Overview of all pages with the authors #Ian Morrison

Trotsky's Marxism

July 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

At the 2011 Left Forum, held at Pace University in NYC between March 18–21, Platypus hosted a conversation on “Trotsky’s Marxism.” Panelists Ian Morrison (Platypus), Susan Williams (Freedom Socialist Party), and Jason Wright (International Bolshevik Tendency) were asked to address, “What was Trotsky’s contribution to revolutionary Marxism? At one level, the answer is clear. Above even his significance as organizer of the October insurrection and leader of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, what makes Trotsky a major figure in the history of Marxism is his status as the leader of the Left Opposition and, later, his founding of the Fourth International. [Read More]

Marxism Leon Trotsky

Is Marx back?

May 9, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

IN LIGHT OF the recent economic crisis, Marxist theory has enjoyed a resurgence of interest. This most recent is the last of many returns to Marx’s work throughout the 20th century. Still, the question poses itself: Why return to Marx, yet again? What does this move tell us about our contemporary situation? Most important, what do previous returns to Marx tell us about capitalism and those who have self-consciously struggled against it? [Read More]

Leo Panitch Karl Marx Politics Vietnam 1968 Imperialism

Against the status quo

January 8, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Despite unrelenting state repression, there have been rumblings throughout the 2000s of renewed labor organizing inside the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). One result of this upsurge in labor organizing was the May 2005 re-founding of the Syndicate of Workers of the United Bus Company of Tehran and Suburbs, a union that has a long history, albeit one that was interrupted by the 1979 “Revolution,” after which the union was repressed. [Read More]

Iran Homayoun Pourzad Unions

Between Old Left and New

A postwar balance sheet

December 6, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE PERIOD FROM THE FIRST WORLD WAR to the Cold War belies easy classification. Unlike the single decade associated with the New Left, this extensive and historically dense period, that of the “Old Left,” has to be broken up into decades. Indeed, this is done even in the popular imagination, in which the 1930s were a time of economic collapse and union radicalism; the 1940s, a time of “the common enemy,” fascism; and the 1950s, a time of refrigerators and consumerism, of complacency and automatic dishwashers. [Read More]

James P. Cannon

What is to be done?

The Platypus Synthesis

June 14, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Transcript of the plenary presentation by Ian Morrison at the 1st annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, Chicago, June 12–14, 2009. See the above link for an audio recording. J. P. CANNON SAID that, If the group misunderstands the task set for it by conditions of the day, if it does not know how to answer the most important of all questions in politics – that is, the question of what to do next – then the group, no matter what its merits may otherwise be, can wear itself out in misdirected efforts and futile activities and come to grief. [Read More]

Introducing Platypus

The Platypus Synthesis

June 12, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Transcript of the introduction to the plenary presentations at the 1st annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, Chicago, June 12–14, 2009. See the above link for an audio recording. What is Platypus? Platypus was set up as an attack on thought-taboos. From the start, we’ve rejected the usual Left culture, which preaches the struggle against the common enemy and focuses all of its energy on demonizing this or that Right-wing clique. [Read More]

Resurrecting the 30s

A response to David Harvey and James Heartfield

May 15, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Over! What a stupid name. Why over? Over pure nothing, it is all the same. Why have eternal creation, When all is subject to annihilation? Now it is over. What meaning can one see? It is as if it had not come to be, And yet it circulates as if it were. —Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s Faust THE LAST FORTY YEARS have been conceptually bewildering for the Left. The withering of working class movements and the rise of the new social movements have coincided with a global shift away from national state-centric (or “Fordist”) modes of accumulation towards a more “global,” neo-liberal capitalism. [Read More]

1930s David Harvey James Heartfield Neo-liberalism Reflections The Left Exchanges

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

Ba'athism and the history of the Left in Iraq

Violence and politics

March 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

SINCE THE 1960s the saturation of brutality and violence in Iraq has caused considerable confusion among Leftists in regards to both its political meaning and causes. One cannot fully understand the character of Saddam Hussein’s Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party without taking into account that it achieved political power by systematically killing off the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) and quelling other political dissent with acts of extreme cruelty. The eight year battle of attrition instigated by Hussein, known as the Iran-Iraq War, caused over half a million Iraqi deaths, and the ethnic cleansing campaigns directed against the Kurds resulted in countless more. [Read More]