On September 26, 2025, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel at New York University on socialism, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and the Left. The speakers were Mitchel Cohen (writer, activist, poet, former chair WBAI-FM Local Station Board, Brooklyn Greens, Red Balloon Collective), Daniel Lazare (author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralysing Democracy (1996), his writing appears in Permanent Revolution Blog, the Weekly Worker, and the Platypus Review), Sebastian LM (member of the Young Democratic Socialists of America at NYU, Mamdani campaign worker), and Melvyn Dubofsky (Professor Emeritus of History and Sociology at Binghamton University, author of American Labor Since the New Deal (1971) and Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865–1920 (1975)), who appeared over Zoom. Platypus member Erin Hagood moderated the panel. An edited transcript follows
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BOURGEOIS SOCIETY FIRST emerges in the Renaissance, but finds its political realization with the revolt of the Third Estate. “Society,” according to the Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno quoting J. C. Bluntschli, “is a concept of the Third Estate.” They set about conceptualizing and politically realizing changes that had already come to pass in emergent bourgeois society’s outstripping of traditional civilization and its Great Chain of Being.
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UNFORTUNATELY, it seems that the Millennial moment, on both Left and Right, has been motivated by anti-postmodernism and anti-neoliberalism. This has meant adopting absolutism as opposed to relativism and collectivism as opposed to individualism, statism as opposed to the market, and hence nationalism as opposed to “globalism.” This has meant remaining blind and irrelevant to developments of post-neoliberalism, which will be both continuity and change — and never one without the other. For capitalism to continue it must change; for it to change it must continue.
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IN MINORITY RULE: Adventures in the Culture War, British Left commentator Ash Sarkar seeks to expose how “minority elites” use the culture wars to stoke fear and panic in the media landscape. Over the course of her analysis, Sarkar mounts an extended criticism of contemporary identity politics on the Left. She contends that, through the kind of politics of victimhood and grievance it adopted, “the left unwittingly forged the political weapons being used against it by our political opponents”.
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On May 2, 2023, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel on the American Constitution and the Left at New York University. The panelists were Erin Hagood (Platypus), Daniel Lazare (writer at the Weekly Worker, author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralysing Democracy), and Caleb Maupin (Center for Political Innovation). The panel was moderated by Platypus member Oliver Chasan. An edited transcript follows.
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