On May 19th, 2018, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion on the 2nd amendment and the Left at Berkeley City College. The discussion was moderated by William Lushbough.

Panel Description:

"Recent school shootings and the ever-recurring instances of police brutality pose acutely the question of gun control today. Should the Left take up the demand for gun control, and if so, how? If not, why not? How is gun control related to the struggle for socialism?"

Speakers (in order of appearance):

• Urszula Wislanka (News & Letters Committees)
• K. Khan (International Marxist Tendency)
• Richard Becker (Party for Socialism & LIberation)

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On March 10, 2018, at Berkeley City College, the Berkeley chapter of the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel titled "What is socialism?: International social democracy." The panelists were Grover Furr, professor of English literature at Montclair State University; James R. Martel, professor of political science at San Francisco State University; Ron Kelch, of News & Letters; and Gerald Smith, of the Peace & Freedom Party and the Oscar Grant Committee. The discussion was moderated by Audrey Crescenti.

Description:

This panel invites you to reflect on the history of social democracy from a leftist viewpoint. Such a perspective raises the specter of the Second International, the political organization that led the workers’ movement for socialism around the turn of the 20th century.

In the U.S., this politics found its expression in Eugene Debs, a radical labor leader converted to Marxism in prison by reading the German Marxist, Karl Kautsky. In Germany, in Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s Communist Party of Germany, inheritor of the Spartacus League’s opposition to joining the German state’s war effort during the First World War. And in Russia, most famously, in the capture of state power by the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin. Thus the Second International gave rise to what is arguably the greatest attempt to change the world in history: the revolutions of 1917–19 in Russia, Germany, Hungary, and Italy. In these revolutions, Communists split from Social Democrats, the latter of whom formed the bulwark of counterrevolution.

During much of the 20th century, a Marxist-Leninist approach to history prevailed on much of the hard left, according to which the Second International revolutionaries had effectively superseded the politics of more right-wing figures within social democracy, such as Kautsky. The Third International has in this respect been widely accepted as an advance upon the Second. In the 1930s, the rise of fascism seemed to sideline the Communist vs. Social Democrat controversy. A generation later, after World War II, these same Social Democratic parties in the West engaged in wide-ranging reforms, while still opposing Communism in the East. For a few decades of supposed “convergence” between East and West, it seemed that the earlier evolutionary view of achieving socialism, contra Communist revolution, might be proven correct.

But the New Left in the West emerged in opposition to such reformism, in search of a more radical politics. In the neoliberal era, however, the division between reform and revolution has been blurred if not erased. And today social democracy is on the defensive against neoliberalism, even as its memory is resuscitated by such phenomena as SYRIZA, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, and Bernie Sanders. But, do we in fact still need to reckon with the earlier history of Marxism—the split between Communists and Social Democrats—in order to understand the problem and project of social democracy today? How are the questions of social democracy and social revolution related today, in light of history? What has social democracy come to signify politically?

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Gayle McLaughlin served two four-year terms as the mayor of Richmond, California, first elected in 2006 and then reelected in 2010. She was first elected to city council in 2004 as a member of the Green Party and was again elected to the council in 2014 after finishing her second term as mayor. She is a co-founder of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, which enjoys a majority on the Richmond City Council. In 2017, Gayle announced her candidacy for Lieutenant Governor of California. The election will be held on November 6, 2018. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview conducted with McLaughlin by William Lushbough of the Platypus Affiliated Society on December 2, 2017, at her home in Richmond.

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On October 17, 2017, the Platypus Affiliated Society Hosted a panel discussion at Berkeley City College on anti-fascism in the age of Trump. The discussion was moderated by Audrey Crescenti.

Description:

Since the Nazi seizure of power eighty years ago anti-fascism has been a component of left-wing politics. In response to the Trump presidency, the politics of anti-fascism, reminiscent of the Popular Front of the 30’s or the Black Bloc politics of the 90s, have -- once again -- been resurrected by the Left. How is anti-fascism the same or different today? Why anti-fascism now?

Participants: 

• Luma Nichol (Freedom Socialist Party, United Front Against Fascism)
• Ramsey Kanaan (PM Press)
• Victoria Fierce (East Bay for Everyone, DSA)
• Eugene E Ruyle (ICSS, DSA, CPUSA, Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library)

[. . .]