Prestigious Chilean journalist, writer and commentator Martha Harnecker talks about social change in Latin America and the recent challenges that social movements and progressive governments are facing today. Discussing corporate and independent media, social organisation, revolutionary strategies, the role of the workers and more.

Marta was a student of Louis Althusser in Paris and returned to Chile in 1968. After the bloody coup against the Allende government in Chile in 1973, she moved to Cuba where she became Director of the research centre “Memoria Popular Lationoamericana” (MEPLA) in Havana. Between 2004 and 2011, Marta lived in Venezuela, based at the Centro International Miranda research institute, and served as an advisor to President Chávez and to various Venezuelan institutions. She now lives in Vancouver.

She is the author of over 80 books and monographs, some of which have been translated into English. Her book A World to Build won the “Literatador Prize for Critical Thinking” in 2013 and was published by Monthly Review Press in 2015. Her latest book Planning from Below: A proposal of decentralized participatory planning, was published in 2015 in Cuba and Spain, and now is in the process of translation into English.

These talk was recorded at Victoria University in a meeting hosted by VU's Community Identity Displacement Research Network.