Freedom in the Anthropocene, Toronto

 January 15, 2014  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

A moderated panel discussion hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society on the interrelation of capital, history and ecology, held at York University on January 15, 2014. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Jordan Briggs, International Bolshevik Tendency Michelle Mawhinney, Political Science, York University Raymond Rogers, Environmental Studies, York University Description The Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen recently characterized the period marked by the start of the industrial revolution in the 18th century to the present as a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. [Read More]
Anthropocene  Capital  Ecology  History  International Bolshevik Tendency 

Radical Interpretations of the Present Crisis, NYC

 November 14, 2012  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

A panel event held at the New School in New York City on November 14, 2012. Video Recoding Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Transcribed in Platypus Review #56 Panelists Loren Goldner Co-Editor at Insurgent Notes; authors: Ubu Saved From Drowning: Class Struggle and Statist Containment in Portugal and Spain, 1974-1977 (2000), “The Sky Is Always Darkest Just Before the Dawn: Class Struggle in the U. [Read More]
Radical Interpretations of the Present Crisis  Capital  Capitalism  Economic crisis  Karl Marx  Marxism 

Teach-in: Does Marxism Really Matter?

 September 20, 2012  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

A teach-in with [Pac Pobric], assistant editor of the Platypus Review, contributing editor, 491, contributor, On-Verge, held on September 20, 2011, at New York University. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Description In the mid-19th century, Marx and Engels famously observed in the Communist Manifesto that a specter was haunting Europe: the specter of Communism. 160 years later, it is Marxism itself that haunts us. [Read More]
Capital  History  Marxism  NYU  Relevance 

Capital in History

Marxism and the Modern Philosophy of Freedom

 August 16, 2011  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

A presentation by Platypus member Chris Cutrone on August 16, 2011, at Communist University, which took place from August 17th to August 20, 2011, at Goldsmiths, University of London. Video Credit: Communist Party of Great Britain. Video Recording Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element What is progress if not the absolute elaboration of humanity’s creative dispositions… unmeasured by any previously established yardstick[,] an end in itself… the absolute movement of becoming? [Read More]
Becoming  Bourgeois  Capital  Capitalism  Freedom  Grundrisse  History  Karl Marx  Marxism  Proletarian 

Left Behind: The Working Class in Crisis

 April 23, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

The Platypus Affiliated Society presents a moderated panel discussion and audience Q & A addressing issues of global capital, trade unions, workers rights, international solidarity, and immigration, in light of recent economic and political change. Held on Thursday April 23, 2009, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Transcript in Platypus Review #13: Panelists Abraham Mwaura, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, organizer at the Republic Windows & Doors Factory. [Read More]
Machine Workers of America  Capital  Capitalism  Chicago Jobs with Justice  Global capital  Immigration  International Labor Conference  International solidarity  Radio  Trade unions  Unite Here  United Electrical  Workers  Workers rights  Working class 

Remember the future!

A rejoinder to Peter Hudis on "Capital in History"

Remember the future!

 November 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS ARTICULATES the problem of what “ought” to be with what “is.” The question is how the necessities of emancipatory struggles in the present relate to those of the past. The tasks revealed by historical Marxism have not been superseded but only obscured and forgotten, at the expense of emancipatory social politics in the present. Dunayevskaya and post-Trotskyism The problem with Raya Dunayevskaya lies in the belief that there has been any real theoretical or practical political progress since the failure of the revolutions of 1917-19. [Read More]
Capital  Exchanges  History  Karl Marx  Marxism 

Re-thinking the Crisis of Capital in Light of the Crisis of the Left

 November 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Far from expressing a sequence of never-ending progression, the Hegelian dialectic lets retrogression appear as translucent as progression and indeed makes it very nearly inevitable if one ever tries to escape regression by mere faith. —Raya Dunayevskaya1 IT MAY SEEM IRONIC that a moment so typified by the crisis of capital calls for a serious critique of the crisis on the Left; however, in the present moment it has become impossible to take on the crisis of existing society without facing the limitations found in prevailing leftist responses to it. [Read More]
Capital  Crisis  Exchanges  Marxism  Marxist-Hummanist Committee  The Left 

Capital, Spectacle, and Modernity

 November 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

A PREFATORY STATEMENT FROM RETORT: Having talked over your questions at length, we find that they can be answered best by grouping together several of them and trying to spell out the key issues and assumptions we see underlying them. That way, we hope, the common ground between Retort and Platypus will be clear – as well as the nature of our disagreements. Soren Whited: How would you describe the historical and conceptual relationship between the commodity form – first articulated by Marx and further elaborated by Lukács as “the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects” – and the concept of spectacle – first formulated by Guy Debord as “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image”? [Read More]
Capital  Spectacle  Modernity  Retort 

Capital in history

The need for a Marxian philosophy of history of the Left

 October 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society  • Other languages: Deutsch, Español, Ελληνικά

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]
1789  1930s  1960s  19th Century  Bourgeois  Capital  Capitalism  Class consciousness  Crisis  Degeneration  Domination  Friedrich Engels  Freedom  French Revolution  György Lukács  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel  History  History of the Left  Industrial Revolution  Karl Korsch  Vladimir Lenin  Marxism  Marxist-Hummanist Committee  Modern  Moishe Postone  Politics  Proletariat  Regression  Revolt of the Third Estate  Rosa Luxemburg  The Left  Theodor W. Adorno  Leon Trotsky  Walter Benjamin