notes on Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism an Infantile Disorder (1920)

 April 13, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

From Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism – An Infantile Disorder (1920): http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ “[E.g.,] Parliamentarianism has become “historically obsolete”. That is true in the propaganda sense. However, everybody knows that this is still a far cry from overcoming it in practice. Capitalism could have been declared – and with full justice – to be “historically obsolete” many decades ago, but that does not at all remove the need for a very long and very persistent struggle on the basis of capitalism. [Read More]
/20th Century  Chris Cutrone  Discussion  History  Vladimir Lenin  Politics  Rosa Luxemburg  the Left  Leon Trotsky 

Going it alone: Christopher Hitchens and the death of the Left

Book Review: Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman (eds.). *Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left*.

Going it alone: Christopher Hitchens and the death of the Left

 March 15, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

New York: New York University Press, 2008. IF IT DID NOT COME TO END IN 1989, as conservative critic Francis Fukuyama expected, this is because, in Hegel’s sense, as freedom’s self-realization in time, History had already ceased. Long before the new geopolitical configurations and institutional forms of the post-Soviet world, a new and unprecedented, though scarcely recognized, political situation had taken shape: The last threads of continuity connecting the present with the long epoch of political emancipation were severed. [Read More]
Christopher Hitchens  Enlightenment  Iraq  Marxism  Moralism  Terror  The Left  War  Anti-war 

notes on Spartacists on Lenin and the vanguard party

 March 1, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some notes and suggestions for discussion on the Spartacist League pamphlet on “Lenin and the vanguard party” (1978): http://www.bolshevik.org/Pamphlets/LeninVanguard/LVP%200.htm I’d like to quote at length from Spartacist founder James Robertson’s 1973 speech “In Defense of Democratic Centralism” that is included in the pamphlet as supplemental material (and is edited in the pamphlet but given in its entirety on-line): http://www.bolshevik.org/Pamphlets/LeninVanguard/LVP%20Robertson%20to%20Spartacus-BL.htm “What we are dealing with in the period from the founding of Iskra to the founding of the Bolshevik Party in 1912 is the transformation of the Bolshevik faction from a revolutionary social-democratic into an embryonic communist organization. [Read More]
Chris Cutrone  Discussion  History  Vladimir Lenin  Marxism  the Left 

Trotsky on art and politics: "with a sword or at least a whip in hand"

 February 26, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Re: Platypus: “They had friends, they had enemies, they fought, and exactly through this they demonstrated their right to exist.” – Trotsky, on the history of new political and artistic movements (1938) http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/06/artpol.htm Not a single progressive idea has begun with a “mass base,â€? otherwise it would not have been a progressive idea. It is only in its last stage that the idea finds its masses – if, of course, it answers the needs of progress. [Read More]
/20th Century  Chris Cutrone  Discussion  Marxism  Marxism  Platypus  the Left  Leon Trotsky  Trotskyism 

notes on Lenin, What is to be done?---Platypus "neo-Leninism?"

 February 23, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some notes and suggestions on Lenin’s What is to be done? (1902). I’d like to start with a quotation from Lenin’s first footnote, in the chapter “Dogmatism and Freedom of Criticism:” At the present time (as is now evident), the English Fabians, the French Ministerialists, the German Bernsteinians, and the Russian Critics all belong to the same family, all extol each other, learn from each other, and together take up arms against “dogmatic” Marxism. [Read More]
Chris Cutrone  Discussion  Karl Korsch  Vladimir Lenin  Marxism  organization  Politics  Rosa Luxemburg  the Left 

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 

Trotsky on "degeneration" and "entire generations passing into discard" (1933)

 February 7, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

It is not a question of counterposing abstract principles… [W]ith the degeneration of organizations, with the passing of entire generations into discard… the necessity… arises of mobilizing fresh forces on a new historical stage… With inevitable halts and partial retreats it is necessary to move forward on a road crisscrossed by countless obstacles and covered with the debris of the past. Those who are frightened by this had better step aside. [Read More]
Chris Cutrone  crisis  Discussion  History  Marxism  Politics  the Left  Leon Trotsky  Trotskyism 

Nothing Left to say

A critique of the Guardian's coverage of the 2008 Mumbai attacks

Nothing Left to say

 February 3, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

This article has been reprinted in Mainstream Weekly. Deep historical precedents HOWEVER SINCERE ITS BACKERS or belligerent its enemies, the “War on Terror” is not and cannot become anti-Islamist. This is not because, as some think, there is no Islamist or Taliban-style fascism on the receiving end of America’s War on Terror. Far from it. The reason is that the prosecutors of the war are only half committed to the selective elimination of certain religious reactionaries. [Read More]
Afghanistan  Anti-semitism  History of the Left  Lashkar-e-taiba  Mumbai  Mumbai Attacks  Pakistan  Taliban  The Guardian  The Left  War on Terror  India  Terrorism 

Platypus in the New Yorker article 'Outside Agitator: Naomi Klein and the new new left'

Platypus in the New Yorker article 'Outside Agitator: Naomi Klein and the new new left'

 December 8, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

“Outside Agitator: Naomi Klein and the new new left.” By Larissa MacFarquhar Read the complete article from the December 8, 2008 issue of The New Yorker. After the death of Milton Friedman, in 2006, the University of Chicago decided to set up an institute in his honor. The institute was opposed by many professors, who formed a group to protest it. Klein offered to debate someone from the institute’s board, but nobody would do it, so she agreed to go to Chicago and talk about her own objections to the project. [Read More]
Larissa MacFarquhar  Marxism  Naomi Klein  New Yorker  the Left  University of Chicago 

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