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School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 112 S. Michigan Ave.

The Platypus Affiliated Society is proud to announce its second annual international convention, What is Left, and where to begin? Platypus has organized four days of activities. Starting on Wednesday May 26th with a film screening at University of Chicago’s Woodlawn Collaborative and Thursday with theater and poetry performances at Decima Musa in Pilsen. On Friday May 28th, the Platypus Affiliated Society will convene for the panel discussion on The Question of Imperialism in the 20th Century at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). On Saturday May 29th, Platypus will host a selective series of workshops and panel discussions at SAIC (112 S. Michigan Ave.)  Activities will focus on political and cultural issues that have shaped the Left historically and today. Sunday May 30th, Platypus members will be leading a series of talks on The Platypus Experience: Perspectives from three generations and The origins of today’s Left in the 1970s New Left. Saturday and Sunday spaces are limited and require registration. Click here to register.

NOTE: If you would like to attend the convention and live in the NYC area, please contact us at newyork@platypus1917.org to arrange transportation with us. We will be finalizing all transportation arrangements by Wednesday, May 26th.

Forging a Left in Iran: Possibilities and difficulties

ATTENTION, LOCATION CHANGE: Tisch Hall, 40 W. 4th St. (4th and Mercer, on the South side of the street) Lower Level 2, Room. LC11.

A teach-in on labor, human rights and prospects for a Left in Iran with Ervand Abrahamian

The Platypus Affiliated Society, in collaboration with United for Iran, Amnesty International and the Network of Iranian Unions (NILU) has organized a teach-in on Iran for May 2nd, from 1-5pm at the Tisch Hall, 40 W. 4th St. (4th and Mercer, on the South side of the street) Lower Level 2, Room LC11. The keynote speaker for the evening  will be historian on Iran and outspoken voice on the recent events, CUNY professor Ervand Abrahamian. The day will consist of an opening informational (1-2pm) panel, a workshop (2-3pm), a break with refreshments provided (3-3:30pm) and the keynote address with Ervand Abrahamian followed by an audience Q&A (3:30-5pm).

We would like to raise questions about the direction of the Green movement in Iran, with an especial, though not exclusive, focus on labor organization in Iran, the role it's playing and what it may achieve in the future. This teach-in will produce political discussion around these questions and inform students, faculty, and the public at large of the ongoing events in Iran. We would like to brainstorm (during the workshop especially) what kind of political response would further possibilities in our time for a progressive leftist movement.

Please register for this free event at (we need a count for refreshments): http://iran.platypus1917.org/
Facebook Invite: Iran Teach-in with Ervand Abrahamian

This event was organized by the platypus affiliated society with the help of united for iran, amnesty international and the network of iranian labor unions (NILU).

http://newyork.platypus1917.org/

http://united4iran.org/

http://www.amnesty.org/

http://iranlaborreport.com/

Platypus panel at the Left Forum 2010 in New York City, Pace University, March 20, 2010.

Rather than asking what the Left thinks of Iran, this panel will pose the question, what does Iran reveal about the Left, its limitations and failures? This panel will address the crisis of the Islamic Republic and the historical task of the Left to clarify its role regarding the current Green Movement today. The 1979 Islamic Revolution continues to weigh on the political imagination of the Left. Perspectives on the Left either focus on Green Movement’s electoral and civil rights struggle, ignoring its Islamist leadership by Mousavi and others, or, in some cases, tout Ahmadinejad as a progressive “anti-imperialist,” denying the discontents expressed in the Green Movement. The 1979 Islamic Revolution continues to haunt the present, in the form of an impoverished imagination of what is possible. We will look more deeply at the political question of Islamism and how the Left can best understand Iran’s revolutionary past. What deeper failure on the Left allowed Iran to develop as it has? Whatever claim the current movement has to being secular in form -- that is, popular in discontent, and pluralist in that it possesses no elaborate program -- the legacy of the Islamic Revolution in the current crisis represents the unresolved failure of the Left to achieve greater freedom that cannot be reached through religious or populist means.

