Platypus

The Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion on the Politics of the Contemporary Student Left at the U.S. Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit on June 26, 2010. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Transcript in Platypus Review #27 Panelists Will Klatt, member of the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and organizer for Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Luis Brennan, student organizer at University of Chicago and former member of the new SDS [Read More]

At the 1st annual international convention of the Platypus Affiliated Society, in Chicago, June 12-14, 2009, the concluding plenary event, a discussion on Platypus’s theoretical stance, its raison d’etre, and where the project will be going. Audience question-and-answer discussion follows. Held on June 14, 2009 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element A transcript can be found here [Read More]

Re: Platypus: “They had friends, they had enemies, they fought, and exactly through this they demonstrated their right to exist.” – Trotsky, on the history of new political and artistic movements (1938) http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/06/artpol.htm Not a single progressive idea has begun with a “mass base,â€? otherwise it would not have been a progressive idea. It is only in its last stage that the idea finds its masses – if, of course, it answers the needs of progress. [Read More]

‘[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’ [Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)]. 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]