Overview of all pages with the authors #Benjamin Blumberg

Conversations on the Left

What is to be done?

June 1, 2013 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON APRIL 18, 2013, the Platypus Affiliated Society organized a conversation at New York University between Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin, Paul Demarty of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Benjamin Blumberg of Platypus, to discuss the differences and similarities between their organizations. What follows is an edited transcript of the discussion. Complete audio and video of the event can be found online by clicking the above links. [Read More]

Jacobin CPGB Weekly Worker

An Unmet Challenge

Race and the Left in America

January 8, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

IN HIS 1932 NOVEL BANJO, the radical black intellectual Claude McKay portrays the vibrancy of black cosmopolitanism in the French port city of Marseilles in the decade following the end of World War I. McKay’s characters – boys of the docks, mendicants, and drifters – grapple with the racism of the wider society, while in their relations to one another live beyond race’s narrowness. One in particular, the novel’s protagonist, an itinerant intellectual named Ray, is driven by French police brutality to reflect on the reality of his race. [Read More]

AFL America American Communist Party Black Belt thesis Claude McKay Communist League of America James P. Cannon Max Shachtman Nationalism Race Reconstruction Richard Fraser Joseph Stalin Stalinism Leon Trotsky

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

Introduction

November 18, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά, Deutsch

ON APRIL 18, 2009, the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted the following panel discussion at the Left Forum Conference at Pace University in New York City. The panel was organized around four significant moments in the progressive separation of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: 2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), 1968 (Atiya Khan), 1933 (Richard Rubin), and 1917 (Chris Cutrone). The following is an edited transcript of the introduction to the panel by Benjamin Blumberg. [Read More]

Benjamin Blumberg International Convention Left Forum Theodor W. Adorno

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

Questions and Answers

November 17, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά

ON APRIL 18, 2009, the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted the following panel discussion at the Left Forum Conference at Pace University in New York City. The panel was organized around four significant moments in the progressive separation of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: 2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), 1968 (Atiya Khan), 1933 (Richard Rubin), and 1917 (Chris Cutrone). The following is an edited transcript of the Q & A session that followed. [Read More]

Left Forum History

Violence at the RNC

October 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

IN MARCH 2003, millions took to the streets worldwide to protest the impending invasion of Iraq. Despite their numbers, the efforts proved in vain. The war went on; the protests dwindled. But however attenuated, there are still protests. In Minneapolis/St. Paul this August, some 10,000 marched against the Republican National Convention. But as organized rallies gave way to irrational violence, the inadequacy of five years of failed Anti-War activism and Left opposition came into sharp relief. [Read More]

Reflections RNC Violence

To the victor, the spoils

Review of Artforum's May 2008 issue May '68'

September 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

We succeeded culturally. We succeeded socially. And we lost politically… I always say: ‘thank God!’ —Daniel Cohn-Bendit in interview on 1968, conducted by Yascha Mounk for The Utopian (2008) [O]ne asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor… Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. [Read More]

Marx after Marxism

March 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

_MOISHE POSTONE IS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY at the University of Chicago, and his seminal book Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory investigates Marx’s categories of commodity, labor, and capital, and the saliency of Marx’s critique of capital in the neoliberal context of the present. Rescuing Marx’s categories from intellectual and political obsolescence, Postone brings them to bear on the global transformations of the past three decades. [Read More]

Capitalism Karl Marx Marxism Moishe Postone