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 

Obama and Clinton

"Third Way" politics and the "Left"

 December 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

FOR THE “LEFT” that is critical of him, the most common comparison made of Obama is to Bill Clinton. This critique of Obama, as of Clinton, denounces his “Centrism,” the trajectory he appears to continue from the “new” Democratic Party of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) expressed by Clinton and Gore’s election in 1992. Clinton’s election was seen as part of the triumph of “Third Way” politics that contemporaneously found expression in Tony Blair’s “New” Labour Party in Britain. [Read More]
Bill Clinton  Consciousness  Critical theory  Depoliticization  Emancipation  Marxism  Movement  Neo-liberalism  Barack Obama  Politics  Profiles  Rosa Luxemburg  Socialism  The Left  Third Way  Workers 

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 The tasks revealed by historical Marxism have not been superseded but only obscured and forgotten, at the expense of emancipatory social politics in the present.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 

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 

To the victor, the spoils

Review of Artforum's May 2008 issue May '68'

 September 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

We succeeded culturally. We succeeded socially. And we lost politically… I always say: ‘thank God!’ —Daniel Cohn-Bendit in interview on 1968, conducted by Yascha Mounk for The Utopian (2008) [O]ne asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor… Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. [Read More]
1968  /20th Century  Anti-capitalism  Antonio Negri  Art  Artforum  Barbarism  Capitalism  Critical theory  Daniel Cohn-Bendit  Difference  History  Labor  Marxism  Multitude  Paris  Philosophy  Postmodern  Proletariat  Society  Students  Theory  Transformation  Utopian  Walter Benjamin  Working class 

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