Held on March 16th, 2012, at Housmans in London.

Speakers:
Barbara Dorn (IBT)
Tammy Samede, Occupier
Ed Nagle, Activist
Steve Maclean, and Michael Richardson, editors of The Occupied Times

A roundtable discussion with students and activists either directly involved with Occupy Wall St. or who are closely following the #Occupy movement.

The recent #Occupy protests are driven by discontent with the present state of affairs: glaring economic inequality, dead-end Democratic Party 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. For many, the protests at Wall St. and elsewhere provide an avenue to raise questions the Left has long fallen silent on:

What would it mean to challenge capitalism on a global scale?
How could we begin to overcome social conditions that adversely affect every part of life?
And, how could a new international radical movement address these concerns in practice?

Although participants at Occupy Wall St. have managed thus far 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 will start at campuses in New York and Chicago but will be moving to other North American cities, and to London, 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
October 2011

A moderated panel discussion and audience Q&A on problems of strategies and tactics on the Left today.
Panelists:

Clare O'Connor,
Baolinh Dang (Proletarian Revolutionary Action Committee- Revolutionary Students Movement),
Cam Hardy (Platypus),
Megan Kinch (#Occupy, Toronto Media Co-Op), 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)

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

UPDATE:

The Platypus Affiliated Society at U of Toronto presents a public forum on:
The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and "Resistance": The problematic forms of "anticapitalism" today.

Audio link is here: (click here) 

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) 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)