1970s

_LAST SUMMER, SPENCER A. LEONARD interviewed Clyde Young, a veteran member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. The interview was broadcast on June 31, 2011 on the radio show Radical Minds on WHPK – FM Chicago. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. A shorter version of this interview ran in the broadsheet edition of Platypus Review issue 43._ Spencer A. Leonard: Everyone hears a lot about the 1960s, the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. [Read More]

ON MAY 19, 2011, Platypus invited Carl Davidson, formerly of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Guardian Weekly, Tom Riley of the International Bolshevik Tendency, and Mel Rothenberg, formerly of the Sojourner Truth Organization, to reflect on “The Marxist turn: The New Left in the 1970s.” The original description of the event, which was moderated by Spencer A. Leonard at the University of Chicago, reads: “The 1970s are usually glossed over as a decade of the New Left’s disintegration into sectarianism, triggered by the twin defeats of Nixon’s election and the collapse of SDS in 1968–69. [Read More]

A panel discussion held on May 29, 2010 at the second Platypus International Convention at SAIC. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Greg Gabrellas Pam C. Nogales C. Spencer A. Leonard Description The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed the rise of a new militancy and sectarianism on the Left. Whether in the case of the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, the Gay Liberation Front, or many other currents on the Left, developments from that time did much to shape the New Left’s legacy as it comes down to the present. [Read More]