year`s conference is being organized under the theme, "Occupy the System: Confronting Global Capitalism" (see complete program here).
The three panels below are grouped around the theme of "reclaiming freedom for the left" and analyze the capture of the discursive trope of freedom by the right in three areas: the economy; ideologies of "meritocracy"; and international interventionism. The last of the below three panels is explicitly about the Middle East and intervention.
Freedom and The Economy: Democratize or Destroy?
Saturday: 10am-11:10am
Room: W520
How does the Left envision freedom in the economic sphere? The mainstream Left has struggled to formulate a systematic response to the economic crisis. Against the mainstream push for austerity, the Left has defended progressive taxation, campaign finance reform, and a jobs program. The focus on these piecemeal, defensive goals points to confusion and uncertainty as to the deeper aims of economic order, and to the narrowing of intellectual horizons. The “Occupy Movement” suggests an opportunity to broaden this debate, offering a heterogeneous array of criticisms against the Fed, the top 1%, corporations, and debt. Yet, in general, the most critical attitude is more focused on destroying than democratizing, smashing rather than socializing. The path to freedom appears, in the mood of some of the Occupy Movement, to be about getting rid of or eliminating, rather than appropriating and transforming, the economic practices and entities that rule our lives. This panel will explore an alternative avenue for the Left – to develop a systematic view of economic questions that begins by addressing the impact on human freedom. There is a great deal of potential to escape the kinds of discipline and domination to which most people are subject, while capturing the benefits of national organization, planning and distribution established through the current economic order.
Chair:
- Danya Reda
Participants:
- Alex Gourevitch
- Corey Robin
- Doug Henwood
Meritocracy and the Ideology of Freedom
Saturday: 12pm-1:50pm
Room: W520
The invocation of freedom remains routine in American politics. But how is freedom defined in contemporary politics, and who defines its meaning? This panel will focus on the ideology of meritocracy as the dominant conception of freedom in America today. The panel will discuss whether and how the ‘meritocratic’ ideology, and the emphasis on legal justice and access to higher education that it entails, has absorbed the energies of the left in a fundamentally anti-utopian project. In particular, it will show how a significant amount of left-wing energy has been absorbed into using courts to enforce meritocratic ‘equal opportunity’ and address the ways in which the ‘rights revolution’ has and has not expanded actual freedom for the majority of Americans. The panel will address the way the limits of the rights revolution is connected to the underlying inegalitarian vision of meritocratic freedom, which presupposes a competitive struggle among the majority to use their ‘equal opportunity’ to win access to deeply unequal positions of social and political power. Understanding the ideas and institutions of meritocracy, and its elite conception of freedom, can help us rethink the way we structure certain basic institutions like the law and public education.
Chair:
- Alex Gourevitch
Panelists:
- Aziz Rana
- Danya Reda
- Nick Frayn
Freedom and International Affairs
Saturday: 3pm-4:50pm
Room: W520
The ‘traditional’ left-wing position on international affairs revolved around two principles: internationalism and self-determination. The current left-wing position is defined by a generic anti-imperialism and a defense of global civil society. It is not clear that these current positions either diagnose the most serious threats to freedom globally (i.e. ‘empire’) nor present the most attractive alternative (global civil society). The purpose of this panel is to think through what it means to defend freedom in international affairs today by reflecting on the prevailing position in light of ‘traditional’ left-wing internationalism. The concern is that ‘global civil society,’ while helpfully asserting the very broad idea of cosmopolitan human solidarity, is ultimately apolitical, eschewing the quest for power itself. It undermines internationalism and self-determination, and thus, in our view, a vision of international affairs that links up with the quest for human emancipation. These concerns will be addressed concretely in two ways: 1) by exploring how the left should conceptualize and critique recent U.S. interventionist practices (such as in Libya); and 2) by addressing the role and political purpose of cross-national solidarities with respect to local democratic movements.
Chair:
- Nick Frayn
Panelists:
- Aziz Rana
- Darryl Li
- Asli Bali