World Peace Forum Teach-In 2013

Saturday November 2, at SFU Harbour Centre
555 West Hastings, Vancouver, BC
9am to 5pm

http://www.peaceforumteachin.org for complete information

The theme of this year’s Teach In is “If Capitalism Doesn’t Work, What Will?”

Billions of people without work, millions of people losing their homes, valuable public services cut and cut again, people and our environment discarded as worthless, an economy that doesn’t work for the vast
majority.

Capitalism has brought us all of this. We are told again and again that there is no alternative. But now, more and more, people around the world are searching for alternatives.

This year’s Teach In will look at some of today’s breaking points, at some of the struggles taking place now, and at a few of the alternative ways in which society could be organized.

The day will start with a plenary talk exploring the challenge of how to bring together the various movements resisting the attacks on the working class and the environment into a coherent vehicle for societal transformation.

Next, the first set of workshops will address the challenges that face us in our lives every day ­ some of the aspects of society that don’t work as they should. We will examine the issues of public transportation, pensions, housing and education and look at both why they don’t work and how they could.

The second set of workshops will look at specific current workers’ popular struggles, at both the issues they raise and at how they impact on the vision of a different world: struggles over pipelines and fracking, the misuse and abuse of temporary foreign workers, the court case challenging our public health care system, and workers striking and organizing unions in the quintessential examples of non-union workplaces.

Activists who are involved in these campaigns bring their experience and their vision to the Teach-In.

The mid-day plenary session focuses on the mechanics of ‘democracy’. “If we are the 99%, how come they win all the elections?” We are bringing Roger Rashi from Quebec Solidaire- a left party that has been able to elect two members to the National Assembly in a ‘first past the post’ electoral system that makes it hard for small parties to win. He will look at both the experience of building an alternative that includes electoral participation while also acting in ‘the street’ in popular struggles. How do those areas combine? Do they? How do you deal with the notion that ‘if elections could change anything they would be made illegal’? And why are there so many people who don’t vote at all?

The last set of workshops will look specifically at potential places to start when building alternatives to capitalism: workers’ control in cooperatives & councils, municipal socialism, de-growth and the commons, and greens and reds cooperating in Europe. Experiences, both successful and not so successful, that challenge the status quo and present an alternative vision of how society could be organized.

We will end the day with a panel that explores the idea of a new socialist project in the aftermath of twentieth century ‘existing socialism’. Speakers who aspire to build on the socialist legacy while avoiding the errors of the past will share and discuss their thoughts on how to move forward and build a peaceful, just and sustainable world.


 


 

Date: 
Saturday, November 2, 2013 - 09:00