Occupy Wall Street’s glory days of regular police spats and national front page news coverage are behind us (unless you watch The Newsroom — hello, Tompkins Square Park!), but at least some members of the movement have remained active agitators. Former Occupiers Khalil Robinson, who has primarily worked at teaching and aiding undocumented immigrants, and Elysa Lozano, an artist and political activist, have triumphed over a failed Kickstarter and months of delay in order to open The Base, which they’ve described on their website as “a sociopolitical space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, committed to the dissemination of radical-left ideas and organizing.” So far, their organizing has consisted of holding free Spanish classes and boxing lessons, but they are officially inaugurating their new space tonight with a panel called “Where Do Social Movements Go From Here?”
Laura Whitehorn, a civil rights and anti-war activist who spent fourteen years in prison in the ’80s and ’90s for her involvement with radical leftist group the May 19 Communist Organization (an offshoot of the Weathermen) will speak at the panel, along with Jeremy Varon, chair of historical studies at the New School and writer of several books on the ’60s, and Sabu Kohso, a Japanese-born New Yorker who writes about local activism in both Japan and the US. They’ll discuss what has worked and what has failed in radical movements past, and speculate on what should happen next.
Stop by 113 Stockholm Street at 7:30 p.m. tonight and see if the nation’s next leftist agitation is going to be sparked in Bushwick.