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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On September 10, 2024, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted the panel “Democracy and the Left” at New York University with panelists Andy Gittlitz (Antifada), Sebastian (Revolutionary Communists of America), George Shulman (NYU), and Grayson Walker (American Communist Party). An edited, expanded version of Grayson Walker’s opening remarks follows.
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I HAD THE PLEASURE of actually seeing Benjamin Studebaker during an online Platypus panel on the Middle East on July 20. Through our comradely deliberations I discovered we had a lot in common; we both see the kernel of truth in Bismarckianism; Marxists should have no empathy nor patience for city-states’ right to self-determination. From that angle, I can understand his opposition to both Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms, and maybe even towards most postcolonial nationalisms in the region.
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