I was pretty sure I knew what I was going to get when I left for Detroit to attend the U.S. Social Forum. Yet I came away surprised, because even though I found the expected sources of frustration and some new ones as well, I discovered a greater number of reasons for hope and optimism about the resurgence of the Left in the U.S. For four days the city of Detroit was the hive for a swarm of non-governmental organizations with a largely youthful and substantially black and Latino constituency of some 15,000 community activists, cyber-anarchists, and radical pedagogues. It can be difficult to watch and listen to the growing pains of this movement of movements, but compared to other Leftist conventions, meetings, and events I’ve attended off and on over the past two decades, this current multitude certainly represents an advance in both theory and practice. The U.S. Social Forum makes capitalism the nucleus of its analyses in ways that the politically correct Left never approximated in the 1990s. Its several hundred workshops and panels consider the myriad ways in which that class and labor conflicts intersect with the inequalities of racism and sexism, thus generating a more dynamic analysis that transcends the previous divisions between identity politics and Marxism. But the even more significant developments are in the demography of the members, how people are getting organized and mobilized, and the communities they are trying to rebuild in participatory and sustainable directions. I’m used to national Left conventions being unholy meeting grounds where the militant misfits of graduate school join with postmodern primitives in dreadlocked drum circles, and while those two populations were still out in full force in Detroit, they were joined by a third contingent of young people of color whose presence has noticeably multiplied with community organizing around urban issues and the use of digital media to fight the power. This is starting to look more like a global movement, or at least one that reflects America’s increasingly global culture. It is only beginning to scratch the surface of its potential, and it can grow by more leaps and bounds if it sheds some of the Left’s old baggage and builds a new, more inclusive, and truly popular culture.
I flew to Detroit on Thursday morning, June 24. My trip was not off to a good beginning: I had made a late reservation and got stuck in a middle seat, and I booked a nonstop flight but this came with the Devil’s bargain that a foul fog of flatulence would accumulate over the course of my three-plus hour flight. The cabbie who picked me up at the airport was absorbed in the Slovakia vs. Italy match of the World Cup, insisting that I watch the final minutes of the game on his mobile phone while he drove me downtown. These were the only minutes of the World Cup I actually watched, and although it was a virtual shootout with a score of 3-2 and apparently entailed the upset and elimination of a major international contender, the white-bread American part of me was still entirely bored. I checked-in at the hotel and began walking to Detroit’s Cobo Exhibition Hall, where I was greeted by a huge bronze statue of the boxer Joe Louis and a moderate number of people milling about, occupied with their laptops and cell phones, or flipping through the program schedule for workshops to attend. A friend and I were firing off texts at one another about our present locations, leading me upstairs to the press briefing room in one of the media centers, a cavernous and chaotic room where perhaps a dozen people worked on desktops while a tangled mass of wires and backup devices lay in waiting on adjoining tables. Inside the press briefing room, a panel was being conducted in Spanish about neocolonial economics in Latin America, and my friend was one of perhaps ten people who were filming, with maybe twice that number in the audience. We split when the Q&A began and walked over to a local bar & grill to grab a bite to eat and make plans for the days ahead.
My buddy spent most of the next two days filming and uploading footage for the People’s Media Campaign. He begins trying to explain that they an offshoot of the official conference that follows a more de-centered encuentro model, and therefore were engaged in a conflict with the official media center where the press briefing had been, but at a certain point all the sectarian in-fighting must have made my eyes glass over. I would spend my time wandering around various parts of the conference hall and taking pictures, looking through the book exhibits, engaging in a few conversations, watching graffiti artists at work, and sitting in an amphitheater listening to rappers. The fusion of Leftist politics and hip hop culture—not just in music, but the revival of graffiti art and break-dancing as well—was one of the most striking features of the U.S. Social Forum. Over the past 20 years or so, hip hop has become a truly global form of popular music and culture that nearly everyone in the world can adopt to speak to their perspective and experience—the most memorable performance I witnessed was by a Lebanese feminist and peace activist local to Detroit. Hip hop has supplanted, in this regard, folk music and more recently rock, the latter of which seems to be in danger of being wholly converted into reactionary white people’s music if the Left cannot reclaim its place in previous social struggles. Whereas rock music was a central element in peace marches and fundraising around the abortion issue at least through the 1990s, guitar-oriented music was noticeably absent from the U.S. Social Forum.
