On October 16, 2008, a panel discussion titled What is a Movement? A Discussion on the Meaning and Direction of Left Political “Movements” Historically and Today was held in Chicago. The panelists were Luis Brennan of the new Students for a Democratic Society, Elena Davis of Pomegranate Health Collective, Chuck Hendricks of UNITE/HERE, Jorge Mujica of Movimiento 10 de Marzo, and Richard Rubin of Platypus. The following edited transcript represents only a portion of a more extensive and wide-ranging discussion.
August 24th, 2009 | Platypus Review editor | 1 comment | ContinuedArchive for Platypus Review editor
The Failure of the Islamic Revolution
The nature of the present crisis in Iran
Chris Cutrone
Confusion on the Left around the 2009 electoral crisis in Iran has been expressed both in defense of President Ahmadinejad’s claim to victory as well as by support of Iranian dissidents and protesters. Slavoj Žižek has weighed in, questioning prevailing understandings of the nature of the Iranian regime and its Islamist character. Responses to the current crisis have recapitulated problems on the Left in understanding the Islamic Revolution since 1979. All share in attributing to Iran an autonomous historical rhythm or logic of its own, rather than as a symptomatic effect of a greater history. Žižek has come closest to addressing this issue of greater context, but even he has failed to address the history of the Left.
August 24th, 2009 | Platypus Review editor | 1 comment | Continued
30 years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran
An interview with Ervand Abrahamian
Spencer A. Leonard
On Thursday April 16 Platypus Review Editor-in-Chief Spencer A. Leonard interviewed the prominent historian and Columbia University professor Ervand Abrahamian on “Radical Minds” broadcast on UChicago WHPK-FM 88.5 on the subject of “30 years of Islamic Revolution in Iran.” Abrahamian kindly agreed to answer some further questions put to [...]
Film Review: Che
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
Book Review: Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History
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
Left behind: the working class in the crisis
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 | 2 comments | Continued
The role of socialists in the civil war in Sri Lanka
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 [...]
July 1st, 2009 | Platypus Review editor | 0 comments | Continued
Resurrecting the ’30s
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.
Film review: The Baader-Meinhof Complex
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.
Going it Alone: Christopher Hitchens and the death of the Left
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 [...]
