Overview of all pages with the authors #Spencer A. Leonard

Marx at the margins

March 1, 2012 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

_LAST SUMMER, SPENCER A. LEONARD interviewed Kevin Anderson, author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (1995) and Marx at the Margins (2010). The interview was broadcast on August 2, 2011 on the radio show * Radical Minds* on WHPK – FM Chicago. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation._ Spencer A. Leonard: Broadly describe your aims and ambitions in writing Marx at the Margins. Kevin Anderson: One aim was that, in the past couple of decades - Really the past three decades since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, there have been a number of critiques of Marx that centered on charges of Eurocentrism, ethnocentricsm, and so forth. [Read More]

"Thirty years of counter-revolution"

January 29, 2012 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

_LAST SUMMER, SPENCER A. LEONARD interviewed Clyde Young, a veteran member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. The interview was broadcast on June 31, 2011 on the radio show Radical Minds on WHPK – FM Chicago. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. A shorter version of this interview ran in the broadsheet edition of Platypus Review issue 43._ Spencer A. Leonard: Everyone hears a lot about the 1960s, the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. [Read More]

1970s Bob Avakian Clyde Young Communism Vladimir Lenin Maoism Radical Minds RCP (USA) Civil Rights Third World

Black nationalism and the legacy of Malcolm X

November 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

LAST FALL, EDITOR SPENCER A. LEONARD interviewed Michael Dawson, Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. The interview, which centered around a discussion of Manning Marable’s new biography of Malcolm X, was broadcast on September 30, 2011 on the radio show Radical Minds on WHPK – FM Chicago. What follows is a revised and edited transcript of the interview. SL: Like many others in recent months, you have contributed to the controversy raging around Manning Marable’s book Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. [Read More]

Michael Dawson Black Nationalism Malcolm X Manning Marable Michael Dawson New Left Radical Minds Race Marcus Garvey

Up in the air: The legacy of the New Communist Movement

December 1, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

_ON OCTOBER 17, 2010, Spencer A. Leonard interviewed Max Elbaum, author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che, to discuss the New Communist Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. The interview was aired during two episodes of Radical Minds on WHPK – FM Chicago, on October 26 and November 9. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview._ Spencer A. Leonard: To start off in the broadest possible way, how and when did the New Communist Movement emerge? [Read More]

Anti-intellectualism Antonio Gramsci Black Belt thesis Black Panther Communist party History of the Left Vladimir Lenin Marxism Max Elbaum New Communist Movement Orthodoxy SNCC The Left Weather Underground

The Maoist insurgency in India: End of the road for Indian Stalinism?

August 6, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Given the considerable international interest in the progress of Naxalism on the Indian subcontinent, particularly in the wake of the 2008 Maoist revolution in Nepal, we are pleased to publish the following interview with Marxist and historian Jairus Banaji conducted on June 28th, 2010. Spencer A. Leonard: The immediate occasion for our interview on the Naxalites or Indian Maoists is Arundhati Roy’s widely read and controversial essay, “Walking With the Comrades,” published in the Indian magazine Outlook. [Read More]

India Jairus Banaji Maoism Naxalism Stalinism

'You don't need a Marxist to know which way the wind blows'

June 10, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON THURSDAY MARCH 11, 2010, Platypus Review Editor-in-Chief Spencer A. Leonard interviewed the prominent 1960s radical and last National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Mark Rudd, to discuss his recently published political memoir, Underground. In April, Leonard’s interview with Rudd, prepared in conjunction with Atiya Khan, was broadcast in two parts on “Radical Minds” on WHPK-FM 88.5 Chicago. Podcasts are available at the above link . Below is an edited transcript of the interview. [Read More]

1960s Mark Rudd SDS

What are intellectuals good for?

February 27, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON THURSDAY NOVEMBER 19, 2009, Platypus Review Editor-in-Chief Spencer A. Leonard discussed with author George Scialabba a new volume of essays entitled What are Intellectuals Good For? (Boston: Pressed Wafer Press, 2009). Their discussion was conducted live on “Radical Minds,” a radio show Leonard conducts weekly with co-host Greg Gabrellas on WHPK 88.5 FM in Chicago. Leonard and Scialabba’s discussion focused chiefly on a single theme of the book, the connections and disconnects between the intellectuals of the anti-Stalinist Old Left forged in America in the 1930s and the New Left that emerged decades later in the early 1960s. [Read More]

1930s George Scialabba Intellectual space New Left Radical Minds

30 years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran

August 23, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON THURSDAY APRIL 16 2009 Platypus Review Editor-in-Chief Spencer A. Leonard interviewed the prominent historian and Columbia University professor Ervand Abrahamian on “Radical Minds” broadcast on UChicago WHPK-FM 88.5 on the subject of “30 years of Islamic Revolution in Iran.” Abrahamian kindly agreed to answer some further questions put to him by the Platypus Review to supplement that interview. Included below is an edited transcript of the original interview together with the answers Abrahamian gave to our supplemental questions. [Read More]

Ervand Abrahamian Iran Islam Islamism Islamic Revolution

Going it alone: Christopher Hitchens and the death of the Left

Book Review: Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman (eds.). Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left.

March 15, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

New York: New York University Press, 2008. IF IT DID NOT COME TO END IN 1989, as conservative critic Francis Fukuyama expected, this is because, in Hegel’s sense, as freedom’s self-realization in time, History had already ceased. Long before the new geopolitical configurations and institutional forms of the post-Soviet world, a new and unprecedented, though scarcely recognized, political situation had taken shape: The last threads of continuity connecting the present with the long epoch of political emancipation were severed. [Read More]

Christopher Hitchens Enlightenment Iraq Marxism Moralism Terror The Left War Anti-war

Nothing Left to say

A critique of the Guardian's coverage of the 2008 Mumbai attacks

February 3, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

This article has been reprinted in Mainstream Weekly. Deep historical precedents HOWEVER SINCERE ITS BACKERS or belligerent its enemies, the “War on Terror” is not and cannot become anti-Islamist. This is not because, as some think, there is no Islamist or Taliban-style fascism on the receiving end of America’s War on Terror. Far from it. The reason is that the prosecutors of the war are only half committed to the selective elimination of certain religious reactionaries. [Read More]

Afghanistan Anti-semitism History of the Left Lashkar-e-taiba Mumbai Mumbai Attacks Pakistan Taliban The Guardian The Left War on Terror India Terrorism