1789

Honoré Daumier's (1808-1879) 'The Republic', 1848. After the Republic was proclaimed on 24 February 1848, the official image of the State had to be changed. A competition was launched to define the 'painted face of the republic'. The French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor submitted a mother nursing powerful toddlers while holding the tricolour flag in her hand. The child sitting at her feet, reading, was much admired. [Read More]

THE UPRISING IN EGYPT, which followed soon after the toppling of the old regime in Tunisia, succeeded in bringing down Hosni Mubarak on February 11, the 32nd anniversary to the day of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. Already, before this timely coincidence, comparisons between the Iranian Revolution and the revolts gripping the Arab world had started to be made. But other historical similarities offered themselves: the various “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and former Soviet Central Asian states and Lebanon in recent years, and the collapse of Communism in the Soviet bloc and beyond (the former Yugoslavia) starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. [Read More]

The following is a talk given at the Marxist-Humanist Committee public forum on The Crisis in Marxist Thought, hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society in Chicago on Friday, July 25th, 2008. I want to speak about the meaning of history for any purportedly Marxian Left. We in Platypus focus on the history of the Left because we think that the narrative one tells about this history is in fact one’s theory of the present. [Read More]

THE PLATYPUS HISTORIANS GROUP is a collective of members of Platypus who are researchers into the history of the Left. We will be publishing this series on the History of the Left under this collective authorship to indicate the collaborative nature of our research and the questions it raises. Each article under this byline will be written by one or several members of this collective, but with contributions and review by as many others of this group as possible and appropriate to the topics essayed. [Read More]