One of the plenary sessions held at the third annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, hosted by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago between April 29–May 1, 2011, set about exploring the legacy of Trotsky’s Marxism. Speakers Mike Macnair of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Bryan Palmer of Trent University, Richard Rubin [...]

Platypus presents: Lessons from the history of Marxism @ Left Forum March 18-20, 2011 Pace University next to City Hall, New York City online registration page: http://www.leftforum.org/node/23 directions: http://www.leftforum.org/directions Please join us for the following panel discussions: The Bourgeois Revolution: from Marx’s point of view //Saturday, March 19 | 10:00 a.m. – 11:50 a.m. | [...]

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century
Toward a Theory of Historical Regression
THE DATE PROPOSED for me to discuss, 1933, immediately summons up two names: Roosevelt and Hitler—Reformism or Barbarism. I wish, though, to couple them with another pair, and another date. The date is 1940. The names are Trotsky and Benjamin. These four names are meant both as contrasts and parallels. At first glance, Hitler and Roosevelt, the New Deal and fascism, might seem polar opposites. But many contemporaries understood Roosevelt and fascism as addressing comparable problems, albeit by somewhat different methods. Similarly, while Benjamin the melancholic mandarin and Trotsky the fiery revolutionary might seem at opposite poles of Marxist discourse, it is the thesis of Platypus that they are both responses to the same crisis of Marxism, just as Hitler and Roosevelt are responses to the crisis of capitalism. These two crises, the crisis of capitalism and the crisis of Marxism, have determined the history of the 20th century, and continue to weigh on the history of the 21st.

Laurie Rojas ON SEPTEMBER 24, 2009, approximately 900 Chicagoans rallied on the sidewalks in front of the Park Hyatt Hotel near the Magnificent Mile. At the height of rush hour, about 200 members and community allies of UNITE HERE Local 1, Chicago’s hospitality workers’ union, arrived at the scene and blocked all four lanes of [...]

The Platypus Synthesis: History, theory, and practice Transcript of the plenary presentations and discussion at the 1st annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, Chicago, June 12–14, 2009. (Audio recording.) Four types of ambiguity Richard Rubin THE TITLE OF THIS TALK, “Four Types of Ambiguity,” is, of course, a take-off on William Empson’s classic 1930 book [...]