What has the Left been, and what can it yet become?
Today is Saturday, July 11th, 2009
Rohini Hensman
THE GRUESOME FINALE of Sri Lanka’s 26-year-long civil war drew international attention and considerable concern for the plight of civilians trapped in the war zone. Many people for the first time became aware of a conflict which had already claimed more than 70,000 fatalities. But the publicity tended to obscure rather than clarify the [...]
Platypus Review editor | July 1st, 2009 | Continued
A response to David Harvey and James Heartfield
Ian Morrison
THE LAST FORTY YEARS have been conceptually bewildering for the Left. The withering of working class movements and the rise of the new social movements have coincided with a global shift away from national state-centric (or “Fordist”) modes of accumulation towards a more “global,” neo-liberal capitalism.
Platypus Review editor | May 15th, 2009 | Continued
Book Review: Cottee, Simon and Thomas Cushman (eds.). Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
Spencer A. Leonard
If History did not, as the conservative critic Francis Fukuyama pronounced, come to end in 1989, this is because, in the sense of being the self-realization of freedom, History [...]
Platypus Review editor | March 15th, 2009 | Continued
The coming sharp turn to the Right
Chris Cutrone
In previous articles I have addressed the Presidential campaign of Barack Obama in terms of the historical precedents of MLK, Jr. (the end of “black politics”) and JFK (Iraq and the election). Now I wish to address the final and perhaps most important but problematic comparison that might [...]
Platypus Review editor | November 1st, 2008 | Continued
Chris Cutrone
[The following is a talk given at the Marxist-Humanist Committee public forum on The Crisis in Marxist Thought, hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society in Chicago on Friday, July 25, 2008.]
I want to speak about the meaning of history for any purportedly Marxian Left.
We in Platypus focus on the history of the Left because [...]
Platypus Review editor | October 1st, 2008 | Continued
Benjamin Blumberg and Pam C Nogales C
Moishe Postone is Professor of History at the University of Chicago, and his seminal book Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory investigates Marx’s categories of commodity, labor, and capital, and the saliency of Marx’s critique of capital in the neoliberal context of the present. Rescuing [...]
Platypus Review editor | March 1st, 2008 | Continued
“The Left is Dead! — Long Live the Left!” — Platypus, Chicago
Chris Cutrone
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
— Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)
“The theorist who intervenes in practical controversies nowadays discovers on a regular basis and to his shame that [...]
Platypus Review editor | November 1st, 2007 | Continued
Chris Cutrone
Platypus is an idea for a journal project on the Marxian Left several of us have had for a number of years, starting with two of us with a long political background on the Trotskyist Left, going back to our undergraduate years (1989-92) at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. The journal idea has been grounded in our shared commitments to challenging post-New Left politics. In recent years, the initial two of us were joined by a few University of Chicago students of the critical social theorist and Marx scholar Moishe Postone. We have been motivated by questioning what a Leftist politics today might be — we are struck by the decline if not total demise of the Left, and by the certain absence of Leftist politics informing the world. So our project involves radically interrogating the self-declared “Left,” taking nothing for granted in our sense of the necessity for reformulating a Leftist politics and re-appropriating the history of the Left towards the present.
The Platypus Affiliated Society
The Platypus Affiliated Society, established in December 2006, 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.
Get connected with the Platypus Yahoo! discussion group and the Platypus Facebook group.
[...]
Ryan Hardy
THE STORY ITSELF IS WELL KNOWN: Originally trained as a physician, Ernesto “Che” Guevara was an Argentine revolutionary who played a significant part in the Cuban Revolution. Later, Che tried to help incite revolution in the modern day Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Bolivia, where he was eventually killed in 1967. In [...]
July 6th, 2009 | Platypus Review editor | 1 comment | Continued
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.
Soren Whited
SUSAN BUCK-MORSS‘S RECENT OFFERING, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, takes critical aim at two targets: what she identifies as Eurocentric models of universal history, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rejection of any notion of universality whatsoever in favor of the postmodernist “plurality of alternative models” (ix). [...]
July 1st, 2009 | Platypus Review editor | 0 comments | Continued
Chuck Hendricks, Aaron Hughes, Abraham Mwaura, and James Thindwa
On April 23, 2009, a panel discussion titled Left Behind: The Working Class In The Crisis was held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The panelists were Abraham Mwaura of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, who has worked as an organizer [...]
July 1st, 2009 | Platypus Review editor | 0 comments | Continued
Platypus Marxist reading group
June 28 - August 16
Sundays 1-4PM at:
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
112 S. Michigan Ave.
room 707
Radical bourgeois philosophy: Kant-Hegel-Nietzsche
We will address the greater context for Marx and Marxism through the issue of bourgeois radicalism in philosophy in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Discussion will emerge by working through the development from [...]
Platypus NYC summer 2009 readings
Theory post revolution: Georg Lukács
Saturdays, 1:00pm to 4:00pm
July 11th to August 29th
Puck Building, NYU (4th floor)
295 Lafayette St
Taking stock of the multifaceted universe of positions and goals that constitute Left politics today, we are left with the disquieting suspicion that perhaps a deeper commonality underlies this apparent variety: what exists today is built on the desiccated remains of what was once felt to be possible.
In order to make sense of the present, [...]
Spencer A. Leonard
Deep historical precedents
However sincere its backers or belligerent its enemies, the “War on Terror” is not and cannot become anti-Islamist. This is not because, as some think, there is no Islamist or Taliban-style fascism on the receiving end of America’s War on Terror. Far from it. The reason is that the prosecutors of [...]
Pam C. Nogales C.
The occupation of the New School Graduate Faculty building on 65 5th Ave. began in the late evening on December 17, 2008 and lasted over thirty hours. In the build-up to the action, differences arose respecting the aims and potential effectiveness of an occupation.
Against both a negotiating committee and concrete demands, a [...]
Andony Melathopoulos
The following interview was conducted as an email exchange between Andony Melathopoulos and Terry Glavin in December 2008. Terry Glavin is a Canadian journalist, an outspoken critic of the anti-war movement’s call to withdrawal foreign troops from Afghanistan and a founder of the Afghanistan Canada Solidarity Committee (afghanistan-canada-solidarity.org).
Andony Melathopoulos: You just returned from [...]
Left Forum 2009 “Turning Points”
April 17-19, 2009
Dialectics of Defeat: Towards a Theory of Historical Regression and
Politics of the Contemporary Student Left: Hopes and Failures
David Harvey
Much is to be gained by viewing the contemporary crisis as a surface eruption generated out of deep tectonic shifts in the spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development. The tectonic plates are now accelerating their motion and the likelihood of more frequent and more violent crises of the sort that have been occurring since 1980 [...]
Observations on the Ideological Recovery in France and the United States
Ashleigh Campi
It has been noted that the current economic crisis is of a scale unprecedented in the history of advanced capitalism. Today, three decades since the first stages of a transition of world markets through the expansion of finance capital, we face the first [...]
Tuomas Nevanlinna
I was intrigued to find in The Platypus Review #7 a commentary by Chris Cutrone on the U.S. role in world politics. I found it more sophisticated and original than anything I had previously come across in the mainstream media either here or in Europe.
Before launching my machine, I would like to situate [...]
Sunit Singh
DER BAADER-MEINHOF KOMPLEX (2008) dramatizes the violence that the Leftist group the Rote Armee Fraktion (”Red Army Faction” [RAF] aka the Baader-Meinhof) wreaked across West German cities in the 1970s. The film documents, or, rather, reenacts their streak of violence that started with petty vandalism against storefronts in Frankfurt but that soon escalated into more serious acts.
Historical transformations in social-political context
Chris Cutrone
We in Platypus have anticipated, since our inception in 2006, the possibility of a “return to Marx,” and have sought to inform the terms in which this might take place. We have sought the re-opening of historical issues on the Left with the intention of their fundamental reconsideration, taking nothing for granted, so that we could definitively close the books on stale “debates” in which the “Left” has remained stuck for more than a generation, since at least the 1960s. Given the confusion reigning on the “Left” today, the urgency for this is evident.
On December 6, 2008, a panel discussion titled Progress or Regress? Considering the Future of Leftist Politics Under Obama was held in New York City. The Panelists were: Chris Cutrone of Platypus; Stephen Duncombe, a professor at the Gallatin School at New York University and author of Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (2007); Pat Korte of the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Charles Post of the Detroit-based organization Solidarity; and Paul Street, author of Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008).
May 15th, 2009 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
The reading group schedule with links to the readings for the summer has been posted at:
http://platypus1917.org/2009/06/21/platypus-chicago-summer-2009-radical-bourgeois-philosophy/
Platypus Marxist reading group summer 2009, June 28 - August 16
Radical bourgeois philosophy: Kant-Hegel-Nietzsche
We will address the greater context for Marx and Marxism through the issue of bourgeois radicalism in philosophy in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Discussion [...]
[Andrew Kliman wrote:]
Reply to Chicago Political Workshop, Chris Cutrone, and Principia Dialectica
Posted: May 27th, 2009 | Author: Andrew Kliman | Filed under: Organization, Philosophy | Tags: concreteness, plagiarism, Postone |
On plagiarism, Postone, and “the” present
May 27, 2009
Dear Comrades,
1. First, I want to respond to the charge that I plagiarize Moishe Postone, by categorically denying it. [...]
I am writing with some very brief notes on Adorno’s last writings from 1968-69, the “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” “Resignation,” “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? (AKA “Is Marx Obsolete?”),” and the Adorno-Marcuse correspondence of 1969.
The center of Adorno’s critique of the 1960s New Left was their romantic opposition to capitalism, found, for example, in [...]
I am writing with some brief notes on Adorno’s 1942 essay “Reflections on Class Theory.”
Another writing by Adorno we read in the group, “Imaginative Excesses,” the final section of the aphorisms orphaned from Minima Moralia (1944-47), published in New Left Review as “Messages in a Bottle,” Adorno addresses the division and necessary unity of “workers [...]
