The Sandernistas

The final triumph of the 1980s

The Sandernistas

 December 17, 2015  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE CAMPAIGN CYCLE for the 2016 general election in the U.S. has been characterized by some throwbacks to the 1980s, most notably in the two major party challengers, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Most remarkably, the Sanders campaign has introduced the word “socialism” into mainstream political discourse. It’s clear that what socialism means in Sanders’s mouth, however, is New Deal liberalism – despite the poster of Eugene V. Debs that hangs in Sanders’s Senate office. [Read More]
Bernie Sanders  Liberalism  New Deal  /2016 American Presidential Election 

Democracy and The Left

Democracy and The Left

 June 1, 2014  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Honoré Daumier's (1808-1879) 'The Republic', 1848. After the Republic was proclaimed on 24 February 1848, the official image of the State had to be changed. A competition was launched to define the 'painted face of the republic'. The French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor submitted a mother nursing powerful toddlers while holding the tricolour flag in her hand. The child sitting at her feet, reading, was much admired. [Read More]
1776  1789  1848  1914  1917  1989  Arab Spring  Bonapartism  CIO  Critique  Cuban Missile Crisis  Democracy  Electoral politics  GDR  Immanent critique  John F. Kennedy  Koch brothers  Kshama Sawant  Vladimir Lenin  Karl Marx  Max Weber  New Deal  Occupy  Republic  Revolution  Rosa Luxemburg  Russian revolution  SFIO  Socialist Alternative  SPD  The Left  Ukraine  WWII 

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