Red-baiting and ideology

The new SDS

 December 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

TO THE EDITORS OF THE PLATYPUS REVIEW: I am not now, nor have I ever been, either a Maoist or sympathetic to Maoism. I am also not a member of SDS. I was outraged however, by the blatant red-baiting of Rachel Haut in a recent Platypus Review Interview and disturbed that it seems to have gone unchallenged by PR. Rachel Haut was quoted as saying: “To say that the Maoists can be part of the ideological debate would mean to condone them being in this organization, which is something I don’t do. [Read More]
Anarchism  Anti-intellectualism  Democracy  Exchanges  Ideology  Laurie Rojas  Maoism  Marxism  New SDS  Organization  Politics  Protest  Red-baiting  Revolution  Richard Rubin  Stalinism  The Left  Student Left 

Re-thinking the Crisis of Capital in Light of the Crisis of the Left

 November 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Far from expressing a sequence of never-ending progression, the Hegelian dialectic lets retrogression appear as translucent as progression and indeed makes it very nearly inevitable if one ever tries to escape regression by mere faith. —Raya Dunayevskaya1 IT MAY SEEM IRONIC that a moment so typified by the crisis of capital calls for a serious critique of the crisis on the Left; however, in the present moment it has become impossible to take on the crisis of existing society without facing the limitations found in prevailing leftist responses to it. [Read More]
Capital  Crisis  Exchanges  Marxism  Marxist-Hummanist Committee  The Left 

Iraq and the election

The fog of "anti-war" politics

 October 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

BARACK OBAMA HAD, UNTIL RECENTLY, made his campaign for President of the United States a referendum on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In the Democratic Party primaries, Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for her vote in favor of the invasion. Among Republican contenders, John McCain went out of his way to appear as the candidate most supportive of the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq. Looking towards the general election, it is over Iraq that the candidates have been most clearly opposed: Obama has sought to distinguish himself most sharply from McCain on Iraq, emphasizing their differences in judgment. [Read More]
Adolph Reed  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad  ANSWER  Anti-imperialism  Anti-war  Ba'athism  Bill Clinton  Bush administration  Democracy  Democrats  Election  History  History of the Left  Imperialism  Iran  Iraq  ISO  Joe Biden  Kurds  Liberalism  NATO  Barack Obama  Occupation  Politics  RCP (USA)  Republicans  Saddam Hussein  Saudi Arabia  Shia  Sunni  The Left  The Right  U.N  Vietnam  World Can't Wait 

Finance capital

Why financial capitalism is no more "fictitious" than any other kind

 October 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

WITH THE PRESENT FINANCIAL MELT-DOWN in the U.S. throwing the global economy into question, many on the “Left” are wondering again about the nature of capitalism. While many will be tempted to jump on the bandwagon of the “bailout” being floated by the Bush administration and the Congressional Democrats (including Obama), others will protest the “bailing out” of Wall Street. The rhetoric of “Wall Street vs. Main Street,” between “hardworking America” and the “financial fat cats,” however, belies a more fundamental truth: the two are indissolubly linked and are in fact two sides of the same coin of capitalism. [Read More]
Authoritarianism  Bailout  Bill Clinton  Capitalism  Crisis  Economics  Financial  Freedom  Friedrich Hayek  Humanity  Ideology  Industrial  John Kenneth Galbraith  Karl Polanyi  Karl Marx  Marxism  Milton Friedman  Modern  Neo-liberalism  Organization  Production  Reforms  Reification  Socialism  Society  The Left  The Platypus Historians Group 

Capital in history

The need for a Marxian philosophy of history of the Left

 October 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society  • Other languages: Deutsch, Español, Ελληνικά

The following is a talk given at the Marxist-Humanist Committee public forum on The Crisis in Marxist Thought, hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society in Chicago on Friday, July 25th, 2008. I want to speak about the meaning of history for any purportedly Marxian Left. We in Platypus focus on the history of the Left because we think that the narrative one tells about this history is in fact one’s theory of the present. [Read More]
1789  1930s  1960s  19th Century  Bourgeois  Capital  Capitalism  Class consciousness  Crisis  Degeneration  Domination  Friedrich Engels  Freedom  French Revolution  György Lukács  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel  History  History of the Left  Industrial Revolution  Karl Korsch  Vladimir Lenin  Marxism  Marxist-Hummanist Committee  Modern  Moishe Postone  Politics  Proletariat  Regression  Revolt of the Third Estate  Rosa Luxemburg  The Left  Theodor W. Adorno  Leon Trotsky  Walter Benjamin 

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 

The Hundred Days campaign: the present and future of SDS

 September 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

FROM JULY 24 UNTIL JULY 28 2008, the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had its third annual national convention in College Park, Maryland. At the convention, national campaigns were presented and voted on by the attendees. A major campaign introduced at the convention was the Hundred Days campaign, which seeks to organize and engage newly politicized Americans in politics beyond the campaign season. During the first one hundred days of the next administration the campaign will organize two nationwide weeks of action to ensure that the people remain involved in politics after the election cycle. [Read More]
Anarchism  Anti-capitalism  Ben Shepard  Capitalism  Chicago  Dave Shukla  Democracy  Democratic society  FRSO  Hope  Hundred Days campaign  Ideology  Left Forum  Liberalism  Maoism  Marxism  Movement  New SDS  New York  Barack Obama  Organization  Power  Process  Protest  Sectarianism  Socialism  Split  Structure  Students  The Left 

The Failure of Pakistan

Perspectives on the crisis, its past, present, and future

 February 2, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

A teach-in, panel discussion and moderated audience Q & A on the failure of the Left in Pakistan, held on February 2, 2008, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Related reading can be found in the Platypus Review #2 Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists -Ayesha Siddiqa (author of Military Inc, Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy) on “Pakistan’s Military Economy” -Manan Ahmed (University of Chicago) on “The Populism of the Bhuttos” [Read More]
Crisis  Failure  History  Manan Ahmed  Military  Pakistan  Panel discussion  Populism  The Left 

Who Needs the Left?

Reflections on Joining the Industrial Workers of the World

 February 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

IN THE SPRING OF 2006, after years of activity on the Left, I joined the IWW. I joined because it cared little for Leftism. And because it began every meeting with a song. After years of dodging the crossfire of competing claims to revolutionary truth, I breathed happily at last in meetings where no one tested my position on Cuba or the Green Party or state capitalism vs. deformed workers states. [Read More]
/20th Century  Capitalism  Copernican Revolution  German Revolution  IWW  Movements  Organization  People  Socialism  Soviet Revolution  The Left  Transformation  Workers 

Remember our real Iranian friends

 November 1, 2007  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

DURING HIS VISIT TO NEW YORK this week to address the UN General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is scheduled to go to Columbia University to address faculty members and also to meet with a group of American religious leaders. His arrival was preceded by weeks of commotion and dispute: should Ahmadinejad have been allowed to visit ground zero? Should Columbia have agreed to host him? Should he even have been granted a visa to enter at all? [Read More]
1977  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad  Bush administration  Columbia University  Democracy  Government  Human rights  Iran  Jürgen Habermas  Jean-Paul Sartre  Leonid Brezhnev  Michel Foucault  Nationalism  Noam Chomsky  Slavoj Žižek  The Left  Women's rights