Books published by Platypus Publishing

The Platypus Review Reader, 2007-2014

Edited by Spencer A. Leonard

The Platypus Review Reader, 2007-2014 contains a selection of 50 articles distributed across ten headings: Marxism in the 20th century, the anti-war movement, the legacy of the New Left, Israel-Palestine, the election of Barack Obama, the economic crisis, art, the history of Marxism, Lenin, and the #Occupy Movement.

The Reader documents a central expression of the Platypus Affiliated Society’s project of clearing the obstacles to the formation of a new Left. In its pages, whether in edited forum transcripts, interviews, or articles, the speakers, interviewees, and authors seek in collaboration with the Platypus Review editors to explore the suggestion in the paper’s Statement of Purpose to the effect that “What exists today is built upon the desiccated remains of what was once possible.” The aim is not to lament, much less decry, the ruin, but instead to make conscious the discontinuity with what was (“the death of the Left”). Doing so requires recognizing what the Left that once existed was, so that the prospect of its reemergence (in necessarily much altered form) can begin at least to be contemplated (and felt as a need).

The Platypus Review expresses a desire to “bury the dead,” or, better, to actively assist in letting the dead bury themselves. Its aim is not to denigrate, much less stifle, any movement or campaign, however modest, but to see that the rites be performed that death demands if there is to be any possibility of its enabling a future regeneration of actual leftist politics. The Review sought to do this by performing the function of curation. As this was expressed in the Statement of Purpose, the dead weight of the Left, so palpable in the anti-war movement, could not “be cast off by sheer will, by simply ‘carrying on the fight.’” Rather, it “must be addressed and itself made an object of critique.” We could not ourselves—whether by study and reflection or by experience (and further reflection)—attain perspectives superior to those we nevertheless seek to resituate as objects of critique and appropriation for a new generation. As we rather hopefully put it in our editorial statement, “To make sense of the present, we find it necessary to disentangle the vast accumulation of positions on the Left and to evaluate their saliency for the possible reconstitution of emancipatory politics in the present.” What we faced on the Left, we felt, was in fact a “vast accumulation of positions,” and this demanded that we evolve a strategic orientation and an activity based not so much in the “positions” themselves as to their manner of “accumulation.” This was the aspiration of the PR from its earliest inception. It is an enterprise upon which it embarked in its first issue with what appears, in retrospect, an uncanny self-awareness, one that perhaps no other post-New Left moment could have afforded and, certainly, a self-awareness that none other did.

616 pages
6.7” X 1.4’’ X 9.5”
2.6 lbs.