Join Haymarket Books and Internationalism from Below for a discussion of the multiplying crises and the emergence of a new protest movement in Sri Lanka.
***Please note: This discussion was recorded on May 16, 2022 and while the situation on the ground in Sri Lanka has changed, the background provided here remains indispensable.***
Internationalism from Below (IfB) is a grassroots, all-volunteer network of socialist internationalists whose primary orientation is to support and popularize mass struggles from below of working and oppressed peoples throughout the world. IfB opposes all kinds of state and imperial violence, and aims to provide a positive alternative to the elements of the anti-war left that whitewashes the violence of repressive regimes.
Since the beginning of the year, Sri Lanka has been facing its largest economic crisis since the country’s independence from Britain in 1948. Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s regime has defaulted on the foreign loans Sri Lanka has amassed over the years, especially sovereign bonds, and struggled to deal with the economic collapse triggered by multiple factors, including the collapse of tourism revenues with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sri Lanka’s currency, the rupee, is being rapidly devalued, while average citizens cannot afford basic necessities. Since March, protests have spread across the country, and the President’s cabinet except for the Prime Minister resigned. The Rajapaksa administration—which has spent the past several years attempting to consolidate power through authoritarian measures—has ignored the growing consequences of the economic crisis caused by the build up of foreign loan obligations.
How do we make sense of the different political visions and actors in the region in light of the growing contradictions of the neoliberal economy and the limitations of authoritarian regimes to manage the effects of crisis? How are the Sri Lankan mass protests providing a new political vision against the forces of debt-run globalization as they continue to decimate regions of the global South? How do we reckon with the movement’s limits—its complex relationship with Tamil self-determination, and the historical legacy of the electoral left’s betrayal of independent mass politics, among other factors?
This panel aims to provide an introduction to the situation in Sri Lanka today from left-wing perspectives, while contextualizing it in the region’s larger political and economic history and issues. The speakers will touch on topics like Sri Lanka’s political economy, local dynamics of racism and authoritarianism in blocking class politics, and grassroots feminist movements’ program and demands.
Speakers:
Devaka Gunawardena is an independent researcher who holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a general focus on political economy.
Rohini Hensman is a writer, researcher, and activist who comes from Sri Lanka and is resident in India and has written extensively on workers’ rights, feminism, minority rights, globalisation, and a Marxist approach to struggles for democracy. Her most recent books are Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India and Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism. She has also written two novels: To Do Something Beautiful, inspired by her work with working-class women and trade unions in Bombay, and Playing Lions and Tigers, set in Sri Lanka.
Niyanthini Kadirgamar is a Ph.D. student in Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is part of the Feminist Collective for Economic Justice.
Moderator:
Promise Li is an activist and writer from Hong Kong and Los Angeles. He organizes international solidarity work with Internationalism from Below and Lausan Collective.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/o4SE9pBf4JY
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
More Episodes
Mar 4, 2021
People Get Ready! Session 2: If The Kids Are United (12-12-20)
People Get Ready—Session 2: If the Kids Are United: Building Power against the Far Right.
A presentation from Tarso Ramos about the evolution of efforts to fight authoritarianism and white supremacy and what it will ultimately take to win the upper hand against these forces.
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In the face of violent authoritarianism, deepening economic crisis, and a deadly pandemic, Left and progressive movements have doubled down in defense of our people. Over the past two years, the global left has built powerful coalitions, engaged in electoral experiments, and steadily reshaped the political terrain. What kind of power has been built through these efforts, however, and how do we pivot from defense to offense in the years ahead?
Join Center for Political Education and Haymarket Books for a half-day symposium on Saturday, December 12th from 1 PM to 7 PM EST for a conversation on beating the right, strengthening the Left, and charting a path to power.-
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Únete con Center for Political Education y Haymarket Books para una conversación sobre cómo derrotar a la derecha, fortalecer a la Izquierda, y construir poder.
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Frente al autoritarismo violento, una crisis económica cada vez más grave, y una pandemia mortífera, los movimientos progresistas y de izquierda han redoblado su compromiso en defensa de nuestra gente. A lo largo de los últimos dos años, la izquierda global ha construido coaliciones poderosas, experimentado con proyectos electorales, y constantemente reconfigurado el terreno político. ¿Qué clase de poder se ha construido a través de estos esfuerzos, sin embargo, y cómo pasamos de la defensa a la ofensiva en los próximos años?
