Left Forum Report 2018 draft

Left Forum Report
The LF project will included a literature table, outreach work, a panel on Tools for Listening when we disagree.
The LF is a large yearly gathering of movement activists and scholars (it used to be the Socialist Scholars Conference) comprised of several hundred panels and workshops and plenaries. This is the third year that the RC participated. The first two were under UER and this year under SAL.
On June 2 a team of 11 co-counselors presented a workshop to 14 participants
The title and theme
The panel
Structure of the WS
Good questions
I can see how I might listen in a structured way like this where we have made an agreement to listen to each other, how would you do this when there is no agreement?
What about when the disagreeing person is a “bad actor?”
Why should I bother to listen to people who are never going to change and are never going to join a movement? Wouldn’t I want to cut my losses?
How might I apply this when I go facilitate a panel later today with many contentious points of view being expressed?

The previous afternoon and early evening three co counselors set up a literature table and distributed 200 flyers.

The WS was at 10 AM and before it cc fanned out and distributed flyers. The cc distributed the flyers in a friendly engaged and engaging way. Several of the WS participants, during an opening go-round, answered the question, why did you come to this WS by saying, because of the contact they’d had with the cc who invited them.

Lessons:
Leading up to this from preparing the content and discharging a lot of early terror and working on memories of being a Protestant in Cuba daughter of an evangelist, and later a member of the PSP, and particularly in both these cases the feeling that I knew something that was supposed to be better than what others had figured out but was actually just something weird, and that I had to “convert” them, and having a lot of shame and humiliation feelings attach to my beliefs and the act of trying to share them, I discharged a lot on places where the “weird “ material had attached to RC, by the time of the LF panel I could tell that our tools are eminently human, and came from a place of understanding and pride that it was by applying them to itself as an organization that RC had one of the greatest longevities among liberation organizations in the US. My “weird” material, also connected to being an immigrant, tends to have me move through the world feeling as though I have “no standing”, to speak with authority on anything. This time I could really tell that I, and we in RC have standing and authority to be able to say:
Listening across disagreements is necessary and doable. It will lead to better, stronger consensus and concerted action. This listening tool is one progressive movements need to build the unity this moment needs.
Doing so brings up many feelings. We have long chains of feelings around disagreements, beginning in our early childhoods, rooted in our histories. And disagreement is made more complex as they enmesh into the gears of the oppressive society, are linked to access to power, privilege, wealth, military might. Opinions, views, policies, are linked to the core “disagreement” between oppression and liberation, and some of the positions have armies. Disagreement is further complicated by its manipulation to disrupt and destroy movements sometimes by expressions from confused but honest individuals or groups and many times by what our questioned called “bad actors” on the payroll of branches of the state whose job is to undermine liberation movements.
Our message was: by listening well to each other on our life story on disagreements, by discharging feelings that emerge, we are in better shape to listen in the course of our activist work and lives, we have more of our hearts and minds available to make good judgment calls as to why, when, to whom and how we listen.
Our context for listening was climate justice. We chose this frame because there is general agreement within the progressive movement that this is a crisis that must be taken on. And because in order to build the movement needed to do so it will be necessary to craft policies and design actions across many views and uniting many constituencies and it will be necessary to listen to and communicate well with many who have been confused.