Presenter: Prof. James Vaughn (University of Chicago)

From Protest to Politics
Parkes Social Hall (1870 Sheridan Rd.)

“It is no coincidence that the ideals of immediate action, even the propaganda of the act, have been resurrected after the willing integration of formerly progressive organizations that now in all countries of the earth are developing the characteristic traits of what they once opposed. Yet this does not invalidate the critique of anarchism. Its return is that of a ghost. The impatience with theory that manifests itself in its return does not advance thought beyond itself. By forgetting thought, the impatience falls back below it.”

—Theodor Adorno, "Resignation"

2024's pro-Palestine encampments on university campuses in opposition to the Gaza War, followed by the re-election of Donald Trump and the first year of his second presidential term, have catalyzed a certain type of introspection on the Left. Whether it be over the apparent primacy of action, a need for so-called "Left unity," or the role of prefigurative politics in contesting the state and its policy, these preoccupations express an ideological crisis borne from a felt lack of political agency.

But is the Left productively reflecting on its experience of political impotence, or is it reconciling to it? That is to say, is the Left is having a "pre-political," or a "post-political" moment?

What would it mean to call the Left post-political? How is the Left politicizing or depoliticizing people, especially on campus? How have conditions for organizing on the Left changed since Trump's election? 

Speakers:

• Kathrin Dick (Cologne, Germany)

• Louis Kreienbaum (Halle, Germany)

• Shanying Liu (NYC, New York)

• Ryan M. (Melbourne, Australia)

What is Anti-Imperialism?
Vail Chapel (1870 Sheridan Rd.)

"In late 2006 we began to move outside of our reading group model and started hosting events.  As you all know, this was during the Iraq war, in which our project was inevitably bound up.  At our first public event we sparked a much-needed conversation about “imperialism,” perhaps the least-understood topic of our time, not least because it serves as mask for a great deal of confusion by acting as a superficial point of shared agreement.  We feel that our project has been vindicated by that fact that almost no other group sought to bring out this debate, even though the concept, “imperialism,” found its way on to almost every placard and banner during this time.  And yet it is not at all self-evident how one would overcome this problem of misunderstanding “imperialism” while continuing to denounce it.  If it were, we would have long since overcome it.  For this reason, we believe that one needs to trace the historical changes, especially of ideas like “imperialism,” and not paper-over the problems in the typical anti-intellectual manner of the “Left.”"

—Ian Morrison, "The Platypus Synthesis"

What did anti-imperialism mean for the Millennial Left? How and from whom did the Millennial Left inherit the concept? How is it being passed down, and why might we still talk about imperialism today? 

Speakers:

• Renée Nader (Auckland, New Zealand)

• Nontapun Punnachet (London, United Kingdom)

• Rudolph Quamina (NYC, New York)

• Johann Richter (Halle, Germany)

Psychoanalysis and the Left
Vail Chapel (1870 Sheridan Rd.)

What is psychoanalysis? Is it useful to understand for the Left? If so, how? What is the historical relationship between the individual and society? How does capitalism affect the relationship between the individual and society? What is the historical relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism?

Speakers:

• Artur Bleischwitz (Jena, Germany)

• Ethan Cole (Charleston, South Carolina)

• Evan Hauffen (NYC, New York)

• Anna Pidstrigach (Leipzig, Germany

Art & Politics
Parkes Social Hall (1870 Sheridan Rd.)

Over the question of the relationship to art and politics, two antinomies seem to dominate: one claims the inescapably political character of art — the political art of the ‘60s, the practices of which persist to this day. The other end of this antinomy, to quote Susan Buck-Morss diagnosing this tendency, argues that “the images of art… have no effect in the realm of deeds.” Historically however, the relationship between art and politics was posed differently. “Images in the mind motivate the will” and thus “have an effect in the realm of deeds” said Benjamin in the 1930s. However, this doesn’t seem to be a straightforward positive prescription about how to relate art and politics. What then, is the relation — if any — between art and politics? What is the task of art today? What is the task of politics? How are both of these tasks received by us in the present, and what kind of subjectivity do both presume? Can political goals be sought within art? If yes, how so? And if not, why? 

