A panel event held on March 12th, 2013 at King's College in Hailfax, Canada

Panelists:
Gary Burrill (Member of the Legislative Assembly for Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley, Nova Scotia New Democratic Party)
Arthur McCalla (Religious Studies, Mount Saint Vincent University)
Katie Toth (Layperson, United Church of Canada)
Antoni Wysocki (STAND)

Description:
Religion necessarily appears to the left today as a question of for or against. But "religion" and "the left" are by no means transhistorical categories. A massive historical divide separates the Abbe Sieyes's conflict with Pope Pius VI from invading Soviet and American armies' conflict with the Afghan mujahideen.

At the beginning of the 20th century, socialist politics served as the church of the working class. It was not merely secular but secularist. Yet, as working class politics unfolded in defeat and betrayal over the course of the 20th century, the left seemed to drift inexorably to the right. This rightward drift was mirrored in religion, and this seemed to render plausible the antipathies of left-secularists such as Christopher Hitchens. Yet during this same period, ostensibly progressive religious movements gained ground by capturing the socially conscious impulses generated in the absence of working class politics. Religion seemed to claim a monopoly on the ideology of peace and social justice. Increasingly, under neoliberal reforms, religion even came to monopolize the provision of social welfare. The left, seemingly overcoming its "theophobia," found itself going to church in hopes of organizing the working class, dropping its erstwhile secularism in the process.

How the left might overcome its current impasses is anybody's guess. An approach towards genuinely reform-minded religionists would seem to offer a means of winning adherents to radical politics without ceding any ground that wasn't already lost to the left decades ago. But while the Left may be bankrupt, religion isn't going out of business any time soon. One is tempted to wonder if the player is not in fact being played.

Questions:
1) Today, some of the most active organizations working with socially-concerned student activists are religious organizations. What does this phenomenon-- community activism, under religion-inflected banners, as ostensible leftism-- say about the current state and future tasks of the political left?

2) The political (and personal) liquidation of the secular left in many parts of the third world during the terminal decades of the cold war occurred alongside the gradual shifting of responsibility for social welfare provision from the state to organizations within civil society, often religious, in the first world. Have these global shifts demanded something new from the left vis a vis religion, and if so, what? If not, why not? More generally, is there a relationship between the death of the left and the revitalization of religion?

3) The Polish revolutionary Marxist, Rosa Luxemburg, stated that socialism would 'complete' Christianity. Does this complicate the traditional Marxist antipathy to religion?

4) To what degree can or should (or must) the left, today, cede organizational ground to religion? How ought those on the left distinguish between tactical cooperation and tailism vis-a-vis religion?

5) Is capitalist society generative of religious organization as a mass phenomenon in the same way that it is generative of left-political organization as a (once-) mass phenomenon? More broadly, what implications for the left follow from your understanding of religion as a mass social phenomenon within capitalism?

6) Early in his career Karl Marx critiqued the secularism of Young Hegelian thinkers for failing to grasp the social and political dimensions of theological questions. One gets a sense of coming full circle; that political questions on the Left today are increasingly explained in theological terms. What do you make of the recent claims by Communist and Marxist thinkers, for example Alain Badiou or Terry Eagleton, in locating the first examples of universalism in the Apostles? Alternately, what of their atheist interlocutors like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, who seem preoccupied with picking through the inconsistencies of religion and make no attempt to understand why so many people are religious? What are the political stakes of these developments? How do you account for the seeming inability of the Left do what seemed possible for Marx, namely to locate the political dimensions of religion and overcome them?

A panel event held on November 14th, 2012, at Dalhousie University. The first iteration of our "Democracy and the Left" international panel series.

Panelists:
Matthew Furlong (Foundation Year and Contemporary Studies Programme, King’s University)
David Howard (Historical and Critical Studies, NSCAD University)
John Hutton (student activist, Dalhousie)
Clare O’Connor (Toronto activist and author)

From the financial crisis and the bank bail-outs to the question of “sovereign debt”; from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street; from the struggle for a unified European-wide policy to the elections in Greece and Egypt that seem to have threatened so much and promised so little — the need to go beyond mere “protest” has asserted itself: political revolution is in the air, again.

