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.

A conversation concerning the history and legacy of the struggles for sexual liberation. What successes and setbacks have shaped the prospect for LGBTQ and feminist organizing today? Held on Thursday, September 13, 2013, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada.

Panelists:
Karin Cope, Professor of Historical and Critical Studies, NSCAD
Kevin Kindred, Nova Scotia Rainbow Action Project
Evan Coole, Queer Activist, Organizer and Educator
Ashley Weger, Platypus Affiliated Society

Moderated by Cam Hardy (Platypus Affiliated Society)

Questions for panelists:
1. How did the LGBTQ rights movement become such? What has its relation to the Left been, and how has the contemporary political focus on same-sex marriage affect that relation? What are the potentials and limits of present politics and organization around equality and legality? What successes and limitations has it met?

2. How does economic life shape our imaginations about what sexual freedom will look like? For example, arguments for marriage equality have often been made in terms of all the economic disadvantages one faces if one can't marry--extra taxes, loss of healthcare, etc. Does marriage equality solve these issues? Or, counter to marriage, consider the importance of the legal protection of sex work to many on the Left. How are and should economics and sex be bound in sex work? Should sex work be abolished or protected? What role would the State play in a Left that seeks to decrease both human economic precariousness and human dependence on the economy more generally?

3. Marriage has always been about the linking of the intimate and the public. The demand that "love" dominate marriage--its development in the 19th century away from a mere economic arrangement between parents--was a way to demand that the public sphere as represented in the state recognize the power and value of individual life. If once progressive, though, this also comes to represent the naturalization of the state as the voice of authority over private life, as well as the retention of the family form which has represented ages of abuse (of women, children, etc.), and enshrines the principle of property over people. What forms of personal/public relation are possible now? What relationship ought the Left fight for between love, the private and the public?

4. What do we mean by a liberated sexuality? That which has positioned itself counter to what we might deem âheteronormativeâ has in the past been given the qualification as âabnormal.â In fighting for greater civil equality, these formerly marginalized sexualities have often fought on the basis of their ânaturalâ or ânormalâ characters. Does recognition for equality often homogenize the formerly marginal into normative bonds (e.g. marriage, family, monogamy, etc.), or is sexual emancipation necessarily antagonistic to the sexual mainstream? Are neither of these positions adequate?

A roundtable on the Quebec Left following the student strike / Une table ronde sur l'avenir de la Gauche québecoise à la lumière de la grève étudiante
Hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society / Présenté par la Platypus Affiliated Society
June 18, 2012 / Lundi, 18 heures / le 18 juin 2012
QPIRG McGill

Participants:
Matthew Brett (Canadian Dimension magazine editorial collective, Secretary for the Society for Socialist Studies, Concordia University)
Jamie Burnett (McGill student activist)
Brad Fougere (International Workers of the World (IWW) / Midnight Kitchen)
Coralie Jean (Mouvement Étudiant Révolutionnaire (MER-PCR))
Molly Swain (Gender, Sexuality Diversity, and Feminist Studies Student Association, McGill)

Moderator:
Andony Melathopoulos (Platypus)

Description: While it is clear that the student strike in Quebec expresses more than just discontent against tuition fee hikes, it’s less clear if there is general agreement among strikers on what follows the strike. For many the strike is about resisting neo-liberalism and its assault on the "modèle québécois", the system of labour legislation, educational reform and public welfare that emerged from the 1960s Quiet Revolution. But for others the strike signals a possibility to go beyond the past. This is has been expressed as a desire to pick up where the 1970s social democracy left off through demands such as free tuition. Others view Quebec's social democratic past as being part of the problem. They judge that parliamentary approaches have grown irrelevant in the face of a direct democracy that has carried the strike through five months in spite of massive police reaction.

