This article was originally published in Bahamas. It is based on the afterword to Jan-Georg Gerber’s Das letzte Gefecht: Die Linke im Kalten Krieg, as well as a talk he gave in January 2024 at the invitation of the Frankfurt Pro-Zionist Left. It has been translated into English by Platypus Affiliated Society member Tamas Vilaghy.
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THE TRIUMPH OF the Right-wing Rassemblement National (RN) in the recent 2024 EU elections and Emmanuel Macron’s subsequent call for snap elections prompted the formation of a coalition of center-and-far-Left parties that vowed to save French democracy from the imminent threat of fascism.
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PERSONALLY, I AM NOT in the business of “condemning” things. I have already alienated my moralist Palestinian and Palestinian-American friends when I said that the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings in New Zealand were working-class people killing working-class people.
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ONE COMMON REJOINDER to Marx’s famous declaration in his last thesis on Feuerbach, raised by Heidegger among others, could be stated roughly as follows: to raise the demand of changing the world is to do so based on a philosophical interpretation of how the world ought to be changed. Therefore, Marx’s statement, which appears on its face anti-philosophical, in fact presupposes philosophy.
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THE PANELS AT the 2024 Platypus East Coast Conference in Boston and Cambridge generated a number of interesting threads of discussion. One thread, which I found particularly engrossing, was initiated by “Hegelian e-girl” Nikki Kirigian in the “Theory in crisis” panel.
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