On April 10, 2026, as the opening plenary of its 18th annual Convention, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel at Northwestern University on the crisis of the American Revolution and its legacy. The speakers were Chris Cutrone (original lead organizer of Platypus and the Campaign for a Socialist Party), Edith Fischer (founding member of Communist Unity in Australia), and Ingar Solty (Senior Research Fellow at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in Berlin and author of Trumps Triumph?, Der postliberale Kapitalismus, and Edition Marxismen). Platypus member Erin Hagood moderated the panel. An edited transcript follows.
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While there should not be a reinforcement let alone ratification of the casting aside of Marxist critical theory by politics, it is also important to recognize that the actual problem is rather the opposite: turning Marxist critics into mere comrades. "Comrade Marx" won't do. Neither will Comrade Adorno — nor Comrade Cutrone.
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In 2018, Platypus Affiliated Society member Stefan Hain interviewed Volkmar Sigusch (1940–2023), who was considered one of the most important sex researchers in the world. From 1973 to 2006, he was Director of the Institute for Sexual Science at the clinic of the J. W. Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, as well as Professor of Special Sociology (Sociology of Sexuality) at the Department of Social Sciences in Frankfurt am Main. Sigusch co-founded the International Academy of Sex Research in 1973 and the Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung in 1988. His book Results in Sexual Medicine (1972) was the first in the world to include “Sexual Medicine” in its title.
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A meaningfully Left-wing politics, committed to majorly expanding democracy, has to center questions of class power and socio-economic inequality, which in today’s world even social democracy largely does not do.
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Cutrone's critique of Rockhill is sharp, but he ends up doing the same thing he criticizes. He uses the lessons of Marx and the Frankfurt School to defend a position of standing alone, without a party. My main point is that when critique is separated from the group context that Marx stressed, it turns a specific defeat into a permanent way of thinking. This misses the point of Marxist practice and what it leads to.
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