On Oct. 3 and Oct. 4, the Politics Department and Oberlin’s chapter of Young Democratic Socialists of America will hold a conference titled “Capitalist Crisis and Democratic Socialism: A Working Conference,” which will be open to the public. James Monroe Professor of Politics and East Asian Studies Marc Blecher and third-year College student and co-chair of YDSA Dylan Kim sat down with the Review to discuss the conference.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is this conference about?
MB: It’s about potentialities for democratic socialism in light of the crisis that’s all around us. Out of all this that we’re in right now, so many different aspects of this crisis, there’s an opportunity. There’s a strand of thinking in political science — American political development. It’s a way of looking at political change that grounds it in the historical process. American political development is a lot about: if you want to understand where things ended up, or could end up, you really have to analyze how we got there and how the previous thing fell apart very specifically. We’re trying to understand the crisis because it will set limits and also create openings and opportunities for a democratic socialist future. And we want to understand what those are.
It’s not just supposed to be a bunch of academics talking theoretically into the air. It’s supposed to be a working conference.
What does it mean for it to be a working conference?
DK: I would say, at least in my vision, I didn’t really want it to be so many lectures and presentations — though obviously the speakers will give a lecture or presentation — but rather more of a dialogue, to sprout some ideas and get opinions from students.
MB: And implicit in what you said, the idea is not just to learn about all these things, but to chart a pathway, a blueprint to move forward. It’s action-oriented; the idea is to come out of it with some sketches or ideas of a way forward.
How did this come about?
DK: Last semester, I started YDSA. We didn’t have that much funding, and so I was kind of building up more toward what we were going to do in the fall. I have a lot of big things planned, and one of the things was that I wanted to invite a big speaker to come and hold a YDSA talk.
I told Marc about it, and he was telling me about how the Politics department was planning to bring these people, not all at the same time, but throughout this semester, because they’re all affiliated with Oberlin — either they taught here or they went here.
So we, together, devised this conference because we felt like the puzzles just fit in really well together.
The first three speakers and the first session lay out a lot of context and foundation for why we’re talking about potential solutions in the first place. And then the second day with [President of The Nation] Bhaskar Sunkara, [Co-founder and Executive Director of The Labor Institute] Les Leopold, and [Co-founder and Co-editor of The American Prospect] Robert Kuttner… I was imagining Bhaskar to give more of a democratic socialist talk, because it was initially more for membership, for people to become more interested in YDSA. But now I think it’s going to be so much more than that. Especially now, we need a dialogue between students and academics to discuss how to go forward, especially because a lot of these Oberlin students are going to go on to do important things later in life.
Why hold this conference now?
MB: It’s obvious that the crisis that’s been building for decades has finally come to a head and plunged us into everything but an economic crash — which may still come.
The moment is always ripe to keep pushing forward. And this one seems particularly ripe.
DK: I think this is a very important period in history where we need these Obies to go out in the world and make as much change as possible.
What do you hope this conference will accomplish?
DK: I want people to start being more hopeful. I think a lot of people are very critical of society now, but they kind of believe there’s no solution or no alternative — just like the world’s ending. A lot of people are feeling hopeless for the future, and I feel like this conference has the ability, or the potential, to refuel that drive in students to actually do something about it instead of just waiting for everything to end.
MB: The left is just so far behind. You can see that so much of the left is just bamboozled by what’s going on, and the Democratic Party is not doing a very good job of responding. Antonio Gramsci has this distinction between a war of position and a war of maneuver. A war of position is where you build up your strengths at the rear, you build up your supply lines, you train your troops, you dig your trenches, you improve communications, you assemble all the pieces you need, which takes a very long time. Decades. And then, only when you’re more or less accomplished, you do the war of maneuver, which is, in the military, you say: out of the trenches, over the top, go attack. And it’s clear to me that the right wing has been engaging in a brilliant war of position for decades, and that now what we’re experiencing is the war of maneuver. They’re finally attacking. They couldn’t really do it in the first Trump term, but now they’re really doing it. So the left has to start. And to counterattack is going to take a while and a lot of learning.
After the dust settles on the conference on Saturday afternoon, after lunch, I think everybody will sit down and decide whether there’s some sort of publication that could come out of this, to decide if we have something worth doing or if we should plan to do it again in a year or two. I don’t know where it’s going to go, but we’re going to keep it open-ended.
Is there anything else you would like the Oberlin community to know about this conference?
MB: I want to add an important distinction. As professors, the Politics department does not have a political agenda. In that capacity, we are not activists, we’re scholars and analysts (though of course we each have our own views as citizens). In terms of the conference, we take the view that the crisis of democratic capitalism, and the alternatives of social democracy and democratic socialism, are real, urgent issues in politics and political science, and worth thinking and talking about as such. We also believe that political practice is related to political analysis and theory. But we are not an activist operation. So, from the Politics department’s point of view, all analytical, theoretical, and normative views are welcome, and this conference is not about the department taking a stand. That’s a different posture than YDSA’s, which is explicitly ortiented to promoting political change.
