Anarchism

Rebelling against the world

Book Review: Alex Butterworth, 'The World that Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents'. New York: Pantheon Press, 2010.

June 10, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

“THE TERRORIST IS NOBLE, irresistibly fascinating, for he combines in himself the two sublimates of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero” (127). The man who spoke these words was Sergei Kravchinsky, the Tsarist officer turned anarchist who went on to assassinate the chief of the Russia’s secret police and expose that country’s autocracy before the world in the best-selling book Underground Russia. Terrorism was not restricted to Russia’s early revolutionary movement. [Read More]

Book review: Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy

September 3, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

[Marx wrote,] “[Humanity] always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely it will always be found that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or are at least understood to be in the process of emergence.”1 This dictum is not affected by the fact that a problem which supersedes present relations may have been formulated in an anterior epoch. [Read More]

Notes on Luxemburg's The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906)

March 23, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some notes on Rosa Luxemburg’s Mass, Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906), which we read as our second text from the period of the 1905 Revolution in Russia. First, on the 1905 Revolution, it needs to be emphasized that this was not only a prelude to and “rehearsal” for the 1917 Russian Revolution, but was itself a world-historic event that was galvanizing for the international Left and workers movement, as well as giving shape to 20th Century political trends more generally. [Read More]

Anarchism Chris Cutrone Discussion Vladimir Lenin Marxism Rosa Luxemburg Leon Trotsky

Red-baiting and ideology

The new SDS

December 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

TO THE EDITORS OF THE PLATYPUS REVIEW: I am not now, nor have I ever been, either a Maoist or sympathetic to Maoism. I am also not a member of SDS. I was outraged however, by the blatant red-baiting of Rachel Haut in a recent Platypus Review Interview and disturbed that it seems to have gone unchallenged by PR. Rachel Haut was quoted as saying: “To say that the Maoists can be part of the ideological debate would mean to condone them being in this organization, which is something I don’t do. [Read More]

Anarchism Anti-intellectualism Democracy Exchanges Ideology Laurie Rojas Maoism Marxism New SDS Organization Politics Protest Red-baiting Revolution Richard Rubin Stalinism The Left Student Left

A polemic on protest

Reflections on the RNC resistance

October 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

I DECIDED NOT TO PARTICIPATE in any illegal protests at the RNC. There’s a simple, material reason: Had I been arrested I would have been accountable for bail money (or unhappily relying on legal defense funds that I truly feel have more value elsewhere) and possibly a day’s worth of income. I have been and continue to be a member of the working class. I grew up with a single mother who worked two low-paying jobs, and for the past five years, living on my own, I have survived well below the poverty line. [Read More]

Anarchism Movements Participation Polarization Protests Reflections Resistance Revolution RNC The Left Utopia Violence

The Hundred Days campaign: the present and future of SDS

September 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

FROM JULY 24 UNTIL JULY 28 2008, the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had its third annual national convention in College Park, Maryland. At the convention, national campaigns were presented and voted on by the attendees. A major campaign introduced at the convention was the Hundred Days campaign, which seeks to organize and engage newly politicized Americans in politics beyond the campaign season. During the first one hundred days of the next administration the campaign will organize two nationwide weeks of action to ensure that the people remain involved in politics after the election cycle. [Read More]

Anarchism Anti-capitalism Ben Shepard Capitalism Chicago Dave Shukla Democracy Democratic society FRSO Hope Hundred Days campaign Ideology Left Forum Liberalism Maoism Marxism Movement New SDS New York Barack Obama Organization Power Process Protest Sectarianism Socialism Split Structure Students The Left

Walter Benjamin

May 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

WALTER BENJAMIN OCCUPIES a unique place in the history of modern revolutionary thought: he is the first Marxist to break radically with the ideology of progress. His thinking has therefore a distinct critical quality, which sets him apart from the dominant and “official” forms of historical materialism, and gives him a formidable methodological superiority. This peculiarity has to do with his ability to incorporate into the body of Marxist revolutionary theory insights from the Romantic critique of civilization and from the Jewish messianic tradition. [Read More]

Anarchism Bolshevism Critical theory Frankfurt School French Revolution György Lukács Historical materialism History Ideology Karl Marx Marxism Profiles Progress Theology Theory Violence Walter Benjamin

"Let the dead bury the dead!"

Response to Principia Dialectica (UK) on May 1968

May 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE NEW MAYDAY MAGAZINE (UK) and Platypus have been in dialogue on the issues of anarchism and Marxism and the state of the “Left” today in light of history. (Please see “Organization, political action, history and consciousness” by Chris Cutrone for Platypus, and “Half-time Team Talk” by Trevor Bark for Mayday, in issues #2, February 2008, and #4, April-May 2008, respectively.) Principia Dialectica, another new British journal, also has taken note of Platypus (see “Weird gonzo leftoid journal,” April 15, 2008), specifically with our interview of Moishe Postone on “Marx after Marxism” (in issue #3, March 2008). [Read More]

1968 Anarchism Exchanges György Lukács Marxism Mayday Moishe Postone Principia Dialectica Theodor W. Adorno Trevor Bark Walter Benjamin

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

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