Socialism

Marx and Engel's Marxism

March 20, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

A panel discussion organized by the Platypus Affiliated Society held on March 20, 2011, at Left Forum, Pace University. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Benjamin Blumberg - University of Chicago Nathan Smith - The Platypus Affiated Society Pam Nogales - New York University Richard Rubin - Platypus Tana Forrester - The Platypus Affiliated Society Description Marx and Engels were not the preeminent socialists but rather socialism’s greatest critics, distinguishing their “communism” from “reactionary,” “bourgeois” and “democratic” socialism. [Read More]

Left Forum Left Forum 2011 Friedrich Engels Forum 2011 Karl Marx Marxism New York NYC Other Socialism Bourgeois Revolutions

Book Review: Sherry Wolf, Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation

January 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009. YOU ARE SEVENTEEN, you enjoy sex with members of your gender, and you have a growing interest in radical politics. What should you believe, what should you do? The socialist position seems practically indistinguishable from mainstream liberalism: support for same-sex marriage, hate crime laws, and a trans-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). There seems to be a more radical option, however. Against the (allegedly) reformist, assimilationist, and legalistic orientation of actually existing gay politics, self-described “queers” demand a politics of radical sexual difference; a politics that seeks, somehow, to go beyond equality. [Read More]

Sherry Wolf Sexuality Socialism LGBT

Rethinking the New Left (Chicago, 11/9/10)

November 9, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Public forum organised by the Platypus Affiliated Society on November 9th 2010 at the University of Chicago. Co-sponsored by The Global Voices Lecture Program of International House, with the support of the University of Chicago Student Activities Fund Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Mark Rudd Alan Spector Osha Neumann Tim Wohlforth Moderated by Spencer A. Leonard Description The memory of the 1960s, which has long kindled contestation and debate on the means and ends of freedom politics, is rapidly fading into the political unconscious. [Read More]

1960s Anarchism Marxism Movement New Left Politics SDS Socialism

my letter to The Nation on "Re-Imagining Socialism"

April 1, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

The following letter that I wrote will be published in The Nation. I wrote in response to the article “Rising to the Occasion” (published elsewhere as “The ’S’ Word”) by Barbara Ehrenreich (author of Nickel and Dimed) and Bill Fletcher, Jr. (spokesperson for the Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization and co-founder of Progressives for Obama), and forum of articles in reply, under the title “Re-Imagining Socialism,” by Robert Pollin, Tariq Ali, Immanuel Wallerstein, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Parenti, Doug Henwood, Mike Davis, Michael Albert, et al. [Read More]

/20th Century Discussion ideology Marxism Politics Revolution Socialism

excerpt from Trotsky

March 16, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

From Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), Results and Prospects (1906), VII. The Pre-Requisites of Socialism: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/rp07.htm “Undoubtedly, the concentration of production, the development of technique and the growth of consciousness among the masses are essential pre-requisites for socialism. But these processes take place simultaneously, and not only give an impetus to each other, but also retard and limit each other. Each of these processes at a higher level demands a certain development of another process at a lower level. [Read More]

Chris Cutrone Discussion emancipation ideology Karl Marx Marxism Revolution Socialism Leon Trotsky

Is Marx Back?

An Interview with Leo Panitch

February 19, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

The economic crisis, as many commentators and critics are quick to point out, has rekindled interest in – and anxieties over – Marxism. Although many on the Left hope this renewed curiosity marks the beginning of a radical turn, similar revivals of anti-capitalist politics in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s failed to achieve the revolutionary transformations they sought. Has Marxism returned as a significant political force? How might this translate into the possibility for a revitalized Left? [Read More]

Anti-capitalism Karl Marx Marxism Radicalism Socialism Socialist Register

notes on Feb. 15 reading Korsch "Marxism and Philosophy" (1923)

February 15, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

‘[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]

/20th Century Chris Cutrone crisis critical theory Discussion History ideology Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Karl Marx Marxism Philosophy Platypus Revolution Rosa Luxemburg Socialism vulgar Marxism

2006 interview with Juliet Mitchell

February 14, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Juliet Mitchell: “I don’t think anti-psychiatrists such as Laing and Cooper saw the schizophrenic as the madman telling the truth. What we had were two sets of rigidity, we had the pathological dimension of psychosis in paranoia, schizophrenia: delusions – which are delusions, let’s face it. But then we had the normative delusions of an acceptable psychotic status quo, which is what our political world very often is. For me, the question is whether the person who is suffering from the extreme pathological dimension of psychosis can find sufficient freedom to not need that refuge, whether he or she is able to come with a critique of the normative psychosis of the political social world. [Read More]

1960s /20th Century academy activism Discussion Feminism Freud Juliet Mitchell movement Psychoanalysis Socialism

note on recent readings: Slaughter, Nettl, Luxemburg

February 10, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

After the recent discussion of Luxemburg’s pamphlet on Reform or Revolution? (1900/08), there might be some confusion regarding the relationship between Luxemburg’s formulations and the raison d’etre of Platypus as an organized project today.—What is the point of reading Luxemburg today? Whereas Luxemburg was critiquing Eduard Bernstein and other “revisionists’” arguments that the development of capitalism had made proletarian social revolution superfluous or even harmful, Luxemburg was arguing that such historical “development” must be seen as symptomatic of the growing and deepening crisis of capitalism, and that the organized Marxist social-democratic labor and political movement must be seen as part of that history, part of that crisis. [Read More]

capitalism Discussion emancipation History Marxism organization Politics Revolution Rosa Luxemburg Socialism society the Left

Obama and Clinton

"Third Way" politics and the "Left"

December 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

FOR THE “LEFT” that is critical of him, the most common comparison made of Obama is to Bill Clinton. This critique of Obama, as of Clinton, denounces his “Centrism,” the trajectory he appears to continue from the “new” Democratic Party of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) expressed by Clinton and Gore’s election in 1992. Clinton’s election was seen as part of the triumph of “Third Way” politics that contemporaneously found expression in Tony Blair’s “New” Labour Party in Britain. [Read More]

Bill Clinton Consciousness Critical theory Depoliticization Emancipation Marxism Movement Neo-liberalism Barack Obama Politics Profiles Rosa Luxemburg Socialism The Left Third Way Workers