Journal of Cultural Studies Series
“Make History:” The Culture Production Campaign of the Labor/Community Strategy Center
I. Los Angeles: one site of struggle
In the present period, a place’s identity and the lived experience of its inhabitants are determined largely by their role in a global system of exchange that is seemingly beyond comprehension. People everywhere are disoriented; they explain their relationship to this transnational economic integration as one of powerlessness–exploitation, oppression, alienation. Yet the often-untenable conditions of daily life under late capitalism and the widespread incapacity of states to stabilize markets and governments leads to ever so many local hot spots of contestation the world over, hot spots that are similar by virtue of their struggles of resistance while distinguished by their specificity. The metropolitan region that constitutes the megacity of Los Angeles is one such hot spot in a transnational process of integration, disintegration, reintegration.
Los Angeles County—the largest in the country at 9.5 million people, among the most racially and ethnically diverse yet segregated—is home to the twelve year-old Labor/Community Strategy Center, and incubator for insurgent counter-hegemonic mass campaigns. As a multiracial social justice “think-tank/act-tank” with an anti-imperialist, antiracist political strategy, the Center seeks to generate a creative and aggressive response to the growing power of the corporate-led political Right in the United States, a response that is led by social movements of the oppressed nationality working class.