On February 2 and March 4, 2025, Platypus Affiliated Society member D. L. Jacobs interviewed Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a Syrian writer and dissident who participated in the Syrian Revolution and the Arab Spring. Saleh was imprisoned from 1980 to 96 for his membership in the Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau). Saleh is the author of The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (2017) and other books.
[. . .]
It is widely accepted that an essential premise of Marx’s theory is that socialism must have a party as its vehicle. I do not accept this claim.
[. . .]
On January 4, 2026, Platypus Affiliated Society member Efraim Carlebach interviewed Tony Collins about his book Raising the Red Flag: Marxism, Labourism, and the Roots of British Communism, 1884–1921.
[. . .]
The “impossibilist revolt” in the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) at the turn of the last century led to the formation of two new political parties — the Socialist Labour Party of Great Britain (SLP-GB) in 1903 and the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) in 1904. In the period up until the outbreak of the First World War, both parties were roughly the same size — each with no more than three hundred members. Yet labor historians have concentrated on the history and theories of the SLP-GB to the almost complete neglect of those of the SPGB, and worse, relegated the latter to a sneering footnote.
[. . .]
Tom Canel’s essay on my debate with Benjamin Studebaker, between pursuit of freedom and the Good, tries to address my writing as a logical problem. But it begins with a misapprehension: not I but Studebaker introduced the category of the “body” into our dispute about Platonism and Marxism. Not my argument but his hinges on the natural body as a phenomenon. For me it is a historical form of appearance in society; for him it is an emanation of the Good — falling away from it.
[. . .]