Speakers:

• Ismail Addemir (Irvine, California)

• Blondine Moree (NYC, New York)

• Jonas Nestroy (Berlin, Germany)

• Evan Rodgers (NYC, New York)

• John Thompson (Cork, Ireland)

The recent protests against the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) recall the Green Movement in 2009, when election results provoked an immediate and nationwide outbreak of popular demonstrations. At the time, the Left hailed this social upheaval as a progressive democratic movement with revolutionary implications. While President Obama offered direct negotiations with Tehran, Trump’s current war on Iran presents the possibility of dealing a final blow to the IRI. But what would take its place? Maybe all that will be destroyed is the “republic” and not its Islamist politics, resulting in a rule of the mullahs without the accoutrements of “democracy.”

With the present crisis in Iran and its grim outlook we pay the price for the historical failures of the Left, going back at least to the period of the 1960s–70s New Left of which the Islamic Revolution was a product.

• What lessons should the Left take from its role in the 1979 Revolution in Iran?

• What was the Left's role in the Green Movement? What opportunities did the Green Movement present for the Left?

• What would the end of the Islamic Republic of Iran mean for the Left today?

• How is the trajectory of the Islamic Republic a part of a larger political history that extends beyond Iran? What does it tell us about the history of the Left in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

Speakers

• Mateo Farzaneh (Northeastern Illinois University)

• Tirdad Kiamanesh

• [to be determined]

Revolutionary Communist Organisation
Swift Hall 107 (2029 Sheridan Rd.)

Presenter: Edith Fischer and Alice

Freedom Socialist Party
Vail Chapel (1870 Sheridan Rd.)

Presenter: Andrea Bauer

Capital, Vol. 1 (2024): Marx for the twenty-first century?
Annenberg Hall G15 (2120 Campus Dr.)

Author: Paul North
Interviewed by Spencer A. Leonard.

Karl Marx: Capital. Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, edited by Paul Reitter and Paul North, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.

True Materialism (2025): Philosophy and Marxism
Annenberg Hall G21 (2120 Campus Dr.)

Author: Jensen Suther
Interviewed by Danny Jacobs.

Jensen Suther: True Materialism. Hegelian Marxism and the Modernist Struggle for Freedom, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025.

Following the re-election of Lincoln as president, Marx wrote to the American people: 

“From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class… [In America] the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century.” 

Given the seismic policies of Trump's second term, we ask: 

Does the American Revolution persist today? What is/was the American Revolution? How does it inform the conditions of possibility for the Left today? What tasks, if any, do the Left inherit from the American Revolution? Do we need new interpretations of the American Revolution?

Speakers:

• Chris Cutrone (Platypus Affiliated Society)

• Edith Fischer (Revolutionary Communist Organisation)

• Jorge Mujica (Arise Chicago)

• Ingar Solty (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung)

The history of the Left is both marked by continuity and change and haunted by the question of historical recurrence. In 1906, Leon Trotsky, speculating on how the dates 1789 and 1848 were taken up by the Left of his time, wrote, “History does not repeat itself. However much one may compare the Russian Revolution with the Great French Revolution, the former can never be transformed into a repetition of the latter. The 19th century has not passed in vain.” Sixty years later, having witnessed the great betrayals of the Left by reneging on its historical consciousness, Theodor Adorno advised to his students in the New Left that, “the theorist who intervenes in practical controversies nowadays discovers on a regular basis and to his shame that whatever ideas he might contribute were expressed long ago - and usually better the first time around.”

Pace Trotsky,  the Left today is locked in the cycles of the past. The regression of historical consciousness endemic to the Left since perhaps 1917 has not revealed mistakes to be overcome so much as rendered them more opaque. Platypus seeks to press on this opacity, to ask of its conditions of possibility — of how a drastic experience of our distance from the past can deter us from making the same mistakes.

When Platypus began in 2006, it observed that the Boomer generation of New Leftists sought to intervene in the Millennial Left by warning against repeating their experience — their mistakes. But by the mid-2020s, the Millennials advise the Zoomer generation to affirm the logic of the sixties: “the struggle continues.”

It was undetermined twenty years ago whether a Millennial Left could overcome the burden of its history and again attempt to recover the mediation of theory and practice. Today, with Trump dissolving the Left’s canards of the last hundred years, instead “the Millennial Left seems to have been the last gasp of the 20th century.”

In this light, we ask:

How has the history of the Left in the 21st century remained beholden to its terms in the 20th? How has the Left’s historical repetition been indexed by and deepened through Platypus?

