By Kate Crane

Max Uhlenbeck is an organizer with the Life After Capitalism conference that will take place this weekend at the CUNY Graduate Center. For details, go to lifeaftercapitalism.org.

Are the mass mobilizations of recent years—the World Economic Forum protests in 2002, the February and March antiwar demonstrations of 2003 (both organized by United for Peace & Justice), and now the RNC—replacing long-term strategy and movement building?

It's something I deal with a lot as someone who's worked with United for Peace and Justice, but is generally connected to other activists who don't necessarily see the mass-mobilization model as a positive one. I've come to the conclusion that the model is neither positive nor negative. It's important that there is this huge coalition able to put on mass demos, in the sense that all the other activists don't have to do all that work. Without UFPJ, we would have a citywide coalition trying to come together to set up large marches, and it would be a nightmare. Because of UFPJ, we'll have a march all taken care of.

Their event anchors the whole week of protest, and the people who don't like that model have the freedom to organize however they want. Though UFPJ has only been around two years, people take them for granted. The critique that "marching doesn't get us anywhere," or that it's just for liberals, is a convenient one, yet it's not rooted in any comprehensive sense of how social change has happened over the years. Large marches are an important part of social movements, it's just that they're only one of many methods of effecting change. I have a deep appreciation and respect for the people who take on that work.

Tell me about this weekend's Life After Capitalism conference.

Last August a few of us got together and started to talk about the momentous occasion of the RNC, how so many people in the city would be energized and excited and mobilized for that. We discussed what would be missing from the RNC protests and identified that by the time summer came, liberals to progressives and radicals would be toeing the "anybody but Bush" line. We wanted to create a space to challenge that, to put forward that it's wrong to focus on our idiotic single president—the problem is deeper than that.

The LAC conference is an attempt to bring together activists from predominantly the U.S. but all parts of the world, to focus on creating a space for a more institutional critique of the capitalist system. We wanted to project the new political tendency that rose out of Seattle and have a weekend of strategy and debate, of face-to-face work, of building movements and alliances. What are our visions? We are trying to emphasize that activists do have visions, and a lot of them are pretty incredible. We want to highlight that as well as bridge the theory and on-the-ground work that activists do every day.

The idea of mobilizing and getting people in streets is always there, but there's not enough dialogue about ultimate goals, which leads to a lot of people getting involved but not staying involved. We're hoping to offer an institutional critique to new activsts to show them it's not about coming to one protest or protesting one administration, but if you have a more systemic critique, that provides you with a framework for you to continue your political work. Bush represents something dangerous, but for many activists not privileged enough to jump from issue to issue, the Democrats are just as dangerous.

What will take place at the conference?

It's broken into four sections. The first is called Contours of Capitalism, which will be a series of sessions of debate and analysis around the idea of capitalism. In the second session, called Perspectives on Power, we'll ask activists from all over, how do you locate power, and how does that inform your organizing? Critical Resistance will discuss how they see prison abolition work as an important way to challenge power and how it fits into a larger framework. Sista II Sista is located in Brooklyn and deals with issues of violence against women of color. What do they consider the steps to meaningful change?

It's going to be different from most conferences, which have either theorists who've been writing books forever or activists who've become well known but aren't necessarily rooted in communities and dealing with day-to-day struggles. We're trying to bridge gaps between community-based organizations and more loosely based struggle-to-struggle activists, recognize the most affected activists and find ways to bring their visions to the forefront.

In the third session, Envisioning Another World, people will articulate more formally what different visions would look like. We're flying in a few activists from Argentina to discuss unemployed worker movements, barter systems and what folks there are talking about. We're trying to break the myth that capitalism is natural; like any other system, it's constructed and can be dismantled and changed.

The fourth session, Organizing Strategies, will address a range of issues that organizers face, from building alliances between people-of-color organizations and more priveleged groups, to making decisions democratically.

Friday night is the conference's opening-night event at Hunter College. The weekend's participants include Naomi Klein, Vijay Prashad, Robin D.G. Kelley, Michael Albert, Lynne Stewart and many others.