Freitag, 27. Mai 2016, 19:00 Uhr
Neues Institutsgebäude, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien, Hörsaal 3
Mit:
Hanna Lichtenberger (Mosaik-Blog)
Sebastian Kugler (Sozialistische LinksPartei)
Ursula Jensen (Internationale Bolschewistische Tendenz)
Kurzfristig abgesagt: Dieter Alexander Behr (Afrique Europe Interact, Forum Civique Européen und viele andere Netzwerke und Initiativen)
"Heute scheint die Idee der politischen Partei als Mittel für die Linke – durch die sich in der Gesellschaft die Notwendigkeit von sozialen Umwälzungen entwickeln ließe – im Gegensatz zur politischen Partei als Selbstzweck theoretisch wie praktisch kaum greifbar. Doch die bestehende Alternative – Politik ohne Partei – scheint zu nichts in der Lage zu sein, als die Launen den Kapitalismus zu billigen, durch welche er sich verändert, doch unweigerlich bestehen bleibt. Schlimmer noch, ohne eigene Parteien ist die Linke dazu gezwungen, passiv oder aktiv andere Parteien zu unterstützen oder zumindest Hoffnungen in diese zu setzen. Es scheint unmöglich, die Frage der politischen Partei zu vermeiden."
"Marx issued the call to all the workers of the globe, regardless of race, sex, creed or any other condition whatsoever. As a social party we receive the Negro and all other races upon absolutely equal terms. We are the party of the working class, the whole working class, and we will not suffer ourselves to be divided by any specious appeal to race prejudice; and if we should be coaxed or driven from the straight road we will be lost in the wilderness and ought to perish there, for we shall no longer be a Socialist party."
-- Eugene Debs, "The Negro in the Class Struggle" (1903)
How have changes in social group identity affected the politics of capitalism and the Left's responses to it? While vulgar-propagandistic and economic-reformist Revisionist pseudo-"Marxism" appeared to reduce the problem of capitalism to exploitation -- to the neglect of other forms of social oppression -- there have been several important attempts to grasp the struggle for socialism in capitalism in broader and deeper ways, occasioned by crises that have transformed the concrete practices and lived experience of people -- for instance, as matters of gender roles, sexuality, and "racial" segregation and affinity -- as capitalism has developed and changed over the course of the past century. We will read from among the most sharply acute and incisively critical attempts by Marxists to articulate these crises of social identity as opportunities for finding how capitalism potentially points beyond itself in the struggle for socialism.
Wednesdays 8 June - 20 July, 2016, 19:00h
Zossenerstrasse 56, eingang A, 4. Stock
Week 1: Women's Question - Wednesday 8 June
- Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The longest revolution”(1966)
- Clara Zetkin and Vladimir Lenin, “An interview on the woman question”(1920)
+ Quintin Hoare, "On Mitchell's 'Women: the longest revolution' " (1967)
+ Mitchell, reply to Quintin Hoare (1967)
Week 2: Women's Question and sexuality - Wednesday 15 June
- Cornelia Möser, Lucy Parker, Ursula Jensen, Joy McReady, Women: the Longest Revolution (Frankfurt), The Platypus Review #84, March 2016
- Margaret Power, Brit Schulte, Yasmin Nair, Women: The Longest Revolution (Chicago), The Platypus Review #84, March 2016
Week 3: Gay Identity and sexuality - Wednesday 22 June
- Theodor W. Adorno, “Sexual taboos and the law today”(1963)
- John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and gay identity”(1983)
Week 4: Race and the Black Question - Wednesday 29 June
Max Shachtman, Communism and the Negro AKA Race and Revolution (1933)
Week 5: Race and the Black Question - Wednesday 6 July
- Richard Fraser, “Two lectures on the black question in America and revolutionary integrationism” (1953)
- James Robertson and Shirley Stoute, “For black Trotskyism” (1963)
- Bayard Rustin, "From protest to politics" (1965)
- Spartacist League, “Black and red: Class struggle road to Negro freedom” (1966)
Week 6: Race and the Black Question - Wednesday 13 July
Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), [
Week 7: Race and the Black Question - Wednesday 20 July
- Bayard Rustin, “The failure of black separatism” (1970)
- Bayard Rustin, "The blacks and the unions" (1971)
- Spartacist League, "Soul power or workers' power: The rise and fall of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers" (1974)
- Adolph Reed, “Black particularity reconsidered” (1979)
- Adolph Reed, “Paths to Critical Theory” (1984)
„Die Tradition aller toten Geschlechter lastet wie ein Alp auf dem Gehirne der
Lebenden“ (Karl Marx)
Daten: Freitags vom 22. April bis 5. August
Zeit: 16-19 Uhr
Ort: Campus Bockenheim
Raum: Neue Mensa 118
Platypus und die Krise der Linken
Warum wir sagen: “Die Linke ist tot, lang lebe die Linke!”
Erste Sitzung am 04.03.16
Christina Kaindl (Die LINKE)
Jakub Baran - (Partia Razem)
Ursula Jensen - (IBT)
Manuel Kellner - (ISL)
Moderator: Lucy Parker
In spite of many different political currents and tendencies, perhaps the most significant question informing the "Left" today is the issue of "political party.” Various "Left unity" initiatives have been taking place in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and subsequent downturn, following Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, alongside continuing "post-political" tendencies inherited from the 1980s-90s (perspectives such as expressed by Hardt and Negri's Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth, John Holloway's Change the World without Taking Power, the Invisible Committee's The Coming Insurrection, the California student protestors' Communique from an Absent Future), the formation of SYRIZA in Greece, and the new party Podemos in Spain (who reject the organized "Marxist Left" as well as the established labor unions as part of the existing "political caste"). In Germany, Die Linke appears poised to break into high political office. At the same time, there has been a growing crisis of the largest "orthodox Marxist" ("Trotskyist") political organizations in the Anglophone and Western European countries, which has been characterized as the "crisis of ('actually existing') Leninism" in the developed capitalist countries. New publications have emerged such as Jacobin magazine, N+1 and Endnotes journals, as a new "millennial Marxism." And there has emerged a related discussion of the legacy of Marxism in principles of political organization going back to the Second International 1889-1914 ("neo-Kautskyism"), for instance in Lars Lih's revisionist history of Lenin and Bolshevism and the Communist Party of Great Britain's member Mike Macnair's book Revolutionary Strategy (2008), the latter occasioned by the formations of the Respect Party in the U.K. and the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste in France. Today, perhaps the most significant question facing the "Left" internationally is goes all the way back to Marx’s dispute with the anarchists in the First International: What would it mean for the Left to take "political action" today?
However, the issue of “political party” seems to generate more problems for the Left than it solves. Formalized political organization would appear indispensable for a long term perspectives beyond the ebb and flow of movements. Yet the role of a party in sustaining activity and discontents over time -- of building towards a revolution -- has had, at best an ambivalent legacy, leading as much to rationalizing politically ineffective strategies or giving cover for various forms of opportunism (e.g. reformism, careerism, etc.). Today the idea of political parties as a means for the Left -- through which the necessity for social transformation could be developed within society -- as opposed to an end in itself, is difficult to envision both theoretically and practically. Yet the existing default --politics without parties -- seems unable to do more than give sanction to the vicissitudes through which capitalism changes, but invariably persists. Worse still, without parties of its own, the Left is forced to either passively or actively support or at least place hopes in other parties. There appears no escaping the question of Political Party for the Left.
