Last year 2300 activists, scholars, socialists, labor and community organizers and radical democrats from more than twenty countries met for a weekend of dialogue and debate. At more than 100 panels speakers and participants exchanged ideas, honed tactics, and discovered new ways to look at old problems. As the anti-WTO meetings in Seattle showed, conscious political intervention is possible, and we believe can be successful. Coalition building is a long and painstaking process in which, by definition, diverse interests, ideologies, and identities clash and coalesce. When it is successful mistrust and power politics give way to solidarity and cooperation.
Questions remain, however.
We encourage panels to address issues covered by the theme. We are also eager to have panels on any and all subjects of interest to those who want a better world, one without exploitation and oppression. We encourage wide-ranging discussion and debate. Diversity of opinion and experience, as well as in race, class, and gender, and sexual orientation give your panel and the Conference strength. Panels are an hour and fifty minutes long and typically have three to five speakers, sometimes including a moderator.