Recommended winter break preliminary readings:
+ Leszek Kolakowski, “The concept of the Left” (1968)
+ Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate / A&Z, Introducing Lenin and the Russian Revolution / Lenin for Beginners (1977)
+ Sebastian Haffner, Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918–19 (1968)
+ Tariq Ali and Phil Evans, Introducing Trotsky and Marxism / Trotsky for Beginners (1980)
+ James Joll, The Second International 1889–1914 (1966)
+ Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940), Part II. Ch. (1–4,) 5–10, 12–16; Part III. Ch. 1–6
Film screenings: January 2017
- 37 Days(2014) [Episode 1] [Episode 2] [Episode 3]
- Fall of Eagles (1974) episodes: "Absolute Beginners," "The Secret War," and "End Game"
- Rosa Luxemburg (1986)
- Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States (2012) Episodes A (1900-20) and B (1920-40)
- Reds (1981)
Week 13. Revolutionary leadership | Jan. 30, 2017
- Rosa Luxemburg, “The Crisis of German Social Democracy” Part 1 (1915)
- J. P. Nettl, “The German Social Democratic Party 1890–1914 as a Political Model” (1965)
- Cliff Slaughter, “What is Revolutionary Leadership?” (1960)
Week 14. Reform or revolution? | Feb. 6, 2017
- Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution? (1900/08)
Week 15. Lenin and the vanguard party | Feb. 13, 2017
- Spartacist League, Lenin and the Vanguard Party (1978)
Week 16. What is to be done? | Feb. 20, 2017
- V. I. Lenin, What is to be Done? (1902)
- + Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate / A&Z, Introducing Lenin and the Russian Revolution /Lenin for Beginners (1977)
Week 17. Mass strike and social democracy | Feb. 27, 2017
- Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions(1906)
- + Luxemburg, "Blanquism and Social Democracy" (1906)
Week 18. Permanent revolution | Mar. 6, 2017
- Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects(1906)
- + Tariq Ali and Phil Evans, Introducing Trotsky and Marxism /Trotsky for Beginners (1980)
Week 19. State and revolution | Mar. 13, 2017
- Lenin, The State and Revolution(1917)
Week 20. Imperialism | Mar. 20, 2017
- Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism(1916)
- + Lenin, Socialism and War Ch. 1 The principles of socialism and the War of 1914–15 (1915)
Week 21. Mar. 27, 2017 (spring break)
Week 22. Failure of the revolution | Apr. 3, 2017
- Luxemburg, “What does the Spartacus League Want?”(1918)
- Luxemburg, “On the Spartacus Programme” (1918)
- + Luxemburg, "German Bolshevism" (AKA "The Socialisation of Society") (1918)
- + Luxemburg, “The Russian Tragedy” (1918)
- + Luxemburg, “Order Reigns in Berlin” (1919)
- + Sebastian Haffner, Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918–19 (1968)
Week 23. Apr. 10, 2017 [Platypus international convention]
Week 24. Retreat after revolution | Apr. 17, 2017
- Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)
- + Lenin, "Notes of a Publicist" (1922)
Week 25. Dialectic of reification | Apr. 24, 2017
- Lukács, “The Standpoint of the Proletariat” (Part III of “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” 1923). Available in three sections from marxists.org: section 1 section 2 section 3
Week 26. Lessons of October | Apr. 29, 2017
- Trotsky, The Lessons of October(1924) [PDF] + Trotsky, "Stalinism and Bolshevism" (1937)
Week 27. Trotskyism | May 1, 2017
- + Trotsky, "To build communist parties and an international anew" (1933)
- • Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938)
- + Trotsky, "Trade unions in the epoch of imperialist decay" (1940)
- + Trotsky, Letter to James Cannon (September 12, 1939)
Week 28. The authoritarian state | May 8, 2017
- Friedrich Pollock, "State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations" (1941) (note 32 on USSR)
- Max Horkheimer, "The Authoritarian State" (1942)
Week 29. On the concept of history | May 15, 2017
- epigraphs by Louis Menand(on Edmund Wilson) and Peter Preuss(on Nietzsche) on the modern concept of history
+ Charles Baudelaire, from Fusées [Rockets] (1867)
+ Bertolt Brecht, "To posterity" (1939)
+ Walter Benjamin, "To the planetarium" (from One-Way Street, 1928)
+ Benjamin, "Experience and poverty" (1933)
+ Benjamin, Theologico-political fragment (1921/39?) - Benjamin, "On the Concept of History" (AKA "Theses on the Philosophy of History") (1940) [PDF]
- Benjamin, Paralipomena to "On the Concept of History" (1940)
Week 30. Reflections on Marxism | May 22, 2017
- Theodor Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory”(1942)
- Adorno, “Imaginative Excesses”(1944–47)
+ Adorno, Dedication, "Bequest", "Warning: Not to be Misused" and "Finale", Minima Moralia (1944–47)
+ Horkheimer and Adorno, "Discussion about Theory and Praxis" (AKA "Towards a New Manifesto?") [Deutsch] (1956)
Week 31. Theory and practice | Jun. 29, 2017
- + Adorno, “On Subject and Object” (1969)
- Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis” (1969)
- Adorno, “Resignation” (1969)
- Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” (AKA “Is Marx Obsolete?”) (1968)
- Esther Leslie, Introduction to the 1969 Adorno-Marcuse correspondence (1999)
- Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, correspondence on the German New Left (1969)
A Platypus panel at NYU, Kimmel Center, room 808
Panelists (in speaking order):
R.L. Stephens (Labor organizer and editor of The Orchestrated Pulse)
Benjamin Serby (volunteer-organizer, Team Bernie NY and PhD Candidate in US History, Columbia)
Howie Hawkins (Green Party, USA)
Karl Belin (Socialist worker from Pittsburgh, labor organizer
Moderated by Tana Forrester (Platypus).
