The Platypus Review

[ Die deutschsprachige Platypus Review ]

Latest Issue: #181

The negativity of capital: The fate of the dialectic after the failure of Marxism

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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Is capitalism Epicurean — and socialism Stoical? A rejoinder to Benjamin Studebaker on political disturbance and social freedom

Chris Cutrone

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.

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Whither socialism? Mamdani and the Left

Melvyn Dubofsky, Mitchel Cohen, Sebastian LM

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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Staff

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Louis Sterrett

COPY EDITORS

Gabriel Almeida
Mike Bartlett
Austin Carder
Rory Hannigan
Thom Hutchinson
Stanley Sharpey
Patrick Unwin

DESIGNERS

Mike Atkinson
Chris Mansour

SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR

Gabe Gottfried

DISTRIBUTION

Erica Gamble

Editorial Statement

Taking stock of the universe of positions and goals that constitutes leftist politics today, we are left with the disquieting suspicion that a deep commonality underlies the apparent variety: What exists today is built upon the desiccated remains of what was once possible.
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Submission Guidelines

Articles will typically range in length from 750–4,500 words, but longer pieces will be considered. Please send article submissions and inquiries about this project to editor.platypusreview@gmail.com. All submissions should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style.

The Platypus Review is funded by:

The University of Chicago Student Government
Dalhousie Student Union
Loyola University of Chicago
School of the Art Institute of Chicago Student Government
The New School
New York University
The University of Illinois at Chicago
The Platypus Affiliated Society