Aside from our three weekly coffee breaks (see below!), we’ll be hosting two Platypus reading groups which will serve as an introduction into the work of our organization. Focusing largely, although not exclusively, on content generated by the Platypus Review, the aim of these sessions is to provide attendees with a sense of the raison d’être of the Platypus project.

Link to the syllabus: http://platypus1917.org/2010/08/03/platypus-introductory-readings

Below, find information for the two reading groups, which will follow the same syllabus.

We hope you’ve enjoyed your summer. Now it’s time to get down to business.

Platypus will be hosting three Coffee Breaks beginning this week at our three New York campus chapter locations. The Coffee Breaks are a great time to meet with members of Platypus, fellow travelers, and allies of the group. It’s an opportunity to discuss issues raised in the latest issue of the Platypus Review, consider the state of the Left, and just hang out with people who have similar political interests. Please join us at any one or all three weekly meetings. Feel free to bring friends and any other interested parties. We look forward to meeting you!

Issue 27 | September 2010

Ideology and the student left
Will Klatt, Luis Brennan, Aaron Petcoff, and Ashley Weger

A transcript of a panel hosted by Platypus at the U.S. Social Forum in June of this year, on the nature of student politics and the role of ideology in organizing on campus. With the decline of the anti-war movement in the wake of Obama’s election, what opportunities exist for radical student politics today?

The coming insurrection? A reflection on resistance at the G20
Ashley Weger

From the student occupations in 2008 to the recent protests against the G20 in Toronto, spectacles of resistance and tactics of direct action are often seen as signs of the power and vitality of left activism. Ashley Weger begs to differ.

Book Review: Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth W. Warren, eds., Renewing Black Intellectual History
Greg Gabrellas

Taking to task even the most respected theorists of race on their failure to provide an adequate framework for understanding and overcoming racism, Reed and Warren’s volume provides many salutary correctives—but leaves a number of questions unplumbed.

Platypus is a project for the self-criticism, self-education, and, ultimately, the practical reconstitution of a Marxian Left. We hope to reinvigorate a conversation on the Left that has long since fallen into senility or silence, in order to help found anew an emancipatory political practice that is currently absent. What has the Left been, and what can it yet become? Platypus exists because the answer to such a question, even its basic formulation, has long ceased to be self-evident. platypus1917

Benjamin M. Blumberg discusses the history of the American Left and the still unmet challenge of theorizing and abolishing race and racism.

Tim Barker reviews Jeffrey B. Perry’s biography of Hubert Harrison, whose interactions with the Socialist Party are an example of the way in which racial and class questions became fatally separated on the American Left.

Max Elliot Katz reviews David Renton’s Dissident Marxism, taking the author to task for neglecting the regression of the 20th century and the liquidation of adequate theory and action.

Red Channels and the Platypus Affiliated Society present:

The Poverty of Student Life, a film screening and discussion

*  *  *

1. Politics of the contemporary student Left

2.  Violence at the RNC

3. The New School occupation and the direction of student politics: an interview with Atlee McFellin

4. Five questions to the student Left

Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

A Platypus Review Special Edition (issue 17: November, 2009)

Platypus banner at anti-war demonstration, Chicago, March 19, 2008

Based on a panel discussion held by Platypus at Pace University last year, The Platypus Review traces in this special issue the slow death of the Left in our time, precisely as a means of identifying the conditions necessary for its reconstitution. Centered around four crucial years—2001, 1968, 1933, and 1917—The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century is an important step in Platypus’s attempt to advance a coherent perspective on the Left’s incoherences, past and present.

Introduction by Benjamin Blumberg
The origin of and impetus for Platypus, in summary.

2001 by Spencer A. Leonard
A pointed argument against the prevalence of romantic Third Worldism, the lack of internationalism, and the actionist character of protest culture in today’s “Left.”

1968 by Atiya Khan
The politically restless and disoriented 1960s analyzed, with respect to the diremption of theory and practice, through the lens of the Marcuse–Adorno correspondence.

1933 by Richard Rubin
An elegiac rumination on the lives of Leon Trotsky and Walter Benjamin, who provide the basis for a discussion of what the 1930s have come to mean for Left politics today.

1917 by Chris Cutrone
Examines the work of Georg Lukàcs and Karl Korsch, whose intellectual trajectories provide a key to understanding the “brilliant failure” of 1917, without taking its failure for granted.

* * *

Platypus is a project for the self-criticism, self-education, and, ultimately, the practical reconstitution of a Marxian Left. We hope to reinvigorate a conversation on the Left that has long since fallen into senility or silence, in order to help found anew an emancipatory political practice that is presently absent. What has the Left been, and what can it yet become? Platypus exists because the answer to such a question, even its basic formulation, has long ceased to be self-evident.
platypus1917.org

Contributors to this issue’s stories: Ashley Weger, Bret Schneider, Jerzy Sobotta, Laurie Rojas, and Haseeb Ahmed