Building the Left in the Age of the Right: Developing a Lifetime Commitment
Second Annual Colloquium on social change.
“Building the Left in the Age of the Right:
Developing a Lifetime Commitment”
A Talk by Eric Mann and Lian Hurst Mann, “Building the Left in the Age of the Right: Developing a Lifetime Commitment,” will be held on November 8 at 5:30 p.m. in the Cape Cod Lounge of the Student Union at UMass Amherst. This second annual colloquium on social change is sponsored by Special Collections and University Archives at the UMass Amherst Libraries and the History department at UMass Amherst. The event is free and open to the public.
Eric Mann is a prolific writer, and has been a civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, labor, and environmental organizer with the Congress of Racial Equality, the Students for a Democratic Society, the League of Revolutionary Struggle, and the United Auto Workers, including eight years on auto assembly lines. In 2001 he was a delegate to the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa where he participated in the protests against the U.S. government's walk out. He is the co-host of the weekly radio show, “Voices from the Frontlines,” on KPFK Pacifica in Los Angeles. Mann is the director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles and sits on the Bus Riders Union Planning Committee.
Mann is the author of Comrade George: An Investigation into the Life, Political Thought, and Assassination of George Jackson; Taking on General Motors: Insurgency in a United Auto Workers Local; L.A.'s Lethal Air: New Strategies for Environmental Organizing; The 2004 Presidential Elections: A Turning Point for the U.S. Left; and Dispatches from Durban: Firsthand Commentaries on the World Conference Against Racism and Post-September 11 Movement Strategies. His latest book, Katrina's Legacy: White Racism and Black Reconstruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, will be available at the event.
Lian Hurst Mann is a founding member of the Labor/Community Strategy Center and the editor of the political magazine, AhoraNow. She coordinates the Center's National School for Strategic Organizing and is co-author of Towards a Program of Resistance: We Make These Demands Against the Institutions of U.S. Imperialism and Reconstructing Los Angeles from the Bottom Up. A Marxist, feminist, and anti-imperialist, Lian spent ten years as a shop-floor organizer against racism and for union democracy. She was a founding member of the Berkeley/Oakland Women's Union and member of the Berkeley Radical Psychiatry collective in the early 1970s. Educated as an architect and culture critic, she is co-editor of Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Strategies and Social Practices, and author of Structures for Knowledge for Change: Architecture as Social Practice. She has written extensively on culture, ideology, hegemony, and strategies for organic intellectual practice, particularly in the arts.
