The Platypus Affiliated Society

Intergalactic mutant music: The music of Christian Wolff and the politics of ‘68: An interview with Christian Wolff

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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Film Review: Pierre Schoeller, Un peuple et son roi. Paris: Archipel 35, 2018.

Ciat Conlin

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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To topple the Stalinist bureaucracy: Reconsidering Leon Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed

Jason Dawsey

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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Ep. 12: On Trump and trans-people, Berlin's anti-AFD protest, and the trouble with Die Linke

Suzy Vogenthaler, David Faes and Pamela Nogales dispel the liberal confusion over the Obama administration's reforms for trans-people. Laurie and Pamela sit with Dorna Darabi for a report of the recent anti-AFD protest in Berlin with over 150,000 participants. And Stefan Hain and Betül Yildrim talk to Pamela at the Freie University coffee break about the divisions within Die Linke, the decline of the Social Democratic Party and German politics after Merkel.

For more on trans politics see David Faes's articles for the new Platypus Review, issue 111.
(1) "Transgender liberation? A movement whose time has passed"
platypus1917.org/2018/11/02/trans…time-has-passed/
(2) "#MeToo and the millennial sex panic"
platypus1917.org/2018/11/02/metoo…nnial-sex-panic/

For more on the German left listen to the recording of our panel in Frankfurt, from 07.12.2017, entitled "What is Socialism?" Speakers were invited to reflect on the history of social democracy from a leftist perspective: how are social democracy and social revolution today still connected? What does Social Democracy stand for politically? The following were invited: Hans-Gerd Öfinger (International Marxist Tendency), André Leisewitz (Journal Marxist Renewal), Martin Veith (Institute for Syndicalism Research), Lukas Schneider (Jusos Frankfurt) and Christoph Spehr (Die LINKE). Edited transcript linked below as well as the panel audio recording are both in German.
platypus1917.org/2018/09/15/podiu…ist-sozialismus/

Hosted by Pamela Nogales, Laurie Rojas and Suzy V.

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#MeToo and the millennial sex panic

David Faes

IT IS BY NOW WELL ESTABLISHED that millennials are not having sex. Indeed, recent studies have revealed that millennials derogate the emotions evoked in love and lust, which they refer to disparagingly as “catching feelings.” The widespread paranoia surrounding consent presumably only deepens such sentiments.

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