THREE DAYS BEFORE OCTOBER 7, my interview with Douglas Lain was released under the title “Are We All Terrorists Today?” In the interview, I said that the armed attacks against free speech at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in 2015, which caused a mass protest movement inside and outside of France, the Republican marches, which have adopted puritanical politics of martyrdom, that robbed Marxists of their own capacity for free speech, of their ability for ruthless scientific criticism against Charlie Hebdo and even the French capitalist state. In that sense, I do understand Chris Cutrone’s frustration with Israeli state terrorism, and the puritanical reaction to it in the Palestine protest movement in the West, a thing that led to the confiscation of his capacity to criticize Hamas ruthlessly.
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FOR AN INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT supposedly fading into irrelevance, the gathering on New York’s Upper West Side on Saturday, January 13, was remarkable: an auditorium overflowing with hundreds of people arguing passionately about where Trotskyism is going and how to get there. On one side were the Spartacists and the International Communist League (ICL), whose U.S. outlet, Workers Vanguard, has long been known for its wit, high intellectual tone, and pugilistic style.
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LAW IS A PRODUCT of the people’s will — its calculus exacts the “is” versus the “ought” of society. The science of law from the judiciary’s perspective is jurisprudence, but the science of law from society’s perspective is politics. Society’s drive to bring about conditions that are not possible is called its utopianism. Utopia conditions the psychic direction of society’s politics, the law has merely followed these inclinations.
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On June 24, 2023 at Trades Hall in Melbourne, Australia, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel on the legacy of 1968. The speakers included Andy Blunden, Alison Thorne, and Arthur Dent. Barry York provides his response to the panel.
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On June 24, 2023 at Trades Hall in Melbourne, Australia, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted this panel on the legacy of 1968. The speakers included Andy Blunden, Alison Thorne, and Arthur Dent. Andy Blunden is a Hegel scholar, was the first draft-card burner in Melbourne in 1966, and later joined the Workers Revolutionary Party. Alison Thorne is a member of the Freedom Socialist Party and a founder of the Australian branch of Radical Women. Arthur Dent, also known as Albert Langer, is an orthodox Maoist, a former member of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Lenininst) (CPA (ML)), and leader of the Red Eureka Movement in the 1970s. An edited transcript follow.
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