Panel organized by the Platypus Affiliated Society presented at the 2011 Naturfreundejugend (Friends of Nature) Berlin Herrschaftskritisches Sommercamp, held in August 2011.
-
Introducing Platypus: Hosting the conversation on the death of the Left
What is Platypus?
We will present on the recent history of the Left in the U.S. through the history of the emergence and activities of our new student organization, the Platypus Affiliated Society. Platypus was established in 2006 in response to the failure of the Iraq anti-war movement. We formed an organization dedicated to "hosting the conversation" on the death of the Left. In particular, Adorno's critique of the 1960s New Left resonated powerfully, and led us to explore Adorno's assumptions from the history of Marxism. We find the most interesting and deepest questions and problems of modern history to be raised by Marxism, but not exclusively so. We hope to help clear or at least call critical attention to the present and historical ideological obstacles to the potential for forming a cosmopolitan Left as a truly progressive-emancipatory force.
The history of Platypus
Our first two public fora were in 2007, on the questions of "imperialism" and the anti-war movement, and "resistance" and the problems of neo-anarchism originating in the 1960s. Since then, we have held many further public fora on different topics, such as: the relation between art, culture and politics; immigration; Iran; Israel-Palestine; the labor movement; philosophy and critical theory; and sexual liberation. Also in 2007 we began publishing the Platypus Review, as our forum-in-print for contending perspectives on the Left and its history, reviewing monthly Platypus's various public activities and engagements. Platypus participated in the newly refounded Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), for instance, in collaboration with U.S. Labor Against the War, presenting workshops on the Iraqi Left, and we helped to organize new chapters of the SDS. But with the historical shift of the collapse of the anti-war movement, the financial crisis and economic downturn, and the election of Obama as U.S. President in 2008, Platypus has turned to more independent activity in hosting the conversation on the absence of a true Left, seeking to present more directly questions and problems from the history of Marxism, as guide to why and how the world has arrived at its present state.
Platypus's organizational aims and goals -- an international conversation
We aim at primarily student audiences and participation, trying to intervene in the reproduction of the bad "Left" that takes place pedagogically through both the academic and activist environments to which students are exposed. Beginning in 2009, we began participating in and hosting panel discussions at the annual national conference of the American Left, the Left Forum in New York City, and holding our own annual international convention in Chicago. Beyond the U.S., we have expanded internationally in Canada, Germany, Greece and the U.K., bringing the conversation we seek to host onto a greater global stage. We seek to establish and coordinate as many chapters for doing this work of hosting the conversation on the death of the Left, in as many campus locations, internationally, as possible, in order to make palpable the present absence but continued urgent need for a real Left.
Panelists include Omair Hussain, Jerzy Sobotta, Pam Nogales, and Jacob Cayia.
A lecture by Platypus member James Vaughn upon the history of humanity between 1600 and 1763, given as part of the Platypus summer 2011 radical bourgeois philosophy reading group. Held on July 27, 2011 in Philadelphia.
Platypus Summer Reading Group 2011: Radical Bourgeois Philosophy
Rousseau-Smith-Kant-Hegel-Nietzsche
We will address the greater context for Marx and Marxism through the issue of bourgeois radicalism in philosophy in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Discussion will emerge by working through the development from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche, but also by reference to the Rousseauian aftermath, and the emergence of the modern society of capital, as registered by liberals such as Adam Smith and Benjamin Constant.
"The principle of freedom and its corollary, 'perfectibility,' . . . suggest that the possibilities for being human are both multiple and, literally, endless. . . . Contemporaries like Kant well understood the novelty and radical implications of Rousseau's new principle of freedom [and] appreciated his unusual stress on history as the site where the true nature of our species is simultaneously realized and perverted, revealed and distorted. A new way of thinking about the human condition had appeared. . . . As Hegel put it, 'The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man, who thus apprehended himself as infinite.'"
- James Miller (author of The Passion of Michel Foucault, 2000), Introduction to Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Hackett, 1992)
