RSS FeedRSS FeedYouTubeYouTubeTwitterTwitterFacebook GroupFacebook Group
You are here: The Platypus Affiliated Society/Archive for category 2025
Robert Owen’s proposed utopian community in New Harmony, Indiana, 1838

(• required readings / + supplemental readings)

Liberal and socialist reading on late liberalism and early socialism:

Louis Blanc, History of the Ten Years 1830-1840 (1842)

Benjamin Constant, Liberty of the Ancients and Moderns Compared (1819)

Émile Durkheim, Saint-Simon and Socialism (1895-96)

Friedrich Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England (Labour Movement) [1845]

Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Utopian Socialism) [1880]*

G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1822-31)

Georgi Plekhanov, “Utopian Socialism in the Nineteenth Century” (1913)*

Plekhanov, The Initial Phases of the Theory of the Class Struggle — An Introduction to the Second Edition of the Russian translation of the Communist Manifesto (1898)

Background (secondary) reading on late liberalism and early socialism: 

Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962)

George Lichtheim, Origins of Socialism (1969)

Joseph Seymour (Spartacist), “Marxism and the Jacobin Socialist Tradition” (1976)

Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (1940) 


Week 1 6/7/25: Babeuf and Jacobin socialism

• Sylvain Maréchal, (1796) "Manifesto of the Equals

• Philippe Buonarroti, History of Babeuf's Conspiracy for Equality (1828/36) selections: "Biographical Sketch of Buonarroti", "To the Reader", "Author's Preface", Part I pp. 88-232

Supplemental:

+ French Republic Constitution of 1793

+ Buonarroti, History of Babeuf's Conspiracy for Equality (1828/1836), Part I pp. 1-87, Part II

+ Gracchus Babeuf, (1797) The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf before the High Court of VendĂ´me

+ Auguste Blanqui, (1832) “Speech before the Society of the Friends of the People”

Blanqui, (1849) "To the Mountain of 1793! To the Pure Socialists, its True Heirs!"


Week 2 6/14/25: Henri de Saint-Simon


Week 3 6/21/25: Charles Fourier

  • Charles Fourier, Selections TBD

Week 4 6/28/25: Robert Owen

Secondary reading:

+ William Benbow, Grand National Holiday (1832)


Week 5 7/5/25: Left Ricardian socialism and Chartism

Supplemental:

+ Charles Wentworth Dilke, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties

+ Bronterre O’Brien, Progress of Human Slavery (1849-50) (Chapter I, VII, and XV to end)

+ Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (Chapters 1 & 9)


Week 6 7/12/25: Young Hegelian communism and Chartism


Week 7 7/19/25: Democracy and socialism

Supplemental:

+ Louis Blanc, Organization of Labor [Selection TBD]

On November 2, 2024, Platypus Affiliated Society members Lucy Sparling and W. Xiao interviewed the cultural critic and social theorist Nina Power, author of One Dimensional Woman (2009) and What Do Men Want? (2022). An edited recording of this interview appeared on the Sh*t Platypus Says podcast. An edited transcript follows.
“YOU HAVE TO make a choice right now. Red or blue. Whatever you think, you must be only one thing and choose only one thing. All that matters is making the choice. One always lies, and one always tells the truth. One always lies when telling the truth, and the other always tells the truth when lying. Good luck!”
THE JAPANESE COMMUNIST PARTY (JCP), founded in 1922, is in its 103rd year in 2025. In 2023, the Party published the party history book 100 Years of the Japanese Communist Party to commemorate its centenary. However, it is a self-congratulatory book written by the JCP itself and does not analyze the history of the rise and fall of the Party in a social and class-based context.
On April 4, 2024, as part of its 16th annual International Convention, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a workshop at the University of Chicago in which Platypus member Ed Remus interviewed Sean KB, a member of the NYC District Council of Carpenters and a co-host of the podcast The Antifada. An edited transcript follows.