The Platypus Affiliated Society is hosting this roundtable to explore these different political visions for the future of the Quebec Left. We encourage political disagreement among participants in the spirit of clarifying the potential directions and further development of the student movement. We assert that only when we are able create an active culture of thinking and debating on the Left without it proving prematurely divisive can we begin to imagine a Leftist politics adequate to the historical possibilities of our moment. We may not know what these possibilities for transformation are. This is why we think it is imperative to create avenues of engagement that will support these efforts

Déscription: Bien qu'il soit évident que la grève étudiante au Québec exprime plus qu'un simple mécontentement face à la hausse des frais de scolarité, il est moins évident de discerner une position commune parmi les grévistes par rapport à ce qui suivra la grève. Plusieurs voient la grève comme étant une forme de résistance contre le néo-libéralisme et l'assaut que celui-ci exerce sur le "modèle québécois": le système de la législation du travail, de réforme éducative et de sécurité sociale établie lors de la Révolution tranquille des années 60. Mais pour d'autres, la grève signale la possibilité d'aller au delà du passé. Ce point de vue a été exprimé par le désir de prendre la relève de la démocratie sociale des années 70 à travers des demandes comme celle de l'abolition totale des frais de scolarité. Encore d'autres grévistes voient le passé social-démocrate du Québec comme faisant partie du problème. Ceux-ci jugent que l'approche parlementaire est devenue désuète face à une démocratie directe qui a porté la grève pendant 5 mois, en dépit d'une massive réaction policière.

La Platypus Affiliated Society présente cette table ronde dans le but d'explorer ces différentes visions politiques de l'avenir de la Gauche québécoise. Nous encourageons le désaccord politique parmi les participants, dans l'esprit de pouvoir clarifier les directions et développements possibles au sein du mouvement étudiant. Nous affirmons que nous ne pourrions imaginer une politique de gauche, adéquate aux possibilités historiques de notre moment, que lors d'avoir créé une culture de débat et de pensée active au sein de la Gauche elle-même. Il se peut que nous n'avons pas encore pris conscience de ces possibilités de transformation. Voici pourquoi nous croyons en l'impératif de créer des forums de délibération qui soutiendront ces efforts de prise de conscience.

A panel discussion with audience Q & A on the problematic forms of "anticapitalism" today.
Held on Wednesday 13th June, 7pm at the University of London Union (ULU), Malet Street, London.

SPEAKERS:
Clare Solomon (co-editor of Springtime: The New Student Rebellions (2011); President of the University Of London Union in 2010)

James Heartfield (active in extra-parliamentary Left for thirty years; author of The 'Death of the Subject" Explained (2002), and the forthcoming Unpatriotic History of the Second World War (2012)).

James Turley (member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) for five years, and a regular writer for the Weekly Worker; co-editor and contributer to Red Mist, a blog of Marxist cultural commentary)

Matt Cole (organizer, researcher, editor, writer, Rousseauist; Kingston University)

Moderated by:
Laurie Rojas (founding member of the Platypus Affiliated Society, editor of the Platypus Review).

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"[After the 1960s, 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 [. . .] focused on the bureaucratic stasis of the [Fordist/late 20th Century] world: it echoed the destruction of that world by the dynamics of capital [with the neo-liberal turn after 1973, and especially after 1989].

The idea of a fundamental transformation became bracketed and, instead, was replaced by the more ambiguous notion of âresistance.â The notion of resistance, however, says little about the nature of that which is being resisted or of the politics of the resistance involved â that is, the character of determinate forms of critique, opposition, rebellion, and ârevolution.â The notion of 'resistance' frequently expresses a deeply dualistic worldview that tends to reify both the system of domination and the idea of agency.

'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; that is, it fails to grasp the dynamic historical context of which it is a part."

- Moishe Postone, "History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism"
(Public Culture 18:1, 2006)

1. Since the 1960s, and especially since the 1990s, struggles for social, economic and political emancipation have been conceived less in terms of structural reforms or revolutionary transformation and more in terms of "resistance." How do you define âresistanceâ and how do you understand its role in possibilities for social change?

2. One powerful way "resistance" has been conceived has been in terms of "culture" and practices of âeveryday life.â How do you understand the implicit (if not explicit) distinction thus made of politics directed at society as a whole, from the more apparently mundane concerns and stakes of quotidian existence?

3. What, in your understanding, are the reasons for and the consequences of this historical shift away from movements for reform or revolutionary politics, to tactics, strategies, and self-understandings in terms of "resistance?"

4. Where do the new forms of politics of âresistanceâ point, in your estimation, for social-emancipatory possibilities, today and in the future?

5. What kinds of change do you envision on the horizon of present social concerns? How do you imagine the potential manifestations of such change?

6. What can and should those on the Left and those interested in working towards social emancipation do, tactically and strategically, in view of such possibilities for change?