Panel discussion hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society at Goldsmiths University of London on October 19, 2017.

Speakers:

Jack Conrad (Communist Party of Great Britain / Weekly Worker)
HaPe Breitman (International Bolshevik Tendency)
Lyndon White (Political education officer, East Finchley Labour Party)
Robert Liow (Student activist, Kings College London)

Panel Description:

Labour lost the election. But Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran of the 1980’s Labour left, seems to have saved the party. Corbyn's tenure has raised old questions about the Left's relationship to the Labour Party. While some on the Left take the crisis within Labour to be an opportunity, in various ways, for its transformation, others reject Labour as a dead end.

For Ralph Miliband, the crisis of Stalinism and welfare-state social democracy in the 1950s raised the problem of the political party for socialism. He thought Labour’s defeat in the 1959 general election made apparent what would have otherwise been obscure: “the Labour Party is a sick party.” This “sickness” was taken as an opportunity for the Left to clarify the nature of the Labour Party and go beyond the “labourism” which had defined it up until that point. The New Left sought to leverage this moment to educate a new generation “into the promise and the conditions for socialism in the 1960’s.” However, by the early 1970’s Miliband felt this opportunity had passed. How should we understand Labour’s metaphorical “sickness”? Should we seek to save the patient or to learn from its death?

On October 17, 2017, the Platypus Affiliated Society Hosted a panel discussion at Berkeley City College on anti-fascism in the age of Trump. The discussion was moderated by Audrey Crescenti.

Description:

Since the Nazi seizure of power eighty years ago anti-fascism has been a component of left-wing politics. In response to the Trump presidency, the politics of anti-fascism, reminiscent of the Popular Front of the 30’s or the Black Bloc politics of the 90s, have -- once again -- been resurrected by the Left. How is anti-fascism the same or different today? Why anti-fascism now?

Participants: 

• Luma Nichol (Freedom Socialist Party, United Front Against Fascism)
• Ramsey Kanaan (PM Press)
• Victoria Fierce (East Bay for Everyone, DSA)
• Eugene E Ruyle (ICSS, DSA, CPUSA, Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library)

Held October 2nd, 2018 at the University of Chicago.

Panelists: 

Elijah Wolter, member of UChciago Student Action (formerly known as the IIRON Student Network)
Jesse Pace, member of the Black Rose Anarchist Federation
Ted Sirota, co-initiator of Refuse Fascism and founder of Degenerative Artists Against Fascism

Description:

Since the Nazi seizure of power eighty years ago anti-fascism has been a component of left-wing politics. In response to the Trump presidency, the politics of anti-fascism, reminiscent of the Popular Front of the 1930s or the Black Bloc politics of the 1990s, have -- once again -- been resurrected by the Left. How is anti-fascism the same or different today? Why anti-fascism now?