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.
[. . .]
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.
[. . .]
On October 30, 2024, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion at the University of Chicago on the then-upcoming 2024 U.S. presidential election. The event’s speakers were Jorge Mújica, Chicago labor organizer and member of Morena; Chris Cutrone, founding member and teacher in Platypus and lead organizer of the Campaign for a Socialist Party; and Eddie Liger Smith, founding member and executive of the American Communist Party. Panelists were asked to respond to the following prompt: How should the Left approach the 2024 election? Would a Harris administration offer new opportunities for the Left? Would a Trump administration? What is to be made of third-party candidates?
[. . .]
On May 17, 2024, Platypus New Zealand members Jamie Adam and Michael McClelland interviewed Helen Hindpere, lead writer on the video game Disco Elysium (2019). Set in the fantastic realist world of Elysium, the role-playing game includes skill checks and dialogue trees that allow the player to determine their political ideology while exploring the aftermath of a defeated revolution. Disco Elysium was created by ZA/UM, an Estonian studio with socialist art collective origins.
[. . .]
THE PUBLICATION OF the late Domenico Losurdo’s last work Western Marxism has aroused a flurry of interest within particular milieus within the online and the offline Left. A reviewer of the book is tasked with examining whether such interest is warranted or not. I want to argue that one’s evaluation of whether this interest is warranted or not will depend upon what one is attempting to glean from the work. The text purports to be both a political and a theoretical engagement with the “Western Marxist” tradition.
[. . .]
