Speaking for the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) at the Left Forum, Jason Wright recently observed that, “It seems for a while now that it has been the desire of Platypus to have a three-way conversation between New Left Maoism (as one of the more palatable faces of Stalinism)
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Lenin stated, infamously perhaps, that Marxists aimed to overcome capitalism “on the basis of capitalism itself.” This was in the context of horrors of not only industrial exploitation but also and especially of war: WWI. Lenin was not, as
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Tony Cliff's recognition in his own moment of a certain kind of impasse within Trotskyism and his attempt to overcome it require full consideration and appreciation both in terms of the merits of its potential and a consciousness of its limits. A panel on the legacy of Tony Cliff opened the discussion at the Sixth Annual Platypus International Convention held in Chicago on April 4th, 2014. What follows are the opening remarks by English journalist and author James Heartfield.
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Art does not have an ahistorical essence but is a multivalent term referring to a set of ideas and practices that function differently in society throughout time.
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From the financial crisis and the bank bail-outs to the question of “sovereign debt”; from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street; from the struggle for a unified European-wide policy to the elections in Greece and Egypt that seem to have threatened so much and promised so little—the need to go beyond mere “protest” has asserted itself: political revolution is in the air, again.
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