Yesterday, I was an anarchist

 April 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

We think too small, like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view. —Mao Tse-Tung I JUST TURNED THIRTY. Fifteen years on the Left – that’s half my lifetime now and what it means to me has changed consistently over the years: from punk rock kid with a mohawk and tattoos on my ribs and shoulders to a union leader with a mortgage and kid and the responsibility of thousands of workers on my shoulders. [Read More]
Anarchism  Labor  Labor movement  Leadership  Movement  Unions  Workers  Reflections 

The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and "Resistance"

The problematic forms of "anticapitalism" today

 April 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

After the failure of the 1960s New Left, the underlying despair with regard to the real efficacy of political will, of political agency, in a historical situation of heightened helplessness, became a self-constitution as outsider, as other, rather than an instrument of transformation. Focused on the bureaucratic stasis of the Fordist, late 20th Century world, the Left echoed the destruction of that world by the dynamics of capital: neoliberalism and globalization. [Read More]

Review: Introducing SDS, Columbia Revolt, 1969

 April 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

A NEW CHAPTER OF STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY (SDS) was formed in February at the University of Chicago (UChicago) in tandem with chapters forming throughout the city and across the country. The new SDS is a national student organization dedicated to progressive political change, whose name was borrowed from the famous New Left organization that helped to shape the social unrest of the 1960s. UChicago SDS held a film screening and discussion in Harper Memorial Library on Thursday, March 6, of Columbia Revolt (1969), a documentary film by the Newsreel collective on the Columbia University student occupation and strike. [Read More]
SDS 

Protest and regression

Notes on a recent protest

 April 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

ALASDAIR MACINTYRE BEGINS AFTER VIRTUE with a parable: Populist demagogues declare war on the natural sciences. Every lab bombed, every chemistry department ransacked, every copy of Nature burned. Once the luddite swell subsides, a group of enlightened citizens attempt to reconstruct science from the remaining fragments. To us, natural science is a way of making sense of the physical world through experiment and observation. In this imaginary future, such a context has been lost. [Read More]
Reflections 

On the election violence in Kenya

 April 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

IT MAY BE THAT THE POLITICAL MEANING of the recent violence in Kenya will exceed the explanatory capabilities of the news media, but the question itself has not yet adequately been posed. In place of a serious engagement with the crisis, coverage of the events has been characterized by genuine shock that this could have happened in Kenya. This has typically been accompanied by the deployment of the bankrupt trope of tribalism by way of explanation. [Read More]
Reflections  Kenya 

Kenya: Move over grandpa

Marginalized youth and aging politics

 April 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Writing from Kenya after 10 years of what he calls “international exile,” former Kenyan-Chicagoan Oketch Onyango told us that he intended on going back in late 2007 to “raise a little bit of hell in the political scene,” but went “running away from the commodity and bang full circle into it in the savanna!,” and so in response he’s been immersed in “reading critical theory like mad” and “doing some writing which papers here don’t want to touch. [Read More]
Reflections  Kenya 

Half-time team talk

Mayday (UK) response on anarchism and Marxism

 April 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

FOR ISSUE #2 (FEBRUARY 2008), Chris Cutrone wrote, in “On anarchism and Marxism: a response to Mayday magazine (UK),” on behalf of Platypus, that the principal difference between anarchism and Marxism lies in the way “history” figures in any present estimations of ideology, conscious political program and organization, at the levels both of the historical specificity of struggles for emancipation beyond the modern society of capital, and in the history of capital itself, of which a Marxian approach considers the history of the Left as an essential and not extrinsic part. [Read More]
Anarchism  Marxism  Mayday 

Cracking the looking-glass

Perception, precarity, and everyday resistance

 April 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Then she began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but that all the rest was as different as possible. —Lewis Carroll Through The Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There (1871) LET US ASSUME, FOR A MOMENT, the identity of Alice, the child protagonist of Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass.” As we venture slowly through the mirror on the wall, we enter into a world that has been inverted. [Read More]
Reflections