Finance Capital and Occupy

Marxist Perspectives

 March 17, 2012  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Video Recording Panelists Radhika Desai is Professor at the Department of Political Studies, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She is the author of Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics (2 rev ed, 2004) and Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’ and the Labour Party (1994), She edited Developmental and Cultural Nationalisms in 2009. She is co-editing Volume 27 of Research in Political Economy with Paul Zarembka. [Read More]
Occupy  Left Forum  Left Forum 2012  Capitalism  Finance capital  Occupy  Political economy 

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 

Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me?

The ambivalence of the current German student movement

Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me?

 March 15, 2010  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

“DIESER HÖRSAAL IST BESETZT!” (“This lecture hall is occupied!”) In November and December 2009, signs bearing such slogans were found on doors at over 60 German universities. For the second time that year, a broad student movement managed to gain public attention for its demands. Protests at the University of Vienna kicked off what became a Europe-wide solidarity wave. In Germany, the Viennese protest first triggered occupations in Heidelberg, Münster, and Potsdam, after which students at many other institutions also became involved. [Read More]
Bologna Process  Capitalism  Germany  Human rights  Max Horkheimer  Michael Burawoy  Nationalism  Occupation  Protest  Red-baiting  Reform  Strike  Students  Student politics  Student Left 

My dialogue with Kliman on Chicago Political Workshop, Principia Dialectica and Marxist Humanism

 May 28, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

[Andrew Kliman wrote:] Reply to Chicago Political Workshop, Chris Cutrone, and Principia Dialectica On plagiarism, Postone, and the present May 27, 2009 Dear Comrades, First, I want to respond to the charge that I plagiarize Moishe Postone, by categorically denying it. When, last July, Sean of Principia Dialectica put forward the allegation of plagiarism (using somewhat different words), I tried to overlook it. I thought that the charge wouldn’t be taken seriously, given that Sean left it wholly unsubstantiated. [Read More]
capitalism  critical theory  Discussion  Karl Marx  Marxism  Principia Dialectica  the Left 

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 

Why the U.S. stimulus package is bound to fail

 March 15, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

MUCH IS TO BE GAINED by viewing the contemporary crisis as a surface eruption generated out of deep tectonic shifts in the spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development. The tectonic plates are now accelerating their motion and the likelihood of more frequent and more violent crises of the sort that have been occurring since 1980 or so will almost certainly increase. The manner, form, spatiality and time of these surface disruptions are almost impossible to predict, but that they will occur with greater frequency and depth is almost certain. [Read More]
Capitalism  Crisis  Debt  Failure  Giovanni Arrighi  Hegemony  Keynesianism  Karl Marx  New Deal  Reflections  Stimulus 

Remarks on Chris Cutrone's 'Iraq and the election: the fog of 'anti-war' politics'

 March 15, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

I WAS INTRIGUED TO FIND in The Platypus Review #7 a commentary by Chris Cutrone on the U.S. role in world politics. I found it more sophisticated and original than anything I had previously come across in the mainstream media either here or in Europe. Before launching my machine, I would like to situate myself. I’m a foreigner, philosopher of sorts, and not a student any more (That means I’m old. [Read More]
Anti-war  War  Bush administration  Capitalism  Democracy  Exchanges  Francis Fukuyama  Imperialism  Iraq  Neo-conservatism  Reagan  Wilsonianism 

note on recent readings: Slaughter, Nettl, Luxemburg

 February 10, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

After the recent discussion of Luxemburg’s pamphlet on Reform or Revolution? (1900/08), there might be some confusion regarding the relationship between Luxemburg’s formulations and the raison d’etre of Platypus as an organized project today.—What is the point of reading Luxemburg today? Whereas Luxemburg was critiquing Eduard Bernstein and other “revisionists’” arguments that the development of capitalism had made proletarian social revolution superfluous or even harmful, Luxemburg was arguing that such historical “development” must be seen as symptomatic of the growing and deepening crisis of capitalism, and that the organized Marxist social-democratic labor and political movement must be seen as part of that history, part of that crisis. [Read More]
capitalism  Discussion  emancipation  History  Marxism  organization  Politics  Revolution  Rosa Luxemburg  Socialism  society  the Left 

Finance capital

Why financial capitalism is no more "fictitious" than any other kind

 October 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

WITH THE PRESENT FINANCIAL MELT-DOWN in the U.S. throwing the global economy into question, many on the “Left” are wondering again about the nature of capitalism. While many will be tempted to jump on the bandwagon of the “bailout” being floated by the Bush administration and the Congressional Democrats (including Obama), others will protest the “bailing out” of Wall Street. The rhetoric of “Wall Street vs. Main Street,” between “hardworking America” and the “financial fat cats,” however, belies a more fundamental truth: the two are indissolubly linked and are in fact two sides of the same coin of capitalism. [Read More]
Authoritarianism  Bailout  Bill Clinton  Capitalism  Crisis  Economics  Financial  Freedom  Friedrich Hayek  Humanity  Ideology  Industrial  John Kenneth Galbraith  Karl Polanyi  Karl Marx  Marxism  Milton Friedman  Modern  Neo-liberalism  Organization  Production  Reforms  Reification  Socialism  Society  The Left  The Platypus Historians Group 

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