The Platypus Affiliated Society

“The future instead of the past”? Bookchin and Marx

Platypus as a project seeks to relate to the contemporary left by focusing on the Left in history. We do this because we think one’s understanding of history is in fact one’s theory of the present, of how the present came to be and what might become of it. We try to understand the left politics of the present in light of what the Left has been, so as to provoke critical reflection. Is the Left today living up to the legacy it inherits? Are we falling short of the aspirations of the past? Must we?

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Bookchin’s Trotskyist decade: 1939–1948

Janet Biehl

MURRAY BOOKCHIN IS KNOWN TODAY as the intellectual originator of radical ecology in the early 1960s. Social ecology, as he named it, was and remains a program for the decentralization of society into small-scale communities that, in confederation, would manage and control a socialized “post-scarcity” economy.

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Trotsky and Trotskyism, Lecture 7, 7.28.12

Richard Rubin
Lecture 7:
1953-1963

Part of the Summer 2012 Platypus Affiliated Society Primary Reading Group Lecture Series: Trotsky and Trotskyism

• recommended / + supplemental reading

Week 7 Readings:

+ Cornelius Castoriadis, “The workers and organization” (1959)
• Cliff Slaughter, “What is revolutionary leadership?” (1960)
• Revolutionary Tendency of the Socialist Workers Party/U.S., “In defense of a revolutionary perspective” (1962)
+ Tony Cliff, “The coming Russian revolution” (final chapter of Russia: A Marxist Analysis, 1964)
+ Hal Draper, “The two souls of socialism” (1966)
+ Isaac Deutscher, “Marxism in our time” (1965)
+ Murray Bookchin, “Listen, Marxist!” (1969)
• Spartacist League, “Genesis of Pabloism” (1972)

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