A moderated panel discussion hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society on the interrelation of capital, history and ecology, held at Goldsmiths on November 20th, 2013.
Panelists:
- Andy Price (New Compass)
Dr Andy Price is Principal Lecturer and Subject Group Leader in Politics at Sheffield Hallam University. He has written articles on both Bookchin and social ecology and on contemporary radical movements for the academic and popular press. Andy joined Sheffield Hallam in September 2012 following two years as professor of political science at Saint Louis University in Madrid. During his time in Madrid, Andy spent time on the indignados camp and carried out research on the youth protest movement in Spain generally. His first book, Recovering Bookchin: Social Ecology and the Crises of Our Time was published in December 2012 by New Compass Press.
- Camilla Power (University of East London)
Camilla Power is an anthropologist and activist, interested in human origins, and specifically gender relations and ritual among egalitarian hunter-gatherers, with a view to learning how to reenact the human revolution.
- David Black (The Hobgoblin, International Marxist-Humanist Organisation)
David Black is a journalist and historian, who latest book, The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism: Essays on History, Culture, and Dialectical Thought, will be published in January 2014
Description:
The Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen recently characterized the period marked by the start of the industrial revolution in the 18th Century to the present as a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. This periodization is meant to capture a change in the history of the planet, namely that for the first time in history its course will be determined by the question of what humanity will become.
This panel will focus on different interpretations of why the Left has failed to deal with the deepening crisis of the Anthropocene through the 19th and 20th Centuries and how and if this problem is interrelated with the growing problems associated with ecological systems across the earth. While Karl Marx would note that the problem of freedom shifted with the industrial revolution and the emergence of the working class - the crisis of bourgeois society that Marx would term capital - the idea of freedom seemed not to survive the collapse of Marxist politics in the 20th Century. We seem to live in a world in which the fate of ecological systems seem foreclosed, where attempts at eco-modernization seem to emerge many steps behind the rate of ecological degradation. For many, degradation of the environment appears a permanent feature of modern society, something which can only be resisted but never transformed.
This panel will consider the relationship between the history of capital and the Left—and thus the issue of history and freedom - and how it may be linked to our present inability to render environmental threats and degradation visible and comprehensible, and by extension, subject to its conscious and free overcoming by society.
A panel held on April 6, 2013, at the 2013 Platypus International Convention at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Today, to perceive the link between human society and the natural environment does not require that we engage in an effort of great abstraction. Indeed, environmental issues and problems are all around us—e.g., in erratic weather patterns and resource depletion, on the one hand, and reflected in advertisements and political discourse, on the other. What remains paradoxical, however, is the fact that the intensity and scale of societally-induced environmental degradation, which rose to historically unprecedented levels during the latter half of the twentieth century, is synchronous with an equally impressive increase in public concern for and attention to the biophysical world. Intuitively, one would expect wide-spread attention and concern—not to mention the increasing amount of intellectual energy both natural scientists and social scientists have devoted to analyzing the environment-society problematic with an eye toward ameliorating human-induced environmental destruction—to at least lead to a decline in the rate of destruction increasing. Yet, this has not been the case.
Similarly, although societally-induced global ecological despoliation has spurred a felt need for urgent action expressed on behalf of those on the Marxian Left, effective collective mobilization is virtually absent. During the 1960s, the Left became increasingly involved in environmental politics. Some of those committed to Marxism have even refocused their efforts to consider a Marxian understanding of the relation between capitalism and biophysical destruction. Yet, capitalism’s destruction of the environment continues unabated.
Environmental politics remain situated in an uneasy relation to the Marxian Left. On the one hand, the rise of the environmental movement in the 1980s, particularly in Europe, marked the sharp migration of people drawn to Marxism in the 1970s to Green politics. On the other hand, a common theme of environmentalism is to impose limits to growth, sometimes expressed in conservative sentiments against technology, urbanization and cosmopolitanism, things that the Marxian left historically took to be signals of progress. One gets a sense that environmentalism is not motivated by the utopianism that Marx sought to clarify in his own time, but a dystopia to which the Marxian Left hopes to mobilize in the service of Marxism. However, if the linkage between capital and ecological despoliation is itself historically specific, then by extension, the possibility of overcoming capital (and hence, the current nature-society antithesis) must be historically specific as well. This panel invites you to consider the relationship between a) the history of capital and the Marxian Left—and thus the issue of history and freedom; and b) the entwinement of capital and biophysical nature in history in ways that challenge us to scrutinize the present and the contemporary ecological crisis in particular.
Speakers:
Eirik Eiglad (New Compass)
Joseph Green (Communist Voice)
Roger Rashi (Québec solidaire)
At the fifth annual international convention of the Platypus Affiliated Society, speakers from various perspectives were asked to bring their experience of the Left’s recent history to bear on today’s political possibilities and challenges as part of the “Differing Perspectives on the Left” workshop series.
A workshop on New Compass, with Eirik Eiglad, held on April 5th, 2013 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The opening plenary of 2013 Platypus International Convention, a panel held on April 5, 2013, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Recently Leo Panitch, characterized SYRIZA as “the most promising anti-neoliberal party on the European political stage”. This statement reflects the mood of many in the Left, who have seen the huge electoral empowerment of this left Greek party as a spark for a possible global reconstitution of the radical Left. SYRIZA, for them, means shifting the process of radicalization from the periphery to the center, from South America to Europe, hoping to spread even further the development of progressive governments (of which most prominent examples are Venezuela, Bolivia, Equador, et al). For others, SYRIZA is doomed to fail within the limits of the established parliamentary politics, and they are certain that its leadership will betray all hopes, as actually they think inevitably happens when left political forces, no matter how radical, think that they can use the “bourgeois state” for their causes.
Speakers:
Eirik Eiglad (New Compass)
Andreas Karitzis (SYRIZA)
James Turley (Communist Party of Great Britain)
