Overview of all pages with the issue #109 - THE PLATYPUS AFFILIATED SOCIETY

The Landslide in Mexico

National democracy and the decline of neoliberal politics

October 1, 2018 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

I The Mexican general election of July 1, 2018 may be described, without exaggeration, as the broadest, most authentic expression of electoral democracy in the country’s history. Fifty-seven million voters – more than 60% of the electorate[^1] – cast their ballot in a contest for more than 3,400 offices at all levels of government: by far the largest number of votes ever cast for the largest number of candidates in the country’s history. [Read More]

Would slavery have ended sooner if the British had defeated the Colonists' bid for independence?

September 4, 2018 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

This article previously appeared in Op-Ed News, Portside, and Black Agenda Report . This essay is from a chapter, “the Hidden History of the American Revolution”, in MythAmerica, a book Keith is writing. “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.” – Marquis de Lafayette, French military leader who was instrumental in enlisting French support for the colonists in the American War of Independence. [Read More]

The death agony of meritocracy

September 4, 2018 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

FORTY-FIVE MILLION AMERICANS collectively owe upward of $1.4 trillion in student loan debt. Yet there is no need to worry. The magic of the free market has a solution for all of your problems. On July 10, 2018, “Paid Off” premiered on TruTV, a new game show that offers contestants a chance to escape a lifetime of debt peonage. “We’re capitalists. That’s just the way it is.” Less than 17 months after Nancy Pelosi’s Margaret Thatcher impersonation, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has shaken the foundation of the United States’ political class. [Read More]

Democratic Socialists of America Student Debt Debt Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Poverty

May '68 in France and the hidden war within the Left

September 4, 2018 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

IN MAY AND JUNE 1968, somewhere around ten million workers were on strike in France. They occupied their factories and marched in the streets, singing the “Internationale” and calling for an end to the ten years of Gaullist rule. Students, too, were on strike, occupying their schools and marching in the streets, singing the “Internationale” and calling for an end to the ten years of Gaullist rule. But popular memory is no less fallible than human memory, and so a poll published in early 2018 in the Nouveau Magazine Littéraire showed that 86% of those polled thought of the events of May ‘68 as a student movement. [Read More]

France May 1968

How the Counter-Culture shaped the Culture of Unfreedom

September 4, 2018 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

“THE WORD ‘CONSERVATIVE’ IS USED by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naïve, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.”1 Writing for the Independent back in 1990, former Conservative cabinet minister, Norman Tebbitt, demonstrated how the 1960s counter-culture still enraged traditionalists. Hard to believe today, but for conservatives the impact of the 1960s was as problematic as trade unions and flying pickets. [Read More]

1960s counter-culture

Event report

2018 Labor Notes Conference

September 4, 2018 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

I RECENTLY ATTENDED THE 2018 LABOR NOTES CONFERENCE, which is probably the largest rank-and-file union conference of organized labor in the United States. I went to find out what labor has been doing across the country and for my own interest in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to see what struggle had broken out amongst its members. Labor Notes has a special place in my heart, not just because it has stood as a bastion for radical organizers since the 80s, but also because it represents, as I see it, the last pillar of labor in the age of Trump. [Read More]

Labor Notes Trade unions Labor movement