Platypus International Convention 2011

Saturday April 30

112 S. Michigan Ave. classrooms

10am–12pm

Debating Politics on the Left Today: Differing Perspectives

Workshop presentations by different Left organizations

10–11am

• Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
  (50 min)  Room MC908

• Democratic Socialists of America
  (50 min)  Room MC920

11am–12pm

• U.S. Marxist-Humanists
  (50 min)  Room MC908

• Communist Party of Great Britain
  (50 min)  Room MC920

12–1pm

• Lunch provided

1–6PM

Lessons from the History of Marxism

Panel discussions, concurrent sessions

1–2:30PM

• Marxism and the Bourgeois Revolution

  Room MC908

  Jeremy Cohan, Spencer Leonard, Pamela Nogales, James Vaughn

  The “bourgeois revolutions” from the 16th through the 19th centuries — extending into the 20th — conformed humanity to modern city life, ending traditional, pastoral, religious custom in favor of social relations of the exchange of labor. Abbé Sieyès wrote in 1789 that, in contradistinction to the clerical 1st Estate who “prayed” and the aristocratic 2nd Estate who “fought,” the commoner 3rd Estate “worked:” “What has the 3rd Estate been? Nothing.” “What is it? Everything.” Kant warned that universal bourgeois society would be the mere midpoint in humanity’s achievement of freedom. After the last bourgeois revolutions in Europe of 1848 failed, Marx wrote of the “constitution of capital,” the ambivalent, indeed self-contradictory character of “free wage labor.” In the late 20th century, the majority of humanity abandoned agriculture in favor of urban life — however in “slum cities.” How does the bourgeois revolution appear from a Marxian point of view? How did what Marx called the “proletarianization” of society circa 1848 signal not only the crisis and supersession, but the need to fulfill and “complete” the bourgeois revolution, whose task now fell to the politics of “proletarian” socialism, expressed by the workers’ call for “social democracy?” How did this express the attempt, as Lenin put it, to overcome bourgeois society “on the basis of capitalism” itself? How did subsequent Marxism lose sight of Marx on this, and how might Marx’s perspective on the crisis of the bourgeois revolution in the 19th century still resonate today?

• Marxism and Sexual Liberation
  Room MC920

  Pablo Ben, Greg Gabrellas, Jamie Keesling, Ashley Weger

  Although Marxism inflected the sexual liberation movements of the New Left, the successor trends — feminism and queer theory — offer themselves as rival and often hostile emancipatory programs. With the exhaustion of identity politics, what remains of sexual liberation for the Left today? Does the achievement of sexual freedom ultimately depend on the overcoming of capital? How do we digest the legacy and significance of goals long forgotten or abandoned (the abolition of age of consent laws, free and on-demand abortion)? How might a Marxist critique of sexual liberation and its discontents clarify the tasks of the present?

2:45–4:15PM

• Badiou and post-Maoism: Marxism and Communism Today
  Room MC617

  Chris Cutrone, Mike Ely, Joseph Ramsey, John Steele

  How does the prominence of Alain Badiou’s approach to communism today speak to the present historical moment and its emancipatory possibilities? Badiou has prioritized May 1968 in France and the contemporaneous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China for his conception of communism and its potential future. As a former student of Louis Althusser and follower of Jacques Lacan, as well as a philosopher of mathematics, Badiou’s work has emphasized a radical ontology of the “event” to describe revolutionary transformation. In describing the politics of communism, Badiou has traced its modern history to the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, periodizing modern communism’s two great “sequences” from 1792-1871 and 1917-76. How does Badiou’s conception of communism relate to the history of Marxism in the 20th century, with its roots in the 19th century? How does Badiou’s work address the problem of capital, in Marx’s terms, or not, and what are the implications of Badiou’s communism for anticapitalist politics, moving forward? What does Badiou’s work say about the relation of Marxism and communism today?

• Art, Culture and Politics: Marxist Approaches
  Room MC816

  Omair Hussain, Lucy Parker, Pac Pobric, Bret Schneider

  After its apparent exhaustion as a project of social transformation, Marxism seems to remain alive as a cultural and hermeneutic endeavor. Self-avowedly Marxist theorists — Zizek, Badiou, Ranciere — exert a heavy, if opaque, influence on the self-understanding and practice of contemporary art and inspire research programs in the humanities. Despite its radical appeal, “Marxist” theory may ultimately flatter the political and aesthetic claims of the present. Could investigation of of the now obscure historical Marxist cultural critique of Leon Trotsky, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin bring to recognition, and therein challenge the inadaquecies of the present? What opaque historical transformations does the difficulty of such work indicate? How might the long-abused concepts of autonomy, medium specificity, kitsch, avant garde — form part of what Marx called the “ruthless critique of the present.” What might the problems of aesthetics and culture have to do with the political project of the self-education of the Left?

