The Left

What does it mean to say that Platypus is the psychoanalyst of the Left?

April 1, 2019 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SAY that Platypus is the psychoanalyst of the Left? Thinking through this analogy can provide some clarity about the Platypus project and its relationship to the existing Left. Freud never had a prescriptive conception of health. In fact, for Freud, mental health existed on a spectrum, and was not a difference in kind. In other words, for Freud, the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy psyche was not a difference in two kinds of psyches, but a difference in how the psyches expressed degrees of mental illness on a spectrum. [Read More]

Platypus The Left Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud

Democracy and The Left

June 1, 2014 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Honoré Daumier's (1808-1879) 'The Republic', 1848. After the Republic was proclaimed on 24 February 1848, the official image of the State had to be changed. A competition was launched to define the 'painted face of the republic'. The French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor submitted a mother nursing powerful toddlers while holding the tricolour flag in her hand. The child sitting at her feet, reading, was much admired. [Read More]

1776 1789 1848 1914 1917 1989 Arab Spring Bonapartism CIO Critique Cuban Missile Crisis Democracy Electoral politics GDR Immanent critique John F. Kennedy Koch brothers Kshama Sawant Vladimir Lenin Karl Marx Max Weber New Deal Occupy Republic Revolution Rosa Luxemburg Russian revolution SFIO Socialist Alternative SPD The Left Ukraine WWII

1873--1973: The century of Marxism

The death of Marxism and the emergence of neo-liberalism and neo-anarchism

June 7, 2012 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

AT THE 2012 PLATYPUS AFFILIATED SOCIETY’S (PAS) annual International Convention, held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago March 30–April 1, Chris Cutrone, President of the PAS, delivered the following presentation, which has been edited for clarity. A full audio recording is available online by clicking the above link. IN THE TRADITION we established just two years ago, there is a Platypus President’s report, speaking to the historical moment. [Read More]

Anarchism History History of the Left Vladimir Lenin Karl Marx Marxism Stalinism The Left Theodor W. Adorno Trotskyism

Up in the air: The legacy of the New Communist Movement

December 1, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

_ON OCTOBER 17, 2010, Spencer A. Leonard interviewed Max Elbaum, author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che, to discuss the New Communist Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. The interview was aired during two episodes of Radical Minds on WHPK – FM Chicago, on October 26 and November 9. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview._ Spencer A. Leonard: To start off in the broadest possible way, how and when did the New Communist Movement emerge? [Read More]

Anti-intellectualism Antonio Gramsci Black Belt thesis Black Panther Communist party History of the Left Vladimir Lenin Marxism Max Elbaum New Communist Movement Orthodoxy SNCC The Left Weather Underground

Oil and the Left

November 6, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

IN SEPTEMBER OF THIS YEAR, Andony Melathopoulos interviewed Imre Szeman, author, professor, and founder of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies, on behalf of the Platypus Review, to discuss his analysis of oil politics in light of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the political responses to it. The interview was prepared in conjunction with Brian Worley. Andony Melathopoulos: In your estimation, did the recent BP disaster precipitate any new thinking from the Left? [Read More]

Imre Szeman The Left environmentalism oil

The dead Left: Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution

July 9, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ONE FINDS QUITE A BIT OF NAME-CALLING among the innumerable articles and blog posts written in criticism of Hugo Chavez and his government. Although most of this invective is not very illuminating, one article by a young, Colombian, Trotsky-ish labor organizer describes Chavez perfectly in two words: a “postmodern Bonapartist.” Chavez, his Bolivarian Revolution, and his project of “21st Century Socialism” are postmodern in the sense that they exist in a discontinuity, in an amnesiac disconnect, with the modernist project of social and political emancipation that started with the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century and withered and died sometime in the late 20th century. [Read More]

Bolivarian Revolution Hugo Chavez ISO Michael Albert Noam Chomsky Tariq Ali The Left Venezuela

Rejoinder to David Black

On Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy

February 26, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

DAVID BLACK’S VALUABLE COMMENTS and further historical exposition (in Platypus Review 18, December 2009) of my review of Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (Platypus Review 15, September 2009) have at their core an issue with Korsch’s account of the different historical phases of the question of “philosophy” for Marx and Marxism. Black questions Korsch’s differentiation of Marx’s relationship to philosophy into three distinct periods: pre-1848, circa 1848, and post-1848. But attempting to defeat Korsch’s historical account of such changes in Marx’s approaches to relating theory and practice means avoiding Korsch’s principal point. [Read More]

David Black György Lukács History of the Left Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Karl Marx Marxism Max Horkheimer Rosa Luxemburg The Left Theodor W. Adorno Leon Trotsky

My dialogue with Kliman on Chicago Political Workshop, Principia Dialectica and Marxist Humanism

May 28, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

[Andrew Kliman wrote:] Reply to Chicago Political Workshop, Chris Cutrone, and Principia Dialectica On plagiarism, Postone, and the present May 27, 2009 Dear Comrades, First, I want to respond to the charge that I plagiarize Moishe Postone, by categorically denying it. When, last July, Sean of Principia Dialectica put forward the allegation of plagiarism (using somewhat different words), I tried to overlook it. I thought that the charge wouldn’t be taken seriously, given that Sean left it wholly unsubstantiated. [Read More]

capitalism critical theory Discussion Karl Marx Marxism Principia Dialectica the Left

notes on Adorno in 1968-69

May 26, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some very brief notes on Adorno’s last writings from 1968-69, the “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” “Resignation,” “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? (AKA “Is Marx Obsolete?”),” and the Adorno-Marcuse correspondence of 1969. The center of Adorno’s critique of the 1960s New Left was their romantic opposition to capitalism, found, for example, in their desideratum of the unity of theory and practice. Rather, Adorno asserted the progressive-emancipatory aspect of the separation of theory and practice. [Read More]

/20th Century Chris Cutrone crisis critical theory Discussion György Lukács Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Karl Marx Marxism Rosa Luxemburg the Left Theodor W. Adorno Leon Trotsky Walter Benjamin

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