ON APRIL 17, 2024, the students of Columbia University’s “Apartheid Divest” coalition, led by Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, erected an encampment, a “liberated zone” with posters copied straight from the Columbia occupation of 1968. As this encampment began, Columbia’s President Shafik was sitting before congress to testify about the rise of antisemitism on college campuses. When she returned to campus, President Shafik ordered the destruction of the encampments and the arrest of over 100 student protesters.
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On January 27, 2024, Platypus Affiliated Society member Stefan Hain gave this teach-in as part of Platypus’s sixth annual European Conference at the Humboldt University of Berlin. An edited transcript follows.
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ECOSOCIALISM IS NOW well entrenched in the “Left,” and is endorsed by many long-established sects. Proponents believe the deteriorating natural environment has created an urgent need to cast off capitalism and adopt this new green and crunchy variety of socialism.
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AT THE PLATYPUS European Conference, I suggested that there is a modern theory of crisis that is no longer fit for purpose. It belongs to modern political theory in general. It is not exclusively Marxist. You’ll find it in Lenin and Adorno, but also in Jürgen Habermas and Reinhart Koselleck. Indeed, you’ll even find it in Robert Dahl, if you know where to look.
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I IDENTIFY STRONGLY WITH the wrongly accused. So does America more broadly. And Trump has been wrongly accused. If you are in the right, then there is no need to lie. And they have lied about Trump.
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