...for the working class, winning political office is not the same as winning political power. Recognizing the crucial difference between the two is critical if we are going to figure out how to fight. Too many on the Left are understandably giddy after this significant electoral win and gloss over this. As the Mamdani administration gets underway, this distinction is becoming clearer.
[. . .]
For Wallis, who sees capitalism in strictly Manichean terms, as an absolute evil, it’s revolution or nothing. Reforms are of no avail, will never ever go far enough, and he completely rejects social democracy for having nothing of a lasting nature to commend itself, writing acerbically that the “alternative [to not opposing capitalism totally] is to reinforce the basic assumptions of anticommunism, which, in their social democratic variant, call for the decomposition of any coherent vision of social transformation and its replacement by a hodgepodge of socialist proposals grafted onto a presumably indestructible capitalist framework”
[. . .]
On October 14, 2025, Platypus Affiliated Society member Jonny Black interviewed Humphrey McQueen, an Australian historian and writer whose work was shaped by his participation in the New Left. He has had a lasting influence on debates about nationalism, labor history, and the fate of radical politics in Australia. He is the author of A New Britannia: An Argument Concerning the Social Origins of Australian Radicalism and Nationalism (1970) Gallipoli to Petrov: Arguing with Australian HistoryWe Built This Country: Builders’ Labourers and Their Unions, 1770 to the Futureem> (2011) and more. An edited transcript follows.
[. . .]
THERE HAVE BEEN DOZENS of excellent and insightful reviews of One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnificent project in response to this political and cultural moment. As a Weather Underground veteran, I suppose if I could add anything useful it would be to provide perspective on the history of extra-legal, anti-capitalist resistance groups
[. . .]
The claim that the human body is separable from social relations deserves an immanent Marxist critique. While I would accept the claim that the good would reside in the body if anywhere, I think it is un-Marxist (not that I claim to be a true Marxist myself!) to conceptualize the human body as separate from human social relations.
[. . .]
