leftforum.org: Board and Staff

board of directors

STANLEY ARONOWITZ is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center, where he is Director of The Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work. He has taught at Staten Island Community College, University of California-Irvine, University of Paris, Columbia University, and University of Wisconsin. After working in metalworking factories in New York and New Jersey, Aronowitz became a union organizer for the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers' Union. He is Founding Editor of Social Text and Situations, was Book Review Editor of Social Policy, and serves on the Editorial Board of Ethnography; Cultural Critique. He has authored and edited 23 books, including False Promises (1973), Science as Power (1988), Roll Over Beethoven (1993), How Class Works (2003), Just Around the Corner: The Paradox of the Jobless Recovery (2005) and Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (2006). He edited and wrote the introduction for a 4-volume critical reception of C.Wright Mills (2004), and is currently writing a biography of Mills.

ERIC CANEPA was Director of the Socialist Scholars Conference and then of Left Forum from 2001 until 2006. He was Coordinator of “Manifestivity,” the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto held in New York City in 1998. He has published several articles on left politics within East Germany. As a musician, he has been artistic director of Spazio Musica Antica in Florence, Italy and has played numerous concerts on harpsichord in the U.S., Belgium, Germany, and Italy. His musicological work has focused on problems of rhythm in 12th - 14th-century music as well as the strategies through which medieval music theory legitimized new practices. He now resides in Florence, Italy.

VIVEK CHIBBER was born in Delhi, India. He is a professor of sociology at New York University, where he has been since receiving his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1999. He is author of Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (Princeton: 2003), as well as articles on imperialism, Marxist theory, long-term historical change, and the political economy of development. He is associate editor of the Socialist Register, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Agrarian Change, Politics and Society, and other journals.

BILL FLETCHER, JR. is the Belle Zeller Visiting Professor at Brooklyn College-City University of New York. He has been President and Chief Executive Officer of TransAfrica Forum, a national non-profit organization organizing, educating and advocating for policies in favor of the peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America; Vice President for International Trade Union Development Programs for the George Meany Center of the AFL-CIO; and Education Director and later Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO. He was a co-founder of the Black Radical Congress. He serves as the chairman of the Board of the International Labor Rights Fund and is a co-founder of the Center for Labor Renewal. A graduate of Harvard College, he has authored numerous articles published in a variety of newspapers and magazines, and is the co-author of the pictorial booklet; The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941.

NANCY HOLMSTROM is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Rutgers – Newark, and a longtime socialist and feminist activist and scholar. She has published numerous articles on core concepts of social/political philosophy including freedom, exploitation, rationality and women's nature/human nature. She has edited The Socialist Feminist Project: A Reader in Theory and Politics and coedited Not for Sale: In Defense of Public Goods.

MAHMOOD MAMDANI is from Kampala, Uganda. He is currently Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Departments of Anthropology, Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where he was also Director of the Institute of African Studies from 1999 to 2004. He has taught at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, Makerere University and University of Cape Town, and was the founding director of Centre for Basic Research in Kampala, Uganda. He is the author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Origins of Terror (2004), When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda (2001), Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (1996) and several other books.As President of CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa) from 1999 to 2002, he was invited to present one of nine papers at the Nobel Peace Prize Centennial Symposium in Oslo. In 2004, he presented one of nine papers at the African Union-organized Global Meeting of Intellectuals from Africa and the African Diaspora in Dakar.

JAMIE MCCALLUM studies Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and teaches in the Urban Studies department and the Center for Worker Education at Queens College. As an agitator for social justice, he's been a labor organizer in New York and California, and helped build worker-activist alliances before the WTO protest in Seattle in 1999. At parties, he is fond of telling people he's "working on a novel." This is his third year working with Left Forum.

