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Abolition, decolonization, immigration, Palestine — how is the Left thinking about the future in this perilous political moment? Socialists and activists showed up in the thousands to this year’s Socialism Conference, a four-day event packed with discussion of today’s most pressing issues and strategies for organizing. Laura Flanders & Friends was there, in Chicago (just days after the Democratic National Convention) for a live taping with three renowned organizers: Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and author of “Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance” and co-founder of The Red Nation, an organization dedicated to Native liberation; Rachel Herzing, an organizer, activist, and advocate fighting the violence of surveillance, policing and imprisonment and co-author of “How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment”; and Harsha Walia, co-founder of No One Is Illegal, an anti-colonial migrant justice organization and author of the books “Undoing Border Imperialism” and “Border and Rule”. As you’ll hear, they’re not counting on politicians to step into office and grant their wishes. They’re focusing beyond the election cycle. Join us as we envision a liberated future and explore all that it takes to get there. Plus Laura’s commentary.
“. . . Having Deb Haaland the Secretary of Interior, has been good in the sense that we’ve gotten these really amazing reports on things that we’ve already known, that there was this massive systematic genocide of Native children . . . But at the same time, her department has overseen more oil and gas leases on federal lands than the Trump administration, and that’s not an indictment of her as a person. That’s an indictment of that department . . .” – Nick Estes
“. . . We know every single fall in an election season that Black women get told we’re the saviors of the entire world and everything relies on us, even though the rest of the time it’s very happily that we’re kind of left to die, quite literally. We are given this message on a regular basis, and I don’t know what to say to people about that. The policies of the so-called United States are not life-affirming policies for Black people, for imprisoned people, and for people living as women.” – Rachel Herzing
“I just think that the strongest counterforce to fascism and anti-colonialism is an organized Left. It is not a candidate . . . Sometimes I think we get fixated on what candidates will or won’t do, and we don’t think about the conditions that the Left can create to actually make those possibilities happen . . .” – Harsha Walia
Guests
- Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe): Author, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, & The Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
- Rachel Herzing: Co-Author, How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment; Former Co-Director, Critical Resistance
- Harsha Walia: Author, Border and Rule & Undoing Border Imperialism; Co-Founder, No One Is Illegal
Transcript
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