Reflections

The sport of protest

Resistance to the Olympics coming to Chicago

September 20, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

NO GAMES CHICAGO WAS FOUNDED in the summer of 2008 when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that Chicago was among the bid cities for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. The group’s aim is to prevent Chicago from hosting the games – nothing more, nothing less. The reason for this opposition is No Games Chicago’s claim that, if Chicago wins the bid to host the Olympics, the city’s working class would bear the bulk of the costs. [Read More]

Symptomology

Historical transformations in social-political context

May 15, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά

Marx ridiculed the idea of having to “prove” the labor theory of value. If Marxian theory proved to be the means whereby the real relations of bourgeois society could be demonstrated in their movement, where they came from, what they were, and where they were going, that was the proof of the theory. Neither Hegel nor Marx understood any other “scientific” proof. The more concrete the negation of the need, the more abstract, empty and flamboyant becomes the subjective mediation. [Read More]

/20th Century Crisis Critical theory David Harvey Karl Marx Marxism Michel Foucault Neo-liberalism New Left Barack Obama Reflections

Resurrecting the 30s

A response to David Harvey and James Heartfield

May 15, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Over! What a stupid name. Why over? Over pure nothing, it is all the same. Why have eternal creation, When all is subject to annihilation? Now it is over. What meaning can one see? It is as if it had not come to be, And yet it circulates as if it were. —Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s Faust THE LAST FORTY YEARS have been conceptually bewildering for the Left. The withering of working class movements and the rise of the new social movements have coincided with a global shift away from national state-centric (or “Fordist”) modes of accumulation towards a more “global,” neo-liberal capitalism. [Read More]

1930s David Harvey James Heartfield Neo-liberalism Reflections The Left Exchanges

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

The necessity of leadership

December 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

TO CHANGE THE WORLD, we need a movement. This movement must be made up of millions of people and thousands of organizations. These organizations must build and push the movement forward. How do we get to this point? We have to start with leadership. From 12 to 155 As a union organizer, I train workers to lead their shop floor and industry wide struggles. In the case of my union, we call the leaders in the shops “committee members. [Read More]

Activism Labor Labor movement Leadership Movement Organization Power Reflections Unions Workers

Violence at the RNC

October 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

IN MARCH 2003, millions took to the streets worldwide to protest the impending invasion of Iraq. Despite their numbers, the efforts proved in vain. The war went on; the protests dwindled. But however attenuated, there are still protests. In Minneapolis/St. Paul this August, some 10,000 marched against the Republican National Convention. But as organized rallies gave way to irrational violence, the inadequacy of five years of failed Anti-War activism and Left opposition came into sharp relief. [Read More]

Reflections RNC Violence

Reenacting '68

October 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE CROWD ASSEMBLED in a shady corner of Grant Park in the waning afternoon hours of August 28 might have been mistaken for extras in a poorly-funded period film. With clothes loosely evoking 60’s-era protest, they reclined in the grass, rolling cigarettes, eating peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, listening to speeches and gazing at the sky. It might have seemed a stretch to bill the event as a historical reenactment of the notorious 1968 Democratic National Convention protests – that long and bloody week in Chicago which has been discussed and picked over at length in this 40th anniversary year. [Read More]

Reflections

Five questions to the student Left

October 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

AN INTERVIEW WITH SDS MEMBER Rachel Haut published in the September issue of this publication provoked widespread comment in radical circles.1 We welcome the discussion but worry that it remains ensconced within the sterile jargon and petty antinomies of the actually-existing-Left. More fundamental questions exist than, say, the position of sectarian groups within the SDS – questions that unsettle the comfortable assumptions of radical politics. There’s a temptation to think such of questioning as an irrelevant, academic obstruction to real action. [Read More]

Anti-war Capitalism Class Identity Ideology Imperialism Movement New SDS Organization Politics Racism Radicals Reflections Society Students Transformation

A polemic on protest

Reflections on the RNC resistance

October 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

I DECIDED NOT TO PARTICIPATE in any illegal protests at the RNC. There’s a simple, material reason: Had I been arrested I would have been accountable for bail money (or unhappily relying on legal defense funds that I truly feel have more value elsewhere) and possibly a day’s worth of income. I have been and continue to be a member of the working class. I grew up with a single mother who worked two low-paying jobs, and for the past five years, living on my own, I have survived well below the poverty line. [Read More]

Anarchism Movements Participation Polarization Protests Reflections Resistance Revolution RNC The Left Utopia Violence

On the corner

Intersectionality and transformation

September 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

IN 1969, SNCC MEMBER and Third World Women’s Alliance founder Francis Beal wrote The Black Women’s Manifesto; Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female. While Beal was certainly not the first woman to raise questions about the different ways differently raced women were impacted by sexist oppression, The Black Women’s Manifesto marks the birth of modern intersectional political thought. In The Black Woman’s Manifesto Beal argued that black women were not the women the Moynihan report painted them to be and that they experienced a unique form of economic exploitation because, unlike white middle class women, they had always worked. [Read More]

Reflections