Forum. The 3Rs: Reform, Revolution and "Resistance"

The Platypus Affiliated Society at Dalhousie presents a public forum on:

The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and "Resistance": The problematic forms of "anticapitalism" today.

Click link to download recording

Thursday, 19 Jan, 7 PM
Room 224, Student Union Building, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS

A moderated panel discussion and audience Q&A on problems of strategies and tactics on the Left today. Panelists: Eric Anatolik (Occupy NS), Jacques Beaudoin (Parti communiste révolutionnaire - Revolutionary Communist Party (Canada)) Howard Epstein (New Democratic Party MLA Halifax Chebucto), Max Haiven (Edu-Factory, Historical and Critical Studies NSCAD) and Andony Melathopoulos (Platypus) .

Part of the Occupy NS New Year's Revolution Series (occupyns.org). Co-sponsored by NSPIRG, International Development Education and Awareness Society (IDEAS) and the Halifax Radical Imagination Project.

"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)