The left in the United States faces a series of urgent questions: How do we stop a genocide in Palestine funded by our own tax dollars? How do we engage with or confront electoral politics? How can we get beyond the insularity of our own context to learn from each other?

Truthout caught up with Harsha Walia at this year’s Socialism Conference, a yearly convergence of over 2,000 people on the left hosted by Haymarket Books in Chicago, to discuss some of these questions. Walia is an organizer, anti-violence worker, and the award-winning author of Border and Rule and Undoing Border Imperialism. She lives in British Columbia, Canada, where she is involved in migrant justice as well as feminist, anti-capitalist, abolitionist and anti-imperialist movements.

In this exclusive interview, Walia discusses building supportive containers for new organizers in this moment of heightened mobilization for Palestine, celebrity culture and the U.S. presidential election, and what we can all learn from international struggles.

You, Kelly Hayes and Robyn Maynard designed a session for the Socialism Conference called “World Building Workshop: Abolition, Solidarity, and Decolonization.” At it, you invited participants to discuss the infrastructure our movements need, any recent wins or stumbles, how we can connect across struggles and how we can manage principled disagreements. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to do that session?

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Read the interview, “Harsha Walia: Democratic Party Laid Groundwork for Anti-Migrant Border Policy,” at Truthout here: https://truthout.org/articles/harsha-walia-democratic-party-laid-groundwork-for-anti-migrant-border-policy/