What has the Left been, and what can it yet become?
Today is Sunday, January 09th, 2011
Eric Stoner Platypus Review 30 | December 2010 IN A STRANGE WAY, the debate over whether the American left should support the Green Movement in Iran resembles the arguments that took place in progressive circles before the 2008 presidential elections in the United States, and that reemerged in the recent midterm elections. Those in the [...]
Laurie Rojas ON SEPTEMBER 24, 2009, approximately 900 Chicagoans rallied on the sidewalks in front of the Park Hyatt Hotel near the Magnificent Mile. At the height of rush hour, about 200 members and community allies of UNITE HERE Local 1, Chicago’s hospitality workers’ union, arrived at the scene and blocked all four lanes of [...]
Historical transformations in social-political context
Chris Cutrone
We in Platypus have anticipated, since our inception in 2006, the possibility of a “return to Marx,” and have sought to inform the terms in which this might take place. We have sought the re-opening of historical issues on the Left with the intention of their fundamental reconsideration, taking nothing for granted, so that we could definitively close the books on stale “debates” in which the “Left” has remained stuck for more than a generation, since at least the 1960s. Given the confusion reigning on the “Left” today, the urgency for this is evident.
On December 6, 2008, a panel discussion titled Progress or Regress? Considering the Future of Leftist Politics Under Obama was held in New York City. The Panelists were: Chris Cutrone of Platypus; Stephen Duncombe, a professor at the Gallatin School at New York University and author of Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (2007); Pat Korte of the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Charles Post of the Detroit-based organization Solidarity; and Paul Street, author of Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008).
Observations on the Ideological Recovery in France and the United States Ashleigh Campi It has been noted that the current economic crisis is of a scale unprecedented in the history of advanced capitalism. Today, three decades since the first stages of a transition of world markets through the expansion of finance capital, we face the [...]
The Platypus Affiliated Society in New York organized a moderated panel discussion and audience Q&A to critically evaluate the widespread assumption that the election of Barack Obama presents an opportunity for today’s Leftists. Asking how opportunity can be distinguished from opportunism, Platypus invited several intellectuals and activists to publicly think through the foreseeable pitfalls and [...]
Chris Cutrone 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 [...]
The coming sharp turn to the Right Chris Cutrone In previous articles I have addressed the Presidential campaign of Barack Obama in terms of the historical precedents of MLK, Jr. (the end of “black politics”) and JFK (Iraq and the election). Now I wish to address the final and perhaps most important but problematic comparison [...]
Chris Cutrone 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 [...]
Laurie Rojas From July 24th until July 28th 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 [...]