I had never been to New York before. I grew up poor and stayed close to home. The farthest I’d ever traveled before this was Washington, DC: and that wasn’t for anything worthwhile (I was around twelve years old, and I was dragged along by my mother to a “pro life” march taking place there). New York had the unspoken promise of, at the very least, being interesting — no matter what I ended up doing there. It just so happened, however, that this year, my specific destination was the Left Forum.
Left Forum is a yearly conference and convention that brings people of varying progressive, radical, or socialist tendencies together for a series of panel discussions, book fairs, and newspaper pushers. Most of the ideologies represented are somewhat common: this year, for example, there were talks given by Berniecrats, democratic socialists, various flavors of trot, and marxist-leninists, to name a few. Something “unique” about Left Forum, however, is the method by which panels are approved: to put it bluntly, vetting is not the strong-suit of the organizers of this convention. Up until about a week before the kick-off date, a panel which alleged the transgender movement was a Soros/Big Pharma conspiracy was on the (vast) list of discussions. Another panel, which claimed the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11th was a “zionist plot”, was also on the list for quite some time. It was only after a fair bit of online backlash that both of these panels were pulled (of course, on the day of, there were a few angry fringe reactionaries that made their discontent known through flyers and other sorts of signage, but most attendees were more shocked that the panels had been on the schedule to begin with).
Since there were hundreds of panels, and many of them happened at the same time as each other, I was only able to attend a few. Thus, I can’t give a full picture of the convention as a whole. I can, however, offer a day-to-day personal log of what I experienced at Left Forum — from angry old left-liberal Bernie true-believers to Spartacists to Posadists to truly wonderful leftist writers and organizers — and, generally, what I experienced during my first visit to New York City.
Day One
The city was hectic. Or, to put it more honestly, overwhelming. I had been to cities before and had seen media representations of New York before, and thought I had a generally good idea of what to expect. Skyscrapers as far as the eye can see, taxis, seas of people, bad smells, worse drivers — right. Those things were in fact present, but in even greater vibrancy and immediacy than my brain had been able to concoct based on its limited experience from Providence and Boston. Not even half a minute would go by without some frustrated driver honking their car horn at something or another (in fact, a more accurate time span between each beep would be more like five or ten seconds). There was no rhyme or reason whatsoever to the way people would act on the sidewalks or at road crossings: it was every person for themselves; “fuck you, got mine” as a pedestrian style. Interestingly, the smell — which is a stereotypical complaint about the city — was one of the least over-the-top things about the place. It would vary from strong perfume or cologne, fresh-cut flowers, garbage, urine, and horse droppings (the latter was a bit of a mystery to me until late into the day: it turns out horse-drawn carriages are a bit of a tourist novelty in the city). In other words, the smell, while not always pleasant, wasn’t anything overly offensive to those with even small-city experience.
The main issue one would likely have with New York — especially those with a tendency towards anxiety — is the claustrophobia the city produces. In the grips of a panic attack one can often feel the urge to escape to somewhere coupled with a sense of feeling trapped. I can say with experience, unfortunately, that New York City is one of the worst places to have a panic attack. There are people surrounding you everywhere you turn, and the skyscrapers go on for what seems like miles upon miles. Nearly everywhere is open, and the places that aren’t are either private or crowded with more people. One truly does get the feeling that they’re a bit like a rat trapped in a maze, especially if they’re already in a tense mood.
Of course, it’s not all bad. In fact, there are quite a few nice things about the city. I had my first slice of authentic New York pizza almost immediately after arrival, and I can confirm that yes, the best New York pizza really is pretty uniquely delicious (there are mediocre and bad slices, of course, but those are easily avoidable in the era of easy internet access). The architecture of the city itself is also beautiful, and there’s always something interesting to look at. Best of all, if you’re a leftist, there are a great amount of opportunities for both action and camaraderie. The latter, though, would not be something I fully discovered until the following day. Instead, most of my activity on day one was spent on logistics.
No one around us seemed to know what was going on. They, like my boyfriend and I, were standing in a barely-moving line that sprawled out to halfway around the college hall Left Forum was taking place in. Was this a line for registered attendees or not? Wasn’t it already time for the doors to open? What was the hold up? What was that other, far shorter line on the other side of the building about? Was that the correct line? Nobody knew, and nobody was too pleased about it — nobody, that is, except for a group of Trotskyists asking each of us for fifty cents in exchange for their newspaper. Perhaps, we thought, the wait was a deal struck between the Forum organizers and a couple of the more obscure Trotskyist split groups to get their names and papers out in the open. It was a half-joke, but needless to say, after the Trot Crew had made their way up and down the line, things suddenly moved along quite quickly. The two-line struggle, it seemed, had resolved itself (hyuck).
Since the wait had cut into the time in which panels were supposed to begin, we were only able to make it to the latter half of a panel about sexism in organizing work. While it was definitely good to hear a diverse variety of voices on the issue from both the panel and the audience, the panel itself veered a bit to the liberal side. I had gone to a SURJ (Standing Up for Racial Justice) meeting once a few months ago and was deeply frustrated with the pop psychology that ran amok throughout the thing. From a mindfulness session in the beginning to the description of whiteness as a series of personality traits to overcome (such as “perfectionism”) more than a structural force, the entire venture seemed to be more of a white people guilt-resolving session than a meeting about how to organize against racism. While the sexism panel didn’t get that bad, there were still hints of it here and there: “perfectionism” reared its head again as a masculine trait, and a panelist remarked that standing akimbo increased your testosterone levels (a trans woman in the audience was vocally skeptical of the idea). In the end, despite the liberal pop-psych tendencies, there was still something nice and a tad cathartic about being able to talk about the difficulties of organizing as a woman in the US left.
Since the first session only had a single time block of panels, the rest of the day was comprised of getting dinner with a friend at a vegan restaurant and getting better acquainted with our hotel room. It was small and thankfully very clean, with a bit of a Japanese aesthetic. The oddest thing about it was the “wall” between the bedroom and the bathroom: instead of an actual wall, it was a window with a translucent curtain hanging over it — we joked that we had gotten the voyeur room. I, sadly, got a little too acquainted with the bathroom and its lack of privacy. While the vegan food was delicious going down, it violently disagreed with me on the way out. So it goes.
I didn’t get an hour of sleep that first night. My initial excitement and fascination with the city was now marred with a stress about how long my illness would last. While I never completely recovered until after I left New York, I thankfully was able to be up and about for the rest of the weekend — lucky for me and (maybe) for you!
(This is the first part of a series ((including a recording of the Posadism panel)) that will be available to OPC Patrons! If you want to become a Patron, you may do so here: https://www.patreon.com/OPC
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