Únete con Center for Political Education y Haymarket Books para un simposio de medio día el Sábado, 12 de Diciembre, de 1 a 7 PM (Hora del Este de los Estados Unidos) para una conversación sobre cómo derrotar a la derecha, fortalecer a la Izquierda, y trazar un camino al poder.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Fu6URuokj5w
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
People Get Ready! Session 3: Build It On Up (12-12-20)
People Get Ready—Session 3: Build It On Up: Tools for the Fight: Activists and organizers share the tools and skills we will need to move from defense to offense in the fights ahead.----------------------------------------------------
*Anuncio en español abajo*
In the face of violent authoritarianism, deepening economic crisis, and a deadly pandemic, Left and progressive movements have doubled down in defense of our people. Over the past two years, the global left has built powerful coalitions, engaged in electoral experiments, and steadily reshaped the political terrain. What kind of power has been built through these efforts, however, and how do we pivot from defense to offense in the years ahead?
Join Center for Political Education and Haymarket Books for a half-day symposium on Saturday, December 12th from 1 PM to 7 PM EST for a conversation on beating the right, strengthening the Left, and charting a path to power.-
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Únete con Center for Political Education y Haymarket Books para una conversación sobre cómo derrotar a la derecha, fortalecer a la Izquierda, y construir poder.
----------------------------------------------------
Frente al autoritarismo violento, una crisis económica cada vez más grave, y una pandemia mortífera, los movimientos progresistas y de izquierda han redoblado su compromiso en defensa de nuestra gente. A lo largo de los últimos dos años, la izquierda global ha construido coaliciones poderosas, experimentado con proyectos electorales, y constantemente reconfigurado el terreno político. ¿Qué clase de poder se ha construido a través de estos esfuerzos, sin embargo, y cómo pasamos de la defensa a la ofensiva en los próximos años?
Únete con Center for Political Education y Haymarket Books para un simposio de medio día el Sábado, 12 de Diciembre, de 1 a 7 PM (Hora del Este de los Estados Unidos) para una conversación sobre cómo derrotar a la derecha, fortalecer a la Izquierda, y trazar un camino al poder.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Ah_lRJOkN2E
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
People Get Ready Session 1: What's Left Building Power After The Elections (12-12-20)
People Get Ready—Session One: What's Left?: Building Power After The Election with Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson & more.
A conversation with organizers from across the country about what has been gained and learned from the last election and how we build power moving forward.
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*Anuncio en español abajo*
In the face of violent authoritarianism, deepening economic crisis, and a deadly pandemic, Left and progressive movements have doubled down in defense of our people. Over the past two years, the global left has built powerful coalitions, engaged in electoral experiments, and steadily reshaped the political terrain. What kind of power has been built through these efforts, however, and how do we pivot from defense to offense in the years ahead?
Join Center for Political Education and Haymarket Books for a half-day symposium on Saturday, December 12th from 1 PM to 7 PM EST for a conversation on beating the right, strengthening the Left, and charting a path to power.-
---------------------------------------------------
Únete con Center for Political Education y Haymarket Books para una conversación sobre cómo derrotar a la derecha, fortalecer a la Izquierda, y construir poder.
----------------------------------------------------
Frente al autoritarismo violento, una crisis económica cada vez más grave, y una pandemia mortífera, los movimientos progresistas y de izquierda han redoblado su compromiso en defensa de nuestra gente. A lo largo de los últimos dos años, la izquierda global ha construido coaliciones poderosas, experimentado con proyectos electorales, y constantemente reconfigurado el terreno político. ¿Qué clase de poder se ha construido a través de estos esfuerzos, sin embargo, y cómo pasamos de la defensa a la ofensiva en los próximos años?
Únete con Center for Political Education y Haymarket Books para un simposio de medio día el Sábado, 12 de Diciembre, de 1 a 7 PM (Hora del Este de los Estados Unidos) para una conversación sobre cómo derrotar a la derecha, fortalecer a la Izquierda, y trazar un camino al poder.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/DuWHd2D2j2A
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
Public Money and Racial Justice (12-15-20)
A conversation about public money, its connections to racial justice and how we can organize to demand it serves our interests.
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Money impacts everything. We live and feel the reality of money and for many of us, money problems are the source of great physical and emotional strain. This webinar focuses on a crucial aspect of the money we’ve got to work with: Public finance––the role of government(s) in the economy. Specifically, we look at public money, what it is and more importantly, why we deserve to have it. We consider public money as part of racial justice work in regards to the federal government’s real fiscal capacity unmatched by its terrible response to the COVID-19 pandemic, budgets as political and moral documents, divest-invest campaigns calling to #DefundThePolice and #DefundICE, and police brutality bonds. We also look at social justice organizing involving public money demands.
#PublicMoneyRacialJustice
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Participants:
Raúl Carrillo is the Deputy Director of the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project and an Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School. Prior to joining the LPE Project, Raúl practiced law for five years, focusing on consumer finance and financial technology. He is the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Modern Money Network, an Executive Committee member of the National Jobs For All Network, and an Advisory Council member of Our Money.