4:30–6PM

• The Marxism of the Second International Radicals
  Room MC908

  Chris Cutrone, Greg Gabrellas, Ian Morrison, Marco Torres

  The legacy of revolution 1917-19 in Russia, Germany, Hungary and Italy is concentrated, above all, in the historical figures Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, leaders of the Left in the Second International (1889-1914) — what they called “revolutionary social democracy” — in the period preceding the crisis of war, revolution, counterrevolution and civil war in World War I and its aftermath. In 1920, Georg Lukács summed up this experience as follows: “[T]he crisis [of capital] remains permanent, it goes back to its starting-point, repeats the cycle until after infinite sufferings and terrible detours the school of history completes the education of the proletariat and confers upon it the leadership of mankind. . . . Of course this uncertainty and lack of clarity are themselves the symptoms of the crisis in bourgeois society. As the product of capitalism the proletariat must necessarily be subject to the modes of existence of its creator. . . . inhumanity and reification.” Nonetheless, these Marxists understood their politics as being “on the basis of capitalism” itself (Lenin). How were the 2nd Intl. radicals, importantly, critics, and not merely advocates, of their own political movement? What is the legacy of these figures today, after the 20th century — as Walter Benjamin said in his 1940 “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” “against the grain” of their time, reaching beyond it? How did Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Lukács contribute to the potential advancement and transformation of Marxism, in and through the crisis of Marxism in the early 20th century? How can we return to these figures productively, today, to learn the lessons of their history?

• Marxism and Political Philosophy
  Room MC920

  Jacob Cayia, Watson Ladd, Nathan Smith

  The profusion of radical and liberal political philosophy in an increasingly reactionary age has gone noted, but not explained or justified. If the New Left inspired the renewed concern with normative theory, displacing the previously dominant positivist social science, how does the era’s unresolved problems persist in the form of philosophical problems? What is the significance of the return to the classical figures of bourgeois political thought: Rousseau, Kant, Hegel? Could the existence of political philosophy be understood, through immanent critique of its most conscious exponents, as a symptom of unnaturalized political defeat?

6–7:30PM

• Dinner provided

7:30–9:30PM

280 S. Columbus Dr. auditorium

• Saturday plenary

The Legacy of Trotskyism

Mike Macnair, Communist Party of Great Britain (Oxford Univ. St. Hugh College)
Bryan Palmer (Trent University)
Richard Rubin, Platypus
representative of the International Socialist Organization
representative of the International Bolshevik Tendency

What is the relevance of Trotskyism for the Left today? On the one hand, there is a simple answer: The mantle of Trotskyism is claimed by many of today’s most prominent and numerous Leftist parties in America and Europe (and beyond). In America, there is the International Socialist Organization; in Britain it is the Socialist Workers Party; and in France the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste also has its origins in Trotskyism. Evidently, the collapse of Stalinism in 1989 left Trotskyism’s bona fides, as anti-Stalinist Marxism, intact. On the other hand, Trotskyism has been infamously associated on the Left with sectarianism — and martyrdom, not least in the circumstances of the murder of Trotsky himself in 1940. Certainly, the ISO, SWP and NPA long ago made their peace in crucial ways with the politics of the post-Marxist New Left — a revisionism that their sectarian brethren (for instance, Trotskyism’s bête noire, the Spartacist League) have proudly and doggedly opposed. However, despite their differences, all varieties of Trotskyism today evince the conditions of the New Left’s “return to Marxism” in the 1970s, for which the legacy of Trotsky provided one significant vehicle (the other being Maoism). For instance Trotsky’s biographer, Isaac Deutscher, strongly influenced the journal, the New Left Review, still a flagship of the Left today. And yet there is something peculiar about this legacy. As one Platypus writer has suggested, Trotsky is as out of place in the post-WWII world as Voltaire or Rousseau would have been in the world after the French Revolution. Trotsky, unlike Trotskyism, exemplifies the classical Marxism of the early 20th century, and that tradition certainly died with him. Thus, before we can understand how Trotskyism’s legacy has influenced the Marxism of our time, we must first answer the question: What has Trotskyism made of Trotsky’s Marxism?