I attended and participated in a few workshops, and tried to get in to a couple more that filled the convention room beyond capacity. My friend and I went with hundreds of others to hear the plenary speakers and watch them projected on large screen TVs in the main exhibition hall. But in my opinion the most significant event was on the final night of the conference, when the younger participants convened for a dance party at the so-called Leftist Lounge, a labyrinth of interconnected clubs fashioned out of industrial space in the motor city’s gutted downtown. It was in these remnants of warehouse and storage space that we danced the night away as a tribe of tribes and not only a movement of movements, the beats and rhythm uniting thousands of bodies in an atmosphere of collective effervescence, with the posters of revolutionaries and radical activists haunting the rafters and beams overhead. If it sounds disparaging to say that the best part of a radical political convention was its dance night, this is only half of my intent. From an intellectual perspective, the analyses of American society and global capitalism offered in the speeches and pamphlets at the U.S. Social Forum are disappointingly simplistic, don’t seem to seem to have advanced much in the past 20 years, and are lagging behind the rapidly changing realities and possibilities of our time. From an activist perspective, there is a promising amount of networking and a necessary degree of cheerleading, but in the digital age most of this no longer needs to be done in face-to-face settings. But from a cultural perspective, the dance party at the Leftist Lounge was inspiring because if the Left is going to take power in this day and age it must also build what Michael Denning has called a “cultural front,” and it is precisely in this crucial area of cultural struggle that the Left has been most deficient since the end of the 1960s.
At a time when commercial entertainment and media permeates seemingly every pore of social life, Stephen Duncombe has recently argued, the Right has learned to fit its politics within the culture of spectacle and fantasy, while the Left continues to focus its resources on the increasingly irrelevant tasks of presenting facts and exposing lies, making logically sound arguments, and trying to tell people the truth. Outside of the Leftist Lounge and the appropriations of hip hop, this shortage of cultural weaponry was quite noticeable at the U.S. Social Forum. For example, at a time when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have gained huge audiences of young people in large part by skewering the Right, it is disheartening not to see the Left nurturing our own cadre of political comedians, and this forum certainly could have benefited from a healthy dose of humor to balance the usual onslaught of movement moralizing. Likewise, digital technologies and software have radically democratized the ability for anyone to make short films that might bridge the experimental and the political, and yet there was nothing of this sort to be found here either. And of course the biggest elephant in the room—totally absent from the workshops and panels—is religion and spirituality, for the great absurdity of our time is that the Right has effectively hitched Jesus Christ to its agenda of greed and militarism, and that the Left has sat back and left them do it without recalling his teachings on equality, peace, and love. Hardcore activists are loathe to admit it, but there is no chance of building a powerful Left in American society if we cannot divorce compassionate spirituality from institutionalized religion while responding to people’s needs to find meaning in their lives through faith in a power greater than themselves.
Having been out until 3 AM, we slept late into Saturday morning, which only offered a truncated schedule of panels and workshops on the forum’s final day. We browsed the book and information tables one last time, talked with some anarchists from San Francisco, went to get something eat, people watched downtown, and finally just sat in the grass to read. One more expensive cab ride to the airport later, I was checking in for my Saturday night flight back home. Also on my flight was a large contingent of young black people who had also attended the U.S. Social Forum. In a clearly audible and irreverent tone, two of the young women declared that ours was now a “soul plane,” and with just enough joviality to assuage the other passengers, another group seated in the rear of the plane began a chant about taking back first class. At that time I giggled to myself with the feeling that despite all its frustrating shortcomings, the best days of this movement are yet to come.
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