Day 1, Session 5—Solidarity Without Borders

A panel with Kazembe Balagun, Mark Bergfeld, Harmony Goldberg and Marcus Grätsch — moderated by Marika Dias

War, ecological crisis, automation, blurring of the rural and urban, the global North and the global South, along with development of precarity for all of global generalized proletariat lays material basis for internationalist solidarity.

Kazembe Balagun has been featured in Time Out New York, The Guardian, German Public Radio and The New York Times and contributed “We Be Reading Marx Where We From” to Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA. As a cultural activist he has sought to create intersections between Marxism, queer theory, feminism and Black liberation movements. He works as project manager at Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York Office.

Mark Bergfeld is a writer and organizer. He has written for media outlets such as Al-Jazeera English, The Nation, New Statesman among others. He has been active in social movements in Europe and served on the Executive Council of the National Union of students in the UK. He currently is writing his PhD on the relationship between trade unions and immigrant workers at Queen Mary University of London.

A founding member of SOUL: School of Unity & Liberation in Oakland, Harmony Goldberg has run left political education programs for grassroots organizations in the Bay Area and New York City for more than a decade. Recently completed her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and she continues to support grassroots organizations and the broader left as a popular educator, writer and facilitator.

Marcus Grätsch is a political scientist and activist. He currently works as Program Coordinator for Left Forum in New York. He is member of the large post-autonomous group “Interventionist Left” in Germany (introduction to this group: https://vimeo.com/167657035) ” in Berlin, he took part in the euromayday movement which fought against precarity and for the freedom of movement between 2004 and 2008 for more see here http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Precarity_Movement . In 2009 he co-founded the “Meuterei” bar and social space operated as worker cooperative/collective in Berlin-Kreuzberg. In 2012 he took part in initiating the transnational “Blockupy” coalition which is a major actor of the European resistance against austerity. For more of this coalition see here: https://blockupy.org/en/