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A workshop with Ursula Jensen of the the International Bolshevik Tendency, held on November 7, 2015 at the 2nd Annual European Conference of the Platypus Affiliated Society in Frankfurt. Every year at Platypus conferences, speakers from various perspectives are asked to bring their experience of the Left’s recent history to bear on today’s political possibilities and challenges as part of the “Differing Perspectives on the Left” workshop series.

A workshop with Martin Suchanek of Gruppe Arbeitermacht (GAM) and Liga für die Fünfte Internationale (LFI) held November 7, 2015 at the 2nd Annual European Conference of the Platypus Affiliated Society in Frankfurt. Every year at Platypus conferences, speakers from various perspectives are asked to bring their experience of the Left’s recent history to bear on today’s political possibilities and challenges as part of the “Differing Perspectives on the Left” workshop series.

A workshop with Manuel Kellner of Ernest Mandel und die internationalen sozialistischen linken (ISL), held on November 7, 2015 at the 2nd Annual European Conference of the Platypus Affiliated Society in Frankfurt. Every year at Platypus conferences, speakers from various perspectives are asked to bring their experience of the Left’s recent history to bear on today’s political possibilities and challenges as part of the “Differing Perspectives on the Left” workshop series.

A workshop with Paul Demarty of the CPGB held on November 7, 2015 at the 2nd Annual European Conference of the Platypus Affiliated Society in Frankfurt. Every year at Platypus conferences, speakers from various perspectives are asked to bring their experience of the Left’s recent history to bear on today’s political possibilities and challenges as part of the “Differing Perspectives on the Left” workshop series.

Ursula Jensen (IBT)
Paul Demarty (CPGB)
Moderator: Richard Rubin

In the late nineteenth century, working people’s response to capital was expressed in the political demand for Socialism. This demand galvanized the formation of European Social Democratic parties guided by the ideology of Marxism. Among the most influential members of the German Social Democratic Party, the political leaders of the Second International, agreed that the primary task of Social Democratic parties was bringing about the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, the decisive political struggle between capital and labor. And while some of these leftist ultimately found the revolution too risky in the decisive decades of the 1910s and 1920s, even their political judgment is far to the left to those Social Democratic party members who, after World War II, openly espoused the integration of workers into a more just and thus more democratic capitalist order.

Once a global movement for the self-emancipation of the working class, today’s social democratic parties have fully substituted the task of educating workers in order to overthrow capitalism, with the task of creating and maintaining the conditions for a more just market economy. The present standpoint of social democracy is society as such, bound by national economies and mediated by the state. Social Democracy today promises to fight social injustice in the name of the people, but it no longer promises to realize socialism.

Yet what remains is the name, and with it the promise and the problem of Social Democracy.
In this panel we would like to investigate this transformation by looking at the history, the birth and decline, of Social Democracy. How can we understand the historical crisis of social democracy for the Left today? How, if at all, could the trajectory of social democracy shed light on problems yet to be superseded on the Left today?