Ursula Jensen

A Panel Discussion at the Second Platypus European Conference in Frankfurt, November 7 2015. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Cornelia Möser (HU Berlin) Joy McReady (LFI) Lucy Parker (Platypus Affiliated Society) Ursula Jensen (IBT) Moderated by Hannah Schroeder. Description A namesake of Juliet Mitchell’s 1966 essay, this panel will explore the long history of the struggle for women’s liberation from the vantage point of the Left today. [Read More]

Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Description Christina Kaindl (Die LINKE) Jakub Baran (Partia Razem) Ursula Jensen (IBT) Manuel Kellner (ISL) Moderated by Lucy Parker. Description In spite of many different political currents and tendencies, perhaps the most significant question informing the “Left” today is the issue of “political party.” Various “Left unity” initiatives have been taking place in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and subsequent downturn, following Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, alongside continuing “post-political” tendencies inherited from the 1980s-90s (perspectives such as expressed by Hardt and Negri’s Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth, John Holloway’s Change the World without Taking Power, the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection, the California student protestors’ Communique from an Absent Future), the formation of SYRIZA in Greece, and the new party Podemos in Spain (who reject the organized “Marxist Left” as well as the established labor unions as part of the existing “political caste”). [Read More]

Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Ursula Jensen (IBT) Paul Demarty (CPGB) Moderated by Richard Rubin. Description In the late nineteenth century, working people’s response to capital was expressed in the political demand for Socialism. This demand galvanized the formation of European Social Democratic parties guided by the ideology of Marxism. Among the most influential members of the German Social Democratic Party, the political leaders of the Second International, agreed that the primary task of Social Democratic parties was bringing about the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, the decisive political struggle between capital and labor. [Read More]