Rev. Delman Coates is the Senior Pastor of Mt. Ennon Baptist Church in Clinton, Maryland and founder of Our Money Campaign, an economic justice campaign that seeks to solve some of our nation’s greatest social and economic challenges. He also founded the Black Church Center for Justice and Equality to address the social and spiritual challenges of the African American faith community. He is a board member of the Parents Television Council and the National Action Network and also a member of the Society of Biblical Literature, the Morehouse College Board of Preachers, and the NAACP.
Alyx Goodwin is a senior organizer at Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE), organizing with BYP100 Chicago, and a co-founder and writer with LEFT OUT Magazine. Her writing and activism are centered around the momentum and challenges of building Black power and self-determination. Her work at ACRE currently focuses on the relationships between the finance industry, policing, and tech, and how these things exacerbate oppressions.
Tamara K. Nopper is a sociologist, writer, editor, and data artist. A Fellow at Data for Progress and an Affiliate of The Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies, she recently researched and wrote several data stories for Colin Kaepernick’s Abolition for the People series and is the editor of We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, a book of Mariame Kaba’s writing and interviews, which will be published by Haymarket Books in February 2021.
Shawn Sebastian is the Senior Strategist for Rural People and Planet First Campaigns at People's Action. In 2019 Shawn served as the Iowa Organizing Director of the Working Families Party and Movement Politics Organizer for Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund. Shawn was the director of the Fed Up Campaign at the Center for Popular Democracy, organizing working class people of color to demand full employment monetary policy at the Federal Reserve.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/b73IIo76K8Q
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
Police Violence From the Black Panthers to Attica w/ Heather Ann Thompson & more (12-16-20)
Join Heather Ann Thompson, Flint Taylor and Darrell Cannon as they discuss 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-years of litigation that followed—through the dogged pursuit of commander Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. The three panelists will further delve into the events leading up to and the legacy surrounding the 1971 Attica prison uprising when 1,300 prisoners took over the facility.
These event will be framed in the context of the paperback release of Taylor’s book Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago and Thompson’s Pulitzer-prize winning book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.
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Speakers:
Heather Ann Thompson is a Collegiate Professor of History in the departments of Afro- American and African Studies, History, and in the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971. Blood in the Water won five other major book prizes and was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Silver Gavel Award, and the Cundill Prize in History. The book has also been optioned by Sony Pictures and Thompson is also the lead advisor on Stanley Nelson’s forthcoming Showtime documentary on Attica. Thompson is also a public intellectual who writes extensively on the history of protests, policing, prisons, and the current criminal justice system more broadly. On the policy front, Thompson served on the historic National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the U.S. She currently serves on the standing Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies. She is currently writing her next book on the MOVE Bombing of 1985. @hthompsn
Flint Taylor is a founding partner of the People’s Law Office in Chicago. He is one of the lawyers for the families of slain Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, has represented many survivors of Chicago police torture over the past 30 years and is counsel in several illegal search and wrongful death cases brought against the Milwaukee Police Department.
Darrell Cannon is a Chicago police torture survivor who was subjected to electric shock and a mock execution at a remote torture site on the far southeast side of Chicago by two of notorious Chicago police commanderJon Burge’s main henchmen. As a result he gave a false confession, was wrongfully convicted, and spent 24 years in prison, 9 in a supermax prison, before he was exonerated in 2007. After his release, he became a powerful leader in the successful movement to obtain reparations for 60 Chicago police torture survivors.
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Order a copy of Flint Taylor's book , The Torture Machine: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1642-the-torture-machine
Order a copy of Heather Ann Thompson's book, Blood In The Water: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781400078240
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/neXDQiYTpns
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
Defending Activism Within and Beyond the University w/ Ruth Wilson Gilmore & more (12-22-20)
In light of the unwarranted firing of Garrett Felber from the University of Mississippi despite his scholarship and contributions to dismantling the carceral state, a panel of activist academics discuss the implications of the situation and the relationship between the university and social movements.
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Speakers:
Garrett Felber was recently fired by the University of Mississippi despite his incredible work in the study of the racist American carceral state and his activism with the Study and Struggle project that organizes against incarceration and criminalization in Mississippi.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies, and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, she has two books forthcoming in 2021: Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition and Abolition Geography.
Elizabeth Hinton is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University and Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States.
Robin D.G. Kelley is the Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA and author of numerous books on the history of social movements in the U.S., the African Diaspora, and Africa; Black intellectuals; music and visual culture.
Kiese Laymon is the Hubert H. McAlexander Chair of English at the University of Mississippi and the author of the bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, which won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Her most recent book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership , was a finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History.
The event will also feature solidarity statements from supporters including Dylan Rodríguez, President of American Studies Association, Sherie Randolph, and more.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/olbnwpV4B38
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
