- Platypus Review #109 is out!Issue #109 of the Platypus Review is now online. This issue features Keith Brooks on slavery and the American Revolution, Greg Lucero on the 2018 Labor Notes conference, Neil Davenport discussing the reverberations of 1960s counterculture, Mitchell Abidor on the May 1968 generation gap, and Jack Devine on the potentials for socialist success in American politics
Marxism in the Age of Trump - new book!Trump’s victory is the beginning not the end of a process of transforming the Republican Party as well as mainstream politics more generally that is his avowed goal. So the question is the transformation of democracy—of how liberal democratic politics is conducted. This was bound to change, with or without Trump. Now, with Trump, the issue is posed point-blank. There’s no avoiding the crisis of neoliberalism.
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“THE WORD 'CONSERVATIVE' IS USED by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naïve, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.” Writing for the Independent back in 1990, former Conservative cabinet minister, Norman Tebbitt, demonstrated how the 1960s counter-culture still enraged traditionalists. Hard to believe today, but for conservatives the impact of the 1960s was as problematic as trade unions and flying pickets.
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FORTY-FIVE MILLION AMERICANS collectively owe upward of $1.4 trillion in student loan debt. Yet there is no need to worry. The magic of the free market has a solution for all of your problems. On July 10, 2018, "Paid Off" premiered on TruTV, a new game show that offers contestants a chance to escape a lifetime of debt peonage. “We're capitalists. That's just the way it is.”
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HISTORIANS HAVE LONG GRAPPLED with the contradiction of a revolution under the banner of "all men are created equal" being largely led by slave owners. Once free of England, the U.S. grew over the next 89 years to be the largest slave-owning republic in history. But the July 4th, 1776 Declaration of Independence (DI) was in-itself a revolutionary document.
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IN MAY AND JUNE 1968, somewhere around ten million workers were on strike in France. They occupied their factories and marched in the streets, singing the “Internationale” and calling for an end to the ten years of Gaullist rule. Students, too, were on strike, occupying their schools and marching in the streets, singing the “Internationale” and calling for an end to the ten years of Gaullist rule.
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I RECENTLY ATTENDED THE 2018 LABOR NOTES CONFERENCE, which is probably the largest rank-and-file union conference of organized labor in the United States. I went to find out what labor has been doing across the country and for my own interest in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to see what struggle had broken out amongst its members. Labor Notes has a special place in my heart, not just because it has stood as a bastion for radical organizers since the 80s, but also because it represents, as I see it, the last pillar of labor in the age of Trump.
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Hans Jürgen Urban trat 1984 in die IG Metall ein und ist seit 2007 geschäftsführendes Vorstandsmitglied. Die Fragen im Interview wurden von Daniel Schultz und Anne Franz erarbeitet. Das Interview selbst führte Daniel Schultz. Beide sind Mitglieder der Platypus Affiliated Society.
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Am 07.12.2017 organisierte Platypus eine Podiumsdiskussion in Frankfurt mit dem Titel „Was ist Sozialismus? Zur internationalen Sozialdemokratie“. Die Podiumssprecher wurden dazu eingeladen, die Geschichte der Sozialdemokratie aus linker Perspektive zu reflektieren: Wie sind Sozialdemokratie und soziale Revolution heute, in Anbetracht der Geschichte, noch verbunden? Wofür steht die Sozialdemokratie politisch? Es wurden eingeladen: Hans-Gerd Öfinger (International Marxist Tendency), André Leisewitz (Zeitschrift Marxistische Erneuerung), Martin Veith (Institut für Syndikalismusforschung), Lukas Schneider (Jusos Frankfurt) und Christoph Spehr (Die LINKE).
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