STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY (SDS) was founded in 1960 as a transformation of the student wing of LID (League for Industrial Democracy). The social democratic inheritors of Walter Lipman’s Intercollegiate Socialist Society, LID had banned Communists from its organization in the 1940s and had a close relationship to organized labor in America.
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On April 2, 2022, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted this panel at Northwestern University as a part of the 2022 Platypus International Convention. The panelists were Benjamin Studebaker (formerly of What’s Left?, PhD from the University of Cambridge, benjaminstudebaker.com), Donald Parkinson (editor-in-chief of Cosmonaut magazine and a member of the Marxist Unity Group organizing committee), James Heartfield (historian and activist, author of Britain’s Empires (2020) among others, heartfield.org), and Chris Cutrone (original lead organizer of the Platypus Affiliated Society, teaches philosophy and critical social theory at SAIC and the Institute for Clinical Social Work).
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On September 19, 2022, Platypus Affiliated Society member D. L. Jacobs interviewed Vivek Chibber, editor of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, on his new book Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change It (2022)
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Adolph Reed, Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives (New York: Verso Books, 2022).
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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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