On August 2, 2024, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion on the question “What were the Antideutsch?” at Humboldt University in Berlin. The speakers were Jan Kalk (Gesellschaft für kritische Bildung), Jan Sander (Platypus), Justus Wertmüller (editor of Bahamas), and Detlef zum Winkel (author). The panel was moderated by Platypus member Marius. An edited transcript follows, which was translated by Platypus members Salim Askar, Tobias Rochlitz, Johannes Schön, Jack Verschoyle, Tamas Vilaghy, and Therri Wünsch.
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This article was originally published in Bahamas. It is based on the afterword to Jan-Georg Gerber’s Das letzte Gefecht: Die Linke im Kalten Krieg, as well as a talk he gave in January 2024 at the invitation of the Frankfurt Pro-Zionist Left. It has been translated into English by Platypus Affiliated Society member Tamas Vilaghy.
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The following is a translation, by Lukas Hedderich and Ethan Linehan, of Walter Held’s “Kritische Theorie ohne politische Praxis? Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung” (1939).
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Karl Korsch’s “The Quintessence of Marxism” (1922), a text made reference to by Korsch in his “Introduction to the Critique of the Gotha Program” (1922), appears to have been translated into English only once: serialized in the pages of the Australian Workers’ Weekly, the official organ of the Australian Communist Party, across seven issues in July and August of 1924. The translation was prepared by Guido Baracchi, a founder of that Party and a labor movement activist, whose biography, Communism: A Love Story (2007) was written by Jeff Sparrow. Baracchi originally presented his translation with a foreword, retained here, that situates the text within Korsch’s pedagogical project. This historic document has been newly transcribed for publication in the Platypus Review by Natalya Antonova, Shane Hopkinson, and Liam Kenny.
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SINCE PLATYPUS IS A PROJECT primarily concerned with the question of Marxism and the Left, other questions lay close at hand: what is psychoanalysis? Why should the Left take interest in it? What is the historical relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism?
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