Ben Lewis and Tom Riley with Chris Cutrone Platypus Review 47 | June 2012 [PDF] On March 31, 2012, the Platypus Affiliated Society invited Ben Lewis of the Communist Party of Great Britain and Tom Riley of the International Bolshevik Tendency to speak on the theme of “Lenin and the Marxist Left after #Occupy” [...]
June 7th, 2012 | admin | 1 comment | ContinuedAll Posts Tagged With: "politics"
Rethinking the New Left forum (Chicago, 11/9/10) audio
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 [...]
November 9th, 2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
Which way forward for sexual liberation? (New York, 11/8/10) audio
A roundtable discussion hosted by Platypus NYU with speakers: Kenyon Farrow, Queers for Economic Justice Greg Gabrellas, Platypus Gary Mucciaroni, Political Science, Temple University Sherry Wolf, International Socialist Organization This event was hosted by Platypus NYU on Monday, November 8th, 2010 http://newyork.platypus1917.org http://www.archive.org/details/WhichWayForwardForSexualLiberationARoundtableHostedByPlatypusNyu With roots in earlier radical traditions, movements that sought to radically redefine [...]
November 8th, 2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
NYC Forum: 30 Years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran: The Tragedy of the Left
The Platypus Affiliated Society presents
30 Years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran: The Tragedy of the Left
6:00pm Sunday, September 13, 2009
at The Brecht Forum 451 West St New York, NY
Platypus at Left Forum 2009
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
notes on Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism an Infantile Disorder (1920)
From Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism — An Infantile Disorder (1920): http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ “[E.g.,] Parliamentarianism has become “historically obsolete”. That is true in the propaganda sense. However, everybody knows that this is still a far cry from overcoming it in practice. Capitalism could have been declared — and with full justice — to be “historically obsolete” many decades [...]
April 13th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 1 comment | Continued
my letter to The Nation on “Re-Imagining Socialism”
The following letter that I wrote will be published in The Nation. I wrote in response to the article “Rising to the Occasion” (published elsewhere as “The ‘S’ Word”) by Barbara Ehrenreich (author of Nickel and Dimed) and Bill Fletcher, Jr. (spokesperson for the Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization and co-founder of Progressives for Obama), [...]
April 1st, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 1 comment | Continued
notes on Lenin, What is to be done? — Platypus “neo-Leninism?”
I am writing with some notes and suggestions on Lenin’s What is to be done? (1902). I’d like to start with a quotation from Lenin’s first footnote, in the chapter “Dogmatism and Freedom of Criticism:” “At the present time (as is now evident), the English Fabians, the French Ministerialists, the German Bernsteinians, and the Russian [...]
February 23rd, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued
note on recent readings: Slaughter, Nettl, Luxemburg
After the recent discussion of Luxemburg’s pamphlet on Reform or Revolution? (1900/08), there might be some confusion regarding the relationship between Luxemburg’s formulations and the raison d’etre of Platypus as an organized project today. — What is the point of reading Luxemburg today? Whereas Luxemburg was critiquing Eduard Bernstein and other “revisionists’” arguments that the [...]
February 10th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 1 comment | Continued
Trotsky on “degeneration” and “entire generations passing into discard” (1933)
“It is not a question of counterposing abstract principles. . . . [W]ith the degeneration of organizations, with the passing of entire generations into discard . . . the necessity . . . arises of mobilizing fresh forces on a new historical stage. . . . With inevitable halts and partial retreats it is necessary [...]
February 7th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued