Held at the University of Houston on September 15, 2017. Moderated by Danny Jacobs. An edited transcript of the event was published in The Platypus Review issue #100.
Panelists:
Gloria Rubac, Workers World Party
Gus Breslauer, Redneck Revolt
Mark Kazanski, Socialist Alternative
Bernard Sampson, Communist Party USA
Description:
Since the Nazi seizure of power eighty years ago anti-fascism has been a component of left-wing politics. In response to the Trump presidency, the politics of anti-fascism, reminiscent of the Popular Front of the 1930s or the Black Bloc politics of the 1990s, have -- once again -- been resurrected by the Left. How is anti-fascism the same or different today? Why anti-fascism now?
A panel
Chris Cutrone, founder and President of the Platypus Affiliated Society, interviewed by Douglas Lain of Zero Books, on the crisis of neoliberalism and the election of Donald Trump.
Cutrone's writings referenced in the interview can be found at:
https://platypus1917.org/category/platypus-review-authors/chris-cutrone/
Chris Cutrone is the last Marxist. Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. Born in 1970 and raised in Valley Stream on Long Island near New York City, Cutrone is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Departments of Art History, Theory and Criticism and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is a lecturer in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, where he completed the PhD in the Committee on the History of Culture and MA in Art History. He received the MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the BA from Hampshire College. His doctoral dissertation is on Adorno’s Marxism.
Cutrone is the original lead organizer of the Platypus Affiliated Society (its reading group in Chicago was established in 2006). From 1989–92, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the Los Angeles Riots and the election of Bill Clinton, Cutrone was a youth member of the Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), upholding the revolutionary socialist tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and the October Revolution of 1917.