Speakers:

[speakers forthcoming]

“Thomas Jefferson would scorn to enter a modern Democratic convention. He would have as little business there as Abraham Lincoln would have in a latter-day Republican convention. If they were living today they would be delegates to this [Socialist] convention!” - Eugene Debs 

Eugene Debs stood at the centre of the socialist movement in the United States during the era of the Second International. Like many socialists of the time, he understood the struggle for socialism as both continuous with, and an overcoming of, the wider legacy of the bourgeois revolution. The Socialist Party of America (SPA) rose contemporaneously with other movements which claimed America’s revolutionary legacy, such as Populism and Progressivism, yet Debs and socialists like him understood these movements to be fundamentally opposed to the goals of the proletarian socialist party. 

Yet this Marxist orthodoxy would enter a dual crisis, both from the international "Revisionist Dispute" of the early 1900s and the success of the October Revolution in 1917. The Bolshevik Revolution and the international revolutionary wave of the post-war years appeared to many socialists, including Debs, as a moment of revolutionary possibility for the socialist movement, yet the subsequent history of socialism in the United States and globally raises the question of whether the split of the SPA, and of the global socialist movement, was a step forward or step backward for socialism. 

What did Debs mean when he said “from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and proud of it”? What is the relationship between the crisis of the SPA, the rise of Progressivism, and the wider crisis of the American Revolution experienced in the aftermath of World War I? How did Debs understand the role of the socialist party in the struggle for socialism? What lessons does the life and legacy of Eugene Debs hold for emancipatory politics today?

Speakers:

• Andrea Bauer (Freedom Socialist Party)

• Mark Burrows (Railway Workers United)

• Carlos Garrido (American Communist Party)

• Ed Remus (Platypus Affiliated Society)

After the working class failed to politically organize itself in the Revolutions of 1848, Louis Bonaparte was elected to mediate society’s crisis by means of the state through police and social welfare programs. This solution of managing discontent through the politics of the capitalist state is what Marxists later understood by 'Bonapartism'. Lenin characterized this phenomenon in State and Revolution: "Bureaucracy and the standing army constitute a "parasite" on the body of bourgeois society— a parasite born of the internal antagonisms which tear that society asunder, but essentially a parasite, "clogging every pore" of existence." 

Yet in the 20th century, it was not socialism which ultimately proved capable of mitigating the anarchy of Gilded Age capitalism but the ‘parasite’ of state intervention. There is no champion of the general will, because we cannot believe that one exists — not independently of articulation by existing institutions, more or less representative political forms. 

Trump’s apparent criminality lies in his disregard for all such limits: through faith in the absolute capacity of the world to be changed, it seemed possible to claim the authority of the general will over and against the state to refashion it. Perhaps Bonapartism has proven to be the most efficient means of organizing the transformation of society — the social revolution. So this panel asks, “Why not Bonapartism? What is the role of the Left in such a historical situation?

Speakers:

• Edith Fischer (Revolutionary Communist Organisation)

• John Garvey (Insurgent Notes)

• Johannes Regell (the Socialists)

• Ingar Solty (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung)

“Marxism is a form of cognition sui generis.” – Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology 

The 20th century saw the objective disintegration of the coherence of Marx/ism within the history of modernity. Now, ten years into the Trump era and its reconsolidation of world politics, Marxism seems more obscure than ever as a way of thinking about the world or the possibility of changing it. In this context Platypus asks the untimely question: “What is Marxism? Does it matter in the 21st century?” 

Do we still need Marx today? Why? 

Why in the past have people invoked Marx? Why did they refer to themselves as Marxists? 

Do we need Marx to understand capitalism? Do we need Marx to understand capitalist politics? 

How is Marxism useful to the Left for articulating the task of freedom? What kind of potential is it possible to find in the objective conditions of the present? Is an immanent critique of capitalism necessary? 

Finally, what kind of problem is it that we find ourselves in today? Is it possible to leave Marx behind, or to go beyond Marx?

Speaker

• Andrea Bauer (Freedom Socialist Party)

• John Garvey (Insurgent Notes)

• Paul North (Yale University)

• Liz Rathburn (Freedom Road Socialist Organization)

• Benjamin Studebaker (PhD, Politics and Int'l Studies)

[prompt forthcoming]

Speakers:

• Max Barrett (Auckland, New Zealand)

• Hilario Carneiro (Berlin, Germany)

• Joseph Haynes (Sydney, Australia)

• Samuel Helgert (Vienna, Austria)

• Artendy Malik (London, United Kingdom)