Pr Occupy

ON MARCH 31ST, 2012, the Platypus Affiliated Society invited Ben Lewis of the Communist Party of Great Britain and Tom Riley of the International Bolshevik Tendency to speak on the theme of “Lenin and the Marxist Left after #Occupy” at the 2012 Platypus International Convention held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The original description of the event reads as follows: “The occasion for this panel is, in part, Pham Binh’s recent critique of Tony Cliff’s biography of Lenin, which was circulated on the web and published in the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Weekly Worker, and the responses in on-going debate by Paul LeBlanc and Paul D’Amato. [Read More]

IN THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE, Marx disagrees with Hegel’s famous quote about history when he writes, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce…”1 Occupy is not a return to the New Left, a farce of the sixties. Usually history becomes codified once the right academic authorities have made their case most palatable to other academic authorities. [Read More]

LATE IN 2011, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a series of roundtable debates on the #Occupy Wall Street Movement. Speakers at the event held on December 9, 2011 at New York University included Hannah Appel (OWS Think Tank Working Group), Erik Van Deventer (NYU), Nathan Schneider (Waging Nonviolence), and Brian Dominick (Z Media Institute), with Jeremy Cohan (Platypus Affiliated Society) moderating. The original description of the roundtable reads as follows: “The recent #Occupy protests are driven by discontent with the present state of affairs: glaring economic inequality, dead-end Democratic Party politics, and, for some, the suspicion that capitalism could never produce an equitable society. [Read More]

MY INITIAL REACTION to the occupation of Wall Street was generally positive. But soon that feeling gave way to doubt and unease. I still find much hope in so many people taking to the streets, but I’ve become less certain of what, exactly, is going on. From Naomi Klein and Michael Moore to Chris Hedges, David Graeber, and Slavoj Žižek—and even Kanye West – every lefty public intellectual and several celebrities have come out in support of Occupy Wall Street and its progenitors. [Read More]