The left has been the province of dreamers, of fantasies, and especially of the “impossible.” More than this, the left has been the province of tricksters and rogues, those who pull back the curtain on the fantasies of this world, who reveal the magic tricks that keep capital and the powerful in place. It’s been the leftists who’ve shown this political and economic system, this “reality,” to have been born from other fantasies and other dreams. And if this world was dreamt up in conspiracy, then can we not dream up and conspire a better one?

In this presentation, we’ll look at the role of imagination and the imaginal in radical politics, the way our imagination is shaped and restrained by “capitalist realism,” and the abundance of really-existing other worlds which we too often ignore in our dreamings. We’ll also look at the matter of “larger reality” and how our failure to include it in our visions for a better world can turn our dreams into nightmares.