The Left has for over a generation -- for more than 40 years, since the crisis of 1973 -- placed its hopes in the Democratic and Labour Parties to reverse or slow neoliberal capitalism -- the move to trans-national trade agreements, the movement of capital and labor, and austerity. The post-2008 crisis of neoliberalism, despite phenomena such as SYRIZA, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring and anti-austerity protests more generally, Bernie Sanders's candidacy, and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership, has found expression on the avowed Right, through UKIP, Brexit, the U.K. Conservatives' move to "Red Toryism" and now Donald Trump's election. The old neoliberal consensus is falling apart, and change is palpably in the air. Margaret Thatcher's infamous phrase "There Is No Alternative" has been proven wrong. What can the Left do to advance the struggle for socialism under such circumstances?
Recent generations of marginalized radicals have been forced to grapple with an impossible choice: they must either submit to a “realistic” electoral compromise with the status quo, often in the form of “lesser evilism,” or they must vote for a third-party candidate, hoping that by making their platform public the winning party could be pushed leftward. Alternatively, out of exhaustion with this impasse, they may choose not to vote, advocating instead a principled abstention from electoral politics.
What lessons can the Left draw from the history of mass electoral parties for socialism to create more emancipatory choices in the future? How do we reimagine the role of electoral campaigns for Leftist politics today? Given that a significant number of working people in America have left the Democratic Party, what is possible?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This event is free and open to the public. All are welcome.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Platypus Affiliated Society, established in December 2006, organizes reading groups, public fora, research and journalism focused on problems and tasks inherited from the “Old” (1920s-30s), “New” (1960s-70s) and post-political (1980s-90s) Left for the possibilities of emancipatory politics today.
http://platypus1917.com/newyork
What Does Climate Change?
80 Years of Environmental Politics - Left and Right
Panelists:
Cora Bergantiños PhD., Socialist Alternative NYC, Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University
Joel Kovel, founder of Ecosocialist Horizons, Author of The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?
Andrew Needham, History NYU, Author of Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest
Christian Parenti, Liberal Studies NYU, Author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence
The awareness of a growing planetary climate crisis in the 1990s appeared to coincide with a change: the final collapse of the traditional forces of the Old Left (communism and social democracy) and the consolidation of what many characterize as neoliberalism. For many green thinkers and activists, the political strength of the Right in the 1990s stymied any meaningful attempt to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. But the global reach of climate change also generated sustained international resistance, which appears unified in its opposition to fossil fuel extraction. For Klein and climate justice activists, the combined weight of this resistance could “change everything” when coupled with the “erosion” of neoliberalism’s credibility, particularly in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the assessment that climate change is inextricably bound up with capitalism (i.e., that climate change cannot be regulated or solved using “greener” forms of capitalism, but would require a “system change”).
Yet amidst the proliferation of activity--from blocking pipelines, to campus fossil fuel divestment campaigns, to blockades to stop hydraulic fracking and mountaintop removal coal mining projects and protests at international climate talks--it remains unclear how climate activism might lead to something different. U.S. Democrats, for example, appear poised to benefit from discontents around inaction on climate change regulation (in spite of advancing neoliberal reforms in the 1990s under Bill Clinton). In the E.U., climate activism has taken a back seat to anti-austerity, as governments responsible for the strictest austerity are largely credited with leadership in decarbonizing their economies. In fact, while an agreement overhauling the Kyoto Protocol seems increasingly likely at the Paris Conference of Parties (COP 21), the same cannot be said about theprospects for “system change.”
The focus of this panel is to consider what remains unchanged by the climate crisis. For there seems to be a continued problem of how discontents under capitalism become readily integrated into new forms of capitalism; a process whereby we unwittingly contribute to the perpetuation of capitalism without intending to. We ask panelists to consider how we might arrive at a post-carbon future from the Left. What would a Left response to climate change look like? How does this differ from the Right?
Speakers:
Boris Kagarlitsky: Transnational Institute
Mel Rothenberg: Chicago Political Economy Group
Christoph Lichtenberg: International Bolshevik Tendency
Last year marked the 25th anniversary of the 1989 revolutions—the ‘Autumn of Nations’ in the Soviet bloc. For an entire generation now of age, the USSR and the Cold War are only historical relics. 1989 is largely remembered as a decisive close to the Cold War contest between communism and capitalism—with the victory of the latter casting a seemingly damning verdict against Marxism as a form of politics. The planned economies based on collectivized property of these states were indicted as failures, and their totalitarian regimes called into question the very notion of working class rule. The fall of communism thus profoundly affected the Left’s ability to imagine the overcoming of capitalism, and the possibility of a classless society beyond it. But in passing into history, the meaning of 1989 can also be reconsidered.
The Platypus Affiliated Society wants to use this anniversary to reassess the question of how 1989 weighs on the present. What is the significance of 1989 in its historical context, and what is its relevance for Left politics today? This panel was held by the Platypus Affiliated Society on Feb. 17th, 2015 at NYU.
One of four panels held by the Platypus Affiliated Society at Left Forum 2014, from May 30th to June 1st, 2014.
We generally assume 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 current 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. We hope 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.
Speakers:
Jon Bekken
Alan Milchman
James Livingston