The illness that had manifested itself in my lower intestines hadn’t let up by the time the next morning rolled around. I hadn’t gotten even an hour of sleep: my entire night had been spent alternating between curling up in bed and being either uncomfortably hot or cold (the air conditioning system didn’t work exactly right), or tip-toeing to the bathroom and attempting to be painfully sick as quietly as I could.
The first session of Left Forum that day would start at 10 in the morning, and the day before, I had been happy and excited to realize that a panel in that session would include Taryn Fivek as a speaker — a Twitter acquaintance, Workers World Party organizer, and one-time interviewee on our podcast. Now, it was clear to me that I wouldn’t be able to make it. Despite feeling so physically awful, I felt worse over the idea of not being able to meet someone I respected that I likely wouldn’t be able to see again — at least not for a long time.
Thanks to my boyfriend’s quick run to the pharmacy for Immodium and gatorade, I felt well enough to get up into the outside world by around 11:00. I got myself a corn muffin at a local café and nibbled at it cautiously for a bit before walking over to the college. There was some time to kill before the next session started, so we decided to peruse the book fair a little bit. Verso and Haymarket, the big Trotskyist publishers, were there; along with Monthly Review Press, a few anarcho-communist publishing outfits, and even a small presence from Kersplebedeb, a Canadian publisher that most notably released Settlers and J. Moufawad-Paul’s books. I began wandering the aisles aimlessly, looking at cover after cover, not really registering any of them in my mind. I was still dehydrated, felt a little nauseous, and there were thick crowds of people all around me. In situations like this, I sometimes start to panic. This time, though, I essentially did the opposite: I was running on auto-pilot. I likely would’ve stayed staring at books forever if I didn’t get a text from my boyfriend asking me where I was.
When we caught up with each other, we checked out the farthest corner of the fair, since it was on the way to the panel we wanted to go to. We quickly realized that this was where Left Forum hid the most embarrassing tables: the conspiracy theorists and Spartacists, namely. Another table that was a bit closer to the normal publishers griped about all the “deep state” panels Left Forum had banned, but a couple stragglers — fluoride conspiracy theorists and 9/11 truthers — had at least managed to score a spot on the corridor. I took a quick picture of them, and moved on.
The first panel we went to featured Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, the author of The Indigenous People’s History of the United States. It was an interesting conversation about revolts in non-urban agrarian areas, with Ortiz focusing on the Green Corn Rebellion — an anti-World War One uprising in Oklahoma that saw white farmers, Native Americans (Seminoles and Creeks, specifically) and African-Americans fighting together against the state — in particular. Another panelist went over the partial history of Mexican uprisings. While I was still feeling a bit dizzy and disoriented during this panel, it was still interesting to hear about uprisings and rebellions that didn’t center urban industrial workers, since many assume that those types of workers have the most revolutionary potential (Trotskyists, especially).
Before it was time for the next panel, we had time to take a break and get some lunch. To my all too happy surprise, I discovered that the Worker’s World Party had set up a table right outside of the college. The atmosphere was cheerful, and I could tell that there was a good rapport between everyone involved. The two people running the table were joking and laughing with another young man who was helping them set things up, and an older man was complimenting the choices of passerby who happened to pick up a book or pamphlet or two. Taryn was crouching on the ground, writing a message in chalk. I was relieved to get a chance to say hello after all! After we exchanged greetings, I helped her finish off the rest of her message (“Build a worker’s world”) with a hammer and sickle. She mentioned that her branch was going to be showing This Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a documentary about Venezuela, later that night. While I had already seen it a few times, I was looking forward to getting to know the branch a little bit and have a relaxing time with fellow communists. I decided to take her up on the invitation, and took a flyer for the event from her as I said my good-byes and headed back into the building for the next panel.
The second panel we went to centered around a subject of my boyfriend’s half-amused curiosity: Georgism. The panel claimed to be about Georgist solutions to gentrification, and while it did focus on that for awhile — and actually was more detailed than “just institute a land tax!” — the most entertainment came after the main panelist speeches were over. As soon as the floor was opened for discussion, a man with long, frizzy hair butted heads with the main panelist — an older man with what I consider an almost physically impossible-looking beer gut — in a bizarrely angry way. The frizzy-haired one would frustratedly ask something about how to keep the panelist’s dream-housing-complex affordable if he scaled it to median income, the panelist would snap back about how it would JUST WORK, and on and on they went. Eventually, both of them became obnoxious enough that the amusement transitioned to boredom.
We were thankful when it was time to go to the next panel, an Eco-Socialism discussion run by Monthly Review. When we got to the room, though, the previous panel was still going on. We discovered quickly that it was about Democratic voting fraud or Bernie Sanders or some such thing, and it mostly consisted of middle-aged audience members yelling to the panelists about voting conspiracies in each state. While some of them may have been true… it was June 3rd, 2017. Just about a year after the last primary. Things had moved on, and there were far more pressing matters do deal with than “Bernie Would Have Won”. The shouting — made cacophonous by the largeness of the lecture hall — stretched on for another fifteen minutes past when the Eco-Socialism panel was to begin. Other audience members that were looking forward to that panel along with us began to look at each other quizzically. What was going on? We never did figure that out. We sat there for another 10 minutes or so, watching the old Bernie crowd thin out to nothing, and the panelists for the next panel still hadn’t arrived. If we stayed any longer, we knew we would miss our chance for dinner and movies with Worker’s World. We decided to skip out on waiting, and took the next subway to the WWP branch space.
Seeing The Revolution Will Not Be Televised with Marxist-Leninists truly was an enjoyable experience that added quite a bit to the film itself. The documentary is about a 2002 coup on the Chavista government perpetrated by business interests with the help of a few key military figures. Everyone hissed and booed at the corrupt Venezuelan officials, and voiced even louder displeasure whenever a United States official was shown on screen supporting Carmona (the short-lived “president” of Venezuela) and his cronies. Every dramatic twist and turn was made even more compelling by the interaction from the audience, from Chavez’s capture to his return. After the documentary concluded, a few WWP members revealed that a delegation from Venezuela had been present with us for the showing of the film, and we were able to hear their side of the story and field them questions. Every part of the experience, from seeing the film to getting to hear from actual Venezuelan delegates to getting to know the WWP branch a little better, filled me with hope for the future: far more than anything I’d seen at Left Forum. In Rhode Island, one can feel a bit isolated from the left. It’s rare to really feel comfortable as a Marxist-Leninist-leaning communist, and you have to take what you can get in terms of organizational choice. Here, in a room full of strangers, I felt truly at home. I wanted to remember that feeling and carry it with me as I moved forward.
