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I. Introduction: The bourgeois revolution(s) and the American Revolution In the period stretching from the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War to the *coup d’état* that brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power in revolutionary France, the old order in Europe and North America gave up the ghost and passed away from the face of the earth. For the years between 1760 and 1800 were, as the liberal historian R. R. Palmer masterfully argued, the Age of the Democratic Revolution. [Read More]

ON SEPTEMBER 20 2013, the Platypus Affiliated Society organized a panel discussion entitled *The Politics of Work* for the *Rethinking Marxism* conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The discussion was moderated by Reid Kane of Platypus. The panelists were asked to respond to a prompt of ten questions that included provocative quotations by Joan Robinson, Fredric Jameson, and André Gorz. This prompt asked each panelist to consider the adequacy of the Left’s historic and ongoing attempts to understand and transform social relations of work and unemployment. [Read More]

IN 1968 THE SOCIALIST GERMAN STUDENT LEAGUE (SDS) of Stuttgart printed a poster that said: “Everyone talks about the weather. Not us.” This slogan was originally used by Deutsche Bahn, the national railway. Instead of the depiction of an electric locomotive of the original poster, the SDS printed portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin below the caption. This alone should have raised some concern. To this day, Deutsche Bahn is incapable of not talking about the weather, which so often disrupts their stereotypically German concern with strict punctuality. [Read More]

ON OCTOBER 28, 2013, Spencer A. Leonard interviewed Bill Ayers, former member of Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground and author of the memoirs *Fugitive Days* (2001) and Public Enemy (2013). What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. The Weather Underground symbol on the cover of *Prairie Fire*. About the letters to police and journalists that would accompany Weather Underground bombings in the 1970s, Ayers writes in *Fugitive Days*, 'Each letter had a logo hand-drawn across the page -- our trademark thick and colorful rainbow with a slash of angry lightning cutting through it. [Read More]