A roundtable discussion organized by the Platypus Affiliated Society on October 18, 2012 at New York University.

A year, a month, and a day ago marked the official beginning of an ostensibly new, post-Obama phase of radical politics in America.

The longer prehistory of Occupy has been variously traced back to anti-austerity protests in Europe, the Arab Spring, and the London riots — with some of its roots stretching all the way to alter-globalization in the late 1990s. Occupy can be understood both in this broader context of radicalization going on throughout the world at the time and as a phenomenon in its own right.

Today Occupy stands at a crossroads. Our moment provides a brief vantage point from which one might reflect upon what the Occupy movement has been to date (its victories, its failures, its enduring impact), whether it still exists at present, and — if so so — what are the tasks that remain for it to fulfill moving forward?

A little over a month on from #S17, and only three weeks away from the US elections, we in the Platypus Affiliated Society thus ask our panelists to consider:
1. What kinds of social transformation has Occupy brought about? What kinds of social conflicts remain unresolved? Where has it triumphed, and where has it fallen short?
2. How, if at all, has Occupy changed your political outlook? Has it modified the kinds of goals you hope to achieve through your activism? And has your approach toward organizing a mass movement in order to achieve these goals shifted at all?
3. What sort of new political possibilities has Occupy opened up that beforehand seemed impossible? Conversely, is there anything once felt had been politically possible at Occupy's outset but now no longer feel is possible?

PLEASE NOTE: Due to technical difficulties, the last five minutes of this panel were not recorded on either audio or video. We apologize for the inconvenience.

HOSTED BY:
The Platypus Affiliated Society

MODERATOR:
Lisa Montanarelli (Writers for the 99%, Platypus Affiliated Society) is an author and activist who participated in the occupation of Zuccotti Park and collaborated with more than 50 other writers and researchers on the book Occupying Wall Street. She has since become a member of Platypus.

FEATURED PANELISTS:
Fritz Tucker (Occupier, journalist) is a native Brooklynite, writer, activist, theorist, and researcher of people's movements the world over, from the US to Nepal. Last year he authored the article "A Chill Descends on Occupy Wall Street: The Leaders of an Allegedly Leaderless Movement."

Victoria Sobel (Media & Finance working groups) is an activist and major organizer within the Occupy movement in New York, especially during its two months in Zuccotti Park.

Shyam Khanna (Strike Debt) is an organizer of Strike Debt, a prominent outgrowth of the Occupy movement.

David Haack (Occupy Your Workplace) is an underemployed artist an anticorporate activist who lives in New York City. He is also a leading organizer within the Occupy Your Workplace working group, and author of "How the Occupy movement won me over" (published in Britain's The Guardian) and "The New Left Zombie is Dead! Long Live Occupy!" (published in Platypus Review 45).

Victoria Campbell (Occupier, Pacifica's Occupy Wall Street Radio show on WBAI) is an artist and activist involved with Occupy Wall Street, also a host on Pacifica's Occupy Wall Street Radio show.

Panel held on April 26th, 2012 at New York University, as part of the 3 Rs panel series.

“After the failure of the 1960s New Left, the underlying despair with regard to the real efficacy of political will, of political agency, in a historical situation of heightened helplessness, became a self-constitution as outsider, as other, rather than an instrument of transformation. Focused on the bureaucratic stasis of the Fordist, late 20th Century world, the Left echoed the destruction of that world by the dynamics of capital: neoliberalism and globalization.

The idea of a fundamental transformation became bracketed and, instead, was replaced by the more ambiguous notion of ‘resistance.’ The notion of resistance, however, says little about the nature of that which is being resisted, or of the politics of the resistance involved.

‘Resistance’ is rarely based on a reflexive analysis of possibilities for fundamental change that are both generated and suppressed by the dynamic heteronomous order of capital. ‘Resistance’ is an undialectical category that does not grasp its own conditions of possibility; it fails to grasp the dynamic historical context of capital and its reconstitution of possibilities for both domination and emancipation, of which the ‘resisters’ do not recognize that that they are a part.”

— Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism” (Public Culture¸ 18.1: 2006)

Reform, revolution, resistance: what kind of weight do these categories hold for the Left today? How are they used, to where do they point, and what is their history? Join the Platypus Affiliated Society for a discussion concerning a question that has renewed immediacy in light of the #Occupy movement.

Speakers:
John Asimakopoulos (Institute for Transformative Studies)
Todd Gitlin (Columbia University)
Tom Trottier (Workers’ International Committee)
Ross Wolfe (Platypus Affiliated Society)