FRANCES FOX PIVEN is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center. Her books include Regulating the Poor (1972, updated 1993, co-authored with Richard Cloward), a historical and theoretical analysis of the role of welfare policy in the economic and political control of the poor and working class; Poor Peoples' Movements (1977), which analyzes the political dynamics through which insurgent social movements sometimes compel significant policy reforms; Why Americans Don't Vote (1988; updated as Why Americans Still Don't Vote in 2000) analyzes of the role of electoral laws and practices in disenfranchising large numbers of working class and poor citizens; and The War at Home (2004), which examines the domestic causes and consequences of the foreign wars launched by the Bush administration. Most recently, in Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, Piven examines the interplay of disruptive social movements and electoral politics in generating the political force for egalitarian reform in American history.

JULIE RUBEN is a longtime activist and organizer in anti-racist, community housing and other social justice struggles. She taught first grade in the San Francisco public schools, cooking at The University of California, Berkeley, and participated in constructing the San Francisco Socialist School. For many years she produced international film festivals, and has worked in production, distribution and publicity for independent film, with a specialty in Latin American cinema. She has lived in Cuba, worked with the Center for Cuban Studies over many years, and has been a Cuba educator for The American Museum of Natural History. She directs the work of Left Forum.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH is an attorney litigating injury cases against insurance companies in New York City. He has authored Notebook of a Sixties Lawyer; Lawyers You'll Like, and has edited The Emerging Police State by William Kunstler and, with Michael Ratner, has co-edited Che Guevara and the FBI: The Secret Police Dossier on the Latin American Revolutionary. He contributes articles to Socialism and Democracy, Capitalism, Nature, and Socialism, and Against the Current. He is on the boards of The Center for Constitutional Rights, The New York Marxist School, The International Endowment for Democracy, and is the co-host of the radio show Law and Disorder on WBAI.

HOBART SPALDING is retired as Professor of History from the City University of New York (CUNY). He focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean, specializing in working class and labor history, and has published widely in both fields. He sits on the editorial board of several publications, most notably Socialism and Democracy.

WILLIAM TABB taught economics at Queens College and economics, political science and sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include Economic Governance in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 2004) and The Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century (Monthly Review Press, 2001).

RICHARD D. WOLFF is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Wolff has taught economics at Yale and the City University of New York as well as at the University of Massachusetts. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne) and offers courses at the Brecht Forum in New York City. His publications, current research, and teaching concentrate on developing and applying Marxian economic theory. His most recent books, co-authored with Stephen Resnick, are New Departures in Marxian Theory (Routledge Publishers: London and New York, 2006) and Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR (Routledge Publishers: London and New York, 2002). He also serves on the editorial board of Rethinking Marxism.

JULIA WRIGLEY is Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is also the acting Associate Provost. She is the author of Class Politics and Public Schools and Other People's Children, as well as articles on domestic workers, class inequalities, and the political economy of education. She recently published (with Joanna Dreby) a study of fatalities and safety in childcare in American Sociological Review. She is currently working on a study of relationships between children, mothers, and children's caregivers and issues related to class dynamics in caregiving relationships.

staff

ASHANTI OMOWALI ALSTON is an anarchist activist, speaker, organizer, and writer. A former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, he spent more than a decade incarcerated as a political prisoner. He was formerly a coordinator for Critical Resistance and on the Board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Currently he is co-chair of the National Jericho Movement and works with Estación Libre and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement-New York City.

JAMIE MCCALLUM, Left Forum Coordinator, (see above)

JULIE RUBEN, Left Forum Director (see above)

SPENCER SUNSHINE, Left Forum Registration Director and Office Manager, is currently working on his PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on the intellectual history of the anti-authoritarian left, with an emphasis on early-to-mid 20th century European thought. His dissertation is on the notion of the "critique of everyday life", focusing on its origins in phenomenology, creation in western marxism, and subsequent migration to anarchism. He is associate editor of the anthology I Am Not A Man, I Am Dynamite! Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition (Autonomedia, 2004).

JAMES TRIMARCO, Left Forum Art Director, is passionate about providing clean and contemporary graphics to organizations and projects on the Left. In addition to his work with Left Forum, he has worked as a designer for community organizations such as Transportation Alternatives and ABC No Rio.