David Haack Platypus Review 45 | April 2012 [PDF] In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx disagrees with Hegel’s famous quote about history when he writes, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce…”[1] Occupy [...]

Carl Davidson, Tom Riley, and Mel Rothenberg Platypus Review 40 | October 2011 [PDF] On May 19, 2011, Platypus invited Carl Davidson, formerly of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Guardian Weekly, Tom Riley of the International Bolshevik Tendency, and Mel Rothenberg, formerly of the Sojourner Truth Organization, to reflect on “The [...]

http://www.archive.org/details/RethinkingTheNewLeftchicago11910 Public forum of the Platypus Affiliated Society TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 9TH 6:00 PM UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL HOUSE ASSEMBLY HALL 1414 EAST 59TH STREET SPEAKERS: Mark Rudd Alan Spector Osha Neumann Tim Wohlforth MODERATOR: Spencer A. Leonard The memory of the 1960s, which has long kindled contestation and debate on the means and ends of [...]

Andony Melathopoulos A bustling city at dawn. Industrious workers set out from their homes, coming and going in a perfect and productive ballet. But by evening the workers vanish. No trace of foul play. No bodies left behind. Mass disappearances like this have recently occurred across the globe, not of humans, but of millions of [...]

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century
Toward a Theory of Historical Regression
THE ABANDONMENT OF EMANCIPATORY POLITICS in our time has not been, as past revolutionary thinkers may have feared, an abandonment of revolution in favor of reformism. Rather, because the revolutionary overcoming of capital is no longer imagined, reformism too is dead. As the task of achieving human society beyond capital has been abandoned, nothing worthy of the name of politics takes its place, nor could it. The project of freedom has now altogether receded from view. For, while bourgeois thinkers like Hegel were no doubt mistaken in their identification of capital with freedom, they nevertheless grasped that the question of freedom only poses itself with reference to the capital problematic.