AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Saturday, April 05, 2014

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Friday Evening Plenary:

Cornel West, Immortal Technique, Marina Sitrin, and

Stanley Aronowitz
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Why revolution now?

What revolution now?

Cornel West is one of America's most provocative public intellectuals and has been a champion for racial justice since childhood. His writing, speaking, and teaching weave together the traditions of the black Baptist Church, progressive politics, and jazz. West has written more than 20 books and is a professor of Philosophy and Christian Practices at Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York.

Felipe Coronel, known as Immortal Technique, is a recording artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist. Hailing from Peru, by way of Harlem, New York, he is one of the highest selling independent artists putting forth a combination of globally themed revolutionary music with a gritty reality based street Hip-Hop. Not only is he an artist, but also a human rights advocate having traveled to places like Haiti & Afghanistan to provide relief through various non-profits. He has also participated in several teaching workshops for adult prisons and juvenile facilities. As the President of Viper Records, with 4 full studio albums, 3 mixtapes, with over 250,000 records sold, he has the Hip-Hop community highly anticipating his 5th studio album, The Middle Passage.

Marina Sitrin has been active in occupy movements worldwide. She is the co-author of They Can’t Represent Us: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy, author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina and editor of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. She is a student, teacher, dreamer and militant, and a visiting scholar at the Center for Place Culture and Politics at the City University of New York. Her work focuses on social movements and justice, specifically looking at forms of social organization, such as autogestión, horizontalidad, prefigurative politics and new affective social relationships – and the struggle to build autonomy in the face of State repression and cooptation.

Stanley Aronowitz is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center, where he is Director of The Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work. He has taught at Staten Island Community College, University of California-Irvine, University of Paris, Columbia University, and University of Wisconsin. After working in metalworking factories in New York and New Jersey, Aronowitz became a union organizer for the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers' Union. He is Founding Editor of Social Text and Situations, and serves on the Editorial Board of Ethnography; Cultural Critique. He has authored and edited 26 books, including False Promises (1973), Science as Power (1988), Roll Over Beethoven (1993), How Class Works (2003), Just Around the Corner: The Paradox of the Jobless Recovery (2005), Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (2006), Against Schooling: For An Education That Matters (2008), and Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals (2012).