Mel Rothenberg

ON THE OCCASION OF THE 25 anniversary of the 1989 revolutions – the “Autumn of Nations” in the Soviet bloc – the Platypus Affiliated Society organized an international panel series on the significance of 1989 for the Left. The panel held at New York University on February 17, 2015 consisted of Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Institute for Global Research and Social Movements in Moscow, Christoph Lichtenberg, supporter of the International Bolshevik Tendency, and Mel Rothenberg, a member of the Chicago Political Economy Group. [Read More]

ON MAY 6, 2013, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a conversation on “Black Politics in the Age of Obama” at the University of Chicago. The speakers included Cedric Johnson, the author of Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (2007) and The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans (2011); and Mel Rothenberg, a veteran of the Sojourner Truth Organization and coauthor of The Myth of Capitalism Reborn: A Marxist Critique of Theories of Capitalist Restoration in the USSR (1980). [Read More]

ON MAY 19, 2011, Platypus invited Carl Davidson, formerly of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Guardian Weekly, Tom Riley of the International Bolshevik Tendency, and Mel Rothenberg, formerly of the Sojourner Truth Organization, to reflect on “The Marxist turn: The New Left in the 1970s.” The original description of the event, which was moderated by Spencer A. Leonard at the University of Chicago, reads: “The 1970s are usually glossed over as a decade of the New Left’s disintegration into sectarianism, triggered by the twin defeats of Nixon’s election and the collapse of SDS in 1968–69. [Read More]