At the same time, the impending general election in the U.S. seems, by comparison, to be a non-event, despite potentially having far-reaching consequences for teeming issues word-wide. Today, the people — the demos — seem resigned to their political powerlessness, even as they rage against the corruption of politics. Hence, while contemporary demands for democracy to politicize the demos, they are also indicative of social and political regression that asks urgently for recognition and reflection. Demands for democracy “from below” end up being expressed “from above”: The 99%, in its already obscure and unorganized character, didn’t express itself as such in the various recent elections, but was split in various tendencies, many of them very reactionary.

Democracy retains an enigmatic character, since it always slips any fixed form and content, since people under the dynamic of capital keep demanding at times “more” democracy and “real” democracy. But democracy can be like Janus: it often expresses both the progressive social and emancipatory demands, but also their defeat, their hijacking by an elected “Bonaparte”.

What is the history informing the demands for greater democracy today, and how does the Left adequately promote — or not — the cause of popular empowerment?

What are the potential futures for “democratic” revolution, especially as understood by the Left?

Questions for panelists to consider:

What would you consider as “real” democracy, as this has been a primary demand of recent spontaneous forms of discontent (e.g. Arab Spring, Occupy, anti-austerity protests, student strikes)?

What is the relationship between democracy and the working class today? Do you consider historical struggles for democracy by workers as the medium by which they got “assimilated” to the system, or the only path to emancipation that they couldn’t avoid trying to take?

Do you consider it as necessary to eschew established forms of mass politics in favor of new forms in order to build a democratic movement? Or are current mass form of politics adequate for a democratic society?

Why has democracy emerged as the primary demand of spontaneous forms of discontent? Do you also consider it necessary, or adequate, to deal with the pathologies of our era?

Engels wrote that “A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is”. Do you agree? Can this conception be compatible with the struggle for democracy?

How is democracy related with the issue of possibly overcoming capital?

Is there a difference between the ancient and the modern notion of democracy and, if so, what is the source of that difference? Does “real” democracy share more with the direct democracy of ancient polis?

Is democracy oppressive, or can it be such? How would you judge Lenin’s formulation that: “…democracy is also a state and that, consequently, democracy will also disappear when the state disappears.”

A conversation concerning the history and legacy of the struggles for sexual liberation. What successes and setbacks have shaped the prospect for LGBTQ and feminist organizing today? Held on Thursday, September 13, 2013, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada.

Panelists:
Karin Cope, Professor of Historical and Critical Studies, NSCAD
Kevin Kindred, Nova Scotia Rainbow Action Project
Evan Coole, Queer Activist, Organizer and Educator
Ashley Weger, Platypus Affiliated Society

Moderated by Cam Hardy (Platypus Affiliated Society)

Questions for panelists:
1. How did the LGBTQ rights movement become such? What has its relation to the Left been, and how has the contemporary political focus on same-sex marriage affect that relation? What are the potentials and limits of present politics and organization around equality and legality? What successes and limitations has it met?

2. How does economic life shape our imaginations about what sexual freedom will look like? For example, arguments for marriage equality have often been made in terms of all the economic disadvantages one faces if one can't marry--extra taxes, loss of healthcare, etc. Does marriage equality solve these issues? Or, counter to marriage, consider the importance of the legal protection of sex work to many on the Left. How are and should economics and sex be bound in sex work? Should sex work be abolished or protected? What role would the State play in a Left that seeks to decrease both human economic precariousness and human dependence on the economy more generally?

3. Marriage has always been about the linking of the intimate and the public. The demand that "love" dominate marriage--its development in the 19th century away from a mere economic arrangement between parents--was a way to demand that the public sphere as represented in the state recognize the power and value of individual life. If once progressive, though, this also comes to represent the naturalization of the state as the voice of authority over private life, as well as the retention of the family form which has represented ages of abuse (of women, children, etc.), and enshrines the principle of property over people. What forms of personal/public relation are possible now? What relationship ought the Left fight for between love, the private and the public?

4. What do we mean by a liberated sexuality? That which has positioned itself counter to what we might deem âheteronormativeâ has in the past been given the qualification as âabnormal.â In fighting for greater civil equality, these formerly marginalized sexualities have often fought on the basis of their ânaturalâ or ânormalâ characters. Does recognition for equality often homogenize the formerly marginal into normative bonds (e.g. marriage, family, monogamy, etc.), or is sexual emancipation necessarily antagonistic to the sexual mainstream? Are neither of these positions adequate?