Video of Platypus panels at the Left Forum can be found on Vimeo on the Platypus channel.
March 16-18 at Pace University
Session 1 W402 Finance Capital and Occupy: Marxist Perspectives Sat 10:00am
Session 3 W623 Impossible Occupations: Marxism and Psychoanalysis Sat 03:00pm
Session 3 W605 The Significance of Art in the Occupy Movement Sat 03:00pm
Session 3 W617 Arab Spring into Winter? Challenges to the Left one year on Sat 03:00pm
Session 5 E308 2011, 1999, 1968 -- and 2012? The history of the Left and #Occupy Sun 10:00am
Session 5 E329 Technology, Un/Employment, and the Left: From Future Shock to OWS Sun 10:00am
Session 5 E326 The Environmentalism of Occupy Sun 10:00am
Session 7 E320 Third Parties and the Left: Problems and Prospects Sun 03:00pm
Drop by the Platypus table!
Please join us for the first platypus public event of the year
Friday 16 of March 2012
7pm @ Housmans
(Peace House, 5 Caledonian Road, Kings Cross, London N1 9DX)
Speakers:
Barbara Dorn (IBT)
Michele Kidane Mariam, Occupier
Tammy Samede, Occupier
Ed N, Activist
Steve, Michael and Martin, editors of The Occupied Times
LISTEN TO AUDIO
The recent #Occupy protests are driven by discontent
with the present state of affairs: glaring economic
inequality, dead-end electoral politics, and, for some,
the suspicion that capitalism could never produce an
equitable society. These concerns are coupled with
aspirations for social transformation at an international level in the #occupy movement.
Although participants at #Occupy sites managed to organize resources for their own daily needs, legal services, health services, sleeping arrangements, food supplies, defense against police brutality, and a consistent media presence, these pragmatic concerns have taken precedent over long-term goals of the movement. Where can participants of this protest engage in formulating, debating, and questioning the ends of this movement? How can it affect the greater society beyond the occupied spaces?
We in the Platypus Affiliated Society ask participants and interested observers of the #Occupy movement to consider the possibility that political disagreement could lead to clarification, further development and direction. Only when we are able create an active culture of thinking and debating on the Left without it proving prematurely divisive can we begin to imagine a Leftist politics adequate to the historical possibilities of our moment. We may not know what these possibilities for transformation are. This is why we think it is imperative to create avenues of engagement that will support these efforts.
Towards this goal, Platypus will be hosting a series of roundtable discussions with organizers and participants of the #Occupy movement. These have started at campuses in New York, Halifax and Chicago but will be moving to other North American cities, and beyond London, to Germany, and Greece in the months to come. We welcome any and all who would like to be a part of this project of self-education and potential rebuilding of the Left to join us in advancing this critical moment.
-The Platypus Affiliated Society
UPDATE:
Since November of 2011, and with the help of working groups and organizers of OWS, Platypus has been hosting a series of roundtable discussions reflecting on the obstacles and possibilities, political content, and potential future of the #Occupy movement. These have taken place in New York, Chicago, Boston, Halifax (Canada), London (UK). We welcome any and all who would like to be a part of this project of self-education and potential rebuilding of the Left to join us in advancing this critical moment.
Click on banners to see event media.
/// Platypus on the Airwaves: Pam Nogales on Occupy Wall Street Radio /// 5.4.12 ///
/// The Day After: What is the #Occupy Movement? NYC III /// 5.2.12 ///
/// Defining Democracy: The Labor Movement and #Occupy /// 3.31.12 ///Â
/// Lenin and the Marxist Left after #Occupy /// 3.31.12 ///
/// Whence Anarchism? The Historical Conjuncture of #Occupy /// 3.31.12 ///
/// The Environmentalism of #Occupy /// 3.18.12 ///
/// 2011, 1999, 1968 — and 2012? The History of the Left and #Occupy /// 3.18.12 ///
/// The Significance of Art in the Occupy Movement /// 3.17.12 ///
/// Finance Capital and #Occupy /// 3.17.12 ///
/// What is the #Occupy Movement? London I /// 3.16.12 ///
/// What is the #Occupy Movement? Cambridge I /// 12.15/11 ///
/// What is the #Occupy Movement? NYC II /// 12.9.11 ///
/// What is the #Occupy Movement? Halifax I /// 11.16.11 ///
/// What is the #Occupy Movement? NYC I /// 10.28.11 ///
The Platypus Affiliated Society at U of Toronto presents a public forum on:
The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and "Resistance":Â The problematic forms of "anticapitalism" today.
Audio link is here: (click here)Â
Wednesday 14 Mar, 7 PM
OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) Room 5170, University of Toronto
A moderated panel discussion and audience Q&A on problems of strategies and tactics on the Left today.
Moderated by Ashley Weger (Platypus)
Panelists:
Clare O'Connor
Baolinh Dang (Proletarian Revolutionary Action Committee-Revolutionary Students Movement),
Cam Hardy (Platypus),
Megan Kinch (#Occupy Toronto participant, Toronto Media Co-op)Â and
Jim Stanford (Canadian Auto Workers).
"After the failure of the 1960s New Left, the underlying despair with regard to the real efficacy of political will, of political agency, in a historical situation of heightened helplessness, became a self-constitution as outsider, as other, rather than an instrument of transformation. Focused on the bureaucratic stasis of the Fordist, late 20th Century world, the Left echoed the destruction of that world by the dynamics of capital: neoliberalism and globalization.
The idea of a fundamental transformation became bracketed and, instead, was replaced by the more ambiguous notion of 'resistance.' The notion of resistance, however, says little about the nature of that which is being resisted, or of the politics of the resistance involved.
'Resistance' is rarely based on a reflexive analysis of possibilities for fundamental change that are both generated and suppressed by the dynamic heteronomous order of capital. 'Resistance' is an undialectical category that does not grasp its own conditions of possibility; it fails to grasp the dynamic historical context of capital and its reconstitution of possibilities for both domination and emancipation, of which the 'resisters' do not recognize that that they are a part."
— Moishe Postone, "History and Helplessness: Mass mobilization and contemporary forms of anticapitalism" (2006)
A public interview with Herb Gamberg and Tony Thomson on the 1970s New Communist Movement in Halifax, held on March 1st, 2012.
The 1970s are usually passed over as the decade in which the social and political upheavals of the 1960s New Left were overwhelmed by a conservative tide. What is forgotten is that the 1970s were also a time of tremendous growth on the Left, most notably in the New Communist Movement. In Quebec thousands of members joined groups intent on forming a new national Communist party. In cities like Halifax and Vancouver activists formed smaller collectives in an effort to "get serious" about their Leftism. The period marked a reconsideration of Marxism and working class politics on a scale that has not been seen since.
What is the legacy of this movement today? Why did it emerge and what lead to its stunning decline in the early 1980s? As activist prepare for the next phase of Occupy is there anything to learn from this experience?
On February 28, 2012, the radio program Radical Minds on WHPK-FM Chicago broadcast an interview with Mary Gabriel, the author of Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011). The interview was conducted by Spencer A. Leonard of the Platypus Affiliated Society.
Transcript in Platypus Review #47:
