Thursday 4 Sept 2014 @ 6pm
Dalhousie Student Union Building

A moderated roundtable hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society (Dal/King's). Part of the 2014 NSPIRG Rad Frosh.

Round table participants:
Anna Dubinski (King's)
Holly Lobsinger (Dalhousie, NSPIRG)
Ian Matheson
Jack Wong (NSCAD)

Description:
What is the relation of student activism to what might be broadly called the Left? What might it be? The responses to these questions seem to either look to or eschew the past for inspiration.

Many contemporary movements have taken as their inspiration the student radicalism of the 1960s, like the Students for a Democratic Society; the subsequent anti-oppression movements of the 1970s and 80s, of gender, environmental, anti-imperialism; and the horizontal democratic resistance politics of the anti/alter globalization movement which characterized much of 1990’s activism. Such an approach of connecting student activism to the Left, however, often ends up in what can seem like anachronistic esoteric arguments. In a present moment dominated by austerity and the seemingly never ending rise of the Right, there seems to be more fundamental questions than, say, the rehashing of position of feminists, anarchists and Marxist groups of the past — questions that might unsettle the comfortable assumptions of radical politics today.

An alternative stance is to think of such of questions as an irrelevant, academic obstruction to real action, recognizing that theory can often confuse more than clarify. The abundance of jargonistic takes on the Left, however, does not diminish that students specifically and the Left more broadly, need spaces to ask themselves questions and struggle for answers.

A place for critical thought and discussion then may be necessary, as movements, whether confused or theory-avoidant, need to ask themselves what political success and failure would look like, on their terms. This roundtable gives radical student activists an opportunity to reconsider what the relation of student activism might be with respect to a reconsidered Left. How would we move beyond the past, to consider freshly the question of how student activism might relate to the Left?

Questions
1. What sorts of questions should radical students ask themselves, the Left, and about the world?

Student life presents unique opportunities — to read, discuss, examine and critique different traditions of politics, sometimes with no previous political experience at all. And yet, a fear of sectarian controversy that could rip apart fragile student coalitions seems to call for, at least partially, imposed limitations to debate and criticism, and perhaps even the intellectual and political development enabled by the post-secondary setting. Even more, as students we often occupy a precarious part of the broader Left, due to perceived (and, perhaps often, real) social privilege. How can we as students actually engage in serious, honest reflection and conversation to clarify these uncertainties? What obstacles do they face? What sort of fundamental questions ought we as student activists ask ourselves and the broader Left? How should we ask them?

2. What is capitalism, and how can it be overcome?

In 2006 the new SDS, a broad coalition of student activists in the US, asserted its aims were to: “change a society which depends upon multiple and reciprocal systems of oppression and domination for its survival: racism and white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, heterosexism and transphobia, authoritarianism and imperialism, among others.” A very similar vision was advanced during the 2012 student strike in the CLASSE Manifesto. These systems, with a single exception, are straightforward forms of domination. A ruling stratum (whites, men) oppresses a given subaltern. While capitalism might appear likewise, as the direct and violent oppression of one class by another, many on the Left would argue this oversimplifies the complicated historical, social, political, economic and cultural characteristics of capitalism. How ought the students think about the specific form of capitalist domination? And what forms of politics are adequate to overcome it?
3. Why, and how, could students succeed today where they didn't in the past?

The Port Huron (1962) statement of the original Students for a Democratic Society sought to “replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity…” From the vantage point of the present, the first SDS seems to have failed to meet its own task. Possession, privilege and circumstance still determine social power. So why did the student movement of the past fail to achieve its ultimate ends? And how can the new student movement succeed, especially in the absence of a large-scale, organized international movement in the present? What would make international revolutionary politics possible again? How ought we to understand the loss of political possibility?

A panel discussion held at University of King's College on 1 February, 2014.

Sponsored by the King's Student Union and Dalhousie Student Union

Panelists:
Eva Curry - Stand
Christoph Lichtenberg - International Bolshevik Tendency  
Chris Parsons - student activist
Alex Khasnabish - The Radical Imagination Project, Mount Saint Vincent University

Description:
It seems that there are still only two radical ideologies: Anarchism and Marxism. They emerged out of the same crucible - the Industrial Revolution, the unsuccessful revolutions of 1848 and 1871, a weak liberalism, the centralization of state power, the rise of the workers movement, and the promise of socialism. They are the revolutionary heritage, and all significant radical upsurges of the last 150 years have returned to mine their meaning for the current situation. In this respect, our moment seems no different.

There are a few different ways these ideologies have been taken up. Recent worldwide square occupations reflect one pattern: a version of Marxist theory — understood as a political-economic critique of capitalism — is used to comprehend the world, while ananarchist practice — understood as an anti-hierarchical principle that insists revolution must begin now — is used to organize, in order to change it. Some resist this combination, claiming that Marxism rejects anti-statist adventurism, and call for a strategic reorganization of the working class to resist austerity, and perhaps push forward a “New New Deal”. This view remains wedded to a supposedly practical welfarist social democracy, which strengthens the state and manages capital. There is a good deal of hand waving in both these orientations with regard to politics, tactics, and the end goal. Finally, there have been attempts to leave the grounds of these theories entirely — but these often seem either to land right back in one of the camps or to remain marginal.

To act today we seek to draw up the balance sheet of the 20th century. The historical experience concentrated in these ideas must be unfurled if they are to serve as compass points. To see in what ways the return of these ideologies represent an authentic engagement and in what ways the return of a ghost. Where have the battles left us? What forms do we have for meeting, theoretically and practically, the problems of our present?

A panel event held on  30 Jan 7, 2014 at Dalhousie University.

Part of the ESS Lecture Series, Dalhousie University College of Sustainability

Panelists:
- Dave Bedford
Political Science, UNB, author of The Tragedy of Progress: Marxism, Modernity and the Aboriginal Question
- Andrew Biro
CRC in Political Ecology, Acadia University author of Denaturalizing Ecological Politics: ‘Alienation from Nature’ from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School and Beyond
- James Hutt
Activist, Solidarity Halifax, Divest Dalhousie and the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition 
- Timothy Luke
Political Science, Virginia Technical University author of Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology: Departing from Marx

Description: 
The Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen recently characterized the period marked by the start of the industrial revolution in the 18th Century to the present as a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. This periodization is meant to capture a change in the history of the planet, namely that for the first time in history its course will be determined by the question of what humanity will become.

This panel will focus on different interpretations of why the Left has failed to deal with the deepening crisis of the Anthropocene through the 19th and 20th Centuries and how and if this problem is interrelated with the growing problems associated with ecological systems across the earth. While Karl Marx would note that the problem of freedom shifted with the industrial revolution and the emergence of the working class - the crisis of bourgeois society that Marx would term capital - the idea of freedom seemed not to survive the collapse of Marxist politics in the 20th Century. We seem to live in a world in which the fate of ecological seem foreclosed, where attempts at eco-modernization seem to emerge many steps behind the rate of ecological degradation. For many, degradation of the environment appears a permanent feature of modern society, something which can only be resisted but never transformed.

Panelists will consider the relationship between the history of capital and the Left—and thus the issue of history and freedom - and how it may be linked to our present inability to render environmental threats and degradation visible and comprehensible, and by extension, subject to its conscious and free overcoming by society.