[act-ma] Public Forum: The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution and resistance | Platypus Boston

[ninad pandit]

*The Platypus Affiliated Society in Boston presents*
*A Public Forum*
 *The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and “Resistance”*

*— the problematic forms of “anticapitalism” today —*

*Monday 16 April 2012, 6:30-8:30PM
**Encuentro 5, **33 Harrison Ave, 5th floor, Boston, MA 02111
*(map<http://g.co/maps/cj77j>
)

 [image: Inline image 1]

“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? The discussion concerns a question that has renewed
immediacy in light of the Occupy movement.

Location – Encuentro 5,  33 Harrison Ave, Boston, MA 02111.
(map<http://g.co/maps/cj77j>
)
Time – Monday, April 16, 2012 | 6:30pm until 8:30pm
http://www.facebook.com/events/423855730963519/

*Speakers:*

Gayge (Common Struggle Libertarian Communist Federation <http://nefac.net/>)
Joe Ramsey (Kasama Project<http://boston.platypus1917.org/kasamaproject.org>
)
Laura Lee Schmidt (Platypus <http://platypus1917.org/>)
J. Phil Thompson (MIT <http://dusp.mit.edu/p.lasso?t=5:1:0&detail=jt71>)
Socialist Alternative
<http://boston.socialistalternative.org/wordpress/> (Speaker
TBD)

For more details, contact at boston at platypus1917.org. Latest updates can be
found on our Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/groups/146774129298/

RSVP for the event here: http://www.facebook.com/events/423855730963519/

“[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 ‘resistance.’  The notion of
resistance, however, says little about the nature of that which is being
resisted or of the politics of the resistance involved — that is, the
character of determinate forms of critique, opposition, rebellion, and
‘revolution.’  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)

http://boston.platypus1917.org
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