Columbia University Platypus Fall 2021 Reading Group: What is the Left? What is Marxism?

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AFGHANISTAN WAS INTENDED BY THE U.S. in the 1980s to be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam War. But it is the United States today that is experiencing a second Fall of Saigon in Kabul.

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The following is a response to a panel hosted by the Melbourne chapter of the Platypus Affiliated Society on May 22, 2021 at the Clyde Hotel in Carlton, Australia, which addressed the question, “What is capitalism, and why should we be against it?”

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FOR A NEW GENERATION grappling with anti-black violence and capitalism, it is no accident that Cedric Robinson’s book, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, is making a comeback.

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KAUTSKY’S MARXISM COULD BE attractive for some of today’s open-minded radical egalitarians. No whiff of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet experiment that went so badly wrong, or the economically successful totalitarian, state-capitalist Chinese version. And no hint of the fossilized, denunciatory vanguardism of Trotskyite sects.

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