THE INTERVIEW WITH DOMENICO LOSURDO in Platypus Review 46, which coincided with translation into English of his book Liberalism: A Counter-History, seems to be part of a broader attempt to raise the estimation of him as theoretician of the Left.
[. . .]
DESPITE THE CREATION OF AN AUTOCRATIC and anti-Semitic regime after the Khomeneiite revolution of 1979, the European Community and later the European Union continued to deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran; and even with new, insufficient sanctions in place, trade with Iran continues until today. It is the capitalist state’s primary task to allow the further realization of capital, but there is a certain sense in which politics surpasses this function
[. . .]
Time magazine nominated “the protester,” from the Arab Spring to the #Occupy movement, as “Person of the Year” for 2011. In addressing the culture of the #Occupy movement, Time listed some key books to be read, in a sidebar article, “How to stock a protest library.” Included were A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, The Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci, Multitude by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Welcome to the Desert of the Real by Slavoj Žižek.
[. . .]
RICHARD RUBIN ARGUES that “the 1930s were a decade of defeat for the Left.” His essay, “1933,” in the Platypus Review issue on The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century, is an idealist abstraction from real historical events, one founded on an uncritical acceptance of Trotsky as a significant historical thinker and actor and a corresponding Trotskyist caricature of the Soviet Union, Stalin, and Chinese Communism. Consequently, the real history of the Left in the 20th century is absent.
[. . .]
In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx disagrees with Hegel’s famous quote about history when he writes, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce…"
[. . .]
