A moderated panel discussion and audience Q&A with thinkers, activists and political figures focused on contemporary problems faced by the Left in its struggles to construct a politics adequate to the self-emancipation of the working class. Hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society.
Room 224, Dalhousie Student Union Building
October 2nd, 7:00 PM
Panelists:
George Caffentzis - Midnight Notes Collective
Shay Enxuga - Baristas Rise Up
Larry Haiven -Solidarity Halifax / Saint Mary's University
Co-sponsored by the Halifax Radical Imagination Project:
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Description:
It is generally assumed that Marxists and other Leftists have the political responsibility to support reforms for the improvement of the welfare of workers. Yet, leading figures from the Marxist tradition-- such as Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky-- also understood that such reforms would broaden the crisis of capitalism and potentially intensify contradictions that could adversely impact the immediate conditions of workers. For instance, full employment, while being a natural demand from the standpoint of all workers’ interests, also threatens the conditions of capitalist production (which rely on a surplus of available labor), thereby potentially jeopardizing the system of employment altogether. In light of such apparent paradoxes, this panel seeks to investigate the politics of work from Leftist perspectives. It will attempt to provoke reflection on and discussion of the ambiguities and dilemmas of the politics of work by including speakers from divergent perspectives, some of whom seek after the immediate abolition of labor and others of whom seek to increase the availability of employment opportunities. It is hoped that this conversation will deepen the understanding of the contemporary problems faced by the Left in its struggles to construct a politics adequate to the self-emancipation of the working class.
Our monthly Coffee Breaks are a great way to meet Platypus members and fellow travelers, and to get to know the Platypus project. It’s an opportunity to discuss issues raised in the latest issue of the Platypus Review, consider the state of the Left, and just hang out with people who have similar political interests.
Monthly 2014 Coffee Breaks
March 4th | 5:00 pm
Coburg Coffee 6085 Coburg Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia
Contact: Quentin Cyr | halifax@platypus1917.org
A teach-in held on September 5th, 2013 at Dalhousie University, led by Quentin Cyr.
In the mid-19th century, Marx and Engels observed, in the Communist Manifesto, that a "specter" was haunting Europe â the specter of Communism. A century and a half later, it is Marxism itself that continues to haunt the Left, while capitalism remains.
What does it mean that Marx and Marxism still appeal, while political movements for socialism are weak or non- existent? What were Marxism's original points of departure for considering radical possibilities for freedom that might still speak to the present?
How does Marxism still matter?
Please note: Due to technical difficulties, the first few seconds of the teach-in are cut off.
A moderated panel discussion hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society held on Friday, May 24, 2013 at the Eyelevel Gallery in Halifax.
In conjunction with the Annual Y-Level Exhibition ("And all sat mute")
Please Note: Due to technical problems, the ending of the event for both audio and video is cut off.
Description:
If it is true that the 'commodity-structure' (Lukacs) is the defining feature of modern capitalism down through the present, then it stands to reason that it has no less impacted the way art is produced, consumed, circulated, and exchanged. This shift in art's character happened both objectively (e.g., as in an article produced for exchange on the market), and subjectively (i.e., as a kind of experience and form of expression for the social and individual body). However, art's relationship to its status as a commodity is an ambivalent one: Art has become at once more free from past forms of domination, but its freedom is constrained when subject to the dynamics of capital. Art as a commodity is both its cure and poison, and has become a social problem for its practice. Since becoming aware of this problem, artists, philosophers, curators, and critics have taken various approaches in seeking to overcome it.
How has art under a capitalist society changed from its pre-capitalist practices? What is the commodity-form, and what is art's relationship to its logic? Must art seek emancipation from the commodity-form, or is it at home in it? In what sense does art take part in the Left and emancipatory politics -- a practice also seeking to overcome the commodity-form -- if at all? By asking these questions, this panel seeks to reinvestigate art's relationship to the commodity form, and make intelligible how this problematic relationship still sticks with us today.
Panelists:
Merray Gerges
Jocelyn Li
Jakub Milčák
Beck Gilmer-Osborne
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?
