Sunit Singh

Eros and Civilization: the title expressed an optimistic, euphemistic, even positive thought, namely, that the achievements of advanced industrial society would enable man to reverse the direction of progress, to break the fatal union of productivity and destruction, liberty and repression – in other words to learn [Nietzsche’s] gay science. — Herbert Marcuse In [ancient] philosophy the duties of human life were treated as subservient to the happiness and perfection of human life. [Read More]

ON JUNE 25, 2013, Spencer A. Leonard and Sunit Singh interviewed Jonathan Sperber, historian of the 1848 revolutions and author of the acclaimed new biography Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life (2013), on the radio show Radical Minds broadcast on WHPK – FM (88.5 FM) Chicago. What follows is an edited version of the interview that was conducted on air. Spencer A. Leonard: Let me start off by asking a very general question. [Read More]

ON NOVEMBER 23, 2010, Sunit Singh conducted an interview with psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell at Jesus College in Cambridge. Although Professor Mitchell’s rehabilitation of Freud is well chronicled, the attempt in “Women: The Longest Revolution” (1966)1 to rescue the core content of the Marxist tradition – its emphasis on emancipation – remains unexplored. What follows is an edited version of the interview. Sunit Singh: The sociologist C. Wright Mills, in an open letter to the editors of New Left Review in 1960, exhorted the still inchoate “New Left” to reclaim an ideological space for socialism over the chorus of liberal commentators proclaiming “the end of ideology” – the idea that there are no more antagonistic contradictions within capitalist society. [Read More]

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]

IT IS NO COINCIDENCE that there is a new English translation1 of Black Skin, White Masks (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (1952), hereafter BSWM), since in this first book, Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) himself believed that the fight against racism had nowhere found more succor than in the United States. Fanon poetically describes the shorn “curtain of the sky” over the battlefield after the Civil War that first reveals the monumental vision of a white man “hand in hand” with a black man (196). [Read More]

A teach-in led by Platypus member Sunit Singh on February 1st, 2010, at Loyola University. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Suggested Readings David Macey - Franz Fannon Fanon - Wretched of the Earth - Conclusion Fanon - Black Skin White Masks (Introduction) (Conclusion) “The Negro, however sincere, is the slave of the past. None the less I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass. [Read More]

The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. —Karl Marx DER BAADER-MEINHOF KOMPLEX (2008) dramatizes the violence that the Leftist group the Rote Armee Fraktion (“Red Army Fraction” [RAF] aka the Baader-Meinhof) wreaked across West German cities in the 1970s. The film documents, or, rather, reenacts their streak of violence that started with petty vandalism against storefronts in Frankfurt but that soon escalated into more serious acts. [Read More]