10/17/2023
On June 2nd, 2023, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel called "Decolonisation and the Left."
Hosted at the Cambridge Jesus Lane Quaker Meeting House.
Description:
Over the past few years and particularly since the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, decolonisation has appeared as a federating catchword for radical politics in Britain and elsewhere. It appears to encompass a wide array of phenomena, forms of activism, and demands, and varies considerably in different geographical contexts, making it difficult to define it. Yet to demand decolonisation today necessarily points to the legacy of the sometimes drastic failures and limitations of decolonisation in different historical moments - post-WW2 struggles for national self-determination, Wilsonianism, the Bolivarian revolutions, and, perhaps above all, the American Revolution itself. To call for decolonisation, rather than for the more traditionally Leftist slogans of anti-imperialism, national self-determination, and antiracism, also means questioning the Left’s - and Marxism’s - own relation to liberalism.
What is decolonisation for the Left today? What are its aims, and how can they be achieved today? How and why were previous phases of decolonisation a failure or incomplete? What would it take to complete it? What tasks have we inherited from those failures? What potential exists today for fulfilling these tasks? How can the contemporary decolonisation movement help achieve this? How does decolonisation relate to the task of socialism, if at all? How does it relate to other ideas such as ‘anti-imperialism’ or ‘anti-racism’? What bearing does the contemporary movement offer on previous forms of radical politics, and how might these earlier struggles judge the present?
Panelists:
- Ralph Leonard (British-Nigerian independent writer for UnHerd, Areo, Sublation, and other publications)
- James Heartfield (ex-RCP, Spiked Online contributor, recent author of a book on Britain's empire)
- Andrew Sanchez (Cambridge dept. of Social Anthropology)
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The Platypus Affiliated Society organizes reading groups, public fora, research, and journalism focused on problems and tasks inherited from the "Old" (1920s-30s), "New" (1960s-70s), and post-political (1980s-90s) Left, for the possibilities of emancipatory politics today.
On June 2nd, 2023, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel called "Decolonisation and the Left."Hosted at the Cambridge Jesus Lane Quaker Meeting Hous...
