On May 4th, 2012, Platypus member Pam Nogales made an appearance on WBAI (99.5 FM) Occupy Wall Street Radio.
Platypus@NYU presents a roundtable discussion following the May 1st General Strike. Held on May 2nd, 2012, at New York University.
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.
A public forum with students, activists and organizers from across the globe held on April 2nd, 2012.
Transcript in Platypus Review #48 (Click below):
From teach-ins in the UK, occupations in Austria and Germany and protests in the Netherlands and Greece, responses to the economic downturn are international in character. These new developments require coordination across global networks and it is why Platypus at U. Chicago is organizing a series of international panels that we hope can take place in Universities across the world where Platypus student members havebeen able to forge connections.
We hope that this panel will be an opportunity to report on activity and form new connections across international efforts. Panelists will report on the state of the Left in their respected regions and reflect on their experience as organizers while helping formulate what the next steps in organizing and planning could look like in the months ahead.
Panelists:
Haseeb Ahmed(Maastricht)
Valentin Badura(Austria)
Cengiz Kulac (Austria)
Moritz Roeger (Germany)
Jerzy Sobotta (Germany)
Thodoris Velissaris(Greece)
Moderated by Pam C. Nogales C. (Platypus)
On March 17, 2012, Ross Wolfe and Pam Nogales of the Platypus Affiliated Society interviewed Domenico Losurdo, the author, most recently, of Liberalism: A Counter-History (2011).
Transcript in Platypus Review #46 (Click below):
A moderated panel discussion and audience Q&A on problems of strategies and tactics on the Left today held on Thursday, 19 January 2012 at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Panelists:
Eric Anatolik (Occupy NS)
Jacques Beaudoin (Parti communiste revolutionnaire - Revolutionary Communist Party, Canada)
Howard Epstein (New Democratic Party MLA Halifax Chebucto)
Max Haiven (Edu-Factory, Historical and Critical Studies NSCAD)
Andony Melathopoulos (Platypus)
The panel was moderated by Pam Nogales.
"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)
