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You are here: The Platypus Affiliated Society/Archive for tag Laura Lee Schmidt


Panel held on April 16th, 2012, in Boston, as part of the 3 Rs panel series.

Thanks to Doug Enaa Greene (http://www.youtube.com/user/dwgthed) for the video recording.

ā€œAfter 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 ā€˜resistance.ā€™ The notion of resistance, however, says little about the nature of that which is being resisted, or of the politics of the resistance involved.

ā€˜Resistanceā€™ 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. ā€˜Resistanceā€™ 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 ā€˜resistersā€™ do not recognize that that they are a part.ā€

ā€” Moishe Postone, ā€œHistory and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalismā€ (Public CultureĀø 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.

Panelists:
Jeff Booth (Socialist Alternative)
Gayge (Common Struggle Libertarian Communist Federation)
Joe Ramsey (Kasama Project)
Laura Lee Schmidt (Platypus)
J. Phil Thompson (MIT)

Platypus panel at the Left Forum 2010 in New York City, Pace University, March 20, 2010.

Rather than asking what the Left thinks of Iran, this panel will pose the question, what does Iran reveal about the Left, its limitations and failures? This panel will address the crisis of the Islamic Republic and the historical task of the Left to clarify its role regarding the current Green Movement today. The 1979 Islamic Revolution continues to weigh on the political imagination of the Left. Perspectives on the Left either focus on Green Movementā€™s electoral and civil rights struggle, ignoring its Islamist leadership by Mousavi and others, or, in some cases, tout Ahmadinejad as a progressive ā€œanti-imperialist,ā€ denying the discontents expressed in the Green Movement. The 1979 Islamic Revolution continues to haunt the present, in the form of an impoverished imagination of what is possible. We will look more deeply at the political question of Islamism and how the Left can best understand Iranā€™s revolutionary past. What deeper failure on the Left allowed Iran to develop as it has? Whatever claim the current movement has to being secular in form -- that is, popular in discontent, and pluralist in that it possesses no elaborate program -- the legacy of the Islamic Revolution in the current crisis represents the unresolved failure of the Left to achieve greater freedom that cannot be reached through religious or populist means.

Panelists:
Laura Lee Schmidt (Chair) ā€“ Platypus Affiliated Society; History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture, MIT
Siyaves Azeri ā€“ Worker-Communist Party of Iran
Hamid Dabashi ā€“ Columbia University
Christopher Cutrone ā€“ Platypus Affiliated Society; University of Chicago