Verso Books Invitation to discussion on
Book Launch Celebration - They Can't Represent Us! Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy

Saturday, May 31, 03:20pm - 04:50pm in Room 1.105

John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York

Abstract: How the new global movements are putting forward a radical conception of democracy. Mass movements in disparate places such as Greece, Argentina, and the United States ultimately share an agenda—to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontal movements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatory democracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today. Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Greece, Spain, Venezuela, Argentina, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is an expansive portrait of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, and organizational forms championed by the new movements, as well as an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy from ancient Athens to Zuccotti Park. The new movements put forward the idea that liberal democracy is not democratic, nor was it ever.

Dario Azzellini -- Johannes Kepler University, Austria, Marina Sitrin, Camilo Turi

Left Forum is the largest annual conference of the broad Left in the United States. Each spring thousands of conference participants come together to discuss pressing local, national and global issues; to better understand commonalities and differences, and alternatives to current predicaments; or to share ideas to help build social movements to transform the world.

                                        This year's theme of Left Forum is

"Reform and/or Revolution: Imagine a World of Transformative Justice.”

Speakers include Harry Belafonte, Angela Davis, Cornel West, and over 1,000 more.

                                  Please register online at www.leftforum.org