Panelists:
Laura Lee Schmidt (Chair) – Platypus Affiliated Society; History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture, MIT
Siyaves Azeri – Worker-Communist Party of Iran
Hamid Dabashi – Columbia University
Christopher Cutrone – Platypus Affiliated Society; University of Chicago

Platypus panel held at Left Forum 2010 in New York City, Pace University, March 20, 2010

Speakers:

Pat Korte, New School Students for a Democratic Society and Radical Student Union, Organization for a Free Society
Hannah Rappleye, CUNY School of Journalism, freelance journalist for Mott Haven Herald in the South Bronx, New School alumnus, former Senior Editor, New School Free Press
Easton Smith, Sarah Lawrence College, UNITE-HERE organizer
Ashley Weger, DePaul University, UNITE-HERE organizer, Platypus Affiliated Society

Moderator: Pamela Nogales, Platypus Affiliated Society

Within both historical and contemporary imaginations, university students are posed as playing an indispensable part in progressive and radical Left political movements. This legacy is imbued with and reproduces a sort of mythological nostalgia of the dissident student exemplified in early groups of the New Left such as SDS, whose name and politics found themselves recycled in the American anti-war movement surrounding the Afghan and Iraq wars. However, the twenty-first century student Left is hardly monolithic in its inclinations, ideologies and impulses. Rather, the current state of student politics is one exemplified both by autonomous actions and alliances, converging and diverging in the anti-war movement, labor solidarity campaigns, school occupations, new attempts toward intellectual discourse and theoretical engagement. Such a multifaceted scene requires adequate address. This panel seeks to host a variety of perspectives amongst actors and organizers of the contemporary student Left, engaging their experiences in dialogue with a multitude of questions that remain incompletely addressed as to the future of the university within the realm of emancipatory politics. Particular attention will be paid to the panelists' perspective on the importance of protest as political act, the prevalence and relevance of identity politics, and the current direction of student intellectualism and activism.

Platypus panel held at Left Forum 2010 in New York City, Pace University, March 20, 2010.

One catch-phrase that has flown in the wake of the successful election of Barack Obama is "post-racial," raising the question of the degree to which America has overcome racism. But perhaps the matter is not one of our historical moment being post-"racial" but rather post-racist. This panel will pose the question of how racism has changed since the historical racism that plagued the U.S., from the failure of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era through Jim Crow until the overcoming of legal racial segregation with the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s-60s. If today this historical form of racism is over it has not meant the meaningful improvement of conditions of life for the vast majority of black people in America, but rather has accompanied worsening conditions, as part of the broader greater stratification and brutalization of American society in the general downturn since the late 1960s - early '70s. This situation demands a strident refutation of the pseudo-problem of "class versus race" and rather requires today's Left to seriously consider the implications of the political scientist Adolph Reed's formulation that racism is a class issue. This panel will address this issue by approaching racism as a historical social problem that was surpassed but not fundamentally overcome, thus allowing the structural conditions that shaped racism historically to continue if in increasingly unrecognized, and thus de-politicized forms. This panel will address how the resolution to the "black question" was not the result of the emancipatory outcome of the Civil Right / Black Power movements of the 1960s, but was rather a part of the general de-politicization of American society in our era. Panelists will assess the historical depths of the present post-political situation by examining how the American Left failed to adequately politicize the social issue of racism in three significant periods of the history of the American Left, the pre-World War One Socialist Party, the early years of the Communist Party, and the decade of the New Left.

Speakers:

Tim Barker, Columbia University
Benjamin Blumberg, Platypus Affiliated Society
Pamela Nogales, Platypus Affiliated Society
Chris Cutrone, Platypus Affiliated Society, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Chicago

Benjamin Blumberg's comments are transcribed in Platypus Review #19 (Click below):