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On 2 September 2019, Stanley Sharpey and Efraim Carlebach interviewed David McLellan in Canterbury for The Platypus Review.  David McLellan (born 1940) is an English scholar of Karl Marx and Marxism. McLellan is currently visiting Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths' College, University of London.

On this episode, Rose and Pamela C. are joined by Allison Hewitt-Ward, a New York Platypus member and art critic. They discuss the recent crack-up at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the relationship between art and political protest. In the second segment, Sophia and Pam interview Goldsmiths University’s graduating Masters art students, Alexander Pierce, Lydia Blakeley, Fred Bungay, Paula Pinho Martins Nacif and Sara Rodrigues, about the relationship between art and freedom and if the censorship of art is ever justified.

Feedback, criticism, and questions are always welcome. Drop us an e-mail at shitplatypussays@gmail.com.

Links:
“Art and the Commodity Form”, a Platypus panel at Goldsmiths, University of London (October 11, 2016). The panel brought together Rex Dunn, independent Marxist and writer; Zhoe Granger, a director of the gallery, project space, and art publisher, Arcadia Missa; and Peter Osborne, editor of the journal Radical Philosophy and professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. Sophia of Platypus moderated the panel.
platypus1917.org/2016/12/21/art-commodity-form-3/

"A Whitney Museum Vice Chairman Owns a Manufacturer Supplying Tear Gas at the Border" (November 27, 2018)
hyperallergic.com/472964/a-whitney…s-at-the-border/

"The Tear Gas Biennial" (July 17, 2019) A statement from Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett
www.artforum.com/slant/a-statemen…y-biennial-80328

"What Warren Kanders’s Defeat at the Whitney Teaches Us About How Protest Works Now" by Ben Davis (July 26, 2019)
news.artnet.com/opinion/kanders-r…n-whitney-1580551

Spencer Leonard (Platypus) on Adam Smith, an interview with Douglas Lain for Zero Squared
youtu.be/cApVoE_A-JM

Book Review: Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013) by Robin Treadwell in Platypus Review 63 (February 2014)
platypus1917.org/2014/02/01/the-artist-at-work/

Pictured: Sara Rodrigues, "Degrees of Abstraction" (2019), performance & installation. Clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o2FztlYeMA

Douglas Lain of Zero Squared podcast for Zero Books interviews Chris Cutrone on Realizing Philosophy.

Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. He is the former head of the often contrarian Marxist group The Platypus Affiliated Society and in this podcast, we discuss the possibility of realizing philosophy.

On this episode, we chat about the HBO miniseries Chernobyl and Cold War nostalgia. Pamela Nogales discusses the ascendance of the Brexit Party in the UK with James Heartfield, a veteran Marxist and Brexit Party candidate. And Rose Freeman and Pam Nogales sit down with members at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia to talk about Platypus chapter building & the left in the region.

To learn more about the Platypus Summer Reading Group "30 years of 1989: What was Stalinism in power?" Visit:
platypus1917.org/2019/05/07/summe…linism-in-power/

James Heartfield spoke at in our Democracy and the Left panel held at Goldsmiths, University of London, in March 2019, the recording is here:
platypus1917.org/2019/03/28/democ…the-left-london/

Co-hosted by Pamela C. and Rose

On June 30, 2019 at the Left Forum at Long Island University Brooklyn in New York City, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel titled "The New Deal and American Socialism".

Description:

The New Deal is widely associated with socialism. This association holds true not only within the popular imagination shared across many sections of American society, but also within the historical imagination of the contemporary Left. This panel will consider the New Deal as it appeared to organized political tendencies that struggled for socialism during and after the 1930s. It will ask whether and how the New Deal -- its life, its legacy, its crisis, its memory, and its potential revival -- has advanced the struggle for socialism in America and beyond.

We ask the panelists to consider the following questions:

  1. How did socialists of various tendencies -- the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Party of America, Trotskyists, and anarchists -- relate to the New Deal during the 1930s?
  2. How, in their respective views, did the New Deal (considered both as policy and as politics) present obstacles to and/or opportunities for advancing the struggle for socialism?
  3. The liberal political coalition forged in part through New Deal policies subsequently prosecuted first the anti-fascist Second World War and then the anti-Communist Cold War; it also administered the American-led reconstitution of global capitalism beginning in 1945 that oversaw the creation of the European welfare state. Considering how the New Deal helped usher in a new era of global capitalism: What is the New Deal's relationship to socialism? What is its relationship to capitalism?

Panelists:

Marc Kagan - PhD candidate, CUNY Graduate Center; former officer in Transport Workers Union, Local 100 (New York)
Jason Wright - International Bolshevik Tendency
Jack Devine - PhD candidate, CUNY Graduate Center; Democratic Socialists of America; host of Revolutions Per Minute (WBAI 99.5 FM)
Jack Ross - Author of The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History