On Thursday March 11, 2010, Platypus Review Editor-in-Chief Spencer A. Leonard interviewed the prominent 1960s radical and last National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Mark Rudd, to discuss his recently published political memoir, Underground. In April, Leonard’s interview with Rudd, prepared in conjunction with Atiya Khan, was broadcast in two parts on “Radical Minds” on WHPK-FM 88.5 Chicago. Podcasts are available at the above link . Below is an edited transcript of the interview
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“THE TERRORIST IS NOBLE, irresistibly fascinating, for he combines in himself the two sublimates of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero” (127). The man who spoke these words was Sergei Kravchinsky, the Tsarist officer turned anarchist who went on to assassinate the chief of the Russia’s secret police and expose that country’s autocracy before the world in the best-selling book Underground Russia.
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ADORNO’S HABILITATIONSSCHRIFT was on Kant and Freud. It ended with Marx. Why did Adorno think that Marx addressed the problems of both Kantian and Freudian accounts of consciousness?
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In light of the recent economic crisis, Marxist theory has enjoyed a resurgence of interest. This most recent is the last of many returns to Marx’s work throughout the 20th century. Still, the question poses itself: Why return to Marx, yet again? What does this move tell us about our contemporary situation? Most important, what do previous returns to Marx tell us about capitalism and those who have self-consciously struggled against it? Why Marxism—and what must Marxism become?
On February 19, 2010, Ian Morrison of Platypus spoke with Leo Panitch, author and professor of Political Science at York University, about these and other topics. Below is an edited transcript of their public interview and of the audience Q & A that followed.
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Uli vom Hagen’s response to my article on the current state of the German Left engages in a remarkable apology for its nationalism, which results from its near complete failure to digest the dangerous policies of the German KPD of the 1920s and 30s. With his focus on the events of 1923 and his excitement for “National Bolshevism,” vom Hagen presents a highly symptomatic position informed by a gross conflation of nationalism and romantic-regressive anti-capitalism, which experienced its peak with the rise of European fascism and National Socialism in Germany.
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