The renewed interest in “socialism” has stimulated plenty of debate about what this term means in a 21st-century context, and that discussion, of course, requires knowledge of socialist history about which most people in the United States know little. That is why Marius Ostrowski’s able translation of Eduard Bernstein’s works on the German Revolution of 1918–19 is so important.
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TERENCE RENAUD IS A LECTURER in Humanities and History at Yale, and his book New Lefts is an excellent intellectual and political history that is both universalistic yet grounded in its universalism in a deep and careful study of a particular political milieu, that of the New Beginnings socialist group in Germany from the 1920s to the emergence of the European New Left that culminated in the French student uprising of 1968.
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On April 29, 2022, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel titled “Gender and the Left.” The speakers were Sara Rukaj (author of Jungle World), Roswitha Scholz (Gruppe EXIT!) and Stefan Hain (Platypus Affiliated Society). A video of the discussion can be found at , and the original German transcript can be found at
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ABOUT FOUR YEARS AGO, I made some statements on a panel about environmentalism. The tone, and content of those remarks was utterly flippant, promethean, and apathetic towards ecology. I am not so much revising my position that ecology is a human construct, nor that the apocalypticism of the modern ecology movement, and enslavement to the Democratic Party, are justified.
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THE COMMENTARY ON THE Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) must exceed the word count of that little pamphlet by a factor of thousands, if not more. To this grand number is added another, A Spectre, Haunting: On The Communist Manifesto by British Marxist fantasy writer China Miéville.
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