On September 10, 2024, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion on democracy and the Left at New York University. The panelists were Sebastian (Revolutionary Communists of America), George Shulman (professor emeritus at NYU, whose work focuses on the relationship of race, political culture, and literature in post-war American life), Grayson Walker (co-founder of the Infrared Collective and the American Communist Party), and Andy Gittlitz (author of I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism (2020) and co-host of the Antifada podcast). An edited transcript follows.
[. . .]
BENJAMIN STUDEBAKER ATTRIBUTES modern social and political thought to Stoicism, which he understands to be at heart Neo-Platonist — by contrast with Plato’s own Platonism. In his view, it comes down to us from late Hellenism — Alexandrianism? But is capitalism Epicurean, as Studebaker avers, and socialism Stoic? Studebaker rejects the vision of socialism as society going beyond politics, which he interprets as the impossible or undesirable state without “disturbance”: an inhuman dystopia.
[. . .]
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
[. . .]
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.
[. . .]
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.
[. . .]
