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The Platypus Affiliated Society in Chicago presents a public forum on:
The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and "Resistance"
The problematic forms of "anticapitalism" today
[PDF poster color] [PDF poster gray] [PDF backdrop] [PDF questions] [reading list]
Tuesday, November 6, 2007, 7-9PM
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
280 S. Columbus Drive main auditorium
[MP3 audio recording] [YouTube video clips] [transcript excerpts from the forum]
A moderated panel discussion and audience Q&A on problems of strategies and tactics on the Left today. Panelists: Michael Albert (Z Magazine, author of Parecon: Life After Capitalism), Chris Cutrone (Platypus) [Chris Cutrone's opening remarks prepared text], Stephen Duncombe (Gallatin School of New York University, editor of Cultural Resistance Reader), Brian Holmes (Continental Drift and Université Tangente), and Marisa Holmes (new Students for a Democratic Society).
"After the failure of the 1960s New Left, the underlying despair with regard to the real efficacy of political will, of political agency, in a historical situation of heightened helplessness, became a self-constitution as outsider, as other, rather than an instrument of transformation. Focused on the bureaucratic stasis of the Fordist, late 20th Century world, the Left echoed the destruction of that world by the dynamics of capital: neoliberalism and globalization.
The idea of a fundamental transformation became bracketed and, instead, was replaced by the more ambiguous notion of 'resistance.' The notion of resistance, however, says little about the nature of that which is being resisted, or of the politics of the resistance involved.
'Resistance' is rarely based on a reflexive analysis of possibilities for fundamental change that are both generated and suppressed by the dynamic heteronomous order of capital. 'Resistance' is an undialectical category that does not grasp its own conditions of possibility; it fails to grasp the dynamic historical context of capital and its reconstitution of possibilities for both domination and emancipation, of which the 'resisters' do not recognize that that they are a part."
[MP3 audio recording] [YouTube video clips] [transcript excerpts from the forum]
[PDF poster color] [PDF poster gray] [PDF backdrop] [PDF questions] [reading list]
Spartacus Youth Club, "Platypus: Pseudo-'Marxist,' Pro-Imperialist, Academic Claptrap" [PDF]
flyer distributed at Platypus 3 Rs forum
Chris Cutrone, "Hysteria in the face of Platypus?" [PDF]
response submitted to Spartacist League newspaper Workers Vanguard
Platypus is a new international journal of critical letters and emancipatory politics, dedicated to reconstituting the Marxian Left (forthcoming 2008).
The Platypus Affiliated Society organizes reading groups, public fora, research and journalism focused on problems and tasks inherited from the "Old" (1920s-30s), "New" (1960s-70s) and post-political (1980s-90s) Left, for the possibilities of emancipatory politics today.
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