This conference aims to rethink the history of the left, its unrealized trajectories, and its failure during the global crisis of the 1970s through a comparative and multidisciplinary perspective (political economy, sociology, history). It will address the strategy of political organizations, the attempts at planning on the scale of socialist states, and the various forms of opposition generated against this global transnational movement. It will pose also the crucial question of the scalar strategy (national, European, international) of organizations through the narratives of actors to understand what the “transnational” nature of social movements means. It will offer an interpretation in terms of unrealized opportunities that highlights moments of conjunctures and political choices, dialectically articulated with the economic conditions of possibility, in the conjuncture of the crisis of Fordism.
Program:
10.00 am: Welcome of the speakers and coffee
Political Economy and the Left: 10.30 am – 12.15 pm
Benjamin Bürbaumer (Economist, Sciences Po Bordeaux): Going back to the old road: the high-speed capitalist restructuring of the Chinese Communist Party’s policy planning
Hannah Bensussan (Economist, Université Paris 13): The Cybersyn experience and the use of information technologies in socialist planning of Chile
Gautham Shiralagi (Historian, Columbia University): A crooked line: state, capital, and the crisis of planning in India’s 1970s
Political geographies and the Left:1.30 pm – 3.30 pm
Daniel Finn (Historian, Editor at Jacobin) : Northern Ireland’s New Left and the legacy of 1968
Hèla Yousfi (Sociologist, Université Paris Dauphine): The Tunisian Left though the struggles for Palestine
Ben Gowland (Human Geographer, University of Oxford): Radical alternatives in the Anglophone Caribbean
3.30 pm – 4 pm: Coffee break
Political sociology and history of the Left: 4 pm-5 pm
Matt Myers (Historian, University of Oxford): Comparing the Left in France, Italy, Germany and the UK during the seventies
Marlène Rosano-Grange (Political Science, Sciences Po-Oxford): European integration and the experience of the Left in Southern Europe
5.30 pm: Concluding remarks
