Walking Distance

 Here's what I would distribute at the entry/exit to the "Left Forum."  No pride of ownership is involved.  Feel free to edit, amend, alter, plagiarize, disregard if and as you develop your own response to the disgrace that is in reality the Socialist Scab Conference.

Every year, we get another iteration of the recurring red Groundhog’s Day nightmare that is called "Left Forum.”  This time the Left Forum occupies a weekend, at a  university, the space and time as defined by capitalism, available to those who have the cash; credit, given the current economic predicament of capital not being quite good enough  to secure an auditorium, a moment, the bandwidth necessary to preservation of capital, much less its expanded reproduction.

Make no mistake, this “Left Forum” is about nothing so much as it is about the preservation of the existing social relations of production—as it is about accommodating to the existing social relations of production of by and through raising an umbrella which says “critique” on the outside, but  says co-sponsored by the World Bank and the UN Mission to Haiti on the inside. 

There’s farce, as in the bourgeoisie’s equivocation, wavering in 1830; there’s tragedy as in the working classes and poor subordinating themselves to the bourgeoisie’s equivocation and wavering in 1848… and then there’s disgrace… as in so-called socialists supporting their so-called governments in World War 1; as in the so-called socialists of the Left Forum advertising, selling, promoting its closing keynote speaker one Alvaro Garcia Linera, current vice-president of the current government of Bolivia, which is currently, and has for several years, been providing military troops to the United States/Nations occupation of Haiti.  

This Left Forum trumpets Linera as one of the “foremost Marxist intellectuals” of the current era in Latin America… which says all we need to know about the current era, the current Marxists, the current intellectuals.  

Linera, supposedly, has written extensively about “value form versus community form” and all we can say to that is “who cares?”  Or more appropriately, this being New York, "who gives a flying fuck?" His job, his relation to capital, is to provide troops in exchange for a certain renumeration from the international coordinating council of the bourgeoisie. 

Pay no attention to that island in the Caribbean, populated with people poorer than poorer, poorer even than those of Bolivia; those people darker even than the people of Bolivia.  It’s entertainment.

So come one, come all:  step right up.  See the same and different clowns performing in the once and future circus of not one, not two, but three left rings.  They call it the "Left Forum."  We call it the Socialist Scabs Conference.