Location and time:

Thursday 11 February 2016, 7pm

RHB 144 Goldsmiths, New Cross, SE14 6NW

(Main Building - Lewisham Way)

Confirmed Speakers:

Jack Conrad - CPGB / Weekly Worker

Elaine Graham-Leigh - Counterfire

Jamie Green - Goldsmiths Labour Students / Momentum

Judith Shapiro - London School of Economics

Panel Description:

The conditions for the novel political formations of Syriza and Podemos developed out of the disintegration of the traditional Social Democratic parties in Greece and Spain. Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of the Labour Party in Britain, argued for greater democracy in the party and invoked Labour's origins in working-class organisation and socialism. Yet it is unclear by the invocation exactly what is being remembered, and what is being forgotten. The Bernie Sanders campaign as a "socialist" candidate for leadership of the US Democratic Party appears equally obscure. Precisely when historical consciousness is most necessary, the project of Social Democracy seems to be fading from memory. Little remains of the foundation moment of Social Democracy today, both in practice and thought.

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 socialinjustice 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?

Questions:

1. What was Social Democracy? How was it constituted, how did it form and what was it ideological foundation?  What problem did it address and what promises did it make?

2.  What role did Social Democracy play for the Left throughout the 19th and 20th century? How has this role changed? How did it affect the world and how was it affected by a changing world? When did it come into its own?

3.  Was the promise of Social Democracy fulfilled? If yes, how, if no, why did it fail? The current crisis of the Left reveals a need for a reconsideration of Socialist Politics, yet Social Democratic parties are on the retreat and are unable to offer a credible alternative.  What does this crisis tell us about the success, failure and the need for Social Democracy?

4.  What would you characterize as the beginning moment of the crisis of Social Democracy? Was it the revisionist dispute in 1903, the voting of the war credits in 1914, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the New Left of 1960, the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s, the Reagan and Thatcher era of 1980s, the creation of New Labour in 1994 or the economic crisis of 2008?

5.  Taken at face value today, is Social Democracy still project of the Left? Does Social Democracy represent a way forward, or a road block?  Do we need a return of the politics of Social Democracy?  What problems would they address today, and what lessons could be gained from its reconsideration?

Location and time:

7pm, Thursday 4th June

Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre,

Goldsmiths College, New Cross, SE14 6NW

Confirmed speakers:

• Simon Griffiths, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Goldsmiths

• Nancy Taaffe, Socialist Party of England and Wales; and TUSC (Trade Union Socialist Coalition)

• Luke Gregory-Jones, BA Politics Student, and Student Occupier, Goldsmiths

• Michael Theodosiadis, Phd candidate, Politics, Goldsmiths; writer and editor for respublica.gr

• Jack Conrad, Communist Party of Great Britain (Weekly Worker newspaper); and Lefty Unity

PANEL DESCRIPTION:

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 ofpolitical 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.

Questions for the panelists:

1) How do you think that addressing the question of political party today potentially helps or rather might undercut the Left?

2) How do you view the problem of political organization in relation to the various currents on the Left that have emerged in the last three years since #Occupy? What should be the long term vision of Left relative to the issue of political organization?

3) In what sense is a party different from a political organization? What is its peculiarity?

4) Political parties, movements and the state have been around for a long time. Is the way they have related in the past different from how they relate now? Do you consider any or all of them as permanent or transitory? More specifically is the need for a party fixed under capitalism, including its most fundamental characteristics? Or are these characteristics open to reconsideration?

5) How do political parties/organization relate to society as a whole? How ought they for the Left? How can the Left transcend the specific interests of political constituencies (e.g. the workers, minorites, the poor, the marginalized) with an eye to transforming society as a whole? Should it? How can a political party/organization of the Left be representative and revolutionary at the same time?

6) How has the need for the Left to take political power reasserted itself today? What are the most important historical precedents for this? How has this problem changed at present from the past?

7) The current trend towards political organization (e.g. SYRIZA, Podemos) has largely found the Left opposing traditional social democratic and communist parties. What is the significance of this trend? Is it a temporary, transitory phenomenon or does it mark a permanent change? Do you regard it as an advance or a regression with respect to the Left's approach to politics?

November 20th 2014

Room 309, Richard Hoggart Building,

Goldsmiths' College, University of London

facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1494809277454523/

Panellists:

John Sinha, Occupy London Activist and member of SWP

Tony Wood, Anarchist Bookfair organiser

Iain McKay, author of An Anarchist FAQ

Dan Morley, Socialist Appeal (International Marxist Tendency)

+ a representative from Alliance for Workers' Liberty

This is part of an international series of panels organized by the Platypus Affiliated Society. For previous panels in this series please see:

http://platypus1917.org/marxism-and-anarchism/

Panel 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 an anarchist 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?

Questions to panellists

1. What do Marxism and Anarchism have to say to those politicized today? Do they instruct us as to how we might act, now? Must we return to these orientations? If so, how?

2. Many recent leftist groupings tend toward square occupation and leaderless horizontality, while retaining an unclear, even reformist, ideological orientation toward capitalism and the state. How do you understand the advent of these forms? Do they challenge traditional Marxist theory and ways of organizing? Are they affirmations of Anarchist modes of thinking and practice? In general, what forms of organization are necessitated by the theories we inherit and the tasks of today?

3. Can you briefly assess the most important splits and breaks between and within both traditions? Does the historical divide between Marxism and Anarchism still matter? What are the significant splits within Marxism and within Anarchism that continue to shape the context?

4. What are the inalienable values and the end goals of radical politics? Are Marxism and Anarchism ideologies of freedom? Of democracy? Of the working class? How do they handle the objective contradictions of realizing these principles under the conditions of capitalist life?

5. What should we fight for today - more state or less state?

6. Has history vindicated Marxism or Anarchism or neither at all?

March 21, 2014, Room 137, Rutherford Information Services Building, Goldsmith's College, 10 Dixon Road, Greater London SE14 6