The following is an edited transcript of a panel that took place at the Left Forum in New York City on June 30, 2019, discussing Hal Draper's 1973 essay “Anatomy of the Micro-Sect”.
[. . .]
INDONESIA PROMISED AN AMBITIOUS PROGRAM of agrarian reform. Based on that ambition, Jokowi’s government released a presidential regulation on agrarian reform. This was done, together with the 2018 Global Land Forum meeting, in Bandung, several months before the presidential election.
[. . .]
CAPITALISM IS IN A MOVING CONTRADICTION in that it presses to reduce labor employed to a minimum and yet posits wage labor as the only way for 99 percent of people to make a living. People may recognize this as a simplified (or bastardized, if you like) version of a section of Marx’s contentious “Fragment on Machines.”
[. . .]
WHEN IT COMES TO LYOTARD’S POSTMODERN THESIS about the end of grand narratives, from enlightenment to historicism, everybody knows he’s talking about Marx. Politically speaking, no other grand narrative survived the 19th century.
[. . .]
THE AVANT-GARDE WAS A MODERN THING. It came in the middle of the nineteenth century, circa 1848, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, as the proletariat multiplied and the democratic spirit became enamored of the absolutist state under the bewitching spell of the antagonism of capital and labor.
[. . .]
