On October 30, 2024, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion at the University of Chicago on the then-upcoming 2024 U.S. presidential election. The event’s speakers were Jorge Mújica, Chicago labor organizer and member of Morena; Chris Cutrone, founding member and teacher in Platypus and lead organizer of the Campaign for a Socialist Party; and Eddie Liger Smith, founding member and executive of the American Communist Party. Panelists were asked to respond to the following prompt: How should the Left approach the 2024 election? Would a Harris administration offer new opportunities for the Left? Would a Trump administration? What is to be made of third-party candidates?
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Presented on October 30, 2024, for the panel discussion “The Left and the 2024 election” with Eddie Liger Smith (American Communist Party) and Jorge Mujica, hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society at the University of Chicago.
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Was die Nazis den Juden antaten, war unsagbar: die Sprachen hatten kein Wort dafür, denn selbst Massenmord hätte gegenüber dem Planvollen, Systematischen und Totalen noch geklungen wie aus der guten alten Zeit des Degerlocher Hauptlehrers. Und doch mußte ein Ausdruck gefunden werden, wollte man nicht den Opfern, deren es ohnehin zu viele sind, als daß ihre Namen erinnert werden könnten, noch den Fluch des Nicht gedacht soll ihrer werden antun. So hat man im Englischen den Begriff genocide geprägt.
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I IDENTIFY STRONGLY WITH the wrongly accused. So does America more broadly. And Trump has been wrongly accused. If you are in the right, then there is no need to lie. And they have lied about Trump.
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MILTON FRIEDMAN FAMOUSLY DECLARED, on the threshold of the neoliberal revolution he helped usher in, “We are all Keynesians now!” Also around this time, Michel Foucault said that “We are all Marxists now.” The point was to thus thrust aside, by treating as safely past, something longstanding as a banality that could be ignored — as Marx said the Young Hegelians had done to Hegel. Friedman, like Hegel, might be wrongly overlooked by subsequent generations as a “dead dog.”
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