On May 30, 2022, Platypus Affiliated Society member Kathrin D. interviewed Vlad (27), a member of the Marxist group KyrgSoc (КыргСоц) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, about the legacy of the Soviet Union in Central Asia and resulting challenges for the Kyrgyz Left. Vlad is dedicated to the rebuilding of a living Left tradition in the former Central Asian Soviet Republic.
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On March 9, 2023, Platypus Affiliated Society member Will Stratford interviewed German public intellectual and labor activist Wolfgang Streeck, former professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Cologne, author of several books on the political economy of capitalism, and current emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. They discussed a variety of issues confronting the German Left, including neoliberalism, the Aufstehen (“Stand Up”) movement, the German Left’s alienation of AfD voters, the war in Ukraine, and both the degeneration and prospects of Leftist politics today. An edited transcript follows.
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TERENCE RENAUD IS A LECTURER in Humanities and History at Yale, and his book New Lefts is an excellent intellectual and political history that is both universalistic yet grounded in its universalism in a deep and careful study of a particular political milieu, that of the New Beginnings socialist group in Germany from the 1920s to the emergence of the European New Left that culminated in the French student uprising of 1968.
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On April 29, 2022, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel titled “Gender and the Left.” The speakers were Sara Rukaj (author of Jungle World), Roswitha Scholz (Gruppe EXIT!) and Stefan Hain (Platypus Affiliated Society). A video of the discussion can be found at , and the original German transcript can be found at
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ABOUT FOUR YEARS AGO, I made some statements on a panel about environmentalism. The tone, and content of those remarks was utterly flippant, promethean, and apathetic towards ecology. I am not so much revising my position that ecology is a human construct, nor that the apocalypticism of the modern ecology movement, and enslavement to the Democratic Party, are justified.
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