On June 24, 2023 at Trades Hall in Melbourne, Australia, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted this panel on the legacy of 1968. The speakers included Andy Blunden, Alison Thorne, and Arthur Dent. Andy Blunden is a Hegel scholar, was the first draft-card burner in Melbourne in 1966, and later joined the Workers Revolutionary Party. Alison Thorne is a member of the Freedom Socialist Party and a founder of the Australian branch of Radical Women. Arthur Dent, also known as Albert Langer, is an orthodox Maoist, a former member of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Lenininst) (CPA (ML)), and leader of the Red Eureka Movement in the 1970s. An edited transcript follow.

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On February 4, 2023, Platypus Affiliated Society members Diana Caudwell and D. L. Jacobs interviewed Paul Cockshott, a computer scientist, communist, and a lecturer at the University of Glasgow. Cockshott was a member of the British and Irish Communist Organisation in the 1970s, but later resigned along with other members, forming the Communist Organisation in the British Isles. He has written several books, including Towards a New Socialism (1993) and most recently How the World Works (2020).

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On June 6, 2023, Platypus Affiliated Society member Michael McClelland interviewed Sue Bradford. Bradford joined the Left in Aotearoa, New Zealand during the New Left era, participating in various organizations that recruited on campuses during the anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s and 70s. After a brief absence from activism, she took part in 1981’s anti-racist campaigns against apartheid South Africa’s rugby team, who were then touring New Zealand. Shortly after, she joined the unemployed workers’ movement in the 1980s, before eventually becoming a household name as a Green Party Member of Parliament for 10 years in the 2000s. She now runs workshops for activists from a cooperative which she co-founded, Kōtare in Wellsford, where she also lives.

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On March 12, 2023, for episode 56 of the podcast Sh*t Platypus Says, Platypus Affiliated Society members Pamela C. Nogales C. and Andreas Wintersperger interviewed Spencer A. Leonard about the two volumes of Marx and Engels’s journalism that he has edited and written introductions for: Marx and Engels on Imperialism: Selected Journalism, 1856–62 and Marx and Engels on Bonapartism: Selected Journalism, 1851–59. Both volumes were published in 2023 by Lexington Books. Leonard is a founding member of the Platypus Affiliated Society. He teaches sociology at James Madison University.

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ON NOVEMBER 15, New York University announced the opening of a new Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Among its central goals, “the Center will research both classical forms of antisemitism as well as the ‘new antisemitism’ and its links to anti-Zionism.” With the hermeneutic suspicion of the anti-Zionist Jew and Marxist-Leninist I am, I ask: what is this “new antisemitism,” and what is to be done? Here, as I frequently do, I went to consult Lenin.

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