Marx@200: The point is to change the world (Knoxville, 3.27.19)

 May 16, 2019  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Panel discussion on the life and legacy of Karl Marx as a revolutionary intellectual, hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society on March 27, 2019 at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). Speakers: Dr. Harry Dahms, University of Tennessee (Sociology) Dr. Arnold Farr, University of Kentucky (Philosophy) Dr. Spencer Leonard, Platypus Affiliated Society Moderated by AJ Knowles. Description: This past year marked the 200^th^ birthday of Karl Marx, than whom, as even his ideological opponent Isaiah Berlin had to admit, “no thinker in the nineteenth century has had so direct, deliberate and powerful an influence upon mankind. [Read More]
19th Century  20th Century  Communism  Critical Theory  eco-socialism  economic crisis  Karl Marx  Knoxville  Marxism  psychoanalysis  Revolution  socialism 

Karl Marx, utopian socialist

An interview with Gregory Claeys

Karl Marx, utopian socialist

 August 1, 2018  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

On May 9, 2018, Spencer A. Leonard interviewed Gregory Claeys, historian of socialism and author of Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (1987), Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (2010), and Marx and Marxism (2018), among others. The day after recording the interview it was broadcast on “Radical Minds” on WHPK–FM (88.5 FM) in Chicago. What follows is an edited version of the interview. [Read More]
Utopia  Socialism  Karl Marx 

Platypus Nashville Reading Group - Fall 2016

 September 30, 2016  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Summer and Fall/Autumn 2016 – Winter 2017 Every Monday, 7:00-9:00 pm Bongo Java, 2007 Belmont Blvd.  I. What is the Left?—What is Marxism? • required / * recommended reading Marx and Engels readings pp. from Robert C. Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader (Norton 2nd ed., 1978)  Week A. Radical bourgeois philosophy I. Rousseau: Crossroads of society | Aug. 8, 2016 Whoever dares undertake to establish a people’s institutions must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature, of transforming each individual, who by himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole, from which, in a sense, the individual receives his life and his being, of substituting a limited and mental existence for the physical and independent existence. [Read More]
critical theory  History of the Left  Marxism  Platypus  Socialism 

Rosa Luxemburg and the party

Rosa Luxemburg and the party

 May 3, 2016  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society  • Other languages: Ελληνικά

IN ONE OF HER EARLIEST INTERVENTIONS in the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), participating in the notorious theoretical “Revisionist Dispute,” in which Eduard Bernstein infamously stated that “the movement is everything, the goal nothing,” the 27 year-old Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) clearly enunciated her Marxism: “It is the final goal alone which constitutes the spirit and the content of our socialist struggle, which turns it into a class struggle.”1 Critique of socialism What did it mean to say that socialist politics was necessary to have “class struggle” at all? [Read More]
Rosa Luxemburg  Eduard Bernstein  Socialism  The party 

Horkheimer in 1943 on party and class

 January 12, 2016  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Without a socialist party, there is no class struggle, only rackets HORKHEIMER’S REMARKABLE ESSAY “On the sociology of class relations” (1943)1 is continuous with Adorno’s contemporaneous “Reflections on class theory” (1942) as well as his own “The authoritarian state” (1940/42), which similarly mark the transformation of Marx and Engels’s famous injunction in the Communist Manifesto that “history is the history of class struggles.” All of these writings were inspired by Walter Benjamin’s “On the concept of history” (AKA “Theses on the philosophy of history,” 1940), which registered history’s fundamental crisis. [Read More]
/20th Century  Capitalism  Communist party  Critical theory  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel  History  Vladimir Lenin  Liberalism  Karl Marx  Marxism  Max Horkheimer  Political party  Socialism  Socialist  Socioeconomic  SYRIZA  Theodor W. Adorno  Walter Benjamin 

Back to Herbert Spencer!

Industrial vs. militant society

Back to Herbert Spencer!

 January 12, 2016  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

HERBERT SPENCER’S GRAVE faces Marx’s at Highgate Cemetery in London. At his memorial, Spencer was honored for his anti-imperialism by Indian national liberation advocate and anti-colonialist Shyamji Krishnavarma, who funded a lectureship at Oxford in Spencer’s name. Marx and Spencer's facing graves.Photograph by Christian Fuchs, http://fuchs.uti.at/ What would the 19th century liberal, Utilitarian and Social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who was perhaps the most prominent, widely read and popular philosopher in the world during his lifetime – that is, in Marx’s lifetime – have to say to Marxists or more generally to the left, when such liberalism earned not only Marx’s own scorn but also Nietzsche’s criticism? [Read More]
Anti-imperialism  Anti-war  Benjamin Constant  Capitalism  Carl Schmitt  Freedom  Martin Heidegger  Imperialism  Karl Marx  Liberalism  Libertarian  Max Weber  Friedrich Nietzsche  Paul Lafargue  Socialism  Theodor W. Adorno  Herbert Spencer  Featured Articles 

Socialism Democracy Social Democracy - A Panel Discussion at II European Conference

 December 16, 2015  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Ursula Jensen (IBT) Paul Demarty (CPGB) Moderated by Richard Rubin. Description In the late nineteenth century, working people’s response to capital was expressed in the political demand for Socialism. This demand galvanized the formation of European Social Democratic parties guided by the ideology of Marxism. Among the most influential members of the German Social Democratic Party, the political leaders of the Second International, agreed that the primary task of Social Democratic parties was bringing about the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, the decisive political struggle between capital and labor. [Read More]
Social Democracy  Socialism 

1917

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

1917

 November 18, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society  • Other languages: Ελληνικά, Deutsch

ON APRIL 18, 2009, the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted the following panel discussion at the Left Forum Conference at Pace University in New York City. The panel was organized around four significant moments in the progressive separation of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: 2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), 1968 (Atiya Khan), 1933 (Richard Rubin), and 1917 (Chris Cutrone). The following is an edited transcript of the 1917 presentation by Chris Cutrone. [Read More]
Bolshevik Revolution  György Lukács  Karl Korsch  Vladimir Lenin  Revolution  Rosa Luxemburg  Socialism  Left Forum 

A Prelude to the History of the Left

 November 1, 2007  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE PLATYPUS HISTORIANS GROUP is a collective of members of Platypus who are researchers into the history of the Left. We will be publishing this series on the History of the Left under this collective authorship to indicate the collaborative nature of our research and the questions it raises. Each article under this byline will be written by one or several members of this collective, but with contributions and review by as many others of this group as possible and appropriate to the topics essayed. [Read More]
1789  1917  1960s  1968  Capitalism  Defeat  Enlightenment  History of the Left  Humanity  Marxism  Movements  Ronald Reagan  Sectarianism  Socialism  Stalinism  The Platypus Historians Group  Trotskyism