- Platypus Review #112 is out!Issue #112 of the Platypus Review is now online. This issue features an interview with composer Christian Wolff on music and the politics of 1968, Jason Dawsey reconsidering Trotsky's "The Revolution Betrayed" and reviews of "Un peuple et son roi" from Ciat Conlin and "Young Marx" by Katie Ebner-Landy.
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.
The Platypus Review
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2018 HAS BEEN A YEAR OF COMMEMORATION and confusion for the French Left. The fiftieth anniversary of May ‘68 has been marked by museums exhibitions, book launches, and quaintly nostalgic demonstrations, leaving the anniversary proceedings as less a reckoning than a leftist-version of Woodstock II.
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Young Marx is a production at the end of history. It is a production led by a Marx whose ideas are parodied, whitewashed, and made to seem out of touch with contemporary reality.
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In his still unrivalled 1930 History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky celebrated the type of Marxist revolutionaries who, under Vladimir Lenin’s leadership, carried out the October 1917 insurrection in Petrograd. “Bolshevism created the type of authentic revolutionist,” he recalled, “who subordinates to historic goals irreconcilable with contemporary society the conditions of his personal existence, his ideas, and his moral judgments. The necessary distance from bourgeois ideology was kept in the party by a vigilant irreconcilability whose inspirer was Lenin.”
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Jim Igor Kallenberg was a dramaturg at the festival for contemporary music Wien Modern, which this year covered the 50th anniversary of 1968. In this capacity, he spoke with the composer Christian Wolff who wrote a new piece for this years edition of the festival. Christian Wolff is a centeral figure in New Music history and significant especially for the music that developed around 1968 – together with his friends and colleagues John Cage, Frederic Rzewski, Cornelius Cardew, Morton Feldman, and others in the U.S.
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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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