On February 22, 2025, Platypus Affiliated Society members Tobias Kohlberger and Michael McClelland interviewed Pablo Abufom, a philosopher, translator, and biologist living in Chile. Abufom has been involved in struggles against neoliberalism in Chile for almost 20 years, as a student organizer, an activist for a new pension system, former director of the political movement Solidaridad, and, more recently, spokesperson for the Coordinadora por Palestina, a coalition of social movements for Palestinian liberation. In 2019, Abufom was a community organizer during the Estallido Social (social outburst) in Chile.
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Yet, beneath this glittering ascent lies a more sinister narrative: the Trump administration’s so-called “crypto revolution,” a policy blitz that promises to crown America as the “crypto capital of the world” but risks inflating a colossal bubble at the expense of the working masses.
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...for the working class, winning political office is not the same as winning political power. Recognizing the crucial difference between the two is critical if we are going to figure out how to fight. Too many on the Left are understandably giddy after this significant electoral win and gloss over this. As the Mamdani administration gets underway, this distinction is becoming clearer.
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For Wallis, who sees capitalism in strictly Manichean terms, as an absolute evil, it’s revolution or nothing. Reforms are of no avail, will never ever go far enough, and he completely rejects social democracy for having nothing of a lasting nature to commend itself, writing acerbically that the “alternative [to not opposing capitalism totally] is to reinforce the basic assumptions of anticommunism, which, in their social democratic variant, call for the decomposition of any coherent vision of social transformation and its replacement by a hodgepodge of socialist proposals grafted onto a presumably indestructible capitalist framework”
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On October 14, 2025, Platypus Affiliated Society member Jonny Black interviewed Humphrey McQueen, an Australian historian and writer whose work was shaped by his participation in the New Left. He has had a lasting influence on debates about nationalism, labor history, and the fate of radical politics in Australia. He is the author of A New Britannia: An Argument Concerning the Social Origins of Australian Radicalism and Nationalism (1970) Gallipoli to Petrov: Arguing with Australian HistoryWe Built This Country: Builders’ Labourers and Their Unions, 1770 to the Futureem> (2011) and more. An edited transcript follows.
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